Page 7 of The Perfect Prey

“Are you staying?”the woman asked in a quavery voice.

Doyle looked at them hesitantly.Jessie shook her head as Susannah answered.

“I’m afraid Officer Doyle has other responsibilities,” she said.“We’ll take it from here.”

She sat down in one of the chairs across the table from Townsend, and Jessie took the other.Once they were settled, she continued.

“Ms.Townsend,” Susannah said firmly, “we’ve had a chance to read the statement you gave the officers at the scene but there are several questions we want to follow up on.”

“Okay,” Townsend said nervously.

“How do you know the Hartleys?”Jessie asked.

“I’m their dog walker,” she explained apprehensively, “which I guess you know.Also, I live in the neighborhood, and we were already acquaintances.”

Jessie and Susannah exchanged a look, and Jessie knew they were thinking the same thing.She nodded that the detective should take the lead with their shared question.

“No offense,” Susannah began, “but you live in the same part of Hancock Park as the Hartleys and you work as a dog walker?”

“No offense taken,” Townsend said, looking comfortable for the first time.She must have fielded this question often.“I’m recently widowed.My husband died about eighteen months ago, and he left me a sizable nest egg, which was nice.But I was also incredibly lonely, so I took up walking local dogs.It kept me busy during a tough time, and now I really love it.”

“But you knew the Hartleys before you became their dog walker?”Jessie confirmed.

“A little, yes,’ Townsend said.“We traveled in some of the same circles.But after Carl died, they reached out to me.They’d heard what I was doing and offered to let me walk Laurel and Hardy—those are their dogs.It was more of a gesture of kindness than anything.They like to walk them but sacrificed a little of their own pup time to help me out.I’d often do the late afternoon walk.And after I brought the dogs back, they’d sometimes invite me in to hang out, maybe have a drink.”

“So they were home most of the time?”Jessie asked.

“Yes,” Townsend said.“Obviously, they’d attend events and the like, usually in the evenings.Cynthia was very active with several charities.But other than obligatory stuff and some travel, they were mostly homebodies.”

“Is that where they were last night?”Susannah wondered, “when they told you they were staying up late and planned to sleep in today?”

“They weren’t specific about what they were doing, just that it would be a late night,” she said, “which is why they asked me to do the morning walk.”

“And you went to check on them because of the dogs’ accidents?”Jessie pressed.

Townsend nodded, cringing at the memory.

“Yes,” she said earnestly.“You have to understand that they were super-devoted to Laurel and Hardy.They didn’t have children and viewed the dogs as their babies.So when I found that the pups had made messes in the mud room, I knew something was wrong.Cindy and Richard would never just leave them cooped up like that to fend for themselves for so long.”

“And that’s when you checked on them?”Jessie wanted to know.

“I called out to them multiple times from down the hall, but they didn’t answer,” she said.“I know it seems presumptuous, but after shouting out four or five times, I decided to go back and see if they were okay.It felt irresponsible not to.”

“And you found them posed like that?”Susannah asked.

“It was horrifying,” Townsend said with a shiver.

“Did you recognize the masks they were wearing?”Jessie asked.

“No, but truthfully, I didn’t look that carefully at them.Once I got close enough to see that they were dead, I turned and ran out of there so fast that I almost tripped.I called 911, then collected the dogs and waited out in the front yard until the police arrived.”

Susannah was quiet.Jessie knew her next question was a long shot, but she had to ask anyway.

“Do you know if either of the Hartleys had any enemies?”

Townsend shook her head, making her frizzy red hair bounce.

“We didn’t have the kind of friendship where they’d tell me stuff like that, but it’s hard to imagine that they did,” she said.“I don’t know much about Richard’s business before he retired, just that it was real estate-related.What I do know is that they were incredibly sweet, and so devoted to each other.They were always buying little gifts for one another, not necessarily expensive stuff.More like cute tchotchkes.And they would go on short weekend jaunts to nearby romantic getaways like Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, or just off the coast to Catalina Island.They were clearly deeply in love and being around them gave me hope that I might find that again too someday.”

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