CHAPTER SIX
Kat Gentry sat in her tiny booth at the coffeehouse and for the third time in the last few minutes, glanced at her phone. It was 3:04, exactly two minutes later than the last time she’d checked.
She knew that she shouldn’t be here, that this wasn’t the most productive use of her time, and yet, she didn’t intend to stop. Later on, she planned to stop by the home of her best friend Jessie to check in on how Ryan was doing. She knew his recovery had been going slower than hoped.
Since she and Jessie had mended fences, she’d been by several times. She’d first visited them in the hospital the night they’d had the confrontation with the poisoner. Hannah had returned from school on the weekends to help out, but during the week, Jessie was mostly alone to watch Ryan, so Kat had been by the house almost every other day since then, bringing meals and helping keep an eye on Ryan so that Jessie could grab some quick catnaps. But her visit today would have to wait.
Right now, she had other plans. Specifically, she got up and left the coffeehouse, making the short trek to the Los Angeles County Courthouse, which she intended to walk the entire exterior of, and not for the first time. This was the building where two important things were happening.
First off, jury deliberations would resume here tomorrow in the trial of Mark Haddonfield, who had caused them all so much pain. In addition to killing multiple people and trying to do the same to Jessie, he was ultimately responsible for the murder of Kat’s fiancé, Mitch Connor. It was based on instructions in Haddonfield’s online manifesto that a crazed acolyte had tried to shoot Kat. Mitch had leapt in front of her, taking the bullet that ultimately killed him.
That was the main reason that she’d been so upset with Jessie. She’d learned that her best friend had met with Haddonfield in the months since Mitch’s death to discuss a case she was working on. That treachery had cut her to the quick.
Eventually, she learned that Jessie was only meeting with the killer as part of a deal in which he retracted his manifesto and ordered his followers to leave Jessie’s loved ones alone. As long as she continued to discuss some of her cases with him, he would refrain from calling for violence against those in her life. Kat still felt ill when she thought about the two of them poring over a case file together, but she’d come to accept that it was the lesser of two evils.
And she would be happy to see Haddonfield convicted—which was a virtual certainty—and then sentenced to life in prison. But she wouldn’t be in the courtroom for that event because she had other business to attend to.
In another part of the vast complex, there was an evidentiary hearing planned in the trial of Ash Pierce, which was scheduled to begin next week. That was where Kat would be. As she wandered along the sidewalk surrounding the courthouse, sipping her coffee and looking for all the world like just another regular gal enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon stroll, her mind was moving a mile a minute.
She kept her eyes on the exterior of the huge building, looking for any weak spots where she could get in or where Pierce could get out. Kat had every right to be in the courtroom, especially as one of Pierce’s victims. But that wasn’t her focal point right now. She was looking for an unmanned entry point, where she could access the place without supervision or having to surrender her weapon. She knew it was a longshot. These places were designed as fortresses. But that didn’t stop her from looking.
She knew that if she found a point of entry that she could take advantage of, then Ash Pierce would almost certainly know about it as an escape option too. Kat had learned the hard way just what Pierce was capable of, and she put nothing past her.
She first been fooled by the woman when Pierce pretended to be Violet Sheridan, an abused wife who came to Kat’s detective agency for help in creating a new identity so she could escape her violent husband. But that wasn’t Pierce’s goal. Instead, her plan all along was to get Kat—and Hannah—to a secluded location.
It turned out that she was actually a professional hitwoman, who’d been paid to torture and kill Kat (all on a livestream) by an incarcerated client that Jessie had caught. The imprisoned woman wanted to exact revenge by making those close to Jessie suffer. That seemed to be a big thing with people that Jessie caught.
And it had almost worked. Pierce tricked her, then kidnapped her and took her out to the desert, where she completed the torture part of her plan. She was about to do the “murder on a livestream” part when Hannah was able to first find them, and then surprise and subdue Pierce.
Technically, everything seemed to be okay after that. Pierce was imprisoned, and everyone moved on. That is, except for Kat, who suffered from constant nightmares reliving the brutal horrors that Pierce had put her through.
And it took a lot to mess with Kat’s head. After all, she’d been an Army Ranger in Afghanistan, 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.
That experience still haunted her, but not in the same visceral way that this had. She’d volunteered for the military and knew the risks going in. That had helped her come to terms with what happened to her there. But being tortured within an inch of her life by a psychotic assassin, especially when she was a highly trained soldier? That was harder to accept.
She’d been told repeatedly that she shouldn’t be too hard on herself. Ash Pierce was no normal enemy. After she’d been caught, they learned the truth about her. The woman was formerly a Marines Special Operations element leader and later, a CIA asset who conducted covert assassinations before becoming a hitwoman for hire.
One would never know it to look at her, though. Pierce, in her mid-thirties, had a tiny frame, short black hair, and pale skin, all of which together suggested someone fragile. Ash Pierce was not fragile.
Of course, the very reason that Kat supposedly shouldn’t have felt like a sucker for being outwitted by Pierce was why the authorities should have taken every precaution with her. And yet, somehow, they’d fallen short.
That lack of caution emerged when she was being transported from the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, California to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility just over a mile from where Kat now stood. Pierce had managed to escape the armored prison truck she was in, killing four guards in the process.
And did the assassin, who had multiple fake identities, make a run for it? No. Instead, she decided to hunt down Hannah, the one person who’d gotten the drop on her. It must have really stuck in the craw of the experienced killer that she’d been outmaneuvered by a then-high school girl.
Luckily, when Pierce found Hannah, Kat was with her, and together they brought the woman down in a fight that ultimately left Pierce in a coma. It looked like she might remain that way forever. But when she woke up a few months later, she conveniently claimed to have lost all memory of her time as a hired killer. That was what had Kat wandering the entirety of the courthouse complex now. She didn’t buy it.
Even though multiple experts claimed that the amnesia was likely legitimate (including Dr. Janice Lemmon, who shared her opinion with Kat but officially kept it off the record), Kat was sure the supposed memory loss was a ruse. She suspected that Pierce was faking it to either win the sympathy of potential jurors at trial or to get the security contingent guarding her to let down their guard so she could escape again.
Kat’s friends tried to reassure her that even if a jury bought the amnesia defense, it wouldn’t matter. Several of Pierce’s murders, including the cold-blooded slaughter of the four prison transport guards, were caught on video. That couldn’t be unseen.
But Kat wasn’t so sure. Ash Pierce had tricked her into thinking she was a fragile, abused wife. If she could do that, imagine what she could do to less cynical, more emotionally susceptible jurors. That was what kept Kat up at night and it was why she scoured every inch of the courthouse, looking for vulnerabilities. What if Pierce was set free or decided to go free on her own?
If Kat was being honest with herself, there was something else that kept her up at night, too. Sometimes she wondered if her fixation on Pierce might some way to compensate for what she’d lost. Mitch was dead, but the man ultimately responsible for it was virtually assured of spending the rest of his life behind bars. That was out of her hands. But if she could ensure that Ash Pierce was properly punished, maybe that could somehow honor Mitch’s memory. Intellectually, she knew that Pierce facing justice wouldn’t heal the wound that pained her each day. But maybe it could be a Band-Aid.
So even though she’d promised both Jessie and Hannah that she wouldn’t obsess, here she was. She’d made the decision that if the legal system failed in its obligation to punish Ash Pierce, Kat would be there to pick up the slack.
They could call it obsession if they wanted, but Kat was at peace with that. After all, that was merely the negative perspective. From her point of view, she was simply on another mission, one she intended to complete, regardless of the consequences.