The Perfect Mistress (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Fifteen)

by Blake Pierce

“It was pretty bloody, hard to tell definitively,” Rich said, “But I saw at least five distinct wounds. The coroner will have more information later today.”

  They were all quiet for a few seconds, taking in the scene.

  “You said she was married?” Ryan eventually asked.

  “Yes,” Rich confirmed. “His name is Dwayne. I spoke to him briefly, earlier on the phone. He was in L.A. but he’s down in Perris right now identifying the body. He promised to be in town in the next hour or so. I told him to go straight to the station rather than here when he arrives. You can meet him there to conduct a formal interview. In the meantime, was there anything else you wanted to check out before we stop by the Clarice Kimble crime scene?”

  Jessie took a moment to look around.

  “I see there are no street lights,” she noted.

  “That’s true,” Garrett conceded. “But the place has motion-activated floodlights. And there was a full, cloudless moon last night.”

  He seemed to be anticipating the conclusion she had come to.

  “This area is wide open,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine that anyone could have snuck up on Sarah.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Garrett said. Rich nodded as well.

  “You said the front door was open?” she reconfirmed.

  “That’s right,” Garrett answered. “Eddie said it was open and the foyer light was on. There was also smoke coming out of the chimney, which meant the fireplace was cooking. I shut that down when I got here. It’s a fire risk with no one inside.”

  “No sign of forced entry or anything stolen?” she asked.

  “Not on the former,” Rich answered. “We won’t know for sure about missing items until the husband gets a chance to look around, but nothing seemed disturbed.”

  “Do we know where she was last night?” she pressed. “Home all night? Doing something in town?”

  “We don’t have that yet,” Garret replied. “We’re waiting for her GPS phone data and we didn’t want to start asking around town yet. We convinced Eddie to keep quiet for the sake of the case, but the second we start asking questions, word will spread like wildfire. I hope that wasn’t a mistake.”

  Jessie had started to tune him out. Her focus was elsewhere. She barely heard Ryan say “no, you did the right thing.”

  “How cold was it last night?” she wondered.

  “It got down to about twenty-six at one point,” Garrett answered.

  Jessie nodded absently and walked up the path to the front door. Even under the circumstances, she couldn’t help but notice how impressive the cabin was. Comprised of massive logs that must have required enormous effort to get in place, it looked like a Swiss chalet that could simultaneously withstand a snowstorm, avalanche and earthquake all at once. When she reached the door, she turned and looked back to where the three men stood.

  “What are you thinking?” Ryan called out.

  Jessie didn’t answer at first. After a few moments she returned to them so she wouldn’t have to yell.

  “Sarah wasn’t wearing a coat when something got her attention outside. She didn’t think whatever it was would take that long or she’d have put it on and she wasn’t that scared or she never would have come out in the first place.”

  “You think she knew the killer?’ Garrett asked.

  “Possibly; or maybe whoever it was just didn’t appear like a threat. There’s no sign that she was dragged to where she died. She walked there. That means she felt comfortable enough to go from her front door to the end of the driveway in the dark in just a sweater. She didn’t realize she was in danger. She had no idea she was about to die.”

  Everyone stood silently for several seconds. Ryan finally broke the spell.

  “Why don’t you show us where Clarice Kimble was killed,” he suggested.

  Rich nodded and they all quietly returned to the car. No one spoke until they were back down the hill and on the main road again.

  They turned off Circle Center Drive onto Cedarwood Street. It was residential, with several large cabins tucked into secluded spots among the pines. They stopped in front of one that looked like a gingerbread house on steroids. It was built of brown, wafer-like squares separated by white lines that looked like frosting, and had bright red shingles on the roof.

  “We can walk around if you like,” Rich offered, “but there’s not much to see. There was a big snow on Monday that blanketed everything; wiped out any residual evidence. Luckily we got all our photos and crime scene work down before then. Everything’s at headquarters in Riverside, but we have digitized files at the station. We can make copies for you.”

  Jessie glanced back at Ryan and saw that he felt the same way she did.

  “We don’t want to disturb the husband until we have some constructive questions to ask him,” she said. “If you don’t think we’d get much out of walking around right now, it can wait.”

  “I think you might be better off holding off until you’ve had a chance to look at the file,” Rich advised. “Her husband, Martin, is pretty broken up right now. In fact, the whole town is. Clarice was a known quantity around here. Learning that she died has been unsettling for everyone in the area. Once word starts to really circulate that she was murdered, it’ll only get worse. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like once folks learn about Sarah Ripley too.”

  “That’s fine,” Ryan agreed. “If you can just point us to where it happened so we have a sense of it, that would be helpful.”

  “Garrett took the call,” Rich said, looking back at the deputy.

  Garrett gulped hard before responding.

  “Right, so Martin called it in,” he said, his voice getting stronger as he went on. “I came right over. As you can see, it’s literally a forty-five second drive here from the station. When I got here, she was lying in the snow by her car. She was on her stomach. There was blood on the hood of her car. I think she had just gotten out, was taken by surprise, stumbled back onto the car and then collapsed forward.”

