The Perfect Block

It was true. After Kyle had persuaded Jessie that she had killed Natalia herself in a drunken rage that she couldn’t remember, he’d offered to cover up the crime by dumping the woman’s body at sea. Despite her misgivings at the time, Jessie hadn’t been forceful about going to the police to confess. It was something she regretted to this day.

Hernandez had sussed that out but as far as she knew, never said anything about it to anyone after that. Some small part of her feared that was the real reason he’d called her here today and that the job was just a pretense to get her in the station. She figured that if he took her to an interrogation room, she’d know which way things were headed.

After a few minutes, he came out to greet her. He was much as she remembered him, about thirty, well-built but not overly imposing. At about six feet tall and a little under 200 pounds, he was clearly in good shape. It was only as he got closer that she remembered how ripped he was.

He had short black hair, brown eyes, and a wide, warm smile that probably even made suspects feel at ease. She wondered if he cultivated it for that very reason. She saw the wedding band on his left hand and remembered that he was married but had no kids.

“Thanks for coming in, Ms. Hunt,” he said, extending his hand.

“Please call me Jessie,” she said.

“Okay, Jessie. Let’s go to my desk and I’ll fill you in on what I had in mind.”

Jessie felt a stronger than expected surge of relief when he didn’t suggest the interrogation room but managed to avoid making it obvious. As she followed him back to the bullpen, he talked softly.

“I’ve been keeping up with your case,” he admitted. “Or more accurately, your husband’s case.”

“Soon to be ex,” she noted.

“Right. I heard that too. No plans to stick it out with the guy who tried to frame you for murder and then kill you, huh? No loyalty these days.”

He grinned to let her know he was kidding. Jessie couldn’t help but be impressed by a guy willing to make a crack about a murder to the person who was almost murdered.

“The guilt is overwhelming,” she said, playing along.

“I’ll bet. I’ve got to say, it’s not looking good for your soon-to-be former hubby. Even if prosecutors don’t seek the death penalty, I doubt he’s ever getting out.”

“From your lips…” Jessie muttered, not needing to finish the sentence.

“Let’s move to a happier subject, shall we?” Hernandez suggested. “As you may or may not recall from my visit to your classroom, I work for a special unit in Robbery-Homicide. It’s called Homicide Special Section, or HSS for short. We specialize in high-profile cases—the kinds that generate lots of media interest or public scrutiny. That might include arsons, murders with multiple victims, murders of notable individuals, and of course, serial killers.”

“Like Bolton Crutchfield, the guy you helped capture.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Our unit also employs profilers. They’re not exclusive to us. The whole department has access to them but we have priority. You may have heard of our senior profiler, Garland Moses.”

Jessie nodded. Moses was a legend in the profiling community. A former FBI agent, he’d relocated to the West Coast to retire in the late 1990s after spending decades bouncing around the country hunting serial killers. But the LAPD had made him an offer and he agreed to work as a consultant. He was paid by the department but wasn’t an official employee, so he could come and go as he chose.

He was over seventy years old now but still showed up to work just about every day. And at least three or four times a year, Jessie read a story of him cracking a case no one else could nail down. He supposedly had an office on the second floor of this building in what was said to be a converted broom closet.

“Am I going to meet him?” Jessie asked, trying to keep her enthusiasm in check.

“Not today,” Hernandez said. “Maybe if you take the job and have settled in for a while, I’ll introduce you. He’s a little on the crusty side.”

Jessie knew Hernandez was being diplomatic. Garland Moses had a reputation for being a taciturn, short-tempered asshole. If he wasn’t great at catching murderers, he’d probably be unemployable.

“So Moses is kind of the department’s profiler emeritus,” Hernandez continued. “He only shows his face for really big cases. The department has a number of other staff and freelance profilers it uses for less celebrated cases. Unfortunately, our junior profiler, Josh Caster, tendered his resignation yesterday.”

“Why?”

“Officially?” Hernandez said. “He wanted to relocate to a more family-friendly area. He has a wife and two kids he never got to see. So he accepted a position up in Santa Barbara.”

“And unofficially?”

“He couldn’t hack it anymore. He worked robbery-homicide a half dozen years, went to the FBI’s training program, came back all gung ho and really pushed hard as a profiler for two years after that. Then he just hit a wall.”

“What do you mean?” Jessie asked.

