The Perfect Impression by Blake Pierce
CHAPTER ONE
Jessie Hunt knew something was off the second she woke up.
It took a moment to figure out what it was. Glancing over at her clock, she saw that it was 11:48 p.m. She blinked a few times and then it hit her. Normally she could feel the heat radiating off the man who slept beside her each night. But the bed was cooler than usual and it felt somehow lighter.
She reached out her hand delicately in the dark just in case she was wrong. But sure enough, Ryan wasn’t there. She grabbed her phone to search the room but he was nowhere to be found. She glanced over toward the bathroom. There was no sliver of light sneaking through underneath the door.
Trying to stay calm, she got up and put on her robe. She briefly considered taking her gun out of the bedside drawer but chose against it. There were a dozen credible reasons Ryan might not be in bed and there was no need to jump to conclusions. But after everything they’d been through, she couldn’t blame herself for the instinct. It’s not like serial killers hadn’t leapt out of the shadows in the past.
She slid her feet into her slippers and shuffled out of the room, armed only with her phone and a body full of adrenaline. At the last second, her apprehension got the better of her and she stepped back into the bedroom to grab one of Ryan’s canes.
As she made her way down the hall, holding the cane above her shoulder like a baseball bat, she reminded herself that her boyfriend might just be restless. Even though it had been six months since he was stabbed, and despite how well his rehabilitation was going, sometimes he was still overcome by anxiety that could only be subdued by middle-of-the night pacing.
She saw a dim light coming from the breakfast room and moved toward it as quietly as possible. Peeking around the corner, she saw Ryan hunched over the breakfast table, poring through a pile of papers. He looked lost in thought.
Sighing in relief, she put the cane down, resting it against the wall, out of sight. Then she coughed quietly so as not to startle him as she stepped into the room. He looked up, seeming to take a moment to connect the sound to the person in front of him.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she whispered back, not wanting to wake her sister, Hannah, who was hopefully fast asleep in her room. “What’s up?”
“I think I may have a breakthrough in the case,” he said excitedly.
Jessie walked over and sat down across from him at the table. It had only been a month since he’d started consulting for the LAPD, so she could understand his enthusiasm at being back in the mix. But she was worried about the effect of expending so much energy on a case instead of rehab. Of course, she couldn’t say that without sounding unsupportive, so she didn’t.
“What did you find?” she asked.
He smiled. Clearly, he’d hoped she would ask.
“You know the case I was looking into, the one with the girl who was carved up?” he asked.
Jessie nodded. He hadn’t mentioned any details beyond that to her, but she did know this was the case he hoped might justify involvement by Homicide Special Section. HSS was a specialized LAPD unit dedicated to solving cases that had high profiles or intense media scrutiny, often involving multiple victims or serial killers.
Ryan had led the unit before the stabbing attack that had put him in a coma for weeks and left him incapacitated for months after that. Now Captain Roy Decker, his boss and the man in charge of HSS, had tasked Ryan with finding cases that fit the profile of the unit, which was in danger of being shut down.
“You mentioned the case vaguely,” she said with the slightest hint of an edge. “But that’s about all I know. You’ve been keeping all the details close to the vest.”
He picked up on her tone.
“I didn’t tell you much because I knew that if I did, you’d get as obsessed as me,” he said apologetically, before tweaking her. “I didn’t want to drag you down from your ivory tower.”
That was a reference to Jessie’s work as an instructor at UCLA, where she’d been teaching criminal profiling for a semester now. Other than an occasional consulting gig of her own for the department, she’d spent the last six months leading a fairly stable, obsession-free lifestyle. Of course, one of those consulting gigs was just four weeks ago.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you all the way down there among the rabble,” she teased back. “Do you want to give me a hard time or do you want to tell me what you’re so clearly dying to share?”
He smiled at her taunt. Jessie knew he loved it when she gave him crap and she loved to see the broad grin on his face. After worrying that he might not survive at all, and then watching him endure multiple painful, often disheartening months of trying to relearn basic functions like tying his shoes and holding a fork, he was finally starting to look more like his old self again.
Once a rock-hard, six-foot, 200-pound specimen, he’d lost over a quarter of his body weight and most of his strength after the attack. Now he was back up near 180 pounds. His color had returned, as had his easy, warm smile. He’d had his black hair cut short again and his kind, brown eyes seemed more alert and focused every day. He was almost back to resembling the detective she’d been so taken with when he came to speak at her class while she was working on her master’s. The simple sight of him reviewing paperwork on a pending case, doing something she feared he might never be able again, warmed her heart.
