THE PERFECT HOUSE

by Blake Pierce

  Eliza stared at her for a long time, her hand frozen on the towel, her eyes darting about madly. When she finally spoke, it was with a certainty that Jessie found disconcerting.

  “I think you’re messing with me, Ms. Hunt,” she said. “I think you’re painting a worst-case-scenario picture that might never play out. There’s no reason the intruder story can’t work. Thanks to your tip, I’ll make sure to give myself convincing wounds, ones too awful for anyone to think I would perpetrate them myself. I’ll…”

  In that moment, Jessie came to a decision. It was clear that Eliza had made her choice, even if she hadn’t yet acted on it. There was no point in waiting for her to make the first move. This might be Jessie’s only chance to surprise the unhinged woman in front of her.

  So while Eliza was mid-sentence, Jessie reached for the golf club. Unfortunately, she moved too fast and instead of grabbing it, she accidentally bumped the handle, knocking the club over and sending it sliding noisily across the kitchen floor.

  Eliza stared at her open-mouthed for a fraction of a second. Then she grabbed the knife.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Jessie didn’t wait.

  She leapt at Eliza as she raised the butcher knife above her head. The other woman was just starting to pull the blade downward when Jessie made contact, slamming her against the kitchen counter with her shoulder as she blocked the descending knife with her forearm.

  The force sent Eliza stumbling back before Jessie could try to grab the weapon from her. As the woman found her footing, Jessie looked around desperately, ignoring her throbbing head. The golf club was near Eliza’s feet, useless. She had no weapon. She was defenseless.

  The only thing in reaching distance was the popcorn bowl. She grabbed it and tossed what was left inside at Eliza. As the fluffy kernels bounced off her body, the other woman smiled at the absurdity of the situation.

  “This is a hell of a thing,” she marveled, holding the long knife up near her face. “I wouldn’t have predicted this scenario at the start of my week.”

  “Eliza, don’t do this,” Jessie pleaded as she grabbed the bowl by the edges, with the domed bottom facing away from her. “Is this how you want your children to see you? If you don’t drop that knife, you’re not just destroying your own life. You’re ruining their futures too.”

  “It’s a little late to be worried about that, don’t you think? I’m committed.”

  With that, she started forward again, knife raised. She was smaller than Jessie but with the build of a former athlete who still kept in shape, she wasn’t going to be easily subdued.

  Jessie didn’t have time to remember all the self-defense training she’d learned at the FBI, but one rule did pop into her head. Let your attacker make the first move and counter it. As Eliza barreled toward her, she held steady.

  Let her get out of position.

  Eliza again lifted the knife high and plunged it down sharply. Jessie raised the bowl to block the blow. The blade connected with the bottom of the bowl and slid off harmlessly to the side. Instead of retreating, Jessie continued to thrust the bowl forward forcefully. The base of the bowl slammed squarely into Eliza’s face, nailing her hard in the mouth and the nose.

  She looked more shocked than hurt but Jessie took advantage of the moment to whack her a second time in the face with the bowl. Then, with all the strength she could muster, she yanked the bowl down, making contact with both the knife handle and Eliza’s right wrist. The weapon popped out of her hand and tumbled to the ground.

  Jessie didn’t wait to see what had happened. As Eliza tried to track the location of the knife, Jessie swung the popcorn bowl up again, squarely connecting with the other woman’s jaw before she could raise her arms to protect herself.

  Eliza staggered backward, clearly stunned. Jessie stayed aggressive, tossing away the bowl and taking one step forward before lifting her leg and kicking the other woman in the stomach. Eliza flew backward and slammed into the far wall of the kitchen before collapsing to the ground.

  Jessie approached her carefully. Eliza was conscious but obviously disoriented. Jessie quickly grabbed her by the ankles, yanking her into a prone position on her back. As she dropped the last few feet, Eliza’s head bounced hard on the kitchen floor. Jessie ignored it and flipped her over. Then she dropped down, pinning her knee in the small of the other woman’s back.

  She looked on the counter for anything to help her restrain Eliza and saw a blender in the corner. She yanked the cord out of the wall, snagged some kitchen shears from the cutlery block, and cut the cord. She seized Eliza’s wrists and tied them behind her back.

  When she was she sure the cord was fastened tight and without removing her knee from Eliza’s back, she pulled her phone out.

  “Hey look,” she said though breathing heavily, “the reception is better in the kitchen.”

  Then she called Ryan.

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  Jessie had held back the tears for so long that when they finally came, they wouldn’t stop.

  It was only when the graveside service was over and they were leaving the cemetery that she finally started to gain some control.

  The weather was still chilly in Las Cruces in March and there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. As she walked back to the limo that would take her to the memorial reception at Pa’s favorite bar, Kat Gentry and Ryan Hernandez fell into step beside her. No one spoke for a while.

  “I’ve never seen so many rickety old law enforcement types all together at once,” Ryan finally said. “I thought maybe oxygen machines and wheelchairs would have been provided.”

  Jessie smiled weakly at his attempt at humor. She appreciated the effort.

