by Blake Pierce
“How did the call with Andrea Robinson go?” he asked.
“Hard to say,” Jessie admitted. “She was very chatty but when it was over, I had no more clarity on whether she could have done all this to me. She said she didn’t have any visitors other than doctors and lawyers. And without access to her records, I have no way of knowing if that’s true.”
“You don’t think Dr. Lemmon could get a peek?”
“She probably could. But I’m not sure she would. And I don’t want to put her in the position of asking her.”
“So we’re back at square one,” Ryan said testily.
“It’s worse than that,” Jessie pointed out. “Whoever is doing this could be someone we haven’t even thought of, in which case we’re spinning our wheels for no reason. All while losing time on this double murder case. You hear anything new since we last spoke?”
“Our Beverly Hills detective friends called,” Ryan muttered. “They have Gregg Dozier, Caroline Gidley’s ex-fiancé, down at the station. They asked if we wanted to sit in on his interrogation. I told them we’d get there as soon as we could.”
“It’s worth a shot, I guess,” Jessie said. “I don’t hold out much hope that it’s him though. Like I said, I think it’s a stretch for him to have gone after all these women as a cover so he could kill his ex.”
“It’s great that your intuition is so honed,” Ryan replied snarkily.
Jessie looked over at him, surprised at the sharpness of his tone.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“What do you mean? Nothing.”
“Then why so snippy?” she asked. “You’ve been poking at me since we came out here.”
He looked like he was about to say something, then stopped himself.
“What is it, Ryan?” she pressed. “There’s obviously something eating at you. If you don’t spit it out, you’re going to be miserable all day.”
He didn’t look any less pained but she could tell he’d decided to come clean.
“I didn’t want to bring this up but we’ve reached the point where I think I have to. Are you sure this whole reputation-destroying vendetta thing is real?”
She stared at him, unsure how to respond.
“What?”
He pulled something from his pocket and held it out to her. It was a Ziploc bag filled with pills.
“I found these in my car on the floor next to the passenger seat when I dropped you off yesterday.”
“What are they?”
“Anti-psychotic medications,” he said, “Strong ones.”
“They aren’t mine,” she insisted.
“It wouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of if they are,” he replied gently. “You’ve been through a lot lately. If you asked Dr. Lemmon to prescribe them because you were struggling, it would be understandable.”
“Ryan,” she said, speaking slowly to keep from losing it, “we basically live together. You see me every day. Have I been acting psychotic?”
“I’m no doctor,” he answered unimpressively.
“Okay, I’ll try not to take offense at that weak tea. Even if I was, do you think I’d hide it from you? Do you think I’d walk around with a bunch of pills in a plastic baggie? Does any of this make sense to you?”
“No,” he told her. “But what also doesn’t make sense is how your life went from seemingly normal to something out of a conspiracy thriller in a matter of days.”
“What are you talking about?”
Again he looked reluctant to respond.
“You’re in too deep to back out now,” she reminded him sharply.
“Okay, fine. Your tires get slashed on a quiet street but there’s no suspect. Your Facebook account suddenly starts spewing racist crap. You get a visit from Social Services. Those don’t all have to be conspiracies against you.”
Jessie looked around the courtyard, half expecting a crew to jump out and tell her she was being punked. When it didn’t happen, she looked back at Ryan.
“What do you think happened?” she asked.
“Maybe it really was kids playing hooky who slashed your tires. Maybe someone did hear an argument between you and Hannah and called DPSS out of an abundance of caution.”
Sensing that she was about to lose it, Jessie took a deep breath and counted to three before responding.
“Even if I bought that, it doesn’t explain the racist posts,” she pointed out.
“Maybe something else is going on.”
“That’s pretty cryptic, Ryan,” she said acidly. “Maybe you care to spell it out.”
“You’re not going to like this…” he began.
“Compared to how I’ve loved what you said so far?”
Ryan sighed and tried again.
“I don’t want you to take offense,” he began, sounding uncomfortably like Jessie realized she must have when she’d asked Hannah if she’d made the anonymous phone call to Social Services. “But have you considered that if you are having some kind of…psychological incident, it could explain a lot of this?”
“Like what?” she demanded.
“Like maybe you slashed your own tires. Maybe you did write those posts yourself.”
“You said we were in a meeting when some of them were posted,” she reminded him.
“I was covering for you because it seemed ridiculous. But those things can be prewritten and set to post at specific times.”
“So you think I snapped and forgot about writing a bunch of hate-filled comments. What else?”
He hesitated briefly but then plowed ahead.
“Maybe Hannah called DPSS in a moment of spite that she now regrets, or because something happened that you don’t remember.”
“I cannot believe we are having this conversation,” she said softly.
“Neither can I,” he said.
They were both quiet for a moment before she had a thought.
“But you said yourself, everything’s been going well lately. Why would I all of a sudden have some kind of mental break?”
