Page 5 of The Perfect Obsession
CHAPTER FOUR
Hannah Dorsey was bouncing off the walls.
The apartment was nice, but it wasn’t designed for two people, and the tight quarters were taking their toll.Of course, she’d never say that to Kat, who had let her stay here for the last month.
Hannah took her coffee and the notes for Kat’s ongoing cases and walked out to the balcony of the 11th-floor unit, where she could see much of downtown.She put the notes down, settled into a chair, and allowed herself a moment to appreciate the last vestiges of cool air before the day gave in to the August heat.
Ever since the two incidents last month, which occurred on the same day, this was the closest Hannah had gotten to getting outside and enjoying the summer.She desperately wanted to simply go for a walk on the street below, but wasn’t sure if she was emotionally ready for it yet.She intended to find out momentarily.
As she took a sip of coffee, she tried to tell herself that she was safe, at least for now.Dallas Henry, her UC Irvine classmate and semi-crush—who turned out to secretly be a men’s rights zealot and fan of a serial killer who had tried to murder her sister?—was in jail awaiting trial.He was charged with, among other things, attempted murder for taking Hannah out on a camping trip to the Santa Monica Mountains, where he intended to first torture and then kill her.
She’d managed to evade him until help arrived, but ended up badly spraining her ankle in the process, leaving her in a walking boot that limited her mobility and made her vulnerable to the other threat she learned she was facing: Ash Pierce.
According to Kat, the escaped hitwoman who had tried to kill Hannah on multiple occasions, had been scoping out Jessie’s home, clearly intent on retribution.The idea of being in that house, even with all the security measures that Jessie had added, was too much.
So they’d come up with a plan.Hannah would stay with Kat while she recovered.The private eye was also on Pierce’s hit list and had secretly moved apartments and offices, listing them under fake names that Pierce hopefully wouldn’t uncover.
The tradeoff for being able to sleep at night was that she did that, sleeping on a pull-out couch in Kat’s modest living room and using a bookshelf as her storage space.Hannah considered it a small price to pay.The problem was that even after she got out of the walking boot and was able to maneuver around close to normally, she didn’t feel confident doing so.
Because Ash Pierce had no idea where Kat lived now, Hannah had no problem going to the apartment building’s basement gym or to the lobby to pick up meals from food delivery services.But actually stepping outside of the complex?That was daunting.
Hannah feared that she was bordering on becoming agoraphobic, and she didn’t like how it was impacting her life.Her anxiety had forced her to leave her internship with HSS’s research department because it required her to be in the office to review sensitive case material.What would happen when she returned for her sophomore year at UC Irvine in less than a month?Was she supposed to scurry around like a mouse on a campus with 37,000 students?
Those apprehensions were why she was changing things up in a few hours.For the last few weeks, she’d been focused on two tasks.Some of her time was spent trying to track down Ash Pierce’s location after she’d visited Jessie’s house.But the hitwoman had gone strangely, scarily silent over the last month.No sightings of her on freeway cameras.No security footage of her at cheap, scuzzy motels.It was like she had just disappeared, which was almost more troubling than her being around the corner.
Her second task this last month was less personally daunting.She’d been helping Kat out with a few of her cases, doing background research on clients and the folks Kat was investigating.That was what the notes on the table were about.But a little later today, she’d be putting the notes aside and going into the field.
Unless she chickened out, she’d be joining Kat for an in-person meeting with a potential client.In order not to freak out, she reminded herself that she’d be in a location that Pierce had no knowledge of and that Kat Gentry, a former Army Ranger, would be with her the whole time.If that meeting went without incident, maybe she could move on to her next goal: visiting Finn.
Finn Anderton was a friend from school who had discovered that Dallas Henry wasn’t what he claimed to be.But when he confronted the guy one night, Dallas stabbed him multiple times, leaving him for dead in a parking lot.Finn had survived, though he was in a coma for ten weeks.
He eventually woke up and named his attacker.Since then, he’d been living at home until he was strong enough to function on his own.Hannah had wanted to visit him, but that would have meant driving there, getting out of the car, and walking into the house, all of which seemed impossible until very recently.
Of course, she could have visited him before that, if only she’d known where to find him.When Finn was unconscious after the attack, he was kept in a safe house rather than the hospital so that his attacker couldn’t finish the job.It turned out that Jessie had orchestrated the move and kept it secret from almost everyone.That included Hannah, whom she feared might try to visit him and reveal his location.
Even though she now understood that her sister’s intentions were good, there was still a little residual resentment that Jessie thought she couldn’t be trusted.The two of them had mostly moved on.Mostly.
Hannah glanced at the time.The meeting with the client, an old army friend of Kat’s, was soon, and she still needed to shower and get dressed.So she put the notes aside, got up, and headed back inside.
She walked into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror.On the surface, she looked the same as she always had.Her blonde hair was a little longer than usual, but looked okay. Her green eyes still flashed.When she stood straight, she was nearly as tall as her sister, who was five feet ten in bare feet.She was naturally skinny, but all her recent rehab workouts had given her a bit of muscle definition she didn’t have before.
But under that surface, things weren’t as great.Her hair was longer because she wouldn’t go anywhere to get it cut.There were shadows under those green eyes.And her new muscles were the result of constant gym sessions intended to keep her from going stir-crazy while she was stuck in one building for four weeks.
Hannah knew she was in a bad place.And she knew she had to attend the client meeting to get out of that place.Now it was a matter of actually doing it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jessie flipped through the papers, trying to keep her frustration in check.
She and Ryan were back at Central Station, in the HSS research department, where they’d been poring over reports and databases for several hours now.Unfortunately, their efforts had so far yielded little of use.
She looked over at the two researchers, who were hard at work, and tried to remember that they were doing their best.If those two hadn’t come up with anything helpful yet, it wasn’t for a lack of effort.Jamil Winslow and Beth Ryerson were as good as it got.
Jamil, 25, who ran the research department, was brilliant—skilled at filtering through massive databases, sorting surveillance video into manageable buckets, or making complex financial records understandable, all seemingly without even trying.What required actual effort for him was the social side of human interaction.His proficiency on that front didn’t always match his intellectual abilities.
Beth, also 25, was as adept with people as Jamil was with numbers.Her perpetually chill, friendly vibe was the complete inverse of Jamil’s jittery intensity.And while she was not a human supercomputer like him, she had an incredibly sharp mind that people tended to underestimate because she was an attractive, six-foot-plus former college volleyball star.But so far, their collective talents hadn’t led to any breakthroughs.
“Let’s review what we know,” Jessie said to Ryan and the researchers.“Caroline Sheffield was a vice-president of film marketing at Sovereign Studios.She got divorced last year from Jordan Sheffield, aka Jordy, a voiceover actor.She was on the boards of several charities and was a fundraiser for both her university, Stanford, and her high school, an exclusive boarding school called Thornfield Academy.”
