The Perfect Impression by Blake Pierce
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
But she felt something else too. A remnant of the mug was still in her hand, a thick, sharp shard, like a ceramic arrowhead. She gripped it tight in her fist and brought it upward, aiming for the fuzzy part of his face that she hoped was his eye.
She made contact and felt something give, like a balloon that initially offered resistance before giving way. The shard was no longer in her hand. She heard a garbled scream. Ferro let go of her neck.
Still unable to see clearly, she opened her palm and swung it up toward his face, in the same general direction as before. It made contact with something hard and she heard the scream above her get even louder. Her vision cleared slightly and she squinted at the writhing head above her. As best she could tell, a chunk of the mug had punctured deep into his cheek.
He was clutching at it, trying to pull it out, as his screams were muffled by a gargle of blood, some of which was drooling down onto her. She took a deep breath, ready to use whatever strength she had left to shove him off her and crawl to the door. But before she could, a loud voice barked out, echoing through the massive room.
“Hands up! Get off the woman. Do it now or we’ll shoot.”
“My face!” Ferro seemed to shout, though it was hard to understand him.
“I don’t give a damn about your face,” the officer yelled back. “Get off her now or you won’t have a face to cry about.”
He rolled off her and collapsed onto the floor, hugging his mangled cheek. Seconds later multiple officers appeared in her line of sight. One had Ferro on his stomach as he placed him in cuffs.
“Can you hear me?” another one asked as he leaned down next to her.
She nodded and tried to speak but found that her throat was raw. She swallowed hard. Suddenly, Detective Peters appeared before her too.
“Don’t try to talk,” he said. “Just give yourself a moment.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t strong enough yet to do it herself but someone had to.
“Melissa,” she croaked, “in bed. Make sure she’s okay.”
He seemed to understand.
“Find the bedrooms,” he ordered officers she couldn’t see. “The wife may be back there. Check on her status.”
The officer who had cuffed Richard Ferro lifted him roughly to his feet. Loose skin from his cheek was dangling down onto his jaw. He was still howling in pain. Peters looked at him and winced.
“We have an ambulance on the way?” he yelled over the noise.
“I’ll check,” the officer replied.
“Good,” Peters replied. “Take him outside. But he only gets checked out after Hunt does, got it?”
“Got it,” the officer said, forcefully guiding the still moaning Ferro out of the house. When his voice finally faded, Jessie looked over at Peters.
“Can you help me up?” she asked hoarsely.
He eased her onto the loveseat and handed her a bottled water. She took a small sip as he stood over her. Once he was sure that she was semi-functional, he shook his head.
“Why didn’t you wait for me to get here?” he asked.
She took another small sip before replying.
“Didn’t think…he’d react well to a…cop in his house.”
Peters looked around at the broken side table, scattered mug pieces, and streaks of blood on the floor.
“It looks like he wasn’t all that happy to see you either,” he noted drily.
She laughed despite herself, and though it caused a sharp burn in her throat that lingered for minutes, it was well worth it.
The joking ended abruptly when they heard an officer shout out from somewhere in the house.
“Found her!”
*
They thought she was dead.
The first two officers who found Melissa Ferro in her bed couldn’t rouse her and began shouting excitedly for their sergeant to come in the room. It wasn’t until he actually checked her pulse and breathing that they learned she was just heavily sedated with what was clearly more than the prescribed dose of Trazodone.
By the time the officers eased Melissa out on a stretcher, Jessie felt close to normal again, though she was sure she’d have some major neck bruising for a while. She watched the group take the clearly still-disoriented woman out the front door to wait for an ambulance. Peters waited until the house was quieter before speaking.
“So you want to explain what the hell is going on?” he asked.
Jessie sighed, unsure where to begin.
“Long story short, I had my suspicions about him so I started flirting. It worked. He came on to me, suggested we get a little more intimate. I asked if he’d been doing the same thing with Gabby.”
“Did he admit it?” Peters asked, sounding surprised at her bravado.
“He inadvertently admitted to the affair. Things deteriorated after I told him I knew Gabby was pregnant. Though he didn’t say as much, it was pretty clear that he wasn’t happy to hear the news when she told him. My guess is that she gave him some kind of ultimatum to leave Melissa or maybe just said she wanted to come clean with her husband. That was a mistake. I don’t think he could handle the idea of having his perfect life blown up.”
