by Blake Pierce
Fellows stared at her in disbelief.
“So if you already know everything,” he demanded, “why are you asking me?”
Jessie smiled at him, though there was no warmth to it.
“Because you coming clean is a sign of good will. Detective Hernandez and I are big fans of establishing good will, isn’t that right, Detective?”
“I’m getting impatient with the run-around, that’s for sure,” Ryan said, continuing to project the aura of a cop whose fuse was dangerously short.
Jessie raised her eyebrows at Fellows, as if to hint that there wasn’t much she could do once her partner’s patience ran out completely.
“Okay, fine,” Fellows said. “So I can’t guarantee that every construction worker on every site has every document they need to work legally. And I have, on rare occasions, worked with a broker to get the best possible deal on a property and then flip it when the values in the area increase.”
Jessie again smiled. Ryan grunted impressively.
“Just to be clear,” she said, her voice saccharine sweet, “your broker friend pressures locals, usually folks on the verge of bankruptcy, to sell their distressed properties on the cheap. Then he sits on them while you convince your firm’s clients to buy, offering them sweet deals. After a few sign up, the broker jacks up the price on the remaining, now valuable properties. And on every transaction, he gives you a generous commission for steering them his way. Is that about right?”
“It’s not illegal,” Fellows said obstinately.
“You know, that’s debatable,” Jessie replied. “A motivated prosecutor can often find crimes that others miss. The question I guess you should probably be asking is whether the detective or I know any motivated prosecutors.”
Fellows looked back and forth between them. As he did, Jessie studied him, trying to determine if he was truly just concerned about getting busted for kickbacks or if there was something bigger he was worried about. She couldn’t tell.
“What exactly do you want?” Fellows asked.
Ryan dived in the next second.
“Where were you last night, Mr. Fellows?”
“What?”
“I want to know where you were last night,” Ryan repeated forcefully.
“I was…last night I was…” He stumbled nervously for words for several seconds before seeming to recall his whereabouts. “Oh yeah, I was at my girlfriend’s. She made us dinner. Then we binged a couple of episodes of The Crown.”
Ryan and Jessie exchanged dubious looks.
“You don’t strike me as The Crown type,” Ryan said.
“You have a girlfriend?” Jessie added skeptically, more to throw Fellows off than because she doubted him.
Before he could answer her, Ryan tossed another question at him.
“When did you leave her place?” he wanted to know.
Fellows seemed uncertain who to answer first, but apparently chose Ryan since he appeared angrier.
“I spent the night. I left early this morning, around six, to go home so I could shower and change clothes.”
“You were at her place all night?” Ryan pressed.
Fellows nodded.
“How long have you been dating your girlfriend?” Jessie asked, putting an extra dollop of suspicion on the last word.
“About a year,” he said, impressively not taking the bait. “Why? Can you please tell me what this is about?”
Jessie’s developing profile of Morgan’s killer didn’t include the likelihood that he was in a long-term relationship. She envisioned him as someone who had trouble forming romantic attachments. She had drawn the same conclusion about the abductor. If Scott Fellows was legitimately in a romantic relationship that had been going on for a year, the probability that he was the culprit in either crime dropped dramatically.
“We’ll need her contact information,” Ryan said. “And consent to check your phone records and GPS data without a court order.”
“Fine,” Fellows said. “Just tell me what’s going on. This can’t possibly be about some shady property deals.”
“Do you know the name Morgan Remar?” Jessie asked.
Fellows’s forehead creased as he thought about it.
“It sounds vaguely familiar. I’m not sure why.”
“What about Brenda Ferguson?” Ryan followed up.
Fellows’s furrowed brow softened and his eyes filled with recognition.
“Oh,” he said slowly. “I get it now. This is about the women, right?”
“Yes, Scott,” Jessie confirmed. “This is about the women.”
“I know about them, of course,” he said. “I recognize the Brenda name. The other one was taken too, right?”
“These women escaped from days of captivity on properties your construction company handles and you only have a passing awareness of it?” Jessie said.
Fellows’s expression suggested he was more peeved than worried.
“Ms. Hunt, I deal with client coordination for five construction subsidiaries, all under the banner of a large company. At any one time, I’m dealing with between fifteen and twenty job sites. I admit that finding out that three women were held on ones operated by Construction Associates was freaky. But no one talked to me about it until now so I figured it was just a coincidence.”
“Four women,” Jessie corrected.
“I’m sorry?”
“There were four women taken. The most recent was at the abandoned wood shop property your company owns near the old zoo in Griffith Park.”
“I didn’t know about that,” Fellows said, looking credibly surprised.
“She escaped two nights ago,” Ryan said.
Fellows didn’t have a response to that.
“We need your help,” Jessie prompted. “Assuming you have nothing to hide in relation to these crimes, what we need shouldn’t be hard for you to do.”
“What do you need?” he asked, trying to sound reticent, though Jessie sensed that he would give them anything that would get them off his case.
