Page 5 of The Perfect Deception (Jessie Hunt #40)

Jessie felt surprisingly fresh.

She knew she was destined for a post-flight energy crash soon, but there was something invigorating about being back in the Central Station bullpen, surrounded by co-workers who were clearly excited to see her.

Ryan, Hannah, and Kat stood off to the side as each member of the team greeted Jessie with warm hugs. Well, almost everyone. Captain Gaylene Parker, their 45-year-old boss, offered a polite handshake. But that was just part of her formal, almost terse personal style. Jessie didn’t take offense.

The rest of the gang was far more effusive. Detective Susannah Valentine’s bear hug was so intense that Jessie worried the woman might snap her spine. Detectives Karen Bray, Sam Goodwin, and Jim Nettles all waited their turn to offer less painful embraces. Then came Beth Ryerson, the junior researcher. Even Jamil Winslow, who ran the research department, and didn’t like to make eye contact, much less have physical interaction, offered her a hesitant arm around the body and pat on the back.

Everybody asked how she was feeling and since she knew they were all talking about her head, she answered forthrightly. No one knew about the treatment facility so she didn't have to lie on that front. She even told them generally where she'd been staying. When Susannah saw photos of the gorgeous locale, she let out a series of jealous expletives that helped Jessie feel more at home than the hugs had.

"All right," Captain Parker said, "I know everyone's happy to have Ms. Hunt back, but we have several open cases that are languishing, so I'm going to ask our detective teams to get back to it."

The detectives reluctantly returned to their desks and the research team headed back down the hall to their office, Hannah included. Parker fixed her attention on Jessie.

“Can I still count on you to start back up tomorrow?”

“Of course. Happy to be back.”

Parker appeared relieved.

“Good. I don’t like to speak ill of anyone, but let’s just say that your temporary replacements haven’t been—as impactful as I would like.”

Ryan nodded in agreement.

“Sometimes we wouldn’t even call for a profiler. Most of the time they were more trouble than help. And one of them really rubbed Susannah the wrong way. She kept grumbling tha.

“there’s only one Jessie Hunt.”

Jessie didn’t say so but she wasn’t surprised. Susannah Valentine, a bombshell who looked more like a swimsuit model than a cop, had a brash, sometimes abrasive personality. That, along with her "bull in a china shop" investigative intensity, tended to cause clashes with people who couldn't handle it. In fact, she and Jessie had gotten off to a rocky start before finding common ground and eventually becoming friends.

“It’s nice to be appreciated,”

she said diplomatically.

“All right then,”

Parker said gruffly.

“I’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning. It’s good to have you back, Hunt.”

Kat waited until she was gone before commenting.

“That’s as warm as I’ve ever seen that woman be.”

“Cut her some slack,”

Jessie said.

“She used to run the vice unit. She’s seen stuff worse than dead bodies. It’s calloused her a bit.”

“Sure.”

Kat didn’t sound impressed.

“It’s times like this that I’m glad to be an independent operator. Speaking of, I have to get back to it. I have a meeting with a guy who thinks his wife is cheating with a pro football player. True or not, that could be a nice payday.”

Jessie studied her friend. To the average person, Kat Gentry looked like she was doing fine. There was no obvious sign of the grief she felt over her fiancé’s murder or the PTSD she still had from being tortured by Ash Pierce. Of course, this was a woman who still bore the wounds of her time in war. Kat had been an Army Ranger in Afghanistan, where she was injured in an IED explosion that left her with damage both internal and external, including multiple facial burn marks and a long scar that ran vertically down her left cheek from just below her eye.

“Okay.”

Jessie tried to keep it casual as she asked the question on her mind.

“Maybe later you can update me on the Ash Pierce situation? I know I’ve been out of the loop but I’d like to know where we stand.”

"Of course. But for now, you should enjoy your last relaxing afternoon for—maybe forever?"

