CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fresh Horizons was located in a cluster of companies that, when all boiled down to its core, was nothing more than a glitzy strip mall for lesser-known businesses.
The Fresh Horizons suite was on the third floor of a building that housed a dental practice and a financial planning firm on the floors below it.
When they stepped inside, Kate took in the smell of a thousand other small, industrial areas.
It was all glass-cleaner and too-strong potpourri, barely winning the fight over something that smelled almost like plastic.
The elevator opened onto a small reception area decorated in warm neutrals, with two low sofas facing each other across a coffee table and a shelf of carefully arranged books along one wall.
The lighting was soft and considered. A small white noise machine sat on the floor beside the reception desk, which struck Sloane as a detail that was highly purposeful.
Whoever had put this space together had understood exactly the sort of people who would be entering the space and what they might need to feel as soon as they were inside.
A receptionist greeted them with a smile at the front desk. She was cute, and in her thirties with a pleasant, unhurried manner. She looked at their credentials with muted shock, made a brief call, and told them Mr. Hale would be right out. He appeared less than two minutes later.
Richard Hale was in his early fifties, trim and well-dressed, with a full head of silver-threaded hair. He extended his hand to each of them in turn and held eye contact when he introduced himself, and had what Kate thought to be an open and inquisitive expression.
"Agents, thank you for coming in. Please." He gestured toward the corridor behind him. "My office is just back here."
He led them down a short hallway lined with framed prints, abstract shapes in muted colors that managed to feel calming without feeling clinical.
They passed a room with its door open, set up for group sessions.
Eight chairs were arranged in a loose circle, and a whiteboard with something written on it in careful lettering that Kate couldn't fully read as they passed. A second room had its door closed.
Hale's office was at the end of the hall.
It was larger than the rest of the suite, with a desk set to one side and a seating area with two chairs and a small couch arranged near the window.
He directed them toward the seating area rather than the desk, which Kate took note of.
It was a deliberate choice, the kind that communicated this is a conversation, not an interrogation.
Kate suspected he made it with everyone.
"Can I get either of you anything? Coffee, water?"
They both declined. He sat across from them, relaxed but attentive, hands rested loosely on his knees. Kate got the idea that meeting with authority figures wasn’t exactly new to him.
"So," he said. "How can I help?"
Kate leaned forward slightly. "We're here about two former clients of Fresh Horizons. Carol Paige and Donna Holt."
Something moved across Hale's face, a shift in attention, maybe.
He had the look of a man reaching back through a mental file.
"Yes, I remember both of them. They completed our program last year.
" He looked between them, almost as if trying to telepathically get them to share more. "Has something happened?"
"Both of them have been killed in the past two days," Sloane said.
In the silence that followed, Hale looked at Kate, then at Sloane, as the composure he'd carried into the room took a visible hit. He sat back slowly, his face cycling through multiple emotions. "Both of them…?"
"Yes," Kate said.
He pressed his fingers together and looked toward the window for a moment. "I'm so sorry to hear that. Both of them." He shook his head once, quietly.
“How clearly can you remember them?" Sloane asked.
“Oh, well, Carol is easy enough to recall,” he said with a pained smile.
“She was reserved but very determined. Donna was warmer on the surface, quicker to open up in group.
They were very different women in some ways, but both of them were doing genuinely well when they completed the program.
" He looked back at them, still looking baffled when he asked: "What happened? "
"We're not able to share the details," Sloane said. "But we're trying to understand the connections between the two women. As far as we can determine, Fresh Horizons is the only point where their lives overlapped."
Hale nodded slowly, processing that. "Of course. So, what is it I can do for you?"
“Do you keep the records of everyone that comes through here?” Kate asked.
“Yes, of course.” He stood and moved to his desk, where he opened his laptop without any apparent hesitation.
"I'll pull their records for you now. That will give you things like enrollment dates, session attendance, any notes from their time in the program.
" He looked up at them in the midst of it, his eyes narrowing a bit.
"I want to be straightforward with you. We take confidentiality seriously here, for obvious reasons.
The women who come to us are in vulnerable transitions and they need to know this is a safe space.
But in a situation like this—" He shook his head. "You'll have whatever you need."
“Do you work with the men and the women? I mean…please forgive me for saying so, but—”
“You find it strange that a man is running this.” He nodded, giving a grim smile. “Yes, I get that a lot. But I’m essentially just the overseer here. Sort of the captain of the ship while everyone else does most of the harder work.”
“I see. Well, back to the original question…”
“Initially, yes, I worked with men and women” he said.
“But men don’t usually like to admit they need this sort of help.
We might get one male interested in our services for every dozen or so females.
