by Blake Pierce
She had hit a mental dead end and allowed her thoughts to drift from picturing the kitchen as a crime scene to viewing it a gathering place. It was where the family ate their meals, where the kids did their homework. Would that ever be possible again? How would little Colt Jr. and Anastasia handle learning of their mother’s death? What would Colton Wooten say to them?
At first, she suspected he’d want to take them to a hotel for the night. But then she remembered that with Colt’s autism, upending his routine could be more damaging than remaining in the residence. It was possible they might have to spend the night in the same house where their own mother had been butchered.
The thought of the place these kids called home being warped into something so horrific was unsettling. She wondered if they’d ever be able to feel comfortable there again. Would Wooten decide they had to move? (That is, assuming he wasn’t in prison for their mother’s murder.)
Suddenly, a thought, fleeting and distant, bounced around in Jessie’s head like a fast-moving pinball. It disappeared before she could latch on to it. She stood up and walked to the kitchen for some water, hoping moving around might help it return.
There it was again, a memory of words more than images, slipping fluidly through her brain, visible but too slippery to fully grasp hold of. She tried to recall what she was thinking about before the flash had come to her. It was something about the kids having to move, having to leave the place they called home. Why were those words so familiar to her?
And then it hit her. Those were the exact words Bolton Crutchfield had used when he told her what he’d revealed to her father.
“I told him the location of the place you call home,” he had said after mentioning, seemingly randomly, that “home is where the heart is.”
It occurred to her that perhaps Crutchfield hadn’t been referring to her current residence. Maybe he was talking about the place that Jessie most considered her home, the place where she’d felt safest and most loved. And if he knew her as well as she feared he did, that could only mean one place: Las Cruces.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As she got in the taxi, Jessie called Pa for the fourth time.
“LAX,” she barked at the cab driver as she listened to the endless ringing. After a minute, she gave up and tried her mom again for what had to be the third or fourth time. When she got no answer, she tried the home phone again. She’d lost track of how many times she’d called that number without success.
She scrolled through her contacts, looking for the management office of the condo complex or one of Pa’s retiree buddies. But she couldn’t find any and her fingers were shaking. Finally she gave up and just called the Las Cruces FBI field office.
She had to go through a seemingly endless phone tree to reach a live person. When she finally did, she identified herself as being an LAPD profiler rather than a worried daughter and asked for the agent on call. She was immediately transferred.
“Agent Pearsall,” a youngish-sounding man said.
“Agent, this is Jessie Hunt. I’m a criminal profiler with the Los Angeles Police Department, Central Station. I’m calling because I’m concerned that a wanted killer I’ve been tracking has learned the home address of my parents and may want to harm them. One of them is a retired FBI special agent from your office, Bruce Hunt. I’ve been unable to reach him or my mother, Janice, on any of their phones. I need it checked out ASAP.”
She gave the shaky-sounding agent the address, the code to access the building, the location of their hidden front door key, and their interior condo security code.
“Okay, we’ll send someone right over,” Agent Pearsall assured her.
“Don’t send ‘someone,’ Agent,” Jessie said forcefully. “Send everyone. If this killer is there, he’s extremely dangerous. He’s murdered countless people and evaded capture for over twenty years. You can’t just send in one agent or order an officer drive-by. Additionally, these are the parents of someone from another law enforcement agency and one of those at risk is a twenty-five-year FBI veteran. Some professional courtesy is in order. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Ms. Hunt. I’ll put out the call as soon as we hang up.”
“Thank you. I’m headed to the airport right now. I should be there in a few hours. Don’t hesitate to call with updates.”
She gave him her number and hung up. She considered calling Ryan Hernandez but decided against it. There was no point in creating anxiety for anyone else just yet. It could be a false alarm, though she knew deep down that it wasn’t.
*
She was given priority boarding on the first flight out of L.A. and was in the air before anyone could call with updates. There were no direct flights to Las Cruces, so she took the first available into El Paso, a forty-five-minute drive away.
She finally landed after 11 p.m. It had been the longest three hours of her life, trapped in a metal tube, uncertain what was going on below her, unable to do anything to help. She tried to pass the time by reading, then by watching a sitcom on the tiny screen in front of her. Nothing helped. Filled with dread, she ended up spending the last two hours of the flight simply staring at the seatback in front of her.
When she stepped off the Jetway into the terminal, she looked around the near-empty gate area and saw two men in boring suits with safe haircuts standing uncomfortably by the newsstand. She knew they were there for her and walked over.
One was tall and square with brown hair and dark eyes that hinted that he’d seen some difficult things in his life. The other was leaner, with straw-colored hair, freckles, and a nervous manner that suggested he was newer to this sort of thing.
“I’m Jessie Hunt,” she said. “I gather you’re waiting for me.”
“We are,” the clearly more experienced of the two said. “I’m Special Agent Miles Gerard and this is Agent Keith Pearsall, who you spoke to earlier. Can you come with us, Ms. Hunt?”
