The Perfect Scandal, page 14
Nobody said a word for a good ten seconds.
“You know, I’m obligated to share this information with Detective Hernandez,” Jamil finally said.
Hannah could hear the reluctance in his voice and knew where it came from. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Ryan to know. It was that he’d be asked how he figured it out and that would inevitably lead to the revelation that he’d been talking to the B team.
“No,” Hannah said, “we’ll tell him. Kat had access to a lot of these records from when she was doing a deep dive into Andy Robinson’s background. If you don’t mind missing out on the credit for finding the ranch, you can avoid any consequence for working with us too. Send us the address and I promise we’ll give it to Ryan soon as we hang up with you.”
“I feel like I’m violating protocol here,” Jamil said under his breath.
“You are,” Kat acknowledged. “But none of us is going to tell. And if it gets Jessie back, who gives a damn, right?”
Jamil was quiet for a second before replying.
“Texting you the address now.”
“Got it,” Hannah said once it arrived.
“Go get her,” Jamil whispered, then hung up.
Kat smiled across the table at her.
“Okay,” she said. “Looks like you’re headed to the Best Restin’ across the street.”
“Uh-uh,” Hannah replied, shaking her head. “No way I’m giving him this. You’re the one who’s going to walk into that suite and hand him that address.”
“I think that would be a bad idea,” Kat objected.
“You’re mistaken,” Hannah said, standing up. “You were upset earlier. Then he got upset. It’s understandable. This is a pretty tense situation. But no good is going to come from you two giving each other the cold shoulder. We all need to be working together. That’s how we get Jessie back. So go over there, give him this lead as a peace offering, and smooth things over.”
Kat nodded.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’ve been letting my bruised ego get in the way. I can’t believe a seventeen-year-old kid is being more mature than the supposed adults around here.”
“Hey, I’ve been pretty mature about the whole thing too,” Callum noted, raising his hand. “Don’t I get any credit?”
Hannah gave him a playful smirk before turning back to Kat.
“But remember, after you’ve made nice, make sure to extract your pound of flesh.”
“What do you mean?” Kat asked.
“Take him away from where the others can hear you and remind him who came up with this lead,” Hannah said. “Insist that from now on, he make us equal partners. Even if he has to do it on the down-low, he needs to keep us looped in. I know the guy. There’s no way he’ll say no after that.”
“Wow,” Kat said, impressed. “Aren’t you the onion? Every few minutes, we pull back another layer.”
“Here’s one more for you,” Hannah said, starting to get the hang of this thing. “Once you pass that address along, get back here quick.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re paying a visit to that ranch too.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jessie tried not to freak out.
It wasn’t easy, considering that after she opened her eyes, she remained in darkness.
She was still groggy, so it took a few seconds to remember why she couldn’t see. She knew she was in the trunk, where she’d been dumped just after Andy had dosed her again with whatever drug she’d used to knock her out at her wedding.
But the darkness was especially unsettling for another reason. When she’d been in the trunk earlier, after they’d left Isaac’s Auto Body, small streaks of sunlight had snuck in through tiny slits. There was none of that now. That could only mean one of two things. Either she was indoors or it was nighttime.
The sudden jolt that made her back slam against the top of the roof told her that it wasn’t the former. The car must have been temporarily stopped to traverse some obstruction, but now it was moving again, bouncing mercilessly along the pockmarked surface that passed for a road.
A few times she thought they were stuck, but Andy managed to gun the accelerator or turn the wheels at just the right angle to get out of trouble. After another five minutes the vehicle finally came to another stop and Jessie heard the engine turn off.
The trunk popped open to reveal that she’d been wrong. It wasn’t quite nighttime yet. In the distance, she could see the sun setting behind some nearby hills. In another fifteen minutes, she figured that it would be completely gone.
Jessie estimated that it was about 7 p.m., though she couldn’t be sure. Since she didn’t know how far they’d traveled since she’d been drugged, she couldn’t accurately gauge the time. Other than being in the desert, she had no idea where they were. The sun set at different times, depending on their location, and they easily could have gone as far east as Utah or New Mexico by now.
“Nice to see you up, sleepyhead,” Andy said as she stepped into view, blotting out the light. She wore a headlamp and had on a small backpack. “You need to get out. We’re not done traveling yet and it’s getting dark. You don’t want to step on a rattlesnake out here at night. It doesn’t usually go well.”
Jessie didn’t respond as she carefully extricated herself from the trunk. Her whole body felt like one giant bruise. Andy pointed her toward a nearby tree and she limped over slowly, appalled at how unresponsive her limbs were to her brain’s instructions.
“Give me a second,” Andy said, as she attached the handcuffs to a high, thick, tree branch.
Then she returned to the Mitsubishi, put it in neutral, and slowly pushed it down a slight slope into a nearby culvert. After that, she covered the top of the car with some brush. It was virtually invisible. Jessie doubted that it would be much easier to see in daylight, even if someone knew what to look for and was standing just yards away.
Andy returned, unhooked her from the branch, and pointed off to the right.
