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They were almost back to shore.

Jessie looked over her shoulder. Behind her, seated on metal benches on either side of the patrol boat, were Monica Silver and Joel Cisco. Both were handcuffed. Cisco had bandages all over his body and a medic was taking his blood pressure one last time before they were to disembark.

He was much more mellow than when Riddell and three Coast Guard officers had boarded the Bodacious Tata an hour ago. The second that he saw them, he started screaming that he’d been coerced into a false confession and Jessie had been willing to let Monica kill him if he didn’t make it.

Riddell had turned to her with a raised eyebrow. When he spoke, his words took her by surprise.

“Pretty desperate guy,” he said, “to make up something like that.”

“Can you believe it?” she replied, neither confirming nor denying anything.

"As soon as we get back on land," he said, "I'm going to reach out to have units from Oxnard and West Covina bring Archie Crittendon and Jackson Dwyer down here. With only three of the yacht bros left alive, there's going to be a lot of finger-pointing. We'll get them in rooms with their lawyers and get their version of events. My guess is that these guys were so arrogant that they didn't come up with a shared cover story for what happened that night."

“What if they did?” Jessie asked.

“Even if they did, it won’t go as they hope. If their stories are exactly the same, that will look bad. No one’s memory of a traumatic event is exactly the same as someone else’s, especially three years later. If it is, that suggests they conspired to make it that way.”

Jessie nodded. Every now and then, some sophisticated ideas came out of Riddell’s thick head.

“And if the three versions are substantially different,” he continued, “then we use that to play them against each other. You and I both think Cisco was the mastermind here. And based on my experience, Crittendon and Dwyer will both roll over on him pretty quick. It was his boat. Even in his version, he took her down to his cabin. He locked her in there. It won’t be hard to get them to paint him as the ringleader if it saves their hides.”

“He was the ringleader,” Jessie pointed out.

Riddell nodded. He was quiet for a moment, but she could tell he wanted to say something more. She waited until he was ready.

“You know,” he finally muttered. “I almost feel bad for Monica Silver, despite everything she’s done.”

“Really?” Jessie said, using all her willpower not to sarcastically add “almost?”

"Yeah," he said sincerely, which suggested that she'd been successful in hiding her feelings. "She tried to get help three years ago, but no one took her seriously. I'm guessing that even if she had come to law enforcement with suspicions about these specific guys, she would have been ignored because there's nobody. After all that time hunting these guys down and then thinking nothing would be done, she probably snapped—thought this was her only recourse."

“That sounds entirely plausible,” Jessie said. “Maybe you should be the profiler.”

“Maybe I should,” he agreed with a smile. It was one of the few she’d seen from him.

"You know, Detective," she said, "in many ways, you are one of the most objectionable people I've ever had to work with, and that's saying a lot. But in the end, when it really came down to it, you were mostly a professional."

“Thanks, I guess,” he said with a furrowed brow. “Does that mean the jury’s no longer out?”

“What?”

“When your husband called the other day, he asked how bad I was, and you said the jury was still out.”

“Oh right,” she said, remembering it now. “How about this? You’ve been found guilty of multiple misdemeanors, but no felonies.”

“I’ll take it,” he replied. “And for the record, I plan to stop badmouthing you to my friends in the Sheriff’s Department.”

“Oh really,” she said. “What have you been telling them?”

He shrugged.

“Just that you’re a self-important, controlling pseudoscience chick who doesn’t know what she’s doing and uses her celebrity as a crutch,” he said with a smile.

“Oh, is that all?”

“No,” he added. “You also have a penchant for napping that made me wonder if you were on ludes or something. You really should make your bedtime earlier.”

Jessie wondered if he was messing with her or if he really suspected the truth about why she’d been so out of it for a while. His expression gave no hint as to where he stood.

“And what will you be telling them now?” she asked, pretending not to be thrown by his last comment.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’m revising my description.”

“How’s that?” she asked.

“I guess you kind of know what you’re doing,” he allowed.

“Thanks, Detective,” she said, shaking her head and turning her attention to the fast approaching harbor.

As the Coast Guard patrol boat slowed and eased toward the dock, she let her exhausted mind drift. She needed a mental break after she’d been up all night and spent the previous day fighting off the effects of a drug that messed up her greatest asset: her ability to understand people in ways others couldn’t.

She definitely understood Monica Silver. Riddell was spot on with his analysis of her, but he hadn’t gone deep enough. Monica hadn’t “just” snapped. Over time, she’d built up a cauldron of hate that simmered and eventually boiled over. She didn’t just want justice for her sister. She wanted to see those who’d hurt her suffer the way she had.

Jessie knew the feeling the well. It had consumed her for the last several months. Her ability to settle for bringing wrongdoers to justice rather than seeking vengeance against them had atrophied to the point that she no longer trusted herself. She truly wondered if, had she been alone with Joel Cisco on that boat, she might have used the knife herself.

One thing she knew for sure—if Monica Silver would have gone a different route, and slit the man’s throat, she wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop her. Was that any different than killing him herself? It was just luck that she didn’t have to answer that question.

What would happen next time she was in a situation with a perpetrator that she had passed judgment on? She knew she couldn’t count on that medication. She wouldn’t be taking it again. It prevented her from catching those very perpetrators.

So, what recourse did she have to prevent herself from giving in to the darkness? She no longer trusted her self-control when these urges rose up inside her. Therapy didn't seem to be working. Medication wasn't an option. She couldn't go to a rehab facility without being outed.

What was left?