She chuckled to herself as she walked off, leaving Jessie and Ryan alone. Her husband smiled at her and she felt a wave of warmth wash over her. His kind brown eyes, shy grin, and adorable dimples—the features that had first attracted her to him—were on full display. So too were some of his other attributes, which included a square jaw and a well-muscled, two-hundred pound, six foot tall body that strained at his dress shirt. It was nice to be close to him again. Having said that, the conversations the two of them most needed to have would wait until later, when they were at home by themselves. For now, she had another priority.

“Do you mind if I check in with Jamil before we head out?”

she asked.

“It won’t take long.”

“That’s fine. I need to finish up a bit of paperwork on the case we closed yesterday anyway.”

He sat at his desk and Jessie headed down the hall to the research department. The door was open but she knocked anyway. Everyone looked up. The room, already packed with computers and giant monitors, seemed much smaller now that Jamil and Beth had been joined by Hannah. She was seated at a small folding table that had been set up in the corner of the room.

“Can I talk to you privately for a second, Jamil?”

He stood up nervously, looking over at Beth who offered a supportive smile.

“You’re not in trouble,”

the young woman teased.

“Jessie just wants catch up on what she missed. And who better to give updates than our resident genius?”

That seemed to make him relax slightly as he walked over.

Beth wasn’t kidding. Jamil was brilliant, skilled at filtering through massive databases, sorting surveillance video into manageable buckets, or making complex financial records understandable, all seemingly without even trying. What required actual effort for him was the social side of human interaction. His proficiency on that front didn’t always match his intellectual abilities.

Luckily he had Beth to help him out. She was as adept with people as Jamil was with numbers. Her perpetually chill, friendly vibe was the complete inverse of Jamil’s jittery intensity. And while not a human supercomputer like him, she had an incredibly sharp mind, which people tended to underestimate because she was an attractive, six-foot-plus former college volleyball star. Jessie wondered how Hannah was fitting in with their two very different energies. It surely wasn’t boring.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Hunt?”

Jamil asked once they were alone in the hallway.

“Call me Jessie.”

She had told him to use her first name dozens of times since he’d joined HSS but he never did. Now it was kind of an inside joke that she wasn’t sure he got.

“I was hoping you could update me on the whole Haddonfield thing.”

It was a pretty open-ended question considering the enormity of th.

“whole Haddonfield thing.”

Haddonfield was Mark Haddonfield, an unstable college student who had become obsessed with Jessie and took great offense when she didn’t do as he thought she should and install him as her profiling protégé. It didn’t matter to him that she didn’t even know who he was.

Already teetering on the mental edge, he.

“rejection”

of him sent him spiraling down a violent path. Ultimately he ended up murdering multiple people that Jessie had previously saved from other killers. He eventually went after Hannah and then Jessie herself before he was caught.

While incarcerated and awaiting trial, a manifesto he’d written before his capture was released on the internet. It called for supporters of his to take action against Jessie and her loved ones on his behalf. That led to an attack on Dr. Lemmon, which she barely survived. And one on Kat, that her fiancé did not.

Realizing that unhinged acolytes would keep coming out of the woodwork, Jessie was able to convince Haddonfield to do a video retraction of the manifesto. In exchange, she agreed to let him look at some of her open case files and "work with her" on occasion. He embraced the deal as it gave him the thing he wanted most: to be her protégé, at least in his mind.

But their work together was short-lived. On the day he was convicted of multiple murders, Haddonfield was killed by none other than Ash Pierce, who used the chaos surrounding the end of his trial to escape from the courthouse where she had a hearing that day. Jessie assumed that was the last she’d hear from Mark Haddonfield. But she was wrong.

After his death, the administrator of the jail where Haddonfield was housed gave her his box of personal effects, saying that was the young man’s wish. Only weeks later did she discover that a necklace pendant in the box was actually a thumb drive. On the drive were screenshots of letters that he’d received from fans of his manifesto. He’d made particular note of messages from three people, who seemed more like disciples than mere fans. It was immediately clear why.

