by Blake Pierce
“Of course not,” Todd said miserably.
“Should I call Deputy Hicks?” she wondered, using the name she’d heard Jessie mention earlier.
“That won’t be necessary,” Todd assured her before turning to the burly guy. “Gunnar, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Gunnar looked astounded.
“Are you kidding me? You’re gonna let this lying bitch run me out of here?”
“Please just go,” Todd pleaded. “Let’s not make this any worse.”
“I can’t believe this,” he said, looking around at all the suddenly unfriendly faces. Realizing he couldn’t win, he started to leave, then turned back and growled so low that only Hannah and Chris could hear him. “Next time, I won’t be so obliging.”
Hannah wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Her fury rose right along with her voice.
“Next time?” she repeated loudly. “What does ‘next time’ mean, Gunnar? What are you going to do the next time you see me that’s not so obliging? Are you going to try to force me to like you? That sounds like a threat. And everyone out here heard it. So I guess if something happens to me, they’ll all know who was responsible.”
“It wasn’t a threat,” Gunnar muttered.
“We’ll see if the authorities agree. I think the young women of this town have had just about enough of you leering at them. How about the next time you get the urge to salivate over a teenage girl, you walk the other way? Because I have a feeling it’s not going to be too well received from here on out. I think you’re going to get called on your crap from now on.”
“Damn straight!” Melina yelled from the table.
“Get the hell out of here,” one of the guys in the band shouted from the lower deck.
Gunnar seemed surprised by the suddenly vociferous crowd.
“You should go,” Todd said firmly, if still under his breath. “You’re only making things worse for yourself.”
Gunnar didn’t respond, simply turning and reaching for the sliding door handle.
“And I swear if I catch you eyeballing me again,” Hannah added, even though she knew it wasn’t necessary. “I’m going straight to Deputy Hicks, maybe even to Sheriff McClane. We’ll see who they find more credible. Bye, Gunnar.”
He slammed the door without another word. Through the glass, she watched him stomp back through the main room and out the front door. When she turned around, there were about three dozen sets of eyes on her. For several seconds, there was silence. Then Patrice broke it.
“Whoo, girl!” she screamed gleefully. “I wish you’d come to visit two years ago.”
A few people applauded and the band broke into an impromptu rendition of Hall & Oates’ “Maneater.” Hannah looked over at Chris, who seemed both impressed and slightly intimidated.
“If that’s your bark, I’m afraid to see your bite,” he marveled.
The rush she’d felt during the confrontation only escalated as she looked around at the admiring faces and then back at Chris, whose expression suggested he was feeling more than just admiration. She allowed herself to ride the wave of good feeling, happy that, for the most part, it was well deserved.
Patrice and the others had gotten up from the table and were walking over. Melina came close and Hannah briefly worried that she was going to make a dig.
“I’m pretty sure you just made my last semester of high school appreciably less creepy. Please transfer here,” she said. Apparently all the Chris-centric water was now under the bridge.
“Hold on ladies. Before we make plans for Heidi to come to school here, which we really need to discuss,” Patrice said, “I think we should nail down our plans for the rest of the night. We’ve probably worn out our welcome here. Heidi, some of our friends are doing a set just down the road at Café Bouquet.”
“Where is that exactly?” Hannah asked.
“It’s literally a hundred yards to the left after we walk out the door,” Chris told her. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
The offer was tempting. She was still feeling the rush from her confrontation with Gunnar and the crowd’s enthusiastic reaction to how she’d handled him. Chris was clearly interested in getting to know her better and the feeling was mutual. Besides, it was just nice to be out with friendly people, moving about freely, behaving like a normal high school senior.
She told herself that nothing awful could happen walking a hundred yards down the road from one busy place to another, surrounded by half a dozen people. Thirty minutes at this Café Bouquet wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And as she’d learned well in her seventeen years on earth, the old cliché was true: it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
They all gathered their things and headed back inside the bar, past the fire and mounted animal heads, to the exit. It was only as Chris opened the door for her and the cold blast of air hit her face that she had second thoughts.
It might be easier to ask for forgiveness, but if she violated Jessie’s faith once more, she wasn’t sure she’d get it. She had made a promise to her sister not to leave this place. If she broke that promise, how could she ever reasonably expect to be trusted again?
“I just remembered I can’t go,” she abruptly said to Chris. “I told my folks that I’d come back in decent time tonight. If I screw up my first night here, there might not be a second, and I’d like there to be a second.”
Chris nodded, though he looked disappointed.
“I would too,” he said, “so I don’t want to mess that up for you. Are you staying nearby? I can walk you back.”
“No, it’s up the hill a ways. Besides, I don’t want you to miss your friends’ performance.”
“Okay,” he said. “Would it be cool to exchange numbers? I can let you know where we’ll be hanging out tomorrow.”
Hannah was about to pull out her phone when she realized that sending him her info would reveal that her name wasn’t Heidi.
“Actually, my phone died earlier. But we could trade them the old fashioned way. If you have a pen I can write my number on your hand.”
Chris desperately searched his pockets.
