“Well, I could tell she was in the same line of work and we started swapping war stories. She mentioned that she’d just had a date where the guy paid her with his watch—said it was worth way more than her rate. She took it but now she was worried that her… manager would be pissed that she hadn’t demanded cash. She was supposed to meet up with him soon. She looked really anxious about it.”

  “How so?” Jessie asked.

  “She was biting her nails and looked real twitchy, not drug twitchy, scared twitchy.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I looked at the watch. It was legit. I used to sell…you can’t charge me for any bad stuff I used to do, right? Not if I tell you about it outright?”

  “As long as it’s unrelated to this case, we won’t,” Jessie promised.

  “Okay. I used to sell fake Rolexes on Hollywood Boulevard. I worked for a guy who showed me how to spot fakes from the real thing. I could tell this was real. So I offered to buy it off her at a discount. I offered her a grand. I wasn’t trying to snow her or anything. She knew it was worth lots more but she needed cash fast. So she said yes. We made the trade. She left. I finished getting cleaned up and went out to the bar to meet my friend.”

  “You’d never met this woman before?” Jessie asked.

  “Not that I remember. And I think I would have.”

  “Why?” Ryan asked, speaking up for the first time since Jessie had taken over the questioning. “What did she look like?”

  Cherie gave him a dirty look, like she still resented his refusal to give her immunity earlier. But she answered anyway.

  “She was unbelievable. I’m actually glad we don’t travel in the same circles because—I’m willing to admit—I couldn’t compete if she was around.”

  “Why not?” Jessie asked.

  “First, she had these amazing, piercing blue eyes. I mean, she could probably hypnotize people with them. I could have stared at her for days. Also, she had this body that looked like something out of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. And she wasn’t just pretty. She was…what’s the right word? Stunning! I mean, the girl shouldn’t have been working the bars. She should have been in the valley getting paid to work it on camera. You know what I mean?”

  “I do,” Jessie said, trying to sound like she was down with the San Fernando Valley porn scene. “What else can you tell us about her?”

  “She had medium-length black hair,” Cherie said, making Jessie glance over at Ryan.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. Their suspect was blonde.

  “Yeah, of course. She said she was considering dyeing it blonde but that her hairdresser said it would look fake since hers was so dark.”

  “Wig?” Ryan mouthed questioningly, suspecting the same thing as Jessie—that the blonde hair they’d seen in the surveillance footage might have been part of the killer’s disguise.

  “What else?” Jessie asked, choosing not to linger on that detail for now. “Did you notice anything unusual? Any tattoos? Scars? Did she have an accent?”

  “No accent that I could tell,” Cherie said. “She sounded normal.”

  “Normal?” Ryan asked.

  “Like she was from here, not Alabama or New York or something.”

  “Ah yes, normal,” Ryan said drily.

  “Anything else?” Jessie asked.

  “No tattoos that I could see. She did have a mark on her left shoulder, kind of angry looking.”

  “What kind of mark?” Jessie pressed.

  “I would say it looked like one of those vaccination scars that older people have.”

  “Like a smallpox vaccination scar?” Ryan asked.

  “I guess. But she’s too young for that. It could have been a burn or something. It was about the size of a nickel. It looked like she’d put some makeup on it earlier but it had mostly worn off.”

  “What else?” Jessie asked.

  “That’s it. She was pretty normal other than being super-hot and trying to sell the watch on the cheap.”

  Before they could continue, there was a knock on the door and Camille Guadino, the rookie tech, poked her head in.

  “We got the location data back on our victim. I can give you his movements for the hours leading up to the incident. Want to take a look back in our office?”

  Jessie looked at Ryan, who nodded yes.

  “We’ll be there in a minute,” he told her.

  Jessie turned back to Cherie.

  “This is a good start,” she said. “We’re going to check it out. If we can verify what you’ve told us so far, we may be in business. I’ll probably have a few more questions for you. But sit tight for now, okay?”

  “Can I get an ice cream sandwich while I wait?” Cherie asked.

  Jessie raised her eyebrows at Ryan.

  “We don’t have that here,” he said. “But someone can get you chips or a granola bar; maybe some coffee.”

  “That’s lame,” she protested. “What kind of café do you have here?”

  Ryan’s face turned red.

  “This is a police station, not a restaurant,” he snapped.

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Jessie interrupted. “Hang tight. Let’s talk outside, Detective.”

  Once in the hall, she watched Ryan visibly exhale.

  “She really gets under your skin, huh?” she said.

  “I don’t know how she gets people to pay for private time with her,” he muttered. “I can barely stand to talk to her.”

  “I’m not sure her clients care about the latter as long as they get the former. Let’s just have someone bring her a collection of snacks. She can take her pick. More importantly, how do we want to work this?”

  “Well,” Ryan replied, “if she’s not our suspect and she’s being straight with us, it sounds like the killer isn’t a wronged mistress so much as a wronged hooker.”

  “I think she is being honest,” Jessie said. “I had my doubts that she was our gal from the start.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The woman walking down that hotel hallway after she left Maines’s room had a poise I just don’t see in Cherie. She was so…unruffled. She didn’t look like she just killed someone so much as that she’d just dropped off her dry cleaning.”

