“Thank God you’re here,” Goodman bellowed. “She just came at me. Look what she did. I thought she was going to kill me. She kept saying ‘First Merry, now you.’”

  Brian nodded at his boss’s words, almost like they were expected.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Goodman,” he said without even questioning the story. “We’ll take care of her.”

  Hannah’s heart sank. After all this, was her plan going to fall apart because of one of Goodman’s lackeys? And how was he going to “take care of her?”

  “That’s not true—,” Hannah began to object but Goodman shouted her down.

  “She’s gone crazy,” he barked. “She was having paranoid delusions. I think she needs to go straight to the Assistance Wing. Once she’s medicated, we can help her.”

  Brian grabbed Hannah by the forearms and pulled her up. She struggled to break free but his grip was too strong.

  “I’ll move her somewhere secure right away, Mr. Goodman,” Brian promised, “but I think I know someone who might be better able to diagnose her.”

  “Who?” Goodman asked, not loving the idea.

  “Me,” Dr. Janice Lemmon said, stepping through the door with her cane in hand, her shoes crunching the glass on the carpet.

  “Stand behind me,” Brian whispered in Hannah’s ear, letting go of her forearms.

  She looked at him, confused for a second before a wave of understanding came over her. Brian wasn’t Goodman’s right hand man. He was Dr. Lemmon’s.

  “Thank goodness you’re here, Janice,” Goodman said. “Look at what this girl did to me. She’s lost it.”

  “Is that true, Hannah? Have you lost it?” Dr. Lemmon asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh dear,” Lemmon said, seemingly troubled. “If only there was some way to definitively determine who was telling the truth.”

  Hannah reached into her pocket and pulled out the phone she’d been using to record everything that had happened since she stepped into Goodman’s office.

  “Maybe this will help,” she replied.

  Goodman looked at the phone. Hannah watched in real time as he began to comprehend how he’d been played. His face again contorted into the same grimace from when he’d raked at it with his fingernails. Without a word, he lunged at her, reaching out for the phone.

  Before he got to her, Brian stepped forward, throwing a shoulder into the older man’s chest. Goodman toppled backward, slamming into the floor. He’d barely hit the ground before Brian was zip-tying his wrists together, and then his ankles.

  Dr. Lemmon stepped over to Hannah.

  “Sorry for the delay in getting here,” she said. “But I was on the phone with the sheriff, who’s on his way here right now by the way. Our exchange took longer than I expected, which is why I sent Brian to check on you and make sure you were safe.”

  “You should have walked a little faster, Brian,” Hannah said sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I got caught in the hall by Goodman’s assistant, who seemed panicky. I worried that if I just ignored her and ran this way, she’d get suspicious and warn Goodman.”

  “Please don’t be too hard on him, Hannah,” Lemmon said. “He had a lot to do this week, what with his normal job and watching out for you in my absence.”

  Hannah looked at Brian, who gave her a sheepish grin.

  “Is that why you gave me all those weird looks this week?” she asked. “The way you were acting, I thought you might have killed Merry.”

  “I guess I’m not the best secret agent ever,” he conceded.

  “And that’s why you came over when I was having lunch with Silvio earlier this week and threatened to put him in the Assistance Wing.”

  “He started yelling at you,” Brian said. “I wasn’t sure how far he’d take it. Dr. Lemmon instructed me to keep you safe, so I had to err on the side of caution.”

  “I get it,” she said. “But he was just upset. Losing Merry was a big deal for him. He blamed himself, thinking he should have seen signs that she was considering suicide. If nothing else, this will ease him of that burden.”

  She sensed Dr. Lemmon’s eyes on her and looked over.

  “What?” she asked.

  Lemmon smiled at her.

  “I’m just impressed,” she said. “I’m gone for a week and you make more progress than the entire time I was working with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lemmon took her by the arm and stepped out into the outer office where Brian and Goodman couldn’t hear them.

