THE PERFECT IMAGE

by Blake Pierce

  She put the containers down on the center island in front of the knife block and headed in that direction, trying to keep her frustration in check. How many times had she asked people to properly tie off those chains for just this reason? It was almost as bad as nails on a chalkboard. When she had events on the deck, preventing the “chain clang,” as she called it, was essential in order to keep guests from going inside to escape the irritation.

  When she got to the sliding back door, she turned on the deck light. Sure enough, the chain on the middle of the three tables was loose and clanging away. She hurried out to tie it down. It took longer than usual, as the chain ducked and parried in the howling wind. Luckily, she was wearing cozy sweats and her long black hair was tied back in a ponytail.

  When she finally got the chain secured, she returned inside and locked the sliding glass door. Now there was no way she could get to sleep anytime soon, so she returned to the kitchen, resigned to an hour of pantry reorganization.

  But as she reentered the kitchen, she noticed something odd. The Tupperware containers were no longer where she thought she’d left them: on the island, in front of the knife block. Or had she moved them and forgotten? Maybe the lack of sleep was playing tricks on her. Even though she was only thirty-one years old, she’d read that sleep deprivation could have all kinds of psychological effects, including hallucinations.

  Not wanting to go down that road, she pushed the thought from her head and headed back to the smaller pantry to get started on the boring task. She decided to begin with the shelves and settled on the top one in the back, where all the canned goods were. The first step was to determine what had expired.

  She had just stepped into the pantry when she felt a hard shove in her back. The force slammed her into the back wall and several cans toppled down on top of her. Turning around, she saw that she wasn’t alone. Someone wearing a face-covering watch cap with small slits for the eyes, nose, and mouth closed the door and stared icily at her. The trespasser was holding a long carving knife that looked to be hers.

  It took a second for shock and confusion to give way to fear. But when it did, she opened her mouth to scream. The large intruder was already slicing at her neck. When the sound came out, it was more of a hoarse hiss than a scream. She felt a stinging sensation, then a burning one. She reached her hands up to her throat and saw that blood was shooting out the side of her neck, drenching the nearby cereal boxes. Yet somehow she was conscious. Somewhere behind the tower of fear that suddenly dwarfed her, a thought emerged. It occurred to her that the attacker had cut her vocal cords.

  The attacker advanced on her and something in her brain told her it was a man. She extended her arms to defend herself but he swatted them down with unexpected force. She thought he was going to come at her neck again but instead, he swung the knife at her left thigh, just below the groin. Again she tried to scream as the pain ricocheted through her but no sound came out.

  She stumbled to the right, where she slammed against another shelf and crumpled to the floor. Several more packages tumbled down on her, but she barely noticed. Her neck was burning and her leg, with blood spewing out of it, was throbbing. She didn’t know which hurt worse.

  She fought to remain conscious as the man in the mask moved toward her. Her disorientation again made way for terror. She tried to open her mouth to try to scream again but found that her body wasn’t responding to commands. Desperate, she attempted to reach out and grab a large soup can in the hopes of slamming it down on the top of the assailant’s shoe. But her fingers wouldn’t grasp the thing.

  She managed to loll her head up at the man standing over her. He removed his mask. She did her best to focus on him but it was difficult. He leaned in closer, gazing into her eyes intently. And then, in her last conscious thought before she died, she realized something.

  I recognize him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jessie sat down at window three in the visitor area and waited. The plastic chair was bolted to the floor. Attached to the wall near the window was a corded telephone.

  On the other side of the glass were two deputies. One stood by the door on the inmate side. The other repeatedly walked back and forth behind the inmates, his eyes constantly moving as he watched for any unexpected activity. Jessie glanced to her left and right, trying to get a peek at the inmates on either side, but the dividers were about six feet high, making it impossible. She was left to stare at the door and wait for the inmate’s arrival.

  She’d been to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility many times before. But this was her first visit to the Medical Services Building and its infamous Female Forensic In-Patient Psychiatric Unit. She wasn’t happy to be here but she had no choice. A woman being held in this psychiatric prison had seemingly inside knowledge of the movements and plans of a serial killer on the outside, one whom the inmate had never met. If Jessie wanted to learn how, she’d have to talk to her, even if that woman, Andrea “Andy” Robinson, had once tried to kill her.

  As she waited for her to arrive, her thoughts drifted to how the last ten days had gone. In order to get her head straight after the Night Hunter confrontation, she had taken a brief leave from UCLA, where she taught a weekly seminar in criminal profiling. She also informed the LAPD that she wouldn’t be available for consulting work for the same reason. That leave ended today.

  She could have used more time but wasn’t sure how much difference it would have made. Hannah, despite having multiple teletherapy sessions with Dr. Lemmon in recent days, still hadn’t said a word about gunning down the serial killer up in Wildpines.

  Ryan seemed to be doing better than her, but Jessie still got the sense that he was struggling a little. Even though he’d been instrumental in taking down the Night Hunter, she knew he still blamed himself for several deaths that occurred because he froze the first time he had a chance to stop him.