  “Cherie definitely doesn’t give off the unruffled vibe,” he agreed.

  “No. And she’s so scattered. This crime was organized. She had it all planned out. I’m not sure Cherie could plan her next meal. To be honest, I think selling the watch was part of the killer’s plan. She must have known she couldn’t pawn it herself. And she knew we’d be looking in shops today to see if she’d try. So she got what she could for it and sent us on a wild goose chase, giving it to a woman who looked enough like her that we’d go down a dead end after the lead. I also think she probably got a kick out of selling Gordon’s prized watch to a hooker for next to nothing. It feels like adding insult to injury.”

  “To do that, sell that watch right after offing a guy like it was no big deal, she has to have ice in her veins.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Jessie said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  They stood quietly in the center of the hall as officers hurried past.

  Neither of them spoke for a while. They didn’t need to. Jessie knew they were both pondering the same thing—the possibility that they might be dealing with something far more sinister than a simple “hooker kills and robs a john” scenario.

  Ryan finally broke the silence.

  “All of what you said makes sense,” Ryan said. “But I don’t get something. Why would she spend any time with this Cherie, knowing we would probably find and interview her? She had to know Cherie could describe her.”

  “That’s a great question,” she noted. “In fact, it’s the one that’s eating at me right now. I feel like this woman is manipulating us, like she’s one step ahead.”

  “Maybe the call girl thing is part of that. You think she could be faking that too?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jessie said, feeling as unsettled as she sounded. “I was hoping to talk to Cherie some more to see if she could help me on that front.”

  “That sounds good. While you do that, I can look at the data Camille collected and go back over Maines’s last few hours. Maybe something will pop.”

  As he headed off to the tech unit to talk to Camille, Jessie returned to her desk. Before she continued her interrogation of Cherie, she wanted to see if she could confirm what the woman had told her so far.

  It didn’t take long. Hotel Figueroa was cooperative and sent over their footage from the night before. Within minutes she found verification of Cherie’s story. She was sitting in the Bar Figueroa from 10:11 to 10:53, sipping a drink, which officially ruled her out as the potential killer.

  At 10:53 she got up and cameras showed her heading in the direction of the ladies’ room. Coverage was spotty in that area so she couldn’t see anyone actually enter or exit the bathroom. But Cherie did return to the bar at 11:07 p.m., where she joined a man in a navy suit. They left ten minutes later, with his hand on her backside.

  Jessie scrolled through the footage a little longer, hoping to catch a glimpse of anyone matching the woman Cherie had described. But there was nothing. She wasn’t shocked. If selling the watch was part of her plan, it would have been surprising if she wasn’t meticulous about the details of that transaction. She’d avoided every camera at the Bonaventure. Doing the same at Hotel Figueroa just made sense. But the timing fit. The hotels were on the same street, only minutes apart. Maines’s killer could have easily hopped a ride share or cab and made it to the second hotel by 10:55.

  Jessie returned to the interrogation room to talk to Cherie. Now that she knew her witness was generally telling the truth, she hoped to learn some more about how her world worked. Maybe if she knew how one call girl in downtown L.A. operated, she could get some insight into another.

  It wasn’t like Jessie had never been exposed to the world of prostitution. In fact, she had a very personal connection. But her experience was limited to the wealthy enclaves of Orange County.

  It turned out that her ex-husband’s mistress—the one he’d murdered and tried to frame Jessie for killing—was actually part of a prostitution ring secretly run out of the yacht club where the couple had been members. Despite that unpleasant association, it didn’t help her much here. The world of L.A. prostitution was unfamiliar to her.

  She returned to the interrogation room, where she found Cherie happily alternating between Twinkie bites and Snapple sips.

  “It looks like your info is panning out so far,” Jessie told her as she sat down across the table from her. “If you keep up the good work, we may have a deal. But I have some more questions for you.”

  “Brnng oot,” Cherie muttered with a full mouth.

  Assuming she was saying “bring it,” Jessie considered how best to do that. She needed to be delicate in her approach to the next question. Finally she dipped a conversational toe in the water.

  “You said you could tell the woman in the bathroom was in the same line of work as you. How could you be so sure?”

  What Jessie didn’t say was that she wasn’t a hundred percent sure the killer was a call girl. Cherie had a hard, beaten-down look. Though only twenty-four according to her rap sheet, she had the appearance of someone a decade older, who’d been in this life for quite a while. The killer projected none of that. Despite her apparent crime, the woman in that hotel footage looked somehow…softer.

  It was clear that she could turn on the seductive charm at will. And physically, she did not project innocence by any stretch. But she didn’t look worn down by the world. She had a vibrancy to her that suggested her spirit hadn’t yet been crushed. Jessie wondered just how much hooking experience she actually had, if any. She seemed like a comparative newbie.

  “She knew the lingo,” Cherie answered, unoffended. “She was up on the right hotels to go to. But it was more than that. She had the ‘eyes in the back of the head’ thing.”

  “What’s that?” Jessie asked.

