The Perfect Secret (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Eleven)

by Blake Pierce

  “How do you have the live video feed from a place we can’t even get a search warrant for?” Jessie asked, astounded.

  Jamil smiled gleefully. Jessie could tell that these were the moments he lived for.

  “Before they shut down all cooperation, I spoke to a helpful security guy there. He’s actually interested in joining the department. Anyway, he gave me all their available archived video for the last week. He also let me patch into their live feed. I think he was trying to impress me. But apparently that didn’t get conveyed to his bosses because the feed is still active. I don’t think they’d allow it if they knew we had access.”

  “How does that help us?” Karen asked.

  Jamil looked like he wanted to enjoy this moment a little longer but seemed to sense it wouldn’t be appreciated.

  “We’ve only done facial recognition from Saturday evening to Sunday midday because we assumed that the murderer arrived for the party and left when it ended. But with the archived footage, we can check to see if Gilliard arrived earlier and left later.”

  His fingers flew over the keyboard for a few seconds before he looked up again.

  “Done,” he said. “We should have the results soon.”

  Jessie didn’t want to waste any time.

  “I need to make a quick call,” she said. “Keep me posted.”

  She walked out to her car, turned on the radio, and made the call. When it picked up, she spoke quietly.

  “Are you at work?” she asked and when she learned the answer was yes continued. “I need your help.”

  *

  When Jessie dashed back into the research room fifteen minutes later, she was so short of breath she couldn’t speak at first.

  “Are you okay?” Karen asked, worried.

  “I’ve got news,” Jessie panted. “But I can’t say where I got it.”

  Both of them stared at her, waiting. She held up her hand while she sucked in air.

  I really need to get in better shape.

  When she was finally able to speak normally again, she launched in.

  “Milly Estrada was Gilliard’s lawyer,” she said. “It didn’t show up in the files we looked at when we were at her office on Sunday because they limited our access exclusively to clients who had cases before a court and he never did. But she’s represented him for years. My source wouldn’t get more specific than that. But they did share that her phone logs from work show that she had multiple conversations with Gilliard this week, including a call on Friday afternoon.”

  Jamil immediately pulled up a new window and began a search. Within seconds, he had several tabs open and began flipping among them.

  “It looks like he hasn’t posted on any social media outlet since Thursday night,” he said. “Kind of odd, considering that up until then, he was active on all of them.”

  A beep from one of the monitors made them all turn in that direction.

  “What’s that about?” Karen asked.

  “The facial recognition search just ended,” Jamil said. “And look what we have here. Paul Gilliard arrived at the Otis Estate at four forty-one on Friday afternoon. And at least according to the footage we have, it looks like he never left.”

  He turned back to Jessie with a gleam in his eye.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Now,” Jessie told them both, “I think it’s time we got to know Mr. Gilliard a little better.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jasper Otis was having a rough week, and almost all of it had to do with the Estradas.

  As he walked down the hall from his business office in East House back to the residence in West House, he did a mental check-in to review where he stood. He had ongoing challenges with Beto, which would hopefully be definitively resolved soon. But the problems stemming from Beto’s ex-wife, Milly, were more immediately pressing.

  What had begun as helping out an old friend had gotten unexpectedly messy. He had known from the first second there was a problem, when his cell phone rang at 3:30 a.m. and the caller ID said it came from his own bedroom. When he picked up, he heard Paul Gilliard’s desperate voice on the line.

  “I screwed up, buddy,” Paul said. “And I need your help.”

  “What is it?”

  “I was with Milly Estrada, you know the lawyer? We were getting hot and heavy in your room and I took a little something to amp everything up and it got out of control. I got too excited, I guess, and I accidentally…yanked her neck too hard and it broke. She’s dead, Jasper.”

  “What?” Jasper had asked, not sure he’d heard it right.

  “I guess I don’t know my own strength and with everything I’m on right now, I didn’t even realize what I’d done.”

  Jasper remembered trying to process the information as he lay next to the barely legal model he’d spent most of the last hour with, the one whose name he didn’t want to tell the cops because she had only officially turned eighteen hours earlier. Suddenly his raucous bacchanal had turned into a potentially empire-destroying nightmare. He remembered getting up and going into the bathroom where he could whisper without being heard.

  “Just turn yourself in, Paul,” he’d insisted. “I’ll get you the best lawyers. We’ll show that it was the drugs that did this, not you.”

  “You don’t get it,” Paul pleaded. “Milly was the best lawyer. She’s the one who saved me when I got in trouble before. If I turn myself in, all of that will come out. I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison.”

  Jasper, who was feeling the effects of some chemicals he’d ingested over the course of the night, felt panic rise in his chest.

  “They’re going to find out it was you, Paul. They’ll check for DNA or something. Better to go on offense and massage the story as best you can.”

  “No,” Paul said emphatically. “We never actually did anything so there’s nothing to trace. Besides, I put her in your shower with the water running. Any physical evidence will be washed away. By the time she’s found, there will be nothing to collect. And if you have your maids clean up the place as soon as she’s discovered, then that will compromise the crime scene.”