Jessie did as she was asked. Though she was tempted to ask for an update, she held her tongue. Something about the way the men carried themselves told her they had information to share but wanted to do so in a more private environment. That realization filled her with increasing dread.
They arrived at the airport security office. Agent Gerard led the way to a private room at the back that looked like it was likely used for interrogations. When they had all taken seats, he took a deep breath, lifted his head, stared her in the eyes, and began to tell her what she already knew.
“I’m terribly sorry to tell you this, Ms. Hunt. But earlier this evening, we went to your parents’ condo and found both of them dead. They had been murdered. We believe it happened earlier this afternoon.”
Jessie nodded slightly, gulped hard, and managed to get out a single, clipped sentence.
“Status of the investigation?”
Both men looked surprised by her response. But Gerard rolled with it and answered her question.
“We have investigative and forensic teams onsite now. It looks like your mother was killed first, and quickly. Your father died later. It appears that he was…questioned first.”
“Tortured, you mean,” Jessie clarified.
“It does appear that he suffered some trauma prior to death, yes.”
Jessie nodded. She was about to say something when she felt an onrushing surge of nausea grow within her.
“May I borrow your restroom?” she managed to ask between gritted teeth.
“It’s right out the door to the left,” Agent Gerard said quickly.
Jessie nodded a second time as she got up and made her way out of the room as fast as she dared. Once in the restroom with the door closed, she took several, long, slow deep breaths, hoping to exhale the queasiness that was causing beads of sweat to form on her forehead.
Flashes of Bruce’s and Janine Hunt’s faces skirted the edge of her mind, trying to force their way front and center. She gasped involuntarily at the realization that she would never see those faces with smiles on them again. She felt another ga
sp, something closer to a sob, rising in her chest and battered it back down.
There will be a time for all this. But it’s not right now.
She took several more deep breaths until she was sure she was in control, until she was certain she could go back out there and speak to those agents without losing it.
“They had a doorbell security camera, as did most of their neighbors,” she said as she reentered the interrogation room, startling both agents. “The whole community is retired law enforcement. The complex has multiple cameras at various entry points. Has all that footage been reviewed yet?”
“We’re still going through it,” Agent Gerard said, not commenting on her brief absence. “But the initial review suggests the suspect used a laser device to blind the cameras he was aware of. We’re still hopeful that he might have missed some and we can get a few images. We haven’t been able to access your parents’ personal footage yet.”
“I can give you the code for that. Take me there, please. The sooner we’re onsite, the less the scene will have been compromised and the more accurate a picture I can get of what happened.”
The agents stared silently at her for a second. To her surprise, it was Pearsall who spoke up first.
“With all due respect, Ms. Hunt,” he said, “it’s a pretty grisly scene right now. You might want to wait until CSU has had an opportunity to clean up a bit.”
Jessie stood up and looked at both men with cold certainty.
“Take me there now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
As Jessie approached the wreckage of what had been her parents’ “home sweet home,” she forced herself to remember her training. If there was ever a situation in which she’d need to depend on it, this was it.
Follow the evidence. Let it tell the story of what happened here. Don’t try to shoehorn it into an existing theory. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t let it get personal.
That last one was going to be hard.
She stood outside the front door for a few seconds, willing her mind to become a blank slate so that she could absorb the scene she was about to observe without emotion or prejudice. She knew it was an almost impossible task. But if she was going to get justice for Bruce and Janine Hunt—her true parents—she would have to set aside her own feelings for as long as she could.
She snapped on her forensic gloves, put baggy plastic slippers over her shoes, took several deep breaths, and walked through the front door. The first thing she noticed was that there were two teams working what appeared to be separate crime scenes.
She walked down the hall to where the smaller group was assembled, in her parents’ bedroom. Agents Gerard and Pearsall followed from a respectful distance, ready to answer any questions she might have.
She entered the bedroom and saw Janine Hunt lying on the bed. She was in sweatpants and a long-sleeved cotton shirt she’d gotten in Cancun a few years ago. It read “Margarita is my middle name. No, really.”
Her eyes were open and her head was turned unnaturally to the left, a result of her neck having been snapped. Jessie looked away for a second, blinked a few times, took a moment to regroup, and then returned her gaze to the bed.
Other than the injury that killed her, Ma looked generally undisturbed. Her thin brown hair, patchy in parts, was exposed and her wig rested on the bedside table. The creases at the edges of her eyes seemed somehow less pronounced now.
Either she had not been aware of what was about to happen to her or Xander Thurman had adjusted her body to look peaceful after he’d killed her. Her arms rested loosely at her sides. She had on thick socks, as her feet always got cold and tingly in the days after chemo.
