Page 52 of The Perfect Accomplice

She hung up as they arrived at a long light at the bottom of Beachwood Drive where it intersected with Franklin Avenue. She sat silently in the passenger seat while Ryan did the same beside her. In the back, Emilio Vega spoke up softly.

“Does that help me?” he asked. “I don’t even have a dog.”

“Please, Mr. Vega,” Ryan said irritably. “We can litigate all this back at the station.”

Jessie was slightly annoyed by the man too, but something he said caused an odd sensation in her. She couldn’t define it. It reminded her of those times when she’d leave her house, sensing that she was forgetting something but not sure what it was.

She closed her eyes, shutting out the brake lights of the cars in front of them and the whoosh of vehicles passing them as they went back up into the hills. What was bothering her? She cast her mind back to the last crime scene at the Henshall house, following the mental map of the place that she’d created.

Then her thoughts stopped, fixing on one that hovered, like a ghost, just out of her field of corporeal vision. The thought was about a door. As she recalled, by the time they arrived at the scene, the door connecting the living room—where Chloe was killed—to the kitchen was open. But Sean Henshall had told them that when he got home, Missy the dog was stuck in the kitchen, with the door to the living room closed.

If Missy was locked in the kitchen, how did her hair get on Chloe’s neck? The easy answers were either that Chloe had either played with the dog earlier, gotten a hair on her hand, and then rubbed her own neck, leaving the trace hair on her skin, or that she’d simply picked Missy up and nuzzled her. Both were possible. But that conclusion made an assumption, and Jessie knew the danger of assuming too much.

She opened her eyes and pulled out her phone, scrolling to photos of the Henshall crime scene and to Missy specifically. The little white poodle was in the arms of Sean Henshall, who seemed to be clutching at her for comfort. The photo reminded her of another one that she’d seen recently and dismissed.

As quickly as her fingers would allow, she exited her camera roll and clicked onto the police report from Erin Podemski’s house. Then she pulled up the photos from that scene, scanning through them until she found the one she wanted. She clicked on it and zoomed in. Sure enough, her memory was right. She immediately called Dr. Roone back.

“This is Jessie Hunt again,” she said without any greeting, “can you describe the dog hair you found in Chloe Henshall’s neck tissue?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Like the breed? I don’t know that yet.”

“No,” she told him, “just the basics: color? Style? Specifically, is the hair white and curly?”

“Definitely not,” he said. “It’s darker, black or brown. And it’s straight.”

“So it wouldn’t have come from a white poodle?”

“Definitely not,” he assured her.

“Thanks,” Jessie said, a charge of electricity coursing through her. “Please let me know when you get something definitive.”

She hung up without waiting for a response and pulled up another phone number.

"What's going on?" Ryan asked as the light turned green, and he began moving.

“Can you pull over?” she asked.

Ryan seemed to sense that she was on to something and, without another word, eased into the nearby parking lot of a cheap motel. Jessie found the number she was looking for and dialed. After two rings, she heard a voice.

“This is Nikki,” said Erin Podemski’s personal assistant.

“Nikki, this is Jessie Hunt. Does Erin have a dog?”

“Oh, hi, Ms. Hunt,” Nikki said, taken aback. “Um, no, she doesn’t.”

“I’m looking at a photo from the mantle in her living room and in it, she’s kneeling next to a dog. It looks like a border collie, maybe?"

“Oh yeah,” Nikki replied. “That’s Max. He was her dog, but he died a few months before I started working for her. Cancer, I think.”

“Do you know if Erin ever used a dog walker or a pet therapist for Max?”

“I don’t,” Nikki said. “Erin didn’t like to talk about Max very much. Every time he came up, she’d cry. It was still pretty raw for her, I guess. But I still have access to her checking account records. I could look back to before he died and see.”

“That would be great.”

“Now?” Nikki asked, surprised.

“Yes, please,” Jessie said firmly.

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