Page 55 of The Perfect Crime

Jessie shared what she had only learned herself yesterday.

“Do you remember how Parker was in and out of the station earlier this week because of some event for her kid?”she asked.

“That sounds vaguely familiar,” Ryan said.

"Well, it turns out it wasn't a school play or anything like that," she explained."He'd been having panic attacks at school.At one point, he even locked himself in a bathroom stall and wouldn't come out.So she's been dealing with that, trying to get him help while still managing Central Station and HSS."

“Jeez,” he said.“I guess I should cut her a little slack.”

“It might be a nice gesture,” Jessie said.“And I think she’ll do the same thing for you.Maybe we all try to give each other a little grace.”

“I like that,” he said, before looking at her quizzically.She could sense that he knew there was something else.Sure enough, he asked, “what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.“it’s just the thing with Parker’s son, it made me re-evaluate the whole adoption thing.I mean, are we really ready to open ourselves up to that kind of vulnerability?What if the child we get is really struggling emotionally and we aren’t able to help.”

“Jessie, I think that dealing with those kinds of struggles is what’s called ‘parenting,’” he said with a smile, before his face turned grim.“But there’s a bigger issue we need to address before we can seriously embrace adopting.”

“What?”

“I saw you with that Prescott guy,” he said, “once you had him under control, you didn’t stop.You were so full of rage.Before I called out to you, you looked like you were about to jam that rolling pin down his throat.I worry that if I hadn’t yelled at you, you would have killed him.In fact, when I woke up, I was afraid to ask, because I thought you might have.”

As she listened to him, Jessie could feel her face—along with the entire back of her neck——grow hot with shame.

“I didn’t though,” she said, not conceding anything.“I cuffed him.I called for backup.He’s alive, not more than two hundred yards from this room.”

“I understand that,” Ryan said.“But you were so angry.It reminded me of Hannah before she got things under control.I mean, if I hadn’t managed to stay conscious long enough to shout at you to stop, would that man be dead right now?Would you be under investigation for murder?”

Jessie looked at him.She wanted to reassure him.But the truth was—she didn’t have an answer, at least not one he’d like.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

Mark Haddonfield could feel eyes on him.

He’d sensed them earlier, in the courthouse holding area, but pretended not to notice.Now that he was on the prison bus returning him from the courthouse to Twin Towers Correctional Facility, he couldn’t ignore it anymore.Despite the shackles that locked his arms against the seat in front of him, he twisted his head around to look at the person in the seat behind him.She stared back at him.There was a twinkle in Ash Pierce’s eyes.

“What?”he demanded.

“It’s just that we’ve been on this bus together multiple times and I thought that I should maybe introduce myself.My name is Ash.”

“I know who you are,” he said guardedly.

“And I know who you are,” she replied warmly.“Mark Haddonfield: the man responsible for a string of murders, all of them people originally saved by Jessie Hunt.I have to say, you really taught her a lesson.The way she treated you, you were entitled to do a hell of a lot more than that.”

“Ididdo more than that,” he said proudly.“Even from behind bars, I managed to have her best friend’s fiancé gunned down.I almost got her psychiatrist taken out too.”

“And yet, curiously, it seems like those attacks have waned of late,” Pierce said, tilting her head in mock intrigue.“I have to wonder why that is.”

He shrugged as much as his shackles would allow.

“I couldn’t tell you,” he replied, which was technically true.The deal—in which he called off his acolytes from pursuing Jessie Hunt’s loved ones in exchange for getting to work cases with her—was confidential.He wasn’t supposed to mention it to anyone, certainly not the woman who had tried to kill both Jessie’s sister and her best friend.

“Well,” she said slowly, almost reluctantly, “the old me, before the amnesia, would have probably congratulated you on snuffing out Kat Gentry’s fiancé.I supposedly wanted to kill her myself, and I suspect that eliminating her future husband probably caused her great pain.But that was the old me.The new me is just trying to get by as best I can.”

Mark had heard about Pierce’s memory loss.He didn’t know if it was legitimate or not, but he knew that she was using it as part of her defense against the charges she faced.He wished the idea had occurred to him.

“I wish you well with that,” he said cautiously.He sensed that despite being shackled on a prison bus with four armed guards nearby, she wasn’t someone to be trifled with, not even by someone with his track record.

"Thank you, Mark," she said."May I call you Mark?"

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