The perfect look
“Seeing the way the guy walked jogged something in memory. I just realized who he is. He is a politician. I’ll fill you in when there aren’t so many ears around.”
Jessie nodded, curious. Natasha fast-forwarded through the footage of the hallway, stopping periodically when someone walked by. No one approached the man’s room. But at 10:14, exactly thirteen minutes after the man had gone into his room, the elevator opened and a woman stepped out.
She was a statuesque blonde, with hair that cascaded down to the middle of her back. She wore huge sunglasses that obscured her features and a cinched trench coat with a high collar. She wandered down the hall, glancing at the room numbers before coming to a stop at the man’s door. She knocked. It opened only seconds later and she stepped inside.
Nothing happened for the next thirty-one minutes. But at 10:45, the women exited the room and returned the way she’d come. This time she was walking toward the camera so Jessie could get a better view of her.
She still wore the sunglasses and coat. But even with them, Jessie could tell that the woman was well put together. Her cheekbones appeared sculpted by an artist. Her skin, even on this small monitor, looked flawless. And it was clear that underneath that jacket she had the kind of figure that could easily make a wealthy, horny man put his political future at risk.
Jessie noticed something else too. The woman seemed to be…strolling toward the elevators. There was nothing hurried about her demeanor. It was quite possible that only minutes earlier she had drugged and strangled a man to death. And yet nothing about the way she carried herself suggested any worry or anxiety. She looked confident.
And that’s when Jessie became certain that they were dealing with something more than just a crime of passion or a robbery gone wrong. If it had been a physical encounter that went south, she would have looked much more harried and rushed. If it was a simple robbery, she could have been in and out of the room in less than ten minutes.
But she’d stayed a half hour. She’d lingered. She’d smashed his phone and taken all his cards, cash, and ID, even though she had to be well aware that his identity would be quickly uncovered. She’d even left family photos in the wallet.
Even more notably, she had apparently left no prints on anything in the room; not the glass, not any surface in the room, not the man’s neck. This was the work of a woman who had carefully planned what she would do, who had taken her time, who had enjoyed herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jessie couldn’t get the image out of her head.
As Ryan drove them to their next stop, she kept thinking back to the final footage that Natasha the security tech had shown them. Now that they knew what the woman looked like, she was able to scan through video from earlier in the night.
There was no recording of the woman arriving or leaving the hotel. But there was footage of her settling in at the Lobby Court—the very bar Jessie had noticed the men in suits drinking at earlier that morning.
She had arrived a little after nine p.m. and waited for fifteen minutes, sipping a drink she’d purchased with cash and drinking with leather gloves on. The thing that jumped out at Jessie was how relaxed she looked. She didn’t have the bearing of someone who would murder a man less than two hours later.
Eventually her “date” arrived. He walked straight up to her as if they knew each other but strangely greeted her as if it was the first time they’d met. He ordered a drink of his own and sat down beside her. They talked for a half hour as he ordered two more drinks and she continued to nurse her first.
Around 9:50, he paid his bill and got up. Cameras tracked him to the bathroom and then the front desk. The woman stayed at bar a little longer to finish her drink, and then walked out of frame, not to be seen again until she got out of the elevator to go to his room.
“What are you thinking?” Ryan asked, interrupting her silent meditation.
“I’m thinking that we’re dealing with someone who enjoyed what she did. And that makes me worry that she might do it again.”
“Legitimate concern,” he agreed. “Can I tell you what I’m worried about?”
“Please,” Jessie said.
“I’m worried that this guy’s wife is going to lose it when we tell her what happened.”
Ryan was referring to the inevitable unpleasantness they were about to face. After they’d left the security office he’d told her who the dead man was: Gordon Maines.
When Ryan had called his suspicion in to the ME, they confirmed it for him. The victim was indeed Gordon Maines, a councilman representing Los Angeles’s fourth district, an area that included Hancock Park and Los Feliz.
Ryan had finally remembered him because of his jaunty walking style. It was the same style he’d had when he’d come to the station once several years ago to dress down Captain Decker for not giving him enough officers for security at a neighborhood parade.
“‘Jerk’ is the kindest word I can think of to describe the guy,” Ryan had said.
