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CHAPTER FORTY
Ash Pierce peeled off her wet clothes and stepped into the hot shower.
She didn’t love being back at her original, nondescript East Hollywood safe house, but the mansion was blown now and every other secure location she had in the city was beyond walking distance. As it was, after she’d escaped through that window earlier, she’d had to leave behindRick Carroll’s Porsche and instead steal another car, eventually dump that,and run eight miles in the pouring rain just to get here. And that was on a twisted ankle.
Frankly she was lucky that a mildly messed up ankle and massive rope burns on her palms were all she’d suffered in the escape, considering she had to leap onto that rope and, while holding on for dear life, rappel down its twenty-five foot length in under three seconds. Then there was pounding headache—the recurring gift from Hannah Dorsey’s baton blow to the head months ago—that had reappeared when she heard the sirens approaching in Hannah’s bedroom and had returned intermittently in the hours since.
Still, despite the pain and exhaustion she currently felt, it had all been worth it. Her plan hadn’t worked quite as she hoped, but it wasn’t a total loss either. Hannah Dorsey probably wouldn’t believe this, but the truth was that Ash had never intended to kill her tonight.
Of course, that might not have comforted the girl, considering the nature of her actual plan. Ash had aimed to kidnap Hannah from her safe house, take her back to the mansion, torture her to within an inch of her life, and send the recording of the festivities to Jessie, Ryan, Kat, and Jack Dolan, the FBI agent leading the hunt for her.
Things obviously hadn’t gone that smoothly. But it wasn’t a total loss. Based on the conversation between the bedroom door between Hannah and her bodyguard, she now knew the names of two men associated with Hannah’s protection—Grover and Rufus. That information alone should help her determine the security company that Jessie was employing. Once she had that, she could do a deep dive, learn who she was up against, and how best to outmaneuver them.
Equally satisfying, she suspected that Hannah would have trouble ever feeling at ease closing her eyes again. How many times would she check bedroom closets and make sure doors and windows were locked before she was ever comfortable in bed?
And that didn’t account for how unsettled Hannah must feel knowing that even a burner cell call to a boy clear across the country, one that Ash shouldn’t have even known about, wasn’t safe. Of course, Hannah didn’t know that Ash had been following the social media accounts of everyone in her orbit for months. Even though Hannah, for her own protection, didn’t have any social accounts of her own, Doug Mercy did.
Doug was a friend of Hannah’s from her brief stay in the mountain town of Wildpines. In addition to being a violin prodigy admitted to Juilliard this fall, he also liked to track his daily adventures. Among them was a recent visit to a Santa Monica beach house with multiple friends, including Hannah, who was mentioned in a number of photos.
Several of the pictures showed Hannah seeming very chummy with a young man named Chris. It didn't take long to determine that Chris was Chris Balfour, who was a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design. From there, it was easy to get his cell number and backtrace all his recent calls, including one just yesterday from a burner phone in Long Beach.
Hannah wouldn’t make that mistake again. Ash doubted the girl would make any more calls, no matter how secure the phone. But that was okay. The damage was done. The idea that her young prey might be slowly losing her grip, unsure if any person or place was safe anymore, was delicious.
And sometime soon, Ash intended to put Hannah out of her misery. But not before breaking her body and her mind. She couldn’t wait.
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
Jessie stood in the Central Station conference room along with a dozen other people, anxiously staring at the monitor on the wall.
It was 12:44 a.m. and she'd been here for over ninety minutes now, watching as HSS detectives Susannah Valentine, Sam Goodwin, Karen Bray, and Jim Nettles, along with a SWAT unit, methodically worked their way through the second of three Skid Row buildings where they believed Mark Haddonfield might be hiding out. So far, they'd come up empty.
“This could take all night,” she heard Beth mutter to Jamil. Both of them were also fixated on the screen and the dozen different video feeds—each from the body camera of a team member—it was projecting.
Jessie couldn't disagree. Still, despite the drawn-out search, they'd been on edge the whole time. In fact, Jessie hadn't even had a chance to download recent events with Kat, who'd been in the conference room all this time too, along with her bodyguard. Ryan had allowed them to stay since they were the ones who had come up with the lead in the first place. But other than a quick congratulatory hug on Kat's engagement, the friends had no time to interact.
Jessie was considering making a quick restroom run when she heard a bit of unfamiliar murmuring off-camera. Her ears perked up. Almost every word since she’d begun watching had been spoken by either the SWAT team leader or Susannah Valentine. This voice was new.
“Something’s happening,” Jessie muttered.
Beth opened her mouth to ask what, but Valentine beat her to the punch.
“We may have something, Captain Hernandez,” the detective said quietly to Ryan over comms. “Karen just spoke to a neighbor who said the tenant in unit 518 matches the description of the subject. The neighbor is completely sauced, so we’re not making any assumptions, but she claims he’s been here less than a week. We’re moving into position now.”
Jessie watched the view via Susannah's body camera feed as she took up a spot behind four SWAT team members stationed outside the door.
“If possible,” Ryan said, “don’t breach with force. Try to go in quiet if you can.”
“Copy that,” Susannah said. “Quiet breach.”
The SWAT team man near the doorknob gave an OK" sign, then proceeded to pull out his lock pick kit. For thirty excruciating seconds, everyone held their collective breath. Then the man gave another "OK" sign.
"The door is unlocked," Susannah said. "We are proceeding with breach. Team leader, on your command."
The team leader gave the signal, and a team member slowly opened the door and entered, followed by three other members of the team, Susannah was next. She moved in quickly, scanning the small space. The entire apartment was half of the size of the conference room, and searching it took only seconds.
"He's not here," Susannah said. "But it looks like he was, at least fairly recently. There's a cup with some milk in it, and it's still a little cold. My guess is that he was here in the last hour or so."
“Keep clearing the building,” Ryan instructed. “Maybe he snuck into another unit.”
