Page 55 of Tell Me (Savannah 3)

Hadn’t she sensed that someone had been following her? What about the guy in the park when she’d gone running? And then there was that time when someone had tried to run her down with a sports car—or at the very least scare her. She’d thought it just a lack of judgment, a near miss by a speeding driver, almost an accident.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

“Don’t let it get to you,” she said aloud, wondering if whoever was on the other end of the camera could hear her—a possibility she didn’t like. She considered destroying it but immediately reconsidered. She needed to find out who the voyeur was first. But she didn’t want the damn thing still functioning, so she located the battery pack, opened it, and removed the power to the little device. “Take that,” she said, then glanced around her unit. Surely there were no other bugs or microphones.

Shivering inwardly, she recalled another time and place, when she had been locked in a tight space, unable to breathe, a tiny microphone recording her terror. Sweat suddenly beaded along her hairline, and she felt her pulse elevate as it always did with her panic attacks. Don’t go there. Everything is fine. Just go about your business.

Slowly, eyeing her connecting rooms, she took several deep breaths. She couldn’t lose it now. She had calls in to Niall O’Henry and Holt Beauregard, along with a few other people Amity had gone to school with or who had known Blondell before she’d been incarcerated.

She just didn’t have time to fall apart. At least not yet.

Nobody knew it, but Morrisette had a deep, innate fear. She hated prisons or jails or any kind of lockup, and the thought of spending time behind any kind of bars nearly paralyzed her insides.

As a teenager, she’d been caught with her boyfriend in a house they’d broken into. She’d lived in Bad Luck, Texas, at the time and had been hauled in by the city police. A big bear of a woman whose name she couldn’t remember had locked her in a holding cell and warned, “You’d better straighten up, little missy, or you’ll find yourself in jail for the rest of your life.” She’d left Morrisette alone for seven hours, and the isolation and lack of freedom had done the trick. From that moment on, Morrisette had taken the big cop’s snarled advice and determined she never wanted to hear the sound of a lock turning behind her again; in fact, she planned to be on the other side of the barred door, and so she’d become a cop.

Not that it wasn’t a great feeling to lock up some scumbag and throw away the key, but she preferred to fill out the paperwork and send the jerk up the river rather than step inside a penitentiary.

Today the old tightness in her chest was with her as she walked inside Fairfield Women’s Prison. She and Reed had waited in the reception area, been escorted to the warden’s surprisingly homey office, then, after a quick briefing, had been escorted to a private interrogation room that was a little too much like a prison cell, in Morrisette’s opinion. Though it was insulated from the general population and the cages where they were held, it still made Morrisette need to tamp down her case of the willies and wonder why the hell she’d ever given up smoking. Right now, she could use a Camel straight.

The area had cinder-block walls painted a dull green and wasn’t much larger than the bedroom in Morrisette’s duplex, and it was a lot less cozy, with its jail-cell door, metal table bolted to the floor, and intense artificial light. The concrete floor had been worn smooth, paths nearly visible on it, compliments of thousands of feet that had shuffled in and out of its barred door.

They waited, as they’d planned, with Reed taking a chair at the narrow table so that he could face the prisoner and her attorney, while Morrisette hung back, leaning against the wall, observing the conversation.

She heard footsteps in the outer hallway and looked up just as Blondell appeared, shackled and escorted by an armed guard whose expression suggested she didn’t know how to smile. Blondell was the older and by far the prettier of the two. Her auburn hair, strands of silver visible, was long and pulled away from he

r face; her cheekbones were still high, and above them large, gray eyes still held a child-like innocence, despite the charges that had been brought against her, despite twenty years of lockup.

Along with the prisoner and the guard came, of course, Blondell’s new attorney, Jada Hill, who looked like some Hollywood producer’s idea of a smart, black woman who had clawed her way to the top. Dressed in a suit that probably cost half a month of Morrisette’s take-home pay, Jada Hill was thin and athletic-looking, with a defined jaw, mocha-colored skin, and a badass attitude that radiated from her.

“For the record,” Jada said, before the interview even got started, “my client maintains her innocence, as she has for the past twenty years. Her story hasn’t changed.” She smiled then, a grin that didn’t touch her dark eyes as she introduced herself, snapped open her briefcase, and slid a crisp business card across the table.

“We just want to hear her side of it,” Reed said affably, as if hoping to diffuse what promised to be a tense situation. “I wasn’t around during the original trial, so I’d like to ask a few questions of my own.”

Attorney Hill wasn’t about to be smooth-talked. “You’ve read her testimony and gone over her deposition?”

“Yes.” Reed nodded.

“So this is just a formality?” Blondell’s attorney clarified.

“I just want to hear it from her own lips, in her own words, as much as she can remember. As I said, I wasn’t a detective on the case at the time; in fact, I wasn’t even in the state of Georgia.”

“You have the records,” Hill pointed out again, but Blondell lifted a hand and in her soft-spoken Southern drawl said, “Of course, I’ll answer your questions, Detective. What is it you want to know?” She smiled easily, in a manner that was part innocence and part seduction, and Morrisette suddenly realized both were part of her personality. If she’d used her brain, she would have toned down the flirtatious glint in her dove-gray eyes, but she probably didn’t even know she was being coy.

“Just so we’re clear here,” Hill broke in. “I’m filing all the papers necessary to get my client released. I’ve already put a call in to the governor, and I’m sure that with Niall O’Henry recanting his testimony, and the egregious amount of time Ms. O’Henry has served, she will not only be released but compensated for losing twenty of the best years of her life, as well as her eldest daughter and grandchild, while being stripped of her right to raise her two remaining children.”

Reed held up a hand. “Save it for the governor or attorney general or district judge or whoever it is that needs to listen. All I want from your client at this time is to hear her side of the story firsthand.” Jada opened her mouth, thought better of it, then closed it tightly.

Turning his gaze directly to the prisoner, he said, “Okay, now that we all know where we stand, let’s start with your side of that night, in your own words.”

Blondell glanced at her lawyer, who gave a tight nod, then finally spoke. “It’s just as I said before. I took the kids out to the cabin for a break, so I could get my mind around what I thought would be the rest of my life. They were all inside, Niall and Blythe in the loft. Amity”—she blinked, cleared her throat, then went on—“was on a sofa bed downstairs in front of the fire. I was on the screened porch, listening to the rain, and I must’ve dozed off . . .”

And so the story went, nearly word-for-word what she’d testified to two decades earlier. She woke up, saw the stranger, and struggled with him, noting his tattoo in the semi-dark and so on and so forth.

Reed didn’t interrupt—nor, thankfully, did Jada Hill.

Morrisette realized that Blondell, whether speaking the truth or having rehearsed the story so often that now it rolled off her tongue like memorized lyrics, actually believed the tale she spun. In her early fifties, Blondell was still a striking woman. Despite her time in prison, her complexion was clear, her eyes bright, her smile, though fleeting, a little on the naughty side. Her small stature was trim and fit, and if anyone could pull off the unflattering prison garb, it was Blondell O’Henry, who looked fifteen years younger than she was.

Watching her partner’s reaction to arguably Savannah’s most notorious femme fatale, Morrisette finally understood the woman’s allure. To his credit, Reed was professional and respectful, but he listened with an intent, patient ear, a side of him Morrisette had seen very infrequently.

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