Anyway…as the session start to delve into personal matters, we give the women the option of moving on to female therapists. ”
“And did either Carol or Donna work with you?”
“Donna did, yes. Carol ended up working closer with one of our former employees, Lynn Peebles.”
“Former?” Kate asked.
“Yes. She moved on about three or four months ago when a job with the local behavioral unit at the hospital opened up.”
He sent two files to the printer on his desk and handed the pages across to Kate. She looked through them while Sloane continued with Hale.
The records were thorough. Both women had enrolled in the standard twelve-week program, attending weekly group sessions and a set number of individual coaching appointments.
Session notes were brief but specific, tracking each client's stated goals and progress points.
Carol Paige had focused on financial independence and rebuilding her social confidence.
Donna Holt had worked primarily on establishing her sense of identity outside of her marriage.
Both had completed the full program and exited in good standing.
And as Hale had stated, Carol was indeed transitioned to an employee named L. Peebles.
Kate looked around the office while Sloane asked Hale to walk them through the program's general structure.
The bookshelves held a mixture of professional texts and titles she recognized from the self-help and psychology sections of any bookstore.
There was a framed certificate from a life coaching accreditation body on the wall, alongside what appeared to be a business award of some kind.
A small corkboard near the window held what looked like handwritten notes and cards, a dozen or more of them, the kind clients sometimes sent after completing a program.
Kate kept an ear attuned to the conversation between Sloane and Hale as well.
He answered the questions about the program structure with the ease of someone who had explained it many times.
He explained that the twelve-week class was a blend of group work and individual sessions.
He had three certified coaches on staff and brought in outside facilitators for specific workshops.
The group sessions ran on Tuesday and Thursday evenings to accommodate working schedules, with Saturday morning sessions available for those who couldn't manage the weekday times.
The program had served over three hundred women and forty-six men since he had founded it.
He had built it after watching a close friend go through a devastating divorce with very little support.
He described that origin with a directness that did not feel rehearsed.
When Sloane asked whether Carol and Donna had been in the same session group, Hale checked his records and confirmed that they had overlapped for approximately three weeks of the twelve-week program.
"So, they would have known each other," Sloane said.
"They would have met, yes. Whether they maintained any contact after completing the program I genuinely couldn't tell you. We don't track that... though we do have a private online community that graduates are welcome to join. But participation is entirely voluntary."
"We'll need access to that," Kate said.
"Of course." He wrote down the platform name and his administrator credentials on a notepad and tore the page off and handed it to her. "You can see everything in there. All posts, all direct messages between members, all of it. I have nothing to hide."
They stayed another twenty minutes, working through the staff list. They asked about anyone else who had been in contact with both women during their time in the program.
They also asked whether any participants or staff had left under difficult circumstances, whether Hale had received any complaints or concerns about anyone connected to Fresh Horizons in the past year.
To each question he gave them a full answer, checked his records where relevant, and offered to follow up in writing with anything they needed that he couldn't confirm on the spot.
He even provided the last known contact information for Lynn Peebles just in case they felt the need to reach out to her.
They thanked him and he walked them back through the hallway to the reception area.
"I appreciate you both coming in person," he said, as they reached the welcome desk. "I mean that. This isn't the kind of news you deliver over the phone."
Hale opened and held the door for them as they stepped out. "If you need anything else, anything at all, please don't hesitate. If I can, I’d like to help find whoever did this."
When the door was closed behind them and they were starting their way toward their car down the street, Sloane looked at the printed records in her hand.
"I can't find anything to grab onto," she said. "He practically gave us everything we asked for. The records look clean, the program looks legitimate, the staff list is five people. I don't see it."
“Same here,” Kate said.
"So, what are we doing with it?" she asked.
Kate looked up the street for a moment before she answered.
She had been in enough interviews over the years to know the difference between a person who was transparent and a person who had learned to perform transparency so thoroughly that it produced the same effect.
She could not point to a single thing Hale had said or done in that office that gave her cause to question him.
The records were detailed and he had willingly produced them.
Hale had handed over his administrator login to the graduate group without blinking.
But a space that looked so carefully assembled had someone maintaining it very deliberately.
It wasn’t an automatic red flag; it was simply a fact about how much effort had gone into every surface of that office, from the white noise machine by the door to the handwritten notes pinned to the corkboard.
Someone had thought hard about what this place needed to look like, and they had executed it well.
It didn't mean they were hiding anything. It didn't mean Richard Hale was anything other than exactly what he appeared to be.
But for Kate, it meant it was far too early to stop looking.
"Well, in the meantime, we just keep pulling on it," Kate said. She turned up her collar against the wind and they walked back toward the car. “Sooner or later, you either run out of string or find something hidden in the folds.”