Unlike most of the correspondence he received, which offered general praise for his crimes or vague suggestions that the writer might follow in his footsteps, these three messages were different. And far scarier.

What set all of them apart was their specificity. In addition to the boilerplate promises to pick up the baton for Haddonfield and carry on his murderous work, these three supporters listed individual people they would go after, and described how they intended to get to them.

One of the three was incredibly detailed in his plans but not especially smart about protecting his identity. He gave his real name and was picked up by authorities even before Jessie left for Italy. He turned out to be an electrician from Reseda with a history of making threatening comments against public figures. Because he’d made specific, credible threats against multiple people close to Jessie, he was held without bail, pending his trial.

Unfortunately, the other two acolytes were more careful in their communications. Both used pseudonyms. Their letters were typed rather than handwritten. Both referenced the real home or work addresses of multiple people in Jessie's inner circle. Clearly, Haddonfield considered them to be legitimate threats, or he wouldn't have flagged them. And even though no one had made a move against folks she cared about in months, Jessie took them seriously too.

That’s why, before she left the country, she’d asked Jamil to look for any markers that might help narrow down their identities. If he’d uncovered anything definitive while she was gone, he would have told Ryan, who’d have passed word along to her. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t made any progress.

“I wish I had better news for you.”

He appeared embarrassed not to have answers.

“I tried to pair the language in the letters to other threatening letters we have on file from the past but there were no matches. In addition, the letters both used bland fonts, making it hard to glean anything useful about either writer from that. The actual physical letters can’t be found. All we have are screenshots, so there’s no way to check fingerprints or DNA. Jail staff did take photos of the envelopes when sending them through security scanners. Those photos show that neither envelope had a return address. Even if we had them, both used adhesive stamps to avoid revealing DNA. The jail address was written in block letters by both acolytes, making handwriting analysis useless. Those kinds of precautions have me as concerned as the actual threats. These two seem more capable than the average person who makes threats.”

“Don’t feel too bad, Jamil.”

Jessie didn’t want the constantly self-judging researcher to get down.

“I submitted the letters to Dr. Janice Lemmon too, you know. She worked as a profiler for the LAPD and FBI for years before she went into private practice as a psychiatrist. And she wasn’t able to come to any firm conclusions either, at least not yet. I’m hoping that she made some other discoveries while I was gone.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful.”

Jamil lowered his head.

“I wanted to have something meaningful for you by the time you got back. But I just don’t.”

“Look, we’re all in the same boat. We know there are multiple threats out there but we just don’t have enough to act on them. For now, just keep doing what you’re doing. Something will break soon.”

Jamil looked like he might want to say something more, but at that moment they were joined by Officer Harper Devery.

“Hi, Ms. Hunt!”

Jamil, not comfortable continuing the conversation with a relative stranger around, offered Devery a curt nod, gave Jessie a half-smile, and retreated to the research office without a word.

“Did I do something wrong?”

Devery asked, confused by Jamil’s sudden departure.

“You’re fine.”

She had no intention of getting into the details of Jamil’s sometimes prickly personality.

“Good to see you again, Officer.”

“You too. I heard you were back and immediately came looking for you.”

Devery was a newly minted officer who had specifically requested to be assigned to Central Station so that he could eventually work with HSS. He barely seemed old enough to be on the force, much less part of a specialized unit. He had a boyish demeanor with brown hair that was parted neatly to the right. He had ruddy cheeks and wide, friendly eyes that had yet to encounter many of the horrors his job could entail.

Even though he’d only been with LAPD for a short time, he’d already proved helpful. On her last case before leaving town, Jessie had brought the eager officer along on a suspect interview. He mostly stood outside the office of the person she questioned, but his presence had provided an extra helping of intimidation that she found useful.

“It’s been over two months since I saw you,”

she said.

“Anything exciting happen for you in my absence?”

“It’s all exciting, Ms. Hunt.”

He sounded genuine.

