Page 31

It only took six minutes to get from the station to Monica Silver’s Hermosa Beach condo.

Still, Jessie could barely contain herself as her legs bounced up and down in the passenger seat of Riddell’s car. When they pulled up on the street in front of the place, it was 4:30 and the sky was still dark.

The complex, about a half mile inland from the beach, was modest but well-maintained. They entered the vestibule and used the Knox Box to let themselves in. The building was only two stories tall, but Jessie took the elevator and Riddell the stairs so they wouldn’t miss her if she saw them and tried to slip by.

When the elevator doors opened, Jessie found Riddell waiting for her. They walked down to Silver’s unit at the end of the hall. It was facing away from the street, meaning the woman wouldn’t have seen them pull up. That was good news. At least they had the element of surprise.

“Are we announcing ourselves?” Jessie whispered.

“Briefly, before I kick open the door,” Riddell said. “I’m not taking any chances with a three-time murderer.”

Jessie couldn’t argue with his logic. They both unholstered their weapons. Riddell counted down from three with his leg cocked, ready to kick.

“Monica Silver, this is the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department,” he barked. “We’re coming in. Put your hands above your head.”

The words had barely left his mouth before he smashed the door open. The lights were off. Riddell rolled into the unit, going one direction. Jessie followed suit, going the other way. They both crouched low, listening for any movement or words, but there was only silence.

Using the light from the hallway, Riddell indicated for Jessie to check the kitchen nook off to the left while he approached the open bedroom door. She scurried around the corner, then popped up and leapt to the right as she scanned the kitchen. It was empty.

Riddell was at the bedroom door. He reached out and flicked on the light before diving in. Jessie started to follow but noticed that the bathroom door was closed. She sidled over to it and waited for word from Riddell. It came a few seconds later.

“Clear,” he said.

Hearing that, she kicked in the bathroom door. It shot open without resistance. She dropped to her knees and peeked in. There was no one there. Then she heard a sound from the hall and spun to her left, aiming her gun at a silhouetted figure in the doorway. Her finger was just starting to squeeze the trigger when she noted that the figure was heavyset and seemingly bald, a far cry from Monica Silver.

“What the hell?” the man demanded.

“Put your hands above your head,” she ordered. “This is the LAPD and Sheriff’s department.”

The man’s hands immediately shot in the air.

“Lie down on your stomach,” Riddell instructed. He was now standing in the bedroom doorway, his weapon also trained on the man. The chunky fellow obeyed immediately, and Riddell hurried over to search him. While he did that, Jessie moved to the bedroom and looked in.

The bed was made, and the room was generally tidy. There was no obvious visual indication of the kind of chaos in Monica’s life that had marked her sister’s. Jessie wandered over to the sliding closet door that was off its track, likely a result of Riddell slamming it open. At the far end, on the built-in shelf, she noticed something that the detective must have missed in his haste.

Four mannequin heads rested on the shelf next to each other. They each had wigs on them. One was blonde. Another dark black. A third was a lighter brown. The fourth was uncovered. Jessie moved over to that side of the closet to get a closer look.

The blonde wig generally matched her memory of the hair length of the bikini-clad woman in the security footage with Daran Peterson. The uncovered head had one word scrawled in red marker at the base: red. She turned and left the bedroom.

“The guy is just a neighbor,” said Riddell, who now had the man sitting on the floor against the hallway wall. “I was about to question him about Silver.”

“Okay,” Jessie said. “But we may have a more pressing concern.”

“What?”

“There are a bunch of wigs in her closet,” she explained, “and at least one of them looks like what she was wearing with Peterson. But the bigger issue is that there’s one missing. I think it’s for a redhead. She might already be out there hunting down Cisco.”

Before Riddell could reply, his phone rang.

“It’s the deputy watching Joel Cisco’s house,” he said, picking up. “What’s going on?”

“We’re at the front door,” the deputy said, “Mrs. Cisco replied to us, but has refused to open the door. We’ve been here for ten minutes, but she’s not budging. She says she may have to call a lawyer.”

They didn’t have time for this, and Jessie had lost her patience.

“Can you make this a video call?” Jessie asked as she walked over.

“Yes, ma’am,” the deputy said and did so. He appeared on the screen.

“Turn your phone around and hold your screen up to the peephole,” she instructed, motioning for Riddell to point his phone at her. “Then tell Mrs. Cisco to look through the hole.”

The deputy did as he was told. A moment later, Jessie could hear a female voice speak.

