Page 127 of Sunset Beach
“I kept wondering if it had been tampered with, but it’s digital,” Drue pointed out. “Everything is time- and date-stamped.”
“If it was Byars, he got in the room the same way you did, right?” Hernandez asked.
“Through the sliding-glass doors,” Drue said, nodding excitedly. “That room’s not exactly ground-floor, as I’d hoped, but even somebody with a blown-out knee like me didn’t have much trouble climbing up onto the balcony.”
“There were no video cameras on the back of that building,” Hernandez said. “We checked.”
“There are now, though,” Drue said dryly. “That’s how Shelnutt’s security guard saw me climbing up.”
“After Jazmin was killed, Gulf Vista’s owners took a look at the hotel’s security lapses and beefed up everything,” Brice said, looking at his daughter. “If I’d known you were going over there tonight I could have saved you from getting arrested.”
“No, you would have stopped me from going altogether,” Drue said. “But that’s not the point, Dad.”
“So Byars decides to deal with Jazmin that night, after she gets off shift,” Hernandez said slowly. “But not in his office, because that’s too public. He uses a room he’s probably used before for that kind of thing.”
“He was head of housekeeping, so he had plenty of access to stepladders or whatever else he needed,” Drue agreed. “And if anybody stopped to ask what he was doing, he could say he was changing a lightbulb or something like that.”
Hernandez took a sip of coffee, made a face and pushed it away. “I don’tthink he planned on killing Jazmin. It was an impulse. Maybe he just intended to have sex with her. She resisted, which either pissed him off or turned him on, or both.”
“If I remember correctly,” Brice said quietly, “the medical examiner said Jazmin had been beaten and strangled.”
“I think she tried to fight him off, and maybe he bashed her with something in the room. Like a lamp or something,” Hernandez said. “The medical examiner said she was choked with a ligature. Maybe an electrical cord.”
An image of the young mother flashed in Drue’s mind, of Jazmin, alone and fighting for her life in that shabby hotel room. She felt queasy.
Drue sipped from her water glass, trying to choke back the nausea.
“I think you’re right about it being an impulse killing,” she told Hernandez. “Byars was a perv and a predator, until things got out of hand. After he realized what he’d done, he had to act fast.”
“Which is when he called his girlfriend, Neesa,” Hernandez said.
“I think Byars ordered her to come to that room and climb up onto the balcony. Once she was inside, he had her clean up the room. They loaded the body into the laundry cart, Neesa shoved all those dreads up under Jazmin’s cap, and off she went.”
“With best friends like that, who needs enemies?” Drue said bleakly.
“He probably planned to move the body off the hotel property, but he didn’t get the chance, because there was some kind of screwup, and Lutrisha found it. In the meantime, by the time our officers responded to the Gulf Vista, the murder scene had been cleaned up,” Hernandez said.
Brice put out his hand and gently closed the cover of the laptop. He looked at Drue. “You say you’ve got a copy of this video?”
“On a flash drive. In my purse, at home,” Drue said.
“What’s your next step?” he asked Hernandez. “You’ll reopen the case, right?”
“It was never closed,” the detective said. “My next step is to go home, crawl in bed and get a couple hours of sleep. Then I’ll try and sweet-talk my husband into skipping golf so he can take Dez to that baseball tournament. Then, I guess I’ll go pay a visit to Neesa Vincent.”
“I want to come too,” Drue said.
“No way. You’re not a cop. You’re not even a lawyer.”
“But I know where she lives, and you don’t,” Drue pointed out. “And Neesa likes me. You think she’ll really talk to a cop? In fact, I’ve got an idea. A great idea, of how we can get her to talk.”
Rae Hernandez pushed herself up from the booth and grabbed her laptop. She fixed Brice Campbell with a malevolent stare.
“She’s your kid, all right.”
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“No,” Brice said. “Out of the question. At the very least, if you’re right, this woman aided and abetted a brutal murder.”