  Jessie felt like she was in a comparatively good place, but she didn’t want to delude herself. If she was really doing so great, why had it taken her a week and a half to come here, to finally speak to the person she should have visited the day she got back from the mountains? Maybe she wasn’t doing as well as she liked to think.

  But then she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass. Considering everything she’d been through lately, she thought she didn’t look too bad for someone approaching her thirty-first birthday. Her brown hair settled just below her shoulders. Her green eyes were bright and alert. And she’d used much of her paid leave from UCLA to work out, hoping to keep her five-foot-ten, athletic build from falling apart.

  The door opened and she snapped to attention. A guard came in, followed by someone she couldn’t see. Then the guard moved to the side and she had a clear view. It was Andy.

  For a brief moment, Jessie was overwhelmed by panic. After all, this was the woman who had poisoned her during a girls’ movie night at her Hancock Park mansion. And this was the first time they’d been in such close proximity since she’d testified at Andy’s trial.

  She knew that with four deputies in spitting distance and a physical barrier between them, she was safe. But the apprehension was there all the same. Still, she needed to know what Andy knew, so she ignored the intense desire to just get up and leave. Instead she took a deep breath and did her best to hide her anxiety by looking as bored as possible.

  Andy projected the untroubled calm that Jessie was trying to manufacture. She wore the assigned uniform for inmates with a mental health issue designation: a yellow shirt and blue, loose-fitting pants. Her blonde hair was slightly longer than it had been when they’d had a video chat seven months earlier but still much shorter than it had been on the outside. She wore no makeup but since she didn’t wear much back in her country club days, the difference wasn’t noticeable. In fact, despite celebrating her thirty-fourth birthday behind bars, she looked shockingly put-together.

  She was good-looking in an understated way that had helped her seem unthreatening when they’d first met. With one ex
ception, all her features were pleasant but unmemorable. That exception was her eyes. Bright blue, they gleamed with what Jessie had originally interpreted as charming playfulness. But in reality, that twinkle suggested something much darker, a malicious intent that Jessie foolishly missed in their earlier, friendly interactions.

  Andy sat down across from her and smiled like she didn’t have a care in the world; as if she was settling in for coffee and chit-chat with an old pal. She picked up the phone on her side of the wall and waited. Once more, Jessie was tempted to just get up and leave. But she swallowed the urge with a gulp and grabbed the phone beside her.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Andy said.

  “I wasn’t going to,” Jessie told her. “But I thought I should give you the opportunity to explain.”

  “Explain what exactly?”

  Jessie saw that the woman wasn’t going to make this easy.

  “Explain how you knew that the Night Hunter would try to use Katherine Gentry to get to me,” Jessie said, though she had no doubt that Andy already knew this.

  Kat Gentry, a private investigator and Jessie’s best friend, had received a collect call from Andy the evening before the Night Hunter’s attack, warning that he would manipulate her to get to Jessie. She had been right.

  “Let’s just call it women’s intuition,” Andy said with a thin smile. Jessie refused to play this game.

  “I see,” she replied. “Well, I suppose now I can go back to Captain Decker and tell him I did my due diligence, but all I have for him is women’s intuition. So I guess we’re done here.”

  Andy nodded knowingly.

  “Ah yes, how is Roy Decker doing these days?” she asked. “I’d imagine pretty well after the department bumped up his budget for the Homicide Special Section unit.”

  Jessie pretended she wasn’t surprised by how much Andy seemed to know about the inner workings of the LAPD budgetary process and attempted to redirect the conversation.

  “Apparently you’re well-versed in how things are going with HSS. Care to share where you got that information?”

  “Happy to,” Andy replied. “But first, how are you doing? My understanding is that things got a little sketchy during your final encounter with the Night Hunter. Sleeping okay? No major emotional or physical fallout, I hope?”

  “I’m not here for chit-chat, Andy,” Jessie said, her tone more measured than her thoughts. “If you don’t have anything useful to offer other than your intuition, I’ll be on my way. I’ve got a lot on my plate.”

  “So I hear,” Andy said, clearly amused. “Between raising a teenage girl, taking care of your injured beau, and juggling teaching and consulting gigs, it’s a wonder that you’re functional at all.”

  “I knew this was a waste of time,” Jessie said, starting to stand up.

  “Hold on,” Andy said, slightly more animated than before. “I promise to tell you. I was just hoping we could catch up a little before getting down to business.”

  “I’m not telling you anything about my life,” Jessie insisted, still standing.

  “Fine. Then will you humor me briefly by letting me tell you a little about mine? I feel like what I have to share will make more sense if it’s in context.”

  Jessie knew that Andrea Robinson, an admitted narcissist, would eventually demand to tell her tale of woe behind bars. It had always just been a matter of time. She suspected that it was the real reason she’d called Kat to tip her off about the Night Hunter; that her cryptic warning was simply bait to get Jessie face to face with her. But the only way to be sure was to let this play out a little.

  “Go ahead,” she said, sitting down again. “You have two minutes. Then you start spilling or I walk out that door.”

  “A whole life reduced to two minutes,” Andy said, theatrically simulating deep sorrow. “I guess that’s what it’s come to.”

