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Jessie Hunt added a hint of soy sauce to the pan, then mixed it in with the slowly caramelizing Brussels sprouts. The smell made her mouth water.
At the butcher block behind her, her husband Ryan was cutting pieces of chicken thighs into cubes that would be added to the pan momentarily. She silently admired his muscular forearms, flexing as they cut. Then, she allowed herself to admire the rest of him.
She lingered on his square jaw and the firm, two-hundred pound, six-foot tall body that strained at his dress shirt before taking special notice of the features that had first attracted her to him—his warm brown eyes, shy grin, and adorable dimples.
Just off to the side of him, the red onions and mushrooms were waiting in separate bowls, ready to be included when the time was right. Neither of them were cooks on the level of her younger half-sister, but considering that Hannah wasn’t here tonight, they were doing the best they could. Jessie might even allow herself a glass of wine if they were truly satisfied with the results.
She reminded herself not to get too comfortable. Just because it was approaching 6 p.m. on a Thursday evening and Christmas was only three days off, that didn’t mean that she and Ryan couldn’t get a call at any minute. Considering that Ryan was the detective in charge of LAPD’s Homicide Special Section, or HSS, and that Jessie was the unit’s criminal profiler, it was entirely possible that their dinner could be interrupted. In fact, considering that HSS specialized in cases with high profiles or intense media scrutiny—typically involving multiple victims or serial killers, it was more likely than not to happen.
Nonetheless, Jessie hoped that they wouldn’t get a call tonight. They needed a quiet evening together. So much had happened in the eight months since they’d gotten married that it often felt like they hadn’t gotten a chance to catch their breath.
There were the huge events, like Jessie having brain surgery after swelling caused by multiple case-related concussions. In addition, Hannah—as well as Jessie’s best friend, Kat Gentry—had nearly been killed by a professional assassin hired to snuff out the lives of those closest to Jessie. And to top it all off, a vengeful serial killer named Mark Haddonfield had tried to murder her as “punishment” for not taking him under her wing as a profiler-in-training.
As Jessie stirred the contents of the pan, she almost laughed to herself at the absurdity of it. After all, that was just the big stuff. It didn’t include the fact that Hannah, for whom Jessie had served as guardian the last two years, was now in her freshman year at UC Irvine, which was fifty miles and a world away. And it didn’t include the ongoing couples therapy that Jessie and Ryan were going through to deal with her residual trust issues after Ryan had held back details about a case in order to protect her. His decision had ultimately put Hannah and Kat in the cross-hairs of that assassin, a woman named Ash Pierce.
“I was going to add the mushrooms,” she told Ryan, “unless you think it’s too early.”
“No, that’s good,” he said, his eyes focused intently on making the cubes of meat as symmetrical as possible. “The chicken will be ready to go in too in another minute or so.”
Jessie smiled. At least they could agree on dinner prep. That was something considering their lack of harmony on other issues. One in particular, while not life-threatening, could prove life-altering. That was their ongoing disagreement about whether or not to have children. Ryan, previously married and without kids, was desperate to have them. Jessie, also once-married, had suffered through a difficult miscarriage well into her pregnancy, and was far less enthused by the prospect of trying again.
Luckily, Ryan had agreed to set the issue aside until Jessie was ready to entertain it again, which meant that the last two weeks had been blissfully free of any baby talk. Of course, that didn’t mean the time had been entirely blissful. After all, it was almost exactly two weeks ago that Kat’s fiancé, Mitch Connor, had been gunned down.
Even now, Jessie still had trouble processing what had happened to her friend. Kat and Mitch had been leaving a movie theater when a young man named Jimmy Platt, who was holding a gun and shouting “I am the new chosen one! I will complete the mission begun by my predecessor. I am the assassin now!” fired at Kat.
Mitch, a former Sheriff’s deputy who’d just gotten a position with the LAPD, leapt in front of her, taking the bullet intended for her. A nearby cop gunned down Platt and called for an ambulance. But soon after arriving at the hospital, Mitch died.