“We need a list of everyone who knew those sites would be unoccupied, not just at the construction firms but among the clients, lenders, and everyone else. I don’t just mean people officially in the loop but everyone who would logically know. The person who kidnapped these women had to know those locations wouldn’t be disturbed. We need to know who that list includes. Can you do that?”
Fellows mentally calculated what was required to make the request happen. Eventually he answered.
“I can’t promise that I can come up with everyone. There’s always casual conversation, you know. But I can create a list of everyone who would reasonably have access to property statuses. It’ll be pretty long though.”
“When can you have it to us?” Jessie asked.
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Let’s shoot for today,” Ryan said definitively. “I think mid-afternoon should be enough time. Sound good?”
Fellows nodded, as if he had a choice. Ryan and Jessie gave him their contact info and got up to leave. They were just exiting the stable when Fellows called after them.
“Wait, you never explained why a homicide detective and a profiler are handling this. I thought you said all the women got away.”
Jessie had already largely dismissed him as a suspect, pending confirmation of his alibi. But it couldn’t hurt to get a real-time response from him. So she spun around.
“The second abductee, Morgan Remar, was murdered last night, stabbed multiple times in her own kitchen. You know anything about that, Scott?”
The color drained from his face and he reached out for the stable’s wall to steady himself. The arrogant jerk of a few minutes ago had been replaced by a shell-shocked schmo. Jessie found it somehow heartening that the guy was so stricken. Despite his cocky smarminess, he hadn’t completely lost his humanity.
Of course, it also meant that they’d lost their best suspect.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hannah looked surreptitio
usly at her phone.
At the therapeutic high school she attended, specially designed for students “facing extreme emotional and psychological challenges,” they weren’t officially supposed to access phones or other non-approved technology while on campus.
But unofficially the teachers and administrators were pretty lax over the lunch break. As long as students didn’t congregate or draw attention to themselves, staffers let it slide.
As usual, Hannah sat alone. She had yet to meet a kid at this school she felt any connection to. Besides, she was hoping to transfer to the “normal” high school in the next few weeks and figured it wasn’t worth the effort to get to know anyone well. So she sat by herself at the courtyard picnic table, nibbling at her sandwich and scrolling through her feeds.
Thankfully, Jessie had stopped asking her if she’d made any new friends. Her older half-sister was making a real effort to be interested and supportive without hovering over her every second. Luckily, the woman had eventually figured out without being told that peppering her with questions about whether she liked her classmates didn’t jibe with that goal.
Just then, a Facebook post alert popped up from Jessie, an event so rare that Hannah couldn’t recall ever seeing one before. Curious, she clicked on it. As she read, she didn’t notice that she’d stopped chewing completely. Her fingers tingled slightly and she felt her face flush red. After taking a few breaths, she reread the post, certain she must have misunderstood it.
So tired of the teenager grind. Didn’t know when I signed on to be a substitute parent that every waking second would be about trying to keep a selfish know-it-all happy. Can’t decide if the proper title is “brat” or “bitch.” No good deed goes unpunished I guess. Who’s with me?
Hannah read it a third time, still having trouble processing that Jessie actually sent this out into the world. But it was right there, just above her last post from almost six months ago sharing pictures of her most recent round of criminal-inflicted body scars.
No longer hungry and feeling mildly nauseated, she shoved her phone in her pocket and tossed the last of her sandwich in the trash. Then she walked quickly to the nearest bathroom, where she hid in a stall, waiting for class to start and hoping the tears that stained her eyes would be gone by then.
*
Jessie and Ryan had only just returned to the station after their outing to the stable when her phone rang. She assumed it would be Detective Sands. He’d texted her while she was in Sylmar asking for any worthwhile updates from her interview with Scott Fellows. She’d gotten voicemail when she called back and assumed this would be the end of their game of phone tag. But the call was from Kat.
“Hi,” Jessie said.
“Hey,” Kat replied. “I’m outside the station. Do you have five minutes?”
“Sure. I’ll be right out. You want some bad coffee?”
“I’m good,” Kat said.
When Jessie stepped outside, she saw Kat leaning against a light post, looking very detective-like in blue jeans, a leather jacket, and sunglasses. She walked over and waited for her friend to speak first. It didn’t take long.
“So,” Kat began. “I shouldn’t have called Brenda Ferguson. I was pissed and I used her to make you feel guilty about shutting me out of the investigation. It was thoughtless and unprofessional.”
“Thank you,” Jessie said.
After an uncomfortable silence, Kat spoke.
“Your turn.”
“My turn for what?” Jessie asked.
“Your turn to apologize,” she said intensely.
“What exactly am I supposed to be apologizing for?” Jessie asked indignantly, though she had a pretty good feeling she knew where Kat was headed.
“For freezing me out of a case I brought you into in the first place,” Kat accused.
“I thought I explained this last night. I called you to tell you what was going on but I was prohibited from letting you come to the crime scene. It wasn’t personal. You should know that.”
