Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Victim Data
JAMIE
Several weeks earlier …
Single. Age 41, Jamie Frisco doodled on a notepad, tapping her fleece-lined slippers to the rhythm of her raging client’s rant.
A snarling, red-headed executive named Winston Birch who, in a cruel twist of irony, was also forty-one, pushed his face closer to his computer screen, distorting his blotchy nose across her Zoom feed.
She let him rant while she frowned at the notepad. Not quite the same thing as Single, age 31.
No, not in the slightest. Also, forgot to add female.
Single, female, age forty-one. Vastly different from single, male, age forty-one.
A single, male, age forty-one gets tapped to be the Bachelor on reality TV dating shows.
Or goes on adventure vacations and comes home with a model-type girlfriend after having a meet-cute over desert lizards or locally sourced kombucha.
Not so for single, female, age forty-one.
That was more like victim data on an episode of Law she’d met her share. It had been two days since her dreaded forty-first birthday and Jamie was in a decidedly dark place.
“I am the talent here, do you understand!” Winston bellowed. She nodded to the screen but privately observed that he did not seem to be suffering from the same existential crisis.
Winston Birch was the CEO of a cosmetics company who was facing a charge of harassment after telling offensive jokes about women’s breasts as they age.
She had been brought in as his professional performance coach to perform a bit of psychological triage, stem the damage, and hopefully get him back on track before a lawsuit was filed.
Fat chance, though. Jamie’s assessment of Winston was grim. Narcissistic. Arrogant. And …
“I’m not gonna get canceled, you hear me? Not by that ancient shrew!”
… a total lack of empathy.
God, she missed talking to serial killers. Gone were the days Jamie spent transfixed, listening to and assessing sociopaths and criminals. As a forensic psychologist for the Los Angeles Superior Court system, Jamie’s unique ability had been perfectly suited to her chosen profession.
As far back as she could remember, Jamie had a gift, a hidden talent.
She could read people—body language, speech patterns, eye movement—and instinctually understand a person’s energy.
She could see things others couldn’t immediately see.
She thought of it as a form of intuitive intelligence, a soft skill in picking up energies that radiated from people.
A furtive glance to the right signaled recalling a memory, a studious glance to the left, a lie.
Latent fear, unspoken shame, simmering rage, the stirrings of love—none of it stood a chance of hiding from Jamie’s powers of perception.
She didn’t know where it came from or how it worked, but she embraced this mental superpower from a young age, tapping into the subtle vibrations, sensing the truths that lay underneath the facade.
She called them out in descriptors, usually three, sometimes more.
Her assessments were almost always dead, solid perfect.
Her raw, natural skills were helped and honed by a master’s degree in psychology.
A trusted professor and mentor had been so impressed by her abilities that he recommended her to the Los Angeles County Forensic Psychology Unit upon graduation.
Jamie chose to stay in Los Angeles and had impressed her superiors from her first day on the job.
She accurately assessed a petty thief they’d brought in who was also murderous.
Didn’t take them long to connect him back to a couple of unsolved homicides in Boyle Heights.
Her reputation grew, as did her confidence.
Los Angeles was her playground, she knew it well, and there was a growing list of menacing figures there to keep her busy.
Her talents had come in particularly handy in the case of an elusive serial killer who was strangling young women around Monterey Park.
Detectives thought they had a suspect but couldn’t find a link.
Jamie interviewed a janitor, Ken Mun, and after meeting with him for a few minutes she assessed that he was highly intelligent, predatory, proclivity toward fabrics, especially silk.
Her assessment helped detectives finger him and put him behind bars for the murders of seven women, all silk fabric reps who had visited the factory where he worked. It was a shining moment in her career.
Her department heads were pleased. She was looking at becoming a lead profiler herself, and her aspirations pointed her toward Quantico.
Until that night.
The night of no moon.
She still woke up, her body racked with tremors of terror like aftershocks. The lingering feeling of hot, calloused hands wrapped around her throat, the smell of gasoline, his oily sweat filling her nostrils. The night she was nearly murdered.
She gripped her coffee cup, knuckles white, while she reminded herself her perpetrator was locked up in a maximum-security prison with no hope of parole. She was safe.
After the incident, the insultingly benign term her mother used to refer to that night, Jamie took a leave of absence from the Forensic Psych Unit.