  “How am I supposed to justify doing that when the cops come?” Jasper hissed.

  “I don’t know. Just say you couldn’t have a dead body in your bathroom—that it was too much for you. The police around here aren’t going to push you, of all people, too hard.”

  “It’s too risky,” Jasper persisted.

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Somehow, he knew what was coming.

  “You know what was risky?” Paul said coldly. “Putting my career on the line for you. Do I have to remind you about that party where I found you with that girl? Do you remember how I convinced her mom not to go to the cops by giving her a producer credit on my movie? Do you remem—?”

  “Okay, okay. I get it,” Jasper said. “You don’t have to go there. We’ll get this done.”

  But now, three days later, it still wasn’t done. He was barely holding off the cops. Paul was still holed up in his home. And the possibility that his own proclivities might come to light was still frighteningly real.

  He had to convince Paul that it was time to go. Oscar-winning matinee idols didn’t just drop off the grid for days on end anymore. He was going to be missed soon. And if he was still at Otis Estate when questions started getting asked, the consequences would be bad for everyone, especially him.

  So instead of going back to his wing to ponder, he went to see Paul.

  *

  Jessie had never been a Paul Gilliard fan.

  Of course she’d seen some of his movies. He was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. She knew she was in the minority, but she always thought he projected a slightly smarmy vibe that was reinforced by his over-tanned skin, over-sculpted hair, and over-ripped muscles.

  But she’d never had cause to think of him beyond that surface level. Now that she was diving deeper, she discovered that her instincts had been right on. The
guy had never formally been charged with any crimes but he’d come close several times.

  “When I worked West L.A. division,” Karen said, “I heard multiple stories from patrol officers about neighbors calling, concerned about screaming fights coming from his place. They never found any obvious evidence of violence when they did welfare checks, and none of his girlfriends ever filed complaints. But I was told that sometimes they looked scared. It was never enough to act on. And it was so long ago that I forgot about it until now.”

  Jessie had been studying a suspicious file of her own.

  “Not enough to go on seems to be a pattern,” she said. “Do you know about his wife?”

  “I thought that was an accident,” Karen said.

  “What was?” asked Jamil, who’d been focused on his own task. “I think that was before my time.”

  Karen filled him in.

  “Seven years ago, he and his wife were skiing. The ski lift safety bar was defective and she fell out of the chair, hundreds of feet to the ground. She died on impact. Gilliard almost fell too. They found him clinging to the chair. At least that was the official story.”

  “Right,” Jessie confirmed. “Conveniently, that was exactly the time that Millicent Estrada became his primary criminal lawyer. According to everything I’ve found, she pushed hard for the case to be closed quickly. It was ruled an accident. He was never formally investigated. Gilliard even filed suit against the ski lodge, though Milly didn’t represent him on that case. But he eventually dropped it, saying going to court would be too painful.”

  “That’s convenient,” Jamil noted. “If it had gone to trial, there would have been all kinds of discovery that might have revealed new evidence.”

  “So he got to look like the angry widower, fighting for justice for his wife,” Karen said, “before becoming the widower too grief-stricken to pursue it. I remember the whole country mourned for him. But why does that matter now?”

  Jessie smiled. This was what she’d been waiting for.

  “Maybe because the two of them hadn’t seen each other in years,” she said. “According to my source, Milly had only bumped into Gilliard in the last few months, once she started getting back on the social circuit after her divorce.”

  “Why is that significant?” Jamil asked.

  This was usually the moment where Jessie got chastised by Ryan for letting her intuition trump the evidence at hand. But he wasn’t here and she got the sense that her audience was ready to take the ride with her, so she launched in.

  “I have a theory. What if Paul Gilliard killed his wife? What if he pushed her off that lift, maybe in a moment of anger, maybe for some other reason? What if Milly Estrada knew that and helped him cover it up, shut down the investigation? She wasn’t as established back then. Getting him as a client was major coup. What if she let her ambition trump her ethics? The whole mess is taken care of and she doesn’t have to think about it for years afterward. She’s still his criminal lawyer but he keeps his nose clean so she is able to move on with her life.”

  “But that changed,” Karen suggested.

  “Exactly,” Jessie said. “A few months ago, she gets divorced, starts going to parties, traveling in the same circles as Gilliard. She can’t avoid him. And she can’t avoid the memory of what she did—whatever that may have been—to help him escape justice. She starts to feel guilty. And then, according to her phone logs, she has several calls with him last week. What if she was feeling guilty enough that she was considering coming clean? What if she was trying to convince Gilliard to do the same? Maybe he agrees to confess and says he wants to come up with a plan, but not in the office, where he says his presence would be noted. He wants to do it somewhere where no one would notice them having a conversation; no one would draw any conclusions, because of the sheer number of people there. So he says he’ll be at the Otis party this Saturday and asks her to come there to discuss it.”

  “You think he lured her there to kill her?” Karen asked.

  “Maybe he genuinely wanted to change her mind and got angry when she wouldn’t,” Jessie said. “Maybe he planned it all along. Either way, it’s murder.”

