Page 9 of The Perfect Deception (Jessie Hunt #40)

The Dominik home, also a mansion, was quite literally a one-minute drive from the Maplewood’s. Had Jessie they realized that, she might have suggested they just walk.

Ryan pulled up to the curb in front of the mostly darkened house. There was one light on in a room on the second floor, though with the curtains half-pulled shut it was impossible to see anything.

Ryan turned off the car and faced Jessie.

“What did you think of Maplewood? Credible?”

“He seems legitimately upset, especially about his wife being gone. But I don’t know that I bought him when it came to finding Cassandra Dominik dead in his bed.”

“What do you mean?”

Ryan cocked his head.

“I’m not sure,”

she conceded.

“It’s just—a woman turns up there and he only knows her casually? That doesn’t pass the smell test for me, even if I don’t have any reason to doubt him yet.”

“Well maybe Michael Dominik can clear some of this up for us.”

Ryan nodded at the second floor room with the light.

“It seems like he might be up.”

They got out and walked up the driveway to the front door. Like the Maplewood home, this place was enormous. But it was more in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, all terra-cotta, wood, and adobe, with a low-pitched first floor roof that extended out over a large front porch.

Once at the door, Ryan rang the bell, then knocked loudly. Jessie glanced up at the lighted second floor room to see if anyone would peek out from behind the curtains. No one did. Ryan waited a minute, then repeated the process with the bell and the door.

After another minute, he turned to Jessie.

“How much longer do you think we should wait before moving to the next step?”

“The man’s wife is lying dead a few blocks from here. I think the time for patience has long since passed.”

Ryan apparently agreed. He pulled out his phone and made a call. It rang five times before Jessie heard someone pick up. Ryan put the call on speaker, keeping the volume low so as to not disturb the neighbors.

“Hello?”

The male voice was sleepy and confused.

“Who is this?’

“This is Los Angeles Police Department Detective Ryan Hernandez. Am I speaking to Michael Dominik?”

“Yes.”

The voice sounded slightly less fuzzy now.

“What’s wrong?”

“Mr. Dominik, we’re at your front door right now. Are you home?”

“No.

“Dominik now sounded completely alert.

“I’m in San Diego for work. Why are the police in front of my house?”

Ryan winced slightly and Jessie knew he was about to do something he wasn’t happy about.

“We’re investigating a case in your neighborhood, Mr. Dominik. As part of it, we see a light on in one of your second floor rooms. We’ve been knocking and ringing the bell for a while and no one has answered. We have some concerns for the welfare of your wife, Cassandra.”

Jessie realized that was what had Ryan wincing. He knew he couldn’t tell the man about his dead wife until they got the information they needed. If he led with her murder, Dominik—assuming he wasn’t involved—would be too upset to be of use to them.

“Are you saying something happened to her?”

The man’s borderline panicked tone justified Ryan’s decision in Jessie’s mind.

Ryan closed his eyes as he answered.

“We’re trying to ascertain the situation. It’s possible there’s an intruder in your home. With the light on and no one answering, things are a little suspicious.”

“I’ll call her. Maybe she’s just afraid to answer the door in the middle of the night.”

“That’s possible,”

Ryan said, willing to allow the man his delusions if it worked to their advantage.

“But don’t call. If there is an intruder in the house and she’s hiding, it might alert them to her location.”

Jessie felt for her husband. Up until this point, he’d been trying to carefully walk a line: not outright lying to the man about his wife’s death nor giving him the false impression that everything was going to be okay. But now he’d overtly suggested that she might be alive when she most definitely wasn’t. It was clearly weighing on him.

“Here’s what I propose,”

he continued, pushing past his deception as quickly as he could.

“I’m going to give you my badge number. You can call Central Station, where I operate from, to confirm my identity. Or you can just call the non-emergency police line. Once they confirm my identity, you can call me back. If you have a hidden key or an access code, I’ll use it to enter the home and check on the situation.”

"Screw that." Dominik's panic level was rising again. "I'll take your word that you are who you say you are. Finding Cassie is more important than anything else. There's a gray brick in the wall behind the small table on the left side of the porch. It's fake. Push it in and it will pop back out. It has a house key. Once you get inside, the security code is #13114."

“All right, Mr. Dominik.”

Ryan was already up on the porch.

“I’m going to check things out. I’ll call you back once I know more.”

Jessie saw the gray brick first. It popped open just as Dominik said it would. The key was resting inside the hollow brick. She grabbed it and went to the front door. Ryan pulled out his weapon as she unlocked the door and stepped to the side. He entered first, and she followed as she unholstered her gun.

"The alarm's not on," she whispered. In her mind, that was a bad sign. It was hard to imagine that Cassandra would have left the house to go to the Maplewoods in the middle of the night without turning it on.

“We can search the first floor first or go straight upstairs to the room with the light on,”

Ryan whispered back.

Jessie held up two fingers to vote for the second choice. Whatever was going on here, she felt sure that it was happening in that room. Ryan turned on his flashlight and located the stairs. They weren’t as elaborate as those at the Maplewood place, though the rustic wooden steps were probably equally expensive.

He led the way and she followed close behind, glancing back periodically to make sure no one was sneaking up after them from the first floor. When they reached the top, it was immediately clear which room to go to. A stream of light poked out from underneath the closed door. The rest of the hallway was dark.

They used the same procedure as before. Jessie grabbed the door handle, turned it, and pushed the door open. Then she stepped to the side so Ryan could enter first.

“No obvious threats,”

he whispered after a few seconds.

Jessie joined him in the room. It may have been clear of obvious threats but it wasn’t clear of unexpected horrors. At the far end of the large bedroom, lying above the covers, was a woman who looked very much like Olivia Maplewood. It was hard to be sure because, even at this distance, Jessie could see that the woman’s face, bent at an awkward angle, was smeared in blood.

“Let’s check the rest of the place out before we approach her,”

Ryan whispered.

He went into the bathroom while Jessie opened the walk-in closet and leapt back. There was no one there. She got to her knees and peeked under the bed in case anyone was hiding there. No one was.

“Bathroom is empty,”

Ryan said from behind her

Nodding, she stood up and approached the bed. The woman in front of her was definitely Olivia Maplewood. She was wearing a loose, cream-colored nightgown. Her head, resting on a satin pillow, had slumped sharply to the right. Her throat, like Cassandra Dominik’s, was slit across the front.

The arterial spray, when it happened, was the likely cause for the red splatter covering her face. Much of the blood had flowed out and collected in the bowl-like dip of the pillow, framing her head in the thick liquid. Her dark hair, partly covering her face, had begun to clump amid the drying blood. Unlike Cassandra, her brown eyes were wide open. They looked scared.

The bubbling cauldron of anger that Jessie had felt operating on simmer in her gut when she saw Cassandra at the first house had returned. Only now it felt like the heat had been turned up.

She tried to find a place to put the rage that was trying to gurgle up through her system. If she was going to function as a profiler and a person, she had to get a handle on this.

She remembered what one of her therapists in Taormina had told her: if she was going to get justice for the victims in her cases, she needed to remain level-headed. Getting furious did them no good. And it didn’t help her either. She felt eyes on her and turned to see that Ryan was staring at her apprehensively.

“How are we doing?”

he asked gently.

She appreciated the concern but that wasn’t her priority right now. A dead woman was lying in front of her, the second victim in one night of what appeared to be a serial killer.

“I’m ready to get to work.