“This place” was an official WITSEC safe house. Though she despised being in the sterile tract home with US Marshals always around, she couldn’t really argue that it wasn’t necessary. After all, it had been less than two weeks since she escaped an attack by her murderous serial killer father, Xander Thurman, who had been hunting for her for months.

And just days after that, his most ardent admirer, another killer named Bolton Crutchfield, had escaped from a psychiatric prison facility, along with four other dangerous prisoners. Two had been captured. But in addition to Crutchfield, two others were still on the loose.

So Jessie wasn’t in a position to quarrel when Captain Roy Decker, her boss at LAPD, ordered her to do whatever the marshals with the Witness Security Program instructed until the situation was resolved. And that meant essentially living under house arrest while she was on a mandated leave of absence from her work as a forensic profiler.

She wasn’t even technically a witness in a pending trial. But because of the imminent threat to her life, her work in law enforcement, and her connection to both the LAPD and the FBI, an exception had been made.

Until her father and Crutchfield were captured or killed, she was stuck. She spent her days following case updates online, broken up by frequent, near-frenzied workout sessions and self-defense training that did little to mitigate her stir-craziness.

The ten-week training program she’d recently taken at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, had provided her with effective fighting skills and new profiling techniques. But it hadn’t taught her how to deal with the crushing boredom of being housebound for twenty-four hours a day.

The house itself was perfectly nice, located on a quiet residential block in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Palms. In the late-spring mornings, she sipped her coffee and watched parents walk their children to the elementary school a few blocks away.

The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, where it could be more easily secured and protected. But that meant there wasn’t much to see most days. Usually around mid-morning, she’d go outside for a swim in the pool, which was covered by a large tarp, theoretically for shade but actually to undermine the prying eyes of neighbors.

Things were even worse now that Kat had left. For a few days her friend had been allowed to stay at the house as well, in part because authorities feared Bolton Crutchfield might come after her too. After all, Kat Gentry had been head of security at NRD—short for Non-Rehabilitative Division—the facility at the Department State Hospital-Metropolitan in Norwalk that Crutchfield and the other prisoners had escaped from. There was concern that some of them might want payback.

But when Kat mentioned she might take a long trip to Europe to clear her head, the marshals leapt at the idea as both a way to keep her off the radar and to reduce their security costs. Jessie still recalled their conversation from several days ago.