“No, but it makes sense,” she replied in hushed tones. “If Natasha was in love with this man and crushed by his loss, where would she want to go most? To the place where his life ended—his office. Whether she killed him in a fit of rage or she had nothing to do with it, I think she’d want to be as close to him as she could get while mourning him. And I can’t think of a better place to do that than where they shared all those intimate moments and where he ultimately died.”

  “But we’ve had university cops posted in and around the building all day,” he pointed out.

  “She might be a shrinking violet in other parts of her life, but when it comes to her obsession with Roman Tobias, Natasha Myers doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who would let that get in her way.”

  They circled around the front of the building, where the lone officer on duty stood guard. The police tape was still up but there wasn’t much need for it right now. After a frenzied afternoon in which every local news station—and some national outlets too—had converged on the scene to do live reports, the university had asserted its authority over the property and kicked everyone out until tomorrow. Other than some students wandering down several adjacent paths, the area was disturbingly quiet.

  After the officer let them in and gave them a key, they made their way up to Tobias’s third floor office. When they arrived at the door, which had also been taped off, Jessie knew right away that her suspicion was right. The “LAPD CSU” sticker that sealed the door and the jamb was split.

  Ryan saw it too and silently motioned for Jessie to unlock the door while he removed his gun from its holster. She counted to three, turned the key, and pushed the door open. Ryan stepped quickly through and she followed. Even in the darkened room, they could see a figure curled up on the couch where they’d found Tobias’s body. The person stirred at the sound of their footsteps.

  “Don’t move,” Ryan ordered forcefully.

  The person froze.

  “We’re going to turn on the light,” he said, nodding at Jessie. “Stay where you are.”

  Jessie flicked on the light to reveal Natasha Myers, who, despite having a gun pointed at her, was still blinking the sleep away. She looked a mess. Her red hair spiked out in all directions. Her skin was blotchy. She wasn’t wearing her glasses so there was no hiding her red, puffy eyes.

  “What’s going on?” she mumbled.

  “We’re with the LAPD,” Ryan informed her. “Slowly sit up, keeping your hands visible at all times.”

  Natasha did as instructed. As she sat up, something on couch fell at her feet. Jessie squinted for a second before realizing that it was a long, ornate, gold letter opener. She could only imagine what the girl had in mind for that.

  “Kick the letter opener toward us, Natasha,” she said as coolly as she could.

  Natasha did so without a word. Once the opener was out of her reach, Jessie bent down and grabbed it. Ryan holstered his gun.

  “Can I please put on my glasses?” Natasha asked, nodding at the pair resting on the table beside the couch. “I can’t see a thing without them.”

  “Slowly,” Ryan warned.

  Once they were on, Natasha seemed to relax slightly. Though Jessie felt guilty about it, she needed to shake the girl out of that comfort zone.

  “Care to explain why you’re sleeping in a sealed crime scene?” she demanded, pretending not to already know the answer. “That’s a chargeable offense.”

  The tactic worked. Natasha’s shoulders slumped and the mousy, frail demeanor she’d briefly lost returned.

  “I was just…” she started to explain, then paused before continuing. “Professor Tobias was my favorite teacher. I had great admiration for him and I guess I just wanted to say goodbye in my own way. I know I shouldn’t have broken in here, but I didn’t think it was hurting anyone.”

  While nothing she said could technically be called a lie, it was clear that she wasn’t going to reveal the true nature of their relationship without a push.

  “Natasha,” Jessie said gently, hoping that lowering the temperature might win the girl’s trust. “My name is Jessie. This is Detective Hernandez. We’re investigating Professor Tobias’s death. But we’ve also been looking for you.”

  “Why?” Natasha asked, suddenly agitated.

  “Because your roommate, Simone, was worried about you,” Jessie told her. “She’s been trying to reach you all day and you didn’t come home tonight. She thought you might do something rash.”

  A cloud of shame crossed Natasha’s face at what she’d put her friend through, but she quickly fought it off.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, arching her back haughtily. “I just wanted to pay respects to a teacher that meant a lot to me, nothing more.”

  Jessie grabbed one of the chairs near Tobias’s desk, pulled it over next to the couch, and sat down close to the girl, who looked to be shaking slightly.

  “Natasha,” she whispered, “we know.”

  Those red puffy eyes opened wide.

  “Know what?”

  “We know about all of it,” Jessie told her. “Your involvement with Roman Tobias, his breakup with you and his threats to your academic status if you said anything, your difficulty getting over him—there’s no point in denying it.”

  She watched as an enormous, invisible weight seemed to topple off the girl. The tension in her shoulders melted away and her brittle, forced smile disappeared, replaced by a sigh of giant relief.

  “I loved him so much,” she said, her voice quavering. “But I couldn’t talk about it with anyone other than Simone and I knew she didn’t like him. When I heard the news today, I couldn’t believe it. I ran right over here. I heard people in the crowd saying he might have been murdered and it was just too much to process. So I just left.”

  “Where did you go?” Ryan asked.