She took another water break. When she was done, Peters had another question.
“What made you so sure that he wasn’t gay?”
“I wasn’t. But I started thinking about how Maura the bartender said he was handsy and remembered how he was scoping out the front desk clerk who came in during our interview. Then I called the councilman that he used as his alibi—something I should have done earlier—and he sounded genuinely confused by Ferro’s version of events.”
“Wait, Ferro didn’t plan all that as his alibi ahead of time?” Peters asked.
“I doubt it,” Jessie said. “I think he went to Catalina hoping to continue the affair with Gabby. He used the excuse that he was helping Philip Blake to his room as a pretext to leave the bar. It was a way to maintain the fiction of his sexuality and avoid anyone suspecting that he was violating the group’s intermingling rule. And since he knew Melissa was in her suite with the golf caddy, he probably thought he was in the clear.
“But when he arrived at Gabby’s suite, I suspect that she gave him the unexpected pregnancy news and told him what she wanted to do. He would have been drunk and panicked and impulsively grabbed the knife that was right there. I suspect it was a spur of the moment thing and that almost everything after the actual murder was just him scrambling.”
“But there were no prints on the knife,” Peters pointed out.
“No, and there were none on the doorknob either,” Jessie said. “It’s likely that he was in there so briefly—maybe less than five minutes—that those were the only things he touched. Remember, the door wasn’t even closed completely. If he was thinking clearly, he wouldn’t have made that mistake. If Melissa hadn’t seen it, then it might have been several more hours before she was found.”
“So you think he killed her right before Melissa found her?” Peters asked.
“It’s hard to know for certain,” Jessie admitted, “but it probably occurred less than a half hour before she found her. He would have been desperate, in such a hurry to get back down to the bar and his alibi that he wiped down what he could and left. Then he made a big fuss of his presence in the bar so he’d be remembered. At some point he must have decided to use Philip Blake as an alibi, making up the secret lover story about a man he had a passing acquaintance with. He must have hoped that Blake’s high profile would make us hesitant to question him, which I’m ashamed to say it did, at least for a while.”
“But it started to fall apart,” Peters added, catching on now. “It was getting increasingly clear that Ariana Aldridge hadn’t done it. I tracked the GPS on her phone after interviewing her and found that she was exactly where she said she was at the time she said. She hung up with her mom at ten thirty-nine. It would have taken her a couple of minutes to get upstairs.”
“Right,” Jessie said. “So we know Gabby was alive and with Rich Ferro around ten forty-three, when Ariana heard voices in the room. But of course Richard didn’t know anything about the timeline we had developed. I gave him the impression that Ariana was our sole suspect. At that point, he would have assumed that all his machinations had worked and he was free of suspicion. That’s when I started flirting with him, to see if he would hit on me. It all went well, that is until I raised my suspicions and he heard police sirens.”
Peters nodded, seemingly satisfied, before his brow furrowed.
“But he never officially confessed to killing her, right?” he noted.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about a confession,” Jessie assured him. “We’ll check both his and Gabby’s phone data to confirm the affair. We can check the DNA from the pregnancy to confirm his paternity. That will provide motive. And then there’s the whole part where he tried to kill me when he found out I knew it was him.”
Though she was doing better, Peters helped her outside. They walked over to her car, which was currently boxed in by four squad vehicles. Jessie could see Richard Ferro in the back of one of them, groaning loudly. Ignoring him, she zipped up her jacket to protect against the howling mountain winds.
“So what now?” Peters asked.
“Now I go home,” she said, dreading what she knew was to come. “This isn’t the only fire I have to put out today.”
“You don’t get at least one night off?” he asked.
“My teenage sister lives with me, so no.”
Peters laughed. Jessie didn’t join in, worried what it would do to her throat.
“Well, I guess that leaves me to do the paperwork,” he said.
“Do you mind? You are the lead detective on a successfully solved murder case,” she reminded him.
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “I guess I am. That ought to play well with Captain Hawley.”
“Hell,” she added, “if you play your cards right, maybe soon you’ll be the new captain in town.”
The look of sheer delight on his face at that prospect almost made her neck stop throbbing—almost. But then she remembered what was waiting for her at home and the ache returned in force.