Page 38

Jessie tried to keep quiet.

As she rolled over in the small cot that the nurses had put in Ryan’s hospital room, she did her best to avoid waking him up. Not that he’d been awake much at all over the last 48 hours.

He’d been unconscious when they first brought him in, though he was intentionally woken up periodically to check on the whether the antidote was working. It was, but that didn’t stop the pain, so after doctors were able to confirm that he was improving, they would immediately sedate him again.

The process had been going on for close to two days. Ryan had received what they hoped was his last course of both the antidote and sedation eight hours ago, at four in the morning, so he might wake up at any moment.

He’d come a long way from that first night. Dr. Roth said that he should make a full recovery. In her decidedly caustic, undiplomatic way, she’d also noted that because of the concentrated dose of the poison that he’d received, he was about fifteen minutes from being too far gone to help when she arrived.

Jessie hadn’t been able to see him in those first few hours. That was for two reasons. The first was her own medical issues.

During the course of her kitchen brawl with the man, who she’d since learned was named Nathan Prescott, she’d suffered multiple injuries, including a bruised lower back, gashes to her forehead and cheekbone, a swollen nose, bruised ribs, and an aching windpipe, along with a strained neck.

Nothing required surgery, though the lacerations on her face did necessitate stitches. After being evaluated and treated, which took a couple of hours, she thought that she'd finally be allowed to join Ryan. Instead, she was questioned by Captain Parker in conjunction with a pair of detectives from Wilshire Station. After they got the basics of what had happened, the detectives began to press her.

“I’m just trying to understand,” the shorter older detective asked, “why you didn’t just subdue the assailant by pulling your weapon on him?”

“I’m sorry,” Jessie said defensively, “but Prescott took my weapon after hitting me in the face with a shovel. After I freed myself from the zip tie and he charged at me, did you want me to go searching for the gun rather than defend myself with what I had available?”

“I guess we’re wondering,” said the taller, younger detective, “why you didn’t look for it after initially subduing Prescott.”

“What constitutes ‘initially subduing’ to you, Detective?” she challenged. “The man had poisoned my husband. He had assaulted me with a shovel and tied me up. All I had at my disposal was a rolling pin. So I used it as best I could until I was confident that he was no longer a threat.”

“I think you did that pretty effectively,” the older detective said with a smirk. “The man has fractures to his skull, eye socket, and jaw, not to mention that he had to have his tongue sewn back on.”

Jessie, who had very deliberately chosen not to think about the last moments of her fight with Prescott until now, could feel anger bubbling up inside her as she listened to him.

“Oh, would you rather I checked on the guy’s boo-boos after each of my attempts at self-defense before moving on to the next one?” she snarled. “I wasn’t aware that my survival was a secondary priority to the discomfort of the man who murdered two people and tried to kill me and Detective Hernandez. You just let me know the new department rules for self-defense when all I have is a rolling pin, and I'll be sure to follow them."

“All right,” Captain Parker had said, “why don’t we all give it a rest? Ms. Hunt, you’ve just been through a volatile situation, but maybe you could rein it in just a little. And Detectives, I know you’re just doing your job, but it sounds to me like you’re impugning the motives of the victim here. Nathan Prescott entered Ms. Hunt’s home after poisoning her husband. He assaulted her and forced her to watch while her husband lay near death. When she got free, he attacked her. I think your tone is out of bounds.”

“I disagree, Captain,” the older one said. “We’re just trying to get a clear picture of how events transpired.”

"I think you've got a clear enough picture," Parker said. "If you have any more questions, you can pose them in a formal setting with her union representative present. Right now, Ms. Hunt wants to see her husband, who, I might remind you, is an LAPD detective who almost died tonight. This interview is over."

Parker then helped Jessie to her feet and led her out of the room and down the hallway.

“Thanks, Captain,” she had said once they were clear of the detectives.

“I’m just keeping an eye out for my team,” Parker deflected. “You didn’t deserve the full-court press in there. But I can’t promise there won’t be more questions down the line. Prescott is a murderer, but he’s in pretty bad shape. That makes folks nervous, even if you did nothing wrong.”

Only after issuing that warning, did Parker send Jessie off to Ryan’s room, where she’d spent most of her time since. She’d gotten occasional breaks, when Hannah, Kat—who had given her a big hug upon arriving—or a member of the HSS team would take her place so she could get a checkup on her injuries or run home for a quick shower and change. But other than that, the last two days had been spent mostly in this small hospital room.

Right now, the cot was killing her back, so she decided to sit upright. Maybe she could get a quick catnap that way. She felt her eyes starting to get heavy when she heard a noise that made them snap open. It sounded like a grunt. She looked over at Ryan. His eyes were open.

