by Blake Pierce
She stepped forward, dazzled by them. Caroline lived in West Hollywood, where it was almost never dark and she rarely noticed. Now the sudden appearance of the city made her feel as if she’d been in a desert and just come across an oasis. She took another step closer, leaving the dirt and once again feeling the damp grass below her feet.
But all once, she felt her grip on the ground slipping. She realized too late that she had stepped to the edge of another hillside and that it was collapsing under her feet. She twisted around as her body dropped and tried to fling her arms out to grab a root or branch. But with the cords on her wrists, it was impossible.
Suddenly she was tumbling down, rolling and bouncing off rocks and trees. She tried to tuck herself into a ball but found it difficult to do anything other than grunt. At one point her right leg slammed against a tree trunk and bent sickeningly.
Caroline didn’t know how much longer she fell but when she finally came to a stop, it was only the excruciating pain that assured her that she was still alive. She opened her eyes, realizing that they’d been clenched tight the entire time going down the hill.
It took several seconds to orient herself. She found that she was on her back, looking back up the hill. She guessed that she’d easily fallen seventy-five feet down a steep cliff covered in rocks, brush, and dead trees. She tilted her head to the left and saw something that, despite all the pain she felt, filled her with joy: headlights.
She forced herself to roll over onto her stomach. She knew there was no way she could put any weight on her right leg, much less get to her feet. So she crawled, digging her fingernails into the earth before her and pushing off with her still functional left leg. She managed to get her body halfway into the road, where she rolled onto her back and desperately waved her bound arms above her head.
The headlights stopped moving and she heard the vehicle’s engine turn off. As someone got out of the driver’s seat and she saw boots moving toward her, she had a sudden, horrible thought.
What if this is the man who took me?
A moment later her fears subsided when the person knelt down and she saw it was a woman wearing what looked to be a park service uniform.
“What the hell…?” the woman said, before pulling out her radio and speaking into it urgently. “Primary station, this is Ranger Kelso. I have an emergency situation on Vista Del Valley Drive in quadrant six. There is an injured woman lying in the road. Her right leg is badly broken and her wrists are bound. Call nine-one-one. I think she was abducted, just like the others.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Why do I smell burning?”
Hannah asked the question calmly but Jessie could hear the accusation in her tone. There was only one reason something might be burning—because Jessie was trying to bake and once again failing miserably.
She darted from the kitchen table where they’d been playing Trivial Pursuit over to the oven and yanked the door open to discover that her cranberry-orange scones had a distinctly blackish, scorched look to them. She hurriedly put on a glove and pulled them out, dropping them unceremoniously on the stovetop. Little rivulets of smoke rose up from the most charred scone, the small one in the back.
Jessie could hear Ryan chuckling from the table. Hannah wore a disappointed expression, like she was the official guardian trying not to chastise her troubled charge. Of course, things were usually the other way around, so Hannah’s expression was also mixed with a hint of satisfaction.
“Don’t rub it in!” Jessie said defensively.
“I would never,” Hannah replied, faux offended.
“Maybe we could use them as hockey pucks,” Ryan offered.
“Or throwing triangles?” Hannah suggested far too enthusiastically. “You know, like Chinese throwing stars, but with extra carbs.”
Jessie tried not to get too annoyed at her half-sister’s good-natured needling. She looked down at the smoking remains of her effort and sighed.
“I guess we’re going to get your last batch out of the freezer,” she said in resignation.
“Feel free,” Hannah said. “But hurry. I’m only two pie pieces away from winning this game.”
“Give me a minute,” Jessie said as she hunted through the freezer and found the container holding the scones. She tossed them in the toaster and waited as they warmed, not wanting to risk burning these too.
“I don’t get it,” Ryan said teasingly. “You’re the second most celebrated criminal profiler in Southern California and yet you seem incapable of cooking anything that doesn’t involve a microwave. How is that possible?”
“Priorities, Hernandez,” she replied simply. “Somewhere amid hunting serial killers, navigating department politics, staying sexy for you…”
“Gross,” Hannah interjected.
“And raising a teenage know-it-all,” she continued.
“I hardly need raising, if you’d like to know,” Hannah countered, smiling.
Jessie pressed on.
“Somewhere amidst all that, I forgot to take baking lessons. Sue me.”
“Is that why your ex-husband tried to kill you?” Hannah asked, feigning wide-eyed innocence.
“No,” Ryan cut in. “That was because of her meat loaf. It’s a crime against humanity.”
Jessie tried not to smile.
“I don’t appreciate all this ganging up on me. And I’ll have you both know that no one who has tried to kill me ever mentioned my cooking as a reason.”
“They were being polite,” Hannah said.
Jessie was about respond when the toaster dinged. She took out the scones and put them on plates, handing one each to the others. Then she sat down and took a bite out of hers.
“Mmm,” she murmured softly, despite herself.
“Not too burn-y?” Hannah asked.
“I want to be sarcastic, but I just can’t,” Jessie mumbled, her mouth full. “How do you make them so good?”
