by Blake Pierce
As she did, Jessie took her in. The woman was quite a sight. Well over six feet tall and 200 pounds, she looked like she could handle security all on her own. An African-American woman in her mid-forties, she moved with a bounce in her step that Jessie envied. She had a broad smile that was even more impressive considering the time of day.
“I’m Roberta Watts,” she said, extending her hand. “I run this madhouse.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jessie said, trying not to wince at Roberta’s powerful grip. “I’m Jessie Hunt.”
“Jessie, what can I do for you? I know this isn’t a health department check at six twenty-one at night. We’re all paid up so you’re not a creditor. So that means you’re here with really good or really bad news. Good Samaritan here to make a generous donation, I’m hoping?”
Jessie didn’t feel she could just start discussing Victoria without any preamble, so she dodged.
“I don’t know that I have the resources for that right now,” she said. “But I live in the area and I was curious about the facility. Do you have a moment to tell me about it?”
“Of course. We always have time for potential contributors. I’ll give you the mini-tour. Follow me.”
She left her office and was halfway down the hallway before Jessie could catch up. She launched into what was clearly her standard pitch.
“We’re a non-profit facility designed to help children develop life skills while providing a safe, secure environment. We offer short-term housing for homeless children and kids between foster families who don’t currently have access to longer-term residential facilities. We provide low-cost and free day care for parents working below the poverty line. We offer meals, on-site education, counseling, and physical and mental health and wellness resources. We are open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. We are a public-private partnership, with seventy-five of our funding coming from donors and the remaining twenty-five percent provided by the city and county. In January, we’ll be celebrating our fifth anniversary.”
As they curled around the corner, the corridor opened up into a large room filled with plastic play structures, beanbag chairs, and a block and Lego center. In one corner was a ping-pong table. In another there was a basketball hoop. A third corner had hopscotch and jump ropes.
Kids were everywhere, running, jumping, and rolling around. They all wore navy sweatpants and light blue T-shirts with the single word “Outreach” printed on them. She watched as one little girl with pigtails did half a dozen somersaults on a row of mats at the end of the room. When she was done, she stood up and bowed as if she’d just completed a gold-medal-winning routine.
“What’s up with the sweatpants and shirts?” Jessie asked.
“Even in an environment like this, where kids are struggling, there can be teasing over clothing. Some children only have one shirt. Some only have a pair of shorts and no jeans. Some are wearing taped-up flip-flops because they can’t afford real shoes. Here, everyone gets a shirt and sweats and is required to wear them. That eliminates some of the conflicts, though not all. We also provide fresh underwear, socks, and, when possible, shoes.”
“You said three-quarters of your funding is private. Is that mostly corporate or individual?” Jessie asked, finally finding a way to broach the topic she had come here to pursue.
“It’s a combination,” Roberta Watts said, her voice faltering slightly. “Our biggest resource is a foundation established by one person. It coordinates donations from everyone. Unfortunately, the woman who spear-headed it passed away earlier this week.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jessie said, not sure why she didn’t come clean in that moment.
“Yes, it’s a real loss. Obviously, we’re unsettled about what will happen to the center from a financial perspective. This woman—her name was Victoria Missinger—was relentless in getting us the resources we need. But on a personal level, it’s really tough as well.”
“Were you close?” Jessie asked.
“Not really. She wasn’t the kind of person who was personally all that warm, at least not with adults. But it was a different story with the kids. They loved her. She’d get down on the ground and play dolls with them. She’d run around and play tag. She’d read at story time. She was as soft with them as she was hard when dealing with a reluctant donor. I haven’t told them yet. I’m not sure how they’ll take it. These kids have been through a lot. But to them, Miss Vicky was a rock, someone they could always count on. Now they can’t.”
It wasn’t until then that the full magnitude of Victoria Missinger’s death really hit Jessie. Until now, she’d mostly looked at the woman as a piece in a puzzle that needed to be solved. The fact that Victoria Missinger had been repeatedly described as distant, even cold, had reinforced her perception.
