CHAPTER ONE

Jessie Hunt glanced at the clock and immediately knew she was going to get chastised for it.

"Somewhere more important to be?" Dr. Janice Lemmon asked sharply. "I thought you had significant stuff to share with me today."

The psychiatrist, who was nearly seventy, might have seemed harmless, with her diminutive frame, thick glasses, and tight, little gray ringlets of hair, but she made up for her appearance with her forceful demeanor.

"I do," Jessie said. "Sorry. I just promised Ryan and Captain Parker that I'd be in before 9:30 today and I'm getting anxious."

"It's barely after nine," Lemmon noted, "and you've already told me about Hannah and Kat, so we're well along. I think you'll get there on time."

It was true. In the half-hour that they"d been talking, Jessie had already updated her psychiatrist on the status of her relationships with her younger half-sister, Hannah Dorsey, and with her best friend, Katherine "Kat" Gentry. Luckily, in both of those instances, things were going reasonably well. In fact, she was throwing a long-delayed engagement party for Kat and her fiancé", Mitch, this weekend.

Hannah, with whom she shared a father—the now dead serial killer Xander Thurman—was finishing up her first semester as a freshman at UC Irvine. Considering everything she'd been through, the fact that she was attending college at all, much less at such a prestigious institution, was remarkable.

What was less remarkable was Hannah's level of communication since starting school. Jessie, who was also Hannah's guardian until she turned eighteen earlier this year, had been expecting a drop off in calls and texts. But even though Irvine was less than an hour away from Jessie's Mid-Wilshire-area Los Angeles home, it was as if her sister was at a college across the country for as often as she saw or heard from her.

Still, Hannah"s grades were good, and when Jessie could get her on the phone, her sister sounded happy and healthy. In light of the horrors she'd experienced in the last three years, that was about all Jessie could realistically hope for.

And Kat, despite her own recent challenges, seemed to be thriving. Less than six months ago, she had been tortured within an inch of her life by a paid assassin named Ash Pierce. But now she was seemingly physically and (mostly) emotionally recovered. It was obvious that she was still working through some PTSD, but as a former Army Ranger injured in Afghanistan, it wasn"t always clear which trauma she was dealing with.

Luckily Kat had turned much of her focus to her upcoming spring wedding to her fiancé, Mitch Connor. She'd asked Jessie to be her maid of honor, a responsibility she was happy to take on if it lightened her friend's load.

The one significant relationship that Dr. Lemmon hadn't pressed her on yet, the most complicated right now, was with Jessie's husband, Ryan. Detective Ryan Hernandez wasn't just her spouse of seven months, he was also her co-worker. Ryan ran Homicide Special Section, or HSS, the specialized unit of the LAPD that focused on cases with high profiles or intense media scrutiny—typically involving multiple victims or serial killers. Jessie was the unit's criminal profiler.

But to her surprise, Lemmon went in a different direction. "What's the deal with Costabile? You haven't brought him up recently."

"That's because there's not much to tell," Jessie said, relieved at her own words.

"That's not what you said two weeks ago," Lemmon reminded her.

The doctor was right. When Jessie had learned that former LAPD sergeant Hank Costabile had been released from prison on a technicality, it was all she could do not to lose it. After all, this was a corrupt cop who, eighteen months ago, tried to impede her investigation of his former boss, Commander Mike Butters, who was paying an underage porn actress for sex. When that didn"t work, he tried to have her killed. That effort failed as well, and he was convicted for the attempt. But a complication involving inadmissible evidence had led to him being freed on the day before Thanksgiving.

"I"ll admit that I was in a bad place when I first heard the news," Jessie acknowledged, "But Chief Decker has been great. Remember that he used to run Central Station and oversaw HSS back when all this first happened. Now that he runs all of LAPD, he has the resources to keep tabs on Costabile, and that"s exactly what he"s been doing. He has units tailing the guy 24/7."

"And that has set your mind at ease?" Lemmon asked.

"Somewhat," Jessie said. "It helps that Costabile hasn"t done anything out of the ordinary since his release, although admittedly, he could just be biding his time. More reassuring is what everyone in the know has been telling me: that the man was originally set to twenty years to life behind bars. He got a literal get-out-of-jail card. He"d have to be a complete idiot to risk that to get back at me. And whatever else Hank Costabile is, he"s not an idiot."

"Well, then I guess we can cross that concern off the list," Lemmon said, looking unconvinced. "It seems like everyone you consider a risk is turning over a new leaf these days."

Jessie knew who the therapist was sarcastically referencing: Ash Pierce. The assassin who'd tortured and tried to kill Kat had, until recently, been in a coma after injuries she sustained in a second, subsequent attempt on both Kat and Hannah's lives. But she had woken up suddenly two weeks ago, claiming no memory of her past crimes.