Kat, in a frenzy of fury, assumed the shooting was at the behest of Ash Pierce. The assassin had recently emerged from a coma and was claiming to suffer from amnesia, recalling none of her prior murderous acts. Kat didn”t buy it. Luckily, Jessie was able to talk Kat down before she entered Pierce”s hospital room and shot her in cold blood.
As it turned out from the subsequent investigation, Jimmy Platt had actually been acting on the instructions of Mark Haddonfield, who had released a manifesto despite his imprisonment. His online screed had implored others to pick up his mantle of murder and kill both Jessie and those she loved. Platt was trying to do just that to Kat when Mitch stepped in front of her that night.
The fact that Kat had been prevented from accidentally killing the wrong psychopath didn’t give her much comfort. She rarely left her apartment these days, and visits from Jessie and Ryan, among others, had meet met with ambivalence at best.
“Ready for the chicken?” Ryan asked, snapping her out of her thoughts momentarily.
“Yup,” she told him, looking at the browning sprouts and the slightly charred mushrooms, “perfect timing.”
“I’d say that we’re doing halfway decent,” he said as he dropped the cubes into the pan, “considering we don’t have the chef to guide us.”
They both took a moment to silently appreciate the sound of everything sizzling. Jessie added a dash more soy sauce to the mix before responding.
“I think Hannah would say we’re doing a more than reputable job,” Jessie agreed, “although we haven’t actually tasted anything yet.”
“Did you talk to her today?” Ryan asked. “Did she say how Kat’s doing?”
Ryan was referring to the fact that after the school quarter had ended last week, Hannah had insisted on staying with Kat at her place. She’d been sleeping on the couch for four nights now and spending most waking hours with her too.
Her demand to watch over Kat wasn’t a total shock to Jessie, considering how close the two of them had gotten. Just last summer, Hannah had informally interned at Kat’s one-woman, downtown detective agency, working with her on cases, often spending long hours stuck in a car, watching subjects do little or nothing of interest. The time together had forged a bond and Hannah, who didn’t have to worry about school until the new year, wasn’t about to let Kat suffer alone.
“We did talk earlier,” Jessie said. “There wasn’t much in the way of good news. She said that she had to coax Kat out of her pajamas long enough to take a shower, her first in three days.”
“How did she manage that?”
“She reminded her that she had an appointment with Dr. Lemmon this afternoon.”
Dr. Janice Lemmon was the go-to person for their family’s mental health issues. Before she’d entered private practice she was, like Jessie, a criminal profiler, who had assisted both the LAPD and FBI. Now approaching 70, the tiny woman with thick glasses and tight, little gray ringlets of hair had set aside that kind of excitement.
She had been Jessie”s therapist for over a decade now, from back when she was in college. Later, she took on Hannah as a client to help her deal with what could diplomatically be called ”anger management issues.” She was also directing Jessie and Ryan through their couples” therapy. And now she”d taken on Kat, too, hoping to help her through the grieving process.
“Did Kat go to the appointment?” Ryan asked.
“She did,” Jessie answered, as she dumped the red onions in the pan, “but I don’t know how well it went. I know she’s still fixated on Ash Pierce, even though the woman wasn’t behind Mitch’s death. I’m hoping she’s eventually able to move past that.”
“Speaking of his death,” Ryan said, taking over mixing duties from her, “I spoke to Captain Parker about that earlier. Even though Haddonfield’s manifesto was taken down, she’s worried that Jimmy Platt won’t be the only one who tries to act on it. She fears there may be other copycats out there, and frankly so do I. I’m not sure the department has the resources to keep everyone that Haddonfield threatened safe.”
“I had an idea about that,” Jessie replied, moving over to the bottle of Syrah at the far end of the counter and holding it up to get his approval.
He nodded, before adding, “no guarantees that we’ll get to enjoy it.”
“I know,” Jessie said. “It seems like the second we pop a cork, Parker calls with a new case. But let’s risk it.”
”Okay,” Ryan said. ”So what”s your idea?”
“I’m thinking of meeting with Haddonfield in person.”