But looking over at Roberta, who was staring at the kids with a misty look in her eyes, she realized that this was more than just a game to be won. Dozens of lives—children’s lives—could be ruined by the death of this one woman.
In that moment Jessie swore that Victoria would get whatever justice she could provide.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
If this was what Ryan Hernandez considered a decent hotel, Jessie wondered what he viewed as unacceptable living arrangements.
True, this was just for one night and most of his suggestions had been weekly options, but still, it was not exactly welcoming. It was clean at least. She hadn’t seen one cockroach. But the room smelled musty, like the windows hadn’t been opened in months.
It was more of a motel, with a door that faced the noisy, overly lit parking lot. The ice machine was outside and down the hall, which meant that it could have been in Siberia. There was no way Jessie was walking down there in her sweats at night in forty-five-degree weather. The room-temperature water in her plastic cup would have to do.
She stripped off the comforter (who knows the last time that thing was washed?) and lay down on one of the two twin beds in the room—no queens were available tonight. The lime-green wallpaper was starting to peel at the seams and the photo on the wall was faded, though it appeared to be of a nondescript, barren hill that didn’t deserve to have its picture taken.
The pillow was lumpy, as was the mattress. The bed frame creaked. The remote control didn’t work and since there were no buttons on the set itself, she had to decide whether to watch a rerun of Mama’s Family or just turn the TV off. She turned it off.
Lying there, she reminded herself that this place was infinitely preferable to the situation of many of the children she’d just seen. They didn’t have their own rooms or TVs or private bathrooms. And yet, she suspected, they were happy for what they did have.
Jessie pushed the image of those kids from her mind. It was too much for one day. She was just debating whether to crash for the night even though it was only 9:30 when a text came in. It was from her Realtor. The potential buyers on the house had rejected her counteroffer. She had to either accept their initial offer or pass. And she had to decide by 9 a.m. tomorrow or they were pulling the offer entirely.
Part of her wanted to say no just to spite them. She didn’t love their hardball tactics and under other circumstances she would have told them to screw off. But there was no guarantee anything better would come along soon. This was, after all, the house where a crazy man had tied up his wife and tried to kill her and two neighbors. That sort of thing tended to reduce home value. And these people knew it.
Right then, Jessie decided it wasn’t worth the fight. She just wanted to be rid of the place. She’d never really wanted to be there anyway. And even taking a loss, she’d still clear seven figures on the sale. That and her take from the divorce would leave her more than comfortable—maybe not Andrea Robinson comfortable, but with more than enough to not worry. In light of what she’d just seen a few blocks away, it seemed churlish to balk at the offer. Besides, making a clean break was worth more to her at this point than getting the best deal.
She
texted back that she’d accept the offer. The reply came less than sixty seconds later. They had an agreement. She should come to Westport Beach tomorrow at 10 a.m. to sign the papers. That would mean pushing back her review of the maid’s taped interview. But if it meant the house issue was resolved for good, then Marisol Mendez could wait a few hours.
Jessie turned off the light and stared up at the ceiling, illuminated by the parking lot lights despite the thick curtains. She tried to push the negative thoughts out of her head and focus on the positive. She was selling the house. She was getting a fresh start. She had made what Dr. Janice Lemmon would call a “breakthrough” when it came to her perception of her adoptive father. And yet…
She couldn’t help but see the other side of things. Professionally, things were sketchy. One man—Dan Romano—was no longer a viable suspect. The home security cameras that might have revealed the killer’s identity hadn’t recorded anything and she was reduced to tracking down uncorroborated rumors of an adulterous maid. And now even that had to be put on hold because she had to sell the house she’d bought with the man who’d tried to kill her.
Add to that, she was sleeping in a motel with a borderline nauseating hard-to-identify smell. And that was because her oldest friend had kicked her out, putting their friendship in doubt, all because a serial killer wanted to teach her a lesson. And that wasn’t even the serial killer she was most worried about. Her father earned that title.