  “When you came into my office earlier today,” she said quietly, “it wasn’t to discuss your urges or your sister or how sick you were of being here. It was out of concern for someone else. Not a loved one, but a girl you barely knew who you believed deserved justice. Then you put yourself in harm’s way to get her that justice. And just now, you expressed genuine concern a for a young man’s emotional well-being. You did these things, not because they advantaged you in some way, but because you felt for these people.”

  “I didn’t think about it that way,” Hannah protested.

  “Nonetheless, it’s an enormous sign of growth, Hannah,” Dr. Lemmon told her. “I believe that you always had the capacity for empathy. The flame was inside you the whole time. It was almost snuffed out of you by a series of traumas that would undo anyone. Your mother was murdered when you were a baby by your serial killer father. Then he returned years later and slaughtered your adoptive parents in front of you. You’ve been kidnapped and tortured and almost killed on multiple occasions. That would shut anyone down emotionally. But that flame still flickered, somewhere deep within you. And now it’s started to grow. You just need to nurture it, to remember how good it feels to care about other people, especially when you don’t expect to get anything in return. I know you got addicted to the thrill of danger, but isn’t this better? You can get the high without the risk or the crash, and it’s all natural.”

  Hannah didn’t respond. She knew if she tried to speak that she would cry—something she hadn’t allowed herself to do in years. Instead she just nodded. Dr. Lemmon didn’t seem to expect an answer. Instead she simply pulled Hannah close, wrapping her arms around her and squeezing.

  Despite her best efforts, Hannah started to cry anyway. And it felt good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  Jessie looked at her watch and frowned.

  It was 2:02 p.m. They had less than fifteen minutes before Daryl Hinton would arrive at Central Station and they’d get a call from Captain Decker demanding answers. She tried not to worry about that as they pulled up in front of Amanda Bratton’s house.

  To cover their bases, they’d first gone to her dorm room to talk to her, but her roommate said she’d already gone home for the weekend. Luckily for them, her home was just a ten-minute drive to Santa Monica.

  The house matched what she imagined was possible for a family that was willing and able to secretly shell out big money to get their daughter into a school she wasn’t qualified for. A large, Tudor-style mansion, it sat on a street only five blocks from the ocean, along a stretch with similarly sized homes.

  “Nice digs. I guess that’s what you can get when mom is a cosmetics company executive and dad is a corporate banker,” Ryan noted, referencing biographical information they’d gotten from Jamil. “If Tobias was paying Justin Carper twenty grand, I can only imagine how much he was getting from the Brattons.”

  “Unfortunately, he may have gotten something extra from Amanda,” Jessie reminded him. “Shall we go in?”

  Ryan nodded, chastened.

  As they walked up the path to the house, Jessie felt the lack of sleep from last night really hit her. Her legs seemed heavy and her eyes ached. She tried to ignore all of it and focus on the task at hand. Ryan looked at his phone, reviewing the college admission application file on Amanda Bratton that Justin Carper had sent them.

  “Based on the info in this file, and especially the photos,” he said, “Amanda definitely doesn’t seem like Tobias’s type. She’s tall, blonde, and curvy, without any interest in his area of expertise, or academics in general. She’s way more of a social butterfly than I would expect him to go for.”

  “She may not have the look he gravitates toward,” Jessie agreed. “But she’s still his type in the crucial ways. She’s emotionally vulnerable and open to manipulation. With those other girls, it was all about the internal—playing on their deep-seated self-consciousness about themselves. With Amanda it would have been more external pressure—emphasizing how embarrassing it would be to get kicked out of school after her parents bribed people to get in. She wouldn’t want to look bad in front of her friends. Tobias would have exploited that.”

  They arrived at the door and Ryan rang the bell. The chime lasted for a good ten seconds and had just finished playing when the door opened. They were greeted by a large, barrel-chested, pink-cheeked guy in his mid-forties, with a shock of thick, blonde hair and brown eyes with deep crinkles at the corners. He was wearing casual slacks and a golf shirt with sweat stains at the armpits and near his rounded stomach.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, with a big smile and a boisterous voice.

  “Just wrap up eighteen holes?” Ryan asked, looking at the man’s attire.