  “It’s a thing working girls have. You never know what kind of guy you’re dealing with. Even if it’s a regular, there’s always the chance that he might get rough. So your head is always on a swivel whenever you’re working—in bed, in a bar, on the street, even in a restroom. No matter how comfortable you are, you can’t get too comfortable—eyes in the back of your head.”

  “And she had it?” Jessie reconfirmed.

  “She oozed it.”

  *

  Hours later, Jessie was still poring over footage from both Hotel Figueroa and the Bonaventure in a vain attempt to catch sight of Blue Eyes, as she’d mentally begun referring to their unnamed killer.

  With an assurance from Cherie that she’d answer any future questions, Jessie had left the wrangling over a plea and reduced sentence to her court-appointed lawyer and the lowly prosecutor assigned to the case.

  Somewhere in the middle of parsing the footage, she’d also gotten a crash course in the world of modern prostitution from Detective Gaylene Parker of the Vice unit. The tutorial had been overwhelming. Apparently the “money for sex” system had changed dramatically in recent years.

  No longer did women just post ads in the back of alternative weeklies or on bare-bones websites. Now the whole operation involved apps, online aliases, and dummy social media accounts. Some men even had memberships in exclusive “clubs” that required entry fees and background checks.

  Jessie had dealt with a case last year that involved something similar—an online club for prospective cheating husbands. But that was a mom-and-pop operation compared to the magnitude of this business. When she finally accepted the realization that understanding the minutiae of the whole thing would take days, not hours, she resignedly returned to the comparatively satisfying task of looking at grainy hotel videos. It was only when Ryan tapped her on the shoulder that she realized how long she’d been staring at screens.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Almost nine p.m.,” he answered.

  “It’s dark out,” Jessie noted, looking out the window. “When did that happen?”

  “Well, Jessie,” he said, sitting down across from her, “it happened over the course of several hours. You see, as it gets later in the day, the sun begins to set…”

  “Shut up, smart-ass,” she said, unable to hide her smile. “Why didn’t you come by earlier?”

  “I did actually,” he said. “But you were so immersed in studying that footage that I didn’t want to break your concentration. Besides, I was having some fun of my own looking at location data from Gordon Maines’s phone.”

  “Find anything good?”

  “We were able to pinpoint his movements for the entire day. None of it is unusual. Lots of meetings, constituent calls, fundraising events—that kind of stuff. It’s only later in the evening that things get interesting.”

  “How so?” Jessie asked, finally tearing her eyes away from her screen.

  “It looks like Maines’s phone auto-connected to the Gallery Bar at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel around nine fifteen last night.”

  “Why is that significant?”

  “Well, do you remember how it looked like Maines knew the killer—or had at least met her before—when she walked up to him at the Lobby Court bar at the Bonaventure?”

  “Yeah. By the way, we’re calling her Blue Eyes now.”

  “Okay,” Ryan said, not missing a beat. “I’m wondering if maybe Maines and Blue Eyes met at the Biltmore first and then she instructed him to reconnect with her at the Lobby Court bar later. That way she could determine if he was serious. Plus she could see if he was alone, maybe tail him to see if he was a Vice cop.”

  “That’s not a crazy hypothesis, Ryan,” Jessie said, thinking about Cherie’s “eyes in the back of the head” theory. “You may have a future in this business after all.”

  “Thanks.” He rolled his eyes.

  Jessie looked at the clock. Suddenly she stood straight up.

  “It’s eight fifty-eight,” she said, only now registering the significance of the time that Ryan had mentioned earlier. “That’s almost when Maines went to the Gallery Bar at the Biltmore last night. It makes me wonder—what if she uses that bar regularly to scout potential johns before sending them elsewhere to hook up? If that’s the case, she might be there right now. You interested in checking out a local watering hole?”

  “You read my mind,” Ryan replied, grabbing his jacket. “Let’s go.”

  “Just one second,” Jessie said as she printed out the clearest screen grab she had of Blue Eyes. “It’s not much. But maybe this will help.”

  Ryan nodded, but she could tell from his expression that he doubted the image would be enough to ID Blue Byes. Unfortunately, she agreed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Alex Cutter sat at the hotel bar. As she sipped her martini, she used the bar mirror to keep an eye on anyone who came within touching distance of her. She was used to being grabbed, pinched, rubbed, and worse. But she was less likely to flinch if she saw it coming.

  She’d been nursing the drink for a solid half hour, since 8:30, while she looked for potential prospects. Two guys had already approached her but she’d politely given both the brush-off. The first didn’t look like he could afford her. The second, while clearly well off, had a sad, schlubby vibe that just wouldn’t do.

  She needed a candidate who met all her requirements. He had to be rich, for sure. He had to have a position of power in his profession. He had to have the confidence—arrogance maybe—to think he was good-looking enough to get her without paying for it. Mostly though, he had to be an asshole.

  For a moment, she wondered if she was sending out the wrong signals and gave herself a once-over in the bar mirror. Everything seemed to be working. The long, straight black hair shimmied down her back, tickling her exposed skin. The slit of her yellow skirt ran tantalizingly, though not vulgarly, high. Her makeup was impeccable. Then she noticed it. She wasn’t smiling.

 

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