The Perfect Wife Page 19

  “Officer Gentry, can I ask you a question?”

  “What?” Gentry shouted, then repeated more quietly, “What?”

  “Why am I not in a black-and-white right now on my way to being processed at the local police station?”

  Gentry looked like she was going to yell again but managed to stop herself. She sat down and heaved a long, deep sigh.

  “Ms. Hunt,” she finally said, her tone mostly level now, “I will be honest with you if you will do the same for me. Why don’t we make an arrangement like the one you had with Crutchfield? Only let’s make it a little more even. Say you ask me one question and then I get to ask you one. Does that seem fair?”

  “It does.”

  “Okay, the reason I’m reluctant to bust you is this: Crutchfield almost never consents to interviews. And when he does, the person usually leaves crying or twisted in knots. For whatever reason, he doesn’t seem interested in messing you up as much as those others. My hope is that his willingness to talk to you might lead to an eventual willingness to reveal details he’s kept to himself. Of the nineteen victims we know of, only fifteen bodies were ever found. And folks smarter than me think he had way more than nineteen victims. Maybe he’ll tell you where the other bodies are buried. Maybe he’ll admit to other killings. Some experts think he had an accomplice. Maybe he’d talk about that. Anything he shares with you is more than he’s shared with anyone else in years. So I’d rather not shut out the one person he’s willing to talk to. But you make it damn hard not to. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes,” Jessie conceded. “It does.”

  “My turn now. And remember, you promised to be honest. What did you two discuss in there?”

  Jessie looked at Gentry for a long time, studying the scar under her eye and the tiny burn marks on her face. She sensed that Gentry had likely seen things in war almost as bad as Jessie had seen herself here at home. And in that moment, she decided to trust her.

  “Can we go outside?” she asked quietly.

  Gentry immediately stood up, uncuffed her, and led her quickly through the multiple security checkpoints until they were standing out in the parking lot. The air was cold but the sun was shining brightly and Jessie had to squint to see.

  “So?” Gentry prompted.

  Jessie dove in, knowing that she had to just start and keep going if she was going to get it all out. She decided to be honest about everything she said, even though she planned to exclude a few details.

  “When I was a little girl, I grew up in Southeast Missouri, at the edge of the Ozarks. My parents were divorced and I was raised by my mom. One day, I was abducted by a man who took me to an isolated cabin deep in the woods. He had several imprisoned people there. He would show me videos of how he’d captured them. Then he would kill them in the cellar, in unspeakable ways. He made me watch.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Gentry muttered but Jessie kept going.

  “When he’d killed everyone he had, he’d go away for a few days to collect more victims. He left me manacled to a post, with some food, a bucket for a toilet, and a dirty mattress to sleep on. When he came back, he’d have three or four more people and he’d work his way through them, always making me watch.”

  Gentry reached out for the wall behind her for support, then bent down on her knees, looking at the ground.

  “One of his victims, a woman, had a bobby pin that fell out of her hair. I snapped it up. When he was sleeping I managed to jimmy the manacles and escape into the woods. I was barefoot and it was winter. There was snow on the ground. I didn’t know where I was going but I kept running. Eventually I could hear footsteps behind me and knew he was chasing me. I got to a cliff overlooking a river. I looked down. It was easily fifty feet down and portions of the river were frozen over. He caught up but I was far enough away that I could have jumped before he got to me. But I couldn’t do it. I just stood there.

  “He grabbed me and carried me back to the cabin and said I had to watch one more time; that he had something special for me to see. He taped my eyes open and said, ‘You have to see, little junebug. You have to know the truth.’ He used to call me junebug all the time.

  “Anyway, he had a woman manacled to the ceiling beams. Only this time it wasn’t in the cellar. It was right there in the living room so I knew this one was different. I can still remember the sound the wooden ceiling beams made as those manacles weighed on them. They creaked and groaned, almost like they were in pain themselves. Sometimes I can still hear it.”

  In that moment, Jessie had a realization. The creaking and moaning she’d been hearing in the new house—that she’d spent so much time trying to find the source of—was always only in her memory. No wonder she’d never found it.

  She looked down at Gentry, who was staring up at her expectantly. Jessie took a deep breath and continued.

  “Then I saw who the woman was. It was my mother.”

  Gentry forced herself to stand upright. It was clear that she wanted to say something but couldn’t find any words.

  “It’s okay,” Jessie told her. “There’s nothing you can say that will make it better. Trust me. So he killed her. I won’t describe how. When he was done, he cut into me from my shoulder to my neck. He said it was a souvenir.”

  She pulled down the collar of her shirt to show the pink scar that jutted out from her skin.

  “And then he left. He never came back. I was trapped in that cabin, bleeding, with the body of my dead mother feet away from me, for three days before some hunters came across me. By then, the fire had long gone out in the fireplace and I was starving and hypothermic. They got me to a hospital where I stayed for two weeks. I gave my statement to the police. But while they found some of the videos and some burned bodies, they never found everyone I told them about. I think they thought I made a lot of it up.”