“I have a pen,” Patrice said, handing one over with a wry smile.
Hannah wrote her number down and made sure to write “Heidi” underneath the digits. She returned the pen to Patrice, who gave her a hug. Chris did the same. The rest of the crew waved to her as they started down the road to the Café.
“Talk tomorrow?” Chris asked as he jogged to catch up.
Hannah nodded and waved. She stood there watching them go for a few seconds, then turned and trudged slowly in the direction of the hill that led to Rich McClane’s cabin. When the others rounded the corner out of sight, she turned and hurried back to Wildyology.
She was still on a high but she wasn’t an idiot. Gunnar might be lurking out here somewhere looking for payback. The killer with the knife might be around too. Though she was loath to admit it, she actually felt comforted by the idea of Jessie picking her up. But before she called her sister, she needed to reach out to someone else.
She had to acknowledge that she’d almost given into her impulse to court danger. It was one thing to confront a stalker-ish creep in a crowded bar. She gave herself a pass on that one, even if she’d pushed it farther than she had to. But she’d almost broken her promise to Jessie, almost backslid into the dangerous territory of justifying risky behavior just because it made her feel something. That it had come so easily, after all her hard work scared her more than Gunnar ever had.
She returned to Wildyology and asked for a quiet table in the back room of the place. Just about everyone else was in the main dining room, at the bar, or outside on the deck, so she had the space to herself. After ordering a slice of apple pie and another hot chocolate, she pulled out her phone and made a FaceTime call. After three rings, Dr. Janice Lemmon picked up. It was clear that she’d been asleep.
“Hi Hannah,
” she said groggily. “Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry for calling so late,” she replied. “I wasn’t thinking about the time. I can call back tomorrow.”
“Don’t be silly,” Dr. Lemmon said, putting on her familiar, thick glasses. “I told you to call me if you ever felt you had to. And you clearly felt the need. So, let’s talk.”
That was all the permission Hannah needed. She launched in. A half hour later she was still going strong.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
If it was anyone else, Kat would have been long gone by now.
But it wasn’t anyone else. It was Jessie Hunt, her one-time (and hopefully future) best friend, assuming she could win back her trust.
That’s why Kat Gentry was sitting in the bookkeeping office of a used car dealership on Pico Boulevard, poring over sales records at 10:30 at night. She’d spent the day teaming up with Detective Nettles, but parted ways with him hours ago, as she couldn’t in good conscience ask him to join her on what looked to be a wild goose chase. So even though no one on the team was supposed to investigate alone, she was working solo.
And as unpromising as it seemed, this was a potential lead in the search for the Night Hunter, the elderly killer who had put the lives of Jessie, Hannah, and Ryan in danger. If there was even a glimmer of hope that she might learn something of value here, it was worth the time and effort.
The accounting manager assigned to stay might be feeling differently. She glanced over at the guy, sprawled out and snoring on the couch in the office. He’d drawn the short straw, ordered to stick around by his boss, who’d gotten a scorching phone call from Captain Roy Decker when he’d initially refused to allow Kat access to the files.
She would have left by now except for one thing. This was the one dealership where the Night Hunter appeared to have bought a car but never collected it. Jamil had discovered five-week-old street camera surveillance of him near the lot, though there was no useful footage from the dealership itself. Unfortunately, they used old-school videotape, which they recorded over every two weeks.
Despite that, Jamil had found a record of an older man purchasing a black 1988 Ford Tempo on the same day he was seen in the nearby street footage. The strange thing was that, according to the salesman who sold it to him, he never even got in the car much less took it for a test drive. She planned to have a crime scene team from the station confirm that tomorrow, just to be sure. There was always the possibility that he’d inadvertently leaned on the thing and left a fingerprint.
But if the salesman was right, he simply walked around the vehicle a few times, paid for it in cash, and said he’d be back to pick it up in a few hours. But he never returned to collect it. It was still sitting on the lot, where Kat had gone to look it over a few hours ago.
That should have been the end of it. The Night Hunter bought a car and for whatever reason, never took possession of it. Maybe he got spooked. Maybe he found something better and decided he didn’t need it. It didn’t really matter if he never bought the thing.
But something about the situation just didn’t sit right with Kat. Everything she had learned about the guy suggested that nothing he did was by accident. If he purchased this car, there was a reason. And if she could figure out what that reason was, maybe it would lead her somewhere useful.
She punched up the camera shot of the lot with the Tempo and zoomed in to study it again. There was nothing remarkable about it. In fact, other than the white 1991 Honda Civic nestled beside it, the Tempo was the most forlorn looking vehicle on the lot. At the least the other old cars nearby—like the maroon Oldsmobile and the lime green Fiat—had some kind of cheesy, retro panache. But not those two; they were just a sad pair of sedan siblings, waiting for drivers that would likely never come.
She was about to give up for the night and head home to get a few hours sleep when her phone rang. She looked down and was surprised. The call was coming from the downtown Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Though she was familiar with the place, having been there many times, she had no idea why she was getting a late night call from the most notorious prison in Los Angeles. Worried that it might be related to one of her unresolved P.I. cases, she answered. An automated voice began talking.
