The Perfect Alibi (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Eight) Read online

  Jessie realized he was right. She and Hannah had been getting along shockingly well lately. But most of their down time was with Ryan around. He was an excellent buffer. But he might also inadvertently be preventing Hannah from getting into anything too heavy. Maybe some sisterly time alone would get her to open up, assuming she even had the urge.

  “Ryan Hernandez,” she said, suddenly feeling unexpectedly chipper considering the state of her vehicle, “you are neither the dumbest nor the least perceptive person I’ve met.”

  “Thanks?”

  “You also have a sweet ass.”

  She heard him cough on whatever he’d just taken a sip of. Satisfied with her work, she hung up.

  *

  Hannah was clearly pleasantly surprised when Jessie picked her up directly from school. That changed to extremely enthusiastic when she learned that they’d be stopping for ice cream on the way home.

  “Why aren’t you working?” she finally, reluctantly asked as they ordered their cones from a shop around the corner from the apartment.

  “I’m not busy right now,” Jessie said. “And I wanted to spend some time with you. You know, without that icky boy around.”

  “Icky isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I think of your boyfriend,” Hannah said.

  “Careful,” Jessie said in mock reprimand. “We don’t have to share every feeling we have the second we feel it.”

  Hannah smiled, obviously amused that she’d managed to cause some embarrassment.

  “I didn’t know the daughters of serial killers were allowed to share feelings at all,” she mused.

  Jessie tried not to leap too hungrily at the opportunity presented before her.

  “Technically, we’re not allowed,” she answered drily. “According to the official handbook, we’re supposed to be cold, emotionless automatons who engage in perfunctory attempts to replicate normal human behavior. How are you doing at following those rules?”

  “Pretty well, actually,” Hannah replied, playing along. “It seems to come quite naturally to me. If there was some sort of professional league, I think I’d be a real contender.”

  “I do too,” Jessie agreed, taking a lick of her mint chocolate chip cone. “You’d probably be a number one seed in the tournament. Not to brag but I think I’d be a strong second seed myself.”

  “Are you kidding?” Hannah asked, as she swallowed a healthy gob of rocky road. “You’re a wildcard entry at best.”

  “How so?” Jessie asked.

  “You express affection for others. You have genuine friendships. You are in a real relationship with a person you seem to care about. It’s almost like you’re a normal human being.”

  “Almost?”

  “Well, let’s be honest, Jessie,” Hannah said. “You still view almost every interaction as a chance to profile the person. You throw yourself into your work to avoid painful communication in your personal life. You carry yourself like a deer afraid everyone it meets is a hunter out to shoot her. So, not completely normal.”

  “Wow,” Jessie said, both impressed and a little disturbed by her sister’s perception. “Maybe you should be the profiler. You don’t miss a beat.”

  “Oh yeah,” Hannah added. “You also try to downplay uncomfortable truths with snarky jokes.”

  Jessie smiled appreciatively.

  “Touché,” she said. “Does all this awareness of our shared stunted emotional growth mean those sessions with Dr. Lemmon are doing some good?”

  Hannah gave her an eye roll that suggested she thought the attempt to redirect the conversation was especially ham-fisted.

  “It means that I’m aware of my issues, not that I’m necessarily able to do anything about them. I mean, how long have you been seeing her?”

  “Let’s see. I’m thirty now so it’s been close to a decade,” Jessie said.

  “And you’re still a mess,” Hannah pointed out. “That doesn’t give me much optimism.”

  Jessie couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You should have seen me back then,” she said. “Compared to the version of me from my early twenties, I’m the poster child for mental health.”

  Hannah seemed to consider the point as she took a bite out of her cone.

  “So you’re saying that ten years from now, I could have a boyfriend who’s way out of my league too?” she asked.

  “Now who’s using snarky cracks to avoid emotional truth?” Jessie asked.

  Hannah stuck her tongue out at her.

  Jessie laughed again and then took another lick of her ice cream. She decided not to push any further. Hannah had opened up more than she’d expected. She didn’t want this to turn into a traditional parental conversation.

  Besides, she considered Hannah’s willingness to admit how alienated she felt to be a good sign. Maybe the shared concerns of Garland and Dr. Lemmon were overstated. Maybe her constant fear that her half-sister might be an embryonic serial killer in the making was meritless. Maybe the girl was just a teenager who had been through hell and was trying to clumsily feel her way out.

  As she watched Hannah wipe a dribble of chocolate off her chin, that’s what she decided to believe.

  At least for now.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Morgan Remar was wiped out.

  Her flight back from the Social Services conference in Austin had gotten in late. She was so tired that she’d drifted off as her husband, Ari, drove her back from the airport. By the time they got back to their home in the West Adams district near downtown L.A, it was after 11 p.m.

  She was supposed to meet with Jessie Hunt, Kat’s profiler friend, tomorrow morning and wanted to get a decent night’s sleep beforehand. Of course, that had been close to impossible lately.