Skills that were once so sharp, so clear-eyed and spot-on, had become clouded by fear.
One afternoon, sitting across from a child predator with mother issues, Jamie found herself paralyzed, unable to call up a single defining psychological trait when the monster across the table reached for the pen near her to write down a date. She shrieked and called for the guard.
Jamie walked to her car and drove home in a rare Southern California rain. Somewhere on that drive, her leave of absence turned into a permanent thing.
Now, quite sadly, Jamie used her skills on C-suite executives to help them out of their corporate troubles instead of dissecting the fascinating and warped brains of criminals.
It was not nearly the same kind of charge, not nearly the same kind of meaning, and not nearly the same kind of psycho.
It was only people like Winston—intolerant, entitled, narcissistic—that she dealt with on a daily basis now.
Jamie subtly checked the time on her cell phone and nearly breathed a sigh of relief.
“Winston, I want you to tap into the talent on your team,” Jamie said cheerfully as she put away her notebook. “Your team is starved for leadership. They are waiting for an opportunity to make you shine.”
“They should. I’m amazing,” Winston snapped.
“So, help them help you. And no jokes about the effects of aging,” and gravity, Jamie thought but left out as she continued, “on women as you are the CEO of a cosmetics company that is specifically focused on reducing said effects. I am no CEO, but this seems like a no-brainer. I’ll see you next week. ”
Winston smirked and the screen went black.
She was sure he flipped her the bird right before she ended the Zoom call. Another gratifying day in the trenches.
Jamie sat in a solid funk brought on by a toxic combination of her birthday, her unsatisfying job, and a deeply depressing Instagram post, typical of social media.
She had scrolled past the braggy travel photos of friends in Spain and Costa Rica.
She stopped on a short video of a chubby bulldog trying to get up on a sofa.
Then, she had spotted it. A distant friend of Jamie’s had posted pictures of a baby shower.
She had zoomed in and realized the man standing with the guest of honor was Nathan.
She held her breath when she looked at the series of pictures again.
Nathan Dodson was standing behind a very pregnant woman who was swathed in pink linen and basking in his adoring gaze. He was smiling broadly, without even a hint of the smirk he was famous for. He looked relaxed. Joyful. About to be a father.
Tears sprung to her eyes at the memory of how good it felt to be in his glow.
How much she wanted to make him happy back then.
Which was closely followed by the searing pain of how devastating it had been when she found out the truth of how duplicitous he was, how calculating, how cruel.
She had heard waves crashing in the distance when she called the hotel in Grand Cayman and a female voice picked up, destroying her dreams with a lilting, “Hello.”
“Nope.” She caught herself giving in to the rush of tortured memories and then briskly brushed the tears aside like an emotional windshield wiper.
“Not going down that lane.” She cleared her throat and looked at the post with a more forensic eye.
There did seem to be something forced about the expression on the woman standing next to Nathan, something she recognized.
It was the look of someone who wasn’t quite sure if she was in a dream or in a trap.
She did acknowledge, however, that the woman looked effortlessly beautiful, as if standing under the colors of her own rainbow, the tramp.
Jamie glanced in the mirror at her own reflection and realized grimly that she looked like someone recently revived by a shot of Narcan. She didn’t touch drugs, but she did have a wine hangover.
She sat down with a heavy sigh and did a deep dive on herself.
Single. Forty-one. Unplucked, unshaved, and unloofah-ed over the past few months, nearly completing full transformation from woman to forest ogre.
Possible Chardonnay addict. Eternally scarred by rom-coms from the ’90s where the flawed, plucky girl gets the guy in the end.
But, she recalled, rather unhelpfully, none of those heroines were forty-one.
And Nathan was going to have a baby.
Tears welled again and then quelled as Jamie poured out her cold coffee and poured in last night’s white wine.
She gloomily scrolled through the rest of the photo stream of Nathan, his new wife, his new life. All evidence of her scrubbed from his socials long ago. Had it really been five years? Had life really changed that much?
She was knee-deep in her pity pool when she heard a sharp rapping on her door. She knew the sound of those bony, heartless knuckles. It was followed by a voice that made the hair on her arms stand on end and a perilously high dose of cortisol shoot through her bloodstream.
“Jamie? Open up. It’s your mother.”