  “Actually, yes,” he replied amiably. “Was it the shirt or the sweat that gave me away?”

  “It was the shirt,” Ryan told him, “along with the pants, the sweat, the cap-matted hair, and the red cheeks that come from four hours on the course.”

  “You have me at a loss,” the man said, laughing. “I’m Jason Bratton. Who are you, Sherlock Holmes? And is this your Watson?”

  “Close,” Ryan said, showing Bratton his badge. “I’m Detective Hernandez with the LAPD. This is our consultant, Jessie Hunt. I’d say that she’s closer to Sherlock Holmes. Is your daughter, Amanda, here, Mr. Bratton?”

  The man’s wide grin faded instantly.

  “No,” he said, much more seriously now as he glanced behind him. “She’s at an afternoon movie with her mother. Why? Is something wrong?”

  “We hope not,” Jessie told him, wondering if he was telling the truth about his daughter’s whereabouts. “May we come in? We can explain what’s going on but it’s a bit of a sensitive matter.”

  “I suppose,” Bratton said reluctantly, opening the door.

  “Thanks,” she said, stepping inside and holding up her phone. “You don’t mind if we record this conversation, do you?”

  “Why?”

  “It protects both you and us,” she said, hitting the record button. “What we need to discuss with you is difficult and not everybody reacts well. It’s on now. Where should we talk?”

  “The den, I guess,” he said, leading them down a long hallway festooned with photos of the Bratton family.

  “Where’s your son?” she asked, pointing out a sullen-looking teenage boy in many of the pictures.

  “He’s at school,” Bratton said as they entered the den, a massive room with vaulted ceilings and a TV at one end that Jessie guessed was 120 inches. “He’s got a baseball game in an hour. I was about to head over there after I showered up.”

  “Is he any good?” Ryan asked as they took seats on a giant couch opposite his lounge chair.

  “Very good,” Bratton replied, his pride shining through despite his discomfort. “He made honorable mention all-area last year as a sophomore. He’s already getting scholarship offers.”

  “Congratulations,” Ryan said in a tone that Jessie recognized. He was about to get down to business.

  “Thank you,” Bratton replied.

  “Speaking of college, that’s why we’re here,” Ryan said bluntly. “There’s no easy way to say this, Mr. Bratton, but we know that you paid Roman Tobias a large sum of money to get Amanda admitted to UCLA.”

  Bratton’s look of paternal pride was immediately replaced by shock.

  “Wait, what?” he asked. But to Jessie, his response seemed to be less a refutation and more simply astonishment at having this secret be called out so directly.

  “There’s no point in denying it, Mr. Bratton,” Jessie replied, intent on keeping him off balance. “But that’s not why we’re here. I’m sure you’ve heard that Professor Tobias was murdered yesterday morning.”

  “Yes, of course,” he answered, his eyes still wide. “It was all over the news, but what does that—?”

  “We believe that Tobias was blackmailing Amanda,” she interrupted, and then, after a long, uncomfortable pause, added the part she most dreaded telling a father about his daughter, “and forcing her to have sex with him in exchange for his silence about the payments you made.”

  Jason Bratton’s face fell and the frantic energy seemed to drain out of his body. But it wasn’t the reaction of a man getting shocking news. Instead, he had the bearing of a man forced to face a truth he’d tried to put out of his head.

  “I get the sense that what I’m telling you isn’t a surprise,” she said quietly.

  He was silent for a moment before taking a deep breath.

  “No,” he acknowledged. “She finally told me this week. She didn’t know anything about the payments so she didn’t believe him at first. But he showed her how there was no way she could have gotten in on her own. He told her that she wouldn’t make it through four years there unless she ‘did her part.’”

  “Had she already done her part by the time she told you about the blackmail?” Ryan asked.

  His lowered head and silence was all the answer they needed.

  “So then you know why we’re here,” Jessie pressed. “It’s not a stretch to imagine that in one of those private moments when Tobias was getting…reimbursed by Amanda, that it all became too much for her, and in a moment of blind fury, she lashed out and killed him.”

