Unfinished A Samantha Leary Short Story

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By J.E. Nickerson

Samantha stepped out of her car, the quiet breeze hitting her face, threading through her hair.

She hadn’t been to Jewel Heights Penitentiary in over twenty years.

The drive in had done something to her. It hadn’t just been distance and time—it had been a slow pull backward. Every mile closer to Jewel Heights had tightened something in her chest, like the past had been waiting just beneath the surface, patient, untouched. The roads had felt familiar in a way she didn’t want them to be. Landmarks half-remembered, intersections that stirred something she couldn’t fully place at first—until she did.

She hadn’t thought about that day in years. Not like this. Not in pieces that came back sharp and uninvited.

Her father.

Harry Leary.

The police knocking on the door of Mary Leary’s apartment with the news that Harry had been gunned down at the Neighborhood Pantry. 

The last time she had made this drive, she hadn’t been Samantha Leary the reporter. She had been a daughter walking into something she couldn’t control, something that would strip the world down to its worst parts and leave it there. The memory didn’t come back all at once—it pressed in gradually, like the penitentiary itself was reaching out, pulling it forward.

By the time the outer walls came into view, she wasn’t just entering the penitentiary. She was stepping back into it.

And now, standing there again, the air felt the same. Heavy. Still. Like nothing inside those walls had changed. Like it had all been waiting for her to come back.

Metal doors clanged behind her as she walked, echoing down corridors that seemed narrower than she remembered. Fluorescent lights buzzed unevenly overhead, flickering shadows across walls scarred with years of fights between inmates and visits with people who had all but forgotten about them. Every scuff, every scratch seemed like a scream frozen in time.

She paused at the visitor booth.

“Samantha Leary. I’ve been cleared to interview Scott Campbell.”

The guard looked up, studying her for a moment before glancing down at his screen. His fingers moved across the keyboard, slow, deliberate.

A beat.

Then a nod.

The buzzer sounded, sharp and mechanical.

Her footsteps were careful. Keys jingled from the belt of the guard who lead her down the corridor —a constant, metallic reminder she was never alone. Voices echoed from distant cells: muttered curses, laughter that didn’t sound like laughter, shouts swallowed by distance. Movements she couldn’t see, but could feel. Always there. Always watching. Always contained.

She walked slowly. Eyes taking in the walls, the living rows of containment. Every cell told a story: rage coiled in a man’s sudden gesture behind bars; hopelessness etched in another’s posture slumped over a table; emptiness in the vacant eyes of someone who had vanished, leaving nothing behind but silence. She slowed. The weight of life suspended, waiting to end pressed on her. Names scratched into walls. Walls layered with years of anger and futility, dust thick on the floor like the residue of lives long forgotten.

Samantha felt it pressing on her chest. The hopelessness. The fury. The endless quiet despair. Here were the endings of people who had committed crimes of every sort: murder, theft, abuse. Some would serve their sentences and leave, but others… others were gone. Vanished into the system, swallowed whole, never to return. Jewel Heights didn’t just contain them—it consumed them.

She passed one man sitting in the corner of his cell, head bowed, hands clenched. Shadows swallowed him.

Then he looked up.

She felt the weight of something stripped from him.

He stood and moved toward the bars—not suddenly, but with a quiet pull, as if trying to rejoin something he no longer belonged to.

Samantha didn’t break her stride.

The sour tang of fear and sweat clung to the air around him.

Further down, a cell was empty, bed prepared for the next eventual inmate. But faint scratches on the wall and residual tape whispered of a someone who had disappeared, and no one outside would ever know what happened.

The air grew heavier as she moved. Every step seemed to pull at something in her chest, the oppressive press of all the lives taken or harmed by the people who lived here. The reminder that containment didn’t bring closure. It only constrained the danger.

Her father’s memory, sharp and unhealed, throbbed behind her eyes. The pen itself seemed alive, breathing through the walls, pressing its despair into her skin.

She had covered prison life a few times. The horrors that went on between inmates came back sharp and unbidden into her mind. The rage, the despair, the invisible corpses of lives that had ended quietly or violently inside these walls. The prison was a weight she could almost touch, a gravity that pulled at her chest.

The officer leading her stopped at a reinforced door. “Interview room’s up ahead,” he said.

Samantha nodded and stepped through.

The room was functional. Sterile: a table bolted to the floor, two chairs, thick glass along one wall. Scott Campbell sat waiting.

Samantha catalogued everything about him as she watched from the narrow window in the door.

Heavy. Mid-forties. Shoulders hunched. Head down.

His wide frame overshadowed the table. Torso thick—not fat, but solid.

She stepped into the room, watching his reaction as she moved around the table and took the chair across from him.

The suit she wore was armor, but a thin one—barely enough to shield her from the isolation that clung to Scott.

He had asked for Samantha Leary by name—the journalist who had covered Susan Eastridge’s case, the one who had written about the night Susan reported being raped, the evidence, the arrest, the conviction. The one who had helped shape how the world saw him.

Not a lawyer. Not an appeal clerk. Her.

The request had come through the system with enough persistence to reach her. He wanted his story told differently this time. Wanted the case looked at again. Reheard. Retried.

Samantha had come because of that—and because she remembered Susan.

“I didn’t rape her.” Scott looked Samantha in the eyes gaze never leaving her face, searching her expression. 

The words were steady. Controlled. No hesitation now that they were out.

He leaned forward slightly, eyes fixed on her.

“You wrote about it,” he said. “About Susan. About me.”

A beat.

“You got it wrong.”

