Page 46 of The Perfect People

“A while,” Jessie said. “I really wanted to ‘bowl’ you over.”

“Oh my god, stop,” Susannah pleaded. “Fine, I’ll go shower. Anything to get away from your awful jokes.”

“Good,” Jessie said as they headed toward the women’s locker room. “Meanwhile, I’ll check in with Jamil and Beth. You know how they love it when I ask if they’ve discovered anything on matters they’ve been looking into all day.”

“Good luck with that,” Susannah said, grabbing a towel and heading off.

Once she was gone, Jessie, against her better judgment, did exactly as she said she would. After pacing back and forth along the row of lockers, holding off for all of thirty seconds, she called the research office.

“Don’t get mad at me,” she said, still pacing when Jamil picked up, “because I am definitelynotcalling to see if you found any connections between Shasta Mallory and Nicole Boyce.”

“Good,” Jamil said. “Because that would be insulting, since I would have called you immediately if we had found anything.”

She was about to apologize when, to her surprise, he launched into the update anyway.

“We still haven’t, by the way,” he said. “No mutual business connections. No intersecting social circles that we can discern, no shared, previous romantic relationships. There is of course some overlap in service providers, considering that they live in the same small community. They used the same hairdresser at one point. They frequented the same bakery. They get their internet service, water, and electricity from the same companies, but so do ninety percent of the residents on the Strand.”

Jessie, who had finally stopped walking back and forth between the lockers, was about to raise an issue on that last point, but Jamil beat her to it.

“And before you ask, we checked every time they had a service call from a provider in the last year. None of the workers who serviced Mallory’s home went to Boyce’s or vice versa and none of the workers who went to either place have a criminal record for anything violent. We’ll continue to look, but as of now, we’ve got nothing.”

“Well,” Jessie replied, slumping down on a locker room bench but otherwise keeping her deflated spirits out of her voice as best she could, “it’s a good thing I didn’t call about that then.”

“Oh,” he said guiltily. “Why then?”

Amused and a little amazed that she’d managed to snow him, she moved on quickly.

“I wanted to let you know that Cyril Currie didn’t pan out,” she said. “He had an alibi for the first murder, and we think he’s going to end up having one for the second as well. But don’t get down about it. It was still a good lead. Way to think outside the box.”

Jamil’s silence told her he was indeed getting down about it.

“Hey,” she said forcefully, “this is the kind of thing we talked about in group. If you carryallthe burdens of the world on your shoulders, it’s not reasonable to fall apart when something eventually drops. You have to expect it to happen from time to time and then cut yourself some slack when it does. Either that or hand off some of your burdens.”

She was referring to the survivors’ group meeting that she and Jamil attended every Saturday, along with Hannah, a meeting they were all missing today.

“I remember,” he said. “I was just hoping I might have had the key to cracking the case this time.”

“So did I,” Jessie said. “By the way, are you going to try to make tomorrow’s meeting, since you’re missing today’s?”

“Are you?” he challenged.

“I’ll go if you do,” she told him, “assuming we get a one-hour lull in this case.”

“Deal,” Jamil said, though he still sounded a little bummed.

Beth cleared her voice softly to remind Jessie that she was still on the line too.

“What have you got, Ms. Ryerson?” she asked.

“I didn’t expect it to turn out this way, but it’s looking like I’m the one with good news to share,” she said in her best “cheer everyone up” voice.

“What’s that?” Jessie asked, happy to help change the subject and keep Jamil from going back to a negative personal place.

“Will you allow me a moment to explain?” she asked cautiously.

“By all means, take your time,” Jessie said.

“Okay, we here in the research department determined that since you joined Homicide Special Section as a criminal profiler almost two years ago, you’ve helped stop eighty-two killers. Thirty-four of them verifiably intended to kill another potential victim if they hadn’t been caught or killed. Some were serial killers who had multiple additional victims in mind. Those eleven intended victims are under police protection.”

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