Jessie chuckled at the gallows humor of it all. But after a moment, the grim smile on her face faded as the magnitude of all those terribles hit her. She felt her body sink into the chunky, uneven mattress as the enormity of crises in her midst started to weigh her down. A dull depression rolled over her like coastal fog. It wasn’t “drive your car into the back of a truck” depression. Rather, it was more like she was lugging a fifty-pound backpack around, one she could never take off. Maybe Dr. Lemmon wouldn’t be so proud of her after all.
She put in the cheap pair of earplugs she’d bought at the drugstore, rolled onto her side away from the parking lot lights, and drifted off into an unsettled, restless sleep.
*
He sat in the rocking chair across from her, whittling.
Little Jessica had stopped struggling to free her arms as the cuts were deep and it hurt to move at all. Besides, he’d just retie them anyway.
Jessica glanced up at the lifeless body of her mother. Though she’d been dead for hours, every now and then the manacles holding her arms to the ceiling beam above her head shifted imperceptibly and she swayed ever so slightly. Jessica knew movement was forthcoming when the wood creaked.
Her father, Xander Thurman, seemed oblivious to his now-dead wife’s tiny movements. He just whittled away, cutting that small piece of wood into something Jessica couldn’t see in his big hands. She did notice the shavings hit the ground at semi-regular intervals.
“You know, Junebug,” her father said in that soft, unhurried voice, “family is the most important thing. Don’t ever forget that.”
Then he laid the wooden carving on the ground, put on his coat, opened the door, and walked out. She didn’t know it at the time but that would be the last time little Jessica would see her father.
Once he was gone, she screwed up the courage to look at the thing he’d carved and left at her feet. It was a valentine; a heart.
With what little strength she had in her tired, hoarse child’s voice, little Jessica Thurman began to scream.
And lying on that lumpy motel room bed, in her churned-up mess of sleep, so did Jessie Hunt.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Jessie pretended she wasn’t nervous. She’d met with many prisoners at many jails. She’d visited with a serial killer at a lockdown psychiatric facility well over a dozen times. She thought she’d be unfazed. But this prison was very different from Bolton Crutchfield’s. This was where her husband, Kyle, was being held.
The Orange County Men’s Central Jail was only three miles from the beach, but you’d never know it. Situated on flat land surrounded by several hills, it was tastefully hidden from the view of the area’s well-to-do residents. At first glance it looked more like a very secure office park than a prison.
But once she entered the property, that misperception was easily corrected. Jessie had already been through two metal detectors and two pat-downs just to be sitting in the communication room where she waited for officers to bring Kyle out to see her.
She sat in a bolted down chair that faced a pane of glass with an old-style corded phone on the wall. Each “communication booth” was separated by a flimsy corkboard divider intended to give some semblance of privacy.
To Jessie’s left a woman with a small child in her lap sat across from a large guy with a shaved head. Both mother and son were crying but the man was dry-eyed. To her right, the guy next to her sounded like he was conducting some kind of business with the prisoner across from him. She heard the words “package” and “lieutenant” and wondered if they knew everything they said was being recorded.
As she waited, Jessie’s thoughts returned to her morning so far. She’d slept poorly and woken up around 5 a.m., so she decided to head to Westport Beach early to avoid the traffic. On her way, she texted Ryan to let him know about her change of plans. He replied, saying he’d handle things with Captain Decker until she got back.
She got to Westport just after seven. And with three hours to kill before signing the house docs, she decided to drive around the old neighborhood she’d learned to despise. She passed by the home of Melanie and Teddy Carlisle, the couple whom Kyle had tried to kill along with her. Other than a few perfunctory texts, she’d lost touch with Mel, the one person she genuinely liked down here. She regretted that but it seemed a small price to pay to put this world behind her.
