CHAPTER FOUR
Ryan felt guilty.
Normally, he wouldn’t confide in a 19-year-old, especially not one who happened to be his wife’s little sister. But this was an unusual situation.
Maybe it was the fact that he was still a little drained from having been poisoned. Maybe it was the medication he was on which made him groggy and a little loopy. Maybe it was that Hannah wasn’t a typical 19-year-old, and, with her personal experience, she might actually be able to help. Or maybe it was just that his concern had finally overwhelmed his natural inclination to keep things close to the vest.
Whatever the reason, when she brought the homemade chicken soup she’d just prepared for him for lunch over to the couch, he asked her to sit down.
“What’s up?” she asked, taking a seat. Her expression suggested she was already wary of what topic he might be about to broach.
“I need your advice,” he said.
“You need my advice?” she repeated, disbelieving.
“I do,” he admitted. “You may actually be the one person in the world who can help me out. But I also need your discretion.”
“What does that mean?” she asked guardedly.
“For now, what I want to discuss needs to stay between you and me,” he said. “We might be able to share it later, but for now, I want to keep the circle tight. Can you promise me that?”
“I don’t usually make promises without knowing what I’m getting myself into.”
“Fair enough,” he said. He would have reacted the same way. “I guess I’ll just have to trust your judgment. I’m worried about Jessie.”
Hannah didn’t respond. Instead, she readjusted herself on the sofa, waiting to hear what came next. Ryan didn’t love being in this position. He liked being in charge in most conversations and right now—weak and emotionally vulnerable—he felt nowhere close to being “in charge.”
“Let me back up a minute,” he said. “I hate to bring up a difficult time, but I’m sure you recall the challenges you faced last year when you felt a constant urge to…inflict punishment on people you considered wrongdoers.”
“You mean the bloodlust, my desire to kill folks that I deemed unworthy?” she said flatly. “The one that made me spend a few months in an in-patient facility and undergo intensive therapy? Yeah, I remember it pretty well. Why?”
He debated how best to raise the issue at hand, then decided to just spit it out. With his head fuzzier than usual, he didn’t have the energy or patience to be diplomatic.
“I think your sister may be in a similar situation,” he said.
To his surprise, Hannah shrugged.
“We already knew that,” she replied. “She admitted to me a long time ago that one of the reasons that she studied forensic psychology and became a profiler in the first place was because she wanted to redirect those feelings into something productive. So rather than pour her energy into personally making these people pay, she’d catch them and turn them over to the justice system. That’s how she channels those urges into something worthwhile.”
“Right,” Ryan said, not sure how make his point clear.
“And,” she continued, “that’s part of why I help other students out at school. By finding solutions to their problems so they don’t have to go to campus police, I feel like I’m doing an amateur version of the same thing. I’m helping people, but it really helps me too.”
“And both Jessie and I are so glad that you’ve found that outlet,” he told her, “even if we do worry a little about who you choose to help.”
“I’ll admit that I made one bad call,” Hannah said. “But now I do more background research on the folks who approach me so they’re less likely to try to—you know—assault me in a secluded corner of the college library.”
Hannah was referring to the student who made up having a stalker so he could get her alone to “discuss the case,” when his real motives were much darker in nature. In the end, it hadn’t gone too well for him, as Hannah’s self-defense training left him writhing in pain on the floor. But in Ryan’s view, the incident had one small positive: it was a reminder to Hannah that not everyone who approached had the purest of motives.
“We appreciate that,” he said, realizing that despite his best intentions, he was still stalling. “But setting that aside, Jessie’s struggling. Lately, she hasn’t just been catching people and turning them over for prosecution. She has been inflicting some retribution of her own.”
Hannah took in his words. When she replied, it was slowly.
“Well, some of the people you guys catch fight back, right? They don’t always give up and offer their wrists to be cuffed. Occasionally, a physical response is required.”
“That’s absolutely true,” he acknowledged. “The people we pursue are incredibly dangerous. We never know what they’re capable of when we corner them, and sometimes, taking them down is an ugly business. But I’m talking about after they’ve been subdued, when they’re no longer threats.”
“What do you mean?” Hannah asked.
“I mean that in at least three instances recently, Jessie was in such a state of rage that I feared she might kill the suspect after they’d been taken down. And the last two times, I worry that if I hadn’t said something to snap her out of it, she’d have gone through with it. With the guy who poisoned me, she was about a half-second from sending a rolling pin handle through the guy’s mouth and out the back of his spine. Frankly, I’m a little concerned about what might happen on the case she’s working today.”
“But she didn’t actually kill the guy,” Hannah said, sounding defensive on her sister’s behalf.
“No, but she came close,” Ryan insisted. “And Internal Affairs was worried enough to do their own investigation. She was cleared, but that might have been more because of her reputation and the intensely challenging circumstances of the situation than anything else. She knows she went too far.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she’s acknowledged it and because she’s addressing it with Dr. Lemmon in therapy,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t be revealing that either, but I want you to know the severity of things.”
“Okay,” Hannah said, leaning against the back of the couch, “so how’s it going?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan admitted. “Remember that she was on medical leave until today for the injuries she sustained when she took down the poisoner. This will be her first time in the field since then. There’s no telling if the work she’s been doing with Lemmon will get the job done. But I’m worried that it won’t.”
“Why not?”
“It didn’t for you,” he pointed out. “As you said, you ended up going to a secluded facility for months to work through what was happening to you.”
