by Blake Pierce
Jessie heard a voice on the other end of the line but couldn’t understand the words. A moment later Andi replied, doing an impressive job of sounding like she was just a hair away from completely breaking down.
“Is there something I can do to help her? I found an inhaler in her purse. Should I spray it in her mouth? Should I try to resuscitate her?”
Andi was now crying. Real or fake, it was utterly convincing. Jessie wondered if she would actually pretend to revive her. Would she breathe into her mouth? Do chest compressions? If she did, she’d discover quickly that her victim was far from unconscious. At that point Jessie would have to be ready to react.
Jessie used the sound of Andi’s sobbing to hide her own attempts to gulp in as much air as possible. She no longer felt like her chest was going to explode but she wasn’t anywhere near full strength either. If there was a physical confrontation, her considerable size advantage would be of no use.
“I’m sorry, say that again,” Andi said, perplexed.
The operator said something else unintelligible.
“How could they be pulling up now?” Andi asked. “I called you less than a minute ago.”
And then, as if in response to her question, there was a loud knock at the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Jessie could feel Andi’s eyes on her, boring into her back.
“What did you do?” she heard the woman hiss, her lips only inches away.
There was another loud knock, this time even more urgent.
“Open up!” a male voice shouted. “This is the LAPD. We received an emergency message from this address.”
Jessie felt fingers dig into her skin as Andi rolled her over onto her back. She kept her eyes closed and tried not to breathe, hoping she looked like an unconscious person. It didn’t work.
“You can stop faking. I know it was you. There’s no way they could have responded this quickly. Not that it’ll do you any good.”
Jessie heard a shattering sound and decided it was time to open her eyes. As she did, the door pounded as if someone was kicking it.
Andi was kneeling directly above her, holding a long piece of her own broken mojito glass in her right hand, which was bleeding profusely. Her eyes were focused in the direction of the banging door.
“Last chance,” the male voice yelled. “Open the door or we will break it in.”
Andi glanced back down at Jessie and saw that she was awake. Her eyes widened with a crazed glee and she lifted the long glass shard above her head before bringing it down.
Jessie was still clutching at her coat and brought it up to block the blow. The glass tore through the material at first before snagging, losing momentum on the way down and never actually connecting with Jessie’s body.
Andi tried to yank the glass free but in the process, managed to pull the ensnared coat as well, tearing it from Jessie’s hands. As she forcefully ripped the glass free of the coat, Jessie took in the deepest breath she could muster. Andi fixed her eyes on her again.
Do something now or you’ll never do anything ever again.
Still lying on her back, Jessie raised her uncovered right foot in the air and kicked at Andi as she dove forward. Her foot smashed into the other woman’s chest, sending her backward before the glass weapon could find its mark.
Andi’s back slammed into the coffee table behind her. The force knocked the glass out of her hand. She slumped there briefly, seemingly dazed. The sound of splintering wood from the foyer brought her back to her senses. She began scanning the carpet for the chunk of glass.
Jessie decided not to wait for her to find it. As quickly as she could, she rolled onto her stomach and began crawling away in the direction of the foyer. She heard jostling behind her and suspected Andi had found the glass and was standing up, so she tried to do the same.
She pushed up with the limited strength in her arms and scrambled to her feet, stumbling forward. She could hear several voices in the hallway ahead of her and careened, off-balance, in that direction. She had just crossed the threshold from the carpeted den into the marble hall when she felt a searing pain in her right calf and a hand on her left ankle. She tumbled forward, throwing her arms out to protect her head as she hit the ground.
“Freeze,” a voice yelled from somewhere in front of her.
She looked up to see two men in LAPD uniforms, both with guns drawn and pointed in her general direction. Behind her, she heard the distinct sound of glass hitting marble and knew that Andi must have dropped the piece she’d been holding.
“Thank god you’re here, Officers,” Jessie heard her say. “This woman broke into my home and attacked me. I had to use a chunk of glass to hold her off. I think she’s delusional. Please be careful. I think she’s armed.”
The cops, who had both had their guns trained above Jessie in the direction of the woman behind her, now looked confused. Jessie hadn’t been expecting this and wasn’t sure how to make the true situation clear. It didn’t help that she wasn’t even sure she could speak yet. Her throat was no longer closed off but it felt raw and tight. She swallowed hard and croaked out the one word she hoped would let them know the truth.
“Hernandez.”
The cops glanced at each other before returning their attention to the women in front of them.
“That’s who sent out the alert,” the officer in front said to his partner, “Detective Hernandez from Central Station. If she knows that, she must be the one who placed the call.”
“Let’s cuff them both and sort it out later,” the officer in back said.
“Fine by me,” the first one said. “Both of you: hands where we can see them. Other than that, don’t move.”
Jessie nodded, relieved, and spread her arms out on the floor in front of her. As long as Andi was cuffed, she didn’t care if she was too. The officer in front holstered his gun and proceeded toward them slowly.