  Ever since she’d escaped, now over two weeks ago, she’d wake up at least three times a night, sometimes screaming, always sweating. She couldn’t stop smelling the pine scent from the wardrobe she’d been held captive in for five days. She jumped every time a door slammed or a car horn honked. She worried that reliving her experience for Kat’s friend would just exacerbate all of that.

  They arrived home and Ari pulled into the driveway. Neither got out of the car until the security gate closed behind them. It had come with the house when they bought it two years ago, but like the aging mansion itself, which they had been slowly refurbishing, it was in disrepair. The day Morgan escaped, as she recovered in the hospital, she’d begged Ari to have it fixed. It was up and working smoothly when she returned home.

  It shouldn’t have been a surprise to her. Ari was the kindest, most generous person she’d ever met, the complete inverse of her first husband, whom she’d felt zero guilt about leaving. Even before all this happened, Ari’s patience with her admitted tempestuousness was impressive. Since the abduction, he’d been a virtual saint, taking her to therapy, giving her massages, cooking every meal and just holding her close for hours on end.

  “You awake?’ he asked gently as she stretched in the passenger seat.

  “Yup,” she said through her yawn, “and surprisingly hungry. The sugar cookies they offered on the flight just didn’t cut it.”

  “You want me to make you something?” he offered.

  “No. I know you’re exhausted. And I’m a big girl. I can make my own snack.”

  “Can you though?” he teased lightly.

  She scowled playfully as she got out of the car and limped to the side door of the house, trying to balance on the large cast on her left leg. She pretended not to think about it because that also meant she’d remember why she had it. And she didn’t want to remember how she’d smashed through the wooden wardrobe door her abductor had improperly locked. She didn’t want to relive the memory of her left ankle cracking audibly when it bent the wrong way on that final blow, the one that opened the wardrobe door. She pushed the thought out of her head.

  As Ari carried her bag into the house, she smiled to herself, perhaps for the first time all day. It was good to be home, with the
one man she could trust. It was good to know that tomorrow she’d be meeting with someone that Kat was sure would move the investigation along.

  Morgan was well aware of Jessie Hunt even before Kat had mentioned her. The woman had outwitted two serial killers before turning thirty. She had escaped the murderous clutches of her own husband, who sounded about a hundred times worse than Morgan’s ex. And, at least in interviews, she seemed unruffled by any of it. To be honest, Morgan was a little star-struck.

  But Kat had assured her that Jessie was approachable in person and that no one was more passionate about getting justice for victims. So she’d go meet with her, even if it meant worse nightmares in the short term.

  But that was tomorrow. Tonight she needed that late-night snack. While she hobbled to the kitchen, Ari went to take a shower. He was a commodities broker and had a 6 a.m. meeting tomorrow with the East Coast team so he planned to just get up, get dressed, and get into the office early.

  She could hear the water turn on in the master bathroom down the hall as she rifled through the fridge for something appetizing but not too heavy. There was some sliced turkey, which she decided to roll up in a tortilla with a smear of spicy mustard. That ought to tide her over until morning.

  The thought of going into work tomorrow after her meeting with Jessie filled her with a complicated mix of enthusiasm and dread. The conference had gone well and she was excited to implement some of the new programs she’d learned about.

  The homeless shelter she worked at in Venice was a mainstay in the community. But it was also slow to embrace new techniques of reaching out to at-risk populations. For such a funky, avant-garde part of town, the care program they employed was surprisingly traditional.

  As energized as she was by the prospect of offering something new, she was equally apprehensive about returning to the place where she’d been taken. Tomorrow would be her first day back after recovering at home for the last few weeks.

  The shelter had hired an extra security officer to escort staff between the parking lot and the office. But Morgan hadn’t been taken on that route. She was abducted returning to the office from lunch on the Venice Boardwalk, only steps from the famous and famously crowded Muscle Beach.

  Even with all those people around, apparently no one had given much thought to the man who walked up behind her, put a chemical-doused rag over her face, and tossed her unconscious body in the back seat of a vehicle parked only yards away.

  If not for the little boy who saw it happen while his mom paid for cheap T-shirts at an open-air stall across the Boardwalk, not even those details would be known. Unfortunately, the boy, only five, was so shocked that he couldn’t offer much in the way of a description other than that the man was white and the car was blue.

  Like the memory of the wardrobe, Morgan tried to shake this image out of her head as well. She’d gone over the plan with the shelter director repeatedly. She’d bring her lunch and eat in the office from now on. She would call security when she arrived to the parking lot and the officer would meet her at her car and walk her to the shelter’s front door. He’d do the same thing in reverse at the end of the day. She would keep her phone’s location function on at all times and call Ari when she arrived at work and when she was headed home.

  The hope was that, with Kat and Jessie Hunt’s help, the police would catch this guy and she could return to something close to a normal life. She knew three other women had been through the same ordeal as her, including one who had just escaped last night. She didn’t want anyone else to have to suffer as they did. The meeting tomorrow was the next step in making it end.

  As she laid the snack ingredients out on the kitchen island, she heard a loud rattling outside. Her whole body went cold with fear. She grabbed a butcher knife from the knife block on the island, turned off the kitchen light, shuffled over to the side door, and turned on the porch light.

