Ryan found it mildly amusing that the guy would even suggest an area filled with patrons when he didn't know the topic of conversation. How would customers feel when they overheard questions about a woman who'd visited here and died later that night? He did the man a favor and pointed back in the direction he'd come from.

  “I think your office would be best,” he said firmly.

  The guy nodded and led the way back. As they passed over the dance floor, Ryan felt the bass ripple through his body. By the time they got to the back, he half-feared that he’d done permanent damage to his hearing. More than that, he gave silent thanks that he never had to come to a place like this in search of love.

  “I’m Will Boston,” the manager said once they entered the office, and he closed the door. Ryan remained standing until Will took a seat, scanning the man’s desk for anything suspicious. Just because the guy worked here didn’t exclude him as a potential suspect. In fact, it made it more likely.

  “I’m Ryan Hernandez,” he said. “As I said, I’m a captain with the LAPD. We’re investigating a case involving a woman who may have come here last night. Were you working then?”

  “I sure was,” Will answered. “Same hours as tonight. I got here just before six and left after we closed up at 2 a.m. What’s the situation with this woman you mentioned?”

  “So you’re in charge of this place from the moment you arrive until the time you leave?” Ryan asked, ignoring Will’s question. “You don’t get any breaks to run out for a bite?”

  Will laughed at the thought.

  “Technically, I get breaks,” he replied. “They’re supposed to be ten minutes long, and I’m entitled to a thirty minute lunch too. But I can’t remember the last time I actually took my allotted time off. I usually eat on the main floor or at the bar, and my breaks usually end up being mostly for putting out fires that I've let burn until then. That was especially true last night."

  “Why was that?” Ryan asked.

  “It’s kind of crazy, actually,” he explained. “We were hosting this mixer for a new dating app and the event was a trivia contest. But it wasn’t normal questions about singers and movies and stuff. It was based on history, and the people who showed up were a different breed."

  “What does that mean?” Ryan asked.

  “Well, they were super-competitive, but not in a fun, ‘we’re all trying to hook up here’ kind of way. It was way more intense than that.”

  “Okay,” Ryan said. “Go on.”

  "Anyway, these two guys got into a big argument about when some law or amendment passed. I don't remember the exact details, but they were literally screaming at each other. Then one of them tossed his drink at the other, and it was on. They were throwing punches. By the time I got there, they were rolling on the floor. I kicked them both out. One of them left, but the other said I was trying to con him out of the prize money he was going to win. I threatened to call the cops if he didn't get the hell out. He left after that. It was ridiculous. I mean, the event was for a dating app and these idiots were more interested in killing each other than meeting people."

  Ryan was a little overwhelmed by how, once Will got going, he didn't seem to want to stop. But it was better to have a more forthcoming interviewee than a reticent one. He decided it was worth the risk to be more upfront himself.

  “That’s actually what I want to discuss,” he said. “We believe that the woman I referenced earlier was at this trivia mixer. Unfortunately, she was found dead after that, not too far from here.”

  Will’s eyes went wide, and his mouth opened, but no words came out.

  “We want to confirm if she actually attended the event,” Ryan continued. “If so, it might help us get a better sense of what happened to her.”

  “Of course,” Will said, regrouping slightly. “I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  “Do you have surveillance cameras?” Ryan asked.

  “We do,” Will said. “They’re not the greatest though. The owners were more interested in setting up a dope sound system than security. I’ve talked to them about it a couple of times because we’ve had women complain about getting harassed in the parking lot, which doesn’t have any cameras, but it’s not on their priority list.”

  “I’ll need to look at the footage,” Ryan told him before pulling out his phone and scrolling to a photo of Rena Hoffman. “Do you recognize her?”

  The manager leaned in to get a better look. Almost immediately, it was clear that he knew who she was.

  “Oh yeah, I totally recognize her,” he said. “She actually won the competition that had those guys fighting. It was kind of funny. They were going at each other over this one question, but according to the trivia host, neither dude was close to winning. That chick ran away with the thing.”

  He stopped talking, seeming to realize in that moment that the “chick” he was referring to was now dead.

  “I can cue up the footage from the patio—that’s where we held the mixer—to when she won,” he said, sounding chastened. “Then you can track her from that point until she left for the night.”

  “That would be great,” Ryan told him.

  ***

  It didn’t take long to find her.

  The moment when the guys started fighting was easy to locate. It occurred at 9:02 p.m. Rena was clearly visible in the background, looking appalled even as other attendees were laughing. The footage was grainy, low-res, and black and white. Even so, from then on, he was able to track her fairly easily using the five cameras in the club.

  The contest ended around 9:30 and people dispersed, some leaving and others remaining to chat. Rena was visible at a two-person high-top table in the corner of the frame. She was sipping a drink alone until she was approached by a man with his back to the camera.

  It was hard to gauge age or height from the angle, but the man was of average build. He wore slacks, a dress shirt, and a casual blazer. He seemed a little overdressed for the event, but maybe he just wanted to make a good impression.