As he did, Jessie heard an almost imperceptible scraping sound behind her. She knew what it was immediately. Andi was picking up the glass again. With every ounce of strength she had left, Jessie yelled as loud as she could.
“Weapon!”
The second officer still had his gun out and didn’t hesitate to fire it. Even with the sound of the shot echoing through the hallway, Jessie heard someone hit the floor behind her. Then the screaming began.
Andi was howling an indecipherable mix of unintelligible screams and only occasionally coherent, random words like “bitch,” “mine,” and “pay.” Jessie glanced behind her to see the lady of the house sprawled out on her back several feet away. Her right arm lay immobile at her side. Blood was pouring from that shoulder. Her left hand was flailing about, intermittently trying to stop the bleeding. The piece of glass rested harmlessly on the ground six feet away.
The first officer hurried past Jessie to attend to Andi. The second officer, with his eyes trained solely on Jessie, holstered his gun and pulled out handcuffs.
“You Hunt?” he asked, looking down at her.
Jessie nodded.
“I still need to cuff you until we clear this up.”
“I understand,” Jessie said, putting her hands behind her back before adding, “Is she going to be okay?”
“She’ll recover,” the officer said. “I’m a pretty good shot.”
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
The stitches made it hard to drive. It was more painful to brake than to accelerate, as she had to flex her calf muscle harder. As a result, the drive out to Norwalk to see Bolton Crutchfield the next day took even longer than usual. Jessie tried to just accept the delay and appreciate the fact that she was alive.
It could have gone much worse. The cut from Andi’s swipe at her leg with the piece of broken glass hadn’t gone especially deep. There was no damage to the muscle and no major blood vessels had been affected. But it was still long and deep enough to require seventeen stitches. Luckily, the doctor told her it wouldn’t prevent her from going to the FBI Academy.
Jes
sie wasn’t exactly sure when she’d made the decision to change her mind and attend the upcoming session after all. It might have been the previous night in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, when she was lying on a stretcher, dealing with the fact that she’d nearly been outwitted twice in the last few months.
Both times it was because she made assumptions that she could trust people—first her husband, then a seemingly innocuous country club socialite—who ended up wishing her harm. She needed to get better at setting aside her personal feelings if she was going to be a great profiler.
She knew she had solid instincts. But instincts weren’t enough, especially if she hoped to catch someone as dangerous as her father before he found her. There were only so many times she could wing it before her luck would run out. She needed more training.
And there didn’t seem to be any better time than now. She’d accrued some professional capital now, as she had just uncovered Victoria Missinger’s true killer and prevented an innocent woman from going to prison. True, she was partly responsible for Marisol Mendez being under suspicion in the first place. But no one seemed to be holding that against her.
The praise for her work had allowed her to request a sabbatical to go to the National Academy. And since she was technically a consultant, and a junior interim one at that, they couldn’t really say no. Ryan said Captain Decker didn’t want to look churlish so he didn’t have any choice but to sign off on it and hold her position with the department, which would no longer be interim after she returned.
It also made sense from a personal perspective. She’d already signed the paperwork for the divorce. The house was officially sold. And to her delight, this very morning she got the call that her offer on the apartment had been accepted.
Later this week, she would formally move in to her new, highly secure, borderline prison residence. If she had to pick ten weeks in which she could just up and leave town for this program, now was the perfect time to do it.
And since the program didn’t begin until after the new year, that gave two weeks for her leg to heal up. She had officially decided to stop in Las Cruces to visit with her folks for a few days before continuing on to Quantico.
She’d already checked with the D.A., who said that she wouldn’t be needed to testify against Andrea Robinson for a few months, so there was no conflict there. But her testimony would definitely be necessary as Andi had done a stellar job of covering her tracks.
There wasn’t much physical evidence of her crime. The security cameras offered nothing because they were fried. There were no fingerprints or DNA at the Missinger house. Andi must have left her phone at home when she went to kill Victoria because that’s where the GPS conveniently showed her during the window in which Victoria was murdered.
There was nothing suspicious in her online search history either. Of course she could have gone to any internet café or public library to check up on how to sabotage transformers or overdose insulin.
Authorities did have Michael’s admission that he had been sleeping with Andi and that she’d often talked about them running away together. But other than Jessie’s testimony, there was almost nothing to tie Andi to the crime. And even then, Andi hadn’t ever actually confessed to killing Victoria, only to poisoning Jessie herself, which she was also being charged with. It was logical to assume she’d done that because she realized Jessie had figured out what she’d done to Victoria.
But Andi was claiming that she’d inadvertently put the peanut oil in the drink, thinking it was liquid sugar. Of course that didn’t explain why she was found trying to stab Jessie with a chunk of glass. In the end, the D.A. thought they might have a better chance of convicting her for attempting to murder Jessie than for actually murdering Victoria Missinger.
Ryan had assured her just this morning that now that they knew the culprit, they’d be able to go back through Andrea Robinson’s life in recent days and find evidence that they didn’t even know to look for before.