  “What makes you think she’d just gotten home?” Jessie asked.

  “For one thing, her hood was still warm. They tend to cool off pretty quick around here in winter so it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Plus, Martin said she called earlier in the evening from her aromatherapy store to tell him she’d be coming home after nine. He was in the house when it happened and tried calling her when she didn’t arrive by 9:15. She didn’t answer her phone so he was actually heading out to the store to check on her when he found her lying in the yard.”

  Jessie looked over at Ryan and saw that he was doing the same mental calculations she was, trying to determine how much time the killer would have had to commit the crime. Before they could come to any conclusions, her phone buzzed. It was Hannah. The message was short: at coffeehouse. ready to get picked up now.

  Though there was nothing overtly urgent about it, she got an odd sensation. It wasn’t like Hannah to give up her private, independent time, especially after having been confined in a safe house for so long. Something felt off.

  “I think we’ve seen everything we need to here,” she told them all while looking directly at Ryan, willing him to get the urgency of the moment. “Why don’t we head back to the station? You can make copies of the file for Ry…Randy while I pick up my sister, Heidi. I think she’s all coffee-housed out for now.”

  Ryan’s expression told her that he understood, even if he didn’t know the details.

  “That sounds good,” he said. “Besides, I’ve needed to use the restroom for a half hour now. The sooner we get back the better.”

  Rich didn’t need any further incentive, putting the car in drive and making a u-turn. Even thought the station was less than a minute away, Jessie had to fight the urge to tell him to go faster.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hannah darted out of the coffeehouse and jumped in the car.

  “Is something wrong?” Jessie asked, trying to discern why her sister would ever give up even a moment of
freedom.

  “Let’s go,” Hannah said brusquely in response.

  Jessie let it lie for a few minutes. Only when they had started winding their way up the road to the cabin did she try again.

  “How did you like the town?” she inquired, hoping another tack might be more successful.

  “Fine,” was the only answer she got.

  They pulled up at the cabin and got out. It was nothing fancy, just a standard log cabin like many others in town. But it did have a large front yard with a charming wagon wheel bench, which was currently covered in snow.

  They grabbed their bags and headed for the front door. It was unlocked.

  “Ryan?” Jessie called out, making sure that everything was okay.

  “In the bathroom,” he yelled back.

  Hannah went to the room with the smaller bed and sat down. Jessie decided to try one more time.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing bothering you?”

  “I’m sure,” Hannah replied definitively.

  “Okay,” Jessie said, giving up for now. “Then I’m going to unpack.”

  Maybe she was reading too much into the text. Maybe Hannah had just gotten tired of the coffeehouse. She wasn’t convinced but with her sister completely unresponsive, there wasn’t much she could do. She retreated to her room and took the stuff out of her bag. All of it fit into one drawer. Ryan came out the bathroom. He had already put away his clothes and sat on the bed as she finished up.

  “What do you think of the place?” he asked.

  “Nothing fancy but it’s charming,” she said, “especially for the price. I think it will do for a few weeks. Anything longer than that and we might get a little stir crazy.”

  The cabin was on Beaver Drive, only a three minute drive from the center of town. But because it was near the top of a long hill and around a long bend from any other homes, it felt isolated.

  “I noticed that there are deadbolts on the all the doors and that the windows are reinforced,” he said. “I guess that’s one advantage of crashing at an undersherriff’s place.”

  “Yeah,” Jessie said, before reluctantly adding. “I guess I’m just paranoid, but I wish it had cleaner sight lines. There are lots of trees near the cabin, lots of places to hide.”

  “What are you worried about?” Ryan asked, unable to mask the surprise in his voice.

  Jessie didn’t love his tone, which suggested he thought her concerns might be overkill. When she responded it was with an edge.

  “Once it gets out around here that we’re investigating these murders, someone in possession of a large knife is going to get pretty nervous. If they decide to come calling on us, I’d like to be prepared.”

  “Fair enough,” Ryan said, holding his arms up in surrender, realizing he’d hit a sore spot. “Speaking of the case we’re here to solve, do you want to go over the file Garrett copied for me before Sarah Ripley’s husband arrives in town? We’ve got a lot to review and not a ton of time before he gets here.”

  “That sounds like a productive use of our time,” Jessie said, still slightly miffed at his hint that she might be overreacting but trying not to give in to her irritation.

  “Okay then,” he said, pulling out a laptop and plugging in the thumb drive Garrett had given him, “While I was waiting for you and Hannah to arrive, I did a cursory review of both victims’ backgrounds. On the surface there are some similarities.”

  “Like what?” Jessie asked, looking at the screen.

  “Both women were in their mid-thirties and married with no children,” he explained. “Both were attractive. Both were successful entrepreneurs who ran retail businesses. But after that, their differences become more noticeable.”

  “For example?”

  “Like Rich said, Clarice Kimble is a local. She lived here until she went away to college in Arizona; met her boyfriend there. After a couple of years in Tucson, they came back here and got married. They’ve been here ever since. A few years back, she opened her aromatherapy store, Sense of Scents. She’s the vice-president of the chamber of commerce and from what I can tell, is incredibly active in the community. She’s on the board of her church and of an arts high school in town called the Wildpines Arts Conservatory.”

