CHAPTER SIX
Jessie was happy to see the man squirm.
They’d gotten Jordy Sheffield’s current location from his booking agent.
Sure enough, he was at a voiceover session.
The recording studio was in the heart of Hollywood at the corner of La Brea and Sunset, so it took them a good half hour to get there.
After arriving and going through security, a young male staffer led them past a series of soundproof booths to one at the end of the hallway.
“It looks like he’s almost done,” the staffer said, pointing through the window at the screen, where an animated program was playing. “This scene is near the end of the episode.”
“When you say almost done, how long are we talking?” Jessie asked.
The young man shrugged. “Maybe twenty, thirty minutes?”
Ryan shook his head. “He’s done now. Tell him.”
The startled staffer looked uncomfortable but didn’t protest, stepping into the booth. They watched as the engineer, recording the session, first gave the kid an angry look, then a bewildered one. They couldn’t see Sheffield from their current angle, but less than a minute later, the door opened.
Out stepped a guy who only somewhat matched the photos they’d seen of him.
Unlike his clean-shaven pictures, the current Jordy Sheffield had unkempt black hair and a patchy, poorly-maintained beard.
They knew that he was thirty, but to Jessie, he looked nearly a decade older than that.
He’d once been pretty good-looking, but now his skin was pasty and he looked paunchy.
The divorce—or maybe something else—had apparently aged him.
“What the hell is this all about?” he demanded. “I’m in the middle of recording a crucial moment, and Clay busts in and ruins my best take to tell me there are cops outside. This better be good.”
Jessie wondered how often the police visited him and why he was reacting this way. In her experience, most folks were far more solicitous and polite when law enforcement showed up unannounced to interview them.
“I’m assuming you haven’t checked your messages this morning, Mr. Sheffield?” Ryan said, showing admirable restraint.
“Of course not. I put my phone on silent during sessions. I’m a professional, after all. Now, whatever this is, can we please make this quick? The director wants to lock the episode by the end of the day, and she can’t do that until I finish.”
“Your session will have to wait, Mr. Sheffield,” Ryan said, this time a little more sharply. “I’m Detective Hernandez with the LAPD, and this is Ms. Hunt. We have some questions for you that we can’t wait to ask.”
Jordy Sheffield briefly looked like he might want to argue some more, but seemed to sense that this wasn’t about a parking violation, and bit his tongue.
“There’s a break room down the hall. We can talk there.”
When they sat down at the break room table, Jessie couldn’t help but take some pleasure in how Sheffield squirmed and fidgeted as he seemed to get that something serious was going on.
“You had a call yesterday with your ex-wife around lunchtime,” Ryan said as he and Jessie settled in across the table from the man.
Sheffield was briefly taken aback before he found his words. “That was private.”
“Not anymore,” Ryan said flatly. “Tell us what you discussed.”
The self-righteous expression from before returned to the guy’s face.
“Look, I’ll acknowledge that our divorce wasn’t the most amicable. There were hard feelings on both sides. But this—siccing cops on me? That’s harassment.”
Jessie noted that Sheffield was acting as if he had no idea that Caroline was dead. He was fairly believable. Then again, he was a professional actor.
“Mr. Sheffield,” she said. “No one is harassing you. But your refusal to explain the nature of that conversation is increasingly suspicious. If there was nothing inappropriate about it, you’re better off just being straight with us.
Otherwise, this chat is going to get contentious real fast. And it may take place back at the police station.
I know you don’t want that. And I’m guessing your director doesn’t either. ”
That seemed to finally sway him. “I don’t see what the big deal is.
It was about alimony, okay. Caroline makes a lot more than I do, and I get money from her monthly.
But things have been slow lately. This series I’m working on now ends this season, and this is the second-to-last episode.
I don’t have anything else lined up, and my resources are drying up.
It’s embarrassing to admit, okay, but I asked her to increase her payments through the end of the year. ”
And how did Caroline react to that?” Jessie wondered.
“Not well,” he answered bitterly. “She said that we’d made our arrangement and that was that. I told her I would go back to court to get it bumped up if I had to. She said to go for it—that I would lose.”
“That was the entire conversation?” Ryan pressed.
Sheffield shrugged. “I might have called her a bitch. I assume that’s why you’re here. But I was pissed. Besides, I didn’t know that was a crime.”
Ryan looked over at Jessie. He clearly thought it was time to broach Caroline’s death and wanted to see if she was on board with it. She nodded that she was.
“Name-calling isn’t generally a crime,” he said, “But murder is.”
Sheffield was quiet for a second. Jessie wasn’t sure he’d heard what Ryan said. But then his brain seemed to catch up.
“What?”
“Your ex-wife was murdered last night, Mr. Sheffield,” he said evenly. “Where were you then?”
“Wait, you’re messing with me, right? You’re probably not even real cops, are you? Caroline’s pissed, so she hired you guys to scare me and make me feel bad.”
“No,” Ryan told him. “Caroline is dead.”
Sheffield looked back and forth between them, waiting for them to tell him this was all a joke, or at least giving the impression that’s what he expected.
“This is real?” he finally asked.
“It’s very real,” Jessie assured him, “which is why we need to know where you were last night between 10 PM and midnight.”
Jordy Sheffield sat quietly for a moment, taking in what they’d told him. After several seconds, he swallowed hard and shook his head, as if trying to force his brain out of standby mode.
“Um, okay. Okay. Give me a second. Yesterday was what?”
“Monday,” she reminded him.
“Monday, last night.” He appeared to search his memory. “Oh yeah. I was at my girlfriend’s place. She lives in West Hollywood. We ordered in. Thai food. Then we watched Love Island.”
“We’ll need to speak to her,” Ryan said. “We’ll also want the name of the restaurant you ordered from, the login data from your girlfriend’s streaming account, and access to the location data on your phone. I assume none of that will be a problem for you?”
“You really consider me a suspect?” he asked incredulously.
“We consider you a person of interest,” Ryan told him.
“Whether you are elevated to the status of ‘suspect’ is dependent on whether your story holds up. Hanging out with your girlfriend isn’t the strongest alibi of all time.
But if we can verify it through other means, that will go a long way to helping you.
So start writing everything down: your girlfriend’s contact info, restaurant details, and authorization to access your phone location data.
The sooner you share all that, the less likely you are to lose this job. ”
Jessie stayed quiet. Ryan was giving Sheffield the impression that he couldn’t refuse any of these demands. Technically, he could. But he seemed on the verge of caving, and she wasn’t about to advise him against it.
The truth was that, if his alibi proved even moderately credible, she thought they’d have to move on. Not because he struck her as a good guy who would never hurt his ex. But rather for the opposite reason.
As Caroline’s assistant had said, it was clear that Jordy was a petty, childish narcissist who was dependent on his ex-wife’s money to support him when his acting work didn’t.
It wouldn’t make sense for him to kill her.
She was his meal ticket. With her dead, he’d be out in the cold.
Of course, it was possible that he acted out in a moment of passion and forgot what he’d be losing if Caroline died.
But Jessie doubted it. Jordy Sheffield was too selfish to forget about the money.
Even as he wrote out everything that Ryan had asked for, Jessie turned her mind elsewhere. As far as she was concerned, the real killer was still out there. And it was her obligation to find them.