Samantha let the silence stretch, feeling it echo against the weight of the past she carried. She was used to criminals claiming she was wrong. That the police had the wrong person.

“Your DNA was on her,” she said finally.

He exhaled sharply, almost imperceptibly.

“We had sex. Earlier that night. Consensual. Gentle. I wasn’t rough. She liked it. I don’t do that—rough stuff.”

Silence filled the room. Beyond it the sound of doors closing and the faint voices of guards and inmates drifted in.

“Now she’s saying I raped her. Strangled her. I didn’t.” Scott’s voice broke slightly. 

Samantha studied him—not the words, but the pauses, the tension in his hands, the way he held her gaze. People learned to say the right things. What mattered was everything else.

“You expect me to believe that?” She asked.

“My hands were never on her like that!” Scott said, leaning forward, his voice rising. The shackles snapped against the ring in the table.

He stopped himself.

Backed off slightly. Drew in a ragged breath.

“I expect you to check,” he said, quieter now, pulling himself back under control. “You’re good at that, right?”

Silence.

“Everyone in here says they’re innocent.” Samantha replied calmly. 

“I’m not everyone.” Scott replied. Controlled. Focused. Real. “And most of them are still waiting for their lawyer to file another appeal. I’m not like that. I called you.”

“I didn’t do this,” he said again, quieter now. “You have to understand that.”

“The DNA evidence says you did,” she said.

“The evidence is wrong.” He snapped. “I told you already we had sex. I didn’t… I don’t do the other thing to women. I never have.”

She had heard that before. Most of the time, it was a lie. But the way he skirted around it—refusing even to name it—pulled at her. Most criminals didn’t care what it did to the victim. They moved on, or bragged about it. But there was something in Scott that felt different.

“I’ll look into it,” she said.

Relief hit his face too fast, almost involuntary.

“Thank you,” he said. Then urgency crept in. “There’s something else.”

Samantha didn’t move.

He leaned forward slightly, hands gripping the edge of the table, knuckles pale. His eyes flicked toward the corner of the room, then back at her, as if scanning for invisible threats.

“They… they keep coming,” he said, voice tight, almost a whisper. “Every night. There’s… no end. I can’t…” His throat tightened, words catching. He swallowed hard, shoulders rolling in a tension that seemed impossible to release.

Samantha held her gaze on him, cataloging the subtle tells—the slight shiver, the way his legs flexed against the cuffs, the constant, silent calculation in his posture. This wasn’t bravado. This was survival.

“Anywhere else,” he added, quieter now, almost muttering, “somewhere I don’t have to…” His eyes darted again, shadowed with fear. “Somewhere I might last the night without…”

He trailed off, letting the weight of the unspoken hang in the room.

Samantha didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. She saw it all—the vulnerability, the fear, the desperation. It echoed the way Susan had appeared when Samantha interviewed her. 

“I’m not a police officer and I don’t have the authority to intervene directly.” She said calmly. 

“Please.” Scott’s voice broke. He leaned in. “I can’t take much more of it.” 

A flicker of something Samantha had seen before in victims crossed his face. Not fear—desperation.  

And that alone was enough to make her wonder what she could do, and what she might have to try.

Samantha held his gaze. “That’s not my call.”

“They’re going to hurt me, beyond what… I’ve already been to the infirmary twice.” he said, control slipping just enough to matter. “I can’t even… I shouldn’t even be here.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

It wasn’t reassurance. It wasn’t promise. It was all she could give.

Scott stared at her, eyes sharp. “Please.”

She stood. Chair legs scraped softly against the floor. She didn’t respond. The thought of mentioning it to the warden crossed her mind—but she knew it wouldn’t change anything lasting. Places like this weren’t just containment. They carried a culture. She could feel it pressing in: the faint metallic tang of disinfectant mingled with the sour sweat of men confined too long, the dull echo of footsteps and metal doors clanging in distant corridors, the low murmur of voices that didn’t carry kindness. The inmates’ past actions dictated the present, and even those trying to survive without cruelty were caught in the same currents. The consequences followed, persistent and unyielding, regardless of what was done to control the people inside.

As she turned toward the door, she felt it—the weight of this place, the memory of Harry, the way she had felt when she saw the men responsible for his death being lead to their cells. The unfinished threads of lives trapped here, and the hopelessness that seeped from every cell.

Not doubt. Not certainty.

Unfinished.

And it stayed with her long after the door closed. She moved through the gates and stood in the cool air, letting it anchor her as she thought about the next steps of the investigation.

She would call Greg. Pull the case file. Start the interviews again. She didn’t have to. She could walk away now and never return. But something had shifted inside her.

The DNA evidence and Susan’s statement had seemed solid. Samples had been over ninety percent for Scott.

And yet… something pulled her to look again. She glanced back at the gray walls of Jewel Heights, the culture inside, the inmates who swore they were wrongfully convicted.

A man in a suit passed by, giving his name to the guard. “I’m here to see my client, Mr. Gavton.” Samantha let his words fade into the background.

Scott hadn’t reached out to a lawyer. He had reached out to her. That meant something.

She walked to her car, the measured clack of her shoes on the pavement echoing in the quiet evening. She would honor Scott’s plea—not because she was certain of his innocence, but because the truth of that night needed a voice.

The moment doesn’t end here. It never does.

For Samantha, this is where it begins—where instinct starts to press against the surface, where something unresolved refuses to stay buried.

Samantha Leary Psychological Thrillers

If you felt that shift—the quiet sense that something isn’t right—you’re already inside her world.

The story continues in the Samantha Leary series, beginning with the prequel.

Step into the series on Amazon