  Bratton looked up suddenly, horrified.

  “There’s no way she would do that,” he asserted with a passion and certainty that took Jessie aback.

  That’s when all her doubts fell away. She still remembered the anonymous call from last night mentioning seeing a possible adult man leaving Tobias’s office around 10:10 yesterday morning. From the moment Bratton conceded that he knew about what Tobias was making his daughter do, Jessie considered him a credible suspect.

  “No,” she said slowly. “Amanda didn’t have to do anything because you did it for her.”

  He immediately shook his head but his eyes were less convincing.

  “No, that not true,” he said weakly.

  “Let me stop you there, Mr. Bratton,” Jessie said. “Detective Hernandez is going to read you your rights. If you still want to tell us why it’s not true after that, feel free.”

  She waited as Ryan walked the man through the process. When he was done, he concluded by asking if Bratton was willing to speak with them. At first he didn’t answer.

  “That’s fine,” Jessie said preemptively. “If you don’t want to talk, maybe Amanda will. Perhaps I’m wrong. After all, she’s got just as strong a motive as you.”

  “No,” Bratton exclaimed. “I’ll talk. Leave her alone.”

  “Okay then,” she said, not waiting for him to change his mind. “How much money did you pay Tobias?”

  “$200,000,” he said blankly. “Half up front and half once she was accepted.”

  “But that wasn’t then end of it, was it?” she coaxed.

  “No,” he admitted. “Once the last quarter started, he came back at us and said that Amanda was struggling. He said he could surreptitiously tweak her grades but that it would require a twenty percent kicker. I told him no way. It was a one-time payment and we weren’t going to be shaken down for another forty grand. That’s when he went to Amanda. He told her that if she didn’t do what he wanted, he’d reveal the secret payments. He said she’d be kicked out of school and that her parents would lose their jobs and be prosecuted. He demanded she pay him with…her body. Unfortunately, in that moment it didn’t occur to Amanda that if it came out, he would be ruined too. So she did what he said.”

  “How did you find out about it?” Jessie asked gently.

  “She came to me this week,” he said, his voice clenching up in anger. “She said she would have kept doing it to protect us but that he made her do things that…she wouldn’t get specific, but she showed me bruises. And her eyes had this hollow look to them. It was like he’d broken her.”

  Jessie nodded. She pictured Jason Bratton getting this information from his only daughter and another realization hit her. Tobias hadn’t scheduled that secret 10 a.m. meeting. Bratton had.

  “Let me guess,” she said, “once you found out what was happening, you called Tobias and told him that you’d changed your mind, that you were open to paying him the $40,000 but that you needed to see him in person.”

  “That’s right,” Bratton said quietly. “I told him I wanted to look him in the eye and get his word that this would be the last payment. Of course, I knew his word meant nothing. It was just a way to get in a room with him.”

  Ryan spoke up.

  “And you knew he’d be just as careful as you were to make sure the meeting would be secret.”

  “Yes,” Bratton said. “He told me to wait by Royce Hall at 9:45 a.m. and that he’d call me on a burner phone with a time and location to meet. I got a call just before 10 to meet right away in his office. He was already there with the door open when I arrived. He actually patted me down and took my phone to make sure I wasn’t recording him.”

  “But you weren’t planning on recording what happened next, were you?” Jessie guessed.

  Bratton shook his head.

  “I didn’t plan for it to happen that way,” he insisted. “I walked in there thinking I would rough him up, maybe give him a pop or two in the mouth, and tell him never to go near my daughter again. I was going to remind him that this works two ways. If our little deal got out, he’d lose everything and go to prison too. But we never got that far.”

  “What do you mean?” Jessie asked.

  “He was so arrogant,” Bratton replied. “Before I even got to any of that, he started talking about me coming to my senses, but that now it was going to cost twenty-five percent. Then he offered me another option: to keep the payment at twenty percent and have Amanda pay off the rest in ‘personal services.’ He actually used that term. That’s when I snapped.”

 

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