Page 7 of The Perfect Betrayal

Jessie was skeptical that the guy didn’t know who she was. Even if he’d never heard of her exploits, he would have looked up who he was working with. The question felt like an attempt to assert some kind of dominance.

“You can call me Jessie,” she said, trying to create a good working vibe from the get-go. “Detective Aaron Riddell, I presume?”

“That’s right,” he said with a scowl. “You can call me Detective.”

“Okay then,” she said, pretending like his reaction was no big deal, “and who’s your friend here?”

“I’m Oliver Stanton,” the man said, “the executive director of the South Bay Yacht Club. I’ll be your primary point of contact as we work our way through this tragedy.”

“Good to meet you, Mr. Stanton, even under these unfortunate circumstances,” Jessie said warmly. “Anyone care to update me on what I might have missed?”

"The body's out back on the deck," Riddell said. "They fished Peterson out of the water about a mile offshore. He got tangled in the fishing line of a passing boat, or they might never have found him. There's a crime scene team checking him out now. I looked him over briefly but came back here to wait for you to find your way down to join us."

“Well, I’m here now,” Jessie said, trying not to bite at Riddell’s passive-aggressive hint that she might have gotten lost along the way.

“Right, you want to check him out?”

“Sure,” Jessie said.

“This way,” he said, turning his back and heading for the exit to the harbor. “You’ll find that the stab wounds—.”

"I'm just going to stop you there, Detective," Jessie said quickly. "I usually prefer to come to my own conclusions while looking at the body before taking in other opinions. That way, those views don't color my perspective, and I don't start off with any preconceptions."

Riddell stared at her in disbelief, as if she’d just said she liked to conduct seances on victims or something.

“Whatever floats your boat,” he said dismissively.

“Oh, I see what you did there,” Oliver Stanton noted, falling into step beside them. “Very clever.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Riddell informed him.

Jessie said nothing. She was about to look at a dead body, and she didn't want her impressions clouded by her increasing agitation with the man she'd been paired with. She needed her head clear.

Her phone rang and she glanced down. The call was from Jamil, HSS’s head of research. She shouldn’t have been surprised that he was already reaching out. Jamil was a full-fledged genius, capable of filtering through massive databases, sorting surveillance video into manageable buckets, or making complex financial records understandable, all seemingly in the blink of an eye. Having said that, his social skills could use a little work.

“That was quick,” she said when she picked up.

"Hello, Ms. Hunt," Jamil said, polite as always. "Detective Hernandez said you were on your way to the scene, so Beth and I tried to expedite our investigation as much as possible for you."

“I appreciate that,” Jessie said. “Where is Detective Hernandez? I assumed that he’d want to be in on this call.”

“He did,” volunteered Beth, Jamil’s sole employee, “but someone we reached out to for information wasn’t asforthcoming as we hoped so he’s using his particular powers of persuasion to change their mind.”

“Gotcha,” Jessie said. “Hey, listen, I’m going to put you on speaker in a sec. I’m here with Detective Riddell of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department’s Homicide Bureau. We’re partnering on this and I want to keep him looped in on everything you learn. Hold on.”

"Yes, ma'am," Jamil said.

Jessie looked over at Riddell, who had a curious expression.

“I reached out to my unit’s research department while I was on the way down here,” she explained. “They’re the best in the business. I wanted to see what they could find out about Daran Peterson right off the bat so we could hit the ground running.”

“You don’t worry that their information will color your perspective and start you off with preconceptions?” he wanted to know, barely holding back a snarl.

Jessie smiled sweetly at him, refusing to let him bait her. Instead, she turned to Oliver Stanton.

“Would you mind giving us a little privacy, Mr. Stanton?” she asked. “We need to discuss some delicate matters.”

“Of course,” Stanton said. “I’ll just hurry ahead to make sure folks on the boat know you’re coming.”

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