Page 36 of The Perfect Deception (Jessie Hunt #40)

Jessie stepped inside, straining to hear what was being said.

To her surprise the person speaking from the room one over was Elise Prager. And she didn’t sound scared. She sounded angry.

“I don’t even know who you really are!”

she bellowed.

“That’s the most pathetic part,”

said someone whose voice Jessie didn’t recognize, though she could hazard a guess.

“You’re oblivious to all the pain you’ve caused.”

“To you?”

Prager shot back.

“We only met a few months ago and I’ve never been anything but nice to you. You wanted to be a part of these swaps, Nancy. I can’t fathom why you would do all these horrific things.”

Jessie peered around the corner. It took her a second to process what she saw. Sure enough, Elise Prager was there. But rather than having been stabbed or drugged, she was pointing a handgun at someone. That someone was Vanessa Winston, who was dressed in her Nancy Manion disguise, complete with short black wig and black glasses.

She was in a floral-patterned sundress, which Jessie suspected she’d worn to seem less threatening when she asked to come in the house. And she was holding a carving knife that looked like it could have caused the killing wounds to all four victims so far.

The two women were in a standoff, about ten feet apart, each standing at either end of a long couch. Jessie could sense that things were on the verge of exploding. In the distance, she thought she could hear the faint sound of sirens approaching. When the other two heard it, that would only ramp up the tension. So, without pausing to overthink it, she stepped into the room, her own gun drawn.

“She’s not Nancy Manion,”

she said, making both Prager and Winston jump slightly.

“That’s Vanessa Winston. She faked her suicide. And she’s doing all this because she holds you responsible for what happened to her marriage. Isn’t that right, Vanessa?”

The woman in the wig and glasses didn’t respond at first. She seemed to be wrapping her head around the fact that someone had finally uncovered her plot. But she recovered quickly.

“I had no choice,”

she finally said, her voice pleading as she stared at Jessie. Despite the disguise, she wasn’t wearing colored contacts now and her gray eyes, so sad in all those photos, gleamed with intensity.

“She ruined my life. I had to return the favor.”

“You’re Vanessa?”

Prager said, her jaw wide.

Vanessa didn’t even look her way. Her attention was focused on Jessie.

“She didn’t care about how any of this impacted our lives. She just got off on the whole thing. Plus she took money for it all. She got paid off our pain!”

“It was a nominal amount,”

Prager objected, not doing herself any favors with her dismissive attitude, even under these circumstances.

“Just enough to facilitate the swaps and make sure that everything ran smoothly. I’m already rich. It’s not like those token amounts were doing much more for me. It was almost like a public service.”

“You see the kind of person I’m dealing with?”

Vanessa looked offended.

“That’s why she has to pay. At first, I just wanted to ruin her little ‘project,’ make it so no one would ever do one of her odious swaps again. Dead people tend to be a real mood killer. And four of them, all tied to her business? Her reputation would never recover.”

Jessie could see her getting agitated and tried to short-circuit it.

“Vanessa, we can work this out. Just put down the knife. I’ll have Elise do the same with the gun. And then we’ll find a satisfying resolution.”

“But then I realized that wasn’t enough,”

Vanessa continued, almost as if she hadn’t heard a word Jessie said.

“Like she said, she’s too rich to care. Ruining the reputation of someone who has no shame, no principles? It’s a losing proposition. So she has to lose it all. She has to die.”

She gripped the knife tight and took a step closer to Prager.

“Keep coming and I’ll shoot! My ex-husband taught me how to use this thing. You’re lucky that I haven’t already pulled the trigger, you whack-job!”

“Not helping, Elise,”

Jessie growled.

But Vanessa seemed oblivious to the comment, more focused on making Jessie understand her.

“You’re Jessie Hunt, right? The profiler?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should understand better than anyone how I feel. Can you imagine what it’s like to switch lives with another woman and then find out that your husband prefers her? That she could slip so easily into your life and he would actually wish for it? Do you realize how painful it is to learn that you’re replaceable? How that turns your whole world into quicksand? She did that! She wanted to destroy me and that’s exactly what happened.”

Vanessa pointed the knife at Prager accusatorily.

“None of that was my fault,”

the other woman retorted.

“Take it up with your husband. He’s the stalker and you’re the psycho.”

Vanessa took another step toward her. The sirens were louder now, though both women still seemed so focused on their confrontation that they didn’t seem to notice.

“Keep coming and I will blow your head off,”

Prager said.

“I’ve got a witness that will testify that you threatened my life. It’ll be self-defense.”

“You’re making things worse,”

Jessie said, doing her best to tamp down the rising anger she felt. Vanessa Winston was the serial killer but Elise Prager was the one pissing her off right now.

“See,”

Vanessa said.

“She doesn’t care. She’s cruel by nature. I think she gets off on putting doubt and confusion into marriages and then watching them crumble. She’s evil.”

