by Blake Pierce
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Ryan reminded her. “She can’t even start looking until we have the Night Hunter in custody.”
“I know. Plus she starts up school again tomorrow. How are we supposed to make that work safely?”
“I’ve already got it covered,” Ryan said. “Before I left work today I got a commitment from Decker. I said that if I was going to keep working this case, he needed to assure the safety of my loved ones. He guaranteed me that a patrol unit will stay within one block of her school at all times until this is resolved.”
“That’s great, but what about coming home?” she asked.
“If one of us can’t pick her up and she gets a rideshare, she’ll have multiple escorts,” he assured her.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the patrol car will follow her home. Plus, Brady has agreed to continue watching her. He’s on paid leave the whole week and he wants to make up for today. Besides, now that Hannah fingered him, he won’t have to try to stay hidden. He just has to watch her.”
Jessie shook her head.
“I still can’t believe a teenage girl identified him within hours of him staking her out,” she said, recalling Hannah’s story during dinner about spotting Brady.
“She’s no average teenage girl,” he countered, kissing her. “Just like her sister isn’t. Speaking of impressive women, how’s your case going? We didn’t get to discuss it earlier. I was surprised to see you come home at a decent hour.”
Jessie sighed.
“There wasn’t much more we could do today,” she said, deflated at the thought of it. “We have lots of suspects, but none we feel great about. Reid called to set up an interview with the wedding planner for both victims, but she was out of town at some fancy event and won’t be back until late. So we had to push that until tomorrow. My bigger concern is that we’ve had two murders on consecutive nights. I’m worried that whoever’s doing this might not be finished.”
“Well, if they strike again, I’m sure Decker will let you know right away,” Ryan said.
“The same goes for you, I guess,” she replied. “Are you confident that the Night Hunter won’t be active tonight too?”
“Not at all,” he replied. “Obviously killing Trembley wasn’t part of his meticulous plan and that may have him back on his heels. Decker thinks he’s going to lie low for a while, but I’m worried that almost getting caught might make him more brazen. He knows we’re getting closer. That’s why I want to get him fast. This guy is always dangerous, but even more so when cornered.”
“I have real concerns that he might try to get in here,” she said, voicing the fear she knew he shared.
“Me too,” he said. “That’s why I think we should add the measures you mentioned— the heat sensors, the external laser grid—let’s do it all. I’m even game for the second panic room.”
“Really?” she said, borderline shocked, “Because if you’re serious, I have just the place.”
“Where?”
“There’s an unfinished room below the laundry room. It’s accessible through the linen closet.”
He looked over at her, stunned.
“How did I not know about this?” he demanded.
“I only discovered it myself back when I was looking at the architectural plans for the house in Garland’s office,” she explained. “I was trying to determine where we could situate a new room when I found it marked but not labeled. So I spent twenty minutes in the laundry room searching for an entry point. Eventually I found a false wall in the linen closet next to the pull-down ironing board.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I knew you’d tease me when I said what I wanted to do.”
He laughed at the absurdity of the situation.
“So we already have a second panic room?”
“We have space for it, but right now that’s all it is. I’ll show you tomorrow. There’s nothing but a cement stairwell leading to a cement-encased room. I think Garland had big plans to turn it into something state-of-the-art. It has outlets and all the proper wiring. But I guess he never got around to it. I can see why. It’s a major project. If I could, I’d get started on it tomorrow. But doing it right will require a lot of research and time.”
“Time is something we don’t have right now,” Ryan noted darkly.
“Believe me, I know,” Jessie said. “No matter what I’m doing or where I am, somewhere in my gut, I always feel the Night Hunter’s eyes on me. I’m tired of being in a permanent defensive crouch. I want to take it to this guy.”
“That mission resumes tomorrow,” Ryan promised her.
But as he turned off the lights, they both knew it wasn’t as simple as that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Brian Clark was tired.
As he unlocked the front door and walked into the dark house, he finally allowed himself to exhale.
He’d spent all day in depositions. When those were done, the team had a marathon three-hour meeting in the conference room to discuss the case. The take-out pasta dinner they’d ordered was sitting like a stone in his stomach.
But now he could let all that go. Sure, it was after eleven at night, but if he was going to keep up this pace, he had to allow himself some down time to decompress. That’s why he went straight to the kitchen and poured himself two fingers of scotch.
But before taking a sip, he had to get things in order. As he walked down the hall to the bedroom, he could already hear the sound of the shower. That typically meant that his fiancée, Caroline, was less than fifteen minutes from sleep. He wanted to make sure to catch her before that happened. Besides, he felt bad about coming home so late after she’d specifically told him that the detectives she’d talked to today had warned against it.
“I’m home,” he said, poking his head into the bathroom.
He heard her startled yip at his voice. He loved giving her a little scare every now and then.
“You know I hate it when you do that, especially with everything that’s been going on lately,” she complained. “Now it’s going to take me an extra fifteen minutes to fall asleep after that adrenaline rush.”
