the stay is ridiculous on its face. Shame the judge. Go to the press. Do whatever you have to do, but I want access to that house. There’s something fishy going on there and I shouldn’t have to fake being a pool girl to prove it.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said noncommittally, purposefully not asking about the pool ruse.
“No excuses, Captain,” she said more directly than she’d ever spoken to him before. “You owe me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jessie seethed silently.
Even though Karen Bray didn’t know her very well, she clearly had the good sense to realize that Jessie wasn’t in a chatty mood just now. So she silently drove to Percy Avalon’s house, leaving Jessie alone with her thoughts.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Jasper Otis out of her head. His smarmy, smiling face kept popping up like a billionaire whack-a-mole.
Though she couldn’t prove it, he was almost certainly behind the Vice locker break-in. That meant he’d effectively quashed the only evidence that he might be a sex-trafficking pedophile. And now he was in the process of quashing a murder investigation.
He’d prevented them from executing a search warrant. In addition, multiple people had apparently come forward in the last day, volunteering to be witnesses who could verify that Otis was around them at the time of the murder. There were so many, in fact, that it seemed the man was rubbing Jessie’s nose in it. Either he was lucky to have so many friends around or he paid very well for alibis.
There was no camera evidence tying him to the scene of the murder because there were no working cameras in his personal residence, the area where they could actually prove useful. There was no GPS data available because his whole estate was blanketed in a dampening net. A call to Len Fustos, the medical examiner, had confirmed what she’d feared—because of the shower water and the unprecedented disturbance and cleaning of the murder scene, there was no useful DNA or fingerprint evidence. They had nothing on the guy. Not a thing.
Her phone alarm buzzed, pulling her out of her pity fest. It was a reminder to call Nurse Patty to see how Ryan was faring. The fact that she wasn’t there to make that determination for herself left a lump of powerful regret in her throat, one she swallowed down hard as she called. Patty picked up the first ring.
“How’s it going?” Jessie asked.
“Not too bad,” Patty said. “His appetite has been solid and he really pushed hard during rehabilitative therapy. They went for an hour, double what the therapist usually starts out with.”
“That sounds like Ryan,” Jessie said. “Can I talk to him?”
“He’s actually sleeping right now. He was pretty wiped out after the rehab and the subsequent bath. It’s already been a full day.”
“Okay,” Jessie said, disappointed. “Well, keep me posted please, Patty. Hannah will be home this afternoon and I’ll be there by dinner. The night nurse should be arriving at five.”
She hung up and tried not to think about Ryan needing assistance getting in the bath. She knew he found it humiliating and didn’t like anyone to help him but her. But she had to get over the guilt. If this new normal was going to work, it would have to be a team effort.
“How’s he doing?” Karen asked. “If I’m not intruding.”
Jessie shrugged.
“It sounds like he’s putting in the effort. So how’s he doing? I choose to believe ‘well.’”
They were quiet the rest of the ride to Percy Avalon’s. The singer lived in a section of the Hollywood Hills above West Hollywood, just north of the famed stretch of Sunset Boulevard that included legendary clubs like Whisky a Go Go, The Viper Room, and The Roxy.
Karen took the turns of the narrow, winding uphill roads fast, as if she was trying to generate some adrenaline after the slog of spending all morning doing boring deskwork. Jessie clung to the door grip handle, trying not to come across as a wuss, even though she feared they might tumble off a cliff at any moment.
When they arrived, Karen pulled up halfway onto the curb to protect her car from drivers like herself. They got out and walked up to Avalon’s gate. Though it suffered by comparison to Jasper Otis’s place, this home was, by any normal measure, impressive.
It was designed to look like a modern version of a medieval castle. There was something slightly cheesy about it, but once she got past the