by Blake Pierce
“Not really,” Jessie admitted. “I can go back but I’m not sure how much I’ll glean from another visit.”
“Hold off until we have a reason,” Hernandez advised. “If we upset them, then we inevitably upset their sugar daddies. And we don’t want to make any enemies before we have to.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’m going to go find Trembley and see if he’s had any luck hunting down Reyes. What are your plans?” he asked.
“I was thinking of going through the records on Victoria’s phone some more to see if I can find anything out of the ordinary. Do you mind if I use your work station? I still don’t have my own computer.”
“That’s fine. If you need to access any databases, all my log-ins are taped to the inside of my top drawer.”
“Thanks,” Jessie said, pretending but failing to sound casual as he walked off.
“Everything okay?” he asked, noticing the hitch in her voice.
“Yeah, fine,” she assured him.
But everything was not fine. And it was Hernandez’s fault. For reasons she’d have to address with Dr. Lemmon, his use of the phrase “sugar daddies” had made Jessie think of her own father. And it was while she had that thought in her head that he’d mentioned that she could access all the police databases using his log-ins.
That series of events had caused an idea—likely a very bad idea—to pop into her head. She sat there for a long moment, deciding whether to pursue it or just continue following up leads on the Missinger investigation.
Before she had officially made a decision, she found herself typing in the website for the FBI’s unsolved crimes database. She entered Hernandez’s log-in information and waited while the page loaded.
I can still exit the program and no harm will be done.
But then the search screen popped up and she found her fingers on the keyboard typing in a name: Xander Thurman—the proper name of the Ozarks Executioner, her father.
Almost immediately, a litany of criminal incidents began to populate the screen. The first crimes on the list were from years before she was even born, back when her father was a teenager. They included everything from cruelty to animals to petty theft.
She scrolled down the screen, scanning quickly through her father’s criminal history. She was just getting to the details of his first murder victim when she sensed that she was being watched. She swiveled in Hernandez’s seat to find Captain Roy Decker standing directly behind her.
Decker was tall and rail-thin, with only a few wisps of gray hair preventing him from being totally bald. He was in his late fifties but the deep creases in his face made him look a decade older. His sharp nose and beady, penetrating eyes reminded Jessie of an eagle hunting its prey. In this case, she appeared to be that prey.
Decker was one of the Central Station commanders and supervised both her and Hernandez, among many others. He hadn’t hired her—that was done by a special department that liaised with profilers. But he could fire her. And right now, he looked like he wanted to.
“Ms. Hunt, do you want to explain why you’re searching a federal database for information on a serial killer when you’re supposed to be investigating the death of a local socialite?” he asked derisively. “Has the Ozarks Executioner come out of hiding to start injecting rich Hancock Park women with insulin overdoses?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Jessie muttered quietly as she exited the site. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hernandez returning to the desk. She felt her face flush with embarrassment.
“I know you profilers all want to make that big catch that will jump-start your career,” Decker said. “But you can’t use department time and resources to pursue an unrelated cold case when we have an unsolved murder on our hands. Is that too much to ask, Hunt?”
“No sir.”
“Not a great start to your time here,” Decker added.
“That’s my fault, sir,” Hernandez said as he arrived. “I asked Hunt to search the database for recent crimes with similar M.O.s but I didn’t walk her through department restrictions and regulations. It’s my bad.”
Decker looked at him skeptically, clearly not convinced, but unable to prove otherwise.
“Don’t let it happen again,” he said. “I’m too busy to have to deal with this crap.”
“No sir,” Hernandez said, aggressively changing the subject. “By the way, we found out where Raul Reyes is.”
“Where?” Decker asked, taking the bait.
“In the hospital. He’s been there since Sunday night with pneumonia. It’s an airtight alibi. He’s not our guy.”
So where does that leave us?” Decker asked.
“Back to the drawing board, sir,” Hernandez admitted.
“Great,” their supervisor said as he turned and started back to his office, before shouting back over his shoulder, “Keep me posted.”
When he was gone, Hernandez turned to Jessie, his expression grim.
“Let’s go get a bite,” he ordered more than suggested. “We need to talk.”
*
Hernandez had picked Nickel Diner, which was a five-minute walk from the station. It was packed, but when the greeter saw him, he created a table up front near the cashier counter and dropped two mugs of coffee on it. Jessie hadn’t even looked at the menu before Hernandez came out with it.
“You can’t pull that kind of thing again, Jessie,” he said severely. “Even if we weren’t in the middle of a case, you can’t go hunting through an FBI database just to find out what’s going on with your ex’s case.”
“That’s not what I was doing,” she said, realizing he hadn’t been around when Decker first called her out. He had no idea that she’d been looking for information on her father.
“What then?” he demanded. “What was worth risking your brand new very interim job profiling for the department? A job I helped get you, by the way.”