“It’s been less than eighteen hours since she was arrested,” he reminded her. “Give us a little time to do our work. Andrea Robinson may have been smart but I guarantee you she left traces of what she did. We’ll find them.”
“I really hope so,” Jessie had said. “I want her to go down for the actual crime she committed. Victoria Missinger deserves justice.”
“That’s the kind of attitude that will serve you well at the FBI Academy,” Ryan noted. “You’ll fit right in with the other straight arrows.”
She didn’t mention that she planned to anonymously donate half of what she got from the sale of her home to the Downtown Children’s Outreach Center or that she had talked to Roberta Watts this morning about becoming a regular volunteer there. It wouldn’t make up for the loss of Miss Vicky, but it was something.
“Who are you kidding?” she teased, trying to divert attention from herself. “You’re way more of a straight arrow than I am. You follow procedure. I barely know what it is. Maybe you should be applying to enter this program.”
“I have actually,” he told her, the disappointment in his voice obvious. “I got in twice. But the timing wasn’t right in either case. Shelly needed me to stay here. I’ll do it at some point.”
Jessie didn’t press him. He clearly didn’t want to get into it. Jessie also realized this was the first time he’d ever actually used his wife’s name.
“Are you going to be able to solve any cases without me around?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“I don’t know,” he said, feigning concern. “Maybe you can get some more tips from your incarcerated buddy that could help me out while you’re gone. Is that why you’re visiting him today?”
“I actually have no idea,” she admitted. “Kat just told me he wanted to speak with me. It’s the first time he’s initiated a meeting. So I’m more than a little curious.”
“Well, I’d say give him my regards, but I don’t think he’d appreciate that from the guy who put the cuffs on him.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll pass on that that,” Jessie had agreed.
But now, as she pulled through the security gate at the Non-Rehabilitative Division of the Department State Hospital-Metropolitan of Norwalk, she knew there was another reason she wouldn’t mention Ryan Hernandez to Bolton Crutchfield.
Somehow she sensed that Crutchfield wouldn’t be bothered that she knew the man who’d arrested him. Rather, he wouldn’t like that she was so friendly with him. She had the weirdest feeling that he would be jealous.
After once again going through the laborious security procedures, she passed through Transitional Prep to the secure hallway where Kat Gentry was waiting for her.
“How are you doing?” Kat asked as they walked down the hall.
“Not too bad, all things considered. I solved a murder and didn’t get killed by the murderer myself. And I decided to spend ten weeks in Virginia,” she added, explaining her plan and letting Kat know the roommate thing wouldn’t work out.
“I understand,” Kat assured her. “If you change your mind when you get back to town, let me know.”
“I will,” Jessie promised, “though I’m not sure you’d want to room with someone who had her place broken into on the orders of one of your inmates, especially one who doesn’t like you that much.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Kat assured her as they reached the door to the residential cells unit and she waved for someone to buzz them in. “I can take care of myself.”
“Of that, I have no doubt,” Jessie said, though she wasn’t sure that was the point.
They stepped through the door. Most of the staffers at the security station didn’t even glance up. Apparently even Cortez, almost always in playful mode, was too busy to flirt with her. He did manage a quick smile and a wave before returning his attention to the screen in front of him.
“So did Crutchfield tell you anything about why he wanted me to come?” Jessie asked, turning back to Kat.
“Nope,” Kat said as she ha
nded over the emergency red-buttoned key fob. “All he said was that it was important that he speak with you. As you know, normally I wouldn’t accede to a request like this. But I decided to make an exception in this case.”
“Well,” Jessie said, with a hint of resignation, “let’s go find out what fresh hell he’s prepared for me now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
When they entered the room, Jessie sensed immediately that something was off.
Crutchfield was already standing up, almost as if at attention. He followed her with his eyes as she sat in the chair behind the desk on the other side of the partition.
“I’m glad to see that you’re doing well, Miss Jessie,” he noted.
“What do you mean?”
“The news said that a woman was arrested for the murder of Victoria Missinger and that the LAPD consultant who caught her was injured in the incident. No name was given but in light of your slight limp, I feel safe drawing the conclusion.”
“What did you ask me here for?” Jessie asked, trying to move past the gamesmanship, though she suspected it was a futile effort.
“Patience, my dear,” he said, sounding slightly peeved. “Please, I have so little to look forward to in here most days. Won’t you allow me this little respite from the drudgery for a little fun?”
“You consider this fun?” she asked.
“I do,” he admitted. “Tell me, was my assistance useful? Were my clues on point?”
“They were,” Jessie told him. “The killer was a ‘lady’ who was unhappy with her lot in life. Although, by the time I made those connections, she was already taking steps to get rid of me.”
“I’m glad she wasn’t successful,” Crutchfield replied, sounding something close to sincere. “Although for a time there it looked like you’d pegged the wrong ‘lady.’ I have to admit I was disappointed in you.”
