The Perfect Show (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Thirty-Three)

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Hannah Dorsey tried not to make it obvious.

It wasn’t easy. After all Kat Gentry was a professional private detective who was usually pretty good at picking up on subtle behavioral changes in other people.

So as Hannah spent much of the last four days in Kat’s apartment, watching her sister’s best friend out of the corner of her eye without trying to let on that she was essentially babysitting an adult woman, she did her best to seem like her usual self.

But Kat wasn’t at the top of her game right now and mostly seemed oblivious to being so closely observed. It was understandable. After all, it was barely two weeks ago that Kat’s fiancé, Mitch Connor, was gunned down as the two of them were leaving a movie theater.

That would have been bad enough, but Hannah knew that Kat’s pain was compounded by unjustified guilt. The young man who shot Mitch, a punk named Jimmy Platt. He was committing the act at the behest of Mark Haddonfield, a serial killer Jessie had captured who had sent out a manifesto calling on followers to harm those that Jessie loved. But Mitch hadn’t been the target. Kat was.

When her fiancé stepped in front of her as the gun was fired, he took the bullet intended for her. Even though she hadn’t said it out loud, Hannah knew that Kat felt responsible for the death of the man she loved.

In the weeks since, Kat had a circle of people caring for her as she navigated the police investigation of the crime, the funeral, and the processing of Mitch’s personal effects. Jessie and Ryan were around, along with several people from the HSS team. But they all had to eventually return to work. So Hannah decided she needed to pick up the slack.

She had just wrapped up the fall quarter at UC Irvine and had planned to spend winter break at Jessie’s house, where she’d spent the last two years of high school. But she just couldn’t justify spending lazy afternoons lying on her old bed, scrolling through her phone, when the woman who had taken her under her wing last summer and mentored her in the minutiae of private investigations was suffering alone in her downtown apartment. So Hannah temporarily moved in.

She didn’t ask for permission. She didn’t warn Jessie and Ryan that she’d be doing this. Instead she had just shown up four days ago with the duffel bag she’d packed when leaving school and announced that she would be sleeping on the living room couch for a little while. Kat had offered token protest before giving in. Truthfully, she seemed relieved.

In the days that followed, they didn’t do much. Yes, Kat had gone to see Dr. Lemmon twice in that time, including earlier this afternoon. But other than that, she’d hardly left the apartment, which left Hannah to do the shopping, pick up morning coffee and take-out meals, and communicate with Kat’s clients, who’d all been told their cases were temporarily on hold unless they wanted to be referred to someone else.

Hannah did her best to be constantly available to Kat, which was both physically and emotionally exhausting. She hadn’t realized the wear on her body until she caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror earlier today.

On the surface, she thought that she still looked presentable. With her five-foot-nine height, blonde hair, green eyes (the same shade as her sister’s), and once-skinny-but- now-athletic frame, she made a good first impression. But upon closer inspection, the hair was less bouncy and vibrant than usual. The eyes had shadows under them. And she just didn’t feel as strong as usual. She hadn’t worked out once since she’d arrived here.

But she found the emotional component of caring for her new charge far more taxing than the physical one. She didn’t realistically think that Kat was in such a bad place that she would harm herself. But she sure wasn’t engaging in a lot of self-care. She had to be coaxed to shower, change clothes, and sometimes, even to eat.

Hannah was hesitant to be too forceful. After all, she was dealing with a woman who hadserved in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger. That was where Kat saw multiple friends killed or injured grievously. It was also where she was injured in an IED explosion that left her with damage both internal and external, including multiple facial burn marks and a long scar that ran vertically down her left cheek from just below her eye. Hannah didn’t want to insult her by suggesting she couldn’t handle sorrow and suffering.

Still, she’d never seen Kat like this before. The combination of grief, guilt, and dashed dreams seemed to have undone her. More troubling than Kat’s depression was her growing obsession with Ash Pierce.

