THE PERFECT IMAGE

by Blake Pierce

  That was why she had to keep going. He’d never be this vulnerable again. It was now or never. Jessie turned to face Sumner and flashed a big smile.

  “We’re making real progress,” she said enthusiastically as she held up her phone, hoping she was as good a liar as Sumner.

  That’s great news,” he replied, sounding as disingenuous as she felt.

  She returned to the chair opposite him, sat down, and sighed loudly, as if she was losing interest in him. She did it intentionally to get under his skin. It was part of her plan, but it was a dicey choice to continue to goad a man like Sumner. He was unpredictable.

  Once she started down this path, there was no way back. And if this went south, she’d be out of cards to play. But she had to do it. She needed a confession in case everything else fell through. Besides, something told her that he wanted to take credit for what he’d done. She sensed that he was proud of it.

  She stared at his arrogant, overconfident smirk. His was the face of a man who was sure he was the cleverest person in the world. He wouldn’t like it very much if she suggested otherwise. It was time undermine that aura of self-importance. She looked at Ryan one last time. He nodded imperceptibly. And with that, she dived in.

  “I hate to do this again,” she said reluctantly, “and I hope you don’t take offense, but I really think you should reconsider asking for a lawyer. You genuinely seem like you might need one. You might be out of your depth here, Curt. No offense.”

  She smiled sympathetically, as if she was telling a hopeful job interviewee that she’d decided to go another way. He sneered back.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Relieved but not totally surprised, she played her first card.

  “Okay then,” she replied briskly. “So here’s what’s so confusing to me, Curt. You were on a walk at the same time that the clocks in your tutorial video say you were cooking. How is that possible?”

  He nodded condescendingly.

  “I could see why that might be confusing for you. But I’ll clear it up. I keep having trouble with those clocks—batteries dying, electronics on the fritz. I never trust the accuracy of those clocks. I just use my watch.”

  Jessie pursed her lips as if pondering his words.

  “Ah, thanks for clearing that up for me,” she said. “But don’t you find it odd that each screwed up clock had the exact same incorrect time as the other one throughout the whole video?”

  It was Sumner’s turn to wave dismissively.

  “Who knows? I’m a chef, not a clockmaker. Honestly, I find even the most basic technology challenging. Figuring out how to put those videos together was a real bitch for me. I’m a bit of a Luddite.”

  Jessie looked at Curt Sumner, with his relaxed, untroubled smile, and suddenly a truth that she’d been fighting against this whole time became plain to her: she was going to lose.

  As long as they were in this room and he thought there was any chance that he was at risk, Sumner would never let his guard down. And unless he did, she would never nail him. She had to change the dynamic, and in that moment, she could only think of one certain way to do it. She had to let him go.

  “You know what, Curt?” she said, standing up, “I think we’re wasting your time here.”

  “What?” both he and Ryan asked at the same time.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right—you’re not a clockmaker. I think this is just one big misunderstanding. Detective Hernandez here is going to close out the paperwork and I’ll give you a ride back home, okay?”

  “Okay,” Sumner said tentatively, standing up slowly. “So should we just go now?”

  “Might as well,” Jessie said, ignoring the hard stare Ryan was giving her as she opened the door and motioned for Sumner to step out. “Just give me one second to grab my coat from next door.”

  Ryan followed her into the observation room and closed the door.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded in an intense whisper.

  “I’m shaking things up,” she said as she turned on the voice memo function on her phone and shoved it in her coat pocket, before patting it for his benefit. “This will work short term but as soon as he and I are out of sight, get the tech folks to turn the wire I’m still wearing back on. I want multiple recording devices on this conversation.”

  “You’re still trying to get a confession?” Ryan asked in disbelief.

  “Give me your keys, sweetie,” she said without answering. “Our guest is waiting.”

  “Be careful,” he pleaded as he handed them over reluctantly.

  She gave him a kiss on the cheek and stepped back outside, where Sumner was leaning against the wall.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “I’m well past ready,” he replied.

  “Then let’s go,” she said, leading him down the hall in silence for a few seconds. Only once they were outside, in the cool air and away from anyone else, did she resume their conversation from the interrogation room as if it had never ended.

  “I know what you meant back in there about being a Luddite. Hell, clocks are complicated,” Jessie said, letting the sarcasm bleed through for a beat before adding, “And yet, despite your problems, you manage to get by, don’t you?”

  “I muddle through,” Sumner replied, sounding equally smarmy as he walked along beside her, “although I’m not sure what you’re referencing.”

  She’d played her first card back in the interrogation room. Now, as they left the sidewalk and moved into the station’s exterior parking lot, she played her second one.

  “Well, for starters, you somehow managed to figure out how to have your cell number forwarded to another phone so it looked like you were home when you were actually out of the house. That’s pretty impressive for a Luddite.”

  Sumner’s silence told her she’d hit a nerve. She kept going, talking in a singsong voice that she hoped he found annoying.

  “I’m assuming you forwarded those calls to the burner phone you smashed into pieces with your foot and dumped in a trash can—all except for the SIM card, of course, which you swallowed. That was a weird choice.”

