She studied the crime scene photos that Ernie Purcell had texted her. They were mostly useless as evidence since the scene had been cleaned up before the pictures were taken.
Despite that, looking at the dead woman, pale and shirtless, with her neck bent at a grisly angle, was unsettling. She barely looked human. Until now, Millicent Estrada had been an abstraction. But seeing her now, broken and vulnerable, Jessie felt a simultaneous surge of empathy and a burning desire to get justice for her.
She moved on to some online research on Estrada. It wasn’t hard to find material. The sheer volume of photos alone was overwhelming. She and Beto were an extremely attractive couple but Millicent was especially stunning.
With long, dark hair that cascaded down in waves and facial features that seemed to have been sculpted by an artist, she had a fierceness that was almost too intense to be called beautiful. Her green eyes were especially compelling, as if they were calculating every person and scenario in real time. For some reason, she reminded Jessie of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg character in The Terminator, who could do threat assessments of every humanoid he came in contact with in nanoseconds.
The pictures only scratched the surface. There were the straight news articles discussing the various cases she and husband Beto had handled, entertainment trade articles about the firm’s work for their impressive celebrity client list, and finally the tabloid headlines about the couple’s divorce and how they planned to keep the business running smoothly despite the split.
Everything sounded so amicable. But Jessie had long ago learned that things were rarely as rosy as they were presented in the press, especially by lawyers as media savvy as the Estradas. She decided that a visit to Mr. Estrada was in order. And she didn’t want to wait until tomorrow. Showing up unexpectedly at his doorstep on a Sunday afternoon was more likely to generate an honest reaction than some massaged interview down at the station with his own lawyer in tow.
As soon as Hannah got back, she would call on Estrada to see if there were any unexpected thorns on those roses.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jessie had a moment of doubt just before ringing Beto Estrada’s doorbell.
After hearing Karen’s tense phone exchange earlier about soccer parenting, she thought the woman might have other stuff on her mind and decided to do this interview solo. Normally, going to a potential suspect’s home without a partner or backup would make her nervous. But in this case, she hoped that making the encounter casual might bear more fruit than something formal.
She wasn’t going to trick an experienced attorney like Estrada into revealing information that put him in legal jeopardy. But maybe coming to his home by herself, not as a cop but a profiling consultant, would set him at ease enough to get him to lower his guard a bit.
And though she felt a little dirty about it, she suspected that interviewing him while he was potentially in the throes of grief after just losing his wife of seven years, even if they were no longer together, might work to her advantage. Besides, if he tried anything stupid, she had her gun and the self-defense training she’d received while attending the FBI Academy’s ten-week program for local law enforcement.
Beto Estrada, who had moved out of the couple’s house after the divorce, lived in a quaint rental cottage in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles, just a few blocks from Museum Row and the La Brea Tar Pits. The place wasn’t much bigger than the guest house they’d found Cord Mahoney in this morning, but it was far more respectable, with a stone paver walkway, a Spanish-style, A-frame roof, and a lemon tree just off the porch.
She pushed any self-doubt out of her head as she rang the bell. Estrada opened the door within ten seconds. Just as in his pictures, he was a vaguely handsome man in his late forties, about a half-decade older than Millicent. He was tall and thin, with black hair and a conservative haircut that reminded Jessie of uniformed British schoolboys.
His eyes were red and puffy, though he appeared to have stopped crying a while ago. Unlike in his pictures, he wore glasses, and had on blue jeans and a sweatshirt with “Rutgers” emblazoned on the front. It reminded her that both Estradas had fought hard to get where they were: New York City public schools, state universities, and finally Rutgers Law School, where they’d