“Collect call from Twin Towers Correctional Facility- Women’s Forensic In-Patient Unit. Will you accept a collect call from: Andrea Robinson?”
The last words were spoken by a live person that Kat assumed was Robinson. She recognized the name, but in her exhausted state of mind, she couldn’t immediately place where from.
“Yes,” she said hesitantly. There was a clicking sound, followed by a fuzzy connection. She could hear loud voices and clanging in the background.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this Katherine Gentry?” a female voice asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Who is this again?”
“Andy Robinson,” the woman said, sounding mildly offended that she had to repeat herself. “I have some important information for you.”
Hearing the name “Andy” made everything click in Kat’s memory. Jessie had mentioned Andrea “Andy” Robinson to her in the past and not with warmth. Robinson was part of Jessie’s first case working for the LAPD as a criminal profiler.
Kat remembered Robinson being described as a bored, rich society girl with a biting wit and a sharp tongue. But after a wealthy wife at their shared country club was murdered, she also had an apparent willingness to help Jessie navigate the cutthroat world of the club.
Kat also recalled Jessie telling her how she was immediately drawn to Andy’s sardonic charm and, after the case was seemingly solved, decided to hang out with her new friend. Unfortunately, Andy Robinson turned out to be a sociopath who had poisoned her married lover’s wife and framed an innocent maid for the crime.
When Robinson sensed that her new criminal profiler friend might be on to her, she poisoned her too. Only Jessie’s quick thinking saved her from meeting the same fate as the murdered wife.
Since her capture, Robinson had been held at the Twin Towers Facility, which was not unlike the facility for criminally insane male prisoners that Kat used to head security for; that is until it all went wrong. Kat recalled how even now that Jessie still occasionally beat herself up for allowing Andy’s charisma to blind her to the woman’s true nature.
“How are you able to call at this hour?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be in your cell right now?”
“I should,” Robinson said, sounding mildly amused. “But I made a big fuss and the folks here have learned that it’s easier to let me have my way than deal with my fusses. Now do you want to keep asking stupid questions or do you want to know why I called?”
Kat could already sense the woman trying to manipulate her by boasting of her relative freedom at the jail and trying to belittle her. Standing up, she walked out of the small office into the dealership showroom to get the blood pumping and clear her brain. Whatever this was about, she needed to be on her game.
“Go ahead,” she said. “What’s so important?”
“First of all, I wanted to make sure Jessie was okay.”
“What would make you think she wasn’t?” Kat asked, not wanting to give anything away.
“Please don’t insult my intelligence, Katherine,” Robinson said with disdain. “I’m incarcerated, not lobotomized. You don’t think I have access to information outside this place? I know that Jessie is facing danger at the hands of an old-timey serial killer. I know that she’s been in hiding—probably under U.S. Marshal Protection—for at least a week. And I know that her friends in the LAPD are no closer to finding this guy now than they were then.”
Kat was stunned at just how plugged-in someone in the in-patient lockdown unit of a prison was, but did her best to hide it. This woman was calling for a reason more complicated than simple concern and if she wanted to tease that out, she needed to match Robinson’s focus.
“Then why are you calling me?” she asked as she pulled up a photo of the w
oman on the other end of the line. “If you know so much, then you must know that I’m just a lowly private investigator. I’m not in the loop on protection procedure.”
“We both know that’s not true,” Robinson replied. “After all, you replaced me as Jessie’s bestie, though you seem like a poor substitute based on what I’ve gleaned so far. I’m sure she’s been in touch. I’m sure she’s poured her fragile heart out to you. I’m sure you are very much in the loop. And since there’s a court order legally prohibiting me from calling Jessie directly, I thought I’d check in with the new but not improved me.”
Kat was increasingly skeptical that Robinson actually had anything useful to offer. She seemed to be fishing. Under normal circumstances she might have just hung up. But she remembered that Jessie had described the woman as brilliant and if she really knew something valuable, ending the call might be a mistake.
But continuing like this was useless. She decided to up the ante. Robinson might be a devious mastermind, but she was also arrogant, and more importantly, imprisoned. That made her the desperate one. Plus, Kat had one extra advantage. When she ran security at the non-rehabilitative division of the state hospital in Norwalk, she dealt with unstable, violent offenders on a regular basis. They didn’t scare her.
“Well, this has been great, Andy,” she said, letting the sarcasm drip off her words. “But it seems like you called me more out of loneliness than helpfulness and I’m pretty busy. So unless you have something useful to share in the next ten seconds, I’m going to say goodnight and let you get back to your padded cell.”
She waited for a response. For several seconds, there was no sound other than the distant howls of what she assumed was another disturbed prisoner. Suddenly, the automated voice returned saying “there are 60 seconds remaining in this call.” Still she didn’t speak. The ball was in Andy’s court.
“It’s not wise to alienate me, Katherine,” Robinson finally said. “I’m already inclined to dislike a usurper like you. It took enormous humility for me to even call you. But I did it anyway, out of concern for Jessie.”