“Sorry,” he said, forgetting how on edge she was. “I made myself a scotch. I could brew you a late-night tea to calm your nerves, if you like.”
“I think it’s the least you can do,” she replied, quickly getting over her agitation.
“I’ll see you out there,” he said, closing the door.
He took off his suit and put on sweatpants and a t-shirt. Glancing at himself in the dresser mirror, he thought he didn’t look too bad, even after such a long day. His thick brown hair still had a bit of the waviness from this morning. His hazel eyes were sharp. He could stand to lose a little weight, especially if he planned to look good in his wedding tux. But all in all, he was holding up okay.
Satisfied, he returned to the kitchen. After he put a chamomile teabag in a mug and started to boil the water for Caroline, he grabbed his scotch and stepped out onto the back patio. He allowed himself one small sip, which he swirled around his mouth, letting the kaleidoscope of flavors envelope his tongue before slowly swallowing.
He needed moments like this. With the stress of the case and the upcoming wedding, he never seemed to have time to unwind. Add to that two of their friends being murdered in the last few days and it was getting harder to keep a healthy perspective on things.
Brian turned to face the backyard and had just let a second sip pass his lips when he heard what sounded like someone spraying water on a nearby plant. It was a fraction of a second later when he felt the stinging on his face and realized the spray had hit him. He opened his mouth to scream but only seemed able to grunt as the scotch dribbled out of his sizzling lips and down the dissolving skin on his chin.
He dropped the glass and reached up to his face just as the syringe plunged into his neck. As his body burned from the inside out, he slumped to his knees and then collapsed to the woo
den deck. He could barely hear the kettle in the kitchen begin to whistle.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jessie heard Caroline Ryan crying even before she reached the front door of the house.
Girding for what was to come, she allowed herself a moment of stillness. After having been ripped from sleep by Reid barely two hours after drifting off, she still felt a little disoriented. She reminded herself what she was about to walk into. The fiancé of the woman she’d interviewed today was dead on the back deck, the killer’s third victim in as many nights.
Blinking slowly, she took in the house that Caroline shared with Brian Clark. It was a Craftsman style home, refreshingly understated compared to the residences of their more showy friends.
She took a deep breath and opened the door. Callum Reid was already there, sitting on a living room couch with Caroline, talking quietly. Jessie moved past the room silently, walking through the more formal sitting room so as not to get pulled into the painful exchange.
She walked slowly, in part to avoid detection, but also so that she could take in her surroundings. The room was meticulously designed, with art on the walls and on multiple tables. On top of the piano was a collection of photos, some of the couple alone, others with family and friends. Other than one slightly discolored spot where some item had clearly once sat but had yet to be replaced, the space was immaculate.
Jessie made her way back to the kitchen and the adjoining back patio. That’s where Reid had said the murder occurred when he called just after midnight. Jessie looked at the time. It was 12:38. The crime scene crew was out on the patio where the body of Brian Clark still lied, covered in a white sheet.
She blinked several more times, still trying to shake off the effects of her disrupted sleep as she glanced around the kitchen. She did her best to focus on the details of the room. A mug rested on the kitchen counter with an unused teabag sitting in it. There was a kettle on the stove. Outside, she could see a tumbler on the deck next to Clark’s limp, right hand.
“We’ve got nothing,” a familiar voice said from behind her.
She turned around to find Callum Reid standing in the kitchen doorway. He looked as bad as she felt, maybe worse. His face was almost gray.
“You look terrible,” she said. “Are you okay?”
He shook his head.
“I think I may be close to clocking out for good, Hunt,” he said, with alarming matter-of-factness.
“What does that mean?’ she asked, perturbed.
“My body just can’t handle these ‘middle of the night’ calls the way it used to. And arriving to find a young guy contorted and unrecognizable doesn’t help. I’m seriously thinking of putting in for early retirement. To be honest, I probably would have done it already if Decker wasn’t in such a bind with HSS.”
The thought of the unit losing the only really experienced detective it still had left filled her with concern. It was already teetering on the edge. His departure would almost certainly send it off the cliff.
“Maybe you just need a vacation,” she suggested meekly.
“My doctor thinks I need a lot more than that. Decker doesn’t know this, but my ticker isn’t tip top. The phrase ‘early-stage congestive heart failure’ was used, along with the term ‘pre-diabetic.’ Apparently my stress level and lifestyle choices haven’t been the greatest for the last…quarter century or so.”
“But are you okay right now?” she asked, refusing to deal with the big picture at this moment. “You look a little ashen.”
“It’s always the worst on an overnight call. Bad sleep exacerbates things. I’m feeling a little short of breath and even more tired than usual. It’ll pass but the doctor says that stuff’s only going to get worse over time unless I do something drastic.”
“I’m sorry, Callum,” she said, using his first name for perhaps the first time ever.
“A concern for another time,” he said, waving his hand. “Let’s focus on the guy on the deck. He’s got it way worse.”