“Well, kind of,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Going to that place helped,” she said, “although if you’ll recall, there were issues there that complicated my recovery. But I still had to eventually come back to the real world and put what I’d learned into practice. I had to face challenging situations and navigate them to see if the work I’d done there was useful.”
“And was it?”
“I think so,” Hannah said, “but not in a vacuum. It was an accumulation of things. I used the techniques I’d learned there. But I also became more cognizant of what was valuable to me, which was the people in my life. I didn’t want to lose the friends and family I’d created over the last few years. Keeping that front and center in my mind and in my gut made a big difference. And working these cases at school has been good too. Like I said, it allows me to redirect those feelings somewhere useful, which is what Jessie is already doing.”
“I’m not sure it’s enough,” Ryan said before taking a slurp of soup.
“Well, it’s not like Jessie can just take time off to go to a facility,” Hannah told him. “I was gone for months, and I assume she’d have to give some kind of explanation for her absence. ‘I’m trying to reduce the urge to murder bad people’ probably wouldn’t go over too well with Captain Parker. Besides, she’s so well-known that his presence would probably get out publicly anyway. That would be disastrous. She has to find a way to deal with this that doesn’t put her at the mercy of other people.”
“Any suggestions?” Ryan asked.
“Not off the top of my head,” she said.
“Maybe you could talk to her.”
Hannah looked appalled.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want me to talk to her on the same day that she’s starting back at work, which also happens to be the day that she’s secretly stressing over the trial of the man who tried to murder her last fall?”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
“Ryan,” Hannah said gently, “you’ve been heavily medicated for the last few weeks, so I’ll give you a pass. But I notice her tense up every time she watches the news about Mark Haddonfield on TV. In case you missed it, the lawyers wrapped up final arguments on Friday. The jury resumes deliberations tomorrow.”
“I guess I did miss it,” he conceded.
He obviously knew about the ongoing trial of the obsessed college student who had tried to kill Jessie when she wouldn’t make him her profiling protégé. But he hadn’t realized it was so far along.
“I guess so,” she agreed. “And that’s not her only stressor. You do still remember her best friend, Kat Gentry, right?”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” he chided.
Kat was not just Jessie’s best friend, she was also a private detective dealing with some issues of her own. Among them was mourning her fiancé, Mitch, who’d been murdered just months earlier. Add to that the falling out she and Jessie had over some information that Jessie had held back from her, and they’d been on the outs for several weeks, until reconciling only recently.
“Just making sure,” Hannah said. “Well, the ladies may have patched up their personal differences after both of you nearly died when taking on the poisoner, but Kat is still obsessed with Ash Pierce, and Jessie doesn’t know how to help her.”
Ryan must have been more druggy these last few weeks than he realized, because he hadn’t picked up on that either. Ash Pierce was a hitwoman who had tortured and nearly killed Kat last summer. She was currently being held in the same jail complex as Haddonfield while she awaited a trial of her own.
“I thought Kat had moved on from that,” he said.
“That’s what she wanted you to think, because she didn’t want to worry a guy who was recovering from nearly having his insides liquified,” she explained. “But for those of us not on paid meds—like me and Jessie—it’s pretty clear that Kat hasn’t let it go. She’s still fixated on Pierce and making sure that if the justice system doesn’t take the woman down, she finishes the job. All of this is to say, maybe now—with so many stressors in my sister’s life—isn’t the perfect time to confront her about her violent urges.”
Ryan shook his head adamantly, making his bowl of soup quake and nearly sending some of the broth over the side.
“I would argue the opposite,” he said. “With all that weighing down on her, she’s at even greater risk of exploding than I realized. Maybe talking to you could let some of the air out of her hate ballon, rather than risking it popping.”
“I don’t know what I could say that would help,” Hannah objected, ignoring his clumsy metaphor. “Besides, she’s already working with the best psychiatrist going when it comes to this stuff. I’d just be in the way.”
“Do you really think so?” Ryan challenged.
“Sure,” Hannah said. “Dr. Lemmon is a world class psychiatrist who used to be a profiler, understands killers, and has been working with Jessie for over a decade. I’m just the half-sister she only discovered she had two years ago.”
“You’re a hell of a lot more than that,” Ryan assured her emphatically. “First of all, forget the ‘half’ part. You’re her sister, and she loves you. Secondly, you’ve experienced the same thing she’s going through and come out the other end. You share the same serial killer father, which can’t be a coincidence when it comes to these urges. You’re connected in ways that no one else is. Is there anyone else in the world more equipped to understand what she’s going through?”
Hannah sat with that for a minute. While she thought, Ryan took several more slurps of the soup.
“This is amazing, by the way,” he said
“Thanks,” she replied absent-mindedly.
He took another spoonful.
“I’m scared that she’d be mad if I tried to talk to her about this,” she finally said.
“She might be mad,” he admitted, “but it won’t be at you. I’m the one who violated her trust by telling you. You’re just trying to help your big sister out. I’ll be in the doghouse, but you’re in the clear.”
Hannah rubbed her temples. Both Ryan and Jessie had noted that the habit was a sign that she was deep in thought. He said nothing, not wanting to interrupt the 19-year-old who might be the key to saving his wife.
“I guess I’d start by asking why she was doing so well for so long, only to backslide recently. Can you think of anything?”
“So much has happened lately that I’m not sure I could pin down one particular source of trouble.”
Hannah scrunched up her face in concentration.
“I’m sure Dr. Lemmon has been over all this with her,” she said, “but I can’t help but wonder—did something happen to her recently? Or did something maybe happen inside her