The Perfect Impression by Blake Pierce
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Night Hunter sat patiently in his car.
He’d fasted since last night so he wouldn’t have to leave his post to go to the bathroom. And he had water bottles if things got dire. He didn’t love this part of it. But it was essential to know what he was dealing with. And that required patience, something he had in spades.
It had taken him a while to find the house. There were layers of paperwork designed to hide it, and they did so effectively. It didn’t surprise him. Garland Moses was nothing if not thorough. He knew that from painful, personal experience.
The last time he saw the man, Moses was an FBI profiler on the verge of retirement. The Night Hunter often wondered what might have happened if Moses had left the bureau to retire out west just a little earlier, before taking on his case. He suspected the last two decades would have been much different.
With no one skilled enough to stop him, he could have continued his adventures up and down the eastern seaboard without interference. By now he might have taken close to a thousand targets, rather than the paltry 267 he’d tallied to date.
And if he was really honest with himself, that latter number was inflated. A whopping 186 of them came after “The Skirmish,” as he liked to call it, with Moses. Only eighty-one of the subjects were truly worthy, ones on which he was able to use his signature calling card, a machete.
Almost all the others came without fanfare, in the dark years, when his body was suffering from the aftereffects of The Skirmish. His two-story fall—really a desperate jump—from Moses’s condo had left him with both a broken leg and hip on one side, a dislocated shoulder and crushed ankle on the other, as well as facial fractures and several broken ribs. And that didn’t include the gashes Moses had inflicted on him with his own blade. He still had a long scar that ran horizontally across his forehead, a final parting gift from the profiler. He had to literally drag himself away before the police arrived on the scene and barely managed to sneak into the sewers mere seconds before the first cop car pulled up.
In the years afterward, not wanting to draw more attention, and physically unable to escape if he was ever found, he’d been reduced to fulfilling his cravings by acting them out on the homeless and the addicted, sacrifices who were less likely to put up a struggle when the frail-looking older gentleman he now was suddenly revealed his true intentions.
But even then he had to mask his work so that it couldn’t be connected to his past exploits; never using the same method, rarely in the same city, often going many months between completing his work. Sometimes he felt like a vampire reduced to feeding on injured wild animals so as not to draw the attention of the townsfolk. It was demeaning.
But that had all changed last summer, when he saw the report on the news that Garland Moses, now a consultant for the LAPD, had been murdered. When he did the research, he uncovered a delicious discovery. His longtime nemesis’s death came at the hands of Garland’s own protégé’s ex-husband, a fellow who seemed like a real piece of work in his own right.
The axis of the whole world tilted that day. The one man who had been his equal, who had kept him in the shadow for twenty years, was dead. The Night Hunter had a new lease on life. And just as exciting, he had a potential new adversary. He had to know if Moses’s golden child, this woman named Jessie Hunt, was as good as her mentor. So he’d come west to find out, to test her.
So far he’d found her wanting. She was talented, to be sure. She had thwarted Bolton Crutchfield, an impressive student of slaughter himself. She caught Andrea Robinson, who seemed to be just like any other wealthy socialite, but was actually a sneakily brutal murderess, one whose obvious potential was going unfulfilled while she languished in a mental hospital. Most impressively of all, Hunt had bested her own father, the legendary Ozarks Executioner, whom the Night Hunter had both admired and envied.
But to his dismay upon arriving in Los Angeles, he found that she’d left the business, choosing instead to teach others about the minds of serial killers rather than try to catch them herself. Yes, she occasionally consulted on cases to help her old colleagues. But she seemed to have been scarred by the loss of Moses, the near-death of her detective boyfriend, and the close call that she and her young charge, a half-sister named Hannah, had barely survived. Some might say she’d gone soft. But he knew that wasn’t the case. She was just hibernating. He knew the feeling.
He’d tried to help her find her way again, first with the elimination of Jared Hartung last month, and more recently by removing Jenavieve Holt. But Hunt had been oblivious, perhaps because she was no longer in the thick of it, more likely because of the unfortunate van accident that prevented Hartung’s body from being properly catalogued.
Still, he had hoped that the creativity of his work, combined with the unusual coincidence that both victims shared her initials, “J.H.,” would have drawn her attention. But they hadn’t. Now he would have to up the ante.
That’s why he was sitting in a car down the block from her house now, the one he’d only found after visiting her campus, sitting in on one of her profiling seminars, and eventually following her home. Without that stroke of luck, he might still be searching for her home, as her ability to hide her ownership of it was as prodigious as her mentor’s had been.
He’d arrived before dawn, as he had for the last several days. He watched as her boyfriend, the hobbled former detective, Hernandez, left early this morning, likely off to the police station in a vain attempt to recapture his former glory. The Night Hunter had initially considered using him. But the man was such a pathetic shell that it hardly seemed like a challenge.
With him gone, that left only Hunt and her sister, Hannah, in the house. Neither had so much as poked a head out yet today. Part of him had wanted to enter the home one day while everyone was out, to explore; to prepare. But knowing Garland Moses, the modest-looking home would have an array of security measures he was unequipped to navigate.
He was an expert at taking life. But at seventy-five, the Night Hunter had to admit that his mastery of modern technology was a weakness. The most certain way to enter this house was to be invited in. He chuckled silently to himself. Apparently he was like a vampire in more ways than one.
He settled back into the car seat, trying to get comfortable despite the joints that never stopped aching. He had time. Eventually, Ms. Hunt would pick up on the clues. It was only then that he’d introduce himself to her sister, Hannah, as merely a feeble old man in need of help from a youthful lass. Maybe he’d even use his real name, Walter, which he hadn’t spoken out loud this century. It might be nice to open up to her before he opened her up.
A car pulled into the driveway. He didn’t recognize it but from the confidence with which the driver marched to the front door, he knew she must be well-acquainted with the residents. He made a note of her and took out his binoculars to get a better look.
The woman was dressed casually in jeans and a light sweater that suggested she wasn’t bothered by the morning chill in the air. Her gray eyes were alert. She was about five foot seven and well-built. He estimated that she weighed about 140 pounds, most of it muscle.
The woman was nice-looking despite a long, vertical scar under her left eye and pockmarks on her face and neck that stood out against her tan skin. Some might mistake them for acne remnants. But the Night Hunter knew better. They were burn marks, the kind one got from an IED explosion. This woman had been a soldier once. He got the sense that she could still take care of herself, and if need be, others.
She paused at the door and turned around to the street, her eyes darting quickly about. She seemed to sense something was off. Though he knew he was too far away to be seen, the Night Hunter sank down in his seat.
When she turned back around, he glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. Other than the angry horizontal scar that cut almost four inches across his forehead, he looked like any other frail elderly man. Still, it was best not to push it. He started the car and pulled out. There was no need to take unnecessary risks. He was a patient man.