THE PERFECT HOUSE Page 6

  Ryan, who hadn’t spoken until then, finally did now.

  “Welcome home,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  “Not too bad,” she said, ignoring the fluttering sensation that had suddenly returned. “Just getting back into the flow of things, you know?”

  “Well, diving right back in should help,” he said. “We’ve got to head out right away.”

  “Do I have time to pick up the weapon I requisitioned before I left for Quantico?”

  “I checked on that for you earlier this morning,” he said as they began walking through the bullpen. “Unfortunately, there was some kind of bureaucratic screw-up and it hadn’t been processed yet. I resolved the paperwork issue but you probably won’t get your gun until next week. Think you can survive just using your brain as a weapon for a few days?”

  He smiled at her but she noticed something she hadn’t picked up on earlier. He had shadows under his eyes, which were a little red.

  “Sure,” she said, nodding, trying to keep up with his brisk pace. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Why?” he asked, glancing over at her.

  “You just look a little…tired.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking straight ahead again as he talked. “I’ve had a bit of trouble sleeping lately. Shelly and I are getting separated.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  They had been in the car for several minutes before things felt normal again.

  Jessie had offered her sympathies back at the station and Ryan had thanked her. But he hadn’t been forthcoming beyond that and she didn’t think that asking any questions was appropriate. And since whatever case they were handling was too sensitive to discuss inside the station, they were reduced to awkward chitchat about her flight back and the perils of supermarket sushi. They were out of rhythm.

  At first, things were no better once they got on the road. As they pulled onto the street from the garage, a homeless guy knocked on her window asking for spare change. She jumped in her seat, hitting her head on the roof.

  “You okay?” Ryan asked, giving her a sideways glance.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m just out of practice,” she said as she rubbed the sore spot. “There aren’t as many homeless guys on the streets of suburban Virginia.”

  Ryan looked like he was about to respond, then thought better of it. Things got a bit better once they started moving through traffic.

  “So what’s so sensitive about this case that we couldn’t discuss it at the station?” she asked.

  “We probably could have,” Ryan admitted, as he pulled onto the freeway heading west. “But Decker can be a bit paranoid and I find it’s easier to roll with it than to fight it. We’re going to Pacific Palisades.”

  “That’s a little out of our area, isn’t it?”

  Yeah, by about twenty miles. But even though it’s almost to Malibu, it’s technically part of the city of Los Angeles, so it’s in LAPD jurisdiction. The folks at the West LA station caught a case they thought we could help with. Actually, they thought you could help. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Wait, what?” Jessie asked, completely confused.

  “Let me back up a little bit,” Ryan said. “Sometime in the last twelve hours, a woman named Penelope Wooten was murdered. She was stabbed at least eight times in the chest and abdomen. My old partner, Brady Bowen, caught the case. It turns out that Penelope is married to Colton Wooten. Does that name ring a bell?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “Maybe not yet,” Ryan said. “But his profile was about to get much higher. Wooten is a former assistant district attorney who now runs a mega practice in Santa Monica. But word is he was on the verge of declaring his candidacy for DA in a few months. And most folks thought he had a solid chance to win.”

  “Is that why Decker said this has to be handled delicately?”

  “That’s a big part of it. Obviously when a wife is killed in what looks like a crime of passion, the husband is automatically a prime suspect. So we’re already in an inherently sensitive situation before we even start investigating.”

  “I don’t know that I’m especially qualified to navigate something like that,” Jessie admitted.

  “No,” Ryan agreed. “In fact, you’re probably less so than most.”

  “Thanks for that,” she said, smirking.

  “Sorry. But it’s true. Having said that, what you are qualified for is dealing with crimes involving wealthy people in exclusive neighborhoods. And the residents of hillside ocean-view estates in Pacific Palisades definitely go in that bucket.”

  “I’ve solved one case, Ryan,” she said skeptically.

  “Officially,” he countered. “But unofficially, you also solved the case involving your husband. And your life leading up to that was immersed in that world—mansions, country clubs, people who burn their own cash for fun.”

  “That might be overstating it just a bit,” she said, trying not to laugh.

  “You get my point,” he pressed. “You lived among these kinds of people. You were one of these people. You get them. You understand how they think. That’s a valuable gift.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” Jessie said, uncomfortable with the compliment. “But how did folks all the way out in Pacific Palisades hear about some junior profiler in the downtown area?”

  “World travels in law enforcement,” he answered. “Also, I may have had a drink with Brady a few weeks ago and mentioned you in passing.”

  “Okay,” Jessie said, not sure how else to respond.

  “Anyway,” Ryan said, barreling past that exchange as quickly as possible, “when this case came up, he thought of you. And having worked with him, it just made sense for me to tag along. His most recent partner just retired so I’ll team up with him for the case and you’ll be the assigned profiler. Sound good?”

  “Sounds like I don’t have much choice,” Jessie said.

  “Are you bummed about having to investigate a case with ocean views and an elevator in the house?”

  “I just…it’s true that I know this world. But my memories of it aren’t great. And if the folks who live here are anything like the ones I knew in Westport Beach, we’re going to be dealing with some real prima donnas. That doesn’t excite me.”

