Free Tell Me by Lisa Jackson Page B

I’ve passed your request along, with all the others, and Ms. O’Henry, under her lawyer’s advice, will decide if she would like to contact you.” She started to rise, as if the short interview was over.
    “But I really would like to speak with her,” Nikki argued, not budging. “I was a good friend of her daughter’s. Amity called me the night she was killed, and I feel like I’m connected to it all in a more personal way.”
    Little lines of disbelief puckered the warden’s eyebrows. “As I said, Ms. Gillette, I’ll relay the information. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”
    “I’ve met Blondell O’Henry. Spent the night in her house. Amity stayed at mine. My uncle was her defense attorney.”
    “Was?” She picked up on the one word she apparently considered a weakness in Nikki’s campaign.
    “Yes. Alexander McBaine.”
    “But he is no longer representing her.”
    “My uncle was forced to retire due to health issues, but I’m sure Blondell—er, Ms. O’Henry—will remember him and me as well.”
    The warden walked around her desk. If Nikki had made the slightest inroad past the woman’s steely resolve, she couldn’t see it.
    “Thank you,” Billings finally said, just as the door opened and the guard who had escorted her into the office was ready to usher her out again.
    Great.
    Just flippin’ great!
    She walked back through the series of gates to find DeAnthony Jones glancing up expectantly as the doors opened and she stepped through. By this time there were two more people waiting, and Nikki would bet her next advance that they were reporters as well. “Good luck,” she said to DeAnthony as he rushed past and she stopped to collect her things through the drawer of the glassed-in desk.
    Officer Ulander, seated behind the thick glass, didn’t seem any happier now than she had been when Nikki had arrived. “Sign please,” she said in a raspy voice before she slipped another form through the drawer. Five minutes later, Nikki was out of the prison, walking through the cool morning sunshine to her car.
    One of the news vans had vacated the lot, but Nikki knew there would be more. Blondell O’Henry was going to be at the forefront of news, not only in Georgia but throughout the South and perhaps across the nation, and Nikki planned to be front and center on the story.
    She switched on the engine, opened the sunroof, and pulled out of the parking space. Since Fairfield was a new facility, the long lane winding to the main highway was smooth, the pavement unbroken. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the prison receding through the back window. Though modern and backdropped by rolling hills, the concrete-and-steel fortress wouldn’t be mistaken for anything other than what it was. Watchtowers rose from the corners of thick walls topped with coiled razor wire.
    Nikki thought of being locked inside and wondered how Blondell had survived all the years behind bars. She’d made it out once, during her only escape, from the first prison where she’d been incarcerated. For nearly three weeks, the news had been filled with images of officers and dogs searching for one of Savannah’s most notorious convicted killers—on the run.
    Nikki remembered that time because it was the summer after her senior year of high school. At the time, Nikki was more interested in her boyfriend, streaking her hair, wondering how she would deal with being so far apart from Jonathan after their inevitable and oh-so-tragic breakup, which would happen as she went off to college. But the state had been abuzz about Blondell’s bold escape via a garbage truck.
    “Can you imagine?” her mother had said at the table on the veranda where Nikki and her parents were eating breakfast. Fingering the diamond cross at her neck, Charlene Gillette had wrinkled her nose as if she, herself, were hidden in those bags of sweltering, rotting garbage.
    Their conversation had taken place just after the Fourth of