CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

The door to the rooftop was barred shut. Jessie wanted to scream in frustration but worried that Paulina would hear her.

"I don't want to try to smash it open or shoot it," Ryan said to both Jessie and the building manager as they stood just inside. "That will warn her that we're here. Is there another way to access the roof?"

"Yes," said the manager, a smallish man in his fifties who looked like he was struggling valiantly not to become overwhelmed by the situation. "There's a service entrance down the corridor. It opens up onto the other side of the roof."

"Take us there," Ryan instructed.

Forty-five seconds later, they were through the quickly unlocked door and on the roof. From this angle, neither Paulina nor Lila was visible. Jessie and Ryan put in their earbuds and listened to Beth, who was giving them a play-by-play of the livestream.

"You guys need to hurry," she told them urgently. "Paulina has listed off Lila's supposed crimes. Now she's put the phone somewhere nearby, and we can see her onscreen. She's right up next to Lila, holding the knife to her throat and saying that she's been found guilty. I think she's almost done talking."

They darted around a series of large mushroom-shaped turbine vents until they finally caught sight of the two women. Despite the situation, Paulina Fitzgerald—now Adrienne Shaw—had a statuesque bearing that made it easy to understand why people would trust her with their money. Even with a hunting knife to someone's throat, she had a self-possessed, unflappable bearing about her. Her own dark hair was tied back in a bun, and her angular, surgically altered features were unperturbed by the enormity of what was going on.

After processing all that, Jessie came to another grimmer determination. From the direction that she and Ryan were approaching, Paulina would see them easily. There was no way to sneak around the back of her.

"We're not going to be able to surprise her," Ryan whispered, "and she's too close to Lila. The risk of hitting the victim is too great to try shooting her. "

"Then there's only one option left," Jessie replied.

"What?"

"We have to try to talk her down," she said.

"In her state, there's no way we're going to be able to—."

But before he'd finished the sentence, Jessie had stepped out into full view.

"Adrienne," she called out from across the roof, "can I have a word with you?"

The woman looked up, startled to see Jessie there, along with Ryan, who had drawn his gun the second his wife made her presence known.

"Don't take another step!" Paulina shouted.

"I just want to talk," Jessie said evenly. "You're still in control here. I'm just trying to understand what you're after."

Paulina shook her head forcefully.

"Didn't you hear the charges I laid out?" she demanded. "Didn't you hear me render a verdict?"

"I did," Jessie said, slowly moving forward, "but we both know that's not what this is really about."

"You don't know anything about me!"

"I know more than you think, Paulina," Jessie said, using her real name for the first time.

The woman briefly froze before regrouping.

"That doesn't mean anything," she spat. "So, you know who I am. That's just a cheap parlor trick."

"But that's not all I know," Jessie told her, inching closer. They had been fifty feet away. Now they were thirty. "I think I understand what really has you so upset, and it's not just the fact that these women you killed didn't appreciate the money they have."

"I'm not upset," Paulina said. "I'm full of righteous outrage for everyone who suffers at their hands."

"You weren't upset at Chloe Baptiste's effort to blackmail you?" she asked, knowing that she was taking a risk by making that assumption. "You didn't resent the way she tried to use your past against you? Isn't that what really set you off, Paulina, and with good reason?"

As she spoke, she continued to take small steps toward the two women, until, when she finished speaking, she was only fifteen feet away.

"Stop moving," Paulina said, pressing the blade of the knife right up against Lila's throat. "You are killing her. "

Jessie stopped and held up her hands with her palms facing Paulina in a sign of submission.

"I'm stopping," she assured her, glancing over her shoulder and seeing that Ryan had stopped too, a good ten feet behind her. Even though she had stopped moving, she kept talking.

"I get it," she said quietly, now that they were close enough to each other that she could be heard without yelling, "I really do."

"You don't get anything," Paulina snarled. "You have no idea what I've been through."

"It's true—there's no way that I can comprehend the depth of your pain," Jessie conceded, before deciding to take a leap that was based more on feeling than fact, "And I don't know what Chloe was holding over you that made you so angry, so desperate. But I do know what it's like to have a father whose intentions can't be trusted."

Paulina stood up slightly. She seemed legitimately surprised by that one, as if this was the first time that someone else had ever suggested that such a highly regarded man might not be exactly what he seemed.

"He was my step father," she said with unvarnished derision.

"Okay," Jessie said, "but all the same, he raised you, right? He was supposed to take care of you. But I'm guessing he failed in some unfathomable ways. Am I right, Paulina?"

The woman's eyes went wide, but she said nothing. Jessie continued.

"My father murdered my mother right in front of me when I was six years old," she said softly. "He used a knife a lot like that one. And then he left me, tied to a chair, in an isolated, snow-covered cabin. That was my childhood, Paulina. I'm guessing that your pain was different, but that it lasted a lot longer than mine. Because, while my mother died and all I have left of her is memories, yours was there the whole time, letting it happen, wasn't she? Is that what you see when you use that knife on these women?"

