Page 41 of The Perfect Appearance

“So if I’m calling,” she replied, pressing ahead, “it must be for a pretty good reason.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

"I want to help you catch her so that I can start living my life again."

"I'm sorry, Hannah, but did you graduate from the FBI training Academy without anyone telling me? If not, I'm not sure how you can be of assistance."

“Wow,” she replied testily, “you don’t have to be jerk about it.”

"We're good," he said loudly, though it sounded like he was talking to someone other than her. "Sorry about that, Hannah, but I had to be sure this was really you and not Pierce trying to manipulate me. I had to put you through voice recognition, and that meant getting you to speak outside your normal speaking range. In other words, I had to piss you off. How’d I do?”

“A+,” she said, relieved. “Now can we get down to business?”

"I'm not sure how you can help, but I'm curious to hear. Go for it."

“You’ve looked at the file on my time with her,” she told him, diving right in. “You know that I’ve had more personal interaction with her, more recently, than anyone else you have access to.”

“What about her fellow prison inmates?” he countered.

“I guarantee you that she was in performance mode the whole time she was there,” Hannah replied, “so she could lull them all into complacency for her escape. Did she get in any fights? Did she violate a single rule while she was imprisoned? I’m guessing no. She didn’t want to give the authorities there any reason to doubt her. And since inmates squeal if they think it will help reduce their sentences, she wouldn’t have confided in any of them. Ash Pierce isn’t the confiding type. She murdered the accomplice she used to get to me and Kat as soon as he had served his purpose. But remember, I saw her in both acting mode and real mode a lot more recently than the people she used to work with. Tell me what you know, any leads you have, no matter how weak. Maybe she said something to me in passing that can help connect the dots as to where she’s hiding or what she’s up to. Stuff that might seem unimportant to you could be a bright, flashing light to me.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“I can’t send you anything, Hannah,” he said. “I can’t risk Pierce getting her hands on info related to our investigation.”

“I get it,” she replied. “So just talk to me. Tell me what you have, and I’ll see if anything leaps out at me. If it doesn’t, all you’ve lost is time. And I’m guessing that if you’ve listened to me this long, you’re desperate enough to make more time.”

There was another silence, even longer than the first one. When he eventually replied, his voice was low.

“Give me ten minutes,” he whispered. “I’ll call you back on this line. Don’t waste my time, Hannah.”

“Agent Dolan,” she replied. “You don’t have to worry about that. Remember, it’s my life on the line.”

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Jessie tried to stay positive.

She and Grover Nix were sitting in his car in the covered parking garage adjacent to the Beverly Hills public library, which offered some respite from the sun. They listened to the HSS research team on speakerphone as they typed away. Neither researcher had spoken in minutes.

Even though Jamil and Beth hadn’t had a hit yet, Jessie felt confident that it was only a matter of time before they’d make a connection between the patients of Gemma Britton and Isabel Shea. After all, they’d only been at it for twenty minutes. Sometimes, this sort of thing took hours, if not days.

“I’ve got something,” Jamil said, as if reading her mind.

“What?” Jessie and Grover asked in unison.

“So far we haven’t found any overlap among Britton and Shea’s patients in private practice, but I do find one who they each saw under less conventional circumstances.”

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Jessie told him.

“Okay,” Jamil said. “About seven years ago, before she became famous, Gemma Britton co-authored a study about recidivism involving felons who were originally incarcerated as minors. One of the study subjects being held at California State Prison-Corcoran was named Judd Banner. He had been sentenced to fourteen years for an armed robbery in which a clerk was shot by the other robber.”

“Sounds promising so far,” Jessie noted.

"Three years ago," Jamil continued, "Isabel Shea was part of an entirely separate program that attempted to help prepare long-incarcerated felons for re-integration into society after their release. Banner was part of the program, and she worked with him on multiple occasions. She left the program two years ago, but Banner remained a part of it. His sentence was reduced to nine years for good behavior, and he was paroled four months ago."

“Where is he now?” Jessie asked.

"I have some info on that, but it's a couple of weeks old," Jamil said. "I'm not sure if it's still accurate. Do you want to contact his parole officer directly?"

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