“Follow that game trail. I’ll be right behind you.”
“What trail?” Jessie asked sincerely. She didn’t see one.
“The opening in the brush over there,” Andy said. “The grass beyond it is flattened out, where animals have passed through. Go that way.”
Jessie did her best to follow what she thought was the flatter grass. With just one sandal and traversing such uneven ground, each step was treacherous. Every now and then, Andy redirected her, prodding her in the back with a thick stick she’d found along the way. Jessie considered trying to grab it, beat her kidnapper to a pulp, and walk back out. But that seemed risky for a number of reasons.
First, it was almost completely dark now, other than Andy’s headlamp. Plus, it was getting cold, and Jessie only had the sweatpants and Barry Manilow shirt. She was weak and sore, and her hands and ankles were cuffed together. Finally, she had no idea where she was. There might be a phone in that backpack but then again, there might not. The safer bet seemed to be to wait until the odds were a little more even.
“We’re here,” Andy said a couple of minutes later.
Jessie stopped. She guessed that they’d walked about a mile but didn’t see anything that signified “here.” All that surrounded them was more brush, along with cactus and some big bushes. Andy stepped over to one large bush and grabbed at it, giving a hard tug. To Jessie’s surprise, the top slid off.
Her exhausted brain needed a moment to process that the top was actually a tarp and that the bush was a very old crew cab pickup truck. The cargo bed was piled high with duffel bags and coolers. Jessie’s heart sank. There looked to be enough supplies to last weeks. If there was ever an any doubt, it was gone now. Andy was clearly in this for the long haul.
“Get in,” she ordered.
Once Jessie was strapped into the passenger seat—an upgrade— with her hand cuffed to the center console, Andy got in the driver’s seat, and turned on the ignition. The engine wheezily coughed to life.
“Ready for our final journey?” she asked excitedly. “Next stop, our new home.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, instead putting the truck in drive and moving ahead slowly but steadily. There was no road that Jessie could discern, only a path that appeared to exist in Andy’s head. They went over some tough territory, including an impressively deep creek and an incline that threatened to make everything in the back topple out. But after a while, (still fighting off the after-effects of the drugging, she couldn’t be sure how long) they rounded a series of rocks, and the truck came to a stop.
“We’re here,” Andy said giddily.
Jessie followed the woman’s gaze, tracking the line of the headlights. At first, she wasn’t sure that she understood what she was looking at. But as Andy inched the truck closer, it became clear to Jessie exactly where she’d been taken and why.
The realization filled her with dread as one thought clawed its way above all the others in her brain.
They’ll never find me here.
CHAPTER TWENTY
7:17 p.m., Sunday night
Ryan watched the cattle scatter.
As the helicopter began to descend toward an open patch of grass on the Rintoo Ranch, a woman he guessed to be in her early thirties stormed out of the main house. She had a shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He didn’t blame her, considering that they hadn’t called ahead.
In the distance, he could see two lines of law enforcement vehicles approaching from different directions on one-lane dirt roads, their lights bright in the nearly dark sky as they approached the ranch. They were coming from multiple agencies across two states, and some would arrive in less than two minutes.
This time he waited for the rotor blades to come to a stop before getting out and walked slowly toward the woman, whose flashlight was shining in his face. He kept his arms out wide at his side. One hand was empty. The other held his LAPD badge and ID.
“You’ve got some nerve landing that thing on my property like this,” she shouted. “I’d be well within my rights to lay you out first and ask questions later.”
“I’m not sure that’s entirely true, ma’am,” he said, making sure his tone was firm but relaxed. “You might not get the benefit of the doubt from a jury later on, considering that I’m properly displaying my identification. I also don’t think my partner, who has her weapon trained on you as I speak, would appreciate you—how did you describe it—laying me out. Nor would the nearly two dozen officers driving this way right now. So, what do you say we lower the temperature a little bit? You put away that shotgun and I’ll explain why we showed up in your backyard via helicopter without calling first?”
The woman didn’t lower the shotgun, but she did move the flashlight over from Ryan’s face to his ID.
“Does that say LAPD?”
“It does,” Ryan assured her. “I’m Detective Ryan Hernandez. You’re Erin Reed. And I’m pretty sure that you can guess why I’m here. Have you seen the news lately?”
Erin Reed lowered the shotgun.
“Andy?” she asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “We need to talk about your cousin.”
“You better come inside.”
*
Ryan watched Erin closely, making allowances for her situation.
It was clearly hard for her to concentrate with over twenty officers moving in and out of her living room, shouting at each other in person and over radios, all while he tried to question her.
He noticed that while she was the same age as her cousin—thirty-three—she looked older, more worn down somehow. Her hair was also blonde, but unlike Andy’s, it was brittle. Her eyes were blue, but not blazingly so. She looked like a washed-out version of her more vibrant L.A. relative.
“We can do this somewhere else if they’re too distracting,” he offered for a second time, nodding at the officers as he, Reed, and Valentine sat in chairs in a corner of the room.
