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“Okay,” he agreed a painfully long moment of silence, not pressing her on whether those were her real reasons. She could sense that he was disappointed but knew he wouldn’t voice it. Chris wasn’t that kind of guy. Plus, he knew her well enough by now that trying to change her mind was a fruitless proposition.
Hannah would never say it out loud, but to her, this had been kind of a starter relationship. Because of the events in her life recently, dating hadn’t really been a priority. So when the opportunity presented itself over the summer to hang out with the cute artsy guy who knew about her past and didn’t judge her for it, she’d leapt at the chance.
Chris knew that Hannah was the half-sister of celebrated criminal profiler Jessie Hunt. He knew that Hannah’s adoptive parents had been murdered two years ago by her birth father, serial killer Xander Thurman. He knew that Jessie had assumed guardianship of her. He knew that Hannah had once killed an elderly serial killer who had threatened her life, along with the lives of Jessie and Ryan. He wasn't scared off by any of it, and she was deeply grateful to him. But that wasn't enough of a reason to remain involved with a boy who lived clear across the country and who she’d officially dated for less than a week.
Hannah darted through a clutch of girls that were ambling too casually along the campus path, disrupting her route to the building she needed to get to. She heard one of them grunt as if she was miffed by Hannah’s maneuver and forced herself not to turn around and make a snide remark.
She didn’t need to be irritated right now, particularly not for the class she was trying to get to on time. Exploratory Data Analysis, a required course for Psychology, which was one her two majors, had proven to be painfully easy so far, which, in a moment of weakness, she’d let the professor know. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the smartest decision to antagonize the person responsible for her grade, but that ship had already sailed..
As she darted up the steps of the Social Science Hall, she wondered if she was actively seeking out drama because everything had been going so well of late. After all, she didn’t need to break up with Chris. She could have just let their relationship slowly die on the vine. Nor did she need to challenge her E.D.A. professor. She could have just kept her head down and quietly aced all his tests.
As she hurried down the hallway of the building, weaving in and out of students moving with decidedly less urgency, she worried that she might be backsliding. There was a time, less than a year ago, when she pursued constant drama as a way to avoid feeling numb.
That feeling had reached its peak after she shot the elderly serial killer who had intended to murder her, Jessie, and Ryan. She didn’t have to shoot him. He was handcuffed and incapacitated at the time. And though she’d claimed self-defense, she knew something else had been going on. She wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.
It turned out that it was an incredible high. In the months after the incident, she’d found herself seeking out that high over and over again, putting herself in positions where intense, potentially violent conflict was almost inevitable. The people she challenged were, in her opinion, deserving of punishment for their cruel behavior, but they were often dangerous, and she was lucky to have mostly escaped unscathed.
At some point, she had realized just how close she was to the edge and confessed her feelings to Dr. Janice Lemmon, the psychiatrist that both she and Jessie saw regularly. They, in conjunction with Jessie, had agreed that she should enter an in-patient psychiatric facility and rehab center, not for drug or alcohol treatment, but for an addiction to bloodlust.
It had seemingly worked. When Hannah left several months later, she felt more in control. She still went to thrice-weekly sessions with Dr. Lemmon, but other than that, she resumed her normal routine. She graduated high school with honors, was accepted to UC Irvine, got a summer boyfriend, and even worked for Jessie’s best friend, Kat Gentry, at her detective agency. She was on the straight and narrow.
Hannah walked into the lecture hall and was relieved to see that the professor wasn’t there yet. She scrambled up the steps and took a seat near the back. As she pulled out her laptop, she wondered what had changed to make her regress. She had a pretty good guess.
Last spring, while working for Kat, they’d been tricked by a female client claiming to need help evading an abusive husband. But in reality, the woman was a professional killer, hired to torture and kill them both as payback against Jessie. That woman was named Ash Pierce.
Luckily, Hannah had managed to get the upper hand on Pierce, though not before the woman had tortured and nearly killed Kat. Hannah had forced down the urge to pummel Pierce’s brains out of her skull with a police baton she found and instead turned her over to the authorities. It was a milestone moment for her, proof that in the most tempting of moments, she could overcome her darker urges.
But then Ash Pierce, who had been incarcerated for months, escaped from a prison transport truck. Inevitably, after Hannah hid out for several days, unsure when or if Pierce might come after her again, there was another confrontation. This time, after Pierce captured her, sat astride her, and was about to kill her, Hannah grabbed a nearby knife and plunged it into the killer’s throat.
That act had saved her life. But it had also felt good. Ultimately Pierce had survived, a result of CPR performed by Kat. But she’d been in a coma ever since. Often in the weeks since, Hannah had dreamt about what happened, but they weren’t nightmares. She relived the blade puncturing Ash Pierce’s throat and would wake up suddenly to the visceral pleasure of the woman’s blood cascading down on top of her. When she realized it wasn’t real, she found herself disappointed.
Professor Gault walked into the room and Hannah shook herself out the happy memory of those dreams. She needed to be focused. The professor, a tall, thin man with a small patch of gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses, glanced around the lecture hall as he made his way to the podium. His gaze landed on her, and he gave her a nasty glare. Apparently, he hadn't let her criticisms of his class go just yet.
She again chastised herself. She should have held her tongue that day, as she should most times she felt like making a scene. The last thing she needed was to go down the road of actively looking for trouble like she used to back in the bad old days.
And yet, despite that instruction to herself, she still found that she was constantly looking to scratch that itch of righteous indignation. Maybe that’s why she was going to the fraternity party tonight.
The frat guys, some of them pledges in her dorm, were generally speaking, assholes. But she’d recently learned they might be much more than that. It was possible that at least one of them might be involved in a crime.
The justice-seeking part of her was insisting that she do something about it, even as the practical voice in her head said she should just keep out of other people’s business, and instead focus on her studies and adjusting to college life.
But as she sat quietly in the back of the lecture hall, listening to Professor Gault drone on, she knew which side of her would win this debate.
Tonight, she'd be having a chat with the frat guys.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jessie wondered if this fog would ever burn off.
It was 9:35 now, and the air was still a dense white as Ryan parked across the street from Ava Martell’s home. The details of the home’s outline were hard to decipher, even though they were less than fifty feet away, but Jessie could tell that it was big.
She got out and threw on a sweater. With the thick marine layer had come an extra chill, almost as if Martell’s Brentwood Park neighborhood was shrouding itself in grief over her loss. Jessie tried not to let her thoughts drift in that direction. This was her first case after being on leave for two months, and she needed to be on her game, focused only on the facts. Anthropomorphizing the weather didn’t do anyone any good, least of all Ava Martell.
“Mind if we do a little prep?” she asked Ryan as they walked across the street.
“Sure,” he replied, his eyes darting through the fog, alert to the remote possibility that the killer might be here.
“Okay, we know from Beth,” she said, referring to Beth Ryerson, HSS’s other researcher, “that Ava’s husband, Harrison Buhner, was supposedly out of town on business and is currently headed back, which theoretically provides him with an alibi.”
