Page 27 of The Perfect Illusion

“She’s only been my legal secretary for a year, but she knows my style,” Moran said. “She also knows that I’m a zealous advocate for my clients. If she was that offended, she wouldn’t work for me, or sleep with me.”

“Zealous is one way to put it,” Jessie pushed. “Some might call it overzealous. Others might call it casually cruel. Would Maryanne still sleep with you if she knew that you’d once harangued Patricia Hollinger when you came across her in the supermarket? Or that you went on Kai Cody’s social media and commented that his wife, Rebecca was “a dirty whore?’ That doesn’t feel like standard advocacy.”

“She would probably still sleep with me,” Moran replied with a snide tone and a toothy grin. “I’m really good in bed.”

Jessie noted that he made no attempt to apologize for his behavior, nor did he express any sympathy for the dead. She wanted to needle him a little more but Missner had apparently had enough.

"That's all," he said. "You got the answers to your questions. You may not consider my client a paragon of gentlemanly virtue, but he's provided alibis for both murders, which you can validate through a variety of means. He's cooperated well beyond what is required. I think it's time you let him go."

Jessie, still hung up on the arrogance of Moran’s last comment, worried that any response from her might include a dollop of violence so she said nothing. Luckily, Brady was more chatty.

“We’ll check the alibis,” he said, “but in the meantime your client isn’t going anywhere. He’ll need to be arraigned on that battery charge, so we’ll put in the paperwork on that.”

“You’re just stalling,” Missner said. “He’s going to post bond in milliseconds so why go through this charade?”

Brady stood up, and Jessie did the same.

“You may call it a charade, counselor, but when my partner is attacked by a sweaty wild-eyed harasser, I take it seriously,” he said. “We’ll process your client as time permits. In the meantime, he’s going in a cell.”

As they left the room, Jessie fought back the urge to hug Brady. Even with coffee stains and pastry crumb bits all over him, it would have been worth it. Only her desire to leave Moran twisting in the wind prevented it.

Once they closed the door behind them, Brady turned to her.

“Sorry I couldn’t do more,” he said.

“I thought you did pretty well.”

“Yeah, but it won’t amount to much, He said, looking dejected. “If Moran’s alibis hold up, and I think they will, our best lead just disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

He was right, but Jessie refused to let the setback get her down.

“Then we just have to look for new fires,” she told him.

Unfortunately, they didn’t know exactly where to look. But with two murders in two nights, she wasn’t about to take a break.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Kat finally felt like she was making some progress.

The first real breakthrough was when she got near-definitive confirmation that hitwoman Ash Pierce was in Ecuador. And it happened because Pierce made a rare error.

Over the course of the day at her tiny office, Kat reviewed material from Gabriela Estrada, the Ecuadorian cop who’d been working with her. Estrada had sent her every conceivable video clip she could find that matched either the original photos of Pierce or the woman at the Guayaquil port with the long, blonde hair and the baseball cap. The mistake Pierce made was the cap.

It was distinctly indistinct, gray, and without any logo. Very few baseball caps these days are completely blank. Kat understood why Pierce might have chosen one like that. If it had a logo, then that could be tracked using recognition databases, making her easier to find. But wearing a cap without any logo was also a tell of sorts.

Once Kat came to that realization, she had Estrada send her footage or still photos of any shortish woman wearing a cap like that near hostels or cash-only motels. Stunningly, she got multiple hits.

As Kat looked them over, she became increasingly confident that they had the right woman. Over the last five days, she counted a dozen images near a hostel not far from the port. One image was outside a local drugstore. The woman in the video had long, black hair but otherwise fit Pierce’s description.

When Estrada reached out to the store, a counter clerk recalled that the woman in the footage had purchased hair-blonding bleach, scissors, and plastic gloves, all with cash. It stuck in the clerk’s memory because she noted to herself how dramatic it would be for the woman to go from long, black hair to a shorter blonde style, especially doing it herself.

Part of Kat didn’t want to get her hopes up. Would someone as adept at disguise as Ash Pierce really make the mistake of wearing the same cap all around Guayaquil? Then again, Pierce was a sociopathic narcissist. Maybe her confidence had bled into arrogance.

After escaping from a county courthouse and eventually the country, she might have gotten a little cocky and assumed no one would find her in such a far-flung place. And even if they did locate her, Ecuador had no formal extradition treaty with the U.S. She probably felt somewhat safe, even if she was still taking precautions.

It was after Estrada sent her a more recent photo, taken just this morning, that Kat felt ready to act. It showed a petite blonde woman wearing the logo-less gray cap as she exited the aptly named GuayaHostel. Even with the surgical mask she wore, along with a light jacket and pants, her pale skin reflected off the sunlight. There was also a slight bulge on the woman’s right hip, a sure sign that she’d recently secured a weapon. The combination gave Kat certainty that she had the right woman and allowed her to finally make the call.

She dialed a number she’d only used twice in her life, and never professionally. It rang three times before Dalton Tepper picked up.

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