Hannah smiled broadly, without any of her trademark cynicism. Jessie couldn’t help but notice how lively she looked these days. Her green eyes, typically dull with disinterest, sparkled. Her sandy blonde hair somehow seemed shinier than usual. She even appeared taller these days, walking with her head held higher. At five foot nine, she was only an inch shorter than Jessie. But with her newly improved posture and her athletic frame, she could be her sister’s body double.
“The secret comes down to one word: butter. Actually let’s make that three words: lots of butter.”
Before Jessie could take another bite, her phone rang. She looked down and realized that this was a call she’d scheduled.
Is it nine p.m. already?
She’d been having so much fun that she’d completely lost track of time.
“Who is it?” Ryan asked.
“It’s the first most celebrated criminal profiler in Southern California. He wanted my take on a case,” she lied. “Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Okay,” Hannah said, “but after that, we’re skipping your turn.”
“Understood,” Jessie said, taking the scone and her phone into the bedroom.
She tried to keep her tone upbeat. But not even Hannah’s delicious pastry could fill the nervous pit that had suddenly materialized in her stomach. She was about to pick up when she had a change of heart. She didn’t want to interrupt this near-perfect evening to discuss darker matters and decided she wasn’t going to. She sent the call to voicemail and texted back instead.
Having a great night with Hannah. Don’t want to cut it short. Can we talk tomorrow?
After several seconds, she got a response. She could almost hear the curtness in the reply.
Meet in person. Station break room. 7 a.m. sharp.
She typed back “ok” and left it at that. She knew the guy liked to get into the office early but she couldn’t help thinking he was making her meet him at that ungodly hour as a punishment for rescheduling. Still, it was worth it if she got more quality time with Hannah.
“Hey,” she called out
as she returned to the living room, “I decided kicking your butts was more important than any case. You better not have skipped my turn.”
As she walked back over, she knew she was only delaying dealing with what was eating at her. But one more night of playing house wasn’t the end of the world. At least that’s what she told herself. Reality, in all its ugliness, would still be waiting for her tomorrow.
CHAPTER THREE
With one notable exception, the break room was empty.
“Thanks for making the time,” Jessie said when she arrived at 6:58 a.m. Just to be safe she locked the door behind her.
“I am a busy man,” Garland Moses said wryly, turning to face her. He was seated at a table, munching on what looked like a granola bar. She was tempted to make a crack about it cracking his false teeth but held off.
“A busy man who has been avoiding me for the last month,” she noted.
“I had a big case,” he protested. “And then I had that conference in Philadelphia. And then I had my vacation.”
“Don’t B.S. me, Garland. In our last substantive conversation at my birthday party, you hinted that you had concerns about Hannah. And then you ghosted me for a month. I’ve been freaking out.”
That was an overstatement. Things had actually been going amazingly well with Hannah in the last four weeks. Considering everything her half-sister had been through in the last six months, the fact that she could genuinely enjoy a quiet night of board games and scones was a minor miracle. That was part of why she didn’t want to cut it short last night.
“You know I’m a senior citizen, right?’ Garland said. “I don’t have conversations that involve the term ‘ghosted.’”
“You’re stalling,” she said.
“No, this is me stalling,” he said, slowly standing up. “Let’s get some coffee.”
He led the way over to the coffee machine. Jessie tried to ignore the vending machine beside it. She hadn’t had breakfast yet and felt her stomach grumble at the thought of preservative-laden snack good. As Garland walked, Jessie noted that he had on an outfit that she’d come to learn was essentially his daily uniform.
He wore a tired-looking gray sport jacket over a brown sweater vest and a dull beige dress shirt. His navy slacks were wrinkled and his loafers were covered in scuffs. His white hair shot in every direction as if he was trying to win an Albert Einstein look-alike contest. The bifocals at the bridge of his nose completed the look.
But Jessie had learned that appearances could be deceiving and that the veteran profiler cultivated the disheveled look to make people underestimate him. He was always perfectly shaved with nary a stray hair in sight. His white teeth were immaculate and his fingernails were faultless. The shoelaces on his worn loafers were new and neatly tied in double bows.
In all the important ways, he was at the top of his game. She had come to not just respect the old guy, but to genuinely like him.
“Okay, Ms. Hunt…” he started, apparently ready to end the stalling.
“I think we’ve reached the stage where you can call me Jessie, Garland. Hell, I’m thinking of calling you Grandpa from now on.”
“Please don’t do that,” he insisted. “Okay, Jessie. I didn’t mean to freak you out. But I did have some thoughts about Hannah. I’m willing to share them with you, as long as you keep them in their proper context.”
“What context is that?” Jessie asked.
“Remember, this is a seventeen-year-old girl whose adoptive parents were brutally murdered right in front of her by her biological father, a notorious serial killer.”
“I’m well aware of that, Garland,” Jessie said impatiently. “First of all, I was there. And secondly, that serial killer was my father too, if you’ll recall.”
“I’m painting a picture here,” he said patiently. “May I continue?”
