Page 34 of The Perfect Betrayal

The wig was just a precaution in case Chandler wasn't alone or had security cameras onboard. This way, she could still protect her identity to a degree. It might not even be necessary, as she would be decked out in a wetsuit that would cover everything but her face. But she didn't want to take any unnecessary risks, as this man was not the last on her list.

All her preparation had led to this moment. She had worked with a personal trainer to sculpt her body into the most appealingly curvy possible version of herself. She had paid a professional Hollywood makeup artist to teach her how to best maximize her facial assets in order to better woo her targets.

And most importantly, she'd become an even stronger swimmer. She'd been on the team in high school, but this wasdifferent. It was one thing to race in the 400-meter freestyle at a local meet. For this mission, she needed to be able to swim as much as two miles out in open, potentially choppy water, and then return after her task was completed.

That was why she’d swum almost every day in the leadup to this endeavor, almost always in the ocean. She could do five miles in heavy waves without feeling overtaxed. She was sure she could handle the calm waters that she’d face tonight.

She checked her watch. It had an app that allowed her to monitor the tracker she’d already surreptitiously placed on Chandler’s boat. The vessel was still where it had been for the last half hour. She knew exactly where to go.

So far, all the hard work and training of the last six months had paid off. She wasn’t about to let justice slip through her fingers now. Some might call it vengeance. But not her. A debt had to be paid. And it would be paid in blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

As Jessie and Riddell sat in a conference room at the yacht club, she tried to hide her frustration.

They had been on a conference call with Ryan, Jamil, and Beth for the last hour and with each passing minute, her patience had ebbed. It wasn’t that the HSS research team hadn’t done a credible job. In fact, they might have been too good at their work.

"I'm going to step out to get a little air," she announced to the group. Riddell looked like he wanted to do the same thing, but she'd beaten him to the punch. He'd have to wait until she got back.

After she left the conference room, she walked over to a giant window overlooking the harbor and stared out at the boats, hoping that the change of scenery would lead to some brilliant epiphany. None came, so she mentally reviewed what they'd learned.

Perhaps her biggest frustration was that all four of the remaining members of the yacht club social circle they were interested in had lawyered up. None would be coming in for questioning without some serious pressure, maybe even a formal arrest. Since none of them were currently accused of a crime, that wasn’t an option.

There were some more positive developments. Samantha Collins had shed some light on the possible origin of Taye Boyce’s additional legal settlements. It wasn’t outrageous to surmise that they were due to attempts to use the same pressure tactics with other women that he did with her, potentially involving his yacht buddies. So Jessie had asked Jamil and Beth, with Ryan’s help, to see what they could dig up. It turned out to be a lot.

The settlements themselves led nowhere. They were sealed so the details of what they were for and with whom, were unavailable. That wasn’t a shock. After all, if not for the restraining order that Boyce had filed against Samantha Collins, they’d still be in the dark about her settlement and the nature of her allegations.

But the search had opened the floodgates. It turned out that all six informal members of the yacht buddies group had unsavory histories. In addition to Boyce and Peterson’s records, both Archie Crittendon and Jackson Dwyer, the two friends they’d spoken to this morning, had multiple drunk and disorderly incidents. The two members who had refused to meet with them at all— Chandler and Joel Cisco—were even worse.

Chandler had all the drunk and disorderly stuff as the other two, but he was also once charged with assaulting a woman on a date when she decided to leave halfway through dinner. The woman claimed that he’d repeatedly attempted to touch her crotch area under the table. She balked and left. But according to the police report, he’d grabbed her hair in an attempt to stop her from leaving. The aggravated assault charge was eventually negotiated down to simple assault. He got a fine and three months’ probation.

Joel Cisco was a real winner too. In addition to similar drunk and disorderly incidents, he’d been busted twice for solicitation. In one instance, he’d only been arrested because he refused to pay the sex worker and she’d called the cops on him, apparently willing to risk a prostitution charge herself in order to get him too. In something of a pattern, his lawyer was able to get those charges reduced as well, so that his entire sentence consisted of a month-long sexual harassment training course, which he was able to do online.

The problem was that in none of those instances did the same woman come up more than once. Jessie had hoped that if aname popped up on more than one occasion, with more than one guy, they’d be able to draw a connection that could offer a new lead.

But each charge was a dead end. And as unpleasant as they all were, none of them seemed to rise to the level that would explain a person committing murder as some kind of retribution. They were missing something.

“Hey,” Riddell called from the open door of the conference room, “your little buddy Jamil found something.”

She hurried back to the room and closed the door behind her.

“What’s up, Jamil?” she asked.

“We’ve been spending all this time trying to find a common link among women these guys have had issues with,” he said excitedly. “But we never checked men.”

“You think that these guys were sexually harassing men too?” Jessie asked. Maybe she’d been narrow-casting too much, but the thought had never even occurred to her.

“I don’t know about sexually,” he cautioned. “But I did find a man who filed a harassment suit against all the guys we’ve been looking at. He retracted it only a day later, which makes me suspect that he got paid off too. But I figured you might want to speak with him.”

“Sure,” Jessie said. “Who is it?”

“His name is Mark Dawson,” Jamil replied. “He used to work at the yacht club until nine months ago.”

“That’s good,” Riddell noted giddily. “He’ll probably know where all the bodies are buried.”

“Where can we find him?” Jessie asked.

“You won’t have to go far,” Jamil said. “He works at a hotel just off King Harbor. Depending on how energetic you’re feeling, it’s walking distance.”

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