Jessie hoped he’d use more diplomatic language when they arrived at Maines’s Hancock Park home to deliver the bad news to his wife, Margo. As he navigated the mid-morning traffic, Jessie’s thoughts returned, despite her best efforts, to Hannah.
She wondered if Garland Moses was having any success determining how the investigation was going. Did the FBI have any leads on Bolton Crutchfield’s possible whereabouts? Was Hannah safe? She was tempted to text him to ask and actually pulled out her phone before reminding herself it was a terrible idea.
First, it had only been a couple of hours since she’d met with him. Garland Moses might be the most decorated profiler in the country, but even he wasn’t a superhero. Besides, if he had information, he would surely let her know. Radio silence likely meant there was nothing worth sharing.
Second, they’d agreed to only communicate verbally. Even though Captain Decker hadn’t yet formally forbidden her from getting involved in the case, it was only a matter of time. Any record that showed she’d tried to get around that directive could put her career at risk and, as Garland had said, mess up her “sweet gig.”
Still, it gnawed at her. Here she was, investigating the death of a man who clearly had several skeletons in his closet. Meanwhile, an innocent young girl was being held captive by a serial killer, simply because she shared the same DNA as another serial killer.
The frustration rose in her chest and it was all she could do to swallow it back down.
Garland Moses better find something soon. Because I don’t know how much longer I can hold this in before it boils over.
*When they pulled up to Gordon Maines’s mansion in Hancock Park, Jessie wasn’t surprised.
She already knew they were dealing with a man who was willing to book a $400 hotel room to cheat on his wife; a man who apparently had a credit card associated with a bogus company, a likely sign that his finances were sketchy too. And he apparently lived in a home no civil servant could afford unless he inherited it.
As they walked up the steps to the front door, Jessie reminded herself not to take her distaste for the victim out on his wife, who might think her husband hung the moon and was about to learn otherwise. Ryan rang the bell and they waited, both apprehensive about what was to come.
The door was opened by a petite, trim woman in her late forties. She was dressed in a tan business suit and her blonde hair was tied up in a bun. Despite her professional appearance, Jessie could tell she was in bad shape.
She had shadows under her eyes that couldn’t be masked, even with heavy makeup, despite a valiant attempt. The eyes themselves were red, a sign of anything from lack of sleep to crying to drug use. None of the choices indicated anything good. She had a long run in her right stocking, which she apparently hadn’t noticed, suggesting her thoughts were elsewhere.
“Can I help you?” she asked, her voice scratchy.
“Hi, are you Margo Maines?” Jessie asked gently.
“Yes,” she said warily. “What’s this about?”
Jessie looked at Ryan, who appeared ready to deliver the news they knew would break her. She’d seen him do it many times before and saw the same reaction now, a stiffening of his spine, as if preparing himself to accept the emotional blowback he was about to get. Suddenly, a wave of empathy rushed over her at the thought of how many times he’d been in this situation in his career. She felt a powerful urge to shield him from it this time and stepped forward slightly.
“We’re from the Los Angeles Police Department,” she said before he could get a word out. “I’m Jessie Hunt and this is Detective Ryan Hernandez. I’m afraid we have some bad news for you, Mrs. Maines.”
Margaret Maines, or “Margo” as she was called in her husband’s bio on the city website, seemed to know what was coming. She lowered her head as she reached out and gripped the doorframe. Ryan inched forward slightly just in case she collapsed.
Luckily, it wasn’t necessary. She looked back up at them with a resolve that Jessie admired, though it appeared fragile.
“Let’s go inside,” Mrs. Maines said. “I think I’d like to sit down before you tell me anything else.”
Jessie and Ryan followed her into the living room, where she sat on the loveseat and motioned for them to take the adjoining couch. Once they were all settled, she looked at them both and nodded.
“Go ahead,” she said resignedly.
Jessie continued, not looking at Ryan to see if he was okay with her taking point.
“I’m afraid your husband has died, Mrs. Maines. His body was found this morning at a downtown hotel. His identity was recently confirmed.”
Mrs. Maines nodded, took a deep gulp of air, and reached for a tissue. As she dabbed at her eyes, she replied.