“Maybe that’s why, Jessie. You’ve had trauma in your life for so long that maybe you’ve gotten used to it. And when it wasn’t there for a little while, your mind created it for you.”
Jessie shook her head in disgust.
“Is that what you really believe?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But you think it’s just as likely that I did all this as it is that someone slashed my tires, hacked my accounts, called DPSS anonymously, and planted those pills?”
“Do you hear how wild that sounds?” he asked her.
“Did it ever occur to you that whoever’s doing this to me wants to make everyone question me? That it’s part of the plan to undermine my credibility and destroy my life?”
Ryan looked at her sadly but didn’t respond. She continued.
“You’ve known me for a few years now, and pretty intimately for the last several months. The fact that you think this is even a possibility cuts me so deeply that I don’t even have words for it.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied quietly. “I’m not trying to hurt you.”
She nodded, standing up and looking away briefly before turning back to face him.
“I think you should meet up with the Beverly Hills detectives yourself. I’m going back to Brenda Ferguson’s place to see if she recognizes the man in the hospital footage.”
“We can do both together,” he said pleadingly, standing up himself now. “I don’t want to do this on separate tracks.”
Ryan,” she said as she got up to leave, “I think you better start getting used to separate tracks.”
She walked off without another word.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Jessie couldn’t even go outside for air.
She was just about to exit the station lobby onto the street in front when she saw the protesters. There were about twenty people marching in a circle on the sidewalk in front of the station. They were chanting something a
nd several of them held signs. Just before she dodged out of sight, she saw one that read “We all know that Hunt must go!”
It wasn’t the most creative phrasing she’d ever heard, but Jessie chose not to engage on the matter. Instead, she decided to skip the fresh air and just go straight to Brenda Ferguson’s. She got her car from the garage and pulled out onto the side street, which was devoid of angry picketers for now.
As she drove down Sixth Street, she saw Garland Moses walking leisurely down the sidewalk, apparently on the way to an early lunch at his favorite haunt, the Nickel Diner. Even though the diner was only a block away, she pulled over into the bike lane and called out the window.
“Need a ride, old man?”
He glanced up and smiled, unable to hide his amusement.
“I’m worried that you at the wheel might constitute elder abuse,” he said.
“I’m an excellent driver,” she said, winking.
“Even though I’m not a pop culture savant, I’ll accept the offer,” he said, getting in.
“You know, Garland,” she said, pulling away once he’d shut the door, “the fact that you say you’re not a pop culture savant is proof that you got the reference.”
“Always profiling, this one,” he said as if he was talking to an imaginary third person in the car.
“You laid that one out on a platter for me,” she replied.
They continued quietly for a few moments before Garland spoke again.
“So you seem to be having quite a week.”
“That is the understatement of the decade,” she agreed. “And you don’t know the half of it.”
“Care to update me?” he asked.
“We’re here,” Jessie said, pulling up in front of the diner.
“My stomach’s not grumbling too bad yet,” he said. “Fill me in.”
“Should I include the murder case I can’t seem to catch a break on? Or the fact that I’m not on speaking terms with my sister, my best friend and, as of ten minutes ago, my boyfriend?”
“I’m assuming that’s the usual ‘rough week’ stuff,” he said. “Maybe skip to the unusual stuff.”
“Okay,” she said, overlooking the fact that Garland Moses apparently thought it was “usual” for all her personal relationships to be in tatters. “Here’s the CliffsNotes version. Assuming you don’t buy the theory that I’m having a psychotic break, which apparently isn’t a certainty these days, someone is trying to destroy my life. It started with my tires—all of them—getting slashed. Then in quick succession, my social media was hacked and racist rants were posted. You seem to know about that one.”
“Everyone does,” Garland confirmed.
“Super,” she said, then continued. “After that a witch from Social Services came to my place to investigate an anonymous allegation that I’m abusing Hannah. And I just found out someone planted anti-psychotic meds that have Ryan wondering if I’m in need of institutionalization. And that’s on top of finding out that my murderous ex-husband is probably going to be released from prison on a technicality.”
“Is that related?” Garland asked, showing an impressive ability to keep a straight face.
“Probably not. It sounds like he charmed a drug cartel into threatening the prosecutor in his case to confess to hiding evidence. I bet he promised to launder their money if he got out. But who knows at this point?”
“Do you have any likely suspects in the life-destroying plan?’ he asked.
As she was about to reply, her phone rang. It was Delia Armbruster. She held up the screen for Garland to see.
“The Social Services witch,” she said.
“Do you want to answer it?” he asked. “I can step outside.”
“No. It’s not going to be good news so I think I’ll procrastinate in facing it,” she said, sending the call to voicemail. “Where were we?”
“Suspects,” he reminded her.