“I said I don’t want to talk.”

“Then just listen,” Jessie said loudly. “Mrs. Cisco, my name is Jessie Hunt. I’m a criminal profiler with the LAPD. I’m working with the Sheriff's Department on a case. My guess is that you’re concerned that all this has something to do with allegations about your husband’s work as a financial advisor. But I want to assure that it doesn’t. This is about his safety.”

“What does that mean?” Cisco asked from behind the door. This was no way to conduct an interview.

“I’ll explain,” she answered, “but first, like I said, my name is Jessie. What’s your first name?”

“Lana,” the woman answered reluctantly, “what did you mean about Joel’s safety?”

"Lana, I need you to open the door so we can talk for real," she said. "I promise that no one is going to barge into your home. I just want to do this face-to-face."

She heard a lock click and the door opened to reveal a petite, attractive woman with brown hair. She was wearing a robe over pajamas.

“Thank you, Lana,” she said before deciding to be as direct as she could, within reason. “Have you heard about the recent murders at the yacht club?”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw something about two members being killed on the news.”

“Well, it’s now up to three,” Jessie informed her. “I don’t know if Joel told you this, but they were all friends of his. And we’re concerned that he may be the next target. In fact, we’re nearly certain of it.”

“Why?” Lana asked, her face scrunched up in concern.

"We don't really have time to go into it right now," Jessie said. "But we need your help to find him. I assume he's not at home, or he would have come to the door."

“No,” she said. “With all the legal stuff going on, he said he wanted to clear his head. He planned to spend the night on the boat.”

Jessie glanced over at Riddell, who had stiffened up. She understood why. Cisco wasn’t on the boat. If his wife didn’t know where he really was and they didn’t get his GPS data soon, they were flying blind.

“Lana,” she said delicately, “we sent officers to look for him on the boat and he wasn’t there. Do you know where else he might be?”

“Which boat did you check?” Lana asked.

“There’s more than one?”

“Yeah,” she answered. “There’s the larger yacht docked in King Harbor and the smaller sailboat he keeps up in Marina del Rey.”

Jessie couldn’t stop her jaw from dropping at that tidbit. For a moment, she was upset that Jamil and Beth hadn’t picked up on this crucial detail. But then she reconsidered. They found the boat in Redondo. Why would they assume the guy had a second one at a different location? It was an understandable oversight.

“Mrs. Cisco—Lana,” Riddell said, turning his phone so that he was now on camera too. “I’m Detective Riddell with the L.A. Sheriff’s Department. We need the name and hull identification number for the boat in the marina. We’re going to have someone check on him.”

“Okay,” she said, “but should I maybe just call him now?”

Riddell looked over at Jessie to see if she had any objection. She nodded to indicate she was cool with it. Right now, Cisco’s potential culpability in any crime was secondary to his safety, even if it meant alerting the man that they were on to him.

“Go ahead, we’ll stay on the line so you can conference him in,” he said before turning to Jessie. “We should get down to the car and head up that way.”

They started down the hall when the man sitting on the floor called out to them.

“What about me?”

“You’re free to return to your apartment,” Riddell said without looking back.

They took the stairs down as Lana Cisco called her husband. It went straight to voicemail. She tried a second time with the same result.

“Could he be asleep?” Riddell asked her.

“I don’t think so,” Lana replied. “If he was, it would ring multiple times before going to voicemail. But I have noticed that when he leaves the marina and is out in open water, this will happen sometimes. He can’t always get a signal out there.”

Jessie looked at Riddell, concerned.

“What?” he asked.

“Hold on a second,” she said. “Lana, we’re going to hang up for now. Keep calling. The deputies will stay with you. If Joel picks up, conference us back in again.”

“Okay,” she said. “Can you tell me what this is about now?”

"We'll deal with all of that once Joel's safe," Jessie deflected. "Right now, we're going to try to make sure he is."

As they got in his car, she indicated that Riddell should hang up.

“What were you thinking before?” he asked.

“That we shouldn’t drive to the marina,” she said. “We can have someone check his slip. But if he’s out to sea already, we need another way to get to him. I say we go to King Harbor, which is much closer to us, and go from there to catch him. Have any recommendations for our best option?”

“I do,” he said, pulling out onto the street. “We’ll catch a ride with the Coast Guard. Those guys move pretty fast. It’s our best chance to make up time.”

“Great,” Jessie said.

What she didn’t add was the concern bubbling in the back of her mind: what if they were already out of time?