“But I’ll admit that I’d love to help you guys out a little more. The other folks in the unit have thrown me a couple of bones while you were gone. But please know that I’m available to help out HSS anytime you need it, assuming I haven’t been assigned elsewhere.”

Just then, Hannah poked her head out of the research office. It looked like she had a question of her own so Jessie decided to wrap things up with Devery.

“We’ll definitely keep you in mind. Just know that you’ll likely be getting grunt work.”

“Happy to do it,”

he said, before giving Hannah a polite grin.

“Anyway, I’ll leave you two be. See you around, I hope.”

Once he was gone, Hannah stepped out into the hall, standing exactly where Jamil had been minutes earlier.

“I worry about that kid,” she said.

Jessie found it amusing that her 19-year-old sister called Devery—a police academy graduate at least three years her senior—a "kid." But she kept that to herself.

“Why?”

“He’s so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I feel like a bank robber could come up to him in a mask and he’d offer the guy a warm handshake.”

“He’ll get there,”

Jessie said, hoping she was right. She was rooting for Devery but he was definitely wet behind the ears.

“What’s on your mind, little sis?”

Hannah paused briefly, as if reconsidering if she really wanted to broach whatever was bothering her. But as usual, she couldn’t hold back in voicing what she was thinking. They shared that trait.

“I know you just got back after a crazy long flight, so I don’t mean to throw this at you right away, but I just don’t want to let it languish.”

“What?”

Jessie acted as if she didn’t suspect what was coming next.

“You remember Finn, my friend who was stabbed just before you left?”

“Of course. I’m the one who coordinated the 24-hour security outside his hospital room.”

“Right, well he was kept there for three weeks, but then his family had him moved.”

“Okay,”

Jessie said.

“Is there something wrong with that?”

“Not technically. But something felt off about it. He was moved at the exact time that I was downstairs in the cafeteria, almost as if it was intentionally done then so I couldn’t ask questions.”

“What questions would you have had?”

Jessie asked.

“Where was he being taken? Under whose authority? Why at that moment rather than a week before or after?”

Jessie pressed her.

“Didn’t the guard on duty have those answers for you?’

“Sure, in general. He said the family had decided to move him to a hospice and that it was done by U.S. Marshals to protect him during transport. He said the Marshal’s IDs checked out. But I didn’t get why he needed to be moved to a hospice anyway. He didn’t seem to have gotten any worse over that three weeks. And when I reached out to the family to learn more, they wouldn’t tell me anything. They weren’t mean about it but they said the Marshals had instructed them not to share any details of his hospice location for his own safety.”

“That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, Hannah.”

Jessie wanted to be delicate with her pushback.

“The person who stabbed Finn hasn’t been found. As long as Finn’s alive, he’s a threat to the killer, so they might come after him. I know you’re not a risk to him but we can’t expect the Marshals to view it that way.”

"It's all just very cloak and dagger." Hannah was clearly frustrated. "I tried to hack into the hospital CCTV to see the transport vehicle that was used and who the Marshals who took him were."

“Should you really be telling a law enforcement officer that you hacked into a hospital’s video system?”

Hannah continued, undeterred.

“But it was all erased before I got to it. It just felt like overkill for a college student stabbing victim.”

“And yet, maybe that was the smart move,”

Jessie pointed out.

“If you were able to hack the hospital’s security footage, maybe the attacker could too.”

“Fine. I get all that. But no matter where I look, everything on Finn disappears into a black hole. Now that you’re back, I was hoping you could help grease the wheels a little and find out where he is, or at least if he’s okay. I don’t even know for sure if he’s still alive. You’ve worked with the Marshals before, when they moved us to a safe house that one time. They trust you. They’ll talk to you.”

Jessie could see the frustration on her sister’s face and wanted so badly to comfort her, to assure her that Finn was safe and sound. But it wasn’t as easy as that.

“I’ll see what I can do,”

she finally said, doing her best to sound like she meant it.

She was lying of course, but Hannah couldn’t know that