Page 2 of The Perfect Prey

So if Hannah had bounced back from the dark place she was in, why was Jessie having so much trouble?It was an issue that she and Dr.Lemmon had addressed in their last session together.

“Why can’t I get past this?”she’d asked as their session drew to a close.“It can’t just be genetics that’s causing this.”

“Have you ever considered,” Dr.Lemmon suggested that day in her office, “that as bad as what Hannah has been through, it’s nothing compared to the trauma you’ve experienced?”

“What do you mean?”Jessie asked.

The tiny but accomplished woman with thick glasses and tight, little gray ringlets of hair, now 70, studied her impassively for a moment before replying.

“Hannah’s birth mother was killed when she was a baby,” she said.“She doesn’t even remember her.And after her adoptive parents were murdered by Thurman, you took her in and gave her not just a safe place to live, but a new connection to family.And even then, she struggled.”

“I know all this,” Jessie had told her impatiently.“I was there, remember?”

“Yes, you were therefor her, but who was there for you?”Lemmon asked.“When you were six, you watched your father murder your mother in an isolated cabin in the Ozark Mountains.Then he left you there—tied up next to her dead body—to freeze to death.If not for some hunters who happened upon you, you wouldn’t be here.Admittedly, you were adopted by a wonderful couple.But years later, Thurman found and killed them too, to spite you.You lived with that undeserved guilt ever since.Hell, Jessie, your own sociopathic ex-husband tried to murder you.And when he got out of prison on a technicality, he murdered your profiling mentor and my friend, Garland Moses, to get back at you, and then he nearly killed your new husband after that.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point,” Dr.Lemmon said, undeterred, “is that you’ve been through a lot in the last few years.I haven’t even gotten to the obsessed woman who kidnapped you and tried to make you her love slave in an Arizona cave.Or to Mark Haddonfield, the college student currently on trial because he resented that you didn’t make him your profiling protégé and killed multiple people you’d saved before coming after you too.”

“I’m familiar with his body of work,” Jessie retorted snarkily.

“And then there was the emergency brain surgery,” Lemmon added, undeterred.“That was just last fall.Between the loss of so many loved ones and the constant stress you’ve faced in the last couple of years, it’s no wonder that your brain is starting to short-circuit a little.”

“So what do we do about that?”Jessie asked.“Because two weeks ago, I came within a half-second of slamming the pointy end of a rolling pin through an incapacitated guy’s mouth into his spine.Only Ryan begging me to stop brought me to my senses.I’m worried that even that won’t do the trick next time.”

“You could always take your sister’s route to recovery,” Lemmon said, “and check yourself into a facility to work through your issues.”

“Hannah could do that because she was in high school at the time,” Jessie objected.“She was still able to take classes while she did all that intense therapy.And thanks to you, she was largely anonymous at the place.That’s not an option for me.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, I can’t take the time off.I don’t have two months to spare to go out to Malibu to work through my psychic pain in group therapy or even one-on-one.Plus there’s the fact that, because of all the high profile cases I’ve handled lately, I’m a minor celebrity.There’s a very real chance that someone might recognize me, and then that would get blasted all over the media.That definitely wouldn’t help my mental health.Lastly, I worry that I could lose my job.If the LAPD discovers that I’m taking time off to try to address an unquenchable bloodlust that has nearly resulted in the deaths of multiple suspects, they might have some concerns.”

“Listen,” Lemmon said calmly, “those are all fair points.But ultimately, they’re not convincing to me.First of all, you don’t have to give the department a specific reason to take some leave.Generalized trauma based on the list of terribles we’ve been discussing is more than enough.No one in the department would dispute that you’ve earned the time.And you can always go to a facility out of the area.It doesn’t have to be in California or even the U.S.You’re notthatfamous, Jessie Hunt.”

“That’s hurtful,” Jessie replied, managing to find a scrap of her sense of humor despite the situation.

“But the larger issue,” Lemmon said, pressing ahead, “is that there are lots of reasons this anger has built up.Frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t reared its head earlier.But no amount of justification for these urges will help you if you kill someone who isn’t a direct threat to you.If you stab a cuffed suspect or jam a rolling pin through the spine of a near-unconscious killer, that’s murder, andyou’llbe the one put on trial.Once that happens, you better believe that all these close calls will be brought up again in a courtroom.You’ve already got a history here.Any decent prosecutor will convict you without breaking a sweat.”

“So what do you propose then?”Jessie asked.

Lemmon sighed.

“Short of checking yourself in somewhere like Hannah did,” she said with a scowl, “we’re going to have to find foolproof tools to help you effectively cope with these feelings, before it’s too late.”

“That sounds good,” Jessie said, “so why are you frowning?”

“Because, my dearest Jessie, nothing’s foolproof.”

Those words were still rattling around in Jessie’s head as she sat on the couch beside her napping husband when her cell phone rang.She looked over and saw that the call was from Gaylene Parker, the captain at downtown L.A.’s Central Station, where Jessie’s unit was headquartered.Parker rarely called on an off day, especially when Jessie was still on leave.It had to be important.

“What’s up, Captain?”she asked quietly so as not to wake Ryan.

“Morning, Hunt,” Parker said in her standard, no-frills tone, “I know you don’t officially start back up at work until tomorrow, but I was hoping you might be able to come in a day early.”

“There’s no one else from HSS that can help you out?”Jessie asked.

HSS was Homicide Special Section, a unit that specialized in cases with high profiles or intense media scrutiny—typically involving multiple victims or serial killers.While Parker was nominally in charge of HSS, it was really Ryan’s baby.He led the unit, which was comprised of five detectives, including himself, a two-person research team, and Jessie, who was the unit’s dedicated profiler.

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