“I want to tell you,” he admitted.
“Then go ahead,” she said.
“I found another, older case that makes me think there might be a pattern.”
“Back up,” she said. “You’ve been so cagey that I don’t have enough details about the first case to know what might constitute a pattern.”
“Right,” he said, remembering how little he’d told her. “So the original case that caught my eye was from last month and involved a twenty-six-year-old female named Jenavieve Holt. She had portions of her skin sliced off in what appeared to be a methodical manner. Also, it looks like she was awake the whole time.”
As he spoke, something in the back of Jessie’s brain lit up, like a dim bulb slowly flickering to life. She said nothing as he continued.
“It seemed very meticulous,” Ryan said, “as if the killer had planned the thing well in advance and taken his time. Even as a stand-alone murder, it was troubling. But it felt like it was conducted with such confidence and patience that I doubted it was the first time the killer had done something like this.”
“Good instinct,” Jessie said, waiting to see where he would go with this.
“So I started looking through other recent cases and found one that had fallen through the cracks. About four months ago, a young guy named Hartung was found in a similar situation—skin cut off in long pieces, also seemingly while he was still awake.”
“Why did it fall through the cracks?” Jessie asked.
“Because on the way to the morgue, the driver got in an accident and the van caught on fire. By the time they got Hartung’s body, it was burned to a crisp. The autopsy was useless. Worse, the accident obscured the horror of the killing. There was an internal investigation. It turned out the driver had been drinking. That whole mess took precedence and the file got buried under more pressing ones, so the final medical examiner’s report, complete with the original crime scene photos, wasn’t filed until the day before yesterday. I got it a few hours ago. And it looks just like the Holt case. In both instances, it appears that the killer used something like an X-Acto knife.”
The dim bulb of familiarity in Jessie’s head suddenly started blazing. She heard herself gasp slightly. Ryan looked up at her.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I have to show you something,” she said, getting up and leading him down the hall to her study.
It hadn’t always been hers. Neither had the house. This used to be the home of Garland Moses, the most celebrated criminal profiler on the West Coast for over a quarter century and Jessie’s personal mentor.
He had willed the house to her upon his death, which occurred at the hands of her ex-husband, Kyle Voss. Kyle was also responsible for stabbing Ryan in the chest. Ryan, along with Jessie and Hannah, had barely survived that encounter. Kyle did not.
They arrived at the door to the study and Jessie used the handprint verification pad to unlock it. Once inside, Jessie moved over to the safe hidden in the wall behind the large, framed print of the Bogart movie The Big Sleep. She pulled out a thick file and dropped it on the desk between them.
Merely looking at it made her uneasy. Suddenly whatever remaining sleepiness she’d felt was gone. That file held a record of evil even she had rarely seen and just touching it made her want to shower.
“This material was here when I moved in,” she said. “It’s Garland’s. You won’t be shocked to learn that he held onto a few files for cases he was never able to solve. Some are from his days as an FBI profiler. A few are from his time consulting for LAPD after he was technically retired. Most are just a few pages long, synopses really; except for this one.”
“What is it?”
“You remember the Night Hunter, right?” she asked.
“Sure,” Ryan replied. “You don’t have to be a profiler to know that case—notorious serial killer who wreaked havoc along the eastern seaboard for years in the 1980s and ’90s.”
“Correct. And you know that Garland spent his last years at the Bureau hunting for the guy, found him in fact.”
“That’s where he got all those scars,” Ryan recalled, clearly thinking of Garland’s dead, vulnerable body on a medical table at the morgue after his death. He’d been covered in them.
“Yes,” Jessie confirmed. “He eventually caught up to the Night Hunter. Unfortunately, the killer got the upper hand on him. He surprised him in his own condo, capturing and torturing Garland for two days, almost killing him before he was able to free himself and use the killer’s own machete against him before the man escaped into the night. Garland gave him several deep gashes on his limbs and sliced a cut horizontally along the guy’s entire forehead. He always thought one of the reasons the Night Hunter bailed that night was that he was half-blinded by the blood pouring into his eyes.”
“I thought that the authorities said that he likely died of his injuries in their fight,” Ryan said.