  “They are a mature group,” she finally managed to reply as they got to the limo. “We’ll have to keep a close eye on them at the bar. Some of these folks have trouble standing upright when they’re sober. Drunk could be ugly.”

  Jessie was a little surprised at how emotional she’d gotten as her parents were lowered into the ground. She couldn’t remember truly losing it like this in all the years she’d lived with them. There had always been that tough outer shell surrounding her, ever since she’d seen her mother murdered. It was like someone had shut off the part of her that allowed her to truly feel grief because if she ever did, it would be too overwhelming to process.

  She assumed it would be that way today too. After all, the last few days had been a whirlwind of activity which forced her to keep her emotions in check. First, she had to help wrap up the Penelope Wooten murder case, including all the reports she had to fill out on her capture of Eliza Longworth.

  In between were several hospital visits to get her head checked out after that altercation and the one at her apartment with her father. Her burns had been treated and her concussion diagnosis confirmed. She’d been ordered to take it easy for a while and come back for an all-clear before resuming work. That worked out because she had another job to do: find a new place to live. Right now she was living out of a hotel room.

  All of it had been so time consuming and attention depleting that she simply hadn’t had any truly quiet moments to deal with what had happened to her family or think about the man who had done this to them. But in the cemetery earlier, with no responsibilities other than to say goodbye to the two people who had raised her—had saved her—after her world fell apart, she couldn’t keep the walls up any longer.

  She tried not to punish herself, remembering what Pa had always told her: they knew the risk they had taken adopting her all those years ago. They knew who her birth father was and that he might one day find her. They knew that they were putting their own lives in danger by joining them with hers. The fact that the danger materialized over two decades later didn’t change that.

  Still, she’d allowed herself to think the threat—at least to them—had passed. She never imagined that Xander would seek vengeance by killing two retirees living out their golden years. But they had eventually paid the price for ge
tting close to her, just as Fred the security guard and Jimmy the doorman had paid the price just for working in the building where she lived. The funerals for those two men would be early next week.

  As they rode to the bar, Jessie wondered how she’d hold up. The families of those men didn’t know that their deaths were connected to her and wouldn’t harbor any resentment to her when she offered her condolences. But she would know.

  Officer Nettles was another story. He was on the road to recovery—the doctors had told him that he would be able to speak again in weeks and likely return to the job in a few months. But his wife was furious at having almost lost him while protecting Jessie and had prohibited her from visiting him in the hospital. She understood.

  Captain Decker was going easy on her, giving her two weeks off to recover physically and emotionally. Having been attacked twice in the same night by murderers gave her a bit of a pass for not meeting him at the hospital or calling in, though Ryan warned her she might not get too many more.

  There were other issues she’d need to attend to, even if she wasn’t working. Highest on the list was determining what had happened to her father after he jumped out the window of her apartment complex.

  He had been in bad shape, with gunshot wounds to the abdomen and shoulder, multiple burns from the explosions he’d set, and, she was fairly certain, a fractured skull. And since he couldn’t go to a hospital in the area to get treated, he was likely recuperating underground.

  Decker seemed convinced he was dead. That belief was based on detectives finding a badly burned body about a mile away at the edge of a homeless encampment. It was too charred for identification but the M.E. indicated that the man was in his fifties and had gunshot shrapnel in left shoulder and ribs. The approximate time of death correlated with when Xander was shot.

  But Jessie knew better. Xander Thurman would not have ended up burned to death at the hands of a homeless man. He would have created a cover story and gone deep underground so that he could recover and regroup without police searching for him. He would lie low until the pressure was off and he was strong enough to accomplish his mission. Jessie was pretty sure that mission was making her pay for rejecting him; for not joining him in his grand undertaking to thin the herd and rid the world of unworthy souls. He might be out of commission for a while, but not forever.

  They were still trying to determine exactly how he’d found her. One of the tech folks had uncovered footage of what looked like him at the El Paso airport the morning Jessie flew back to L.A. If he’d seen her enter the terminal, even if he couldn’t go in himself without a ticket, it wouldn’t have been hard to narrow down her possible destinations.

  How he’d found her apartment complex was still a mystery, however. Jessie knew she’d have to answer that question if she was going to feel secure wherever she next planted roots. And she also decided that her new home must include one other essential element. It had to be a place where no one else was put at risk like Fred and Jimmy had been.

  In between home-hunting, she had one other major responsibility. She had to provide testimony in anticipation of Eliza Longworth’s preliminary hearing, at which she would be charged with counts of murder and attempted murder, among other things.

  Brady Bowen, who had apologized more times than she could count for putting her “in harm’s way,” had agreed that if Eliza had just turned herself in instead of attacking Jessie, she might have been out in under a decade and seen both her kids graduate from high school.

  Now she’d languish in prison for decades, stuck with the knowledge that the man who’d betrayed her trust was raising their kids. But she had made her choice and Jessie’s reservoir of sympathy for her was mostly empty.

  At the bar, seemingly every retired law enforcement officer in southern New Mexico wanted to offer a toast to Bruce and Janine Hunt. If Jessie had partaken of them all, she wouldn’t make it outside upright, much less to the airport for her evening flight back to L.A. So after the first couple of shots, she switched to mineral water, as did Kat and Ryan.

