Page 32 of The Perfect Prey

“What does that mean?”Jessie asked.

“I’m still not a hundred percent sure,” he admitted.“Most of the time, she was fun and open-hearted.But sometimes, I couldn’t get hold of her for long stretches.She would just disappear.I actually got worried a few times.After the fact, she’d say she was in meetings and couldn’t talk but this was often late at night, and we’re talking three or four hours of radio silence.She’d also sometimes cancel when we had plans, and her explanations were vague to the point of infuriating.”

“You got furious?”Susannah pressed.

“You know what I mean,” he insisted.“Eventually, I called her on it and said that whatever it was—an affair, drugs, who knows—that she needed to tell me, or I couldn’t be with her.I said I couldn’t handle a relationship where one person kept so many secrets.”

“And how did she respond?”Jessie wanted to know.

“She admitted that she hadn’t been honest but that she couldn’t tell me why or what she’d been doing.I offered her an out.I said that if, from now on, she could just stop doing whatever she was hiding from me, that maybe there was chance that we could find a path forward.But she said she knew herself—that she wouldn’t be able to stop whatever this was.So I had to end it.I just couldn’t go on that way.”

Jessie and Susannah exchanged a look that they both understood.They’d have to learn Evelyn’s secret some other way.But even though it felt like a formality, they still need to put a button on Callum Clay’s story.

“Where were you last night from seven to eight?”Jessie asked bluntly.

His face sagged.

“You need my alibi,” he said slowly as if it hadn’t occurred to him until now that he might be a suspect.“I understand.I work for a payroll company.That’s where I was until one in the morning.And that’s why I was so tired when you rang my bell.Because April 15thfell on a weekend this year, the IRS extended the filing deadline until tomorrow.We’ve been slammed.”

“Can anyone corroborate that?”Susannah asked.

“About eight or nine people,” he said.

“We’ll need all their names,” Susannah told him.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They waited until they were in the car, headed back to the station before discussing what they’d just learned.

“What do you think Evelyn’s secret behavior was?”Susannah asked Jessie as they pulled out into traffic.

Jessie didn’t have to mull it over for long before replying.

“It could be an affair or drugs, like Callum feared,” she mused, “but my money would be on her attending these secret parties.The only problem is that there were no parties in the last few months, and her GPS location data from prior to that indicates that she never went to any of them anyway.So I don’t know what to think for sure.”

Susannah started to reply but then stopped herself.Apparently, she’d hit the same wall.They sat in silence for a few minutes until their phones rang simultaneously.Jessie looked at hers.It was Jamil.She held it up to show Susannah.

“Put him on speaker,” the detective said.

“What’s up, Jamil?”Jessie said.

“Are you able to speak freely?”the researcher asked.

“Yeah, we’re in the car on our way back,” Jessie told him.“It looks like Callum Clay isn’t our guy, so I hope you have something good for us.”

“I just might,” he said.“I’m starting to get the financial data on the Hartleys that was so difficult to access last night, and it’s very interesting.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Susannah said.

“It looks like those $22,000 monthly withdrawals they made went to an overseas charity called the International Children’s Support Fund or ICSF.”

“That’s one of the blandest charity names I’ve ever heard,” Susannah muttered.

“And I think that may be by design,” Jamil replied, sounding as excited as Jessie had heard him in a long time.“I think this ‘fund’ wants to sound boring to help it slip under the radar, because the more I look into it, the shadier it seems.It has a 401(c)3 charitable designation, but for the life of me, I can’t discern how that originated.It appears to be based in India, but all my efforts so far to contact anyone there have failed.I also can’t find biographical info on the charity’s executive officers that goes back more than three years.I can’t prove it yet, but I’m not sure that any of these people even really exist.It’s like some ghost charity.And whoever created it did a masterful job.”

“Okay, that’s interesting, Jamil,” Susannah said, frustrated, “but if we can’t trace the source of the charity or tie it to anything here in L.A., how does that help us?”

“I’m not sure,” Jumail said, “but I haven’t told you the most interesting part yet.”

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