Jessie looked at Hernandez closely, trying to gauge how much she could trust him. If she stayed at Central Station, as she hoped, they would likely work together a lot. They needed to be able to count on each other. They needed to know what made the other one tick. Maybe she should tell him the truth about what was driving her. If she was going to be around him that much, this seemed like too big a secret to keep.
Besides, it was possible that he could help. He had access to resources like the database. Perhaps he’d let her use them. Beyond that, he was a detective; his job was to catch criminals. And he wasn’t just any detective, but one who had been instrumental in capturing Bolton Crutchfield, the very man who had told her that her dad was looking for her. It seemed like an almost criminal waste not to pick his brain. But that meant coming clean about her past.
“You want to know what made me check that database?” she asked.
“I do.”
“All right, I’ll tell you,” she said, diving in before her internal warning system went off. “But I need to know I can count on your discretion. Besides me, only four people in the world know what I’m about to tell you. One of them is my therapist, two are serial killers, and the last one makes a living ensuring one of those two serial killers doesn’t get out of prison.”
“Um, what?” Hernandez said, looking mildly stunned.
“Do you remember how Professor Hosta mentioned that I’d been granted permission to interview a high-value inmate and that I’d established a rapport with him?”
“Yeah, I think about it a lot, actually,” he admitted.
“Well, that inmate is Bolton Crutchfield.”
“Bolton Crutchfield, who butchered at least nineteen people over six years just for kicks? The guy who gave me this scar when I apprehended him?”
Hernandez pulled up the left side of his shirt to reveal a long, thick angry red line that ran vertically along his side from the hip bone up to the middle of his rib cage.
“The very same,” she said, forcing down a gasp. She hadn’t realized he’d been injured when bringing down Crutchfield.
“I haven’t even gotten to the crazy part yet,” Jessie warned him. “So you’re going to need to buckle up and just let me say this, okay? No interruptions. Just let me get it out.”
“Okay,” Hernandez said, though he sounded like he was wishing he could bail on the whole conversation.
“Okay then, here goes. My father is Xander Thurman, better known as the Ozarks Executioner. My mother—her name was Carrie—and I had no idea. We lived in southeast Missouri. Money was short and jobs were hard to come by. So for many years, he worked in construction, doing jobs in various towns throughout the area. He’d be gone for days or even weeks at a time. Then he’d return and we’d be a family again.
“He was a decent dad—loving, sometimes tender. He used to call me Junebug. But he also had a volcanic temper. If he got angry he’d get very still and quiet and you knew the explosion was coming soon. He was never violent with me but I think he hit my mother a few times out of my sight. She didn’t speak of it.
“What we didn’t know was that, while he was off on these construction trips, he was also abducting, torturing, and murdering people. The cops aren’t sure when it started. Because of the itinerant nature of his work, it was hard to track his movements. But they think it escalated once he bought a cabin in the Ozarks, in part paid for with money he took from his victims. He used the cabin to hide and eventually murder his victims.
“He took us out to the cabin a few times but my mom didn’t love the place. It was sparsely furnished and she said it smelled strongly of antiseptic, like a hospital room. After a while, he just went there by himself for ‘hunting weekends.’ But all that changed one day when I was six.”
The server walked over but Hernandez waved him off and the woman walked away without a word.
“My mother got jealous,” Jessie continued. “She accused him of using the cabin as some sort of love nest. Looking back on it, I think she must have been following him one day when I was at school and seen him drive in that direction with a woman. She couldn’t know the woman was actually a future victim.
“I guess something in my dad snapped at the accusation. He was offended at the notion that he’d been unfaithful. So he took us out there to show us the truth. Apparently he had no problem revealing that he was a killer. But being called an adulterer offended him.
“He drove us to that cabin on a dreary, snowy day in the middle of winter. I remember getting out of the car and walking to the cabin, my worn-out sneakers squishing into the slushy snow and the cold, wet stuff seeping through to my socks. I hadn’t dressed properly for the visit.
“Once inside, he pulled open a trap door to reveal a basement and told us to go down there. I remember thinking how odd it was that an isolated backwoods cabin had a basement. When we got down, it was pitch-black. He turned on a kerosene lamp. That was when we saw them, a man and a woman, I assume the one my mother had been jealous of, completely naked and manacled to a supporting beam of the basement roof.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hernandez had been about to sip his coffee. But at those words he put it down and rested his hands, palms down, on the table.
“The man looked like he’d been there for days,” Jessie continued. “He was emaciated and had cuts—more like precise incisions—all over his body. He barely lifted his head when we came in. The woman didn’t look like she’d been there as long. She had fewer cuts and seemed less beaten down somehow. She still had enough energy to be terrified. I heard a muffled scream come from her direction and saw that something had been stuffed in both their mouths.”
Hernandez gulped hard, trying not to look overwhelmed.
“My mom began screaming,” Jessie said. “That’s when my dad covered her mouth with an ether-soaked rag. She got quiet and slumped into his arms. Then he carried her back upstairs, instructing me to follow them. I could barely move my muscles but I did what he told me. He had me sit in a wooden chair in the living room while he stripped my mom of her clothes and tied her up the same way he’d done the others. I was so shocked and terrified that I never even thought of running. He manacled her arms to a wooden support beam and let her hang there with her arms limply holding her up.”
