Page 46 of The Perfect Crime

When she’d said yes, it was because Kat was so upset after this afternoon.She confided that when she lost contact with Hannah during her visit to the underground jewelry shop, she’d been legitimately concerned that Hannah was being sold into sexual slavery or cut up into little pieces.Hannah felt she owed it to her sometime mentor to show her a fun evening.

But it was almost 10 p.m.now, and after several good hours involving pizza and a crappy action movie, Kat was at it again, harping on how she’d put herself in an untenable position in that clandestine back-alley store.

“You could have been killed and I wouldn’t have even known where to look for the body,” Kat reiterated as they sat on the couch.

“Sure you would have,” Hannah said, trying to lighten the mood.“I told you the place had a metal door and a chick with purple hair sitting nearby on a barstool.You almost certainly would have found my remains before they moved them somewhere else.”

“That’s not funny,” Kat insisted.

“It’s a little funny,” Hannah replied with a smile.“Besides, my decision to go in there basically resolved our case.Now we know that Rex Stiller isn’t cheating, that he in fact loves his family very much.Today we—or at least I—saw him bring food to his struggling son and buy some sketchily sourced earrings for his wife.He’s a flawed man who doesn’t seem overly concerned with the moral implications of his jewelry purchase, but from what I can tell, he’s not a bad person.”

“Maybe,” Kat muttered.“The fact that he was willing to go to a place like that doesn’t reflect very well on him.”

“But that’s not our call to make,” Hannah protested.“Our job was to determine if he was guilty of what his wife suspected him of.He wasn’t.I know that as a private investigator, you’re primed to look for the worst in everyone because you see it so often, but not everyone’s bad.In this case, the guy turned out to be, all things considered, kind of a mensch.”

“He’s in the minority as far as I’m concerned,” Kat said.“Most folks I encounter in this gig—and in general lately—arebad, plain and simple.”

“I get that you see it that way,” Hannah said, deciding it was time to bring up the issue she’d been keeping to herself all day.“And with what you’ve been through recently, I don’t blame you for that worldview.But I have to say—I think that your fixation on Ash Pierce is curdling your perspective and making it hard for you to move on.”

Kat looked at her sideways.Hannah girded herself.Things were about to come to a head.

“Why did you mention Ash Pierce?”she asked.

Hannah sighed, taking one last bite of pizza before facing the music she knew was inevitable.

“Because I learned from the best,” she finally answered, “you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that when we were surveilling Stiller’s office yesterday and you left briefly to go to the restroom, I slipped an AirTag into your change purse.”

“Why would you do that?”Kat demanded.

Her face turned beet red.Hannah couldn’t be sure whether it was more out of anger or embarrassment.Frankly, she didn’t care.

“Because, when you asked me to watch Stiller solo for a while because you had a ‘meditation appointment,’ something felt off,” she said forcefully.“So I did the sort of thing you taught me.And what do you know?Your appointment turned out to be going to the courthouse where Ash Pierce had a hearing scheduled.What a coincidence.”

Kat didn’t try to deny it.

“She tortured me, Hannah,” she said by way of justification, “and then she tried to kill me.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Hannah replied.“You know why?Because I’m the one who found you in the desert, beaten and tied up.I’m the one who stopped her.And need I remind you, she tried to kill me that night too, and multiple other times, before we finally stopped her together.It messed me up, but I’ve made a conscious decision not to let that experience define me.Maybe you should do the same thing.”

“I’ve tried,” Kat said.“It didn’t take.”

"Listen," Hannah said, leaning in close, "I understand that you're struggling.Like you said, you were brutally tortured.And then you lost Mitch.It's hard to know where to put your feelings about those things.For a while, I wondered why you weren't pouring your emotional energy into tracking the trial details of the man responsible for your fiancé's death.After all, Mark Haddonfield's trial starts next week.But I think I know why you've fixated on Pierce."

“Oh really,” Kat said defensively, “I’m all ears.”

“It’s because you know that Mark Haddonfield is never getting out of prison.There’s an ironclad case against him and despite everything he’s done, he’s still just a gawky college dropout in over his head against the legal system.But Pierce is something different.”

Kat didn’t say anything, so Hannah continued.

“Ash Pierce was in Marines Special Ops, trained to both attack and evade,” she said.“After that, she worked as an assassin for the military and the CIA.Once she got out of government work, she’s made her living as a hitwoman, adept in deception and able to alter her identity.She tricked both of us, making us think she was an abused wife, so that she could get to us when we were most vulnerable.After she was caught, she escaped a prison transport.And when we finally took her down, she was injured so badly that she entered a coma which left her with amnesia, a claim I know you don’t believe is legitimate.You’re worried that she might escape again, or worse, beat the charges against her by somehow earning sympathy from a jury.You know that Haddonfield will die in prison.But you fear that one way or another, Pierce might outwit the system.So you’re thinking of ways to make sure that doesn’t happen—or do something about it if she does.How am I doing?”

Kat’s silence told her she was on the right track.

“I’m warning you,” she pleaded, “and I speak from experience: pursuing vengeance won’t get you what you want.If you allow yourself to be consumed by her, she wins.You have to let this go for your own sake.”

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