to say.
“Don’t give me that,” Eliza said, shutting her down. “We both know you can get restless. But this is how you dealt with it?”
“I know this doesn’t help,” Penny insisted. “But I was going to break it off. I haven’t talked to him in three days. I was just trying to find a way to end it with him without blowing things up with you.”
“Looks like you’re going to need a new plan,” Eliza spat, fighting the urge to kick the coffee cup shards at her friend. Only her bare feet prevented her. She clung to her anger, knowing it was the only thing keeping her from falling apart completely.
“Please, let me find a way to make this right. There has to be something I can do.”
“There is,” Eliza assured her. “Leave now.”
Her friend stared at her for a moment. But she must have sensed how serious Eliza was because her hesitation was brief.
“Okay,” Penny said, picking up her things and scurrying toward the front door. “I’ll go. But let’s talk later. We’ve been through so much together, Lizzie. Let’s not let this ruin everything.”
Eliza forced herself not to scream epithets in response. This might be the last time she ever saw her “friend” again and she needed her to understand the magnitude of the situation.
“This is different,” she said slowly, with emphasis on each word. “All those other times were us against the world, having each other’s back. This time you stabbed me in mine. Our friendship is over.”
Then she slammed the door in her best friend’s face.
CHAPTER TWO
Jessie Hunt woke up with a start, briefly unsure where she was. It took a moment to remember that she was in midair, on a Monday morning flight from Washington, D.C., back to Los Angeles. She looked at her watch and saw she still had two hours left before they landed.
Trying not to drift off again, she roused herself by taking a sip from the water bottle stuffed in the seatback pocket. She swished it around her mouth, trying to get rid of the cottonmouth coating her tongue.
She had good reason to nap. The last ten weeks had been among the most exhausting of her life. She had just completed the FBI’s National Academy, an intense training program for local law enforcement personnel designed to familiarize them with FBI investigative techniques.
The exclusive program was only available to those nominated to attend by their supervisors. Unless accepted to go to Quantico to become a formal FBI agent, this crash course was the next best thing.
Under normal circumstances, Jessie wouldn’t have been eligible to go. Until recently, she had only been an interim junior criminal profiling consultant for the LAPD. But after she solved a high-profile case, her stock had risen rapidly.
In retrospect, Jessie understood why the academy preferred more experienced officers. For the first two weeks of the program, she’d felt completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information being thrown at her. She had classes in forensic science, law, terrorist mindsets, and her area of focus, behavioral science, which emphasized getting inside the minds of killers to better understand their motives. And none of that included the relentless physical training that left every muscle aching.
Eventually, she found her bearings. The courses, which were reminiscent of her recent graduate work in criminal psychology, began to make sense. After about a month, her body was no longer screaming when she woke up each morning. And best of all, the time she spent in the Behavioral Sciences Unit allowed her to interact with the best serial killer experts in the world. She hoped to one day be among them.
There was one added benefit. Because she worked so hard, both mentally and physically, for almost every waking moment, she hardly ever dreamed. Or at least, she didn’t have nightmares.
Back home, she often woke up screaming in a cold sweat as memories of her childhood or her more recent traumas replayed in her unconscious. She still remembered her most recent source of anxiety. It was her last conversation with incarcerated serial killer Bolton Crutchfield, the one in which he’d told her he would be chatting with her own murderous father sometime soon.
If she had been back in L.A. for the last ten weeks, she’d have spent most of that time obsessing over whether Crutchfield was telling the truth or screwing with her. And if he was being honest, how would he manage to coordinate a discussion with an on-the-lam killer while he was being held in a secure mental hospital?
But because she’d been thousands of miles away, focused on unrelentingly challenging tasks for almost every waking second, she hadn’t been able to fixate on Crutchfield’s claims. She likely would again soon, but not just yet. Right now, she was simply too tired for her brain to mess with her.
As she settled back into her seat, allowing sleep to envelop her again, Jessie had a thought.
So all I have to do to get good sleep for the rest of my life is spend every morning working out until I almost throw up, followed by ten hours of non-stop professional instruction. Sounds like a plan.
Before she fully formed the grin that was beginning to play at her lips, she was asleep again.
That sense of cozy comfort disappeared the second she walked outside of LAX just after noon. From this moment on, she would need to be on constant guard again. After all, as she’d learned before she left for Quantico, a never-captured serial killer was on the hunt. Xander Thurman had been looking for her for months. Thurman also happened to be her father.
She took a rideshare from the airport to work, which was the Central Community Police Station in downtown L.A. She didn’t formally start work again until tomorrow and wasn’t in the mood to chat, so she didn’t even go into the main bullpen of the station.
Instead, she went to her assigned mailbox cubby and collected her mail, which had been forwarded from a post office box. No one—not her work colleagues, not her friends, not even her adoptive parents—knew her actual address. She’d rented the apartment through a leasing company; her name was nowhere on the agreement and there was no paperwork connecting her to the building.
Once she grabbed the mail, she walked along a side corridor to the motor pool, where taxis were always waiting in the adjoining alley. She hopped in one and directed it to the retail strip center that was situated next to her apartment complex, about two miles away.
One reason she’d picked this place to live after her friend Lacy had insisted she move out was that it was difficult to find and even harder to access without permission. First of all, its parking structure was under the adjoining retail complex in the same building, so anyone following her would have a hard time determining where she was going.
Even if someone did figure it out, the building had a doorman and a security guard. The front door and the elevators both required keycards. And none of the apartments themselves had unit numbers listed on the outside. Residents just had to remember which was theirs.
Still, Jessie took extra precautions. Once the cab, which she paid for with cash, dropped her off, she walked into the retail center. First she passed quickly through a coffee shop, meandering through the crowd before taking a side exit.
Then, pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her shoulder-length brown hair, she passed through a food court to a hallway that had restrooms next to a door marked “Employees Only.” She pushed open the women’s restroom door so that anyone
