Page 7 of The Perfect Deception (Jessie Hunt #40)

At first Jessie wasn’t sure where she was.

As she blinked her blurry eyes open, she tried make sense of things. Everything was dark. She could hear Ryan’s voice but didn’t understand what he was saying. After a moment, she realized that she was lying in her own bed in her own house. She must have been sleeping.

“Whoot?”

Her voice sounded like it was full of marbles.

But Ryan must have understood because he replied immediately.

“I’m sorry to wake you.”

He was speaking in an urgent whisper, probably keeping his voice down because Hannah was asleep in the other room.

“I just got a call from Captain Parker.”

“Is everything okay?”

Through the remnants of sleep, Jessie squinted at her bedside clock. It read 1:09 A.M. That gave her the answer to her own question. Obviously, their boss wouldn't be calling at this hour if everything was okay.

“I’m afraid not.”

He sounded as tired as she felt.

“There’s been a murder in the West Adams district. The victim was found lying in bed at someone else’s house.”

“Okay. Good luck with that.”

She rolled away from him and hugged her pillow.

“Parker wants both of us on this.”

“I’m not supposed to start up again until tomorrow and I’m still wiped out from travel. Does she really want my jetlagged ass sleepwalking through this?”

“I think she wants to get you back in the rotation as quickly as possible and since I was available, it made sense to pair us up on your first case back. Do you think you can muddle through?”

Jessie rolled back over to look at him.

“It doesn’t sound like I have much choice.”

“She was pretty insistent.”

Jessie sighed heavily. She knew this was her job and she wanted to help. But she had hoped she’d get at least one night in her own bed to decompress and readjust to her old life.

“Fine.”

She pushed herself upright.

“Give me ten minutes to get ready.”

“If it’s any consolation, I can drive so you can sleep in the car.”

It wasn’t.

“West Adams is less fifteen minutes from here. There’s no point in trying to sleep. By the time that I’d drift off, we’d be there.”

When Ryan didn't respond, she looked over at him. His expression told her that he'd been kidding about the sleep. Clearly, she needed to wake up a bit more if she was going to be of any use.

Whoever this victim was deserved her best. She just needed to summon it.

***

As they drove down the street of the house where the murder had occurred, Jessie was still Googling what she could find on the residents. She didn’t want to reach out to the research staff at this hour. At least that way they’d be fresh when she asked them to help out in a few hours.

“I’m not familiar with this neighborhood,”

she admitted as they passed a series of large homes in varied styles on huge lots.

“Probably because it doesn’t have much crime,”

Ryan told her.

“It’s called Lafayette Square. Semi-gated community with less than 300 homes. It’s over a hundred years old.”

“Semi-gated?”

“Right.”

He pulled over to the side of the street just behind an ambulance and three squad cars, all of which had their lights flashing.

“Meaning where we entered, on St. Charles Place, is the only way in or out. All the other major streets are gated off. No security at the entrance though, which is too bad. That means no cameras.”

“Well, according to what I’m reading, the folks around here could afford security if they wanted it.”

She scrolled through her phone.

“It looks like most of the homes here go for over $2 million. The address we’re going to sold for over $3 million four years ago.”

They both looked at the house just up the block, which was already cordoned off with police tape.

“I wouldn’t want any part of that place.”

Ryan was shaking his head.

“It looks more like Dracula’s lair than the home of—who lives there again?”

“James and Olivia Maplewood.”

Jessie clicked on a link.

“Looks like he works for a corporate bank. Office is downtown, less than ten minutes from here. She’s an interior designer. From her website, it seems like she does a lot of houses in the neighborhood. And you said neither of them is the victim?”

“Not according to Parker. Should we go in?”

“I guess so.”

She did her best to locate her game face as she reached for the car door handle.

He put his hand on her forearm.

“Are you going to be okay with this?”

The concerned look in his eyes told her he wasn’t just asking about whatever ugliness they’d find inside. She’d been to hundreds of crime scenes, some so horrific that they still haunted her. She might have been gone for a few months, but she was certain that she’d be able to steel herself for what they were about to face.

But Ryan was also, in his delicate way, asking something else. Oftentimes in the months before Jessie went on her sabbatical, it was seeing the brutality of what had been done to victims that fueled her rage, and the desire for vengeance that came with it. He wanted to know if she was going to be able to keep her cool or if the bloodthirsty urges she’d been dealing with were about to return.

“That’s what the time away was for, Ryan,”

she told him.

“So that when I’m in a situation like this, I’ll be okay. I guess we’re about to find out if it was worth the trip.”

She tried to sound nonchalant but the truth was that she was as worried as he seemed to be. She had no idea how she would react once removed from the security blanket of The Ionian Center.

A secluded treatment center on a cliff overlooking the sea was a far cry from an L.A. bedroom where someone just had their life snuffed out. But she was going to have face hersel.

“in the wild”

at some point. Might as well be now.