After that, she passed by her own house, the McMansion she’d be signing away in a few hours. It seemed so blandly innocuous from the street. One would never guess that this was where a marriage had fallen apart, a husband’s plan to frame his wife for murder had been hatched, a miscarriage had occurred, and three people had almost died.
After getting some breakfast, she went to the Realtor’s office to sign the sale documents, a process that was, while time-consuming, also thankfully mind-numbing.
Next she went to the harbor, where the now-shuttered Club Deseo stood forlornly on the pier. As a result of Kyle’s crimes, including the murder of a club employee, local authorities did a wider investigation and uncovered that the yacht club they belonged to was also a front for a high-end call girl business. It gave Jessie no small amount of satisfaction to know a place she’d so detested now sat empty.
She found a spot on a cliff overlooking the harbor and parked. From here, she had a broad view of the Pacific Ocean. But her eyes were drawn to a rock outcropping at the edge of the harbor, jutting out of the water and surrounded by buoys intended to warn boats away.
That’s where Kyle had dumped the body of Natalia Urgova, the club waitress and sometime escort he’d been sleeping with until it became inconvenient for him. Jessie had only met Natalia once and it hadn’t been a warm introduction. But she remembered every detail of the girl’s face, in part because she saw it so often in her dreams.
A gate slammed and Jessie was thrust back into the present. Kyle was being led over to their booth. Even in the gray jumpsuit he was wearing, her husband still looked good. He was tall and blond, with bright blue eyes and broad shoulders, and she could still recognize the man she’d fallen in love with.
Of course, that Kyle Voss—the rakish but goofy charmer who’d wooed her in college—either never existed or long ago ceased to. The man in front of her had lied to and manipulated her for months, if not years. It was infuriating how easily he’d played her, and more than a little embarrassing, considering what she did for a living. Maybe that was why she was here now—to make some sense of that.
She picked up the phone as he sat down and he grabbed the receiver on his side of the glass
.
“Hi, love,” he said with a mix of humor and venom. “Miss me?”
“You’d be amazed how little,” she replied.
“I doubt that. Your life was so much more exciting with me in it.”
“Exciting is one way to put it,” Jessie mused. “But I’ve managed to find other things to hold my interest. You’d be surprised.”
“Oh, I don’t think I would be,” he said, his eyes twinkling with glee. “I’ve got ears in here. I know you’re working with the pigs full time now.”
“The pigs?” Jessie repeated, almost laughing.
‘I figure now that I’m behind bars, I have to talk the part,” he explained, clearly not serious. “Convincing?”
“It needs a little work. But I think it’s great that you’re trying to adapt to your new surroundings.”
Kyle stared at her, a grin playing at his lips but not quite forming.
“Funny how quickly we slip back into the old resentful banter, huh?” he noted.
“I think it reinforces why our imminent divorce is a wise move,” she pointed out. “We don’t have what I’d refer to as a healthy relationship.”
“There’s no such thing, Jessie.”
“Some might suggest that it’s that kind of mind-set that sent you down the road that got you in here.”
“Are you profiling me right now, baby?” he asked, smirking.
“Nope. You don’t have to be a criminal profiler to make that deduction. And figuring you out isn’t my job anyway. I just felt I owed it to the wreckage of our marriage to see you in person and tell you that the divorce will be finalized at the start of the new year—January second, to be exact. So enjoy the remaining two weeks of our wedded bliss, dear.”
“That feels petty, Jessie,” he said feigning disappointment.
“Yeah,” she agreed, smiling, “it kind of does.”
“Well, thanks for the heads-up. But I should tell you—I have plans, my love. I intend to beat these charges. And when I do, I’m going to woo you and win you back. We’ll find our way back to each other. And once we’ve begun our resplendent second act together, I’m going to wait until you’re sleeping, get a tire iron, and beat you until you’re a pulpy mess of shattered bones, shredded skin, and oozing blood. It’s gonna be special.”