CHAPTER ONE
Jessie Hunt sat in mid-morning L.A. traffic, trying to stay focused on the choked highway and not on the conflicting emotions bouncing around inside her.
It was less than half an hour ago that she'd said goodbye to Hannah Dorsey, her younger half-sister.
Dropping Hannah off for the fall quarter of her sophomore year at UC Irvine, where she was a double major in psychology and criminology, should have been easier than it was freshman year.
But it ended up being even harder, with good reason.
After all, it wasn’t every college sophomore that had to transition from being nearly killed by a vengeful hitwoman to prepping to attend her first day of Neuroscience of Perception. Jessie shook her head at the thought of what her little sister had endured over the summer.
It had started when Hannah’s friend and fellow student, Finn Anderton, was stabbed multiple times by a mysterious attacker, leaving him in a coma for weeks. Only later did she learn that the assailant was the very guy she had started dating at school, Dallas Henry.
Dallas was secretly a devoted incel who had made it his mission to crush “uppity” women.
He considered Jessie, with her work as a criminal profiler and her history of catching male killers to be a prime target.
And his chosen way to punish her was to seduce, then torture and kill Hannah, who had barely escaped him.
But that was only part of her nightmarish summer break.
When Jessie thought about what else Hannah had to brave, she had a brief, unhealthy urge to ram the car right in front of her.
Instead she took several deep breaths and reminded herself that the horrors were over now.
Or at least that's what she'd told Hannah when they were setting up her apartment bedroom.
“Dallas is in jail awaiting trial,” she reminded Hannah as she folded several t-shirts and put them in a dresser drawer. “And Ash Pierce is—no longer a problem. You can have a fresh start this year.”
Neither she nor Hannah commented on the specifics of why hitwoman Pierce wasn’t an issue anymore. They both knew.
“I hope so,” Hannah said as she put a Stevie Nicks poster on the wall above her bed. “I feel like I’ve barely been keeping my head above water lately. And then I feel guilty for focusing on my stuff.”
“Why?” Jessie asked.
“I’m still worried about Ryan and Kat,” she said.
Ryan was Ryan Hernandez, Jessie’s husband and an LAPD detective.
Kat was Kat Gentry, a private investigator who was also Jessie’s best friend.
Both had been badly injured in the brutal home invasion attack executed by Pierce, a former CIA assassin who’d later become a freelance hitwoman.
Hannah had also suffered a concussion in the attack.
Had Jessie not arrived in time to take Pierce out once and for all, they’d surely all be dead.
“They’re on the mend,” Jessie reminded her. “That’s why I felt comfortable coming to help you move in.”
It was true. Both Ryan and Kat were doing much better now.
While Hannah had recovered quickly from her concussion, the other two had taken much longer.
Pierce had tortured Ryan before the others arrived, luxuriously slicing deep into his face and body over two dozen times.
Then she’d rub lemon juice into the gaping wounds.
He would pass out repeatedly, only to be revived by smelling salts so she could carve into him again.
His 27 “engravings,” as Pierce had called them while she made them, required well over 300 stitches.
Luckily, or more likely by design, none of them had nicked an important artery.
Jessie suspected that Pierce didn’t want him bleeding out too quickly.
But he’d been the lucky one, at least physically (his emotional well-being was another matter entirely).
And while he would have many of the external scars forever, at least they didn’t prevent him from moving about.
Kat didn’t get off so easy. She and Pierce had ended up in vicious hand-to-hand combat that left her with a broken nose, cheekbone, and right wrist. But all that was preferable to the multiple cracked ribs she suffered.
Those were what had her bedridden for much of the last month.
It was only in the last week that she’d really been able to move around without constant pain.
That was why Jessie had everyone stay at the house, where she could care for them. Though she’d had the help of a day nurse early on, she’d also taken a monthlong sabbatical from work so she could concentrate on them.
But in the last week, as Kat improved, she stopped using the nurse and handled things mostly on her own, with the assistance of Hannah.
She’d left her two patients on their own for the first time when she took Hannah to school.
Irvine was only an hour away from home but it felt like a big step for all of them.
She had decided to change the subject away from Ryan and Kat to assuage her sister’s unjustified guilt.
“When are you planning to see Finn?” she asked.
Finn had recovered enough from his stabbing and subsequent coma to return to school as well, though with limitations, according to Hannah.
“I’ll go over a little later, once he’s had a chance to get settled,” she said. “I’ll check to see if he needs anything.”
“You’re a good friend,” Jessie told her, though she knew that at one point, the two of them had almost been something more. She didn’t mention that.
There were a lot of things she and Hannah weren’t mentioning these days and the current status of relationships with one-time almost-boyfriends was the least daunting among them. Far more challenging was the secret they were keeping from the rest of the world.
Neither had mentioned to anyone else, nor to each other, what had happened that evening when Jessie stopped Ash Pierce’s rampage in their home. She hadn’t just “stopped” her. She shot her dead.
Technically, Pierce was still a threat at the time, with a knife nearby and accessible.
But the truth was that Jessie had already shot the hitwoman once in the abdomen, mostly incapacitating her.
But then she baited Pierce into going for the knife, and when she did, Jessie shot her in the chest, leaving her finally, definitively dead.
