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Jessie cringed at the sound of the siren.
Ryan had turned it on so that they could make better time to Playa Vista, where the latest victim had been discovered. But after a few minutes it became clear that at this late hour, they didn’t really need it. He turned it off just as they got a call from Jamil.
“I’m hoping that you’re calling because you’ve got updates for us,” Ryan said.
“That depends on how much you already know,” the head researcher replied.
“All Captain Parker said was that there was another victim, this time found in an apartment in Playa Vista. Same M.O. as the others. She texted me the address. That’s all we know.”
“Okay,” Jamil said, “we can flesh things out for you a little bit. Do you want to start, Beth?”
”Sure,” Beth Ryerson, the junior researcher, replied. ”So our victim”s name is Naomi Hacket, age 33. She and her family moved here from the Bay Area last year, where she had worked at both Google and Facebook. The odd thing is that her primary residence is in Pacific Palisades. The apartment where she was found was on a six-month lease.”
“A secret love nest?” Ryan proposed.
“I don’t think so,” Jamil said. “The apartment is less than a quarter mile from her new company’s offices and the rental is prominently listed in the financials. It doesn’t look like she was trying to hide anything from her husband. In fact, the rental listing data semes to suggest that she used the place as a crash pad during the week, which would make sense.”
“Why is that?” Jessie wondered.
”Well, it looks like her company, Hackett Insights, is launching in the spring,” he explained, ”but they have a huge marketing push planned for right after the New Year. Hackett was a first-time CEO. This company is her baby. It”s possible that she was just burning the midnight oil to get ready and figured that driving back and forth to the Palisades every weekday was too much of a hassle.”
“I wonder how much her family loved that,” Jessie mused. “Did she have kids?”
“Yes, one,” Beth answered. “A five-year-old girl named Olivia.”
“That can’t have been easy,” Jessie mused before muttering almost to herself. “It won’t be fun giving them the death notification.”
Ryan nodded in agreement before posing another question.
“What does the husband do?”
“He’s an environmental lawyer,” Jamil said. “His firm has offices in the Bay Area and down here, so it doesn’t look like the move impacted his work too much.”
They were all quiet for a moment. Jessie watched as they zipped past other cars on the 90 Freeway. Even though Ryan had turned off the siren, he’d left the cherry light in place to alert other vehicles to their presence. At this rate, they’d be at the apartment in less than a minute.
“Hey guys,” she said as a new thought occurred to her. “You said that Naomi Hackett was planning a big marketing push for the company at the start of the year. Any chance that Clarissa Langley’s firm was involved?”
Nobody replied at first, which told her the idea hadn’t occurred to either of them.
“We’ll check and get back to you,” Jamil said.
”Okay,” Ryan replied. ”We”re almost to her place, so just text us when you know.”
“Nice work, you two,” Jessie added. “It’s good to have this background when we go in there.”
They hung up just as Ryan pulled off Jefferson Boulevard. They could see the massive residential section of Playa Vista, a huge mixed-use community that sprouted up, seemingly out of nowhere, in less than two decades.
“If we go in there,” Ryan said quietly.
“What?” Jessie asked, not getting the reference.
“You said this background info will be helpful when we go in there,” he reminded her, “but if this crime scene is anything like the others, we might not be let in at all.”
***
Ryan turned out to be right.
Not only were they not allowed inside Naomi Hackett’s apartment, but the entire building had been evacuated. They found Sergeant Kenton, who was having as busy a night as them, standing just outside the police tape. He looked like he’d been waiting for them.
“I’m sorry we have to see each other again under these circumstances,” he said, speaking aloud their shared sentiments.
“Agreed,” Ryan said. “What can you tell us so far, Sergeant?”
”Before we address the situation here, I wanted to update on something we learned from the prior scenes,” Kenton said. ”As promised, we got all the footage from the security cameras at those residences. Our initial pass came back negative for anything overtly suspicious. It”s all been sent to your team at HSS for a more comprehensive review. But I looked at it myself, and there”s no sign of anyone entering or even approaching either home immediately prior to or in the window of death. Of course, with everything going on, I wasn”t able to look back much further than that. And we don’t have anything from here yet, though I doubt we’ll have much more luck.”
“Thanks for checking,” Jessie said. “We’ll have our people go back quite a while beyond that. It’s sounds like, with the timer and motion sensor components on the canisters, they could have been placed in these homes hours, or even days in advance of being activated.”
“That’s a lot of potential suspects,” Ryan said, before returning his attention to Kenton. “What’s the status here?”
“As you’d expect, the hazmat team is still clearing the apartment. Neither CSU nor the coroner has been allowed in yet. But they did find a canister like the ones at the other victims’ residences. And at my request, they did take some photos, which I have here for you.”
He pulled out his phone and showed them. The first image on the screen was of a woman lying on her back just inside the entryway of her apartment. She had curly, auburn hair and pale skin that was likely only partly a result of spending so much time inside an office of late. She was dressed in loose, beige linen pants, a Cal Tech t-shirt and fuzzy socks. Kenton flipped through several additional photos of the body and the apartment, but nothing jumped out at Jessie.
“Was the door open when you arrived?” she asked.
”It was, but we weren”t the first ones here,” he said. ”Apparently, a food delivery driver named Juan Hinojosa was. He said he was bringing her an order of In-N-Out. When he walked down the hallway, he saw the door open and her lying there like that. He said he called out to her, even tried to shake her to wake her up. But he got no response. He checked her pulse but couldn”t find one, so he called 911.”
