She could imagine the bland young thing’s body shaking with excitement, much as it had when Andy would offer a furtive, delicate stroke on her forearm or whisper something in her ear, allowing her warm breath to make the hair on the girl’s neck stand up. Eden had been so easy to manipulate that it almost wasn’t fun. But the girl was marginally smarter than that cow Livia had been, and smelled better too, which was why she’d been assigned the more ambitious task.
Andy stood up and stretched, then walked around the lounge to loosen up, pretending for a moment that she wasn’t incarcerated in a psychiatric lockdown facility. Sure the Western Regional Women’s Psychiatric Detention Center, or PDC, was much nicer than the Twin Towers. The furniture wasn’t falling apart. Patients were rarely stun-gunned into submission. Nobody painted feces on the walls. The medical staff actually seemed to want to help the patients get better. But there were still bars on the windows, armed guards everywhere, and barbed wire fencing around the facility.
But that too would all change eventually. At some point, she anticipated relocation, or possibly even freedom, for her part in stopping a killer. After all, once Eden began her butchery, Jessie would investigate and discover that she’d spent time at Twin Towers with Andy. Her boss, Captain Decker, would insist that Jessie take advantage of her willing human resource.
As part of the arrangement that got Andy in this more palatable facility, Jessie would come to her demanding insights into the girl’s mindset, anything that might help catch her before she did more damage. If she resisted and didn’t ask for Andy’s help, then any future murders committed by Eden would be her fault. And if she did ask for help and got it, she would be in Andy’s debt. Of course, Andy had no intention of calling in that debt. That wasn’t the plan.
Instead, Andy simply wanted to rebuild the trust she’d lost. Admittedly, when one goes from being friends with a person to trying to poison them, it can be hard to mend the relationship. But Andy was sure that over time, her repeated, altruistic efforts to help Jessie catch disturbed people doing terrible things would win over her once and future friend. Admittedly, she was creating the very violence that she would later help stop. But that was a pesky detail.
Eventually, inevitably, Jessie would start to soften. She would acknowledge that Andy’s assistance was helpful, even vital. She would hear from the doctors at PDC that Andy was making real progress in therapy, showing genuine remorse. She would begin to consider the possibility that Andy was capable of change.
From there, it was short trip back to friendship and whatever lay beyond. Andy knew that Jessie had a best friend already, a brutish thing named Kat. She knew Jessie had a half-sister, a basket case named Hannah. And she knew Ryan Hernandez, Jessie’s partner and now fiancé. He was an attractive but unworthy man. Soon, all of them would recede in Jessie’s estimation, surpassed by Andrea Robinson. And if by some chance, they didn’t fade from her heart, Andy would ensure that they left her life in more dramatic ways.
“Andy,” a voice called out, snapping her out of her reverie, “Are you okay?”
She turned around to see one of the facility attendants, a dolt named Dewey, staring at her.
“Of course,” she said with a sweet smile, “why?”
“It’s just that you’ve been staring out that window, not moving, for a few minutes,” he said with real concern. “I just wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.”
Dewey had the twin gifts of being both somewhat dim-witted and easily manipulated. All it had taken was some perfunctory flirting and feigned interest in his life to make him her bitch boy. He wasn’t going to help her escape or anything crazy like that. But if she needed to make a phone call after hours or have an unapproved visitor stop by, he’d happily bend the rules a little.
At some point, she’d take greater advantage of that, but right now it was enough to keep him on simmer. Being in this place was boring and playing Dewey like a yo-yo offered some measure of amusement. But very soon, if Eden did her job well, things would get much more entertaining. It was all coming together.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jessie convinced Ryan to wait.
As much as he had wanted to storm over to Bridget’s casita right after talking to Cedric Cleaver, Jessie had persuaded him not to.
“They’re all going to The Cove bar tonight,” she had reminded him. “Let’s hold off until then. Matt Darcy will have had a few more drinks by that time. He was already getting lubricated when I saw him earlier. By the time we go to the bar, his defenses should be down. We’ll find a moment to get him alone and then see what we can squeeze out of him.”
Ryan had acquiesced, which was why they, along with Kat, had spent the last few hours eating dinner while on the phone with Jamil and Beth, all of them reviewing resort video and financial documents from the Newhouses, Darcys and Andrews. It proved mostly fruitless.
“This could all be for nothing,” Ryan had eventually blurted out in frustration. “Assuming that Scott Newhouse was killed, there’s no certainty that it was any of these people. It could have been some random guest in the men’s area of the spa who killed him for thrills. If the killer was wearing a hooded robe and didn’t sign in or out, we’d never know. We’re fixating on these five people because we have no choice, but it could be a wild goose chase.”
After several seconds without anyone talking, Kat finally spoke up.
“Talk about a negative Nellie,” she teased. “You’re bumming me out, Hernandez.”
Even though he made good points, Jessie agreed. Maybe it was falling behind earlier when they were chasing Ronnie Nance through the laundry, which might have bruised his confidence. Maybe it was all that talk about pre-marital counseling from Cedric Cleaver. But Ryan just wasn’t as relentlessly confident as she was used to seeing him. She decided it was time to shake things up.
“It’s almost 8 p.m.,” she said, standing up and stretching dramatically. “I think it’s time we let our brilliant research team clock out for the day. Besides, it’s getting late enough that we can head over to The Cove to see if Darcy is feeling chatty. What do you say?”
“I say let’s go,” Ryan replied immediately, standing up as well.
Kat waved her arm in opposition
“And I say, since I’m absolutely coming with you guys, I need ten minutes.”
“Why?” Ryan protested.
“You two may be stuck wearing the clothes you arrived in,” she noted. “But I’ve got a whole wardrobe of fancy clothes on loan from this place, one of which is a cocktail dress I’ll never have another chance to wear. I’m not wasting the opportunity.”
While she went off to change, Jessie entertained herself by watching her fiancé fidget and pace nonstop, completely unaware that he was doing it.
*
Getting into The Cove was an undertaking and Jessie was losing patience with it.
There was no easy way into the VIP-only bar. It was built into the side of a cliff, just feet above where waves crashed against the rocks that formed its outside. But it was only accessible via Breakers, the less restrictive club high above it, which sat atop the cliff.