  “I just got in my car and drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway. When I hit Santa Barbara, I pulled over and sat on the beach for a little while. At some point I realized I couldn’t just drive away from my feelings, so I turned around and came back. Somehow I felt like he needed me to return.”

  “And you came here?” Jessie wondered, not commenting on the girl’s delusional mindset for now.

  Natasha nodded.

  “They were letting students and professors back in on the first floor for classes,” she explained. “I just had to show my ID. Then I waited in the restroom until there were fewer police around. I snuck up to the third floor and hid in a storage closet that the professor and I used for…well, the point is that I knew the lock didn’t work well. When it got late enough, I checked the hallway. There was no one up here so I came to his office. The professor keeps an extra key hidden behind a bust of John Adams right outside the door. He always said no one cared about Adams so it was a safe hiding place. Sure enough, it was still there. So all I had to do was unlock the door, break the seal, and come in. I’ve been here ever since, communing with his spirit.”

  Jessie sighed at hearing those depressing last words. She tried to focus on something else that Natasha said: that she knew where Tobias kept the key. That meant she could have easily snuck in this morning and hidden, waiting to attack. She already had a potential motive. Now she was basically admitting that she had the means and possibly the opportunity.

  But why would she admit to such a thing when she didn’t have to, especially when it could implicate her. The reason appeared obvious. Natasha Myers was guileless, largely incapable of believable deception. That conclusion wasn’t based on the evidence but on Jessie’s read of the girl’s psychological makeup—her profile. She suspected that if Natasha had killed Tobias, she’d already have admitted to it by now. It was for that reason that Jessie felt comfortable saying what came next.

  “We can get into this more another time,” she said wearily, “but you know he’s not worth any of the emotional energy you’re pouring into him. Don’t get me wrong, we’re going to find out who killed Professor Tobias because that’s what we do. But he was a bad guy, Natasha. What he did to you, he did to lots of others. I think you know that.”

  Natasha bit her lip but didn’t argue.

  “I’m afraid we have to ask this,” Ryan said, “but where were you this morning between 10:00 and 10:30?”

  “Are you asking me for an alibi?” she asked, truly stunned. “You think I killed him? I would never.”

  “You seem pretty passionate about the man,” Ryan noted.

  Jessie knew he was just doing his job, getting a potential suspect off balance, but it made her cringe nonetheless. To her surprise, Natasha didn’t take the bait.

  “Why would I kill him?” she asked sincerely. “I loved him. Besides, if I wanted to make him suffer, to destroy him, it would have been easy. I knew what we were doing wasn’t aboveboard, and I knew about the other girls, at least some of them. I even hid in that maintenance closet and watched him bring them here, logged dates when he was with some of them. I know their names. I’m embarrassed to say that, but I did it. I could have reported him to the university or to the media. I could even have blackmailed him. I could have watched his life fall apart at my hands. But I didn’t do any of that, did I?”

  Neither Jessie nor Ryan had an immediate response to that. It didn’t matter because she wasn’t done.

  “And to answer your question, I had a test in sociology today. The class runs from nine to ten-thirty. There are two dozen students and an instructor who can verify that I was there the whole time.”

  Jessie looked over at Ryan and read his mind. It was easy because she knew he was thinking the same thing: after all this, they’d hit another dead end.

  Captain Decker was going to be pissed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Decker wasn’t pissed, but he was disappointed.

  “I wanted to give you the space to work the case so I didn’t tell either of you this earlier,” he said over the phone as Ryan maneuvered through the late evening traffic, “but Chief Laird is worked up over this one. With all the local and national press, he says this is giving L.A. a black eye. I held him off for now by telling him that every student Tobias ever taught is a potential suspect so it’ll take time, but he’ll want an update tomorrow morning, which means I will too. Start fresh then. For now, you can call it a night.”

  Jessie had rarely heard a more welcome sentence. As they drove home mostly in comfortable silence, she found herself close to drifting off on several occasions and tried to shake it off. If she was tired, so was Ryan, and she didn’t want him to drive into a ditch because they had both fallen asleep. So she did what always kept her awake: think about the case.

  She thought about what Natasha had said—that she could have easily destroyed Tobias simply by reporting him, could have blackmailed him if she chose. It was true, but not just for her. Any of the other young women he manipulated, used up, and tossed away could have done the same thing. They all could have obliterated his reputation, his entire career, without actually killing him. That wasn’t proof that they hadn’t, but without as strong a motive, each of his victims seemed considerably less compelling as suspects.

  In fact, it made much more sense that the killer knew nothing about Tobias’s affairs. Without that knowledge and the ability it provided to ruin his life without ending it, the killer may have felt that murder was their only option. Of course, that begged the question: what would have motivated someone who wasn’t aware of Tobias’s myriad secrets—professional jealousy? Some financial factor they’d overlooked? Or could it just have been a student with poor anger management skills who got upset over a bad grade?

  The first two options certainly made sense if the crime was premeditated. After all, the body had been dragged across the carpet and carefully placed on the couch. And the school’s cameras didn’t catch anyone in the area. Then again, the moving of the body could have been a panicked choice and not being caught on camera might have been pure luck. Those factors fit better with the heat-of-the-moment, unhinged student theory.