  Every song that played was one of Bruce’s or Janine’s personal favorites. A few times, especially during Patsy Cline’s rendition of “Crazy,” she caught Ryan looking at her when he thought she wouldn’t notice. She found herself doing the same thing to him and realized that at some point, when her life settled down, she’d need to figure out exactly what was going on there.

  Thoughts of Ryan disappeared as the next song started to play. It was “Don’t Worry Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin. A wave of memories suddenly cascaded over her all at once. She pictured Pa offering her a hand up after she’d fallen while skiing on a bunny slope. She saw Ma waiting at the front door when she got home from school, holding out a mug of hot chocolate topped with a massive mound of whipped cream. She remembered both of them rushing into her room when she would scream at bedtime and staying there all night long, scrunched up on her small bed, so that they were the first thing she saw when she woke up in the morning. She turned away from Kat and Ryan and used her sleeve to wipe at the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  They had been there about an hour when Kat got a call. Jessie couldn’t hear what it was about in the noisy pub but she saw her friend’s face fall and knew it was something bad. Kat waved to get the bartender’s attention.

  “Is there an extra room where I can take this call?” she shouted. “It’s law enforcement business.”

  “Isn’t everything here?” the guy yelled with a grin, before adding, “You can use the office in the back.”

  Kat thanked him and motioned for Jessie and Ryan to follow her. The three of them made their way down the hall to the back office and closed the door, which somewhat muffled the shouts and cheers from the front.

  “What is it?” Jessie asked.

  Kat held up a finger and pushed a button on her phone, which she rested on a desk.

  “Administrator Phelan, can you hear me?” she asked.

  “I can,” said an older male voice.

  “Administrator, I’ve put you on speaker. I’m here with LAPD Detective Ryan Hernandez and criminal profiler Jessie Hunt. Guys—Paul Phelan is the supervising administrator for the NRD facility. He’s my boss. Go ahead, Administrator—you said you had a priority update.”

  “That is correct,” Phelan said. “I’ve just sent you security footage of an incident that occurred less than thirty minutes ago. It seems that Bolton Crutchfield has escaped from the high-security NRD annex.”

  “What?” Kat demanded. “How is that possible?”

  “It appears that he had assistance. You can review the footage but the short version is that four members of our unit interior security staff were killed. One more was found unconscious in the break room. Two exterior guards were also killed and one other is in critical condition. In addition, all the other prisoners were set free by Crutchfield.”

  “This is Detective Hernandez, Administrator,” Ryan interjected. “Have resources been deployed to retrieve the prisoners?”

  “Many resources, Detective. We have LAPD, Sheriff’s Department, Highway Patrol, and even FBI out there right now. Unfortunately, so far only one prisoner has been retrieved.”

  “Crutchfield did that on purpose,” Jessie said, her mind already revving up. “He wants police resources dispersed, having to hunt for multiple escapees instead of just him.”

  “Well, it’s working so far,” Phelan said. “There’s been no sign of him since he left the facility. How soon can you get back here, Officer Gentry?”

  “We were booked on a flight this evening,” Kat said. “But I’ll go to the airport now and see if I can get on an earlier one.”

  “Please see that you do. I’ll apprise you of any relevant updates in the interim.”

  He hung up without another word.

  “I’m going with you,” Jessie said.

  “No, you should stay here for the rest of the wake. There’s nothing you can do back there right now.”

  “Let me at least se
e the security footage,” Jessie insisted. “Maybe there are some useful clues on it.”

  Kat pulled up the footage on her phone and placed it on the desk where all three of them could see it. There was no audio. It opened with a wide shot of the main security station at the center of the secure unit. There were three officers at the desk. After a few seconds, Ernie Cortez, the massive, genial guard who was always hitting on Jessie, appeared onscreen.

  He was holding something in his right hand as he stepped behind the officer on the right, studying a monitor in front of him. In one swift, deft motion Ernie pulled out the item, which was now revealed to be a hunting knife, and slit the officer’s throat. The female officer next to him looked over just in time to see Ernie plunge the knife into her forehead. As she fell back, the third guard, just to her left, stood up, reaching for his weapon. But before he could get it out of his holster, Ernie was on him, grabbing his gun hand while smashing the guard’s head backward against the station desk’s wall. The two men tumbled out of frame so that only their legs were visible. After a few seconds, the other guard’s legs stopped moving.

  Ernie returned to the frame, where he pulled the knife out of the female officer’s head and moved around the desk to stand near where one of the hall spokes met the central area. He hid there, unmoving, with his back pressed to the wall. A few seconds later, a fourth guard appeared from that direction with a perplexed look on his face. He was clearly confused by the lack of any staff at the security station.

  As he passed Ernie, the larger man wrapped his left arm around the guard’s arms while simultaneously cutting his throat. The guard dropped to the floor, writhing slightly. Ernie, oblivious, walked around to the security desk and typed in something on one of the keyboards. Then he disappeared from the frame again.