Hernandez put his head in his hands. Jessie wondered if he was going to make it.
“You okay?” she asked him.
“No,” he admitted. “But keep going anyway.”
So she did.
“My father explained to me that there was a lot of evil in the world and that it was his job to root it out and destroy it. I remember asking him if what he was doing wasn’t evil too. He told me that sometimes it took a sinner to save the world. I said that Mommy wasn’t evil and that he didn’t need to destroy her. He said that she did have evil in her but promised that he would try to get it out of her as best he could and would only destroy her as a last resort.
“And that’s what he did. Between tormenting and killing the people in the basement, he would ‘test’ my mom by cutting her or burning her. I don’t remember him ever doing anything special to get the evil out. I don’t remember him asking her any specific questions. And anyway, she had the rag in her mouth so she couldn’t answer.”
An older woman sitting at nearby table got up, dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table, and left, her plate still half full. She cast Jessie a dirty glance on her way out.
I guess I should lower my voice.
“While we were there, he went away a few times,” she went on, speaking just above a whisper now. “I remember finally loosening the ropes on my arms and legs enough that I could have escaped. But that would have meant leaving my mom and I couldn’t do that. Besides, I never knew when he might come back.
“He always returned with new victims, whom he dragged down to the basement. He brought in three more people, in addition to the two that were already downstairs. Over the course of what I now believe to be about ten days, he brutalized and murdered them all. Then he turned to my mom.”
The server approached us again.
“Give us a couple more minutes,” Hernandez said quietly without taking his eyes off Jessie.
“He began whispering to her in this frenzied voice,” she said. “He took his hunting knife and told her he was going to gut her with it. That’s when I decided to make a run for it. I figured it was the only way to stop him from killing my mother right then and there.
“So while his head was turned, I snuck out of the cabin. I don’t think he even noticed at first, he was so focused on my mom. But eventually I heard him coming after me. I was barefoot and freezing and lost and eventually came to a cliff overlook a raging, ice-filled river. I thought about jumping. But in the end I couldn’t. He caught up to me and brought me back. He tied me up again and taped my eyes open so I couldn’t look away. He said, ‘You have to see, little Junebug. You have to know the truth.’ He called me Junebug. Then he plunged the knife into my mother repeatedly. After that, he used the same knife to cut this into me.”
Jessie pulled down the left side of her top to reveal a scar that ran horizontally just below her collarbone from her shoulder to her neck. She saw the server approaching again and pulled the shirt back up.
“I’ll have toast and fruit,” Jessie said.
“French fries with a side of bacon,” Hernandez added.
The server nodded and left as quickly as she’d come.
“Interesting order,” Jessie noted, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
“What happened then?” he asked quietly, refusing to change the subject.
“My father left me there, bleeding, staring at my mother’s dead body. He never came back. A couple of hunters found me three days later and got help. When I recovered enough to speak, I told the authorities everything that had happened. Except for my mother, my father had burned all the bodies. They had some physical evidence to back everything up—videos he’d made and human remains, mo
stly pieces of bone. But some of the cops still couldn’t believe it.
“They decided to move me out of town to protect me. Back then they were still hoping they might catch him and I was the only witness. They had both my written statement and my video testimony. There was no reason I had to stay there. So I was put in Witness Protection, relocated to live with a couple in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Bruce and Janine Hunt. They had recently lost their toddler son to cancer. The husband was an FBI agent there. The wife was a teacher.”
“So that’s where you spent the rest of your childhood?” Hernandez asked.
“Yeah. I started going by Jessie because I couldn’t stand to hear the name my mom had called me after everything that happened. I was given a back story to use. No one but my adoptive parents and a couple of U.S. marshals based in New Mexico knew the truth. I stayed there through high school, and then came out here when I got accepted to USC.”
“Are you still close with them?”
“I used to be very close to both of them. And I’m still close with Janine, my adoptive mother.”
“But…?” Hernandez said, obviously picking up on her hesitation.
“Unfortunately, she got cancer in my junior year of college, just as her son had all those years earlier,” Jessie said matter-of-factly. “She’s been in and out of remission for almost a decade now. It’s taken a real toll on her both physically and mentally and she’s mostly bedridden now. She was always the bridge between me and my adoptive father, Bruce. We’re both pretty stubborn. But in recent years, with her so weak, Bruce and I kind of drifted apart. Still, he comes out here occasionally. He was even here a few weeks ago to check on me after the whole ‘your husband is a sociopathic killer’ thing. But we don’t talk a ton.”
“Does he still work for the bureau?” Hernandez asked.
“He’s semi-retired. He still consults for them and for Las Cruces PD. But he’s not formally an employee.”
“Kind of like you,” Hernandez noted with a wry smile.