  “Where did you go after that?” Gentry managed to ask. “Did your father take you in?”

  “No. He wasn’t the type. And the FBI was worried that even though there was no known suspect to prosecute, that this guy might come after me in case he was ever caught, so that I couldn’t be a witness. So the US Marshals placed me in Witness Protection. I was adopted by a family in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The father was in the local FBI office and they had recently lost their toddler son to cancer. It made sense. They were looking for a child to love. I needed a secure environment far from Missouri. So my life as Jessica Thurman ended and I started a new one as Jessica Hunt. But they called me Jessie because my mom used to call me Jessica and it was too painful to hear.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Gentry said. “I can’t imagine what that was like.”

  “Thank you. But I haven’t answered your question yet, about what we discussed.”

  Gentry nodded, apparently having forgotten that was what she originally wanted to know.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “The abductions I saw in those videos and the murders I saw in that cabin were only known to me and the man who committed them. I described them in my statement, but only generally. Besides, no one believed me. Yet Bolton Crutchfield knew all about them.”

  “How do you know that?” Gentry asked.

  “Because his murders were performed in the exact same way,” Jessie said. “He was coached by the man who originally committed them.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because he admitted it to me. He referred to the man who killed my mother—the cops back then named him The Ozarks Executioner—his mentor. He told me that the man knew I would come calling one day. That’s why he visited Crutchfield in this hospital. It’s what he’s wanted all along.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Jessie made the long drive back to Westport Beach, barely aware of the traffic around her. As unsettling as they were, the revelations from Crutchfield about the origin of his crimes reconfirmed her suspicions more than upended them. She’d suspected as much for a long time and it was reassuring to know those suspicions were
correct.

  It was something else he’d said that was circling in her thoughts; that she couldn’t let go. She could still hear his words echoing in her brain: “Trust your instincts. Maybe you ain’t the one who should be twistin’.”

  Her instincts were screaming at her that if she couldn’t recall killing Natalia, then she probably hadn’t. Jessie had many memories she’d like to block out forever. But they were all right there, ready to reappear in her dreams if not when she was awake. She’d learned the hard way that banishing them wasn’t really an option for her.

  But if she accepted that she hadn’t killed the girl, then that meant she had to consider the possibility that the person who told her she must have—her own husband—might have.

  The idea seemed absurd. She’d known Kyle Voss for almost a decade and nothing about him had ever hinted that he was capable of such an act. Until they’d moved to Westport Beach, the worst things she could say about him was that he was a bit of a workaholic and tended to be on the possessive side. But considering all her psychological baggage, those things always seemed minor.

  Since the move, things had gotten worse, for sure. Insisting on joining a country club that was a front for a secret sex club was not great, even if that wasn’t his reason for joining.

  And while he’d taken care of her after the miscarriage, he had become distant and withdrawn. Then again, everybody handled tragedy differently and she wasn’t in a position to judge.

  She had caught him snorting coke at a nightclub. And while troubling, she wasn’t inclined to draw permanent conclusions about his character based on that. She’d done far more in her high school and college days and it hadn’t turned her into a monster.

  The one thing that had really stunned her was how willingly he’d covered up Natalia’s death. True, it was a crisis moment and anyone can panic in a situation like that. But he didn’t seem panicked. He seemed… purposeful.

  As she exited the freeway, something Detective Hernandez had said yesterday popped into her head. It was something about, when conducting an investigation, guarding against making assumptions and setting aside preconceptions about people.

  It occurred to Jessie that her best bet might be to talk to someone who had a different perception of Kyle than she did. She could think of one person who knew him long before she’d ever met him. And he just so happened to live a few blocks from her.

  *

  Jessie rang the doorbell of the Carlisle house and waited, trying to keep her nervousness in check. Melanie opened the door, clearly both happy and surprised to see her.

  “Twice in two days,” she noted. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “I’m sorry to come by unannounced. I’m actually here to see Teddy. I called his office and they said he came home early. Is he here?”

  “He is,” Mel said, clearly taken aback. “Do you want to come in?”

  “Actually I need to talk to him privately. I know that sounds weird. But it’s kind of important. Do you mind?”

  Mel obviously did. But she made an admirable effort to hide it.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Give me a second and I’ll get him.”

  Jessie stood awkwardly at the front door while Mel retreated into the house. She could hear whispering but couldn’t make out the words. However, from the tone it was clear that Mel was suspicious and Teddy was confused. A minute later he appeared.

  “What’s up?” he asked through narrowed eyes.

  “I just wanted to talk to you about something. Can we go over near my car?” she asked and headed in that direction without waiting for a reply.

  When they got to the driveway, she turned to see him with his arms crossed defensively.

  “I can’t take long,” he said. “I promised Daughton I’d be right back.”

  Jessie doubted that was true but didn’t say so.

