The Perfect House

Penny went with her to campus police and sat in the courtroom to offer moral support when she testified. And when the tennis coach wanted to drop her from the team and pull her scholarship because she was still struggling months later, Penny went to him and threatened to help her friend sue the bastard. Eliza stayed on the team and won conference player of the year as a junior.

When Eliza miscarried after trying to get pregnant for eighteen months, Penny came over every day until she was finally ready to crawl out of bed. And when Penny’s older son, Colt Jr., was diagnosed with autism, it was Eliza who did weeks of research and found the school that finally helped him start thriving.

They’d been through so many battles together that they liked to call themselves the Westside Warriors, even if their husbands thought the name was ridiculous. So if Penny was suggesting she reconsider marriage counseling, maybe she should.

Eliza was pulled out of her thoughts by a ding on Penny’s phone. She reached over and grabbed it, ready to let her friend know someone was reaching out. But when she saw the name on the text, she opened the message. It was from Gray Longworth, Eliza’s husband. It read:

Can’t wait 2 c u 2nite. I miss your scent. Three days without u is too long. I told Lizzie I have a partner’s dinner. Same time & place, right?

Eliza put the phone down. Her head was suddenly swimming and she felt weak. The mug slipped from her hand, hit the ground, and shattered into dozens of ceramic shards.

Penny ran back outside.

“Everything okay?” she asked. “I heard something break.”

She looked down at the mug with coffee splattered all around it, and then up at Eliza’s stunned face.

“What is it?” she asked.

Eliza’s eyes moved involuntarily to Penny’s phone and she watched her friend track them with her own. She saw the moment of recognition in Penelope’s eyes as she put two and two together and realized what must have so startled her oldest, dearest friend.

“It’s not like it seems,” Penny said anxiously, dispensing with any attempt to deny what they both knew.

“How could you?” Eliza demanded, barely able to get the words out. “I trusted you more than anyone in the world. And you do this?”

She felt like someone had opened a trap door below her and she was falling into a pit of nothingness. Everything that grounded her life seemed to be disintegrating before her eyes. She thought she might throw up.

“Please, Eliza,” Penny begged, kneeling down beside her friend. “Let me explain. It did happen, but it was a mistake—one that I’ve been trying to fix ever since.”

“A mistake?” Eliza repeated, sitting upright in her chair as nausea mixed with anger, making a churning cauldron of bile bubble up from her stomach to her throat. “A mistake is tripping on a curb and knocking someone over. A mistake is forgetting to carry the one in a subtraction problem. A mistake isn’t accidentally letting your best friend’s husband inside you, Penny!”

“I know,” Penny acknowledged, her voice choking with regret. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was a terrible decision, made in a moment of weakness, fueled by too many glasses of viognier. I told him it was over.”

“‘Over’ suggests it was more than once,” Eliza noted, scrambling to her feet. “Exactly how long have you been sleeping with my husband?”

Penny stood there silently, clearly debating whether being honest would do more harm than good.

“About a month,” she finally admitted.

Suddenly her husband’s recent time away from the family made more sense. Each new revelation seemed to pack a new punch to the gut. Eliza felt that the only thing keeping her from collapsing was her sense of righteous rage.

“Funny,” Eliza pointed out bitterly. “That’s about how long Gray has been having those late-night partner meetings you told me he probably felt bad about. What a coincidence.”

“I thought I could control it…” Penny started to say.

“Don’t give me that,” Eliza said, shutting her down. “We both know you can get restless. But this is how you dealt with it?”

“I know this doesn’t help,” Penny insisted. “But I was going to break it off. I haven’t talked to him in three days. I was just trying to find a way to end it with him without blowing things up with you.”

“Looks like you’re going to need a new plan,” Eliza spat, fighting the urge to kick the coffee cup shards at her friend. Only her bare feet prevented her. She clung to her anger, knowing it was the only thing keeping her from falling apart completely.