She got out of the car, hoping she looked confident. He did the same. They approached the officer standing on the sidewalk where the path led up to the Maplewood home. After flashing their IDs and being granted entry, they walked up the path. Another officer was waiting at the front door. He had salt and pepper hair and looked to be in his forties.

“Detective Hernandez, Ms. Hunt, thanks for coming. I’m Sergeant Hauk, the officer in charge.”

“Were you given a heads up that it would be us coming?”

Ryan wanted to know, seemingly surprised that the guy knew who they were.

“No, but I recognize you both from the news.”

He sounded slightly sheepish at the admission.

“And once I got a sense of the crime scene, I had a feeling this might be up your alley. Wealthy neighborhood. Victim isn’t the homeowner but is found in their bed. It’s got all the HSS trademark elements.”

“Maybe you can tell us a little more about those elements,”

Ryan said.

“We don’t know much.”

"Sure. Okay, if I fill you in while we head up to the primary bedroom? That's where it took place."

They both nodded and he led the way, passing a carry-on suitcase at the bottom of the winding staircase and jogging up the steps. Jessie didn’t increase her pace to match his. Nor did Ryan. Seeing that, Sergeant Hauk paused until they caught up.

“Sorry. I guess I’m a little excitable on this one. The victim’s name is Cassandra Dominik. She lives a couple of streets over. James Maplewood, the homeowner who found her, says he knew her through the neighborhood but had no idea why she was here. He said that he just returned from a business trip to find her in his bed. He also said that his wife, Olivia, is missing.”

Jessie hadn’t been expecting that last tidbit. This was the first she’d heard of a missing wife. She set aside all the wild theories that were already forming in her head, including the idea that this might have been an affair gone bad; that maybe Olivia had walked in on it and had to be disappeared. Jessie hadn’t even seen the body yet and her mind was spinning tales. She shut it down by asking a question.

“Where is James Maplewood now?”

“He’s up here in a guest bedroom,”

Hauk said.

“To my non-profiler eye, he seemed pretty messed up. But I guess you all will decide if that’s legit. We have confirmed that at least one thing he told us is true.”

Ryan turned to the Sergeant as they reached the top of the giant staircase.

“What’s that?”

“Regarding the business trip, he told the first officer on the scene that he’d just returned from Chicago. Showed us the ticket on his phone. That carry-on downstairs was his.”

Jessie didn’t point out that just because Maplewood had a plane ticket didn’t mean he’d used it. There was no point. When the research crew got into the office later this morning, they could confirm the man’s story using GPS data and surveillance camera footage from the airport. If he was lying, it wouldn’t be hard to prove. For now, she was willing to buy the assertion.

“And he says he knew the victim?”

Ryan double-checked.

“Yes.”

Hauk started down one wing of the long hallway.

“He said he knew her casually from the neighborhood.”

“How credible did the ‘casually’ seem to you?”

Jessie asked.

“I wasn’t here yet when he said that. According to the first officers on scene, he was kind of babbling, I guess in some kind of shock.”

“And he expected his wife to be home?”

Ryan said.

“But she’s not here.”

“That’s what seems to have him the most freaked out.”

He stopped at the next door, which was half open.

“This is the primary bedroom.”

“Okay.

“ Jessie turned to Ryan.

“If it’s cool with you, I’m thinking we check out the crime scene first to get a sense of it before talking to the husband. That way we don’t go into that interview blind.”

“Agree, but we shouldn’t wait too long before seeing him. If his wife really is missing, we may have more than one crime on our hands.”

They stepped into the bedroom. Out of the corner of her eye, Jessie saw a human-sized lump on the king-sized bed off to the right. But before she went over, she scanned the rest of the room, looking for anything unusual. There didn’t seem to be any sign of a struggle, no knocked over pictures on the dresser or vases lying broken on the hardwood floor. She noted that the floor was also devoid of any obvious sign of blood.

“Where’s the medical examiner?”

Ryan asked.

“Over here,”

announced a familiar-sounding voice.

Jessie followed it to find who she expected. Cheryl Gallagher, an L.A. County deputy medical examiner, moved toward them. She wore her standard lab coat. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, which matched her perpetually tight face. Jessie had worked with her on multiple occasions, and while the woman wasn’t the warmest person of all time, she was good at her job.

"Any conclusions yet, Cheryl?" Ryan's relieved tone indicated that he, too, was glad to have a solid professional on the case.

“As always, I offer my standard caveat that it’s too early to be definitive about anything. But I think we’ll ultimately be able to peg the time of death between 8 and 10 P.M. The cause of death is pretty clear-cut. Her throat was slit. Based on the lack of defensive wounds and the relaxed state of the body, my guess is that she was either asleep when it happened or had been drugged beforehand. We’ll know more on that front once we get the bloodwork back.”

“Are your folks ready for us to take a look?”

Ryan asked.

“Clear a path!”

Gallagher barked at the crew of four techs by the body. They all took several steps back.

Ryan turned to Jessie.

“You good?”

She knew that like in the car, his question had more than one meaning. But rather than trying to answer, she simply nodded.

Was she good? No. But was she ready? She didn’t have much choice