  “No problem. I actually feel kind of silly asking this,” she said, slipping into the story she’d prepped in her head on the way over. “But Kyle’s birthday is coming up in early December. It’ll be about ten years since his high school graduation and I thought it might be fun to give him a few gifts that called back to that era. The problem is I don’t really know much about those days beyond what he’s told me. Then I realized I have a great resource from back then—you. I was hoping you could tell me a bit about what he was like in high school. Maybe some stuff he wouldn’t be willing to share with me himself.”

  “What kind of stuff?” he asked, clearly intrigued even if he was still a little on guard.

  “Nothing too revealing. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable. Maybe something mildly embarrassing or silly? For example, was he popular? Did he date a lot?”

  Teddy screwed up his face and Jessie could tell he had bought in and was genuinely trying to think back for some good stories. Then he looked back at her.

  “He actually wasn’t a ton different than he is now. He was a real go-getter even back then; always knew what he wanted and how make it happen.”

  “Okay. Can you think of any stories that show that in action?”

  He seemed stumped for a second but then his face broke into a grin of recollection.

  “I do remember one cool story that shows how persistent he was,” he said, then seemed to reconsider. “But it involves a girl. Are you okay with that?”

  “Of course. I never assumed I was the first girl he ever dated.”

  “Okay, he took the head cheerleader to the prom,” Teddy said. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “That is cool, Teddy,” Jessie agreed. “But it’s not a story. It’s a declarative statement. Can you give me some details?”

  Teddy squirmed a little as he stood there, clearly still not sure what was out of bounds.

  “Just tell me,” Jessie cajoled him. “This stuff is a decade old. It’s all water under the bridge. I’m just looking for colorful material.”

  She could see the furrow in his brow soften and knew he was convinced.

  “All right then. There was this girl named Becky Patrone. He was seriously into her. I mean everybody was, but especially Kyle. She was the head cheerleader and super smart—she was almost class valedictorian. She had a scholarship to Harvard.”

  “Sounds like a real slacker,” Jessie said, trying to keep the banter light.

  “Yeah, right. Anyway, Kyle wanted to ask her to the prom. But she already had another date—her boyfriend. His name was Reese something. He was the quarterback of the football team and president of the student council. They were like this star couple. And even though Kyle was generally well-liked, there was no way Becky was going to dump her football star boyfriend to go to the prom with some guy she was just friends with.”

  “Sounds like a serious dilemma,” Jessie said.

  “It was. That is until Reese got busted,” Teddy said mischievously.

  “For what?”

  He paused again, the furrowed brow returning. Apparently he had remembered something else about the story and was now having second thoughts about sharing it.

  “Tell me, Teddy,” she said in her most reassuring voice. “There’s no point in stopping now.”

  That seemed to make sense to him and he continued.

  “Actually, it was pretty awful,” he said, suddenly serious. “He was charged with drugging and raping some girl at a party a few weeks before prom. He denied it and Becky stood by him for a while. But then the cops found some, um, physical evidence that he’d been with this other girl. So even if it was consensual, he’d cheated. Becky dumped him and was really devastated. But Kyle offered her a shoulder to cry on and convinced her that she shouldn’t miss out on prom because of something another person had done. He offered to take her and she went.”

  “Good for Kyle, I guess,” Jessie said, trying to keep the judgment out of her voice. “But not so great for Reese.”

  “No, it kind screwed up his life. And the thing is—I think the charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence or something. But it was t
oo late. His reputation was ruined.”

  “So did Kyle and Becky start dating?” Jessie asked.

  “Not really. I think she always viewed him as more of a friend than a possible boyfriend. I know he hoped to join her at Harvard too—he applied. But he didn’t get in, not that there was ever much of a chance of that.”

  “That’s too bad,” Jessie said. “So they drifted apart then?”

  “Actually, it looked like he might have another shot for a while,” Teddy suddenly remembered. “Becky got accused of cheating on some final exam late in the year. It was kind of crazy because she was already set for college and had a great GPA. Remember how I said she was almost valedictorian? Well, she would have been if not for cheating on that one test. And it cost her the scholarship to Harvard too. She couldn’t afford to go without it and all her other schools bailed after that, including USC, where Kyle was headed, as you know. So she ended up having to go to a community college.”

  “That really sucks,” Jessie said. “Did she go somewhere nearby at least?”

  “No. Kyle was hoping she would. He thought she’d stay close to home to save money after losing Harvard. But she surprised everyone. She went somewhere in Arizona. I think she wanted to get away from all the gossip at home.”

  “That is really sad. I hope things turned around for her.”

  “Oh, don’t feel too bad,” Teddy said. “I heard she still did fine. After all, she was super hot and super smart. I think I read in an alumni email that said she’s a lawyer in Phoenix now.”

  “I’m glad to hear it worked out for her,” Jessie said neutrally. “Otherwise I’d feel bad using any part of that story for his birthday gift. But since she’s okay, maybe I can make some reference to him taking the head cheerleader to prom.”

  “He’d love that,” Teddy agreed.