  “I thought you said this was all a big misunderstanding,” he said, not amused.

  “Oh, totally,” she told him. “This is just me and my harebrained theorizing. Anyway, I think that trash can was on the corner of California Avenue and 11th Street, which is only half a block from your house. What a coincidence! Some people might wonder why you’d do something wacky like that, but not me. I don’t like to pry.”

  “Of course you don’t,” he said archly.

  “You sure you don’t want that lawyer now?” she asked with a giggle, before adding, “Just kidding. Or am I? It doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s not like I’m a cop.”

  He looked less like he wanted legal representation and more like he wanted to slice her up. His eyes were blazing and he no longer had that relaxed, untroubled smile. Jessie saw Ryan’s car in the distance and headed that way. As she walked, she noticed that there was no one else in the lot with them.

  “I would never ask for a lawyer, Ms. Hunt,” Sumner replied, still sounding even-keeled, though he didn’t look it, “as that might mean an end to all this free entertainment.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she said, playing her third card. “We’re having too much fun, aren’t we? But I do think you’re selling yourself short. You say you’re a Luddite but you did also learn how to auto-upload those videos so it seemed like you were home when you were really out. I’m guessing you’ve done that at least once before, on the night that Siobhan Pierson died, so kudos to you.”

  She saw that he was about to respond but didn’t want to give him the chance to lower his internal temperature with a snarky quip so she plowed through.

  “One funny thing you’ll learn, Curt, is that at the downtown station where we usually work, we have this researcher. He’s the one who texted us back in the interrogation room. His name�
�s Jamil and he’s definitely not a Luddite. He’s a real tech whiz kid, the kind of guy who can detect auto-uploads and track forwarded cell calls and access useful home security footage without even trying. I don’t mean to compare you to him—that wouldn’t be fair. But you’re pretty good too.”

  Sumner exhaled deeply, much like Jessie often did when she was trying not to lose it with Hannah. His breath was visible in the crisp air.

  “You give me too much credit,” he said.

  His voice was still calm but his eyes were shaky. This was as agitated as she’d seen him. To most people, he probably looked fine. But in her limited time spent with him, she knew otherwise. He was boiling inside. But if she wanted him to bubble over she had to push a little harder, even if she got burned.

  “I think maybe I did give you too much credit,” she said sincerely, her voice a whisper, “but not anymore.”

  “What?” he asked, confused. He’d clearly been expecting more sarcasm.

  They had reached Ryan’s car. Standing by the passenger door, Jessie turned to face Sumner directly. For the first time, she truly appreciated how big the man was. She was tall but he still towered over her by half a foot. It was hard not to be intimidated. But she did her best.

  “I thought we were dealing with some evil genius,” she said with what she hoped sounded like regret. “But you’re not that. You’re the guy who showed up on security video outside a potential victim’s house. You’re the guy who forgot to plan ahead and didn’t realize that the new deck at the Carlisle house might mean other changes had been made too.”

  Sumner was squirming now, as if there was a creature inside him trying to get out. She kept going, hoping that either her phone or the wire was catching everything they said.

  “You think you’re so smart because you left your cell phone with its GPS at home to give yourself an alibi; because you picked victims within walking distance of both your home and the House Cooks you scheduled that night. That way, you didn’t have to drive yourself or take a cab or a rideshare. That way, there were no witnesses and no digital record, no way to track your movements. You thought you were being so clever but you left bread crumbs everywhere. You think you’re some architect of death but compared to the people I go up against, you’re just an amateur.”

  Behind his tightly pursed lips, Sumner was grinding his teeth.

  “You’re wrong,” he hissed quietly.

  She was close. But she needed something more, something that would open the floodgates. And then she hit on it. He wanted to prove he was better than her. He wanted to prove she was wrong, that she had failed to judge him properly. She needed to let him have his moment of vindication, out here, alone, where there would be no consequences. And she had an idea how she would do it.

  “Am I wrong, Curt?” she teased, leaning in toward him despite her thumping heart, trying to channel his arrogance. “I don’t think so. All this is happening because you’re weak. You just couldn’t help but glance longingly at Sheena Lennox when we drove past her house, could you?”

  She pressed on before he could respond.

  “You think this was all some test of your mastery. You can gussy it up all you want, but you’re deceiving yourself. Hell, that’s what the Night Hunter did too. He thought he was an artist. But he was just like you and all the others, driven by desires he couldn’t control. You’re all consumed with the need to control others. But the irony is that you can’t control yourself.”

  Sumner’s eyes were fixed on the asphalt next to the car. His hands were balled into fists, pressing into his jacket. She could feel the fury radiating off him. Now it was time for the big lie.

  “You had to look at Sheena,” she spat victoriously, playing her final card, bluffing with all her might, “just like you had to have her. And if you couldn’t have her, you were going to kill her. Just like you couldn’t have Chrissie Newton, so you killed her.”

  That was what broke him. He took a step toward her, bumping into her with his chest, knocking her up against Ryan’s car.

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” he snarled down at her.

  Jessie tried not to flinch.

  “What do you mean?’ she asked, craning her neck back to make eye contact with him.

