Page 48 of The Perfect Revenge
“Do you know who did this to you?”Rufus asked.
Finn blinked crazily.
“Okay, let’s try to make this easy.It seems like you’re saying that you know who stabbed you.Blink once for yes.Twice for no.”
Finn blinked once.Rufus turned to Lenore.
“Since he can’t talk or write yet, we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.Get a pen and paper.Then you’re going to go through the alphabet.When you hit the first letter in the attacker’s name, Finn is going to blink multiple times.Then you start over and follow the same procedure until we get the whole name.”
“Can’t you do that?”she asked.“I need to let the on-call doctor know that he’s awake.”
"I'll take over momentarily," Rufus assured her."But before I do anything else, I have to call my boss.We have a protocol.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Jamil Winslow wanted to be sure.
That's why he hadn't let Beth tell Jessie what his "project" was.It could just be a coincidence, and he didn't want to get someone in trouble with law enforcement by jumping the gun.But this was definitely strange.
He checked the numbers again.The search he’d begun yesterday for high school student references to Mark Haddonfield had yielded many more results than he’d expected.But then he’d had a thought.What if one of those students also used the phrase “tip of the spear” at some point?
Jamil knew that taking time away from the murder investigation to pursue this was not standard procedure.But he felt like he was on the verge of something big.Besides, he knew himself.This whole “tip of the spear” thing was like an earworm that he couldn’t get out of his head.Unless he got to the bottom of it, the thing would stay stuck there.
The idea was promising but it turned out that the phrase wasn’t just used by Mark Haddonfield’s acolyte—the one that had written a letter promising to finish what Haddonfield had started.It was more common than he would have guessed, even among the high school crowd.
There were dozens.Some, in school papers or on campus news broadcasts, were innocuously used to describe some administrative effort.Others illustrated how important a given athlete was to their team.Even more were used literally, discussing actual spears as part of a school assignment, often on Greek or Roman history.
But then there was this reference, which had made Jamil sit up straighter in his chair when it popped up minutes earlier.It was a senior quote from a Bakersfield area high school yearbook, in response to the prompt “what do you hope to accomplish in the world?”The student said:I want to be the tip of the spear in the ongoing fight for justice.
On its own, the comment was fairly innocuous, even admirable.Who would object to a student who wanted to lead in the fight for justice, however amorphous that language was?But what made it intriguing was who it came from.The student was Dallas Henry.
As Jamil knew from Hannah Dorsey's occasional mentions of him while interning in the office, Henry was currently a classmate of hers at UC Irvine, and the two of them seemed to be semi-dating.That felt like quite a coincidence.
That’s why he’d asked Beth to call Hannah and get her opinion on whether Dallas Henry might be something other than he appeared.Had he ever exhibited odd behavior?Had he ever expressed incel-like views?Jamil doubted it.Hannah wouldn’t have hung out with a guy like that.But they had to check.Normally, he would have also brought the issue to Jessie Hunt’s attention, but with her currently on the hunt for potential serial killer Sienna Tropper, he didn’t want to distract her.
“I keep getting Hannah’s voicemail,” Beth said.“It doesn’t even ring.Do you think we should call Jessie?”
Jamil reconsidered his prior position.It was one thing not to reach out to Ms.Hunt if Hannah was available to answer their questions.But if they couldn’t reach Hannah andstillkept Ms.Hunt in the dark?He pictured the profiler’s reaction.It wouldn’t be positive.
“Yes, I think we have to call her,” he said.
“I think so too,” Beth agreed, doing exactly that.
She put the call on speaker, but it turned out not to matter.It went straight to voicemail, too
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Sienna Tropper waited impatiently.
She reminded herself that Shannon Mitchell would be returning soon.The woman had left for her evening neighborhood walk 42 minutes ago, and they usually lasted about 45 minutes.She might be back any second.
Sienna stayed in the shadow of Shannon's porch, where she wouldn't be seen but could sneak up on the woman easily when the time came.This was the culmination of her plan, and she didn't want anything to go wrong.
It was hard for Sienna to believe that less than a week ago, she'd been a blubbering ball of self-pity.It was only a week ago, Friday, when she'd been at the Venice Farmers' Market and seen Shannon, one of the women who had chosen her to be a surrogate.Unfortunately, like with her three previous clients, she'd miscarried once again.That effort two and a half years ago was Sienna's last attempt at surrogacy.Once it failed, she moved on to other endeavors.
Not everything had gone perfectly since then, but of late, her life had been pretty even-keeled.That is, until Monday.It wasn’t seeing Shannon that threw her so much.It was seeing Shannon’s baby.
Luckily, the woman hadn't recognized her, so they didn't have any awkward interaction.Once Sienna went home, she did some internet sleuthing.Had Shannon tried again with another surrogate?Or had she decided to adopt instead?The answer was far worse than anything Sienna could have imagined.Shannon had given birth herself.
