The perfect look

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jessie was surprised at how nervous she felt.

She rarely visited the second floor of the station, which was used mostly for storage and administrative offices. In fact, as she walked down the long hallway, she didn’t pass a single soul.

She stopped at the door to the tiny office marked with the simple nameplate “G. Moses” and knocked quietly. She heard a bit of paper shuffling from the other side and then what sounded like the crack of elderly kneecaps stretching out. The noise sent a shiver down her spine. A moment later Garland Moses opened the door.

“I lost,” he said in his familiar rasp when he saw her.

“Lost what?” she asked, her blood pressure suddenly rising.

“I had the over in the over/under bet on whether you would pester me for the first time before or after noon. It’s eleven fifty-six a.m. so I lost. I owe myself ten bucks.”

Jessie was relieved that he was only mocking her and allowed herself a moment to breathe before responding.

“Well, hopefully you pay up quick. I hear your methods of collecting late payments can be rough. “

“You have no idea,” Garland said, his mouth breaking into something close to a smile. “Let’s just say there’s forced Metamucil involved.”

“Nice,” Jessie said, gagging slightly. “So how much longer do I have to politely talk about your senior health routine before you fill me in on the situation?”

Garland half-smiled again. It seemed to be turning into a habit.

“Come in,” he said, moving aside.

She took one step into the office before realizing she couldn’t take another without bumping into his desk.

“I thought people were being sarcastic but this really did used to be a closet, didn’t it?”

“I don’t need a lot of room,” he replied, closing the door and squeezing past her to get to the chair on the other side of his small desk. Other than that, a single chair for guests, a desk lamp, and a half-sized file cabinet, the room was empty.

“I guess when you only take on a few cases each year, you don’t get drowned in paperwork.”

“I liked to keep the paperwork to a minimum even back in my busier days. A cluttered desk means a cluttered mind.”

“Confucius?” she asked teasingly.

“No, Moses, but not the bible one,” he said. Before she could reply, he continued. “So on to your case.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got nothing.”

“What?” she asked incredulously.

He seemed untroubled by her reaction.

“The truth is I haven’t even tried yet.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Think about it, Hunt,” he said patiently. “I can’t just walk over to the local FBI office, saunter in, and ask the assigned agents how their investigation is going, especially on the same morning the profiler most connected to Crutchfield returns to work. It will be obvious what I’m doing. They’ll shut down. You’ll get in trouble. And I’ll lose my official status as ‘grandiose emeritus.’ That’s no good.”

“You make it sound impossible,” Jessie protested. “No matter how you approach them, they’ll have their guard up.”

“Not necessarily, especially if I happen to be already enjoying my lunch at a joint I know they frequent. And if they join me because of the whole ‘grandiose emeritus’ thing, maybe they get to talking. Maybe they want to impress the old man and they spill a little more than they should. Maybe I seem disinterested so they tell me even more, to prove their mettle. Folks like to do that around me.”

“Because of your ‘grandiose emeritus’ status,” Jessie repeated.

“Now you’re getting it,” he said. “But no one’s going to tell me a thing if I come out and ask them directly. They’re FBI agents, not second graders.”

“So why aren’t you out having lunch?’ she pressed.

“Because they don’t usually show up at this place until around one. That’s why I called the owner and told him to hold a table waiting for me at twelve forty-five—a booth in the back, with a little privacy and room for three.”

“You’ve already done that?”

“I have.”

“I’m sorry,” Jessie said, impressed. “I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat. It’s just that Hannah’s out there, with God knows what happening to her. I saw you hanging out here and it got me riled up. I shouldn’t have made assumptions.”

“I appreciate that, Hunt. And I don’t blame you. An old guy like me, you’d be forgiven for thinking I completely forgot about our little chat this morning. But can I give you a piece of advice?”

“Of course,” she said.

“You have to loosen your grip a little.”

Jessie nodded.

“That’s been challenging for me,” she admitted.

“I get it,” he replied. “I was the same way for a long time. But the thing is, with what we do, there’s always going to be some bad guy out there. There’s always going to be a victim in danger. There’s always going to be a ticking clock. But if you’ve got the accelerator pressed to a hundred all the time, you’re going to crash. It’s inevitable. And then you’re no good to anyone.”

Jessie nodded. Everything he said resonated. Before she could admit it, he continued.

“I know it’s not easy, and especially not now, when the person at risk is your own half-sister. But you have to hit the brakes sometimes. You have to find some kind of equilibrium in your life. Otherwise you will burn out. And people you could have saved will die. I’m not saying you shouldn’t work hard. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t care. But you have to find that line where you can do this job and still be a functioning human being. Otherwise you’ll be miserable. You know what I mean?”

Jessie felt like she’d never better understood anything in her life.

“I do,” she said simply.

“Good,” he replied. “Then get the hell out of my office. I need to take a little siesta before lunch.”

And with those words of wisdom still in her ears, she left him to his nap.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hannah Dorsey reminded herself that she wasn’t dead yet.

It might have seemed obvious, but this time a week ago, she couldn’t be so sure. And every minute that she was alive meant she had a chance. At least that’s what she told herself.

She knew it was around midday because of where the glimmer of window light shined on the floor in the basement where she was being held. For a while she thought she’d been moved out of California because she’d never seen a basement here before.

But the man—he had told her to call him Bolton—had explained that the former owner was an East Coast transplant who had demanded one be built in his new Southern California home, even if it didn’t really make geological sense.

Bolton had explained a lot of things to her.