“Oh, right,” she recalled. “Other than the aforementioned ex-husband, there’s the corrupt cop awaiting trial because of me and the sociopathic society gal in a psychiatric prison because of me. We think we can eliminate two other folks that I helped put away. But I could easily be forgetting someone else I helped catch. Or it could just be some unhinged suspect we ultimately let go who was offended by my interrogation style. The list is endless.”
“No it’s not.”
She looked at him sideways, unsure if he was joking. His serious expression suggested he wasn’t.
“What do you mean?”
“Assuming you’re not having a psychotic break,” he said mildly, “and I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for now, then the list of possible perpetrators is actually quite small. Whoever is doing this to you is not someone you simply slighted in an interview. This is someone who believes you destroyed their life and is meticulously trying to return the favor.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am,” he said. “And if you weren’t so close to it, you’d be sure too. The person responsible for this clearly has access to you, either on their own or through a surrogate. They got close enough to slash your tires and plant medication. But they didn’t try to kill you. Instead they tried to unsettle you. The person has access to resources that allowed them to hack your social media. They were creative enough to get authorities to investigate you for impropriety with someone in your care and to have someone you work with question your stability. Your torturer, and that’s what he or she is, is very intelligent and has enormous patience. The person doing this wants your world to crumble around you slowly so they can enjoy it. This is personal.”
Jessie sat with that for a moment, letting it settle in. Garland was right. There were only so many people who had the intelligence, means, persistence, ability to deceive, and true loathing to undertake something of this magnitude.
Some of them, like Sergeant Hank Costabile, her ex-husband Kyle Voss, and Andy Robinson, couldn’t be removed from the short list. But there was one more name she realized she had to add, someone who knew her well, had easy, regular access to her, was dangerously intelligent, and had shown a troubling ability to mask the darkness that lurked inside. The one trait this person lacked was a loathing for Jessie. Or at least that’s what she had assumed.
She looked over at Garland, wondering if she should say the name aloud. But doing that would make it real in a way that she wasn’t sure she was ready for. Still, there were only two people in the world she felt comfortable asking this question of and one of them was sitting across from her now.
“Garland,” she asked, not sure if she’d be able to get the words past her lips. “Is there any chance it could be Hannah?”
Garland Moses gazed back at her with an enigmatic expression. After a while, his face softened into something close to compassion. Finally he answered.
“I just don’t know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Jessie’s right hand throbbed.
It was her own fault. She should have known better than to listen to Delia Armbruster’s voicemail while driving to meet a woman in peril after having her mentor admit he wasn’t sure her own sister wasn’t the one trying to reduce her world to rubble.
But she did listen to the voicemail. And she did subsequently punch the dashboard. And it did hurt so bad she wondered if she might have broken a few fingers.
By the time she got to Brenda Ferguson’s house, she had regained the use of all her digits. But the pain lingered, as did the sense of humiliation that came from her inability to control her emotions. She had to get a grip before meeting with Brenda, who needed to deal with a competent professional, not someone whose life was obviously spiraling out of control.
She played back Armbruster’s message again, hoping that hearing it a second time, she could focus on the content and not just the fury the message engendered.
“Ms. Hunt, as I mentioned when we met in person, I have recommended that the investigation of the allegations against you proceed. We have sched
uled a formal interview for you at our downtown office tomorrow at ten a.m. In addition to myself, there will be a member of our investigative team asking you questions. You are free to bring counsel if you deem it appropriate and to access documentation in connection to the allegations. Please confirm that you got this notice. Your absence from the interview will be taken into consideration when making a determination on the allegations in question. Good day.”
Even on a second listen, Jessie didn’t know what to do with the call. It sounded like not showing up would hurt her irreparably. But she didn’t even know a lawyer who could serve as counsel, much less have one.
But there was one silver lining she’d missed earlier. Apparently she could access the documents from the case. If she could look at them and get her hands on a transcript of that anonymous call, maybe she could discern something about the caller. It was better than nothing.
Rather than calling Armbruster back, she texted confirmation of her attendance and requested all records associated with the file, specifically the transcript and recording of the original complaint call. Feeling like she was making some forward progress, Jessie got out of the car and walked to the Fergusons with something approximating a good attitude.
When she got to the door, she was greeted by a uniformed officer standing guard.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked politely.
“Yes, Officer…Tanner,” she said, looking at his name tag. “Can you please let Brenda Ferguson know that Jessie Hunt is here to see her?”
She noticed his face twitched slightly when she said her name.
“Is she expecting you?” he asked.
“No. But she’ll know what it’s in reference to.”
“Hold on, please,” he said coldly before radioing the other officer inside.
Something about his manner was off-putting. The guy looked normal enough. He was in his late twenties with sun-bleached blond hair, a deep tan, and a skater tattoo she could see on his lower neck, despite the high shirt collar. But he gave off a frosty vibe. When he was done on the radio, she tried again.