“Please, let me find a way to make this right. There has to be something I can do.”

“There is,” Eliza assured her. “Leave now.”

Her friend stared at her for a moment. But she must have sensed how serious Eliza was because her hesitation was brief.

“Okay,” Penny said, picking up her things and scurrying toward the front door. “I’ll go. But let’s talk later. We’ve been through so much together, Lizzie. Let’s not let this ruin everything.”

Eliza forced herself not to scream epithets in response. This might be the last time she ever saw her “friend” again and she needed her to understand the magnitude of the situation.

“This is different,” she said slowly, with emphasis on each word. “All those other times were us against the world, having each other’s back. This time you stabbed me in mine. Our friendship is over.”

Then she slammed the door in her best friend’s face.

CHAPTER TWO

Jessie Hunt woke up with a start, briefly unsure where she was. It took a moment to remember that she was in midair, on a Monday morning flight from Washington, D.C., back to Los Angeles. She looked at her watch and saw she still had two hours left before they landed.

Trying not to drift off again, she roused herself by taking a sip from the water bottle stuffed in the seatback pocket. She swished it around her mouth, trying to get rid of the cottonmouth coating her tongue.

She had good reason to nap. The last ten weeks had been among the most exhausting of her life. She had just completed the FBI’s National Academy, an intense training program for local law enforcement personnel designed to familiarize them with FBI investigative techniques.

The exclusive program was only available to those nominated to attend by their supervisors. Unless accepted to go to Quantico to become a formal FBI agent, this crash course was the next best thing.

Under normal circumstances, Jessie wouldn’t have been eligible to go. Until recently, she had only been an interim junior criminal profiling consultant for the LAPD. But after she solved a high-profile case, her stock had risen rapidly.

In retrospect, Jessie understood why the academy preferred more experienced officers. For the first two weeks of the program, she’d felt completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information being thrown at her. She had classes in forensic science, law, terrorist mindsets, and her area of focus, behavioral science, which emphasized getting inside the minds of killers to better understand their motives. And none of that included the relentless physical training that left every muscle aching.

Eventually, she found her bearings. The courses, which were reminiscent of her recent graduate work in criminal psychology, began to make sense. After about a month, her body was no longer screaming when she woke up each morning. And best of all, the time she spent in the Behavioral Sciences Unit allowed her to interact with the best serial killer experts in the world. She hoped to one day be among them.

There was one added benefit. Because she worked so hard, both mentally and physically, for almost every waking moment, she hardly ever dreamed. Or at least, she didn’t have nightmares.

Back home, she often woke up screaming in a cold sweat as memories of her childhood or her more recent traumas replayed in her unconscious. She still remembered her most recent source of anxiety. It was her last conversation with incarcerated serial killer Bolton Crutchfield, the one in which he’d told her he would be chatting with her own murderous father sometime soon.

If she had been back in L.A. for the last ten weeks, she’d have spent most of that time obsessing over whether Crutchfield was telling the truth or screwing with her. And if he was being honest, how would he manage to coordinate a discussion with an on-the-lam killer while he was being held in a secure mental hospital?

But because she’d been thousands of miles away, focused on unrelentingly challenging tasks for almost every waking second, she hadn’t been able to fixate on Crutchfield’s claims. She likely would again soon, but not just yet. Right now, she was simply too tired for her brain to mess with her.

As she settled back into her seat, allowing sleep to envelop her again, Jessie had a thought.

So all I have to do to get good sleep for the rest of my life is spend every morning working out until I almost throw up, followed by ten hours of non-stop professional instruction. Sounds like a plan.

Before she fully formed the grin that was beginning to play at her lips, she was asleep again.

*

That sense of cozy comfort disappeared the second she walked outside of LAX just after noon. From this moment on, she would need to be on constant guard again. After all, as she’d learned before she left for Quantico, a never-captured serial killer was on the hunt. Xander Thurman had been looking for her for months. Thurman also happened to be her father.