  “Well, I’ve got good and bad news.”

  “Bad news first,” Jessie insisted. “Always give me the bad news first.”

  “The bad news is, from my experience, you are indeed entering prima donna territory.”

  “So what’s the good news?”

  “I know a great seafood place we can go for lunch.”

  “We’re headed to a murder scene and you’re thinking about lunch spots?” Jessie asked incredulously.

  “Always,” Ryan replied with an almost disturbing level of enthusiasm.

  *

  The Wooten house rested inside what could only be called a compound.

  They had to enter through a gate at the bottom of the hill, which was manned by an officer checking identification. The drive up to the house was an almost quarter-mile-long stretch of hairpin turns. There was a second gate along a wall surrounding the house, which also had an officer standing guard.

  “Both gates have code panels,” Ryan noted as they passed through. “That would make it hard for too many outsiders to get in.”

  “Yep,” Jessie agreed. “And you wouldn’t even know there was a house up here from the road. Also, without having seen the body, getting stabbed eight times doesn’t sound like the work of some random home invasion robbery gone wrong. It feels personal.”

  Detective Brady Bowen was waiting for them when they pulled up into the massive circular driveway. He wasn’t what Jessie had imagined a detective from a fancy coastal community would look like. Squat, with a barrel chest, an ample gut, a mustache, sweat pouring off his brow and shirttails poking out of his slacks, which looked about to burst at the seams, he reminded her of Andy Sipowicz, her adoptive father’s favorite character from that 1990s show NYPD Blue.
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  When they stepped out of the car, he gave Ryan a big bear hug and then turned to Jessie. Up close, she noticed that his bright blue eyes sparkled with warmth and enthusiasm.

  “Great to meet you, Ms. Hunt. I hear super things,” he said, wiping his hand on his pants and politely shaking hers.

  “Nice you meet you too. And please call me Jessie.”

  “Only if you call me the Bradenator,” he said, before adding, “Just kidding, Brady works fine.”

  “Hey, Bradenator,” Ryan said with not a little sarcasm. “What have we got here?”

  “Always straight to business with this guy,” Brady said, winking at Jessie. “Okay, here’s the situation. Penelope Wooten, age thirty-four. Married seven years to Colton Wooten. Two children—Colt Jr., age six, and Anastasia, four. She was found around eight a.m. this morning by her yoga teacher, Beth Copeland, and neighbor and best friend, Eliza Longworth. They had a session scheduled for today. There were eight deep stab wounds in her chest and abdomen, along with a few smaller defensive ones on her hands. It looks like she may have fallen while trying to fend off the attack, then gotten the worst of it when she was on the ground.”

  “Time of death?” Ryan asked.

  “It’s too early for anything definitive yet but we’re likely looking at some time between midnight and seven a.m. No sign of forced entry. The best friend says the front door was unlocked.”

  “Are the friend and yoga teacher inside now?” Jessie asked.

  “The yoga teacher, Copeland, is out back,” Brady told her. “The friend, Longworth, had to go to the hospital. When she saw the victim, she ran over to give her CPR and slipped in the blood. She landed pretty hard and bruised up her knee. She was also covered in blood from trying to administer CPR. When the paramedics arrived she was pretty freaked out and they recommended she go to the hospital. It looked like she might be in shock. An officer went with her to take her statement.”

  “Are we certain she got all the blood on her from slipping in it?” Jessie asked skeptically.

  “That was my first thought too,” Brady said. “But the yoga teacher said she didn’t have a drop on her until she fell. She was right there when it happened.”

  “Is Mr. Wooten here yet?” Ryan asked with trepidation.

  “Ah yes,” Brady said in an unenthusiastic tone. “The counselor is in the dining room right now. Believe me—I wouldn’t be making Bradenator jokes if he was in hearing range. An officer asked some preliminary questions, but I haven’t spoken to him yet. I figured I’d wait so we could all get his answers for the first time together.”

  “Did the officer have any initial thoughts?” Jessie asked.

  “He described Wooten as distraught and confrontational. Not surprising but not much fun either.”

  “Well, I guess we should check out the body,” Ryan said. “Then we can talk to Beth Copeland while things are still fresh for her. Is Wooten going to balk if he has to wait?”

  “I think we can hold him off a bit,” Brady assured him. “The officer can tell him that we’ll meet with him once we’ve done our due diligence—crime scene investigation, witness interviews, et cetera. He’s an officer of the court. Even under these circumstances, he should understand.”

  “I also think we should talk to Eliza Longworth as soon as possible,” Jessie added, “preferably before she gets too cleaned up. I want her raw answers, before she’s had too much time to regroup.”

  “Not a problem,” Brady said. “She was only taken away about twenty minutes ago. I’ll give instructions for her not to change or shower until we’ve spoken to her. Shall we go in?”

  Jessie and Ryan nodded and followed Brady toward the house. As they approached, Jessie craned her neck to take the whole place in. It was a three-story, Spanish-style mansion built into the side of a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which glimmered about a half mile off in the distance. Other similarly situated homes dotted this hill and others nearby. They were all impressive but from what Jessie could see, most of them weren’t gated.