Pierce said that she remembered her old career, working for the military in a clandestine unit known for taking out enemy operatives, but that everything after that was hazy. The memory loss conveniently included her entire life of crime as a hitwoman. Jessie, like Kat, was dubious about the woman's transformation. And from her tone, it was clear that Lemmon was equally skeptical.

"I think we both know that the person you're referencing has some serious credibility issues," Jessie noted. "Luckily, the California Department of Corrections agrees. She's still at Cedars-Sinai hospital, recovering from her coma under strict guard. But no one seems to be buying what she's selling. She's supposed to be transferred to the prison hospital at Twin Towers next week."

"You don't think there's any chance that she's telling the truth?" Lemmon asked.

"I don't, and neither does Kat, but we're not the experts that you are," Jessie replied. "Maybe you should have a session with her."

"You think she'd go for that?" Lemmon wondered.

"Not if she's smart," Jessie mused. "Besides, my concern is with the other incarcerated killer who's been in the news lately."

"You're referring to Mr. Haddonfield, I gather?"

"I am," Jessie confirmed. "I have to say, he's been causing me more sleepless nights than Costabile and Pierce put together."

"Because of the manifesto?"

Jessie nodded. Lemmon was referencing Mark Haddonfield and what the media had dubbed The Manifesto. Haddonfield was a former UCLA student and Jessie Hunt uberfan/obsessive whose enthusiasm for her curdled when he couldn"t get into a seminar she taught on profiling at the school. Somehow, that setback, combined with an already borderline personality, set him off.

Haddonfield decided that if he couldn"t become Jessie"s protégé, he would become her nemesis, and went about it by murdering multiple people that Jessie had previously rescued from serial killers she had tracked and caught. Ultimately, he came after Jessie herself when she was hospitalized after suffering a serious head injury. But she managed, with the assistance of both Ryan and Dr. Lemmon, to stop him before he could complete his mission. He was currently being held at downtown L.A."s Twin Towers Correctional Facility, awaiting trial for his crimes.

Unfortunately, before he was caught, he'd written a long screed, which he timed to post online on Thanksgiving day. It was an unhinged description of how Jessie had wronged him, why he had to punish her, and how he'd gone about it. Then it turned into a call to action, asking for someone to take up the mantle of vengeance and pick up where he'd left off.

Authorities had discovered the manifesto within hours of its posting and managed to get it pulled down almost everywhere. But before that happened, there was no way to know how many people had seen and embraced his entreaty. In the two weeks since the manifesto posted, no crimes associated with any of Jessie's past cases had been committed. But that didn't set her mind at ease. Someone might just be taking their time.

"Yes, because of the manifesto," Jessie finally answered.

"Do you want to talk about that?" Lemmon asked.

"Not really," Jessie said. "There's not anything I can do about it right now. And as long as nobody's acted on it, I'd rather keep my attention on issues I can actually impact positively."

"That's a healthy attitude," Lemmon agreed. "So which issue would you like to tackle in our remaining time?"

Jessie sighed.

"Well, we've been dancing around the Ryan stuff," she conceded. "maybe we should just dive in."

"I'm all ears," Lemmon said, leaning back in her chair. "What ‘stuff' are we talking about? The boss stuff or the trust stuff?"

"Neither actually," Jessie told her. "Since he resigned as captain of Central Station and returned his attention exclusively to leading HSS, the boss/employee dynamic hasn't been a problem. He runs the unit, but Captain Parker has final say so there's not much friction there. And the trust thing—we're working through it."

The "trust" issue that Lemmon mentioned was in regard to an incident last spring, when Ryan kept secret a threat from a killer that he thought might stress Jessie out unnecessarily, especially since the killer had already been caught and he thought it was just empty talk. Unfortunately, the threat was real and almost resulted in the deaths of Hannah and Kat. It had taken a long time for him to convince her that he could be trusted to be straight with her, even when he thought it might be detrimental to her emotional health. In fact, there were times when she still had her doubts that he'd completely changed his stripes, but he was clearly trying, and it felt petty to keep holding it over him.

"What then?" Lemmon asked.

"Do you remember how I told you that he'd expressed interest in having kids and that I was. . . less enthusiastic."

"Of course," Lemmon said. "I know that he wanted to have children with his previous wife but that in six years of marriage it never happened."

"Correct," Jessie said. "He"s told me that, in retrospect, he views that as a blessing. He didn"t want to bring children into what ultimately became a broken home. But"s that"s made him even more committed to having them now, since he doesn"t have the doubts about us that he did with his ex."

"But you've expressed reservations in light of your recent health issues, among other things," Lemmon recalled.

"That's right," Jessie replied. "You know all about the physical concerns I've had in the last few years. Since I started working as a profiler, it feels like I've sustained injuries to every part of my body, especially my head."