“I knew something was wrong. He never came home last night. Sometimes he works very late. But he always calls. And he didn’t pick up any of mine. I actually thought about calling the police. But then I pictured him sleeping in his office with his phone on silent or with a dead battery. I didn’t want to overreact. I called the office this morning and they said he hadn’t come in yet. I knew something was wrong. I was this close to calling.”
“Why didn’t you?” Jessie asked, keeping her tone non-accusatory.
“Gordon was very particular. He hated bad press. I could hear his voice in my head saying, ‘If you call the police, it’ll end up in the papers. It’ll be on the news. My opponent in the next election will turn it into something nefarious no matter how innocent. There’s no room for public relations mistakes in modern politics.’ He was very big on avoiding bad press. Now I wonder if I could have prevented this by calling.”
Jessie thought it was ironic that a guy who was concerned about PR was apparently carrying on some kind of tryst and bankrolling it with what appeared to be a slush fund. But she kept that to herself.
“Don’t blame yourself, Mrs. Maines,” Ryan said. “From what we can tell so far, it looks like your husband died last night. No call you could have made would have saved him.”
She seemed to take some small solace from that, sighing deeply with something approximating relief. She appeared to be debating whether to ask her next question but finally just spit it out.
“How did it happen?”
Jessie, feeling only slightly cowardly, determined that Ryan’s years of experience on the job might come in handy for this one and decided to let him answer.
“Maybe we save the details for another time, Mrs. Maines,” he suggested gently.
The broken look on the woman’s face was quickly replaced with a combination of irritation and resolution.
“Tell me the truth, Detective. It’s clearly not just natural causes. I’m going to find out sooner or later. And I’d rather hear it first in the privacy of my own home than in some cold morgue surrounded by a group of strangers. I’ll take two strangers over ten any day.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You’re correct. It wasn’t natural causes. I’m afraid he was strangled to death. The circumstances surrounding his murder are somewhat… salacious. Shall I go on?”
“Please,” Mrs. Maines insisted, her voice flat.
“It appears that he was at the hotel for a rendezvous with an as-yet-unknown woman. We don’t know her motive. We just know that he was likely drugged, then robbed and strangled.”
Jessie watched as the woman’s face hardened. She felt a twinge of anxiety as she wondered whether Margo Maines was going to blow up or break down. It turned out to be neither.
“I’m quite confident it was a drugging and robbery,” she insisted crisply as she sat up straight. “There is no way Gordon would have gone willingly to a hotel room with some woman unless his clarity had been altered.”
Jessie remembered the footage of the bar, in which Gordon had happily flirted for a half hour before going to book a hotel room, all without being slipped a thing. She wondered if she should burst his wife’s bubble of certainty but decided that wasn’t her job.
Another moment of moral cowardice.
“In any case,” Ryan said in a “moving on” voice, clearly not wanting to challenge her either, “even though we have confirmation it’s him, we’ll need someone to come down to the medical examiner’s office to formally identify the body. If you’d rather one of his staffers do that, we can accommodate your wishes.”
“No, I’ll do it,” she said.
“Thank you,” Ryan said. “There is one other thing. We don’t have many leads on the woman we suspect of killing your husband. But she did take all of his credit cards and identification.”
“What about his watch?” Mrs. Maines interrupted.
“What watch?” Ryan asked.
“He had a Rolex watch with his initials inscribed on the back.”
“We didn’t find it at the scene,” Ryan said. “But we’ll add it to the list of missing items.”
“I gave him that watch for our tenth anniversary,” she said, her thoughts clearly drifting back to that moment.
Jessie had an idea but decided to put a button in it for now. Reluctantly, Ryan pulled Maines back into the present.
“We’ll do our best to recover it, ma’am,” he assured her. “But regarding the credit cards, rather than cancelling them, we were hoping to track them in the hopes that we could catch her in the act of using one. She might also try to forge any number of documents using his ID. Would you give us permission to review his transactions and financial data to see if there are any anomalies?”
Mrs. Maines cast a skeptical eye at him, clearly aware that his request likely had an ulterior motive.
“That seems broad,” she noted.
“It is,” he admitted. “We want to cast as wide a net as possible so we don’t miss anything. We can get a court order if need be. But that takes time and I worry she might slip through our fingers in the interim. But if you sign the releases now, we can get started immediately.”