  Ryan pulled into the driveway, which was good because Jessie could feel her brain starting to melt. Before it completely turned to mush, she texted Kat to see how her day on the Andy Robinson “proof of guilt” hunt had gone: Any updates?

  The brief reply came quick: Working on it. Will keep you posted.

  Jessie decided not to push. She picked Kat for this job for a reason. Now she just had to trust her judgment. Besides she was too wiped out to do anything else. She and Ryan both lumbered inside. Ryan turned on the kitchen light. Jessie looked at the breakfast table and groaned. Strewn about right where she’d left them this morning were brochures for half a dozen wedding venues.

  The sight of them added an extra layer to her exhaustion. She was excited about getting married, but the actual planning part was a constant source of agitation. Even after Ryan had relented on his preference for a big wedding, they still had to pick a date, create a guest list, invitations, and course, select the dreaded venue.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ryan said, reading her mind. “We’ll deal with all that later.”

  “Bless you, kind sir,” she replied, her hands pressed together as if in prayer.

  “How about instead of that, we focus on who can fall asleep faster?”

  “I thought you were hoping that I’d ‘lift your spirits’ tonight,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “I didn’t want to assume,” he said bashfully. “I figured you’d want a rain check.”

  The thought had occurred to her, but she didn’t want to renege.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she offered. “If you can promise me that I’ll be asleep in fifteen minutes, I’ll happily find a way to lift those spirits a lot more than that protein bar from earlier did.”

  “Sold!” he shouted, darting for bedroom with a goofy grin on his face.

  *

  She could feel him staring at her.

  No matter where she moved in the mansion’s giant living room, his eyes followed her. She pretended not to notice, walking over to the large fireplace at the far end of the room and stoking the smoldering logs with the poker.

  Of course, that was just a ruse. She’d grabbed the poker for a very different reason. She listened for footsteps getting closer, but heard none. She wanted to turn around to see where he was in the room but couldn’t. Her legs were locked in place, unresponsive. She was helpless to protect herself like this.

  Then she heard them, footsteps echoing throughout the enormous room. They were getting closer. She thought she could hear him breathing. And yet she still couldn’t move. She was frozen. As the pace of his steps and his breathing quickened, she used the one thing at her disposal.

  She lifted the poker up by her shoulders as if preparing to face a pitcher, then swung it down hard, slamming it into her left shin. The pain was excruciating but it also snapped her out of her paralysis. Her legs were suddenly responsive.

  She spun around to find him standing only feet away from her. In the smokiness of the room, it was hard to see him clearly but she knew who it was: her father. Xander Thurman, the man who’d murdered her mother right in front of her when she was six years old, then left her to die in a snowy cabin, looked just as he did when she’d last seen him.

  His lean, wolfish body was hunched over. His long, dark hair was dotted with visible gray. His green eyes, the same shade as hers, gleamed maniacally. He was still the same serial killer, who, after two decades spreading mayhem across the country, had come to L.A. to convert or kill her.

  But then the smoke cleared and she saw that she was wrong. It wasn’t her father in front of her but Bolton Crutchfield, her father’s protégé, who escaped from a psychiatric prison, then returned to torment and occasionally assist her. Short and pudgy with brown hair parted neatly to the side, he stared at her unblinkingly with steely brown eyes.

  The room was so smoky that the overhead sprinklers turned on. Water poured down from above, mixing with the smoke to make the air dank and thick. In the middle of it, she realized that she’d been mistaken. The man in front of her, tall and blond with cold, blue eyes and broad shoulders, was actually her ex-husband, Kyle Voss, who’d cheated on her, killed his mistress, and then tried to frame her for it. That was before he got out of prison and tried to kill her, Hannah, and Ryan. He’d almost succeeded.

  As she held the poker tight, waiting for him to advance on her, she became aware of something that had been tickling the corner of her brain. All of these men were dead, all killed by her in fact, while defending herself. That’s when she knew she was dreaming.

  But even that knowledge didn’t help. The man, whoever he was, advanced on her quickly. She raised the poker higher, waiting. When he was close enough, she swung with all her might. Just before the tip of the poker made contact with his skull, she saw his face clearly. But it wasn’t a man at all. It was Andy Robinson. And she was smiling.

  Jessie sat straight up in bed, gasping for air, her heart pounding.

  The clock read 2:53 a.m. She looked over and saw Ryan to her left, sprawled out, his legs creeping well over onto her side of the bed. Her t-shirt was soaked with sweat, as were the sheets below her. She allowed a few seconds for her body to regulate.

  It’s been a while since I’ve had a dream like that.

  She slid out of bed and got a big towel from the linen closet, which she laid over the damp part of the sheets. Then she headed to the bathroom for a quick shower and change before returning to bed and hopefully, some semblance of sleep.

  It had been months since she’d had a nightmare that vivid. She didn’t recall ever having one with all those people in it and tried not to fixate on the fact that the only one of them who was still alive might be set free tomorrow. Instead, she let her mind drift to another equally troubling concern.

  Will I ever get past my demons? And if I can’t, what hope does Hannah have?

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

 

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