Page 19 of The Perfect Illusion (Jessie Hunt #39)

There were little fires everywhere.

Jessie was starting to feel overwhelmed. Jamil and Beth had kept busy while she and Brady were questioning Benjamin Moran. And they’d found so many potential leads that Jessie felt she needed to take a break. Since lunch had just arrived, it felt like the perfect time.

“I’m be back in a few,” she announced to Brady and to the researchers on speaker. “I just need to clear my head.”

That’s why they were waiting for criminal record checks on half of the shared connections.

In the interim, Beth had been scouring potential suspects’ social media profiles to see if any of them were out of town on either night.

It might not completely eliminate them as suspects, but it would lower those folks on the priority interview rankings.

Jessie stepped out the back of the building.

Unlike Central Station, West L.A. station didn’t have an interior courtyard where she could go to gather her thoughts.

But the back of the building, where many officers went to smoke, had several benches facing a row of trees.

She sat down on one and, despite her apprehension that she might completely drift off, closed her eyes.

As Jessie settled in on the bench, she allowed her mind to drift.

Oftentimes, she found that she did her best work when she stopped pressing so hard and let her instincts guide her.

Right now, her brain was so cluttered with the names of pageant contestants, coordinators, judges, and even fans, that she was having trouble seeing the forest.

There had to be some other connection between Patricia Hollinger and Rebecca Martinez, or at least a perceived connection in the mind of their killer.

It made sense that it had something to do with pageants, especially considering how both women were posed with tiaras and sashes. But that wasn’t a certainty.

Maybe the killer just happened to see those items in the victims’ houses and thought that mocking their pageant history in death was a nice, cruel touch. Maybe adorning them that way was a comment on their shared unattainable attractiveness rather than a specific attack on their pageant background.

Neither of those options seemed as likely as the idea that this was punishment by someone affiliated with a past pageant, but considering them was already loosening up the knots in her brain, so she went with it.

The truth is that there were other connections between the women. They lived close to each other. Even though Martinez had temporarily moved to Cheviot Hills, her normal house was in Bel Air, less than fifteen minutes from Hollinger’s Brentwood residence.

It was possible that they shared other connections—perhaps the same utility company, which might employ an obsessed fan.

Or maybe a food delivery driver who frequented their homes and became fixated on them both.

There were countless possibilities, many of which Jamil had already plugged into the system, hoping for a hit.

And of course, there was the more obvious connection—the one that had originally led them to question the divorce attorney, Benjamin Moran, in the first place. Both women had married young, then gotten divorced before remarrying older men.

In both their cases, the original husbands had made out well in the divorce proceedings, managing to avoid alimony payments entirely while still leaving the marriages with sizable assets. That gave them little motive to be upset with their exes, at least financially.

But neither woman was kneecapped by ending up on the wrong end of their divorce settlements. Patricia Hollinger remained active in the pageanting world, earning a healthy six-figure salary. And Rebecca Martinez did even better than that through her modeling work.

So neither of them was desperate when they met their second husband, although the increase in wealth for them after remarrying was exponential. Still, it was hard to view either of them as the gold-diggers that Benjamin Moran had portrayed them as.

In Martinez’s case, her new husband was almost a decade and a half older than her. But he was also an athlete, good looking and in great shape, and well-liked by everyone in the city. It wasn’t as if Rebecca would have to scrunch her eyes closed when she kissed the man.

And while real estate magnate Robert Hollinger was a full thirty years older than Patricia, he wasn’t ancient by any means. And after having met him, Jessie could see the appeal. In addition to his doting nature, the man was a silver fox type, attractive and charming.

One could never be certain, but so far, based on both women’s online correspondence and social media posts—along with interviews with their friends—everything suggested that they’d both legitimately married for love and were generally happy with their husbands.

There was no sign, in either instance, that they were looking to break up or secretly involved with someone else.

Taking a more expansive view, Jessie had to concede that these divorces and remarriages had worked out for everyone—ex-husbands, ex-wives, and new husbands. That is until two days ago, when the wives started dying.

Jessie felt a nagging itch as she turned over that last conclusion in her head. These divorces and remarriages had seemingly worked out for all directly involved here. But was that always the case with Moran’s clients? Maybe this process wasn’t so smooth for everyone.

She couldn’t help but wonder if any of his previous clients had experienced less satisfactory outcomes when they got divorced. Could one of them have been so unhappy with how things went that they got violent?

Of course, the logical target of their ire would be Moran, the lawyer who theoretically let them down. But taking him out would make them an obvious suspect. The same suspicion would fall on them if they decided to get revenge on an ex-wife who’d gotten the better of them.

But then Jessie allowed her mind to wander and consider a more avant-garde strategy on the part of the killer.

What if they went after other women, ones who had fared less well in their divorce proceedings?

It would allow the murderer to fill some need for vengeance without putting the spotlight on themself.

And it would put Moran—the lawyer who'd failed them—under the microscope as a potential suspect.

It would be a more complicated but still effective way to get retribution.

Admittedly, it was a wild, convoluted theory.

But it was no crazier than some others she’d come up with that had been spot on.

It was certainly worth looking into. All she needed was for Jamil to check specifically on Moran’s clients who didn’t fare as well in their divorces and might have an axe to grind.

She opened her eyes and popped up off the bench, slightly rejuvenated despite her sleepless night. She had something new to go on, and that was better than the situation sixty seconds ago.