  What she saw made her sigh in relief. A raccoon was aggressively trying to squeeze into one of their locked trash bins. He managed to get a paw into the tiny open space between the can and the lid but couldn’t quite squeeze through. When the light came on, his head darted in her direction and she could have sworn she saw a flash of guilt cross his face before he hopped down and darted off into the darkness.

  She silently laughed at herself. If a shoplifting raccoon could cause heart palpitations, it was going to take a while to get back to something approximating a normal life. She turned the light back on and returned to the island to prep the snack.

  But as she put down the knife and reached for the turkey, she noticed the tortilla was gone.

  I could have sworn I got that out.

  She turned back to the fridge. That’s when she noticed the dirty footprints from what looked like a boot. Neither she nor Ari wore shoes in the house. The cold sensation of fear that had just subsided suddenly returned, as if a huge, frozen fist had suddenly clenched around her entire body. She picked up the butcher knife again. Glancing at the counter, she noticed something else. The small paring knife was missing from the knife block.

  She started to call out to Ari when the shadow darted out from the pantry behind her, clasping his hand over her mouth just before she got the name out. She tried to struggle free but he had already jabbed the paring knife into the small of her back four times before she thought to swing the butcher knife in his direction.

  Morgan gasped underneath the hand covering her mouth. She had no idea if she made contact as the pain and shock were too immersive for anything else to get through. She lost track of how many times he plunged the small knife into the soft skin above her hips. But at some point, she collapsed to the floor.

  She landed hard on the kitchen tile and felt her skull bounce once before settling down again. She was on her stomach but her eyes were open so she could see him place the knife delicately on the island with his gloved hands. Then he bent over and wiped the blade of the butcher knife she was still clinging to. She couldn’t see his face.

  “Repent,” he whispered in her ear.

  Though she was quickly losing consciousness, Morgan felt a shiver of horror-stricken recognition as she realized it was the same voice as her abductor. He stood back up and looked down at her with mild interest before walking to the side door.

  Just before he stepped out and closed it behind him, she saw him bring her tortilla to his mouth and take a big bite. Then he closed the door and was gone. Three minutes later, so was she.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jessie was frustrated.

  She knew she should probably go to bed. After all, it was almost midnight and Ryan was spending tonight at his place. But she wasn’t tired. She had the case files for all four abductions laid out on the bed. As she listened to Hannah laughing in the other room as she watched an episode of Top Chef, she tried to connect the dots.

  While these women had a lot in common, nothing jumped out that was similar enough to show an obvious pattern. All were in their late twenties to mid-thirties. All were at least middle-class, if not well-off, and lived in nice neighborhoods. But that’s where the similarities ended.

  None of them lived in the same area of town. None of them were found near where they were taken or near any of the other victims. Three were married, but one, the most recent victim, wasn’t. Three were white but the third victim, Jayne Castillo, was Latina. One had kids. The other three didn’t. Two had office jobs, one had a home business, and one was a stay-at-home mom. None had criminal records.

  She wanted to have something positive to share with Morgan Remar when she met with her in the morning. But right now, there wasn’t much to go on. She was hoping that maybe something Morgan would tell her might jibe what she’d learned from Brenda Ferguson today.

  She was debating whether to tell Hannah it was time for lights out when her phone rang. It was Ryan.

  “Miss me?” she asked.

  “Always,” he said. “But that’s not why I’m calling. I was just assigned a case. Decker wants you with me
. I’m on my way in. Can I pick you up on the way? I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Sure,” she said, already starting to put away each woman’s file. “What the case?”

  “I don’t know much yet. Just that a man found his wife dead in their kitchen less than an hour ago. They live in West Adams. She was in her late twenties, stabbed multiple times in the back before bleeding out.”

  “Okay,” Jessie said. “I’ll meet you out front in fifteen. That’ll give me just enough time to beg Hannah to go to sleep.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “Thanks. She’s watching food television so I’m going to need it.”

  *

  They pulled up in front of the house at 12:35 a.m. The area around the home was already cordoned off and was surrounded by four black-and-whites, an ambulance, and a medical examiner’s van.

  Jessie and Ryan got out a half block away and walked past several hundred-year-old mansions until they reached the crime scene. This home was large and impressive too, but it was more dilapidated than the others. A tarp and a pile of lumber in the front yard suggested the owners had been trying to remedy that.

  Ryan flashed his badge and a uniformed officer lifted the police tape so they could duck under and head to the front door. They were met by Officer Pete Clark, a veteran cop with a tight gray buzz cut and arms like a He-Man action figure. Known around the department for his no-guff demeanor, he didn’t disappoint.

  “How’s it going, Pete?” Ryan asked when they met him at the stoop.

  “The Dodgers were just about to bat in the bottom of the thirteenth inning when I got the call, so not great. This basically ruined the night for me.”

  “Sorry this pesky murder got in the way of your baseball game,” Ryan replied with fake sympathy. “Mind filling us in on what happened here?”

  “No problem,” Clark said, clearly not taking offense at Ryan’s crack as he switched into professional mode. “Follow me.”