  After several minutes of chatting, he motioned for the server and appeared to order a drink. Not long after, it arrived and was placed in front of Rena. Ryan fast-forwarded through the video, though not so quickly that he couldn't tell if the man dropped anything in her drink. He never did.

  “Do you recognize that guy?” Ryan asked Will.

  “Not from that angle,” the manager said.

  Ryan moved the footage along. It was clear that the two of them were hitting it off because they stayed at the table, engaged in conversation until 10:22, when the man asked for the bill. Unfortunately, once he got it, he paid in cash. They walked away together, but even though the guy was now facing the camera, the graininess and height of the camera angle made it hard to make out the man’s features.

  “There might be a better view of them when they leave,” Will said. “The camera near the front is just as crappy but the angle is lower so you may be able to see him full-on.”

  Sure enough, as they passed by the hostess table in the front of the club, the man's face was more clearly visible. Ryan froze the image. Rena's suitor looked to be in his mid-thirties. His face was soft but not pudgy. He wasn't flabby, but it was clear that he was slowly losing the fight against age and whatever vices he enjoyed.

  “Do you recall him at all?” Ryan asked.

  “Not by name or anything,” Will said. “I do remember seeing him dropping a pretty big tip earlier in the night when he got his own drink at the bar. But it was cash, so I assume that won’t help you identify him. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Ryan said.

  Being able to track a credit card receipt would have been helpful. But he now had a decent image of the man Rena had left with. Even though it was a little fuzzy, Ryan held out hope that Jamil would be able to use facial recognition to ID him.

  For the first time since they’d taken on this case, he felt like they were on the right track.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  Things were looking up.

  Jessie allowed a hint of optimism to flicker inside her. Not only had Ryan sent Jamil a halfway decent video clip that might actually help identify the man that Rena had left the Brewpub with, but they’d also had some success in the interim.

  Beth had managed to access the full list of mixers that Noemi had attended recently and found that on Monday night, she signed up for a wine tasting event at Sharper, an upscale club located at the Eastpark Century City Shopping Complex, exactly where Jamil had identified her phone GPS location.

  While Susannah, who had rejoined the team in the Research department, reached out to Sharper to see if they had video footage they could send over, Jessie asked Ryan to head there rather than come back to the office. As the one active-duty detective in the field, he was the only option.

  Once that was done, the group put their collective efforts into to trying to determine which IRL dating app user might be their killer. Jamil had already run the screenshot of the thirty-something guy with Rena at the Brewpub through the app database in search of a match but had come up empty. That wasn’t really a shock. Photos on the app were optional and while about seventy-five percent of women included one with their profile, only about half of the men did.

  The app was only in the beta version, but there were still thousands of male users. Even after Jamil filtered the parameters to men without profile photos between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, they were left with 1,241 possible options.

  “Can you filter it so that the list only includes men who attended both the wine tasting on Monday and the trivia contest last night?” Kat asked Jamil.

  “I already tried that,” he said. “The app doesn’t have that ability yet. I’ve left multiple messages with the company. I’m sure that they can access that data from their end, but they haven’t gotten back to me. In the meantime, we’ll have to go into every male suspect’s profile and look at his mixer history individually.”

  That’s exactly what they were doing now. But it was a cumbersome process and one that might prove fruitless anyway. It occurred to Jessie that the person they were looking for might be using a fake name or even have deleted his account. She was just about to bring that up to the group when she heard simultaneous pings and looked up.

  “What was that?” Susannah asked.

  Beth looked around, seemingly confused, before a smile crossed her face.

  “It was their phones,” she said, moving over to the table where they were resting. “Both Noemi and Rena just got a notification at the same time.”

  Jessie immediately knew why Beth was smiling and hoped they shared the same instinct.

  “What’s it for?” she asked, trying not to get excited.

  Beth looked at both phones. When her smile didn't fade, Jessie knew why before being told.

  “It’s an alert for a mixer tonight,” Beth said. “It’s called the Mega Movie Mashup Mixer. The description says to come as your favorite film character and be ready to enjoy a night of romantic Hollywood magic. It’s at 8 p.m. at Site G.”

  “Jamil?” Susannah asked, not needing to finish the question.

  Hold on one sec,” he said. “Okay, according to the app’s glossary, Site G is The Citadel on Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills.”

  Kat turned to Jessie and said what they were both thinking.

  “You know there’s a good chance your guy is there, right.”

  “It’s a decent bet,” she agreed. “His first kill was on Monday, then last night. I’m guessing he knows that he doesn’t have long before he’s identified. He’ll want to get in another kill while he still can.”

  There was a brief moment of silence in which Jessie suspected they were all thinking the same thing. They had cracked the code. They knew what this guy looked like. They knew where he was likely to be. They were actually going to get him.

  “We better move quick,” Susannah said, snapping them all out of it. “It’s almost 7 p.m. This thing starts at eight. We don’t have much time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Austin Flynn studied himself in the mirror.