“Right,” she said, sensing that he’d reached the limits of his comfort zone when it came to discussing his personal life. “You said we’ve got nothing.”
“As far as we can tell, so far,” he told her. “Like I told you on the phone, it’s the same M.O. as with the others, but this time the killer didn’t even have to get into the house to commit the crime. The team is still dusting for prints, but they’re not optimistic.”
Jessie hoped that would change over time but didn’t attach her hopes to the possibility.
“Did Caroline have anything useful to offer?” she asked.
“She helped with the timeline a bit; said he got home while she was showering a little after eleven. He offered to make her tea. When she got out of the shower, she could hear the kettle whistling. She got into her robe and rushed out to find the sliding kitchen door open and him lying face down on the deck. She freaked out, locked the door, and called 911. She’s beating herself up because she didn’t go to check on him first.”
“If the other victims are any indication, he was likely dead before she even got there,” Jessie said.
“That’s what I told her, but it didn’t help much. She couldn’t remember the exact time she found him but the call to 911 came in at 11:19. She says she got in the shower at about 11:05 and had been in there for about five minutes when he poked his head in. So if she’s to be believed, our window for the crime is from about 11:10 to 11:18.”
“That’s tight,” Jessie noted. “It means the killer was either already waiting here or followed him home, then injected him and left, all in less than ten minutes.”
“Pretty bold, too,” Reid added, “What with the fiancée just down the hall.”
“I assume there’s no security video,” Jessie guessed.
“You assume right. How did you know that?’
“It seems to be part of the pattern. Neither of the other victims had it either. It makes me think the killer had been to the house before and knew it well enough to be confident they wouldn’t be discovered that way.”
“That fits with the theory that this was someone in their social circle,” Reid pointed out.
“Very true,” Jessie agreed, “although now that we have a male victim, I think we can eliminate the hypothesis that this was the work of a guy who had a vendetta against woman.”
“Or that this was a woman who was jealous of other women exclusively,” he added.
Jessie wasn’t as comfortable with that conclusion.
“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” she countered. “Jealousy could still play a role, even if a victim was male. If this was a woman whose envy had reached lethal proportions, she might consider killing a fiancé to be just a different kind of punishment. Claire and Jax paid the ultimate price. But Caroline will suffer too. That might be what the killer is after, causing all different kinds of pain.”
“Those are a lot of theories, Hunt,” Reid said, sounding beaten down by the multitude of unpleasant options.
“Agreed. That’s why we need to talk to that wedding planner in the morning. I’m hoping that her perspective will help us narrow things down a little. In the meantime, I think we should go back to the station and dig into Brian Clark’s life a little more. Maybe the legal case he was working on played some part in this. Or maybe he’s got a dark side we don’t know about.”
“You don’t really believe either of those, do you?” he asked skeptically.
“No,” she conceded. “But I find that making assumptions usually ends badly for me. Besides, we’ve got to do something to stay awake until the sun comes up in five hours.”
She felt guilty the second she said that, as Reid seemed to turn an even more sickly shade of gray at the prospect of spending all night poring through the personal and professional life of Brian Clark.
Still, they didn’t have much choice. Somewhere out there was a murderer who seemed to enjoy making people suffer as much as killing them. And Jessie had a feeling this murderer wasn’t
done yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
It was almost dawn when Walter Nightengale left the house.
As he walked to the old clunker halfway down the block, he switched the small, brown, beaten-up travel bag from his right hand to his left. With all the supplies he kept inside, it tended to get heavy after a while and he wasn’t as strong as he used to be.
He had intentionally left the front door open, knowing that the homeowners would notice it when they checked their security system. The Morgans, a family of four, were on vacation in Mexico and had left their palatial Brentwood mansion in the care of a house sitter.
They’d used Hallie Douglas for this before and trusted her. She’d babysat for their kids for years. House sitting was comparatively easy, merely requiring keeping an eye on the place, watering the plants, and turning on the security system when she was out. It was that last task that the Morgans would find incomplete when they checked the system status on their phones later this morning. And that’s what would make them call the security company to check.
Walter knew all of this. In fact, he was counting on it. How else could he get Jessie Hunt’s attention on such short notice? He needed her, almost certainly via her boyfriend, to learn that a young woman had been murdered in his particular style. He needed her to discover that the woman, a twenty-one-year-old college student at Pepperdine University, was skinny, about five foot nine, with sandy blonde hair just past her shoulders and bright green eyes. He needed her to notice that, at least on the surface, Hallie was the spitting image of someone Jessie knew quite well. He needed her to pick up on the fact that Hallie Douglas had the same initials as someone Ms. Hunt cared about deeply. He needed her to grasp all these things so that she knew that he was taking the game to the next level.
As he got into the old car and pulled out onto the quiet suburban street, he was confident that she would figure it all out. Like her mentor, Garland Moses, Jessie Hunt was very smart. But the Night Hunter was smarter.