“Wait, what?” he asked, incredulous. “You want to go to Twin Towers and chat up the guy who killed multiple people to get back at you before he tried to kill you too?”
“Hear me out,” Jessie said.
Ryan sighed heavily as he moved the wooden spoon around the pan.
“I’m listening,” he replied.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said carefully, knowing he wasn’t going to love this. “All of Mark Haddonfield’s issues with me stem from his belief that I wronged him personally when he didn’t get admitted into the profiling seminar I was teaching at UCLA.”
“Which was bananas,” Ryan noted.
“Agreed,” Jessie said. “I had no control over that. The school did. But set aside the fact that he’s an unbalanced guy who thought he had some personal connection with me, who assumed that I was going to mentor him and that he would become my profiling protégé. And press pause on the additional fact that once that didn’t happen, he decided to punish me for my ‘betrayal’ by killing survivors that I’d rescued from previous serial killers.”
“Should I also set aside that he ultimately tried to kill you too?” Ryan asked, clearly irritated by this thought experiment.
“For now, yes,” Jessie replied, “because I think all of that can work for us.”
“How so?”
Jessie pointed at the pan. “You’ve stopped stirring. It’s going to burn if you’re not careful.
Ryan resumed maneuvering the ingredients around the pan, and Jessie continued.
“What if I let him be my protégé?” she asked.
Ryan shook his head in confusion.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if I went to the prison and met with him, told him that I’d had a change of heart and wanted his input on cases, but only if he renounced the manifesto and announced to any potential copycat that me and my loved one were off limits?”
“So in exchange for revoking what is essentially a kill order, you’d confer with him on cases?” Ryan asked, dubious.
”Technically, yes, but not in any meaningful way,” Jessie assured him. ”If I agreed to visit him, say once a month, and went over a case file, asked for his insights and suggestions, I”m thinking that might appeal to his neediness and his narcissism. If he knew that those visits continuing was contingent on the safety of me and my family, I think he might go for it.”
“You don’t think he’d suspect he was getting played,” Ryan wanted to know.
”But he wouldn”t be getting played,” Jessie said. ”I would come to him with real cases, albeit not high-profile ones, and genuinely ask for his views. That doesn”t mean I have to act on anything he says. But if giving him a little personal time gets him to call off his dogs, that seems like a small price to pay.”
“What about his trial for committing multiple murders and attempting to kill you?” Ryan reminded her. “It starts next month and you’re a star witness. Won’t that complicate matters?”
“Not necessarily,” Jessie said. “I’d let him know up front that our arrangement wouldn’t have any impact on the trial or my testimony. The guy likely doesn’t have any illusions about whether he’ll be spending the rest of his life behind bars. Maybe the thought of speaking with me periodically will make that seem less onerous.”
”I know it would for me,” Ryan said with a wry smile, removing the pan from the stove and turning off the heat. ”But what if he gets assigned to prison far away, say Corcoran or heaven forbid, Pelican Bay? That place is all the way up near the Oregon border.”
“I’d tell him that my job responsibilities would keep me from visiting as often, but that within the bounds of my work obligations and prison rules, I’d still meet with him semi-regularly.”
“Is this something you’re willing to do for the rest of his life?” Ryan pressed.
”We”ll cross that bridge down the line,” Jessie answered. ”Right now, I just want to secure the safety of my loved ones. And who knows, maybe after meeting with me for a while, he”ll be too emotionally invested to re-issue any calls to harm me or the people I care about.”
“That might be wishful thinking,” Ryan told her as he spooned dinner onto her plate.
She shrugged as she poured wine into the two glasses on the table.
“It’s better than doing nothing and waiting for the next shoe to drop,” she said, sitting down across from him. “Now let’s dive in.”
She raised her glass. Ryan did the same. They clinked briefly and took their first sip of the wine. Jessie stabbed the first bite of the steaming hot meal and was just putting it in her mouth when Ryan’s cell phone rang. He held it up for her to see. The call was from Captain Parker.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jessie muttered.
Ryan smiled ruefully.
“Maybe she just wants to say ‘hi.’”