“Hey,” she said, getting up and moving to the chair next to his bed, “welcome back to the land of the living.”

“Was I that close to leaving for good?” he asked, his voice scratchy but surprisingly strong.

She grabbed the cup on the tray next to him and held the straw to his lips.

“It’s water,” she said. “Sounds like you could use it.”

He nodded appreciatively and took a sip.

“To answer your question,” she told him, “it was touch and go there for a while. We don’t need to get into all the particulars right now, but let’s just say that you were less than an hour from having your ashes scattered somewhere.”

"I don't want to be cremated," he said drily, thankfully playing along with the lighter tone she'd purposely adopted. She didn't want to discuss this too seriously, or she feared she might lose it completely.

“Noted,” she said, even though she already knew his wishes and was teasing him by pretending not to remember.

“How are you ?” he asked. “No offense, but you look a little rough around the edges.”

“The stuff you see looks worse than it feels,” she said, before pausing and adding, “actually it feels as bad as it looks, and the stuff you can’t see is worse. But I’ve been assured that nothing is broken and that I’ll be good as a used car in a week or two.”

“What about your head?” he asked, not playing along anymore. “I saw you get hit in the face with that shovel. Did they check for a concussion?”

She could hear the concern in his voice and understood why. Her surgery last fall was a result of swelling on the brain caused by multiple concussions in a short period of time.

"I was assured that I didn't get one," she said. "In this instance, it seems that the soft mush of my face took the brunt of the blow."

“I’m glad,” he said quietly.

She offered him another sip of water, which he accepted greedily. After he was done, she put the cup down. She could sense that he had another question but waited for him to ask on his timetable.

“What happened with the guy?” he finally said.

“His name is Nathan Prescott and he’s here,” she said, “in a different wing though. His condition is described as serious but stable. He’s under guard until they’re able to transport him to the jail. They think it will be several weeks at least. I won’t bore you with all the details right now, but suffice to say, he’s been charged with a laundry list of crimes. It’s not going to go well for him. In addition to matching that partial print at the Whitaker house to him, he basically confessed to me while we were waiting for you to kick the bucket. He’s not getting out.”

Ryan nodded. He looked like he had another question about the case, but then his attention was diverted to something behind her.

“Who sent the flowers?” he asked.

“Everyone,” she answered. “Even Chief Decker stopped by with some. But the biggest bouquet is from your favorite lady, Captain Parker. She’s been coming by twice a day to check on you.”

“That’s very nice of her,” he said.

“Especially under the circumstances,” she agreed.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Jessie shared what she had only learned herself yesterday.

“Do you remember how Parker was in and out of the station earlier this week because of some event for her kid?” she asked.

“That sounds vaguely familiar,” Ryan said.

"Well, it turns out it wasn't a school play or anything like that," she explained. "He'd been having panic attacks at school. At one point, he even locked himself in a bathroom stall and wouldn't come out. So she's been dealing with that, trying to get him help while still managing Central Station and HSS."

“Jeez,” he said. “I guess I should cut her a little slack.”

“It might be a nice gesture,” Jessie said. “And I think she’ll do the same thing for you. Maybe we all try to give each other a little grace.”

“I like that,” he said, before looking at her quizzically. She could sense that he knew there was something else. Sure enough, he asked, “what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “it’s just the thing with Parker’s son, it made me re-evaluate the whole adoption thing. I mean, are we really ready to open ourselves up to that kind of vulnerability? What if the child we get is really struggling emotionally and we aren’t able to help.”

“Jessie, I think that dealing with those kinds of struggles is what’s called ‘parenting,’” he said with a smile, before his face turned grim. “But there’s a bigger issue we need to address before we can seriously embrace adopting.”

“What?”

“I saw you with that Prescott guy,” he said, “once you had him under control, you didn’t stop. You were so full of rage. Before I called out to you, you looked like you were about to jam that rolling pin down his throat. I worry that if I hadn’t yelled at you, you would have killed him. In fact, when I woke up, I was afraid to ask, because I thought you might have.”

As she listened to him, Jessie could feel her face—along with the entire back of her neck——grow hot with shame.

“I didn’t though,” she said, not conceding anything. “I cuffed him. I called for backup. He’s alive, not more than two hundred yards from this room.”

“I understand that,” Ryan said. “But you were so angry. It reminded me of Hannah before she got things under control. I mean, if I hadn’t managed to stay conscious long enough to shout at you to stop, would that man be dead right now? Would you be under investigation for murder?”

Jessie looked at him. She wanted to reassure him. But the truth was—she didn’t have an answer, at least not one he’d like.