Page 42 of The Perfect Revenge
“I think she was killed Wednesday evening, probably right after coming home,” she said.
“Why?”Susannah asked.
“Because there’s no way she’d dress like that to drive up to Santa Barbara for a yoga retreat.So this was probably the outfit she wore to work on Wednesday.But if she’d had any time after getting back here, she surely would have changed out of those clothes and into something more comfortable.Look—she hadn’t even taken off her heels yet.My guess is that she was killed within minutes of getting home.And since there was no sign of forced entry, that means either someone had access to the place and was lying in wait, or she knew them and let them in.”
Her attention was drawn away from Lena Hayes by an incoming text.She saw that Susannah got one too and knew it was from Jamil even before looking at it.
Just starting background research on Lena Hayes.But preliminary findings show no connection to Elite Family Services or any other surrogacy company.
Jessie stared at the screen, trying to make sense of things.Even though Denise Monroe was proving to be a dead end, their strongest lead was still the connection that Veronica Sterling and Maggie Caldwell had to the surrogacy service.
If Lena Hayes had never worked with them, then that meant that Jessie might have been going down a rabbit hole this entire time.She had nothing firm tying all three women together.Everything she thought she knew had just been blown out of the water
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Kat knew something was up the second she heard the call on the police scanner.
"Limousine driver.Throat slit," the officer on the scene reported."He's sitting in the driver's seat, and it appears that he was attacked from behind by someone in the backseat."
That alone was suspicious, but it was three other things that really piqued her interest.The first was that the crime scene unit hadn’t found any prints in the back of the vehicle.The whole area had been wiped down.
Secondly, the body was discovered under a downtown freeway overpass, in an area that Kat was familiar with.It was out of the way, in a section of downtown that was surrounded by abandoned buildings.That meant there would be few, if any, security cameras in the area.
Finally, there was the extra tidbit that the officer relayed over the scanner, the one that really piqued her interest.“It looks like this guy was punctured like a pin cushion before his throat was cut,” he said.“There are at least a half dozen stab wounds in his shoulders and upper chest.I don’t get the need for that when the attacker could have gotten the job done with just one cut to the throat.”
Kat knew why.In her experience, Ash Pierce never missed out on the opportunity to make someone suffer before killing them.She seemed incapable of just taking someone out, no matter how ancillary they were to her.The combination of those three factors had her Spidey sense going crazy.The incident had all the earmarks of a Pierce hit.
Luckily, she learned that the case was being handled by Terrell Prescott, a detective from Central Station’s homicide unit, which handled the more traditional cases that HSS didn’t take.Kat knew Prescott casually through Jessie and the HSS crew and figured he might be willing to share information with her.
That’s why she had just pulled up a block from the crime scene and was currently making her way to the taped-off area.She could see Prescott as she approached and waved to him.He saw her and walked over.Prescott was a formidable physical specimen.A former NFL star who played linebacker for three years before blowing out his knee a decade ago, he made a dramatic career shift to law enforcement.
“What’s up, Kat?’he said.“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without Jessie Hunt nearby.”
“This is actually the first time that I’ve ever been away from her,” Kat replied playfully.“It feels like the first day of kindergarten.”
“Well, that can be very scary.How can I help?”
This was the part where she had to be a little coy about why she was here.She couldn’t just ask him to spill everything he knew based on her hunch.
“I’m actually working a case myself,” she said.“And when I heard how your victim was killed, it sounded familiar, so I thought I’d check in.Did I hear correctly that there were no fingerprints?”
“Yeah,” he said, apparently not as concerned as she feared about sharing case details.“It’s pretty odd.There are zero prints in the back of the limo.Not on door handles, armrests, or drinking glasses.It’s completely clean.”
“And the victim’s throat was slit from behind, as if by the passenger in the backseat?”
“Correct.”
“And I’m guessing you haven’t had any success with surveillance camera footage in this area?”
"We haven't canvassed the neighborhood yet, but I'm not optimistic," Prescott said, looking around."There are no cameras under the freeway, and with so many businesses in the area going under lately, I don’t expect many working security cameras around here.But you seem to know that already.”
“Looking around, I made an educated guess.It feels like whoever did this knew what they were doing.”
“Safe assumption,” Prescott agreed.
“How was the body discovered?”
"The driver, Manuel Avila, hadn't checked in after his last assignment.The dispatcher got worried.Apparently, Avila is meticulous about following procedure.So they used the tracker on the limo to check his location and sent another driver to see what was up.That's who found him."
