The Perfect Show (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Thirty-Three)

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“Stop!” barked the thick-trunked officer with the name Gaston pinned to his uniform. “This is a secure area.”

Hannah instructed her body to quake in something approximating fright. It wasn’t all that hard. When she replied, she reminded herself to keep her voice high-pitched and quavery, like the uncertain teenager she wanted him to see.

“I know,” she said hesitantly, though she kept advancing, “but I’m doing a school project, and I was told it was that it was okay to be here.”

“Who told you that?” Officer Gaston demanded, “and stop moving forward.”

“Um, Nurse Jenny at the station,” she explained. “She’s a friend of the family. I want to be a nurse and she said I could come check out the hospital.”

“And she gave you permission to walk in this area, unaccompanied?” he asked skeptically.

“Well no,” Hannah replied, not wanting to put the woman’s job in any more jeopardy than it already was. “She got busy working and I just thought I’d check stuff out on my own. Is that cool?”

“No, it is not cool,” he retorted. “Officer Braden, search her.”

Another officer approached her, his right hand uncomfortably close to his gun holster.

“Ma’am, I need you to extend your hands out to the side,” Officer Braden said. “I’m going to search you.”

“Why do you need to search me in a hospital?” she protested even as she raised her arms, doing her best to seem oblivious to the nature of the situation.

“As I said before, young lady, this is a secure unit,” Gaston retorted in disbelief. “Didn’t Jenny explain what that meant?”

Officer Braden began to pat her down as she maintained a vibe of cluelessness.

“She said something about it,” Hannah conceded, “but I wasn’t paying super-close attention. I guess I just thought it meant that you take extra care of your patients up here, like maybe they were famous celebrities or something. But are you saying that you keep, like, criminals here?”

“She’s clean,” Officer Braden said, stepping away. “You can put your hands down, ma’am.”

“Thanks,” she said, before returning her attention to Gaston, “Are there criminals on this floor?”

“I’m not at liberty to comment on patients,” Gaston informed her humorlessly. “You need to turn around and go back to the nurses’ station. Frankly, I’m tempted to have you escorted off the floor, maybe even out of the hospital entirely.”

”What”s the big deal?” Hannah teased, hoping she was properly affecting ”brat” mode, ”Is there someone in here so scary that I can”t even know who he is. I mean, come on, are you protecting me from him or him from me? Am I that scary that I can’t even see who’s there?”

“It’s okay, Officer Gaston,” a voice called out. “You can let the girl in.”

Hannah immediately recognized it as Ash Pierce, though her voice sounded slightly different than she remembered. It was somehow less biting, softer than before. She wondered if that was due to the knife to the neck she’d given her or some actual change in the woman’s personality.

Even with the variation in vocal tone, the woman’s words sent a shiver of anxiety through her, followed by surge of excitement at the realization that she was actually going to be in the same room with Pierce. She did her best to hide both reactions. After all, she wasn’t supposed to know who was in there.

As she waited for Officer Gaston’s response, another thought popped into her head. She wondered why Pierce was letting her in. The woman had clearly heard their conversation in the hall. If she was faking the memory loss, was she offended that Hannah asked if she was scared of her? Or if the amnesia was real, was she just curious about all the ruckus in the hall?

“It’s a woman?” she managed to blurt out, remembering that she wasn’t supposed to know who was in there at all.

Officer Gaston ignored her comment as he poked his head in the room. “Are you sure you want to let her in? She’s a lot.”

“Truthfully, I was going to take a nap,” Pierce said, “but it’d be nice to talk to someone who’s not a cop, a nurse, or a psychiatrist for a change.”

Hannah watched as Officer Gaston turned the idea over in his head. She was stunned that he was even considering it. Ash Pierce was a dangerous killer, whether she remembered it or not, and to let any civilian into her hospital room would be a dereliction of duty.

But it was a disturbing testament to Pierce’s personal power of persuasion that he looked on the verge of saying yes. Hannah suspected that the woman had been diligently using her time since waking up to create a rapport with those tasked with watching her and wondered if it was sincere or just a manipulation. Either way, the fact that she’d convinced the lead officer in charge of guarding her that such an interaction might be safe was beyond troubling.

“Let’s keep it brief,” he said tersely before glaring at Hannah. “You can stand just inside the doorway, not one step closer. Do you understand?”

Hannah nodded pliantly.

”What”s your name, by the way?” he asked as he stepped to the side.

”Hannah,” she replied, moving forward, hoping he wouldn”t ask for the last name. She peered into the room and even before she saw Pierce, took note of the fact that there was a third, female officer seated in a chair in the corner. She eyeballed Hannah suspiciously. Hannah waved as dorkily as she could before turning her attention to Pierce.

The woman was sitting at a forty-five degree angle in her hospital bed wearing a loose-fitting, floral hospital gown. In most ways, she was much as Hannah remembered her, though there were some changes. Her black hair had been cut short. Her skin seemed even paler than before.

She”d always been a diminutive, narrow-framed woman, but she appeared even more slight than Hannah remembered. She wondered if that was because Pierce had been fed through a tube for so long. Her left arm was cuffed to the sidebar of the hospital bed, and her right ankle had a monitor on it. There was a small bandage on her neck. Hannah knew she”d had surgery to fix the damage done by the stabbing. The doctors had held off until recently because they didn”t want to do the procedure while she was in a coma.

