Page 14 of The Perfect Illusion

“What’s on it?”

“It’s a recording of the run-through,” Sullivan said. “I like to review them later to see where there are issues: timing lulls, poor spacing—that sort of thing.”

“Go ahead,” Jessie said.

Sullivan took out the thumb drive and held it up between his thumb and forefinger for them to see. Something about the thing jogged a memory for Jessie. It took a moment for her to make the connection. The thumb drive looked very similar to the decorative pendant on a necklace in Mark Haddonfield’s box of personal effects. Could that be what the pendant actually was—a thumb drive hidden as a decoration? She knew what she would be doing when she got home.

Sullivan plugged the drive into his desktop and motioned for them to come around to look at the screen. A video popped up with a wide shot of a ballroom with a stage at the back. There was a timestamp in the upper corner. Sullivan moved the video to 5 P.M.

“That’s me,” he said, pointing at a man shown from the back who seemed to be wearing the same sport coat that Sullivan had on now. When he turned around, it was clear that it was him.

“Where was this run-through held?” Jessie asked.

“Same place as the pageant will be,” Sullivan said. “The Costa Mesa Grand Hotel.”

He fast-forwarded at double speed, repeatedly pointing himself out every time he appeared on camera. From 6:06 to 6:21 P.M., the official window of death for Patricia Hollinger, he was never off-screen for more than four minutes. That stretch of time was barely long enough to run to the bathroom and back, much less drive to Brentwood. That didn’t mean that Sullivan couldn’t have hired someone to do his dirty work. But based on their current surroundings, Jessie had doubts that he could afford anything that ambitious.

They’d need to follow up to be sure, but it was looking increasingly likely that, while Marcus Sullivan was a reprehensible person, he was not Patricia’s killer. That didn’t stop Jessie from reconsidering grabbing the phone handset and doling out some justice for the crimes he had committed. She felt that invisible fist squeezing her again and turned to Brady.

“I was going to run to the restroom,” she said. “You got this?”

“Sure,” he said, clearly slightly surprised that she would exit the interview before it was over. But he said nothing more.

She left the inner office and rushed through the outer one too. After stepping into the hall, she pulled the door closed behind her and leaned against the wall. Taking long deep breaths, she waited for the fist to release its grip, and along with it, the anger bubbling inside her.

It took quite a while.

CHAPTER NINE

Dallas Henry showed up to the coffee shop just off campus ten minutes early.

He knew should have been nervous but what he felt was closer to anticipation.

They were supposed to meet at 5 P.M. but he didn’t want to take any chances and end up arriving late. That wasn’t the impression he wanted to present.

This was his first get-together with Hannah Dorsey since their big conversation. That was when he’d suggested that they hold off on any social interaction outside class until she was sure that’s what she really wanted.

They had, of course, chatted on the way out of class several times. He'd even walked her to her next class on a couple of occasions. But that was about it. He didn't want to push for fear that it would alienate her. Despite her casual confidence, it was clear that Hannah was skittish around guys she didn't know that well.

And as Dallas adjusted the napkins on the table where he waited for Hannah, he silently wondered who could blame her? Based on the research he’d done, she been through more in her nineteen years than most people deal with in ten lifetimes.

Her father, a notorious serial killer known as the Ozarks Executioner, drugged and killed her mother when she was a baby. He returned years later to torture her and murder her adoptive parents. If not for the famous profiler Jessie Hunt, the man would have killed her too. Amazingly, that serial killer was Hunt’s father as well, making them half-sisters. After the incident, Jessie had formally adopted Hannah.

That horrific event would have been enough for most people to deal with, but based on what Dallas has gleaned, not long after that, another serial killer—one who idolized The Ozarks Executioner—kidnapped Hannah and tried to brainwash her into turning against Jessie and killing her. There was more, including Jessie’s ex-husband attempting to kill both women, as well as Jessie’s fiancé. Compared to all that, the incident in which a fellow student tried to assault Hannah in a university library seemed comparatively tame.

If Dallas had gone through even a fraction of what Hannah had, he suspected he’d be institutionalized right now. He’d had his fair share of tragedy, including the death of his father in a car crash six years ago. But his suffering couldn’t hold a candle to hers. And if things went as planned, that suffering would continue soon.

"Salted caramel latte for Dallas," the barista called out and he got up to grab it. He'd already been given his drip coffee, but he'd asked Hannah a week ago what her favorite coffee drink was. Now, he hoped to surprise her by having it waiting when she arrived.

It was all part of his plan to make her as comfortable with him as possible, no matter how many baby steps it took. All her emotional callouses served to protect her. And he needed to scrape them away before he could truly put his plan into action.

The things he intended to do to her would be more effective—and more painful—if the actual physical horrors were accompanied by a sense of betrayal at the hands of someone she’d grown to trust. So it was his job to win that trust.

He knew that he'd already made it part of the way there, or she wouldn't be meeting with him at all, much less alone and off-campus. That meant he'd scrubbed his personal history effectively. He knew that Hannah was adept at searching the web in ways the average person couldn't. So there couldn't be any record of his dark web activity, especially his participation in several men's rights groups that engaged in conversations some might consider "outside the bounds of acceptable discourse."

He didn’t however scrub evidence of his troubled early teen years, the stretch soon after he learned that his father had actually committed suicide in a “car accident” after his mother left him for her boss. He needed some dirt on him. Looking too goody-two-shoes would be suspicious to Hannah. But his official record could actually work to his advantage.

The image he presented was of a young man, upset over his father’s death, who got into some fights at school leading to detentions and even a brief drug-related suspension. But after a rough freshman year of high school, he “turned it around” in the middle of his sophomore year, finding the strength to move forward.

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