“It felt personal, Jessie,” she said, pushing off from the light post. “It felt like I was good enough to pass information along to you. But once the varsity squad stepped in, you didn’t want the JV around anymore. I was on this thing first. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
Jessie could feel the frustration rising in her chest and tried to force it back down.
“Of course it does. And the information in the files you gave me has actually been really helpful. It gave us at least one new lead. But this isn’t just a private investigation anymore. It’s a murder case. You can’t just go traipsing around in the middle of it.”
“So what are you saying?” Kat challenged. “That I’m out of my depth?”
“I didn’t say that,” Jessie insisted.
“What then?”
Jessie stared at her friend, wondering if there was anything she could say that would lessen her anger and if she even had an obligation to. She was getting pretty irked herself.
“Look, I get that you’re put out. But I’ve told you repeatedly, I didn’t have a choice here. And I know you don’t want to hear this but the person who hired you is dead. You don’t have a case anymore.”
Kat looked wounded. Jessie immediately realized she’d gone too far. Before she could fix it, Kat replied, her voice cold.
“I guess I’m doing it pro bono now.”
She started to walk away.
“Kat, wait,” Jessie said, hoping to patch things over.
But her friend didn’t turn around as she walked away, saying one last thing.
“I’m seeing this through, with or without your help.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The True Avenger moved down the hall with careful stealth.
He loved to refer to himself by that title, even if he couldn’t say it out loud. After all, unlike some comic book heroes, he was doing the hard, real-life work of righting wrongs, of rebuking faithlessness. It wasn’t glamorous. He didn’t wear a costume. But at the end of the day, he was making a real difference in the world. He was eliminating the perpetrators, the ones who had aggrieved the innocent.
As he walked along the dimly lit hall of his office building, he carried his documents, the ones essential to his work, rolled up tightly so no one could catch a glimpse if they walked past. He had a switchblade in his right pocket, ready to pull it out if necessary. He’d practiced snapping it open many times in the privacy of his home. He had it down to a science.
He’d even bought several department store dummies at auctions to use for practice. He took them into his spare room, where he would wrap towels around the necks and waists of the mannequins and put a black “X” on spots representing vulnerable organs. Then he would rehearse pulling out his knife and jabbing it into the marked spot, imagining it was soft human flesh. One time, he’d get the carotid artery. The next it would be the small of the back where a kidney rested. He’d gotten very proficient.
He’d never had to use the knife at work. But he kept it close because he sometimes liked to review his plans while sitting on the toilet. It was an inherently risky move but one he was willing to take. No one he’d ever encountered in the restroom or the hall had given him a suspicious look or taken an interest in the rolled up documents he carried to or from the restroom. But that didn’t mean he shouldn’t stay vigilant.
It wasn’t easy to complete his mission. In the middle of his efforts to cleanse the world, he was still subject to the vagaries of everyday life. There were clients who constantly demanded his attention. And because of the nature of his work, he couldn’t put them off too long without putting his livelihood at risk.
He had just listened to a voicemail from an irate man yelling that there could be potential legal consequences resulting from a delay he blamed on the Avenger. Some small part of him did feel guilty about it. Any time a good man suffered in this unfair system, it was cause for upset. And he hated to think that he was partly responsible for that. But in order to expedite the deliv
erance, sometimes the innocent suffered.
The first three of the four stages of The Deliverance had ended. They couldn’t have gone more perfectly. All four women had been assembled without complication. He called that first stage of the plan The Collection.
After being taken to isolated locations, they had all been held for the required length of time. He called that second stage The Purification, in which they were humbled for their sins, forced to exist in tight quarters, eat like the fallen animals they were, and wallow in their own filth.
Stage Three, The Unraveling, had only recently come to a close. Counterintuitively, it was perhaps his favorite stage. In it, the women “escaped” and managed to return to their previous lives. Of course those escapes had been permitted and carefully stage-managed. And the escapes were far from complete, as each of the sinners still suffered from grievous physical and, more importantly, psychological wounds.
That wasn’t quite true. Not all of them still suffered. One of them had already completed Stage Four, The Reckoning. But as satisfying as beginning Stage Four had been, he knew he had to be careful. The authorities would be on to him now.
That was why he constantly reviewed his plan of action notes. On this day, once he had safely exited the hallway and returned to his desk, he resumed studying them. Now that The Reckoning had begun, he had to be more careful. No one had anticipated him returning to visit a woman who had been abducted and “escaped.” But that would surely change now.
If the authorities hadn’t already connected the abduction to the murder, they soon would. That meant he would have to be more careful in his movements, more wily in his methods of subterfuge. Of course, he’d planned for all this, had contingencies for every move they would make. But that was all theory. Getting it right in the real world was much more complicated, much more difficult.
But, he reminded himself, all worthwhile endeavors were difficult. That was what made them worthwhile. If it was easy to accomplish this task, then anyone could do it. It would not require the True Avenger. But it did require him. Only he truly understood the nature of what had to be done.