“Go ahead,” Jessie said, deciding not to interrupt the guy she’d been trying to talk to for a month.
“Then,” he continued, “only weeks later she was kidnapped by another serial killer out to mold her into a murderer like himself and her father. In the process, he made her watch as he slaughtered her foster parents.”
Jessie felt the urge to point out that, as the person who rescued Hannah in both those instances, she was intimately familiar with the details. But he obviously knew all that. He was making a point. So instead, as he spoke she stared at herself in the reflection of the vending machine window, trying to smooth her furrowed brow through sheer will.
“That’s true,” she noted, keeping her tone neutral.
“And in the middle of all that, she learned that she had a half-sister, one who she saw tortured and who seems to court death and danger through the very nature of her job. You are her last remaining relative. And every time she says goodbye to you, she knows it might be for the last time.”
Jessie hadn’t considered that fact and immediately felt bad, both for Hannah and at her own lack of insight.
“Still,” she finally replied, “you already knew all of this when you hung out with her.”
“You mean when you asked me to babysit her so I could secretly profile her?”
“You say potato. The point is, you knew all that when you met her and, despite that, you told me you had concerns.”
“Yes, I do,” he finally admitted. “I won’t get into the details because I don’t want to betray her trust and they’re not all that important anyway. But based on the things we discussed, I’m concerned about Hannah’s seeming lack of empathy. I’m just not sure how concerned to be.”
Jessie found it enlightening to stare at herself in the window as she absorbed this news. She was able to see her reactions in real time. Hopefully she had a better poker face when she was in public stare-downs. But in the relative privacy of the break room and with Garland focused on adding sugar to his coffee, she didn’t try to hide her suddenly ashen complexion or the fear in her green eyes. She blew her brown hair out of her face and responded carefully.
“Care to elaborate?”
“Here’s the thing,” he answered. “Most teenagers are inherently self-involved to a certain degree. It’s part of finding their own identities. Finding out who you are requires you to put the focus on yourself. That’s normal, if sometimes infuriating.”
“I’m following you so far.”
“But she’s also been through so much trauma that it wouldn’t be stunning if emotionally, she just shut down completely. If everything she’s feeling is just a variation on pain, why feel anything at all, not just for herself, but for anyone? So it’s possible that some part of her is just calloused over as a form of self-protection. That, while troubling, wouldn’t be shocking either.”
“And yet…” Jessie prodded, looking over at him.
“And yet,” he conceded, “it’s not clear to me that her closed off nature didn’t already exist before any of this happened. Some people just don’t form strong bonds or attachments for whatever reason. Her mother died when she was little. She was in the foster system for a while before being adopted. Any number of things could have stymied her ability to develop connections.”
“Or she could have just been born that way,” Jessie offered. “It could be a function of genetics.”
“That’s possible too,” Garland agreed, stepping aside so she could get some coffee. “The problem is that we don’t have any quality studies that provide anything definitive on that front. But that’s not really what you’re asking, is it?”
“What am I asking, Garland?” Jessie countered.
“You’re asking if she has the potential to become a killer, like your shared father was, like Bolton Crutchfield tried to make her, like you fear that you could turn into yourself. Am I correct?”
Jessie was quiet for longer than she liked.
“You are correct,” she finally said softly.
Jessie’s eyes were focused on pouring cream into her coffee but she could hear the careful pause before Garland replied. She imagined him
internally debating how best to proceed.
“The frustrating answer is—I just don’t know. We’re both well aware of the FBI’s behavioral science research indicating that almost every serial killer on record had some kind of trauma as a young person. That might have come in the form of abuse, bullying, or the loss of a loved one. My personal anecdotal experience reinforces those findings.”
“Mine does too,” Jessie agreed. “But I noticed you said ‘almost’ every serial killer.”
“Yes. There are records of killers who seem to have had perfectly normal childhoods without suffering any clear ordeal. Some people are just…off. You know that as well as I do.”
“I do,” Jessie said as they walked back over to the table. “But what I want to know is if my half-sister, the girl living under my roof, is one of them. Because if she’s gone through this much horror so early in life and she’s missing that—for a lack of a better term—empathy gene, then we’ve got a problem.”
“Maybe,” Garland said cautiously as they sat down. “But maybe not. To the best of our knowledge, she hasn’t tortured any animals or killed anyone.”
“To the best of our knowledge,” Jessie granted.
“And you’ve been through many of the same tribulations she has. Your serial killer father murdered your mother and your adoptive parents, and he tried to kill you, as did another serial killer who was obsessed with you. And don’t forget the ex-husband who attempted to frame you for murdering his mistress and then tried to kill you when you found out. You’ve had a pretty good run of trauma yourself and you haven’t gone on any killing sprees.”
“No,” Jessie said, pausing before revealing something she’d shared with few others. “But I’ve often wondered if I entered this field as a way to be up close to the violence and cruelty of these people without having to go to their lengths. I worry that I get a contact high off their crimes.”
Garland was quiet for a moment and she found herself worrying that he might be wondering the same thing.