BENEATH ALL THE LIES

Andrew's P. O. V

I was sitting on my desk that morning and firing up my laptop, doing a research on a name. Cassandra Bennet, the new PA of Deena Deevan. Since I was assigned on the case of missing husband and baby of Deena Deevan, I had been doing research on everyone around her. I had researched all her employees' background and all of her family members, that included her parents and brother who currently resided abroad.

Deena Deevan or formerly known as Deena Thatcher was married to Kayne Thatcher and just before the divorce was finalized, her husband and baby went missing. The last CCTV recording showed that Kayne Thatcher left their residence in his car with their baby. The car, the baby and Kayne Thatcher all of a sudden just disappeared with no trace, as if the earth swallowed them whole. The suspicion was that he kidnapped the baby and ran off. But that didn't make any sense. Both Thatcher was due in court regarding their custody agreement over their baby after the divorce was finalized, so if this was about the custody of the baby, they should have disappeared after the divorce was finalized and the verdict was out, not before.

There was no trace of him ever leaving the country and there was never bank activity recorded. He never used his credit card anywhere, his bank account showed no activity at all. That what made us thought that he might have been murdered. All of his assets, properties , office and other valuable documents were supposed to fall to his daughter once she was 18 years old. That was his last will, updated just a month before he disappeared. And that made Deena didn't inherit anything from her husband. We suspected her involvement in the disappearance of Kayne Thatcher and her baby. But we couldn't find any evidence linking her to it as her alibi was strong. She was at the court that day, waiting for Kayne so their divorced paper can be finalized. Also why would Deena want her own daughter killed and pressured the police to keep searching for them?

The case had gone cold since no evidence or witness had ever surfaced regarding the case for the past 23 years. Overall, there had been 3 detectives assigned to this case and none made any significant breakthrough. Detective Pembrooke the last detective assigned to this case, told me to dig deeper around the name Juliette Carrero, the previous secretary of Kayne Thatcher who resigned a month before he disappeared. But detective Pembrooke also informed me that his search for Juliette Carrero hit a dead end when he came to know that she had already died by suicide a few days after the Thatchers disappearance, based on police record.

Kayne Thatcher, aside from being a congressman, also owned a PR firm Thatcher&Hanson Inc. Naya Hanson was Kayne's partner and she shared the ownership of half of the firm. She was also cleared from the suspect list as at the time of Thatcher disappearance, she was not even in the country and she had a plan on selling her share of the firm to Thatcher and moved abroad with her husband. When asked why she came back, she said she couldn't let anyone else ruin what she and Thatcher had built from the scratch. But when I went to visit her while reviewing this case, she mentioned Deena and asked me if she had been cleared off the suspect list. When I said yes, she told me that Deena had more motives than anyone to get rid of her ex husband since she knew her husband wasn't gonna leave her with anything other than alimony. But why would Deena care, her daughter was gonna inherit those assets anyway, and Deena came from a well off family, she even had a share in her family's business abroad.

And then while doing a research on Cassandra Bennet, I found a name I've come across before, Zasha Bennet. There was ticket under Juliette Carrero's license plate 23 years ago, near the time Carrero was found dead but the one turned up at the court and paid the fine was a woman named Zasha Bennet, she identified as the driver who drove Juliette Carrero 's car at that time. And now I came across that name again, listed as Cassandra's mother.

I didn't have any evident to link Zasha Bennett to Kayne Thatcher disappearance, so I couldn't really put her in the suspect list. Hence I couldn't just interrogate her. But I needed to find more about Juliette Carrero, and to do so, I would had to visit Naya Hanson again.