“No,” Erin said. “I feel more comfortable knowing what’s going on. But how much longer is this going to take?”
“They need to finish searching every building on the property and the surrounding area,” Valentine explained. “Vehicles are also examining the boundaries of the property all the way to the fence lines in every direction. They’re also talking to everyone currently on the ranch. How many did you say that was again?’
“Other than me, there are just four ranch hands here right now,” Erin explained. “They live in the back house.”
“Besides them, you live here alone?” Valentine pressed.
“Usually my son is here too, but he’s with his dad for a few weeks.”
“You’re divorced?” Valentine asked, even though she knew the answer. Ryan understood that she was probing, testing to see how the woman would react to sensitive questions, but his area of interest lay elsewhere.
“Yes,” Erin said without malice. “It was finalized last spring. I had been living back east but I wanted a simpler life. A lot of the best memories of my youth are from here so I decided to come back; to give Danny a chance to live in a less structured environment. You know, the ranch is partly named for me. My name is Erin and my mom’s name was Marin. When I was little, I used to say that I was a ‘Rin too,’ like her. So Dad named it Rintoo Ranch.”
Her eyes clouded over, and it was clear that she was focused on a memory from long ago. Ryan almost felt bad about pulling her back from it, but not enough that he didn’t do it.
“Erin, has Andy contacted you at any point in the last few days?”
“No,” she said adamantly, snapping back into the present.
“What about any time prior to that—earlier this week or during her time in prison?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“I haven’t heard from her at all,” she insisted, “not for years.”
“What was the nature of your relationship?” he asked.
“We had none,” Erin told him, “I mean, not anymore. We were really close as kids. We’d visit each other all the time, every year. I would go stay with her in Los Angeles, usually over the holidays. She would come out here for a few weeks in the summer. We had such a great time. Then she just stopped coming.”
“Why?” Valentine asked.
“I have no idea. She always had an excuse as to why she couldn’t make it. We still saw each other from time to time when I would come to L.A. But then she started finding ways to conveniently be gone when I’d come into town. She cut off contact completely a few years ago, even before all this killing stuff happened. I felt like there had to be a specific reason, but I didn’t know what it was.”
“You never got any kind of explanation for the break in communication?” Ryan wanted to know.
“No,” she said. “I tried to reach out many times, but she wasn’t interested. Eventually I gave up. We lost touch completely. But I still kept tabs on her. I mean, I was aware that she had problems as a teenager, got into some trouble, even went to juvie for a while. She got sent off to a boarding school and a military academy. But she seemed to set herself straight after that, went to college, was even working on her master’s in chemical engineering until her dad died and she dropped out. You know that’s how our family got rich, right? Her dad invented some polymer when we were toddlers. This ranch and everything else came from that invention. Anyway, to answer your question, we weren’t in touch when I heard the news.”
“About the murder,” Ryan confirmed.
“About all of it,” Erin replied. “I thought she was leading the life of a boring, country club lady of leisure. Then I find out that she was having an affair with a married guy, killed his wife, framed the maid, and tried to kill the profiler who figured it out. When I heard the news, despite having lost contact with her, it was still a shock. I had no idea she was capable of any of that.”
Just then, one of the officers came into the room and walked over. Ryan recognized him as the Deputy Sheriff from La Paz County, which had jurisdiction in this part of Arizona.
“Sorry to interrupt, Detective Hernandez,” he said.
“What have you got?” Ryan asked.
“We still have units searching the perimeter of the property along the fence line, but it’s not looking promising. We haven’t found anyone unexpected in the buildings or any sign of vehicles other than ones we can account for. We’ll keep looking, but I don’t think they’re here.”
Ryan tried to hide his disappointment. How was that possible? When Kat had brought him the information, it had seemed like a home run. The ranch was in the immediate area of the travel center. It was clearly well known to Andy but not obviously traceable through records searches. It was well off the beaten path.
And yet, they had come up empty again. Was this another diversion? Did Andy know they would come here? Was she off somewhere, laughing at them? That seemed unlikely. Finding this ranch had been challenging. As far as false leads went, it felt like an elaborate one without much payoff. Despite what the deputy was telling him, he wasn’t ready to give up yet.
“Check it again, please,” he said. “Robinson might have set up some kind of hiding spot here, even without her cousin’s knowledge. Look at any structure, be it a hunting blind or a well. It might be masking something underground.”
He looked over at Valentine, who said nothing, though her skeptical expression spoke volumes. He ignored it and focused on Erin Reed.
“I’m afraid we’re going to need your phone, ma’am,” he said. “I can get a warrant if I have to, but it would save a lot of time, and potentially someone’s life, if you just handed it over.”
“Why?”
“We need to confirm that you haven’t been in communication with Andy.”
“You don’t believe me,” she said, apparently hurt, “after everything I told you?”
“It’s not a matter of believe, Ms. Reed,” he said without emotion. “My job is to get Jessie Hunt back safely and I will use every tool at my disposal to accomplish that task. Nothing else matters to me right now, certainly not your bruised feelings. So, are you going to make this easy or hard?”
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