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“Oh, that,” he said. “There was a miscommunication. I booked a flight for last night in case I wanted to come back early, but I didn’t end up taking it.”
“Records indicate you checked in at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas,” Ryan told him.
“There must be some mistake,” Buhner insisted unpersuasively.
“And the car at the parking garage near LAX?” Jessie reminded him.
“Right,” he said, swallowing hard. “A friend asked if he could borrow it last night so I told him he could pick it up at the garage.”
“How did he get your keys?” Ryan wondered.
“I gave him a spare set,” Buhner said quickly.
“I see,” Jessie noted, before deliver the coup de grace. “That’s weird because in the surveillance footage we got from the garage, your friend looks exactly like you. How do you explain that?”
Buhner’s face melted into a puddle of shame and panic. To his credit, he recovered quickly, replacing that expression with one of indignant offence.
“I’ve had just about enough of this,” he bellowed angrily. “My wife just died, and you are assaulting me with accusations. Here I am, tired and confused, and you are taking advantage of my vulnerable state to cast aspersions on my character. Do you know who I am? Do you realize where this kind of harassment could land you both?”
Jessie felt a twinge of pain in her head as his volume increased. For a moment she sensed the beginnings of nausea tickle her insides before quickly subsiding. She noticed Ryan staring at her with concern on his face and realized she must have cringed or otherwise revealed herself. She gave him a tight smile and turned her attention to Buhner.
“Mr. Buhner,” she said quietly and calmly, as if his outburst hadn’t happened. “I’m going to lay my cards on the table in order to save valuable time. We know you returned to Los Angeles last night, not today. We have all manner of proof. We are currently getting approval to look at the GPS data from both your phone and car, and possibly the content of your calls, texts, and e-mails. Our team is getting a court order to review your personal finances. You’ve already lied to us multiple times—and quite poorly—in the course of this interview. We have enough to take you downtown to Central Station on suspicion of murder.”
Buhner didn’t respond. Instead he stared at her, his eyes wide, his whole body tense.
“Take a breath, Mr. Buhner,” she suggested before continuing. “Now at this point you have two options. One, Detective Hernandez here can arrest you, read you your rights, and we can march you out of your own office in handcuffs. You’ll get to call a lawyer at the station and the whole unpleasant legal hamster wheel will start rolling. Do you want to hear option number two, Mr. Buhner?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding vigorously.
“Okay,” she said, her voice all warm honey now. “The alternative is that you come clean with us. Based on your ineptitude so far, if you killed your wife, we’re going to be able to prove it, and probably quite soon. You’ll want to get ahead of that. But if you didn’t murder Ava, and you’ve been lying to us for some other reason, now’s the time to say so. Because no matter how odious the secret that led you home last night is, unless it involves killing someone, honesty is the better policy. Right now, you’ve lied to law enforcement officials. That could be interpreted as impeding a murder investigation or it could be deemed the desperate act of a confused, grieving husband. How the rest of this story plays out is up to you.”
Then Jessie stopped, clasped her hands together, and waited. Ryan stood silently beside her. When Buhner, after an interminable pause, finally opened his mouth, she truly had no idea what he would say.
“If I tell you about another crime to avoid getting charged with this one, what happens?”
“That depends on the nature of the crime,” Ryan told him. “We can’t help you until we know more.”
“All right,” Buhner said lowering his head and looking at his feet, “Ava and I hadn’t been intimate much in the last few years. I couldn’t say why for sure, but it might have been because I asked her to get…more experimental. I think it kind of backfired and she became reluctant to do much of anything with me. I got frustrated.”
He stopped talking and Jessie wondered if he was having second thoughts about coming clean. She looked over at Ryan, who appeared on the verge of speaking, but she shook her head. There was more coming.
“So one day, about six months ago,” he continued, “I was outside our flagship hotel, just a few blocks from here, for a community outreach event where we did a clothing giveaway. This one woman, who was clearly a prostitute, came over and took a company t-shirt. She also propositioned me, said that if I ever wanted to do something nastier than hand out clothes, I should give her a call. She even wrote her number on my wrist. I laughed it off in the moment, what with the other execs right there. But I couldn’t get her out of my head. So I called.”
He paused again for interminably long time.
“Anyway, I don’t want to get into all the details,” he said quietly, “but I met up with her. And she was willing to do things I didn’t expect, didn’t even know I wanted. Certainly nothing that Ava would have ever considered participating in. It became a regular thing. I gave her a certain amount every week—cash only—to ensure that she was available when I wanted to meet. I found that I didn’t just like the acts themselves, but the dirtiness of it. There was nothing dirty about Ava but there was with this woman. I even liked the grimy parts like meeting in an hourly, fleabag hotel. I got off on all of it.”
“And that’s what you were doing last night?” Jessie asked, making sure to keep the judgement out of her voice.
“Yes,” Buhner admitted. “I did that a lot—said I was going to come back into town one day but return the night before so there would be fewer questions. I’d also go to meetings or events I didn’t care about and knew Ava wouldn’t attend, then I’d leave early to do this. So when I called Ava last night, I was actually at the Vegas airport, waiting to board my flight back here to meet with the prostitute.”
“Do you think Ava had any idea what you were doing?” Ryan asked.
“No way,” Buhner insisted. “Ava wasn’t the type to hold her tongue when she had something to say, especially for something like that. If she had known, she would have crushed me, right before serving me with divorce papers. That’s one of the reasons I always used protection. If I ever got something and gave it to her, she’d know something was up.”
He was quiet for a second before adding, “and of course, I didn’t want to expose her to any diseases.”
“Of course not,” Ryan nearly spat, “you’re a real hero.”
