Page 22 of The Perfect People

“Richard Vance, you may not end up being charged with murder but youarestill under arrest for assaulting a law enforcement officer, two of them actually,” she said. “Jessie, you want to call Breem and ask him to have some of his people take Richie Boy here in?”

As Jessie pulled out her cell phone, Susannah turned her attention to Ilana Owens, who still looked stunned at the turn of events.

“I’m sorry to throw a wrench in your afternoon, Mrs. Owens,” she said, “but I think that all things considered, this day is a net plus for you. You no longer have to be the sugar mama for a guy who burns through your money, leaves you physically bruised, and would have moved on to another divorcee when you got wise to him. Plus, now you can spin the story to say that you helped put an end to his reign of douchebaggery. The truth will be our little secret.”

“Thanks?” the woman said, still more dazed than appreciative.

“Don’t mention it,” Susannah said, shoving Richie Boy off the patio and onto the Strand to wait for the MBPD to show up.

“What happened to toning down the ‘bull in the china shop’ thing?” Jessie asked as she closed the gate behind them. “It kind of got away from you there at the end.”

“What can I say?” Susannah replied with a shrug. “I’m a work in progress.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He checked his reflection in the Santa Monica Beach restroom mirror.

It was almost a waste of time. The mirrors were so old and dull that he couldn’t identify any of his features in detail. Instead of curly blond hair, what he saw was just a blondish mass atop his extremely tall head. His wire-framed glasses were barely discernable on his face. On the other hand, his gangly frame was also blurred by the mirror to give him an unexpectedly imposing appearance. He liked that.

Mark Haddonfield had been working out a lot in recent months and it had paid off in terms of pure strength. It just hadn’t made him look any more muscular. But that was okay. His goal wasn’t to be a male model. It was to have the functional strength necessary to complete the assignments he’d given himself. And he did have that.

Mark stepped out of the restroom and reestablished his line of sight with the group. They were still where they’d been when he’d left them a minute ago, standing on the Santa Monica Pier, looking out toward the South Bay of Los Angeles, which included Palos Verdes, as well as the beach communities of Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Manhattan Beach, where Mark’s nemesis, Jessie Hunt, was currently hard at work.

As he fell in behind a group of German tourists, keeping an eye on the gang that mattered to him, he wondered how Jessie’s case was going. He knew it had something to do with a music manager who’d been killed at her beachfront home while hosting some huge party last night. Other than that, details were scarce.

Frankly, he was surprised, and mildly offended, that she would accept what sounded like a run of the mill murder case when she hadn’t made any progress in stopping his handiwork. How she could focus on anything other than the murders of multiple people who had previously nearly been the victims of killers she’d already caught was beyond him.

He’d slaughtered four people over the last few months, each of them in the same style as the original killer who almost took them out, each time without leaving any clues other than the ones he intended for her to find. That she could spend any waking seconds on something other than catching him was another insult in the long list of grievances he had against the woman he once viewed as an inspiration.

It was almost laughable now to think that he’d once held her in such high regard. He’d originally been a fanboy, following her career religiously. He even transferred from Stanford to UCLA last fall when he learned that she’d be teaching a seminar in criminal profiling there.

But he couldn’t get into the class, first because of bureaucratic crap, and then because Jessie, without warning, went back to working at HSS full-time. She screwed him over, along with his dreams of becoming her protégé.

As a result of her equivocation and selfishness, he lost his passionate drive and his grades suffered. Without anything to compel him to excel, he couldn’t make friends at this new school in this huge, impersonal city.

And everywhere he went, he saw Jessie Hunt’s face plastered on screens, staring back at him spitefully, telling him he wasn’t good enough. It was like she was challenging him to prove her wrong, to prove that he could steal the headlines from her. But how could he compete with her when she was constantly in the limelight?

First, she was kidnapped by some wacko on her wedding night. Then she got rescued after the LAPD, FBI, and Sheriff’s Department teamed up to find her. After that, she saved hundreds of people from being poisoned in a movie theater. Then she caught some pervert using drones to target young women. Next, she solved the murder of some pharma billionaire. No matter where he went, there she was, taunting him.

But somewhere in the middle of all that, despite the odds being against him, Mark soldiered on, refusing to be beaten down by her constant attempts to make him feel “less than.”

Somehow, he pulled himself out of his rut, and her silent, judging eyes, and managed to develop The Strategy, which he’d been using for these last few months. And it seemed to be working. He certainly knew he had her attention and that of the rest of HSS. He also knew that he had prospective future victims running scared. LAPD had put protective units on the homes of potential victims who’d survived encounters with past serial killers. They thought they had it covered.

But he’d blown that up when he killed Melissa Ferro. After all, her husband, Richard, wasn’t a serial killer. He was just an evil scumbag who murdered his pregnant mistress when she threatened to reveal their affair and who then tried to kill his wife when she became a threat. If he was the new model for the Clone Killer (as Mark had gleefully discovered they were referring to him at HSS) then all bets were off.

There was simply no way to protect that many potential victims. The department would spread itself thin and wear itself out futilely attempting to play whack-a-mole when they had no idea what the mole looked like or where it might pop up. It was delicious. And considering that the next victim on his list would be struck down imminently and hit closer to Jessie than she could ever imagine, all hell was about to break loose.

Mark stayed behind the German tourists as he walked along the far side of the pier, making sure to stay out of the sight line of the gang. As an extra precaution, he put on a baseball cap and sunglasses. He needed to do a better job of blending in.

It wasn’t lost on him that Hannah Dorsey had noticed him by the ice cream stand earlier that afternoon. He should have known better. She was Jessie Hunt’s half-sister, after all. Of course she would have some of the same skills of perception as her sibling.

That was part of why he was here, in fact. He already knew everything there was to know about Jessie. He was a scholar on the subject. Hell, he could teach his own seminar on her. And he was extremely knowledgeable about Captain Ryan Hernandez as well. The public records on Jessie’s husband, former partner, and current boss were copious.

But information on Hannah was harder to come by, partly because until very recently she had been a minor. It was the one real gap in his data set on Jessie. And he needed that data if he was going to fully complete The Strategy. It was all very straightforward.

If he was going to systematically destroy the woman who had ruined him, he first had to kill the people she thought she’d saved. That would terrify those potential remaining victims, while staining her reputation with the citizens of the city that currently adored her. Instead of being the Angel of the City of Angels, she would be the city’s Angel of Death.

But he couldn’t be confident that would break her. There was a missing piece to the puzzle, and he was pretty sure he was staring at her right now. He needed to understand just how important Hannah Dorsey was to Jessie Hunt and just how devastating it would be to lose her. There was research to be done.

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