Page 53 of The Perfect Crime

Then his body went slack, and his eyes closed.

Jessie vibrated with shock.It was as if, for a moment, she stepped outside of her body and looked down at herself.She was straddled over a barely conscious man, about to thrust a rolling pin handle down his throat in the hopes that it might come out the other side.

She was, until just this moment, an unthinking ball of fury, consumed with inducing as much pain as possible, unconcerned with anything else, including her own husband’s welfare.

She’d gotten so caught up in destroying the man that she’d completely forgotten that Ryan’s life hung in the balance, that if he didn’t get help soon, he wouldn’t make it.

She felt all the anger drain out of her as her shoulders slumped.The man’s garbled screams were barely audible to her as she pulled out her handcuffs, slapped one on his wrist and the other to a leg of the very butcher block he’d tied her to.

She slowly got to her feet and made her way over to her cell phone, which was resting on the breakfast table next to Ryan’s.She called HSS.Beth answered.

"I need EMTs to our address ASAP," she instructed."The killer poisoned Ryan and followed us here.I need you to get Dr.Amelia Roth here, too, with the antidote.Tell her that the killer gave Ryan a more concentrated version of the poison, so she needs to use whatever dosage will work.Ryan is unconscious and in bad shape."

"Got it," Beth said, her voice quavering ever so slightly."You're on speaker, so we all heard.Detective Valentine is calling for EMTs now, and Jamil is calling Roth.But Jessie, are you okay?"

“The suspect is incapacitated and handcuffed,” she answered.“I’m not in any imminent danger.”

“I understand,” Beth said.“But areyouokay?How are you?”

Jessie thought about it for a second.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

It was the truth.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

Jessie tried to keep quiet.

As she rolled over in the small cot that the nurses had put in Ryan’s hospital room, she did her best to avoid waking him up.Not that he’d been awake much at all over the last 48 hours.

He’d been unconscious when they first brought him in, though he was intentionally woken up periodically to check on the whether the antidote was working.It was, but that didn’t stop the pain, so after doctors were able to confirm that he was improving, they would immediately sedate him again.

The process had been going on for close to two days.Ryan had received what they hoped was his last course of both the antidote and sedation eight hours ago, at four in the morning, so he might wake up at any moment.

He’d come a long way from that first night.Dr.Roth said that he should make a full recovery.In her decidedly caustic, undiplomatic way, she’d also noted that because of the concentrated dose of the poison that he’d received, he was about fifteen minutes from being too far gone to help when she arrived.

Jessie hadn’t been able to see him in those first few hours.That was for two reasons.The first was her own medical issues.

During the course of her kitchen brawl with the man, who she’d since learned was named Nathan Prescott, she’d suffered multiple injuries, including a bruised lower back, gashes to her forehead and cheekbone, a swollen nose, bruised ribs, and an aching windpipe, along with a strained neck.

Nothing required surgery, though the lacerations on her face did necessitate stitches.After being evaluated and treated, which took a couple of hours, she thought that she'd finally be allowed to join Ryan.Instead, she was questioned by Captain Parker in conjunction with a pair of detectives from Wilshire Station.After they got the basics of what had happened, the detectives began to press her.

“I’m just trying to understand,” the shorter older detective asked, “why you didn’t just subdue the assailant by pulling your weapon on him?”

“I’m sorry,” Jessie said defensively, “but Prescott took my weapon after hitting me in the face with a shovel.After I freed myself from the zip tie and he charged at me, did you want me to go searching for the gun rather than defend myself with what I had available?”

“I guess we’re wondering,” said the taller, younger detective, “why you didn’t look for it after initially subduing Prescott.”

“What constitutes ‘initially subduing’ to you, Detective?”she challenged.“The man had poisoned my husband.He had assaulted me with a shovel and tied me up.All I had at my disposal was a rolling pin.So I used it as best I could until I was confident that he was no longer a threat.”

“I think you did that pretty effectively,” the older detective said with a smirk.“The man has fractures to his skull, eye socket, and jaw, not to mention that he had to have his tongue sewn back on.”

Jessie, who had very deliberately chosen not to think about the last moments of her fight with Prescott until now, could feel anger bubbling up inside her as she listened to him.

“Oh, would you rather I checked on the guy’s boo-boos after each of my attempts at self-defense before moving on to the next one?”she snarled.“I wasn’t aware that my survival was a secondary priority to the discomfort of the man who murdered two people and tried to kill me and Detective Hernandez.You just let me know the new department rules for self-defense when all I have is a rolling pin, and I'll be sure to follow them."

“All right,” Captain Parker had said, “why don’t we all give it a rest?Ms.Hunt, you’ve just been through a volatile situation, but maybe you could rein it in just a little.And Detectives, I know you’re just doing your job, but it sounds to me like you’re impugning the motives of the victim here.Nathan Prescott enteredMs.Hunt’shome after poisoning her husband.Heassaulted her and forced her to watch while her husband lay near death.When she got free,heattacked her.I think your tone is out of bounds.”

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