Vanessa Winston might be suffering from paranoia and a persecution complex, but Jessie thought there was some merit to her charge. Prager did seem to enjoy the chaos she caused, even if she didn’t intend it to lead to tragedy. It was like her own personal soap opera, where she wrote the script and had a front row seat to the drama. But that didn’t mean she deserved to die, and she was damn close to that happening.

“Both of you stop!”

Jessie barked.

“No one is getting stabbed or shot today. Vanessa, I feel for what you’ve been through. Put down the knife and turn yourself in. Then you will get the chance to tell your story. People will sympathize with you, but not if you do this.”

She turned her attention to Prager next.

“Once she drops the knife, you need to do the same with the gun. If you shoot an unarmed woman, that’s not self-defense. It’s murder. And I’ll testify to that. So unless you want to spend the rest of your life in a cell instead of a mansion, stop antagonizing her.”

The two women stared at each other. Both had to hear the sirens now. Maybe the looming prospect of multiple cops bursting in soon was the reason that Jessie felt a slight dip in the tension in the room.

Vanessa started to lower the knife. Jessie allowed herself a silent sigh, hopeful that she’d get out of this without a head injury or having to shoot anyone. Vanessa laid the knife on the back cushion of the couch and released her hand from it.

“Good call,”

Prager said, the gun still trained on Winston. As she lowered it slightly, she added under her breath.

“no wonder your husband was so into other women, you crazy bitch.”

The muttered comment was too loud. Jessie heard it clearly. Even though it wasn’t directed at her, a sudden surge of anger rose in her chest. For a fraction of a second, she was tempted to use the knife on Prager herself. That thought was enough to make her want to start counting, breathing, and visualizing all at the same time.

But there wasn’t time for that. Instead she thought of the technique that baseball player Kai Cody used, focused detachment. She tried to zone in on a particular detail that could consume her focus and dissipate her rage. She chose Vanessa Winston’s face.

That’s how she knew that the woman had heard Prager too. Her eyebrows were twitching furiously and her lips were curled into a grimace. Then, without warning, she grabbed the knife again and lunged toward Prager. Jessie raised her weapon, aimed for Vanessa’s shoulder, and was just about to pull the trigger when a shot fired. It was from Prager’s gun.

Everything after that seemed to happen in slow motion. Vanessa appeared to have been hit in the abdomen but she kept moving forward, plunging the knife into Prager’s chest before toppling over, hidden from view behind the couch. A moment later, Elise Prager crumbled too, disappearing from sight.

Jessie stood there, momentarily in shock. It passed almost immediately. She snapped out of it and scrambled around the couch. Vanessa was curled up in a ball, writhing in pain, bloody hands clutching at her stomach.

Elise Prager lay flat on her back. The knife jutted out of her chest, right where her heart would be. Her fingers were on the handle, fumbling weakly at it. She was gasping for air and blood was coming out of her mouth. Jessie knelt down beside her, not sure whether it was worse to remove the knife or leave it there.

“Hold on. Help is coming.”

Looking at Prager, Jessie couldn’t help but flash back to the nearly identical situation two months ago. Only then it was serial killer Rachel Thompson who was lying in the same position, flat on her back, a knife protruding from her chest. But that time, Jessie was the perpetrator.

Prager seemed to be trying to talk, opening and closing her mouth, though no words came out. Then she stopped. Jessie looks at her eyes. They were empty. She was dead.

Jessie went numb. In the blink of an eye, she’d gone from nearly containing the situation to having one dead person and another—.

“Argh.”

The groan behind her pulled her out of it. She turned around to see that Vanessa had stopped writhing, though her hands were still hugging her gut. Blood was pouring through her fingers. Jessie desperately looked around the room. Her eyes fell on a pool towel hanging from a hook on the wall. She jumped up, grabbed it, and returned to Vanessa, pulling the woman’s hands away and replacing them with the bunched-up towel.

“Ms. Hunt?”

The voice behind Jessie made her leap slightly before she realized it was Devery.

“In here!”

she shouted back.

“I need your help.”

He came into the room, gun in his hands, and moved around to the back of the couch. His eyes opened wide. But she didn’t have time to coddle him.

“Prager’s dead. Winston might be close. I need you to go out front and direct everyone back here, especially the EMTs. Tell them we have a woman with a GSW to the left abdomen. Got it?”

He nodded.

“Then go!”

He dashed out of the guest house. Jessie returned her attention to Vanessa, doing her best to staunch the bleeding. The woman’s eyes were clenched shut and she was muttering to herself. It was mostly unintelligible, although Jessie did catch a little.

“Had to do it... No choice…. Couldn’t stop myself…”

Jessie didn’t say anything, instead focusing on keeping pressure on the wound. But as she listened to Vanessa murmur the same things over and over again like a mantra, an unsettling realization popped into her head.

Vanessa Winston sounded just like her