Page 15 of The Perfect Deception (Jessie Hunt #40)

Kat tried not to slam down the phone in her office.

She was too deep into this thing to let frustration get the better of her, but it was still hard.

It wasn’t the fault of the overnight manager of the Las Vegas Commodore Hotel that she was no closer to her goal than before. He had just been the messenger.

When she left Vegas yesterday on her above-the-speed-limit journey back to help pick up Jessie at the airport, she already knew that she’d missed Ash Pierce. She just didn’t know by how long. Now she did.

According to the surveillance footage at the hotel, Pierce had left two days before Kat arrived. That was the information she’d hoped to glean before leaving Sin City yesterday. But at least she had it now and could add it to the picture she was forming.

Kat leaned back in her chair and stared at the map of the U.S. that she’d affixed to the corkboard on her office wall. The red pushpin she’d placed on the black dot for Vegas seemed to be staring back at her. She had been so close this time.

She was certainly closer than when this process first started. Once she’d learned that Pierce had returned to the country via a cruise ship in Long Beach nearly six weeks ago, she’d followed every available crumb. With the off-the-book assistance of both Hannah and Jamil, who used the department’s facial recognition technology to track Pierce down, she’d followed the crumbs first to San Diego.

There was footage of Pierce, now wearing a medium-length brown wig, getting off a bus near a youth hostel in the Gaslamp Quarter of the city. Kat had learned from Pierce’s time in Ecuador that she preferred hostels to hotels, probably because they were more likely to take cash and had fewer security cameras.

As soon as she saw the images, Kat drove the two hours south. Sure enough, one of the hostel managers confirmed that a woman matching Pierce’s description had stayed with them for about two weeks, but had left three days prior to Kat’s arrival.

Things quieted down for a couple of weeks before Hannah sent her a message at five in the morning one day. She’d got an alert that the facial recognition system had a hit on Pierce in Phoenix. When Kat looked at it, she was initially excited. That is, until she saw the date. The video clip of a woman with short red hair and oversized sunglasses was from a week prior to getting the alert.

Still, Kat drove the six hours to the desert city in the hope that she might find the hitwoman. If Pierce was staying there as long as she had in San Diego, maybe she hadn’t left yet. But the hope was misplaced. The hostel manager there said the woman had stayed for ten days and checked out two days prior to Kat showing up.

Next was Joshua Tree National Park. Pierce must not have noticed that some of the campgrounds there, in addition to having basic toilet facilities, also had cameras. That explained why, in the still images of her, the woman wasn’t wearing any disguise. She must have assumed that in an isolated camping spot in the middle of the California desert she could move about more freely.

That was how Kat saw that the woman’s dyed blonde hair was starting to return to its natural black color. In just a few weeks, she’d need to get another dye job if she wanted it to last. Unfortunately for Kat, those images weren’t on a central server so it took a while for her to see them.

Because of the lack of Wi-Fi in the area, a park ranger had to manually go to each campground, collect old school motion-detection disk recordings, and take them to the ranger station for downloading. That only happened weekly, which meant that by the time Jamil and Hannah flagged the Joshua Tree footage, it was a week old.

Even though she knew it was probably pointless, Kat made the trip to the national park. She checked out the campground where Pierce had stayed and spoke to a young couple who had overlapped with the killer by one day before she departed two days prior to Kat’s arrival.

“She seemed nice enough,”

the young woman said.

“We didn’t talk much because her campsite was about fifty yards east of ours. But the few times we did chat, she was pleasant.”

“Yeah,”

her boyfriend added.

“I misplaced my Swiss Army Knife and we had no way to open this can of beans we had. I walked over and asked her if she had one I could borrow. She pulled out this big one and proceeded to jam it in the top of the can and carve through it like it was butter. I was impressed.”

Kat couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same knife Ash had used to remove Camille Overton’s fingertips and teeth.

“You just asked for help the one time?”

“Yeah, I found my knife the next morning so I was okay after that, but I have to say she seemed pretty normal to me. What did she do?”

“She’s a hitwoman who has killed at least a dozen people that I know of,”

Kat said matter-of-factly.

“She also kidnapped me and brought me out to a desert not unlike this one, where she tortured me within an inch of my life until I was rescued.”

The couples’ jaws dropped open simultaneously. Kat realized she might have been blunter than necessary. But her capacity for diplomacy when it came to Pierce had long since fizzled out.

After striking out in Joshua Tree, Kat’s most recent adventure was in Vegas. Unlike most of the other places she’d crashed in, Pierce used a hotel there, the Commodore. That’s where the footage that Jamil sent Kat three days ago came from. Once she hightailed it there, driving through the middle of the night, she understood why.

Despite its impressive-sounding name, the Commodore was a seedy motel that accepted cash payment weekly, nightly, and even hourly. It was off the strip but within walking distance, in an industrial area near the freeway. After doing some research, Kat learned that all the hostels in the city were on populated streets with traffic cameras and businesses nearby that likely recorded everything too. That explained why Pierce hadn’t used one of them.

The head manager hadn’t been much help, probably because he worried that Kat was interested in what happened in the rooms that offered hourly rates. But the overnight manager wasn’t as discerning. For some cash of his own, he agreed to check the hotel cameras to determine when exactly Pierce had arrived and left. He even agreed to let Kat watch the footage with him.

Unfortunately he had to wait until he was working alone, which meant the overnight shift. Sticking around for that would have meant Kat missing Jessie’s arrival back in town. Not even Ash Pierce could get in the way of that. So she’d left town.

It turned out not to matter whether she’d stuck around or not. When the manager informed her that she’d missed Pierce by two days, she wasn’t shocked. Just missing Ash Pierce was almost becoming Kat’s second job.

She allowed herself a bitter chuckle as she stared more closely at the map on her wall. Pushpins marked everywhere she knew the killer had been: Long Beach, then San Diego for two weeks, Phoenix for ten days, Joshua Tree for ten more, and Las Vegas for a week. All her stops, with the exception of the isolated campground, were in large cities where she could stay anonymous. And her stays were getting shorter.

Kat also couldn’t help but note that each of Pierce’s stops was still in the general region of L.A. Even Phoenix, the farthest away, was only half a day’s drive. It was clear that the woman didn’t want to get too far away from her targets. But equally important, she didn’t seem to want to actually return to L.A. yet, where she was more likely to be recognized. Law enforcement throughout the region was well aware of her.

Kat suspected that Pierce wouldn’t return to town until she was ready to take decisive action. The concern was that after being back in the country for six weeks, she might be getting closer to doing that.

Kat’s hope was to turn the tables on the killer and find her first. That meant figuring out where she was hiding now. But that was easier said than done. The number of good-sized cities in the western states was overwhelming.

Pierce could return to any of the places she'd already gone, but there were multiple other options. She could be as far away as Tucson, Arizona, or much closer, in Riverside, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, Lancaster, Bakersfield, or a dozen other large towns, all of which were less than three hours from where Kat now sat.

She was sure of one thing at least. Whether she found Ash Pierce first or the assassin came to her, the clock was ticking. They’d be seeing each other again soon