“Where is he now?” Ryan asked. “Can we talk to him?”
“The EMTs took him to the hospital about ten minutes ago,” Kenton said. “Even though he was only in the apartment for a minute or so, they wanted to get him checked out. But I was able to speak to him briefly before they left. I recorded part of it, figuring you might want to check it out.”
“Sergeant Kenton,” Jessie said, impressed, “You read my mind.”
Looking slightly sheepish, he swiped to the video and hit play without replying. The interview appeared to take place outside the building, not far from where the three of them now stood.
“So, what time did you get the delivery request?” Kenton asked as the video picked up mid-conversation.
The delivery driver, a skinny, Latino man wearing an L.A. Dodgers cap who looked to be barely into his twenties, looked at his phone.
”It came in at 9:02,” the man recounted. ”I was near the Marina del Rey In-N-Out location, so I got assigned the order. I collected it from the drive-thru at 9:19. I arrived here just after 9:30. I texted the customer to let her know I was here in case she wanted to come down and meet me at the building”s main door, but I didn”t get any response. I tried again a couple of minutes later. I still didn”t hear back, but someone was coming out of her building, so I rushed in before the door locked. The unit number was in the delivery request, so I took the elevator up. That”s when I saw her.”
“So to be clear,” Kenton reviewed. “You got the order request at 9:02. What time did you send the first text to let her know you were here?”
Hinojosa looked at his phone again.
“9:32.”
“We need to take him in now, Sergeant,” someone off-camera said.
“That’s one of the EMTs,” Kenton explained to Jessie and Ryan. “He was getting anxious.”
On camera, the delivery driver looked back and forth between the EMT and Kenton, apparently unsure what he was supposed to do next. Kenton resolved that for him.
“Okay, I’m almost done,” he said to the EMT before focusing on Hinojosa again. “You already explained off-camera what you did when you found her. Now tell me what you did after you called 911.”
”I knocked on the door of the next-door neighbor,” the young man explained. ”I didn”t want to just be standing out in the hall near an open apartment with what seemed to be a dead woman. If someone saw that, they might think I did it.”
“Did the neighbor answer?”
“Yeah, it was that woman,” he said, pointing somewhere off-camera. “I showed her the lady on the floor, said I thought she was dead, and told her I’d called 911. She kind of freaked out, ran in the lady’s apartment and started doing CPR. But she stopped after a while. I think she realized it was no use.”
”Okay, that”s it,” the off-camera EMT demanded again. A moment later, the video stopped.
“I managed to confirm the details of his story with the neighbor, whose name is Marjorie Attell. Once the EMTs found out that she’d been in the apartment and even given Naomi Hackett mouth-to-mouth, they moved fast to get her looked at, so I didn’t get any video of our conversation. But she did tell me that Hackett had only been living here a few months. Apparently she runs some new tech company that’s launching early next year, and she got this place so she could spend some weeknights here rather than go back to her home in Pacific Palisades.”
Jessie was glad to hear that the neighbor’s version of events matched Jamil’s theory and was about to ask a question when she and Ryan received a simultaneous text from their head researcher. It read: Clarissa Langley’s marketing firm was working on the launch of Hackett Insights. She was the lead strategist. Efforting more details.
Jessie looked up at Ryan, who was clearly as intrigued as she was. Still, she asked Kenton the question she’d had before the text.
“Did Marjorie Attell offer any impression of Naomi Hackett—her personality, what kind of neighbor she was?”
”Only briefly,” Kenton told her. ”She said that Hackett was nice, though she always seemed harried. Apparently, Hackett felt guilty because she had to spend so much time away from her family, especially her daughter. She was excited because after tonight, she would be spending the rest of the year at their house. That was all I was able to get out of her before she was whisked away.”
Jessie did her best not to reveal the deep well of anguish that suddenly washed over her. It was one thing to see Naomi Hackett’s dead body on the floor of her apartment. But imagining her young daughter, waiting in vain for her Mommy to return home for Christmas? It was almost too much to bear.
“Okay,” Ryan said, more focused on the facts of the situation than the emotion of the moment, “so we know that Naomi Hacket was alive at 9:02 to place her delivery service order but had died by the time that Juan Hinojosa arrived with the food at 9:32. That’s a really small window of time for this poison to take effect.”
Jessie set aside the pain she knew Olivia Hackett was soon in for and nodded, adding to the point.
“Maybe that’s why, unlike the other two victims, she was able to at least get to her front door. It’s possible that the poison hadn’t fully overwhelmed her system at that point. But something must have happened in the interim to prevent her from getting outside. Maybe the effort to get to her door used up all the strength she had. Or maybe she fell and couldn’t get back up to reach her neighbor’s door.”
“Hopefully the coroner and crime scene folks will have some answers on that by morning,” Kenton said.
“Not until then?” Ryan asked, surprised.
“It sounded like it was going to take more than a few hours,” the sergeant replied. “The hazmat folks wanted to take extra precautions because the aerosol canister seemed to have been activated so recently.”
“So what are we supposed to do in the interim?” Jessie asked.
Ryan shrugged in shared frustration..
“I guess all we can do is make sure that research gets all this info so they can input it in the databases,” he replied. “Hopefully something will pop. Other than that, I think our best bet is to get some sleep and start fresh in the morning.”
Jessie fought back a snort. The idea that she could get any sleep when there was someone out there, poisoning unsuspecting women in their own homes, was ridiculous. But telling Ryan that wouldn’t do any good. He’d just worry about her. So she kept it to herself and hoped that the morning would bring some good news.