  “Sounds like a pillar of the community,” Jessie said drily. She’d learned to be suspicious of such spotless resumes.

  Ryan was about to continue when Hannah poked her head in the door.

  “Everything all right?” Jessie asked.

  “Yeah, sorry to interrupt but this cabin’s small and I couldn’t help but overhear you.”

  “That’s okay,” Jessie said. “What’s up?”

  “I heard you mention the Conservatory and it reminded me—I met some students who go there at the coffeehouse earlier. They invited me to hang out tonight at a café bar. I looked it up and it’s only a half mile walk from here, just down the hill. I’d like to go if it’s cool. After all, the whole point of coming up here was to let us get outside a little, right?”

  Jessie looked over at Ryan, who shrugged. She could tell he didn’t want to get in the middle of this and though she understood the urge, she didn’t exactly love being left out on an island to deal with it. She turned back to Hannah.

  “I think you can definitely go. I’m less sure about the ‘walking there’ part. It’s partly true that we’re here so we can get outside. But the other reason we’re up here helping out is because, over the last few nights, someone has been stabbing women who were alone late at night. I know that the pattern so far suggests that victims are older than you, but I don’t really want to test the theory. So if you don’t mind being driven there and back, I’m okay with you going.”

  She could see Hannah’s mind racing and recalled her own teen years, when prior to having a car, she’d insisted that her adoptive mother drop her off a block from the mall so none of her friends would observe the horror of her getting a ride from a parent.

  “I’ll park next door so no one sees you get out of the car,” she offered preemptively.

  Hannah smirked.

  “You think I’m so shallow that I’d be bothered by you dropping me off right in front of the place?” she asked, trying to gin up a sense of moral outrage.

  “Maybe,” Jessie said. “At your age, I was. I’d actually consider us to be in a pretty healthy familial place if our conflicts are about you being embarrassed by people seeing you with me.”

  Hannah looked torn between wanting to be snarky and not wanting to upset her chances of going.

  “They’re meeting at nine,” she finally said before disappearing from the doorway.

  “Lovely, dear,” Jessie called out to the empty space, “I’ll be sure to remove my apron and curlers before we head out.”

  She looked over at Ryan who shook his head disapproving.

  “I don’t think she’s as amused as you are,” he chastised.

  “Mind your business, coward,” she instructed. “You were about to tell me why Sarah Ripley is nothing like Clarice Kimble.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said saluting elaborately. “As I was saying, Clarice is a local through and through. Sarah lives in Los Angeles—Silverlake specifically. She has a shop there called SEE, or Sarah’s Everyday Essentials. It’s kind of a gift store. They have everything from leatherbound journals to body scrubs to tote bags with quips about ‘wine o’clock.’”

  “Sounds like the kind of place I’d like to visit,” Jessie admitted.

  “Apparently you’re not the only one because she was planning to open up a second location here. She leased a space at the start of the year and, according to Garrett, hoped to open for business by April.”

  “But she doesn’t live here?”

  “Not yet,” Ryan said. “Garrett said she was a familiar face around town, usually here on weekends. She was well-liked, from what he says, friendly and enthusiastic about being here. They own the place where she was killed, though her husband came up far less often, and he wasn’t well-known.
But Sarah had joined the chamber and was ingratiating herself with the local powers-that-be.”

  “Any suggestion that her attempts at ingratiation had alienated anyone?”

  “Garrett said he hadn’t heard anything like that but I guess we can see if her husband tells a different story.”

  Jessie nodded, her eyes scanning the files on the laptop.

  “Do we know if the women knew each other?” Jessie wondered. “Maybe they were in the same social circle?”

  “I asked Garrett that and he said he wasn’t aware of them knowing each other socially. But he also admitted that he wasn’t totally plugged in to the over thirty female social scene.”

  “I see one connection at least,” Jessie noted, pointing at the screen. “They were both part of some online group for local business owners called ‘Wildpines Business Association.’ It looks like it’s not formally associated with the chamber of commerce, although I see a lot of cross-over in membership.”

  “Good catch,” Ryan said, typing in the web address for the WBA.

  When it loaded, they saw that the site was pretty bare bones. There was a list of local businesses in the association, with addresses and phone numbers, one-line business descriptions, and website links. There was an events tab, which included monthly coffee klatches and occasional workshops. And there was members-only chat forum, which required a log-in and password. That was pretty much it.

  “Why do they need this, if there’s also a chamber of commerce?” Jessie asked. “Don’t they do the same thing?”

  “From what I can tell, the WBA is more informal, intended as a resource rather than an official group representing the town. What I’m wondering is whether it’s just a coincidence that both women were in the group.”

  Jessie was inclined to think so.

  “This town is so small that it looks like half the businesses here are listed,” she noted. “I’d be more surprised they weren’t both members. I have a different question. I know we only have two victims. But they have comparable profiles and were killed only two nights apart with the same weapon. Does this killer have a type?”