Page 21 of If She Sensed

"I mean, is this enough to go back and question Hale again?”Sloane asked

“Not yet, I don’t think," Kate said.“But it does make me wonder what these people are signing themselves up for when they join.Maybe we can figure that out back at the office.”

Sloane looked up from the coffee cup and gave a short, single nod.She had already picked up her phone to make the next call on the list.

Kate gathered the paper wrappings from their lunch and stood to find a trash can.The afternoon light was warm and bright.She was glad for the half hour of tacos and the two plastic chairs, but now it was time to get back to the sterile environment of a field office conference room—which was surprisingly another part of the job she was starting to miss.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kate had her laptop open on the conference room table again.As she navigated through the Fresh Horizons forum and Facebook private group, she could hear Sloane just outside of the room.She had been pacing the hall for the past ten minutes or so, continuing to make her way through the list of Fresh Horizons graduates she had accumulated.

Kate started with the Fresh Horizons client records Hale had printed for them.It detailed the program's structure clearly enough: twelve weeks, consisting of a blend of group and individual sessions.There was also a standardized intake process before the first meeting.It was that last part she wanted to look at more closely.The printed records showed session notes and attendance logs, but they did not include the intake forms themselves.

She went to the website, looking for more answers.The public-facing pages were exactly what she had already seen.Just more clean, warm, and professionally written testimonials from graduates, along with a brief biography of Hale.A photograph of the group session room with its circle of chairs topped the About Us page.She skirted over most of this, finally finding something she thought might be of use.

She clicked through to the tab labeled Join Us.Within just a few seconds, she saw that there was a download available for the intake questionnaire; it was available to view before submitting anything.She downloaded a copy of it, pulled it up, and read through it slowly.

The first section was standard enough.It asked for name, contact information, and preferred session times.The second section asked about current life situations divided between marriage, kids, job, and community involvement.At first glance, it seemed well within range of what a program like this might reasonably ask.

But it kept going, getting slightly more personal with every page.It asked about the applicant’s current living situation and whether the participant owned or rented their home or apartment.It asked for a full home address, framed in a note below the field as needed for scheduling and correspondence purposes.Current employment status and general income range were framed as helpful for determining scholarship eligibility.It also asked whether the participant had children at home, and if so, their ages and custody arrangements.A section on social support asked participants to list the names of two or three close contacts they relied on, described as helpful for our coaches in understanding your current support network.And near the end, a section on future goals included a question asking participants to describe their current feelings about dating and relationships, and if they had any active interest in re-entering the dating world.

Kate sat back in her chair, giving the final page of the form a curious glance.She then read through the form a second time, more slowly.Taken individually, she could construct a justification foralmostevery field.Coaches might genuinely benefit from knowing whether a client had children at home, or whether financial stress was a factor in their recovery.The address made some logistical sense if the program sent materials by mail.The social support question had the language of therapeutic intake down cold—almost too clinical, really.

But taken together, as a complete picture of a single person (a woman, especially), the form built something else entirely.It built a profile.

She was about to print out a copy of the form when her phone lit up.It was a text from Allen.She almost set it aside, then saw the image he'd attached: another drawing Michael had done, again choosing crayon on printer paper.This picture showed a very good rendering of the cartoon dog he’d been watching on TV last night.He was barking up a tree where the gray smudge of what she supposed was meant to be a squirrel was looking down.

Got an artist on our hands,the text read.

She looked at it for a moment longer than she meant to, smiling and missing her son fiercely.She sent back a heart and set the phone face-down on the table, but the image stayed with her.Michael was four.In two years, he'd be in school, and the drawings would get more sophisticated.Then these early ones—the lopsided trees and the crayon grins—would be gone.She thought about how many of them she'd been home for lately and how many she hadn't.The consulting arrangement was supposed to give her flexibility and most of the time it did, especially as of late.But there were stretches like this one where it felt less like flexibility and more like the same job with a different name on her badge.It often felt like she was just playing the role of a pretend agent.

But beyond that, she also needed to finish her memoirs.She'd been circling that project for months, picking it up and setting it back down, and she could feel the energy for it starting to thin at the edges.If she didn't push through and finish it soon she was going to lose whatever momentum she had left for it.Then the whole thing would quietly die on her hard drive next to the other half-finished ideas she'd been meaning to return to.

She turned the phone back over, looked at the drawing one more time, and then put it in her pocket.She had to push thoughts of her family to the side if she wanted to focus on the case.She had gotten good at it over the years and as she did it now, her mind didn’t go to the case, but instead to Harold Ryan.

She had been managing everything with Harold Ryan in compartments—as well as she could, anyway.There were hours, sometimes whole half-days, when the Rizzo connection sat in one compartment, her family in another, the memoirs in a third, and the job in yet another.She moved between them without letting the walls dissolve.It was a functional approach that she had been using it for thirty years.But the compartments were becoming harder to maintain.

What she had found while working on the memoirs — the overlap between the method of Dennis Coyle's murder and the documented signature of a contract killer whose work law enforcement hadn't formally catalogued until years later — was not going away.It wasn't becoming less troubling the more she looked at it.She had sat across from Harold Ryan in that visiting room and watched a man answer questions about things with as much clarity and truth as she could have hoped for.She knew it had not been a performance or careful calibration of a practiced liar.Just a tired man recounting the same true facts he had been recounting for twelve years to people who kept deciding not to believe him.

And if she was right about what she had found — if the overlap meant what it appeared to mean — thenshehad been one of those people.She had led the original investigation.She had built the case that a jury had accepted in under four hours.She had stood in a courtroom and believed, with the full conviction of a thirty-year career, that the right man was being convicted.She had been so damned certain.

She understood now that certainty and knowledge were not the same thing.

The memoirs were supposed to be the project she finished out this chapter of her life with.A fair accounting.Three decades of cases, the ones she had solved and the ones that had cost her, the methods and the partnerships, the occasional missteps and how she had corrected them.She had thought of them as a kind of final record, a thing she was proud enough of to put her name on.She had been three-quarters of the way through a clean first draft before she found what she found in those photographs.

Now she wasn't sure what the book was anymore… or even if she still had the right to write it in the same voice she’d started with.That voice had assumed a reasonably honorable record.But if Harold Ryan had spent twelve years in a correctional facility for something he hadn’t done, for something that was down to the case she’d built against him, then that was part of her record, too.

And she couldn’t write her way around it.

Sloane appeared in the doorway, breaking her thoughts apart.She looked eager and satisfied as she took a seat at the table.

"So, I finished the graduates list," she said, dropping into the chair across from Kate."And surprise, surprise, they were all positive.Every single one of them.Good experience, helpful program, spoke well of Hale.Blah blah blah."She reached over and took the last third of the coffee in the pot."Gloria Tran is the only person who gave anything other than a five-star review."

“At least the list is knocked out,” Kate said.“On the other hand… come look at this.”

She turned the laptop toward Sloane and walked her through the intake form, pointing out the fields she had flagged.Sloane read it in silence, her expression settling into the same vague uneasiness Kate had started to feel.She went back to the top and read it a second time.

"Home address," she said.