“This is an ugly business, Jessie. I feel like I don’t need to tell you that, with what happened with your husband. But it’s one thing to have a brush with violence or death. It’s another to face it every day, to see the foul things human beings can do to each other. It’s hard to keep your humanity under the onslaught of that stuff. It grinds you down. If you don’t have somewhere to put it at the end of the day, it can really mess you up. That’s something to think about as you consider my proposal.”

Jessie decided now wasn’t the time to tell Detective Hernandez that her experience with Kyle wasn’t the first time she’d seen death close up. She wasn’t sure if watching her father murder multiple people as a child, including her own mother, might hurt her job prospects.

“What exactly is your proposal?” she asked, steering clear of the topic entirely.

They had reached Hernandez’s desk. He motioned for her to sit down across from him as he continued.

“Replacing Caster, at least on an interim basis. The department isn’t ready to hire a new full-time profiler just yet. They put a lot of resources into Caster and they feel burned. They want to do a big candidate search before hiring his permanent replacement. In the meantime, they’re looking for someone junior, who won’t mind not being a full-time hire and won’t mind being underpaid.”

“That’s sure to reel in top applicants,” Jessie said.

“Agreed. That’s my fear—that in the interest of keeping costs low, they’ll go with someone who doesn’t have the chops. Me? I’d rather try someone who might be green but has talent rather than a hack who can’t profile worth a damn.”

“You think I have talent?” Jessie asked, hoping she didn’t sound like she was fishing for a compliment.

“I think you have potential. You showed that in the classroom scenario. I respect your professor in the class, Warren Hosta. And he tells me you have real talent. He wouldn’t get specific but he indicated that you’d been granted permission to interview a high-value inmate and that you’d established a rapport that might prove fruitful in the future. The fact that he couldn’t read me in on something a fresh-scrubbed master’s graduate is doing suggests you’re not as untested as you seem. Plus, you managed to uncover your husband’s elaborate murder plot and not get killed in the process. That’s nothing to sneeze at. I also know you were accepted into the FBI’s National Academy without any law enforcement experience. That almost never happens. So I’m willing to take a flyer on you and throw your name into the mix. Assuming you’re interested. Are you interested?”

CHAPTER FIVE

“So you’re not doing the FBI thing?” Lacy asked incredulously as she took another sip of wine.

They were sitting on the couch, halfway through a bottle of red and devouring the Chinese food that had just been delivered. It was after 8 p.m. and Jessie was exhausted from the longest day she could remember in months.

“I’m still going to do it, just not now. They gave me a one-time deferment. I can join with another Academy class, as long as I attend at some time in the next six months. Otherwise I have to reapply. Since I was lucky to get in this time, that pretty much guarantees I’ll be going soon.”

“And you’re bailing to do grunt work for the LAPD?” Lacy asked, disbelieving.

“Once again, not bailing,” Jessie pointed out, taking a big glug from her own glass, “just delaying. I was already on the fence with everything going on with the house sale and my physical recovery. This was just the clincher. Besides, it sounds cool!”

“No it doesn’t,” Lacy said. “It sounds totally boring. Even your detective buddy said you’d be doing routine tasks and handling the low-profile cases no one else wanted to take on.”

“At first. But once I’ve got a bit of experience I’m sure they’ll throw me on something more interesting. This is Los Angeles, Lace. They’re not going to be able to keep the crazy away from me.”

*

Two weeks later, as the patrol car dropped Jessie off a block from the crime scene, she thanked the officers and headed for the alley where she saw police tape already up. As she crossed the street, avoiding the drivers who seemed more intent on hitting than avoiding her, it occurred to her that this would be her first murder case.

Looking back on her brief time at Central Station, she realized that she’d been wrong to think they couldn’t keep the crazy away from her. Somehow, at least so far, they had. In fact, most of her time these days was spent in the station, going through open cases to make sure the paperwork Josh Caster had filed before he left was up to date. It was drudgery.

It didn’t help that Central Station felt like a busy bus station. The main bullpen area was massive. People swarmed around her all the time and she was never quite sure if they were staff, civilians, or suspects. She had to repeatedly move desks as profilers without the “interim” tag used their seniority to lay claim to work stations they preferred. No matter where she ended up, Jessie always seemed to be situated right below a flickering fluorescent light.