Page 61 of The Perfect Betrayal

Suddenly, Finn turned and darted into the building. As the door closed behind him, she couldn’t help but wonder if she should be worried about him.

Or even afraid of him.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

Jessie let out a relieved sigh.

She’d been playing phone tag with Twin Towers administrator Dante Moore all morning without success. But now his assistant said to wait on the line and he’d be right with her, finally.

First, he’d left her that voicemail when she was on the boat without a cell signal. It had been a cryptic request for her to call him back, with no details. When she returned the call, he was in a meeting with his guard supervisors.

When he tried her back again, she was with Riddell in an interrogation room, questioning Jackson Dwyer. He’d given up Joel Cisco within ten minutes of entering the room, right around the time that they revealed that they were giving Oliver Stanton immunity to testify and hinted that he could get a reduced sentence if he was helpful too.

According to Dwyer, Heather Silver had passed out within minutes of getting on the Bodacious Tata. Cisco carried her down to his cabin. After she eventually woke up, Cisco tried to make a move on her. But she wasn't into it. When she attempted to fight him off, slapping him across the face, he hit back, knocking her unconscious.

While she was out cold, Cisco and Robbie Chandler convinced the rest of them that it was too risky to go back with her. What if she went to the cops and claimed assault? What if they saw the bruise on her face?

Cisco proposed just pushing her overboard. He said the chick was new to town and had mentioned that she hardly knew anyone. And no one but the club manager, Oliver Stanton, had seen them leave with her on the boat. If they each kept their mouths shut and scared Stanton into doing the same, thiswhole thing might disappear, especially without a body. They all agreed to it, though Dwyer claimed he did so reluctantly. So they tied the boat’s anchor to her and dropped her in the Santa Monica Bay.

After that, Cisco moved the Bodacious Tata up to Marina del Rey and brought his yacht down to King Harbor. Dwyer said that none of them wanted to hang out on the sailboat anymore after what had happened.

When Jessie left the interrogation room, she felt like she needed a shower. She was actually glad that Cisco hadn’t told the whole truth when he “confessed” on his boat. If he had, she would have almost certainly taken that knife from Monica Silver and gutted the man herself.

She had been debating just how much of what she’d just learned to share with Monica when she’d seen the text from Moore saying he was available to talk. Both the shower and the conversation with Silver would have to wait. She called Moore right back.

“Jessie, you’re a hard woman to get a hold of,” he said when he came on the line.

“Right back at you, Dante,” she said. “You were pretty closemouthed in your message. What’s going on.”

“Do you remember how you asked me to make you aware if anything cropped up regarding Mark Haddonfield?”

“Of course,” she said, doing her best to keep the sense of anticipation out of her voice.

"Well, something cropped up," he said. "The inmate who took Haddonfield's bed after he died had an issue last night."

“An issue?”

“He soiled himself overnight, possibly intentionally. He’s not playing with a full deck,” Moore said. “After we moved him and his roommate out of the cell, we cleaned it. The mattress wasobviously a lost cause. But when they were removing it, the cleaning crew noticed something written on the underside of it.”

“What?” Jessie asked, a pit of dread and excitement forming in her gut.

“It was written in crayon,” he said. “It reads as follows:

JH

6-21-HD-44.

Though she felt certain that the message, which had Hannah’s initials, was intended for her, she tried not to jump to that conclusion.

“Are you sure he wrote it?” she asked.

“Yes,” Moore said. “Haddonfield complained about his last mattress smelling and being lumpy. He was relentless, even brought it up with his lawyer and filed a formal complaint. So we changed it out.”

Jessie thought about that. Had Haddonfield specifically demanded a mattress switch and gotten a record of it in his file so that when this question came up, she could be sure he’d written the message? It felt like something he would do.

“Was there anything hidden inside it?” she wondered.

“No,” he said. “I knew you’d ask that, so I made my people cut it open and check. They hate me now, by the way. But they didn’t find a thing.”

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