In the first few hours after he’d killed her foster parents and drugged and abducted her, he didn’t do much talking. That was partly because Hannah was too drowsy to understand him at first. After that, her panicked screams made talking impossible.

But after about eighteen hours, she’d shouted herself hoarse. Beyond that, she was so wiped out from fear, adrenaline overload, and confusion that listening to the man’s southern-inflected accent became almost a balm. If he was talking, he wasn’t killing. So she was happy for him to talk away.

She imagined he’d be coming by to chat soon. He always brought her lunch around the time the light from the small window hit the middle of the room, which she estimated to be noon. She’d figured out a few other things in the week she’d been here.

First of all, she knew it had been about a week because she was able to scratch a notch for each day into the wooden post she was chained to with the spoon he left her. In fact, she was pretty sure it was Tuesday. She also knew they were somewhere isolated. Otherwise Bolton would have gagged her or at least boarded up the small window that offered her that shred of sunlight.

He clearly wasn’t worried about someone hearing her calls for help or smashing the window and seeing her down here. Besides, she hadn’t heard anything like a car driving by, a plane passing overhead, or an alarm going off in the distance.

At night, through the window’s smeared dirty glass, she was able to see the flashing pink and blue neon sign in the far distance for a place called Bare Essence. The style of the sign suggested to her that it was probably a strip club. But considering she wasn’t an expert on places like that, the information wasn’t of much use.

She was also pretty sure he didn’t want her dead, at least not yet. It wasn’t for a lack of willingness to kill. Back at her foster parents’ house, before he drugged her but after he gagged her and tied her up, he’d carried her quietly into the living room and sat her in the corner so she could watch as he killed them.

He hadn’t done it stealthily. In fact, there was casualness to him throughout the ordeal. Her foster father was asleep in the easy chair and her foster mother was seated on the adjoining loveseat watching the TV.

Since they were facing away from him, he’d simply gone into the kitchen and come out with two knives, one a smaller serrated variety and the other a large carving knife. He gave Hannah a little wink as he walked around behind the couple and sat down next to Hannah’s foster mother, a bland, gray-haired but generally decent woman named Caryn.

Caryn must have assumed it was Hannah and only glanced over after the show went to commercial. When she saw the strange man with the knife smiling beside her, she opened her mouth to scream. That’s when he plunged it into the side of her throat.

She made an odd wheezy, gurgling sound, as if someone had let the air out of a balloon while underwater. Her foster father, Clint, who wasn’t objectionable but clearly only participated in the foster process at his wife’s behest, stirred slightly but didn’t wake up.

As Caryn’s blood spurted across the living room, some of it spraying on Bolton, he got up and wandered over to Clint. The man didn’t react so Bolton grabbed the remote control and began turning up the volume until it was so loud Clint couldn’t help but awaken.

“Too loud,” he muttered grumpily.

When he didn’t get any response, the man rubbed his eyes and looked at the screen. It was only then that he realized his view was blocked by a shortish, pudgy man with patchy brown hair and a double chin. Bolton smiled widely, revealing front teeth desperately in need of dental work, as several of them jutted in different directions. His bright, intense brown eyes never blinked.

Then, as if a starting bell had gone off at a horse race, he leapt forward and sank the carving knife into the center of Clint’s chest. Hannah couldn’t see her foster father’s face, only the back of him as his body stiffened briefly and then sagged back into the chair. He never made a sound.

Bolton looked over at her and shrugged as if to say, “I thought there’d be more to it.”

Hannah knew she should be freaking out. And she was sure that reaction would come. But in that moment after Caryn and Clint were butchered, she didn’t have much of a reaction at all. She wished she could have but it just wasn’t in her, not after everything else.

Only two months earlier, she’d gone through something equally traumatic. She and her adoptive parents had been kidnapped from their San Fernando Valley home and transported to a big mansion near downtown L.A. That time the perpetrator was an older man, likely in his fifties, and he was much less playful. Later she would learn that his name was Xander Thurman and that he was a notorious serial killer.

But at the time, all she knew was that she’d been brought to this strange house by this strange man. He tied her to a chair and made her watch as he proceeded to torture her adoptive parents. He left for a while before returning to finish what he’d started. Then a woman—Hannah later discovered she was a criminal profiler named Jessie Hunt—came into the house, apparently looking for him. He surprised and attacked her, knocking her out.

While she was unconscious, he strapped her arms to a ceiling beam. When she came to, he tortured her as well. The two of them engaged in a vicious verbal back and forth that was mostly lost on Hannah. Eventually, the woman’s quick thinking gave her the upper hand, which led to a ferocious fight that left the man dead and the woman in awful shape.

Hannah managed to free herself and get help. She didn’t remember much of the night beyond that, other than that the EMTs had to sedate her because she started to lose it. When she woke up, she was in the hospital. After questioning by multiple detectives, she was sent briefly to a group home and then to live with Caryn and Clint.

The next several months were a blur. She tried to go to school but found focusing difficult. The county got her a tutor to home school her and that went a little better. She cut her hair pixie-short so that when she looked in the mirror, she wasn’t reminded of the girl from the family photos, the photos of a family that no longer existed.

It didn’t really work. Her hair was still sandy blonde, her eyes were still green, and her long legs still made her look like a baby giraffe. She was still Hannah, whatever that meant.

Somewhere in that period, a detective came to follow up on the statement she provided the day after the attack. She repeated what happened, only this time it felt like she was reporting it from a distance, like she hadn’t actually been a participant in the events that destroyed her family.

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