CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
After four hours without moving, Ash Pierce stood up to stretch.
It might not seem like it to an observer, but surveilling Jessie Hunt’s house was no easy task. And after four full days—and sometimes nights—of sitting in a chair staring across the street, her body was feeling the strain.
She activated the motion sensor so that she would get an alert if there was any movement near the house while she stepped away. Then she moved from Linda Crewes’s dining room into the living room, which had hardwood. That would make it easier for her to do the mini workout she had planned.
After taking off her socks and warming up for a minute, she prepped to do a series of burpees. She hoped that it would not only loosen things up, but disperse some of the nervous energy that she’d developed sitting in that chair in front of the window for so long.
It had been like this since Sunday evening, when she finally arrived here from Lake Tahoe.
There had been one brief hiccup along the way.
When she pulled onto the street, an officer standing beside his patrol car had waved her down and asked for identification.
She happily handed over Linda’s driver’s license and pointed at the house fifty yards away, explaining that after driving for eight hours, almost non-stop, she was ready to get home and crash hard.
She’d expected additional questions but there were none. The officer waved her through. She used the remote in the console to open the garage door, pulled in, and closed it after her. She hadn’t left Linda’s house since.
In the interim, she’d gotten familiar with the routines of both the police who patrolled the neighborhood, and with Jessie and her husband, Detective Ryan Hernandez.
The schedule for the cops was pretty straightforward.
They circled the block at specific times and would periodically park out front, usually around the time that the couple was leaving or returning.
But Hunt and Hernandez’s patterns were more haphazard, dictated by the cases they were working. They seemed to generally leave the house together around 7:30 each morning. But when they returned home, and whether it was together or solo, varied wildly.
Ash took in a long, slow breath, squatted deeply, put her palms on the floor, and drove her legs behind her.
She did a pushup, then hopped back into a squat before jumping as high as she could.
She repeated the process twenty times. When she was done, she was panting heavily.
She took a sip of water and set a two-minute timer to recover before she started in on the lunges.
While she waited, her thoughts returned to the home across the street and two houses over.
Though she hadn’t been able to access the dwelling’s structural plans from county records (they were mysteriously and suspiciously missing), she was able to draw some conclusions about the home’s security measures based on what she saw.
There were three panels by the front door.
In addition to the standard numeric code keypad, it appeared that one panel was for fingerprint identification and the other was a retinal scan.
All of them had to be cleared before entry through the steel door was possible.
It was obvious that she wasn’t getting in that way.
Even if she had the technical skill to bypass the keypad, and somehow got hold of the finger and eyeball of a registered entrant, the multiple cameras affixed to streetlights—some of which had facial recognition capability—would take note of the woman trying to get in.
It was too big a risk. Besides, if she had the finger and eyeball of a resident, her mission would already likely have been accomplished.
There was also the garage entrance, which she suspected had the same security protocols.
But that was harder to sneak up on. Someone approaching it would draw far more notice than a person walking up to the front door.
And usually—though not always—Hunt and Hernandez would close the garage door before even exiting their vehicle, making accessing them when they were vulnerable nearly impossible.
Ash had hoped that at some point over the last week, either Hannah Dorsey or Kat Gentry would stop by. If she got that lucky, then there would be no need to gain entry to the house. She could just follow them back to wherever they were staying and get them there.
But they were clearly aware of that too.
Each of them had to know that with her at large, they were targets, so they were wisely keeping away.
Ash had (very carefully) checked out Gentry’s office and apartment, but she’d long since moved out of both.
And despite Ash’s best efforts, she couldn’t find out where the woman had relocated to.
In fact, it wasn’t even certain that Gentry was still in L.A.
But Ash suspected that she was. She and Hunt were best friends.
They’d want to stay close. And there was no way the profiler would send her little sister out of town where she couldn’t get to her quickly if necessary.
If Ash had to guess, Gentry was living in some off-the-books apartment with serious security, and that for the time being, Dorsey was staying with her.
She’d considered visiting UC Irvine, where Dorsey was about to start her sophomore year, and had an on-campus apartment waiting for her. But ultimately, she chose not to. It was too risky to visit a university campus rife with cameras and potential undercover cops.
Besides, there was no way that Dorsey was moving into her place with Ash after her. She’d be a sitting duck and knew it. Hannah Dorsey was a brat who deserved to be put down, but she wasn’t stupid. Ash had learned the hard way not to underestimate the girl.
Unfortunately, patience was a limited commodity for her.
As she began her lunges, she did some mental calculations.
The owner of this house, Linda Crewes, hadn’t been heard from since her Sunday morning breakfast in Lake Tahoe.
While her work as a real estate agent allowed her a lot of personal freedom, there were still people she interacted with on a regular basis.
Using the woman’s phone, Ash had managed to postpone multiple home showings until next week, claiming that she’d caught a bug while at the Tahoe conference.
There was an all-hands meeting at Crewes’s realty office tomorrow morning, which she’d tried to beg off of.
But her manager said that even if she couldn’t come in, she should call in on Zoom.
She could always keep the camera off, claiming she looked like death warmed over.
But by even participating, she was risking making a verbal mistake that could draw attention.
And what if a friendly co-worker decided to stop by unexpectedly with some chicken soup? It wasn’t out of the question.
She’d loaded up with groceries at the travel plaza on the way here, so she hadn’t needed to go out and shop, but those supplies were starting to run out.
On a few occasions, she’d used Linda’s food delivery apps to order dinner, but every time she did that, it was a risk.
What if the driver was friendly with Linda and expected some interaction?
She didn’t want to do anything to raise alarm bells.
Most concerning was Crewes’s body. Ash thought she’d done a decent job of burying her, but she knew better than to count on it. A windstorm could expose the mound. An off-trail hiker could stumble across the grave. Animals might smell her rotting flesh and dig her up.
If she hadn’t been discovered yet, it was only a matter of time. And even though identifying her would be near impossible, a missing persons case would be opened. That would start a ticking clock that would invariably end with someone figuring out who she was.
Once that happened, things would move fast. Smart people would realize where Crewes lived and the authorities would descend on the home. Ash needed to have completed her work and moved on by then.
She realized that she’d lost count of how many lunges she’d done.
Only her burning quads told her that she’d reached her limit.
She stopped and stood upright, enjoying the deep ache in her muscles.
She noticed that there was smeared blood on the hardwood floor too.
It took a second to realize that she’d done so many lunges that the skin under her bare feet had been rubbed raw and bloody. She simply hadn’t noticed.
She wiped her brow and made a decision. With all the variables at play, she probably needed to act tonight, whether the timing was perfect or not.
The waiting was over. It was time to pull the trigger—literally.