“They did,” Jessie replied, “but if this file is any indication, Garland wasn’t so sure.”
“Okay,” Ryan said slowly. “But where are you going with this? Even if he had survived his fight with Garland, wouldn’t he be in his seventies by now? And why would he suddenly start killing again? Besides, I thought the Night Hunter was more of the dismembering type, what with the machete and all. This doesn’t seem like his M.O.”
“All excellent points,” Jessie said as she rifled through the file and pulled out a sheet of paper near the end. “And normally I wouldn’t have even thought to connect them, except for this.”
She tossed him the page and waited while he read it, watching his eyes grow wider the further along he got. When he was done, he looked up.
“Why have I never heard about this before?” he asked.
“Because it could never be verified so it didn’t go in the final report,” she told him.
According to the notes, after the clash with the Night Hunter, Garland found an address written on a piece of paper that had been taped to his medicine cabinet mirror. He figured it was left by the Night Hunter for the authorities to discover when they found his dead body. When investigators went to the address, they found a murdered woman who looked like her skin had been peeled off with an X-Acto knife.
“So did Garland think that the Night Hunter had changed techniques?” Ryan asked. “That he was going to switch everything up after he killed the profiler chasing him, so he could start fresh?”
“Hard to say for sure,” Jessie said. “That’s possible. Or maybe he was training a protégé to take over in case he didn’t survive his attack on Garland. Either way, they never found another murder that matched that original X-Acto killing—until now.”
“So it could be the Night Hunter,” Ryan offered. “Or it could be a protégé. Or it could be someone who was doing research on Garland Moses, read this file, and was inspired—some kind of copycat.”
They sat quietly in the study, pondering the possibilities. Jessie couldn’t decide which was more troubling to her. A protégé or copycat, especially one new to the system, would be hard to identify and eager to make a bloody mark on the city. But a return of the original Night Hunter meant they were dealing with a methodical, patient killer who had escaped capture for decades.
Both were nightmares that filled her with dread while simultaneously making her blood boil. Before either could say anything more, Jessie’s cell phone rang. It was Captain Decker. She showed Ryan the screen. He frowned.
“Kind of late,” he said, noting the time. It was almost midnight. Jessie shrugged and answered.
“Hi, Captain,” Jessie said. “Everything okay?”
“There’s been a murder on Catalina Island,” he said without preamble. “It’s a rich victim at a fancy hotel. Headquarters specifically requested us. Apparently, a bigwig from the hotel is a generous LAPD donor. It’s not our typical case but I’m not in a position to be turning down requests from HQ these days.”
“Sir—” she started to say before he cut her off.
“HSS is being asked to take this on and I don’t need to remind you how badly we need a win these days,” he said. “Besides, apparently the sheriff out there is overwhelmed and understaffed. He asked for a profiler to assist, one who could get there quick and participate while ‘maintaining a small footprint,’ whatever that means. Everyone on the team is assigned to a current case so I thought of you. Can you do it?”
Jessie tried to set aside her surprise at such a sudden, late-night request to scour her memory for all her recollections about the island.
“Hunt,” Decker said urgently. “I need an answer fast. If you say no, I’ve got to scramble on this one.”
“That’s an hour’s boat ride, isn’t it?” Jessie said.
“We have a helicopter on standby. It can get you there in twenty minutes. Like I said, we’re already behind the eight ball on this. Can I count you in?”
“Can I pick my partner?” she asked.
“No partner,” he said sharply. “There’s not enough time. And remember, we’re pushing the ‘small footprint’ thing. Other than local law enforcement, you’ll be solo on this. Can I count on you?”
“I don’t even know what the case is,” she protested.
“I don’t know much either,” he admitted. “But I figured that since you’re on semester break, you had the time.”
“You’re keeping tabs on my school schedule?” she asked, slightly stunned.
“I keep tabs on everything, Ms. Hunt. You know that,” he told her. “Anyway, there’s a squad car waiting outside your place to get you to the heliport. I can tell you what I know on the drive over.”
Jessie looked over at Ryan, who had heard everything.
“Don’t say no for logistical reasons,” he said. “If you’re interested, go. I can make sure Hannah’s squared away. Hell, since it’s a weekend, she’ll probably sleep till noon anyway. Don’t worry. I’ve got things covered on the home front.”
She couldn’t help but feel a surge of adrenaline as she answered Decker.
“Tell the officers I’ll be outside in five minutes.”