It was understandable. Kat had a long, unpleasant history with Pierce. The latter was a hitwoman who feigned being a client in order to lure Kat out into the desert, where she intended to livestream herself torturing and murdering her. She’d been hired for the job by a killer that Jessie had captured and who wanted payback. Luckily Hannah, who had been working for Kat at the time, arrived in time to outwit and nearly kill Pierce before ultimately, reluctantly leaving her to the authorities.

Months later, Pierce escaped while being transported from one prison to another and went hunting for Hannah. That search ended in a confrontation in a hospital boiler room, where Hannah and Kat worked together to defeat the killer. The conflict, which involved hand-to-hand combat and a knife, ended with Hannah stabbing Pierce in the neck and Kat using CPR to save the dying woman.

Pierce ended up in a coma, leaving Kat to obsess over her decision to save the assassin. She came to regret it, especially when Pierce eventually woke up claiming no memory of those recent clashes, or any of her time as a killer for hire. The last thing she said she could recall was her work as aMarines Special Operations element leader and later, a CIA asset who, according to her, conducted covert assassinations for the agency, eliminating enemies on behalf of her country.

Kat was skeptical about Pierce’s amnesia, and regularly went to the secure hospital ward where she was recuperating. She befriended the nurses and tried to get proof that Pierce was lying. When, weeks later, Mitch was shot by Jimmy Platt, who was shouting “I will complete the mission begun by my predecessor. I am the assassin now!” Kat assumed he had done it at Pierce’s behest and went to the hospital ward, ready to return the favor. Only Jessie talking her down last minute prevented her from shooting Pierce, which would have almost certainly led to a murder charge.

But even though Kat was eventually persuaded that Platt was acting on Mark Haddonfield’s directive and not Pierce’s, she couldn’t let go of her fixation. In the days since Mitch’s funeral, she had become increasingly convinced that Ash Pierce’s memory loss was all a ruse. She believed that the hitwoman was playing a long game, either to create doubt in the minds of a future jury judging her many crimes, or to get the security contingent guarding her to let down their guard for another escape attempt.

Hannah was generally inclined to agree with her. Everything she knew about Pierce suggested she was capable of that kind of manipulation. They’d both already been the victims of the woman’s skills at deception. But Kat had taken her suspicions to a different level entirely.

She’d pored over studies about the legitimacy of post-coma amnesia. She’d talked to the ward nurses, trying to learn about any behavioral discrepancy that might prove the woman was faking. She’d even tried to go back to the hospital again this week before Hannah had convinced her that it would be an extremely bad look.

She’d suggested that Kat address her obsession at her appointment with Dr. Lemmon today. So when the woman returned to the apartment, Hannah waited what she thought was an appropriate amount of time, and then broached the subject.

“Did you talk to Dr. Lemmon about Ash Pierce at your session today?” she inquired casually, as if she was asking if Kat wanted tea.

Kat shook her head.

“I wanted to, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I can barely talk to you about it. Being judged by a professional therapist is more than I can handle right now.”

Hannah didn’t point out that Kat, rather than being barely able to discuss the topic with her, brought it up constantly. As frustrating as it was to seemingly be the woman’s sole release valve, Hannah understood. She’d been in a similar position herself.

It wasn’t that long ago that that she’d discovered something unsettling about herself. Maybe it was because her and Jessie’s shared birth father was a serial killer who slaughtered her adoptive parents right in front of her. Or maybe it was because she’d been kidnapped by a different murderer who tried to convince her that she should get in on the killing game too, starting with her own sister. Or perhaps it was nearly being murdered by Jessie’s ex-husband, who snuck into their home and tried to take them both out, along with Ryan.

Whatever the source, Hannah had discovered an unnerving element in her own character. She had what could only be described as bloodlust. It had developed over time but fully flowered when she shot an elderly serial killer even after he’d been subdued by Jessie and Ryan. The act had given her a thrill like nothing she’d ever experienced before.