It was only then that she noticed that Hannah had regained consciousness after the blow to the head from Pierce that had knocked her out. She’d seen the whole thing. But her only words about the matter, then or since, were “it will be our secret.”
And it had been. When Jessie filled out her report about the incident, she implied (though carefully avoided saying outright) that Pierce was about to fling the knife at her, leaving her no choice but to shoot a second time.
For her part, Hannah claimed that she hadn’t fully awakened until after the incident took place.
The Force Investigation Division did a perfunctory inquiry, but considering that Pierce had broken into the house and assaulted three people before Jessie shot her, there wasn’t much inclination to push too hard.
Ash Pierce was a coldhearted killer, responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen people that they knew of, including five law enforcement officers.
Jessie was deemed to have acted in self-defense and was fully exonerated.
She had authorization to return to work when her sabbatical ended, which happened to be tomorrow.
She knew she should feel some measure of guilt.
After all, for most of the last year, she’d been battling a kind of bloodlust, a desire to mete out violent justice against the perpetrators she encountered.
It was only recently that she finally felt she had gotten a handle on that urge, with the help of an unusual meditation technique she’d learned from a professional baseball player.
But as far as she was concerned, this wasn’t a failure of that technique. When she shot and killed Ash Pierce, she wasn’t acting from a place of rage or vengeance. It was simply a matter of practicality.
Pierce had sworn to slaughter everyone Jessie loved before coming after her.
She’d come close on multiple occasions and twice escaped from custody after capture.
When Jessie had her gun pointed at the woman, she couldn’t help but think that it could all happen again.
If Pierce could escape twice, she could escape a third time, and if she did, she’d surely come after Jessie’s family once more.
That was unacceptable. They couldn’t all live under the constant threat posed by a woman who had dedicated her life to destroying them. It had to end. So Jessie had ended it. And she didn’t feel bad about it. Mostly.
She had to concede, if only to herself, that if she was truly fine with everything that went down, she probably would have told her psychiatrist about it by now.
After all, for the last decade, she had told Dr. Janice Lemmon pretty much everything she felt.
But she’d kept this to herself. Even when Lemmon had asked her about the incident directly, she’d deflected, saying her focus right now was on the well-being of her loved ones.
But it was clear that Lemmon wasn’t going to let it go. At some point, she would press her on the issue again. And when that time came, Jessie would have to decide how honest to be.
But that day wasn’t today. This final Sunday before returning to work would be about making sure that Ryan and Kat had everything they needed to be comfortable while she was gone at work.
Kat was already making noises about being ready to go back to her apartment soon, so this week would be a good stress test to see if she was up to it.
Jessie’s phone rang. Even before she answered, she was guessing who it might be.
Hannah, saying they’d forgotten something essential she needed for her apartment?
Ryan, wondering if she might pick up some ice cream on the way home?
Dr. Lemmon, asking to move up their next appointment so that she could interrogate her more?
To her surprise, it was none of those people.
Instead it was Captain Gaylene Parker, who ran LAPD’s Central Police Station, where the unit that Jessie and Ryan worked with was based.
Homicide Special Section, or HSS, was a small unit, consisting of five detectives and two researchers, that specialized in cases with high profiles or intense media scrutiny—typically involving multiple victims or serial killers.
“Hi Captain,” she said, putting the call on speaker. “Everything okay?”
“Busy, as usual,” Parker said, maintaining the same no-nonsense, borderline curt demeanor that Jessie had become used to. “So busy in fact, that I could use your help.”
“Well, then I guess it’s a good thing that I’m starting back up tomorrow.”
“I was actually hoping you might be able to move that up a day,” Parker said.
Jessie waited for her to say why but the captain remained silent, apparently waiting for her to agree. But she wasn’t going to just upend her schedule without a pretty compelling reason.
“What’s going on?” she finally asked.
“A woman was found dead in her West Adams home about an hour ago,” Parker explained. “It was originally assigned to Southwest Station, until I got a call.”
Jessie suspected who the call was from even before Parker said it.
There was only one person with the authority to summarily transfer a case from one station to another: the chief of police.
And since the current chief, Roy Decker, used to be the captain of Central Station, it was almost certainly him.
“Decker?” she asked.
“That’s right,” Parker told her. “He learned that the victim’s husband is a major benefactor to the LAPD and has apparently raised close to $20 million for various police causes in recent years. He said he wants people he trusts implicitly on this one, and there’s no unit he trusts more than HSS.”
“Makes sense,” Jessie said, “considering that he originally set up the unit. But why me?”
“Officially, because almost everyone else in the unit is occupied with a case. We’ve been pretty short-handed with both you and Hernandez out.
The only detective I have available to send is Sam Goodwin.
Unofficially, Chief Decker specifically asked for you.
He said there’s a complicating component to the case beyond the prominence of the husband, and he needs someone who can navigate things delicately. ”
“What does that mean?” Jessie asked.
“I actually have no idea,” Parker conceded. “That’s all he told me. So are you willing to come back early, Hunt?”
Jessie sighed. She was definitely intrigued, although she had apprehension about leaving Ryan at home. Then again, The way this had been framed, she didn’t really have much choice.
“I just need to make a few calls to square things away at home. But I think I’m good.”
“Thank you,” Parker said. “I’ll send you the address. Goodwin will meet you there. And Hunt?”
“Yes?”
“Remember, tread carefully on this one.”