Mrs. Maines still looked somewhat unconvinced. But the way Ryan had framed it, saying no would look like she was hampering the investigation of her husband’s murder. After a moment it became clear that she’d decided that whatever skeletons she suspected he was hiding would ultimately have to take a backseat to catching his killer.
“Give me the papers,” she said roughly.
Ryan, who already had the envelope waiting, handed them over. Jessie saw him fighting the urge to smile and had to fight her own urge to kick him.
He was lucky that Margo Maines didn’t know his expressions as well as she did. New widows don’t usually appreciate self-satisfied smirks.
CHAPTER SIX
Jessie was getting frustrated with Ryan.
They were back at the station, sitting at their desks, rifling through confusing financial documents while they waited for the tech team to untangle the origins of “City Logistics” and where it got its resources. Captain Decker was at a meeting at headquarters, meaning Jessie had still managed to avoid the sit-down where he would inevitably warn her away from Hannah’s case.
In the meantime, Ryan had floated the idea that Margo Maines was faking—that she had uncovered her husband’s dalliance and hired a hit woman to take him out, either for revenge, the life insurance, or both. In fact, he seemed fixated on it.
“She just didn’t seem credible to me,” he insisted. “I don’t buy her claim that Gordon had to be drugged to go up to a hotel room with another woman. You saw that footage from the bar. He was all in. Margo had to at least have a hint about his lecherousness.”
“I’m sure she did,” Jessie agreed, despite her agitation. “But that doesn’t mean she took a hit out on him. Maybe she just wasn’t comfortable acknowledging to two people she’d just met that she’d been looking the other way when it came to his bad behavior. Wives have been known to do that.”
Jessie kept her voice steady so he wouldn’t pick up on how raw this discussion still was for her. Her own ex-husband, Kyle, had cheated on her for months. And though the signs were all around her, Jessie had somehow managed to miss them.
In her more honest moments, she acknowledged that she might have intentionally ignored them because confronting them would have blown up her marriage and her life. Of course, that happened anyway when Kyle murdered his mistress, framed Jessie for it, and then tried to kill her too. But that wasn’t the point here.
“Maybe she wasn’t comfortable revealing she knew he cheated because she was embarrassed,” Ryan conceded. “Or maybe she knew that admitting it would give her a motive.”
Jessie didn’t want to dismiss his theory. It wasn’t crazy. And he’d been at this a lot longer than she had. But he seemed to be ignoring some other relevant details.
“Let me ask you this,” she offered. “If this was a paid hit, why not go with the double tap to the head? It’s much quicker and more surefire.”
“Maybe Margo Maines knew the details would eventually come out. Her husband would be shamed and she’d be the martyred wife. She’d get sympathy galore and no suspicion.”
“That explains it from her end but not the killer’s,” Jessie countered. “The woman who killed him took her sweet time. Even if she’d been tasked to make the scene look tawdry, she could have been in and out in less than fifteen minutes. She was there twice that long. She lingered. That’s not the work of a professional. And she could have just drugged him and left it at that. A dead, naked, drugged-up politician found in a hotel room is embarrassing enough. Why the strangling too? No. This feels personal.”
Ryan sat with that for a while. The argument seemed to make an impact. Jessie’s frustration level dropped a notch.
“That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of it from the killer’s perspective.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the profiler,” she said, tweaking him slightly.
He flicked her off playfully. But a sudden flash in his eyes told her he had a new theory.
“What about this?” he began. “Maybe the woman was his mistress. It could be she didn’t know he was married or maybe he’d promised he’d leave his wife for her. Either way, by last night she’s discovered that he’s stringing her along and she’s pissed. So she decides to get a little revenge for herself. She kills him up close and personal. Then she gets everything: vengeance on the guy who used her, a chance to destroy his reputation and as a lucky strike extra, the wife loses her big-time important husband.”
“I like that idea better than the other one,” Jessie allowed.
Just then, Camille Guadino from the tech team walked over with some paperwork and a rueful smile. Fresh out of school, she was the rookie of the unit, assigned to the most mundane tasks.