  They stepped into the foyer. Almost immediately she noted that next to the base of the stairs was an elevator. She had thought Ryan was joking. Brady led them through the expansive living room into the kitchen, handing them each latex gloves before they entered. As Jessie put them on, she steeled herself, aware that once she rounded the corner, she would be looking at something awful.

  It was worse than she’d expected. The other high-profile woman whose murder she had solved, a Hancock Park philanthropist named Victoria Missinger, had been poisoned. There was no overt sign of violence and she had looked like she was sleeping. That was not the case here.

  Penelope Wooten lay face-up on the Spanish kitchen tile, surrounded by a large, now-congealing puddle of blood that had matted her long blonde hair. She was wearing a yoga outfit, which was punctured at various points on her torso by multiple knife wounds.

  But that wasn’t what got to Jessie. She’d seen knife wounds and dead bodies up close before. It was the woman’s eyes. They were wide open, fixed with the twin emotions she must have felt at the time of her death: fear and confusion. They seemed to be simultaneously pleading for help and asking why.

  Jessie knew she couldn’t do anything about the first request. But she silently swore to answer the second part—why had this happened and not just that: who did it?

  CHAPTER TEN

  The more Jessie studied the crime scene, the more certain she was that Penelope had known the killer.

  As she walked around the kitchen, she tried to employ the tactics she’d just learned in her behavioral science seminars at the FBI training academy. Her instructors had preached one overriding principle: let the evidence guide your conclusions.

  It seemed like logical advice but it required a mindset change for Jessie. She had always let her instincts be her guide. She seemed to have a gift for reading people, at least people she didn’t know. But she’d come to realize she’d gotten too dependent on that skill.

  On more than one occasion, she’d ignored evidence that could have helped her solve a case because her gut was sending her down a different path. She realized she was especially susceptible to giving those she liked the benefit of the doubt. That was partly why she hadn’t picked up on the clues that her ex-husband was a sociopath. It was also why she was almost killed by Victoria Missinger’s murderer, a charming socialite named Andrea Robinson.

  Luckily, her blind spots hadn’t burned her too much. She survived both those situations and even solved the cases. But she knew that much of that had been luck, which would eventually run out. Her gut could still play a role in investigations, but she was determined not to let it cloud her judgment or supersede the evidence.

  And the evidence in front of her now was pretty clear: whoever had killed Penelope Wooten had a serious grudge. As they’d been informed, there were eight stab wounds, most quite deep. There were also defensive wounds on the palms that suggested Penelope had seen the attack coming.

  Jessie pointed at them as she spoke.

  “The person who did this could have stabbed her in the back but apparently wanted her to be frightened, to see what was about to happen. That suggests this was personal and not just some burglar panicking.”

  “Agreed,” Ryan says. “This doesn’t feel like a robbery gone wrong.”

  “No forced entry, right?” she double-checked with Brady.

  “Correct.”

  “That’s another sign that Penelope likely knew her assailant well enough to let him or her in,” she mused, “assuming the culprit wasn’t in the home already.”

  “The weapon appears to be the large butcher knife that’s missing from the cutlery block on the kitchen counter,” Ryan said, nodding in that direction. “That makes me suspicious that the murderer knew their DNA or fingerprints might be found on it.”

  “Another sign that this was a crime of passion,” Jessie added. “If it had been preplanned, the perpetrator was more likely to have worn gloves.”<
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  “There’s a Ring camera on the front door,” Brady said. “We’re trying to unlock her phone so we can access it. Those cameras are motion-activated so it won’t show us everything. Still, maybe there’s something there.”

  “Can’t the husband show us the footage?” Ryan asked.

  “He doesn’t have it on his phone,” Brady said. “She set the whole thing up.”

  “Can he at least give us the code to her phone?” Ryan wanted to know.

  “He doesn’t have that either. The passcode he had doesn’t work. Apparently she changed it and never told him.”

  “That’s not suspicious at all,” Jessie said sarcastically.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” Ryan warned, “especially with this case.”

  “Never,” she assured him, smiling sweetly. “Bradenator, you said the kids are six and four. So they’re likely in school or daycare right now. How did they get there?”

  “Dad takes them in early on Tuesdays because of her yoga class. He said she wouldn’t get back in time if she dropped them off.”

  “So she was here when they left for the morning?” she asked.

  “He said she was asleep when he left with the children at six forty-five.”

  “He saw her sleeping?”

  “I haven’t talked to him yet,” Brady said. “But he told the officer that when he rolled out of bed, she was lying next to him.”

  “So if he’s telling the truth,” Ryan mused, “that means the time of death was somewhere between six forty-five and eight a.m.”

  “If he’s telling the truth,” Brady agreed. “Of course, he could have offed her and then used the kids for an alibi.”

  “That’s true,” Jessie agreed. “But he would have had to have kept them out of the kitchen all morning. Sounds tricky. Plus, would the guy kill his own wife with his kids in the house? Whether it was him or someone else, it seems that the killer did this at a time when they knew the children wouldn’t be a factor.”

  “That flies in the face of the ‘crime of passion’ theory,” Ryan pointed out.