  Both Karen and Jamil sat quietly for a moment, pondering the hypothesis. Jessie took it as a good sign that neither had dismissed it out of hand. Finally Karen raised a question.

  “But why would Jasper Otis cover for him?” she asked. “There’s no way Gilliard could have covered this up and stayed at the estate this long without Otis’s knowledge and consent. Why would he put himself on the line for the guy?”

  “That’s a good question,” Jessie conceded. “Maybe Otis didn’t want the bad press and acted rashly. Maybe he was just trying to be a good friend. Maybe Gilliard had something on him.”

  She had an idea what that might be but decided to hold off on voicing that suspicion for now. Before she could expound any further, Jamil waved his hand to get their attention.

  “Got something?” Jessie asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “I did the search you mentioned about mold remediation. Anything like what you said they claimed was going on in the residential wing requires a clearance inspection before work can be done. The approved clearance has to be filed with the city. No such approval was filed for Otis Estate at any point in the last month.”

  “Well, that’s suspicious,” Karen said.

  “Also, Nancy Salter told you the remediation process was underway, correct?” Jamil asked.

  Jessie nodded.

  “Well, I reviewed the camera footage for the last week. At no point did I see any van or truck on the property with any name having anything to do with mold cleanup.”

  “So they’re faking it,” Karen concluded. “There is no mold problem.”

  Jessie shrugged.

  “Never say never,” she said, “but claiming that an entire section of the residential wing is too dangerous to enter because of hazardous mold spores is a good way to keep folks from going anywhere near there and inadvertently discovering a potential murderer.”

  Jamil frowned.

  “What’s wrong?” Jessie asked him.

  He kept his eyes down as he spoke, as if he felt bad even voicing his thought.

  “I don’t want to be the wet blanket here. But aren’t we kind of out on a limb with this? We’ve made a lot of suppositions, based on not that many facts. If we’re wrong, it could go really badly for all of us.”

  Jessie thought about the twenty-two-complaint lawsuit she’d been served yesterday. Jamil had no idea how right he was. If they were wrong, Otis, and possibly Gilliard, would sue them until they were ground to dust.

  She decided to keep that to herself. If they were wrong, and maybe even if they weren’t, she was facing years in court. But Karen and Jamil wouldn’t have to. She’d take the heat for all of it. There was no reason for them to pay the price for her wild speculation.

  “You’re right Jamil,” she said. “So I guess we should find out if we’re wrong. What time is it?”

  “Eleven forty-seven,” he said, looking at his watch. “Why?”

  “Because Karen and I need to head out. We’ve got a search warrant to execute.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  Jasper waited until no one was around.

  When he was sure the hallway was clear, he pulled down the zipper on the plastic tarp that sealed off the first floor residential wing from the rest of West House. It would look awfully suspicious if anyone saw him entering an area marked “off limits zone: hazardous material warning.”

  He opened the large doors that closed off the wing from the rest of the house and then walked down the hall to the bedroom at the far end of West House. Jasper had put Paul there because, other than his own personal wing, it was the most isolated part of the residence. It also had its own bathroom, dining room, and small entertainment room, making it perfectly self-contained.

  He was carrying a bag with a lunch made up of a turkey, compote, and brie sandwich, hummus and carrots, a ripe peach,
and sparking water. Ever since Sunday morning, he’d asked the kitchen staff to make him two of every meal, one of which he personally delivered to Paul.

  He wanted to keep the circle of information small. No one else knew Paul was here, although Nancy clearly suspected something was up. She was the one who suggested the mold cleanup idea when he’d told her the residence needed to be cordoned off for several days. She pointedly hadn’t asked any questions.

  He knocked on the door and waited. Sometimes Paul made him wait a while before answering. Jasper found it increasingly irritating that he was a kind of servant in his own home. Luckily, this time Paul answered quickly and ushered him in. He was dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, and an untucked button-down dress shirt.

  The guy didn’t look great. Normally the actor was the picture of virility. At forty, his close-cropped brown hair was just starting to show flecks of gray. In the last three days, the flecks seemed to have multiplied exponentially. His usually ruddy skin was pallid. His brown eyes were bleary and had dark shadows under them. He still cut a strapping figure but it was undermined by his hunched shoulders and defensive slouch.

  “I’ve got lunch,” Jasper said, trying to buoy his friend.

  “Thanks,” Paul said. “But I’m not that hungry.”

  “You’ve got to eat something,” Jasper insisted as he sat down in a chair in the dining room before addressing the real reason he was here. “And we have to get you out of here.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Paul snapped. “I wanted to leave that night but all those frickin’ people made it impossible to get out without being seen. I’m supposed to be on set in New Mexico tomorrow morning. If I’m not there, the questions start and I don’t have answers.”

  Jasper nodded supportively.

  “Good, then we’re on the same page. Let me call for a car. We’ll find a way to sneak you out and get you to the airport.”

  “Fine,” Paul said. “We’ll do it tonight when it’s dark.”