“Okay, I was happy to help Reggie out,” Hannah said. “Turns out he was a gentle giant. But why should I help out someone you admit is a jerk?”
“Because I know you Hannah. And if this threat is legit and something happened to Jennings after I came to you for help, you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself.”
“I think I probably could,” she said.
Finn looked dubious, and with good reason. He was right. Even if this dude was a total asshole, if he was hurt or killed when she could have done something to prevent it, that would penetrate evenheremotional armor, which was largely immune to guilt.
She looked at Finn, with his gray puppy dog eyes. The guy had struggled all the way here, ignoring his own physical discomfort to help someone he didn’t sound overly enthused about, all because he thought Hannah was the best option to resolve this. She sighed.
“I’m not promising anything,” she said.
“I understand,” Finn replied, breaking into a grin. “Just hear him out.”
Hannah shook her head, certain she was going to regret this.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The man watched intently.
It didn’t take long for the subject of his interest to arrive.
As he sat in his car across the street from the Central Police Station parking garage entrance, he tried to look nonchalant. Not that he was the kind of guy who would draw suspicion at first glance. But for now at least, he wanted to keep a low profile.
He didn’t want to be noticed by any of the members of Homicide Special Section. One of his gifts was his ability to fade into the background and not get noticed until he chose to be. But if he was seen out here right now, it might cause unwanted attention.
He’d done his research on the members of the HSS team. Because of his mission, he had to be familiar with all of them. He knew about Captain Gaylene Parker, who ran the station, and by extension, HSS. He was aware of the various members of the team, including Detectives Sam Goodwin, Susannah Valentine, Karen Bray, and Jim Nettles, as well as researchers Jamil Winslow and Beth Ryerson. But they were all background noise to him.
The real targets were Ryan Hernandez, and especially his bitch wife, criminal profiler Jessie Hunt. Also on his bucket list of intended victims were Jessie’s sister, Hannah Dorsey, and her best friend, Kat Gentry. But Jessie was the real prize.
The man had watched the media embrace her as she flaunted herself for the last two years. Yes, she’d solved some horrific crimes and taken several dangerous murderers off the streets. That was commendable. But Jessie Hunt had also taken down several righteous men, including a few who had taken on the important work of eliminating multiple skanky whores.
The media referred to these gentlemen as serial killers. But the man in the car viewed them more like exterminators, removing pests, some of them poisonous. She’d even taken down an allegedly corrupt police sergeant merely because he helped his boss get some hot young (admittedly underage) tail. She was always butting her head in, making a spectacle of herself. And her efforts were starting to have more far-reaching consequences, ones that were unacceptable. It was time she was put in her place.
He'd been biding his time, waiting for the perfect moment. He briefly thought someone else might have done the work for him when a college student named Dallas Henry had seduced Jessie's uppity sister and taken her on a wilderness camping trip, intending to torture and kill her.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work out as planned and Henry was now in jail awaiting trial for her attempted murder as well as that of another college kid named Finn Anderton. The man in the car had been so impressed by Henry’s effort that he even sent him a letter with a secret code embedded in it, which let the kid know that someone would pick up where he left off.
Hewas that someone. The thought made him squirm happily in his seat, but only for a moment. He saw a car round the corner and recognized it as Detective Sam Goodwin’s. Jessie Hunt was in the passenger seat. The man slid down so that he wasn’t visible as they passed by him and descended down the ramp into the garage.
He sat there quietly for a minute, reminding himself of what he had to do. The work would require confidence, quick thinking, and a spine of steel. But he was ready to test himself.
He’d watched long enough. Now, finally, it was time to put the first stage of his master plan in motion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jessie tried to stay positive but it was hard.
The afternoon was starting to bleed away. And despite the assistance of every available member of the HSS team, they weren’t any closer to having a solid suspect.
They’d gone through every member of Thomas Bradford’s Traditional Citizenry group, reviewing criminal records and checking protest videos to identify them. They even briefly got help from Detectives Susannah Valentine, Jim Nettles, and Officer Harper Devery, who all took several names on the list.
By the time Valentine and Nettles had to leave to conduct an interview for their own case, they had cleared ten Traditional Citizenry members based on their presence at the protest that occurred when Yuki Tanaka was murdered. Devery was able to stick around a little longer than that before he had to go back out on patrol, and cleared another half dozen members.
That left Jessie, Sam, Jamil, and Beth to follow up on the other 17 members of the anti-immigration group. Jessie supposed she should have been happy that the group had fewer than 35 members. She’d assumed it would be in the hundreds. Still, that was a lot of folks who hated another group of people enough to pay membership dues and get arrested.
It was actually Jamil who made the connection that gave Jessie hope for the first time in nearly an hour. While the rest of them were reviewing hate group members, he paused to follow up on some database searches he’d done looking for other links between the two victims. One had just popped up.
