Blake Pierce - The Perfect Affair

She waited and could almost hear Burnside’s brain working in the intervening silence.

“You didn’t get this from me, okay?” he insisted.

“Of course not.”

“Nothing’s turned up on the laptop yet. We’re still waiting. The phone is still missing too. But we traced it to its last known location, a few blocks away. We found the SIM card in an alley, or at least what was left of it. It had been crushed, and from the look of it, burned.”

“That seems unusually thorough for a thief, don’t you think?” Jessie noted. “Almost like the robber was more interested in keeping Michaela’s call data hidden than in keeping her phone.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Ms. Hunt,” Burnside replied.

“No, of course you don’t. As long as this conversation isn’t officially happening, is there anything else you want to tell me about what occurred last night?”

More silence as Burnside weighed his response.

“I don’t have anything more to share about last night,” he finally said. “But I will say this. Going forward you might want to let this one go, Ms. Hunt. I can tell you don’t want to. And I know from your reputation that letting things go isn’t really what you do. But in this instance, you might want to reconsider.”

“Why?”

“I have to go, Ms. Hunt. But I wish you all the best. Take care of yourself.”

Before she could reply, he had hung up. She was pondering whether to call him back when she saw Garland Moses walk into the bullpen and make his way to the stairs leading to his tiny second-floor office. As usual, the legendary profiler projected the image of a rumpled, absent-minded professor, with his gray hair a mess, his glasses in danger of sliding off his nose, and his sport jacket dwarfing his wizened frame. She stood up and chased after him.

“Hey, Garland,” she said, reaching him at the bottom of the stairs and walking up with him. “You’ll never guess who I ran into yesterday.”

“You shouldn’t challenge me like that, Ms. Hunt,” he replied, winking. “I guess stuff for a living, you know.”

“Okay, then have at it,” she teased.

“I’m going to say Dr. Janice Lemmon,” he mused casually.

“How could you possibly know that?”

“That’s easy. You know I know her and seemed delighted by that information when you found that out. Also, your current gossipy, schoolgirl tone suggests that whoever it is has what you believe to be some sort of personal connection to me. That limits the options pretty dramatically. Therefore, Dr. Lemmon.”

“That’s pretty impressive,” she admitted.

“Also, she called me and warned me you were fishing for info,” he said with a wink in his voice.

“I see,” Jessie said, giddy at the thought. “Do the two of you chat on the phone often?”

“I feel like I’ve been transported into a Jane Austen novel and you’re the scheming protagonist. Please tell me that you didn’t accost me merely to hone your matchmaking skills, Ms. Hunt.”

“That’s not the only reason, Garland. I do have a favor to ask.”

“What’s that?” he said, as they reached the top of the stairs.

“I was hoping to introduce you to my half-sister, Hannah.”

“Ah yes, the girl you saved from the serial killer.”

“The girl you helped me save,” Jessie corrected. “If not for your suggestion, I never would have found her.”

“How is she?” he asked, brushing off the compliment.

“I was hoping you could tell me. I thought we could manufacture some sort of casual encounter and you could judge for yourself.”

Garland looked at her disapprovingly as they approached his office door.

“So you want to introduce me to her under false pretenses so I can profile her because you’re worried she might be a little serial killer-ish?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Jessie protested. But…yes.”

“I’m not totally comfortable with that,” he told her as he opened the door. “I don’t think it’s fair to the girl and I worry that it might further erode the trust the two of you already sorely lack.”

“How do you know tha…”

“However, I have to admit I’m curious to meet this girl. She sounds like a real pistol. I’d be willing to do that. To go through what she’s suffered and still be even moderately functional? It’s quite incredible. I can’t guarantee anything beyond a chat. If you’ll accept those terms, I’ll agree to it.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Jessie said.

“Very well then. We can talk later to set something up,” he said, then slammed the door in her face.

Under normal circumstances, Jessie would have been offended. But she decided to take the win. Garland had agreed to meet with Hannah. And once he did, Jessie was sure that he would be able to help. Even subconsciously, he’d end up profiling her. It was in his blood, just like it was in hers.

It was what they did.

By the time Ryan arrived, Jessie had a full head of steam.

She’d spent the rest of the morning getting as much background information as she could on Michaela Penn. He had barely reached his desk before she started peppering him with details.

“Something doesn’t fit with this girl,” she said before he even sat down.

“Good morning, Jessie,” he replied. “How are you?”

“Good morning,” she said, offering a brief smile acknowledging the niceties of human interaction. “How am I? I’m confused. Michaela Penn is a real contradiction. This is a girl who graduated from a prestigious Catholic girls high school a year early while on an academic scholarship. She was legally emancipated at the age of sixteen. All very impressive, right?”

“Right,” Ryan agreed, clearly giving up on the pleasantries.

“But the reason her emancipation was approved was because her father, who now lives up near Lake Arrowhead, was abusive. She was able to prove to the court that she was better off on her own.”

“What about her mom?”

“Her mother died of ovarian cancer when she was seven.”

“No other relatives?” Ryan asked.

“Not in California.”

“Where did she live then?”

“Until she graduated early, she boarded at the school. Since then, she’s bounced around among three different apartments until she settled on the place where she was found last night. None of the others were anywhere near as nice.”

“So how did she afford the new place?” Ryan wondered.

“That’s a good question. Like Lizzie said, she’s a waitress. She works at Jerry’s on Ventura Boulevard. And according to her manager, she only worked part-time. That’s not going to pay for the place she was living in, much less all the art and electronics we saw.”

“Any clues from her social media?” Ryan asked, finally firing up his computer.

“Not so far,” Jessie admitted. “I’ve looked at her Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Tumblr, and Whisper accounts, along with everything else I could find. It’s pretty standard stuff—selfies at the beach, pictures with friends at concerts, funny memes, inspirational quotes, tons of smiles; not a mean comment in her mentions. It’s almost…too normal.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s hard to explain. I know people’s social media is curated to project the best possible image. But hers is relentlessly normal—nothing controversial, nothing revealing. It’s just so impersonal. After looking at it all, I didn’t get the sense that I knew her any better than before. It felt like a puzzle with several pieces missing.”

“So there’s nothing in there that would explain why someone would stab her multiple times?” Ryan asked drily.