  “No one to blame but yourself,” Jessie reminded her. “Besides, you seem to be getting by in here. I don’t see any visible scars.”

  Andy smiled patronizingly, as if Jessie couldn’t possibly understand the unseen scars she had.

  “That’s true,” she conceded. “And it’s part of what I wanted to discuss with you. You see, one of the major reasons I’ve managed to get by in this place is oddly counterintuitive. I’ve convinced the psychos in here that I’m crazier than they are. I periodically scream bloody murder for no reason. I took on the most violent inmate on the floor—beat her senseless with a plastic lunch tray—to make sure no one messed with me. She didn’t do anything to prompt it but I knew that if I told the guards she attacked me and I was acting out of self-defense, they’d believe me over her, which they did.”

  “Sounds like you’ve adapted quite well to your new environment,” Jessie noted, both impressed and troubled.

  “I’m getting by as well as I can,” Andy corrected. “I make a point to never alienate the guards. I attend all my required therapy sessions. I take all my prescribed medications. The doctors say I’m doing great.”

  “But are you really doing great?” Jessie challenged. “It seems like you’re playing a role to me.”

  “Of course I’m playing a role. But can you blame me for that? I have to survive in this facility any way I can. If that means making the other inmates a little scared of me, that’s what I’ll do. There are multiple women in here who get in shouting matches with imaginary enemies, sometimes with imaginary friends. One inmate started ripping out another’s hair, claiming it was covered in snakes. I have to protect myself, Jessie. Besides, I may be working the other prisoners but I’m not working the guards or medical personnel. I doubt you’d do things any differently if you were on the other side of this glass.”

  Jessie pretended not to be appalled at the description of daily life in this place. She didn’t want to give Andy the edge that came from knowing she’d shocked her.

  “You’ll forgive me if I have a little skepticism about how forthcoming you’re being with the people treating you,” she said blandly. “I’ve seen how good you are at manipulating people, even those trained to be on the lookout for it.”

  It pained her to admit out loud that she’d been so easily deceived, but it was a preemptive move. Acknowledging how Andy had played her back in the day removed it as something that could be lorded over her. Andy gave the hint of a smile, as if she was impressed by the humility.

  “That gets me to the other part of why I asked you here,” she said, “beyond merely describing the woes of incarceration.”

  “And the other shoe drops,” Jessie proclaimed, sensing that Andrea Robinson was finally getting where she intended to end up all along.

  Andy looked mildly irked by her sarcasm as her eyes flashed briefly. But she quickly regained control. Jessie made a mental note of it.

  “I was just going to say,” Andy said calmly, ‘that if you think I’m snowing the doctors here, maybe I should be placed at a facility where they’re more practiced in dealing with folks like me.”

  Jessie studied her through narrowed eyes.

  “What are you saying exactly?” she asked. “Stop playing games and just spit it out.”

  “Okay, cards on the table,” Andy replied. “This place is supposed to be for short-term incarceration of inmates with mental illness; short-term, as in no more than a year. They cycle in new women every day, often on misdemeanor charges, then medicate them enough to release them once they’ve served their time, and send them back out into society. But not me—I’ve been in here well over a year with no sign that a transfer is imminent.”

  “Maybe accommodating a murderer isn’t their top priority,” Jessie pointed out.

  “Maybe not,” Andy allowed. “But I’m not looking to get my sentence reduced or go to some country club prison. There are multiple, high-security, lockdown facilities that I’m eligible for. I’m talking about places where the inmates don’t throw their own feces at each other, or if they do, it’s cleaned up more often than every twenty-four hours. I d
on’t think that’s an unreasonable ask, Jessie. And I’m hoping that they’d consider the request, if it was accompanied by a good word from the woman I allegedly poisoned.”

  “It’s not alleged, Andy. You were convicted.”

  “Touché,” Andy said. “So what do you say?”

  Jessie knew that the bartering had begun. Andrea Robinson didn’t expect her to support a prison transfer out of the kindness of her heart. She would have to offer something valuable in exchange. That’s the reason this conversation was happening in the first place.

  “I’m still confused,” Jessie said. “Are you offering me anything worthwhile to get my support for a transfer to a different facility?”

  “If I were,” Andy wondered, “what would you say?”

  “I’d say it depends.”

  “On what?” Andy asked with a wry smile, fully aware that her bait was generating interest.

  “On how secure the alternate facility is and, more importantly, on what you have to offer.”

  Andy’s smile grew wider.

  “Then I guess we’re at an impasse for now,” she said. “Maybe you just need to sit a little with the idea of helping me secure that transfer. If you give me your word that you’ll provide that, I promise to share information far more valuable than how I knew what the Night Hunter was up to.”

  Jessie stared at the woman, fully aware that she was being maneuvered. Still, she couldn’t deny that Andy had somehow managed to predict that the serial killer would attempt to specifically manipulate Kat rather than anyone else. Maybe finding out how she knew was worth writing a letter in support of her transfer.

  “Let me be straight with you,” she said firmly. “If I write a letter for you, I will only submit it if I deem the information you share worthwhile. And a letter from me doesn’t guarantee that a transfer will happen. I don’t make those decisions. Are we clear on that?”