Блейк Пирс - The Perfect House

“Nah, just the two of us. I’m thinking a candlelit dinner. But somewhere where we can put a bucket beside the table in case she has to puke.”

“You really are a romantic, Pa.”

“I try. How are things with you? I’m assuming you passed the FBI training.”

“Why do you assume that?”

“Because you knew I’d ask you about it and you wouldn’t have called if you had to deliver bad news.”

Jessie had to hand it to him. For an old dog, he was still pretty sharp.

“I passed,” she assured him. “I’m back in L.A. now. I start work again tomorrow and I’m…out running errands.”

She didn’t want to worry him with her actual current destination.

“That sounds ominous. Why do I get the feeling you’re not out shopping for a loaf of bread?”

“I didn’t mean for it to sound like that. I guess I’m just wiped out from all the travel. I’m actually almost here,” she lied. “Should I call back tonight or wait until tomorrow? I don’t want to mess with your fancy, puke bucket dinner.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” he advised.

“Okay. Say hi to Ma. I love you.”

“Love you too,” he said, hanging up.

Jessie tried to focus on the road. The traffic was getting worse and the drive to the NRD facility, which took about forty-five minutes, still had a half hour left.

NRD, short for Non-Rehabilitative Division, was a special stand-alone unit affiliated with the Department State Hospital–Metropolitan in Norwalk. The main hospital was home to a wide array of mentally disordered perpetrators deemed unfit to serve time in a conventional prison.

But the NRD annex, unknown to the public and even to most law enforcement and mental health personnel, served a more clandestine role. It was designed to house a maximum of ten felons off the grid. Right now there were only five people being held there, all men, all serial rapists or killers. One of them was Bolton Crutchfield.

Jessie’s mind wandered to the most recent time she’d been there to see him. It was her last visit before she left for the National Academy, though she hadn’t told him that. Jessie had been visiting Crutchfield regularly ever since last fall, when she’d gotten permission to interview him as part of her master’s practicum. According to the staff there, he almost never consented to talk to doctors or researchers. But for reasons that didn’t become clear to her until later, he’d agreed to meet with her.

Over the next few weeks they came to a kind of agreement. He would discuss the particulars of his crimes, including methods and motives, if she shared some details of her own life. It seemed like a fair trade initially. After all, her goal was to become a criminal profiler specializing in serial killers. Having one willing to discuss the details of what he’d done could prove invaluable.

And there turned out to be an added bonus. Crutchfield had a Sherlock Holmesian ability to deduce information, even when locked in a cell in a mental hospital. He could discern details about Jessie’s life at that moment just by looking at her.

He’d used that skill, along with case information she shared, to give her clues to several crimes, including the murder of a wealthy Hancock Park philanthropist. He’d also tipped her off that her own husband might not be as trustworthy as he seemed.

Unfortunately for Jessie, his skills at deduction also worked against her. The reason she’d wanted to meet with Crutchfield in the first place was because she’d noticed that he’d modeled his murders after those of her father, legendary, never-caught serial killer Xander Thurman. But Thurman committed his crimes in rural Missouri over two decades earlier. It seemed like a random, obscure choice for a Southern California–based killer.

But it turned out that Bolton was a big fan. And once Jessie started by asking him about his interest in those old murders, it didn’t take him long to piece things together and determine that the young woman in front of him was personally connected to Thurman. Eventually he admitted that he knew she was his daughter. And he revealed one more tidbit—he’d met with her dad two years earlier.

With glee in his voice, he’d informed her that her father had entered the facility under the guise of a doctor and managed to have an extended conversation with the prisoner. Apparently he was looking for his daughter, whose name had been changed and who had been put in the Witness Protection Program after he killed her mother. He suspected that she might one day visit Crutchfield because their crimes were so similar. Thurman wanted Crutchfield to let him know if she ever showed up and give him her new name and location.

From that moment on, their relationship had an inequality that made her incredibly uncomfortable. Crutchfield still gave her information about his crimes and hints about others. But they both knew that he held all the cards.

He knew her new name. He knew what she looked like. He knew the city she lived in. At one point she discovered he even knew she’d been living at her friend Lacy’s place and where that was. And apparently, despite being incarcerated in a supposedly secret facility, he had the capability of giving her father all those details.

Jessie was pretty sure that was at least part of the reason that Lacy, an aspiring fashion designer, had taken a six-month gig working in Milan. It was a great opportunity but it was also half a world away from Jessie’s dangerous life.

As Jessie pulled off the freeway, only minutes from reaching NRD, she recalled how Crutchfield had finally pulled the trigger on the unspoken threat that had always hung over their meetings.

Maybe it was because he sensed she was leaving for several months. Maybe it was just out of spite. But the last time she’d looked through the glass into his devious eyes, he’d dropped a bombshell on her.

“I’ll be having a little chat with your father,” he’d told her in his courtly Southern accent. “I won’t spoil things by saying when. But it’s going to be lovely, I’m quite certain.”

She had barely managed to choke out the word “How?”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that, Miss Jessie,” he’d said soothingly. “Just know that when we do talk, I’ll be sure to give him your regards.”

As she pulled onto the hospital property, she asked herself the same question that had been eating at her ever since, the one she could only put out of her head when she was intently focused on other work: had he really done it? While she was off learning how to catch people like him and her dad, had the two of them really met a second time, despite all the security precautions designed to prevent just that sort of thing?

She had a feeling that mystery was about to be solved.

Entering the NRD unit was just as she’d remembered. After getting authorization to enter the enclosed hospital campus through a guard gate, she drove behind the main building to a second, smaller, nondescript one in the back.

It was a bland concrete and steel one-story structure in the middle of an unpaved parking lot. Only the roof was visible behind a large, green-meshed barbed-wire metal fence that surrounded the whole place.

She passed through a second guard gate to access NRD. After parking, she walked toward the main entrance, pretending to ignore the multiple security cameras that followed her every step. When she got to the exterior door, she waited to be buzzed in. Unlike the first time she’d come, she was now recognized by the staff and admitted on sight.

But that was only for the outer door. After passing through a small courtyard, she reached the main entrance to the facility, which had thick, bulletproof glass doors. She swiped her entry card, which made the panel light turn green. Then the security officer behind the desk inside, who could see the color change as well, buzzed her in, completing the entry process.