“Hello?” she said.
After an unusually long silence, a digitally altered voice responded.
“Stop now. Hannah has been through enough already. Do you want her to suffer more?”
Then the line went dead.
“Ryan!” she screamed.
He was halfway to his car but sprinted back over immediately.
“What is it?” he asked breathlessly.
She told him what the caller had said.
“We have to go check on her,” she insisted.
“Of course,” he said. “Where would she be right now?”
Jessie looked at the time: 11:37.
“She’d still be at the school she started at last week.”
“Okay. Give me the address and I’ll follow you there. You call her directly while I call for a unit to get over there now. They’ll do a welfare check and stay until we arrive.”
She gave him the address, hopped in the car, and immediately called Hannah. It went straight to voicemail.
Stay calm. The school makes them turn off their phones during class. That’s all this is.
But knowing it was normal not to be able to reach her and believing it were two different things. As she zigzagged through midday traffic on the longest twelve-minute drive of her life, Jessie called the front office. She got voicemail for that too.
“This is the administrative office. We’re sorry no one is able to take your call. Please listen to the list of options and select your preference. A staffer will respond at the earliest possible convenience.”
Jessie screamed at the automated message as she punched in “0.” The action had no impact. She wanted to throw the phone but instead forced herself to listen to the phone tree choices, trying to determine who was most likely to actually be at their desk. When she heard that she should dial “6” for the library, she decided that was as good a choice as any.
Someone picked up on the third ring.
“Library,” the whispered female voice said. “Please hold.”
“No!” Jessie yelled. “This is an emergency.”
“I’m sorry,” the voice said, clearly startled.
“My name is Jessie Hunt. I work for the Los Angeles Police Department. My sister is a student there. A threat was just made against her. Her name is Hannah Dorsey. I need you to go to the head of campus security, have them determine her current location, and go there and secure her. Officers will arrive shortly to help. Do you understand?”
“No,” said the understandably flustered librarian.
“Listen to me closely. Get a pen and a piece of paper right now,” she ordered and managed to wait two full seconds before continuing. “Got them?”
“Yes? Is this a prank?”
“It’s not a prank,” Jessie said firmly, fighting the urge to yell. “Write the following down: Go find the security officer. Give him the name Hannah Dorsey. She’s a senior. Tell him to find and secure her. She may be in danger. Give him the phone number that I’m about to give you and tell him to call me—Jessie Hunt.”
The librarian eventually calmed down enough to repeat the instructions back to her. Then Jessie sent her on her way. Glancing at her phone, she saw a text from Ryan saying a unit was en route to the school and would be there in four minutes. Assuming her GPS was correct, she’d be there three minutes after that.
Three minutes. An eternity. What’s the difference?
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Hannah was still pissed.
Jessie saw it immediately upon arriving in the security office, before the girl even said a word. And now, over an hour later, Hannah was clearly still seething.
In one sense, it was understandable. She had been dragged out of Calculus by the security officer without explanation, giving her and all her classmates the impression that she was being arrested. She had been ordered to the security office without any idea why she had to go. Two uniformed officers showed up moments later and stood guard outside the office until Jessie arrived.
She’d done her best to make it clear that her half-sister hadn’t done anything wrong and that this was a safety measure for her own protection. But Hannah didn’t care about that. She had been publicly embarrassed at a school she’d only been at for a week and a half. How was she supposed to try to reclaim a normal life if she couldn’t even go to class without a crisis?
It was a fair question and as they waited in Jessie’s car down the block from their destination, she tried her best to answer it. But Hannah wasn’t satisfied. Telling a seventeen-year-old that her safety was a higher priority than her popularity didn’t go over well. Telling her that returning to something resembling normalcy would occur in fits and starts got an enormous eye roll. Jessie feared how Hannah would react to her answer to the next question.
“What are we doing here?” she asked as they sat in Jessie’s parked car on a quiet mid-Wilshire residential street.
“We’re waiting for a colleague to arrive,” Jessie answered.
“Is that what you’re calling Ryan these days—a colleague? Did you two have a lovers’ spat?”
“It’s not Ryan,” Jessie told her, refusing to be baited. “It’s a man named Garland Moses. He’s agreed to spend the afternoon with you while I look into the threat against you.”
“Why can’t we just go back to the apartment?” Hannah whined. “You’ve got so many locks and alarms and security codes, it’s like frickin’ Rikers Island. Aren’t we safer there than at some shack on an unprotected city street?”
“We’ll be able to go back there soon,” Jessie assured her. “But for now, this is the best option. Garland Moses is one of the few people I totally trust. And with Kat on an impromptu trip to meet a charming deputy sheriff in Lake Arrowhead, he’s the only one of those people currently available. So that’s who you’ll be hanging out with for the next few hours.”
“Isn’t he that old dude?”
“If by ‘old,’ you mean one of the most legendary forensic profilers in American history, then yeah, I guess he’s on the older side.”
“Yeah, old,” Hannah reiterated. “How’s that guy going to keep me safe?”
“Appearances can be deceiving, Hannah. That guy has tangled with more serial killers than you can name. You and I will never forget that night trapped with our psycho father. Garland Moses has been through half a dozen scrapes with guys like him. He’s old but he’s wily.”
Just then, Moses pulled into his driveway. He got out of his beat up old VW bug and waved over at them.
“He drove here from the other direction and we’re halfway down the block,” Hannah noted. “How did he know this car was us?”
“Old guy instinct,” Jessie replied as she started the car and pulled up in front of Moses’s house.
The place wasn’t a shack but it was on the smaller side. A quaint one-story, mid-century home, it looked out of place among the much larger, more modern houses that had taken over the block. The small porch out front looked like it had been built much more recently. Jessie couldn’t explain why but she suspected Garland had done it himself.
“Hello, Ms. Hunt,” he said with as close to warmth as he could muster. “And this must be the infamous Hannah Dorsey. I see the scowl is already in full effect.”