CHAPTER ONE
Jessie tried to ignore the pain.
Instead, she focused all her energy on the end goal and not the struggle to get there. Though her thighs were burning, and her breathing was heavy, she pressed ahead, her eyes fixed on her destination: her driveway.
After another thirty seconds, she was there. She dropped out of sprint mode and slowed to a walk. She pulled out her phone and hit “stop” on the time clock of her running app. It read: 42:29.
Not bad for five miles. That’s just under 8 ½-minute-miles.
She allowed herself a moment of pride. She was still a long way away from getting back to the eight-minute-miles she ran in college, but she’d shown steady improvement in recent months. And considering all the injuries she’d suffered in the last few years, from stabbings, to gunshot wounds, to multiple concussions and at least two strangling attempts, she thought she was doing pretty well.
Jessie walked to the end of the block, allowing her breathing to return to normal. Her thoughts drifted to yesterday’s seminar in criminal profiling at UCLA. It was one of her final ones before re-joining LAPD’s Homicide Special Section full-time and the vibe was bittersweet. Students, as they had for weeks, pleaded with her to reconsider. The post-lecture Q&A session ran longer than usual, as if the kids were hoping to squeeze out every last kernel of knowledge that they could glean from her. It was gratifying and a little depressing at the same time. She didn’t want it to end.
Jessie turned around and made her way back to the house, trying to shake off the gloom that came from knowing something so positive would soon be over. She had agreed to return at the request—more like pleading actually—of Captain Roy Decker, who ran LAPD’s Downtown Station and oversaw Homicide Special Section, or HSS. He’d told her that she could remain as a consultant rather than an employee and continue to work with Detective Ryan Hernandez, who in addition to being her semi-regular partner, was also her fiancé. Decker also offered her a huge jump in pay.
Normally that wouldn’t be the deciding factor. Even without the job, Jessie was well-off, a result of her divorce and an inheritance from her adoptive parents. But with a wedding to plan and her sister’s recent “relocation,” having the extra income couldn’t hurt.
Jessie reached the front door and began to stretch. She knew that worrying about current and future bills wasn’t conducive to loosening her muscles but she couldn’t help it. Even though she didn’t want some huge wedding, Ryan seemed insistent. The venues and vendors he was suggesting were all high-end, and of course, very pricey. It was increasingly a bone of contention, one that she was getting tired of relenting on.
And then there was Hannah. Jessie sighed at the thought of her. Her younger half-sister, Hannah Dorsey, now only weeks from turning eighteen, was currently a resident at the Seasons Wellness Center in Malibu. The unremarkable name made it sound like the place might be an exclusive spa. It was certainly as expensive as one. After insurance, each week there cost a minimum of $7000, and that was just for room and board.
In fact, the place was an in-patient psychiatric facility that focused on those suffering from all manner of mental illness including suicidal ideation, life-threatening eating disorders, even uncontrolled OCD. Hannah had checked in there voluntarily two weeks ago, at the insistence of the therapist she shared with Jessie, Dr. Janice Lemmon.
Officially, she was there to deal with a diagnosis of self-harm tendencies, but that didn’t accurately describe her circumstance. For months, if not longer, Hannah had been deliberately putting herself in dangerous situations that could end badly. She had admitted that normal human interactions mostly left her numb and emotionless. So she courted confrontations with neighborhood bullies, creepy stalkers, drug dealers, pedophiles, and even a sexual slavery ring, all as part of a need to get a hit of adrenaline. Even if the feeling was fleeting, at least it was something.
But then an elderly serial killer called the Night Hunter trapped Jessie, Ryan, and Hannah in a remote mountain cabin. Jessie and Ryan managed to capture and subdue the man. But while he was handcuffed and unarmed, Hannah shot and killed him. She claimed it was a form of self-defense, a way to stop a man she knew would never stop searching for a way to get at them, even from behind bars.
Only later did Jessie learn that the real reason Hannah had murdered the Night Hunter was because she simply wanted to know what it felt like. As it turned out, she liked it. The act gave her a high she’d never experienced before, and she wanted to recreate it. In the weeks after she shot the Night Hunter in cold blood, she harbored fantasies of killing someone else in the hopes of recapturing the thrill of that moment.
When, over a month later, Hannah finally revealed that to Dr. Lemmon, the doctor came up with the idea of sending her to Seasons, where she’d been ever since. In her time there, she’d participated in intense therapy sessions, both group and individual, as well as a couple of sessions with Jessie. Dr. Lemmon had also ordered everything from redirection therapy to brain-mapping. All options were under consideration. Nothing was off the table. The goal was twofold: first, to help Hannah feel emotions without needing heightened situations; and second, to eliminate her addictive desire to get a high from—to put it bluntly—killing people.
As Jessie finished up her final deep stretch, she recalled her last visit, just two days ago. It wasn’t a therapy session, just a casual visit, but it hadn’t been particularly casual. Hannah wasn’t in a very chatty mood.
“Are you just here to rub my nose in my grotesquery?” she had asked. It had gone downhill from there.
Jessie tried to shake loose of the memory as she opened the door to the mid-Wilshire house she’d inherited from her murdered profiling mentor, Garland Moses, and headed for the bedroom to undress and shower. She could hear Ryan grunting in the backyard and went that way to check on him.
Her fiancé was taking advantage of the mild, early-March Los Angeles day, doing his rehab workout session outside and shirtless. Now over eight months removed from being stabbed in the chest and spending weeks in a coma, he was about ninety-five percent recovered.
He was currently doing squats while holding forty pound dumbbells. Jessie admired him silently from behind the sliding glass door. His short black hair and dark skin gleamed in the sunlight. His normally kind brown eyes were fixed in concentration. Sweat poured down his muscled chest as he knelt down and popped back up, his calves rippling with the effort. Though Ryan wasn’t vain, Jessie knew that it was important for him to regain the chiseled physique he’d had before being attacked. His six-foot, two-hundred-pound body had always been both a source of pride and a weapon he could use against the criminals he came up against. His goal was to get back to where he’d been and he was almost there.
Once he finished his set, she tapped on the glass and opened the door.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she told him, “You almost done?”
“I’ve got about five minutes left. I’ll hop in after you’re done.”
Jessie was tempted to suggest he finish up early and join her. But she knew he really wanted to get back to full strength and anything that interfered with that, ...
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