  He thought he looked pretty snazzy in his outfit. His Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca-style, ivory dinner jacket really popped. His hair was slicked back, just like Rick's was in the film. Austin didn't smoke, but he had a cigarette in his mouth to approximate the look of the movie's main character. He was curious to see who would guess his identity and who would just assume he was another guy in a James Bond tux.

  He glanced at his watch. It was already 7:22, and the mixer tonight started at eight. Luckily, the event was only a couple of miles from his Beverly Hills mansion, so he was in no danger of being late.

  Austin was particularly excited about this evening. Unlike the mixers the last two nights, he was genuinely jazzed about tonight’s theme. Yes, he liked wine just fine and enjoyed a robust discussion of history, but both of those mixers had been a little stodgy. No one could get too superior at what was basically an early Halloween party.

  He hoped he’d have better luck than the previous nights. Both of them had started with such promise before degenerating quite rapidly. It wasn’t how he’d hoped they would go, but his dates hadn’t ended up being who they said they were either. For him, it was the same old story.

  Austin thought he was past this. Back when he’d gotten married five years ago, he figured it would be forever. His bride was young, beautiful, and charming. That should have been his first warning sign. Austin was under no illusion that he really was as smooth as Rick in Casablanca. Nor was he amazingly good-looking or especially funny.

  That left one likely reason that Penelope would have chosen to be with him: his money. He was an heir to a boutique potato chip company that had become hugely popular in the nineties when he was just a child. The family was now worth well over half a billion dollars, and he had access to a tenth of that. The fortune was what gave him the mansion, the yacht, and the fancy sports cars like the orange Lamborghini Huracan that he planned to use tonight.

  But he'd deluded himself into thinking Penny had truly fallen for him. She was very convincing. That included keeping him in the dark about the multiple affairs she'd conducted almost from the month after their wedding.

  He didn’t learn about any of that until much later, nearly three years into their marriage, when he returned early from an out-of-town company board meeting to discover an unexpected vehicle on the property. It was a souped-up pickup truck. Rather than go inside the mansion, he followed his instincts and waited all night across the street in his Mercedes SUV.

  Sure enough, the next morning a strapping, lumberjack-looking guy left the mansion and drove off in the pickup. After getting over the initial shock, Austin was consumed by shame more than anything. He was embarrassed that he hadn’t even considered that this might be a possibility.

  Suspicious that this wasn’t a one-time thing but not the type of guy to confront someone directly, he came up with a plan. He would act normally but have a series of hidden surveillance cameras set up in the mansion and in Penelope’s car.

  He steeled himself for the worst but was still stunned by what he found. His wife was carrying on multiple sexual relationships with three different men, including, in what felt like an insultingly tired cliché, the gardener. He collected all the footage, ready to provide it to the divorce attorney he’d selected but not yet hired.

  Deep down, he knew why he kept delaying. It was because the public humiliation of being such a sucker was something he wasn’t yet ready to deal with. When Penelope unexpectedly suggested—the weekend before he had resolved to finally meet with an attorney—that they take the yacht to Catalina Island, he was filled with mixed emotions.

  Part of him didn’t to have anything to do with this betrayer, much less be stuck in close proximity with her for forty-eight hours. On the other hand, he wondered if perhaps Penelope had started to feel guilty about all her indiscretions and was hoping to use this weekend getaway to reconnect.

  Ultimately, he decided to give her a chance. He owed the marriage one last shot. So they’d left on Friday around midday. It was over dinner that night that he learned the real reason she wanted to take this trip.

  She wanted him to buy a cabin in the mountains of Big Bear that she could use for “skiing and hanging out with friends” when he was out of town. She claimed that she was just so lonely in the L.A. mansion without him there.

  Austin was furious. Penelope didn’t want to recommit to their marriage. This was all a ploy to find a new way to cheat on him, using his financial resources to make it easier. That was when he’d lost it. He was tempted to take the unopened wine bottle on the table and smash it on the deck. Instead, the explosion was one of words.

  “I know you’re having affairs!” he had shouted at her before he could stop himself.

  “What?” she said, clearly trying to hide her shock by acting hurt.

  “Don’t try to deny it, Penny,” he scolded. “I have video. Lots of it.”

  Her expression changed from stunned surprise to righteous indignation.

  “You took secret videos of me?” she demanded.

  “Of you having sex with other men, yes,” he informed her. “The divorce lawyer will have a field day with them.”

  Suddenly the mask of adoring, supportive wife dropped away, and the real Penny showed herself. Her warm smile turned into a cold grimace. Her ice blue eyes hardened. She pushed her expensively coiffed blonde hair out of her eyes and stared daggers at him.

  “You don’t have the guts,” she spat.

  For a moment, he was too taken aback to respond.

  “What?” he finally asked.

  "You heard me," she told him, her voice a low growl. "Are you, Mr. Potato Chip Man, really going to submit to the ugliness of a divorce proceeding, where the world will learn just what a pathetic loser you are? Do you really want everyone to know that your wife has been hopping from bed to bed for years, and you never had a clue? Hell, I screwed a guy the week after we got back from our three-week honeymoon. Do you want that in the papers? Do you want your proud family to know?"

 

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