Just then, almost as if he was reading her mind, her husband appeared outside the conference room door, his brow furrowed in consternation. She smiled as she approached the door and unlocked it. Even looking worried, Ryan Hernandez was impossibly handsome.
His shirt was tucked in, casually highlighting his muscular frame. He ran a hand nervously through his short dark hair and offered her a half-smile that couldn’t hide his concern or his adorable dimples. His big, brown eyes, always filled with warmth and compassion, were currently clouded with uneasy thoughts.
“Your session with Dr. Lemmon is over, I gather?” he asked.
“Just finished,” she said. “What’s up? You look troubled.”
“More frustrated than troubled,” he replied, holding out the file he’d been gripping in his left hand. “The Marina del Rey Sheriff’s Station issued their final report on the Woody Garnett killing yesterday while you and Nettles were working that stalker case. So I asked Karen Bray and Susannah Valentine to review their findings for any discrepancies.”
“And?” Jessie asked, though she could already tell from his tone what the answer would be.
“Nothing,” he said, unable to hide his skepticism.
She tended to share the feeling. Woody Garnett was a recent murder victim who had been stabbed in the stomach on his own boat in the marina two weeks ago. Alone, that wasn’t especially interesting. But a few months back, Garnett was also nearly the victim of a serial killer, a young woman taking vengeance on cheating spouses. She had stabbed him in the stomach in a Marina del Rey hotel room and he would have died if Jessie and Ryan hadn’t arrived to stop her and save him. The nature and location of his death seemed awfully coincidental.
“Really?” she said, incredulously.
“They couldn’t find any connection to the prior case. Harper Grey, who stabbed him the first time, was locked up at the time of his murder. His ex-wife, who had the strongest motive to try to kill him this time around, was out of town. His ex-girlfriend—the one he left his wife for—had an alibi. No one else seemed to give a damn about him. There’s no motive. There’s no evidence to tie anyone to the scene. Nothing to go on at all. You’re welcome to review the file, but Karen and Susannah went over it pretty thoroughly and said the sheriff’s people did a solid job. No corner cutting. We may just have a strange twist of fate here.”
“Okay,” Jessie said, sensing an opening as she gently pushed the file back toward him, “I guess that means I can focus more energy on Zoe and this whole Operation Z thing.”
Ryan sighed heavily and she knew what was coming. But she said nothing. She wasn’t going to make it easy for him. She was going to make him speak the words.
“About that,” he said, motioning for her to take a seat at the conference table as he closed the door, “I’ve been doing some thinking. I know what Zoe told you. But I just don’t see how she could make this threat a reality. Think about it. She spent months strategizing that attack on the movie theater. Then she was arrested. Do you really think she had the time to plan this alternative Operation Z? Or the resources? Andy is dead. She’s not writing any checks these days. This sounds like a young woman who is frustrated that her big operation got short-circuited and is lashing out by making collect calls to you, trying to scare you into thinking the people you love are still in danger.”
Jessie was far less certain. There was no reason that, during all those months that she planned the movie theater attack, Zoe couldn’t have also been planning something else. And who was to say that Andy Robinson didn’t provide Zoe with all manner of financial resources through back channels that they had yet to uncover?
Still, she couldn’t deny that Ryan might have a point. This could just be an unstable, resentful woman attempting to create anxiety for her mentor’s nemesis in whatever pathetic way was still available to her. Either way, she knew they couldn’t have officers providing security for them forever. It wasn’t tenable and it wasn’t fair.
She knew that Chief Decker had a soft spot for her and would authorize the cost of the protective units in perpetuity, but she couldn’t put him in that position. He’d only just been named permanent chief. He didn’t need the press asking questions about preferential treatment for people from his old station and their civilian loved ones, even if there was legitimate cause.
And Ryan had only been the captain of Central Station for a few months now himself. Even though he’d never say it, every additional day that he had a protective detail was a day that he looked weak to the rank and file.
Finally, there was Hannah and Kat. When Jessie had first learned of this threat, she’d gone straight to her best friend and said that her little sister’s safety was in her hands, regardless of how many LAPD officers were around. Kat hadn’t batted an eye. That was because Kat Gentry hadn’t always been a private detective.
Prior to that, she was in charge of security for a psychiatric facility for mentally unwell criminals. More importantly for Jessie’s purposes, before taking that position, she’d served in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger, where she engaged in everything from special reconnaissance to close combat missions, until she was injured in an IED explosion that left her with scars both internal and external. Despite that, or maybe because of it, Jessie knew that Kat would be on high alert every second that she and Hannah were together.
“When are you dropping the protective details?’ she asked Ryan, not even attempting to argue with him.
“I put in the order this morning,” he said. “The unit assigned to meet Kat and Hannah has been alerted and I will tell them in person momentarily.”
“Okay,” Jessie said, standing up and starting for the conference room door. “I would have preferred more of a heads-up, but since it’s a done deal at this point, I guess we’ll just have to trust that Zoe is full of crap.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, following close behind her, “at some point, it becomes a ‘crying wolf’ situation when she keeps making all these idle threats.”
Jessie stopped in her tracks at the conference room door and turned to face him. She could tell from his guilty expression that he knew he’d screwed up.
“What do you mean, ‘keeps making all these threats,’ Ryan? She only called me once. What aren’t you telling me?”
CHAPTER TWO
For a second, it looked to Jessie like Ryan might try to squirm out of it.
Then his whole body slumped, and he leaned back against the glass window of the conference room.
“That call you got from Zoe wasn’t the first time she made a threat like that,” he muttered under his breath.
“When was the first time?” Jessie asked, trying to control the volume of her voice.
“The night we stopped Operation Z, when I arrested her at the movie theater,” he said, his eyes focused on a spot on the carpet between them. “She said something very similar as I was cuffing her.”
Jessie swallowed hard before responding, again trying to fight off the urge to yell.
“Why didn’t you think to mention that?”
“In part, for the same reason I mentioned earlier. I thought she was blowing smoke after getting caught, trying to puff herself up. Also, after everything you’d been through, I didn’t want to worry you. I thought that after the kidnapping, along with the concussion you suffered and Callum’s death, it was one more thing you didn’t need.”