Читать книгу The Perfect House - Блейк Пирс - Страница 9

Jessie kept her head on a swivel, on the lookout for anyone or anything out of the ordinary.

As she returned to her place, following the same circuitous route as earlier in the day, all the security precautions she’d been so proud of only hours earlier now seemed woefully inadequate.

This time around, she tied her hair into a bun and hid it under a baseball cap and the hood of a sweatshirt she bought on the way back from Norwalk. Her small backpack purse was attached in the front so that it hugged her chest. Despite the added anonymity they might have provided, she didn’t wear sunglasses out of concern they would limit her line of sight.

Kat had promised to review the tape of all Crutchfield’s recent visits to see if they’d missed something. She also said that if Jessie could wait until work ended, she’d make the drive to DTLA, even though she lived in far-off City of Industry, and help ensure that she got back safe. Jessie politely declined the offer.

“I can’t count on having an armed escort everywhere I go from now on,” she’d insisted.

“Why not?” Kat had asked only half-jokingly.

Now, as she walked down the corridor to her apartment, she wondered if she should have taken her friend up on the offer. She felt especially vulnerable with the bag of groceries in her arms. The hall was deathly quiet and she hadn’t seen anyone at all since entering the building. Before she could dismiss it out of hand, a crazy notion popped into her head—that her father had killed everyone on her floor so that he wouldn’t have to deal with complications when he approached her.

Her peephole light was green, which gave her some assurance as she opened the door, looking down both ends of the hall for anyone who might jump out at her. No one did. Once inside, she flicked on the lights and then turned all the locks back before disarming both alarms. Immediately after, she rearmed the main one in “home” mode so that she could move about the apartment without setting off the motions sensors.

She put the grocery bag on the kitchen counter and searched the place, nightstick in hand. She had successfully applied for a firearms permit before she left for Quantico and was supposed to get her weapon when she went to the station for work tomorrow. Part of her wished she had just picked it up when she stopped by to get her mail earlier today. When she was finally confident that the apartment was secure, she began to put the groceries away, leaving out the sashimi she’d picked up for dinner instead of pizza.

Nothing like supermarket sushi on Monday night to make a single gal feel special in the big city.

The thought made her chuckle to herself briefly before she remembered that her serial killer father had been given a guide to her place of residence. Maybe it wasn’t a complete roadmap. But from what Crutchfield had said, it was enough for him to eventually find her. The big question was: when was “eventually”?

*

Ninety minutes later, Jessie was punching a heavy bag, sweat pouring off her body. After finishing her sushi, she had felt restless and cooped up and decided to work out her frustrations in a constructive way at the gym.

She’d never been much of a workout fiend. But while at the National Academy she’d come to an unexpected discovery. When she worked out to exhaustion, there was no space left inside her for the anxiety and fear that consumed her so much of the rest of the time. If only she’d known this a decade ago, she could have saved herself thousands of sleepless nights, even the nights filled with endless nightmares.

It might also have saved her a few trips to see her therapist, Dr. Janice Lemmon, a renowned forensic psychologist in her own right. Dr. Lemmon was one of the few people who knew every detail about Jessie’s past. She’d been an invaluable resource in recent years.

But she was currently in recovery from a kidney transplant and wasn’t available for sessions for a few more weeks. Jessie was tempted to think she could dispense with the visits altogether. But while it might be cheaper to go with workout therapy alone, she knew there would surely be times she’d need to see the doctor in the future.

As she went in for a series of jabs, she recalled how, prior to her trip to Quantico, she’d often wake up covered in perspiration, breathing heavily, trying to remind herself that she was safe in Los Angeles and not back in a small cabin in the Missouri Ozarks, tied to a chair, watching blood drip from the slowly freezing body of her dead mother.

If only that had just been a dream too. But it was all real. When she was six years old and her parents’ marriage was on the rocks, her father had taken her and her mother to his remote cabin. While there, he revealed that he’d been abducting, torturing, and killing people for years. And then he did the same to his own wife, Carrie Thurman.

As he manacled her hands to the ceiling beams of the cabin and intermittently stabbed her with a knife, he made Jessie—then Jessica Thurman—watch. He tied her arms to a chair and taped her eyelids open as he finally cut her mother open for good.

Then he used the same knife to slice a large gash across his own daughter’s collarbone from her left shoulder to the base of her neck. After that, he simply left the cabin. It was three days later when, hypothermic and in shock, she was discovered by two hunters who had just happened by.

After she recovered, she told the police and FBI the story. But by then, her dad was long gone and any hope of catching him was gone with it. Jessica was put into Witness Protection in Las Cruces with the Hunts. Jessica Thurman became Jessie Hunt and a new life began.

Jessie shook the memories out of her head, switching from jabs to knee kicks intended for an attacker’s groin. She embraced the ache in her quad as she slammed it upward. With each blow, the image of her mother’s pale, lifeless skin faded.

Then another memory popped into her head, that of her former husband, Kyle, attacking her in their own home, trying to kill her and frame her for the murder of his mistress. She could almost feel the sting of the fireplace poker he jammed into the left side of her abdomen.

The physical pain of that moment was only matched by the humiliation she still felt at having spent a decade involved with a sociopath and never realizing it. She was, after all, supposed to be an expert at identifying these kinds of people.

Jessie switched it up again, hoping to push the shame out of her mind with a series of elbow shots to the bag near where an assailant’s jaw would be. Her shoulders were starting to shout at her in displeasure but she continued pummeling the bag, knowing that her mind would soon be too tired to be distressed.

This was the part of herself she hadn’t expected to discover at the FBI—the physical badass. Despite the standard apprehension she felt when she arrived, she had suspected she’d do well on the academic side of things. She had just spent the previous three years in that environment, immersed in criminal psychology.

And she’d been right. The classes in law, forensic science, and terrorism had come easy. Even the behavior science seminar, where the instructors were heroes of hers and she thought she’d be nervous, came naturally. But it had been the physical fitness classes, and the self-defense training in particular, where she’d surprised herself the most.

Her instructors had shown her that at five-foot-ten and 145 pounds, she had the physical size to contend with most perpetrators if she was properly prepared. She would likely never have the hand-to-hand combat skills of a former Special Forces veteran like Kat Gentry. But she left the program confident that she could defend herself in most situations.

Jessie yanked off the gloves and moved to the treadmill. Glancing at the clock, she saw that it was approaching 8 p.m. She decided that a solid five-mile run should wipe her out enough to let her sleep dream-free tonight. That was a priority as she started back at work tomorrow where she knew all her colleagues would give her crap, expecting her to be some kind of FBI superhero now.

She set the time for forty minutes, putting pressure on herself to complete the five miles at an eight-minute-per-mile pace. Then she turned up the volume on her ear buds. As the first few seconds of Seal’s “Killer” started to play, her mind went blank, focusing only on the task in front of her. She was completely oblivious to the song’s title or any personal memories it might conjure up. There was only the beat and her legs pounding in harmony with it. It was as close to peace as Jessie Hunt could get.