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“Maybe add an extra chair if you would?” Grover requested. “I’ll be her shadow, even back there.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it under control,” Ryan said. “I’m going to go see if any progress has been made in the hunt for the serial killer terrorizing the city. Please keep me posted.”
Once he was gone, Jessie couldn’t help but ask the questions that had been eating at her.
“Any updates on Haddonfield that you know of?”
Both researchers shook their heads unhappily.
“We’ve been using every resource at our disposal and haven’t found a thing,” Jamil admitted. “He’s gone to ground.”
“And Pierce?” Jessie wondered. “I know the FBI is taking point on the search for her, but you must have feelers out.”
Beth shook her head again.
“Same thing,” she answered. “Once she escaped from that prison transport truck, it’s like she completely disappeared.”
“That’s not a shock,” Grover said. “With her background in intelligence, she’ll have set up safe houses all around the city. She likely has access to cash, fake IDs, and whatever else she needs to stay off the radar.”
“Too much to hope for, I guess,” Jessie said with a casual shrug that belied her actual unease. “We better get started.”
They did just that, setting up a secret mini-office where Jessie could work while hiding from most of her friends and colleagues.
“This day is getting weird,” she muttered.
***
She completed her review of the case file in less than a half hour.
As Grover looked over her shoulder, mostly out of boredom, she went through the coroner’s report, the witness interviews, and all the detectives’ notes. As she pored over the pages, she could feel the beginnings of a headache licking at her brain but did her best to ignore it.
It turned out that Janice Lemmon was right. The case detectives did seem stymied, and from all indications, they were on the verge of accepting that this one might not get solved. According to the coroner, Britton had been beaten to death with a quartz crystal bowl from her own office, which the killer used to pummel her skull repeatedly.
Jessie looked at the brutal crime scene photos and contrasted them with the others of Gemma Britton from when she was alive. The woman, in her mid-forties, was striking, with flaming red hair, porcelain skin, and sharp blue eyes.
The estimated time of death was between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. last Friday, which matched with when Britton’s receptionist left for the day and when she returned. Per the receptionist, Cara Boynton, Britton let her leave early, around 4:40, while her final session with the suspected killer was still going on.
Boynton said that she returned to the office at 6 p.m. after realizing that she’d left her AirPods in in her desk. When she arrived, she found the psychiatrist’s office door open with her light on. She went to turn it off and discovered her boss lying bludgeoned on the floor.
Boynton also told them, and records confirmed, that the final patient of the day was a twenty-eight-year-old Caucasian man named Tyler Hardigan who Britton was seeing for the first time. Boynton described him as being of normal height and weight with bushy brown hair and tinted glass. She said he wore a Hawaiian shirt and brown pants.
According to the detectives on the case, no one with that name and her description matched anyone in the available databases. The closest was a forty-one-year-old anthropology professor at USC who was currently doing fieldwork in Peru.
The detectives found surveillance camera footage of “Hardigan” entering and leaving Britton’s building at times that coincided with her window of death, and the video corroborated Boynton’s description, though it also showed that he was wearing gloves. But they lost track of him once he left the building and walked down the street. They didn’t know how he got to the appointment or where he went after.
The crime scene unit didn’t find any useful fingerprints or DNA in Britton’s office and Boynton told them that the man paid cash, leaving no paper trail. The bills were tested for fingerprints, also a dead end.
The detectives on the case had also looked into Gemma Britton’s ex-husband, but he proved to have an air-tight alibi. The last entry in the detectives’ case file was from yesterday at 3:14 p.m., close to twenty-four hours ago. It seemed that no attempt at progress had been made since then. Jessie sighed in frustration.
“What are you thinking?” Grover asked, setting aside the reports that he’d been perusing to keep himself busy.
“I’m thinking that I’d like to access Gemma Britton’s past patient records,” she said.
“Why?” he asked. “According to the receptionist, the suspect was a first-time patient, correct?”
“Yes,” Jessie conceded, “but I have my doubts. Boynton had only been working for Dr. Britton for two months. It’s entirely possible that this man last saw the doctor before Boynton came on board.”
“But wouldn’t Britton have noted that?" Grover asked, perplexed. "Even if he gave a fake name when she saw him come in, surely she would have said something to that effect.”
