“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 wifemay be back there. Check on her status.”
The officer who had cuffed Richard Ferro lifted him roughly to hisfeet. Loose skin from his cheek was dangling down onto his jaw. He was stillhowling 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 outafter Hunt does, got it?”
“Got it,” the officer said, forcefully guiding the still moaning Ferroout 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 tooka 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 noteddrily.
She laughed despite herself, and though it caused a sharp burn in herthroat that lingered for minutes, it was well worth it.
The joking ended abruptly when they heard an officer shout out fromsomewhere in the house.
“Found her!”
*
They thought she was dead.
The first two officers who found Melissa Ferro in her bed couldn’trouse 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 learnedshe was just heavily sedated with what was clearly more than the prescribeddose of Trazodone.
By the time the officers eased Melissa out on a stretcher, Jessie feltclose to normal again, though she was sure she’d have some major neck bruisingfor a while. She watched the group take the clearly still-disoriented woman outthe front door to wait for an ambulance. Peters waited until the house wasquieter 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 askedif 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 Itold him I knew Gabby was pregnant. Though he didn’t say as much, it was prettyclear that he wasn’t happy to hear the news when she told him. My guess is thatshe gave him some kind of ultimatum to leave Melissa or maybe just said shewanted to come clean with her husband. That was a mistake. I don’t think hecould handle the idea of having his perfect life blown up.”
She took another water break. When she was done, Peters had anotherquestion.
“What made you so sure that he wasn’t gay?”
“I wasn’t. But I started thinking about how Maura the bartender said hewas handsy and remembered how he was scoping out the front desk clerk who camein during our interview. Then I called the councilman that he used as hisalibi—something I should have done earlier—and he sounded genuinely confused byFerro’s version of events.”
“Wait, Ferro didn’t plan all that as his alibi ahead of time?” Petersasked.
“I doubt it,” Jessie said. “I think he went to Catalina hoping tocontinue the affair with Gabby. He used the excuse that he was helping PhilipBlake to his room as a pretext to leave the bar. It was a way to maintain thefiction of his sexuality and avoid anyone suspecting that he was violating thegroup’s intermingling rule. And since he knew Melissa was in her suite with thegolf caddy, he probably thought he was in the clear.
“But when he arrived at Gabby’s suite, I suspect that she gave him theunexpected pregnancy news and told him what she wanted to do. He would havebeen 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 afterthe 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’slikely that he was in there so briefly—maybe less than five minutes—that those werethe 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’tseen it, then it might have been several more hours before she was found.”
“So you think he killed her right before Melissa found her?” Petersasked.
“It’s hard to know for certain,” Jessie admitted, “but it probably occurredless than a half hour before she found her. He would have been desperate, insuch a hurry to get back down to the bar and his alibi that he wiped down whathe could and left. Then he made a big fuss of his presence in the bar so he’dbe remembered. At some point he must have decided to use Philip Blake as analibi, making up the secret lover story about a man he had a passingacquaintance with. He must have hoped that Blake’s high profile would make ushesitant to question him, which I’m ashamed to say it did, at least for awhile.”
“But it started to fall apart,” Peters added, catching on now. “It wasgetting increasingly clear that Ariana Aldridge hadn’t done it. I tracked theGPS on her phone after interviewing her and found that she was exactly whereshe said she was at the time she said. She hung up with her mom at tenthirty-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 aroundten forty-three, when Ariana heard voices in the room. But of course Richard didn’tknow anything about the timeline we