  “I wasn’t pining for Chrissie,” he shouted, sticking his finger in her face. “It was the other way around. She practically threw herself at me!”

  Jessie didn’t know where he was going with this but it was her job to keep him riled up enough to get there. She couldn’t stop now.

  “Sure she did,” she shot back skeptically, though she sensed that she was out on a limb that could break at any second, and when it did, Curt Sumner might break her.

  “She did,” he insisted, “during their House Cook. Hell, she wanted to go at it while her husband was in the bathroom. But I didn’t do it, not until later. And then I found out she was frickin’ crazy.”

  “Crazy, how?” Jessie asked.

  She watched him seethe at the memory of it. He couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t even try.

  “After a month of mediocre sex, she begs me to come over to her house. When I get there, she says she loves me and she’s leaving her husband. I told her I wasn’t interested. Then she starts threatening me, saying that she’ll tell everyone that Chef Curt Sumner sleeps with wives who hire him. She was screaming at me, right up in my face, promising to ruin my career. I had to protect myself so I grabbed the closest thing I could find—a knife—and used it. I didn’t have a choice.”

  He was standing in front of Jessie, his whole body shaking, the finger that was pointed at her quivering wildly. She worried that he might inadvertently poke her in the eye.

  “I get it, Curt,” she said, her voice now warm honey. “You didn’t have a choice. She didn’t leave you one.”

  “Right,” he agreed, looking at her plaintively. “You understand.”

  Now that the dam had broken, he didn’t seem to care about anything but making certain that she did. That was fine with her. Every second that he talked was another second for the cavalry to arrive.

  Where the hell are they, by the way? Didn’t they hear that confession?

  “I do,” Jessie assured him, putting her hand on his shoulder and easing him away from her. And she did understand. While she didn’t buy his crap about not having a choice, now that she knew how this started, she could make an educated guess as to why it continued. “It happened so quickly, didn’t it?”

  He nodded that it did.

  “But after it was over,” she prodded gently, “once you knew you had gotten away with it, you couldn’t stop reliving it, could you?”

  Curt Sumner’s eyes widened. He stared at her like she was literally reading his mind.

  “I watched the life bleed out of her. I saw her last breath, the moment the light left her eyes. It was beautiful…and powerful…to know that this woman had been alive moments earlier and, because of me, that was all gone. To have that power in my hands—it was intoxicating.”

  “You wanted that feeling again,” she nudged.

  The second she said it, she knew she’d gone too far. The dreaminess in his eyes at the memory of killing Chrissie Newton disappeared, replaced by the cunning alertness that had defined him until a minute ago. He suddenly appeared to realize what he’d done, and how irreparable the damage was. Still, he tried.

  “You bought all that?” he asked with forced nonchalance. “I was just messing with you. I can’t believe you actually fell for it.”

  Though she knew she shouldn’t, that she was baiting a hibernating bear, she gave him her own relaxed, untroubled smile.

  “Too late for that, Curt,” she said. “We got everything on the wire. You really should have asked for that lawyer.”

  She should have known better. Maybe she’d been lulled into complacency by his refined manner or her awareness that he was unarmed. Maybe it was just that he was such an unbelievably narcissistic bastard. But all that compl
acency vanished in a moment. Only the flare of his nostrils gave her any warning about what was coming.

  He yanked his right fist, still balled up tight, back behind him and thrust it forward toward her face. With that brief second of preparation, Jessie ducked and dropped to her knees. Above her, she heard a loud shattering sound and felt pebbles of glass rain down on her neck.

  She looked up to see that Sumner had smashed his fist through the front passenger window. He was staring at his hand, which was bloody and had bits of glass sticking out of it. For a moment, he seemed too shocked to scream.

  Then he let out a howl that echoed through the parking lot. Jessie knew it was only a matter of time before his attention turned to her. As quickly as she could, she dropped her stomach and rolled under Ryan’s car. Now on her back, the last thing she saw before she scuttled under were Sumner’s eyes boring into hers.

  She tried to scurry to the middle of the car but before she could, she felt his hands on her ankle. He hollered again at the pain that gripping her leg must have caused. But that didn’t stop him from tugging at her furiously. She felt the asphalt scrape against the skin of her back as he yanked her out.

  When she saw him again, he was standing over her, his bloody, glass-pocked right hand dripping down on her. He grimaced as he clenched it tight, oblivious to the blood that went from a trickle to a thin stream down the outside of his fist. Jessie wanted to kick at him but he was standing straddling her waist, making it impossible. All she could do was clench her knees into a ball and hope to drive her feet at him when he plunged his fist down.

  He moved fast, dropping suddenly as she tried to tuck into a protective shell. Just as the gleaming fist picked up team, she saw something to the left out of the corner of her eye. Something slammed hard into Sumner. Before she could blink, he was gone.

  She rolled over to find the chef sprawled out on the ground, gasping for breath. Just beyond him, Ryan was scrambling to his feet. With his eyes focused and clear, he took two steps forward and dropped to his knees, landing both squarely on Sumner’s sternum. The man groaned. Then Ryan slid off, rolled him onto his back, and cuffed him.