"How could you possibly know any of this?" Paulina whispered, loosening the grip the knife slightly.

"Why would you leave a life that seemed so perfect?" Jessie asked. "Why change your identity and start over unless the perfect fa?ade hid a nightmare? There are only a few reasons someone would do something as desperate as that. That's how I know, Paulina. And also—because I can see it in your eyes. I can see years of pain."

Paulina just stared her, unblinking, as if stunned by the first person to ever understand her. Jessie kept going .

"But I can tell you that the pain doesn't have to last forever," she said, "not if you're willing to face it head-on head-on. There are people who can help. I can help. But to get that help, and to get real freedom from the trauma of your past, you have to stop this. You have to let Lila go. If you do that, we can start down the path to healing. All you have to do is hand over the knife. Will you do that, Paulina?"

For an endless, wordless eternity, Paulina just stood there, knife in her hand, tears welling up in her eyes. Then, finally, she nodded.

"Okay, I'm going to step toward you then," Jessie said carefully. "Just hold out the knife by the blade and I'll take it."

She took a small step forward. Paulina looked down at the knife, almost like she'd forgotten that it was in her hand. She was just starting to adjust it so that she would be holding the blade when she passed it to Jessie. And then, whether out of anger or terror, Lila grunted.

Paulina looked over at her and in that moment, something changed. Jessie saw it immediately. The vulnerable young woman trying to make a break with her tattered past was gone. The vengeful butcher of three people was back.

As Paulina regripped the knife, Jessie launched herself forward, making up the distance between them in the time it took Paulina to raise her arm over her head. The woman seemed to sense that she wasn't going to be able to stab Lila before Jessie got to her, so instead, she turned to face her pursuer directly, swinging the knife downward.

Jessie got to her first. She grabbed Paulina's right forearm as it drove toward her, stopping her momentum. For several seconds they grappled, like a deadly game of arm wrestling, as the blade rested only inches from Jessie's face.

"I can't get a clear shot!" Ryan shouted from behind her. "Move!"

Without really thinking about it, Jessie stopped pushing up on Paulina's arm and yanked it down and to the side, making both of their bodies twist so that she was no longer blocking her husband's aim.

He fired a second later. For a moment, nothing changed between the women. Then Jessie saw a patch of blood start to spread at Paulina's right shoulder. A second after that, Jessie felt the other woman's grip loosen. Then Paulina dropped to the ground, leaving the knife in Jessie's hand.

She clutched the thing like a precious jewel, staring down at its long, sharp, serrated blade. In a flash, she pictured Paulina's three victims, all slaughtered mercilessly with this weapon. Then she looked over at Paulina, lying on her back, clutching at her right shoulder with her left hand, wincing in pain.

Jessie Jessie suspected that the woman in front of her had suffered unimaginable agony in her lifetime, but she'd unleashed just as much on the world. Seeing her lying there, undone by the pain of her wound, when she's inflicted so much of it on others, sparked a rageful fire in Jessie's chest. She gripped the knife handle tight.

As she pictured the bloodied, destroyed bodies of Chloe Baptiste, Isabella Moreno, and Fiona Greene, she felt an intense desire to give Paulina some of her own medicine, to see how she would enjoy having her insides ruptured by the very blade that she'd used on others. It was the same thirst for vengeance that had almost consumed her when she watched Ryan punch corrupt cop Hank Costabile into submission just weeks ago.

"Jessie, step aside so I can cuff her," Ryan said from behind her.

She heard his words but didn't move. She was more focused on where she would strike the first blow with the knife. Would it be to Paulina's neck so that the woman could see her own blood spray everywhere? Or would she go for the face, like Paulina had done to Isabella?

"Jessie," Ryan whispered with quiet concern, now right beside her. "We're on a livestream being watched around the world. Put the knife down."

Those words forced her brain back into the reality of the moment. Whatever she had fantasized about doing, it couldn't happen. She stepped to the side so that Ryan could get to Paulina. As he passed by her, she placed the knife on a nearby end table.

She watched her husband carefully roll Paulina onto her stomach and put handcuffs on her wrists. Beyond them, Lila grunted again. Jessie shook herself into alertness and hurried over to the young woman.

She took the gag out of her mouth and, as the girl quietly whimpered, she began to tug at the duct tape binding her to the chaise lounge, but it was too tight. She got up and retrieved the knife, making sure not to look at Paulina as Ryan read her her rights. She returned to Lila, who flinched at the sight of the knife but held still as Jessie cut her loose.

"Thank you," the girl said hoarsely.

"We'll get you some water," Jessie promised.

"You saved my life," Lila said softly .

"It's part of the job," Jessie told her.

But what wasn't part of the job was almost acting on the bloodthirsty desire to stab a captured killer. Jessie tried not to think about it, to focus exclusively on freeing Lila. But deep down she knew the truth.

If Ryan hadn't mentioned that livestream to her, they might not be calling for an ambulance for Paulina Fitzgerald. They'd be calling for a body bag.