Jesse let her eyes wander around the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing. The closet door was closed. The bathroom door was slightly ajar. The TV was off and the remote rested on top of it. The old-fashioned VCR was to the right. The display panel, which read “play,” was so covered in dust that the word was barely visible. No family photos seemed to have been taken. It looked normal, apart from the murdered woman on the bed.
Jessie stepped out and walked down the hall to where the large group of investigators had congregated in the den. When she got closer, she saw what was of such interest. It occurred to her that her mother had gotten off easy. She knelt down, pretending to tie her shoe, even though it was covered in a slipper. While on one knee, she allowed herself to silently exhale the cry that had materialized in her lungs. The image before her was brutally, painfully familiar.
Bruce Hunt was seated in a dining room chair, his forearms taped to the wooden armrests. His legs were tied to the legs of the chair. His eyelids were taped wide open. And there was a long, deep knife cut across his chest from his left shoulder to just below his neck.
Jessie’s hand involuntarily went up to the spot on her chest where she had a scar that matched his wound exactly, just as everything else about the scene did. When Xander had forced little Jessica Thurman to watch him kill her mother, he had tied her arms and legs to a chair and taped her eyes open. He’d sliced a long gash along her upper chest too. It was all the same, with one exception.
Her father had a second knife wound in his chest. The weapon was nowhere in sight but it must have been big because the hole in the flesh over his heart was about as big around as a golf ball. Blood, now mostly dried, had dribbled down his front and rested in a puddle between his feet.
He looked so fragile. His burly chest was curled in on itself. His previously sinewy arms sagged. He was no longer the man she both respected and occasionally resented, who’d kept her safe from harm all those years. He was just an old man, pushed to the breaking point before being killed.
Pushing the onrushing wave of grief off to the side, Jessie forced herself to look around the den, hunting for anything unusual, anything significantly different from her visit less than three months prior. Nothing jumped out at her but she didn’t trust her powers of observation at this exact moment.
“Make sure they take lots of pictures of the room,” she muttered, speaking to Gerard and Pearsall for the first time since entering the apartment. “I’ll want to study the details more closely later.”
They both nodded as Jessie stepped back outside into the cool, late-night New Mexico air. She walked several steps away and sat down on a bench near a small, path-side garden. Her mind was swimming.
This had all been done for her—either as punishment or warning. It was a reminder of what Xander had once done many years ago to the person she loved most in the world. It was a reminder that he could still get to the people she cared about, the people who made her feel safe.
In a weird way that she couldn’t quite explain and didn’t want to think about, this was also his way of reintroducing himself to her after so many years away. He was saying “I’m back.”
*
Jessie sat outside the apartment for another hour while the assorted teams did their work, processing evidence and then removing her adoptive parents’ bodies. Eventually Gerard walked over.
“We’ll want you to come to the medical examiner’s office to officially sign off on the identifications,” he said quietly. “They’ll need to hold on to the bodies for a few days for the investigation. But they should be able to release them to you by the end of the week, the weekend at the latest.”
“Thanks,” she said, not looking up.
“John Brode, the agent in charge for our office, was hoping to talk to you tonight or tomorrow. He wanted to get whatever you could give him on your suspect.”
“I’ll give him a statement tonight. Can he meet us at the M.E.’s office?”
“Sure, I’ll tell him,” Gerard promised. “Do you have a place to stay? I can make a few recommendations if you like.”
“That’s okay. Once we get everything squared away tonight, I plan to go straight back to L.A. I’ll take your lodging recommendations for when I come back for the funeral, maybe this weekend.”
“You’re leavin
g town tomorrow?” he asked incredulously.
“Yeah, I’m in the middle of a case. Besides, I have a feeling the guy who did this is headed there next. This was just an opening act for him.”
Her phone pinged. Turning away from the open-mouthed FBI agent, she looked at the message and gasped. It was from her pa, Bruce Hunt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It took Jessie a few seconds to figure out what must have happened.
The message wasn’t, as she’d hoped, some declaration of love from beyond the grave. Instead it was simply a confirmation that an Amazon order he’d placed had been processed. The order, to be delivered to Jessie, was for the compact disc of an album called The Best of Bobby McFerrin.
She looked at the time the order had been placed—4:17 p.m.—and realized that it was right in the window when he was being tortured. It occurred to her that he must have placed the order through their Alexa device while he was strapped down in the chair. And since it was being sent to her, it was almost certainly intended as some kind of coded message for her.
She clicked on the link for the album and scrolled down to the track listing, hoping to uncover whatever that message might be. She only vaguely recalled the name Bobby McFerrin and couldn’t immediately think of any songs by him.
The she saw it. The first song on the album was one she was familiar with, though she’d never known who sang it. It was called “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”
A flood of memories suddenly overwhelmed her. This was the song Pa had most often sung to her as a lullaby when she was a child. He sang it in the first months after she came to live with them, when she was still shell-shocked over what happened and couldn’t get to sleep. He sang it when she woke up screaming in the middle of the night. And it helped.