Even though the shooting was conveniently deemed self-defense, she knew the truth: she had done it on purpose, just to see what it felt like. After that, she began seeking out other confrontations in which she could mete out vengeful justice against perceived wrongdoers. On more than one occasion, it nearly led to her committing violence against people who probably didn’t deserve what she had in mind.

Ultimately, she’d gone to Dr. Lemmon, confessed how she was feeling, and agreed to go to a long-term treatment facility to work on controlling her urges. It had worked on the whole, and she’d tried to channel her need to dole out punishment in more constructive ways, most recently by helping fellow college students who’d been wronged in some way.

She was modeling herself after her sister, who had admitted that she too sometimes felt the pull toward violence against transgressors but had found a release valve by redirecting those darker desires toward a more noble goal: getting justice for the victims of the offenders.

But the tickle was always there in the back of Hannah’s gut, that longing to make people pay, sometime in bloody fashion. And listening to Kat go on about Ash Pierce, a woman who had tried to kill Hannah on multiple occasions, did little to temper that craving.

“I actually have a favor to ask,” Kat said, snapping Hannah out of her thoughts and making her wonder how long she’d been sitting there, silently brooding.

“Okay,” she replied apprehensively.

But before Kat could go on, Hannah’s phone buzzed. She glanced over. It was a text from Finn Anderton, a fellow UC Irvine student and frat boy that she’d initially despised and more recently found herself enjoying flirting with. He lived down in Orange County, about an hour away.

How’s everything going? the message inquired innocuously. She was tempted to respond, but with Kat sitting expectantly next to her, she instead put the phone in her pocket. The boy could wait.

“Do you want to respond to that?” Kat asked.

“Later,” Hannah said with a dismissive wave. “What’s the favor?”

“I know this is a big ask, but I wanted to see if you could follow up on this whole Pierce thing?”

“What do you mean?” Hannah wanted to know.

“Look,” Kat said, “as deep in my own messed-up head as I’ve been lately, even I know that I can’t be objective when it comes to evaluating if Pierce is full of crap. But you worked for me last summer. I taught you all the basics of conducting an investigation. You could review the research I’ve gathered and take an unbiased look at whether her condition is legit or not.”

“Unbiased?” Hannah said, unable to control her surprise, “you’ve got to be kidding!” Don’t you remember that I was in hiding at a safe house after she escaped from prison because she had a personal vendetta against me? She tried to kill me too, Kat. I wouldn’t call myself unbiased.”

“Okay,” Kat said heavily, as if the effort of arguing was almost too much for her, “let’s say that you’re more clear-headed then. I haven’t slept. I can’t stop crying over Mitch. And I feel like every time I move, I’m covered in molasses slowing me down. You can at least offer a fresh perspective. Will you just look at what I’ve compiled and see what you think? I need to know, once and for all, whether this whole amnesia thing is real or not.”

“I may be double majoring in Psychology and Criminology,” Hannah conceded, before trying to squirm out of the request, “but I just finished the fall of my freshman year. I’m hardly qualified for this assignment.”

Kat was undaunted. “I’m not asking for your help because of your academic prowess, Hannah. You know Pierce. That makes you qualified enough in my book.”

Hannah exhaled deeply. She wasn’t sure that she’d be any better at this than Kat. But the woman was looking at her with pleading eyes. She knew there was no way she could decline.

Besides, if taking over this project could give Kat a mental break and prevent her from going further down the rabbit hole, that alone would justify her involvement. And in the back of her head, there was another reason she considered doing it. If Kat wasn’t thinking about the case, she was less likely to show up unannounced at the hospital again and do something rash.

Of course, Hannah didn’t trust that depending on what she found, she might not do the same thing.

“Okay,” she replied reluctantly. “I’ll do it. But only because I love you.”

Kat leaned over and gave her a hug. Hannah could smell the mustiness on her.

”One condition, though,” she added. ”You have to shower right now.”

Kat smiled weakly and nodded, getting up immediately. As she watched her go, Hannah already began to wonder if she was making a terrible mistake.