“Uh-oh,” Ryan said, looking at her. “Don’t tell me you’re going to give us actual evidence we’ll have to follow up on instead of just spinning endless webs of theories.”
“Sorry, Detective, but yeah,” she said as she dropped a folder on his desk. “Real, fresh-brewed evidence coming your way.”
“What have you got, Guadino?” Jessie asked.
“It took a while but we finally figured out what City Logistics is all about.”
“Urban planning enthusiasts?” Jessie quipped.
“So close,” Guadino replied. “It’s a consulting firm that ‘offers feedback and recommendations on urban improvement issues.’”
“What the hell does that mean?” Ryan asked.
“It means it’s pretty much what you guys suspected. It’s a shell company run by a lawyer owned by a shell company also run by a lawyer who’s a partner in the same firm that represents a consulting agency that has done work for a strategist associated with—you guessed it—Gordon Maines.”
“What does all that gobbledygook mean to us?’ Ryan sked.
“It means that, via multiple cutouts, Maines had access to a corporate account with over two hundred eighty grand in it. And it looks like someone at an ATM located in the Bonaventure Hotel withdrew two grand in cash from that account at the time Maines was there.”
Jessie and Ryan exchanged a look that acknowledged the theories they’d been discussing for the last ten minutes were now likely moot.
“What?” Guadino asked, sensing she was missing something. “Did I screw up somehow?”
“No, you’re good,” Jessie assured her. “Go on.”
“Okay. We’ve been tracking all of his credit cards and haven’t gotten any hits. I’m starting to doubt we will. Usually, these cards get used in the first hours after a robbery, before the victim discovers they’re gone. Or in this case, before the body is found.”
“Was that a joke?” Ryan asked. “Did you just make fun of a man’s death for cheap laughs?”
“Uhhh…” Guadino started to sputter.
“I’m just screwing with you. That was a good one. Anything else?’
“Yes,” Guadino said, dispensing with the humor and sticking to the facts. “The damage to his phone turned out to be minimal. We were able to get all his recent texts and a call log. It’s in the folder. But he didn’t make any calls or text anyone in the hour prior to withdrawing the cash.”
“Thanks, Guadino,” Jessie said. “We’ll take it from here. You can go ahead and get back to working on your stand-up routine.”
Guadino smiled sheepishly and left. When she was gone, Jessie looked over at Ryan.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.
“That you could really go for a pastrami on rye right about now?”
“That too,” she said, happy to embrace his attempts at levity, “but also that this woman isn’t looking like a mistress at all. It sounds like Gordon was paying for his evening. I think we’re dealing with a pro.”
“I agree,” he said. “That would explain her hanging out at a fancy hotel bar.”
“Women sometimes hang out at bars, Ryan,” Jessie chided. “It doesn’t always mean they’re prostitutes.”
“I didn’t mean it like th—”
“I’m just screwing with you,” she said, grinning. “You’re not the only one who can play that game. It does fit the profile. But it doesn’t explain why there was no phone communication prior to their meet-up. If this was a first-time date, they’d need to nail down the particulars of when and where. But there’s none of that.”
“Right,” Ryan said. “And he didn’t look surprised to see her, which makes me think this wasn’t the first time they’d met up.”
“But if this was a regular thing, why did she wait until now to kill him? And why rob him if he was willing to pay upwards of two grand anyway?”
“Maybe she wanted to make sure he really had deep pockets and wasn’t just fronting. Of course, once she knew, one would expect her to use those cards ASAP after she left him in that room. She had to know they’d be cancelled by the morning. But there’s not a single purchase.”
“I get the sense that this woman is too smart to use those cards,” Jessie said. “She wore gloves the whole night. The scene was clean. She knew how to avoid the hotel cameras. Remember how there was no footage of her when he nodded at her in the lobby? She wouldn’t be so sloppy as to risk using the cards and getting busted after the fact.”
“Then why take them?” Ryan asked. “What’s the point?”
“Maybe to make it harder to identify him? She took his license too and that doesn’t make much sense. Or maybe just to humiliate him even more—to add insult to injury. I’m thinking that might be why she took the Rolex too. Not because it’s worth so much money but because of the inscription. It had personal meaning and value to Maines. Taking it might have been a way of taking away the power that came with his identity.”