She turned to face Hannah more directly and smiled warmly at her. Her sharp, brown eyes were bright and animated. There was no overt sign that she recognized the young woman in front of her as the person she”d tried to kill twice and who had given her the injury that landed her in here. Hannah made sure to keep her own face expressionless.

“You said your name was Hannah?” Pierce asked innocuously.

“That’s right.”

“And you’re here because you want to be a nurse like Jenny?” Pierce confirmed. “She’s a friend of your family?”

“Yes,” Hannah answered, suddenly realizing the danger the nurse would be in if Pierce was faking all this and suspected that Jenny was a part of the plan to get in. “That’s what I told Officer Gaston.”

She hoped that no one would follow up on that, but if they did, her phrasing would allow Jenny to say later that Hannah had lied about their connection and that she didn’t know who she really was. Realizing that she likely didn’t have much time before this all fell apart, she decided to cut to the chase.

“Why are you handcuffed?” she asked as naively as she could.

“Because they say I’m dangerous, Hannah,” Pierce replied, betraying no hint that she accepted that proposition.

“Are you?” Hannah pressed.

”I think I used to be,” Pierce replied. ”They say that I was a contract killer. But I was stabbed in the neck when I was supposedly trying to kill some young woman and I ended up in a coma. When I finally woke up, I had no recollection of that or anything from the last few years.

Hannah thought she might have seen the slightest twitch on Pierce’s face when she said, “stabbed in the neck,” but she couldn’t be sure.

“I thought that kind of thing only happened in the movies,” Hannah said, with just a hint of skepticism in her voice.

“Me too,” Pierce said with a chuckle. “But now it’s my life. I’m charged with multiple murders, all of people I have no recollection of. I’m supposed to go on trial this year. It’s actually pretty terrifying, and in my view, unfair. Whoever that person was, I’m not her anymore.”

“But if you killed a bunch of people,” Hannah posited, “shouldn’t you pay for what you did, even if you don’t remember it?”

“That’s certainly what some people say,” Pierce conceded without argument.

Behind her, Hannah sensed Officer Gaston shift nervously and knew he was getting anxious. She didn’t have much time.

“Another thing, if it’s not too rude to ask,” Hannah said.

“Go ahead,” Pierce told her. “I’ve had all kinds of stuff said to me in the last month.”

“Well, I’m just wondering, how did you become a contract killer in the first place?” she asked. “I mean, you probably weren’t some bookkeeper or retail clerk or housewife before all this, right? You must have done something that prepared you for murdering innocent people?”

She allowed her tone to become slightly confrontational at the very end of that comment, hoping to get a rise out of the woman. But instead of speaking, Pierce put her hand to her mouth and coughed. There was no way to know whether it was legitimate or if she was covering her displeasure with Hannah’s relentless probing.

“Sorry,” she said after a moment, “still not fully recovered yet. But to answer your question, I used to work for the military in an elite unit that targeted leaders of enemy combatant forces. I remember that time vividly. I guess it trained me for what they say I did later on. It would technically make sense, even if that doesn’t sound like a road I would have gone down. I remember myself as a patriot who was defending the interests of her country. I can’t imagine how that would have curdled into something so dark.”

Hannah had to concede that she was good. Ash Pierce was saying all the right things, whether she meant them or not. She hadn’t shown any clear sign that Hannah’s questioning had angered her. She projected genuine confusion at how she was in this circumstance. Nothing she’d said or done, save for that brief twitch and a conveniently well-timed cough, had suggested any awareness of who she used to be.

“Have you tried to reach out to the people you hurt to make amends?” Hannah asked, hoping that changing tactics might unsettle Pierce.

“No,” she admitted. “In all honesty, I’m worried about how they might react if I tried to do that. Do you really think they’d accept an apology? Do you think they’d believe me?”

Hannah stared at her, unable to keep the coldness out of her voice when she replied. “I doubt it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Pierce said with a guilt-ridden smile. “I think it might just make it worse.”

She suddenly yawned, bringing her hand up to cover it.

”I”m sorry,” she said. ”I think I”m starting to hit that mid-morning wall.”

“We’ll have to leave things there,” Office Gaston said. “Ms. Pierce has been more than generous with her time.”

The way he said it made it sound like the woman was a head of state deserving of respect and Hannah was a pesky reporter he was shooing out of the room. If Pierce was suckering him, and the rest of the security detail was as susceptible to her machinations, they weren’t just not up for the job, they were in danger. But she couldn’t say any of that without blowing her cover as an aspiring nurse.

”Well, thanks for making the time for me,” Hannah said, slipping back into the na?ve student persona. ”Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

Pierce chuckled lightly at that.

”I doubt Officer Gaston or his friends will allow that to happen,” she said, sounding regretful. ”But I”m a big believer in fate. If it”s meant to be, I”m sure we”ll see each other again.”

Hannah smiled to hide the renewed shiver that ran up her spine. Maybe the comment was intended to be harmless, a polite way for a changed woman to part ways.

But to Hannah, it sounded more like a threat.