Jessie didn't need to repeat the details for Lemmon. The doctor was well aware of the multiple concussions Jessie had suffered, the last of which ultimately led to brain surgery ten weeks ago.

"But that's not your primary source of reticence if I recall," Lemmon prodded.

Jessie could tell the doctor wasn't going to let her off the hook on this one. Truth be told, she didn't really want her to.

"No," she conceded, "there's the standard concern I'm sure lots of women in my position face. I'm just not sure I'm ready to put my career on hold to have a baby. But we both know that's not what's really holding me back."

"The miscarriage," Lemmon said.

Jessie nodded, though that simple phrase failed to convey the gravity of what had happened. Barely three years ago, when Jessie was married to her previous husband, Kyle Voss, she got pregnant and was excited about it.

What she only learned later was that Kyle was a cheating, murderous sociopath who killed his mistress and tried to frame Jessie for it. However, before that revelation, when he had learned about pregnancy, Kyle had secretly poisoned Jessie as means of ending it. It turned out that he didn"t consider himself the fathering type, and that was his way of handling it.

Jessie had struggled with the pain of losing the baby for months before she discovered her husband's true nature and what he'd done. Ultimately, she'd barely survived his attempt to frame and subsequently kill her. But she wasn't sure her feelings toward motherhood had survived the experience along with her.

"I've pushed dealing with what happened back then into such a hidden place that I'm not sure I can even access those feelings anymore," she admitted. "Until I can work through what happened to me, I'm not sure I have any business being a parent, which makes the choice I made recently a strange one."

"What choice is that?" Lemmon asked.

"I went to see my OB/GYN earlier this week to see if I"m even able to have children after all the physical trauma I"ve suffered lately. I figured, why go through the emotional rollercoaster if it"s a moot point?"

"And when do you expect the results?" Lemmon asked.

"By the end of the week," Jessie said.

"It's already Thursday," Lemmon noted.

"I'm well aware," Jessie replied.

That was an understatement. The truth was that every time her phone rang over the last few days, she'd gotten a small pit in her stomach as she checked who it was from. And every time it turned out not to be from her doctor, she experienced an odd combination of relief and disappointment.

"So here's the big question," Lemmon said, "if you are able to conceive, what then?"

"I guess then I'm out of excuses. I'll have to deal with this stuff for real."

"Don't you think you should be dealing with it anyway?" Lemmon nudged. "Like you said, you've kept your feelings about what happened to you buried for a long time. Maybe that's something you should consider discussing with your husband?"

"Probably," Jessie conceded reluctantly.

"And maybe, in anticipation of that discussion, we try to unearth those feelings here?"

Jessie shrugged. "I guess as long as I'm here, we may as well not waste the time."

"Okay then," Lemmon said, leaning forward. "I want you to go back to the moment when you first learned you were pregnant three years ago. Do you remember how—"

Jessie's phone, which was on silent, buzzed softly. She tried to ignore it but saw that Lemon had noticed it too.

"I'm sorry," she said to the psychiatrist. "People know they're not to contact me until after 9:30. I guess someone forgot."

Lemmon's eyebrows rose slightly.

"Or," she said, reading Jessie's mind, "someone thought it was important enough to reach out even though you specifically said not to."

"There's that possibility," Jessie admitted.

"Go ahead and check," Lemmon said. "I'll never get your full attention unless you know one way or another."

"Thanks," Jessie replied, quickly pulling out the phone and looking at the screen.

She didn't mention that some small part of her was relieved to at least temporarily delay facing the emotional minefield this discussion would unearth.

"It's Ryan," she said. "He knows where I am, and he wouldn't call unless he had a good reason. Do you mind?"

Lemmon obviously did but shook her head that she didn't. Jessie answered the phone.

"Is everything okay?" she asked.

"I'm sorry to interrupt your session," he said urgently, "but a case just came in—a murder in the Hollywood Hills— and Parker wants you and me to take it. Are you able to cut things short?"

"Sure," Jessie answered, not looking up to see Lemmon's expression. "What happened?'

"I don't know the details yet, but Parker said Chief Decker specifically requested us for this one, so it's got to be big."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes," Jessie said.

She stood up as she hung up the phone. Lemmon watched her with impressively unjudgmental eyes.

"You're not going to ream me out?" Jessie asked.

"You do what you need to do," Lemmon said gently. "But just remember, these other issues aren"t going away on their own. At some point, hopefully soon, you need to make your emotional well-being a priority. Otherwise, you won"t be much good to anybody."

"Message received," Jessie said as she headed for the door.

She really did have mixed emotions about leaving. She genuinely wanted to unshackle herself from the burden she'd been carrying all these years.

But someone had been murdered, and that, like always, took precedence.