Merryville Correctional Facility was situated in one of the most beautiful places on earth, twenty miles south of the Canadian border. The morning sunlight sharpened every lime-green bud on every tree for miles around, and in the distance you could see the mountains with their toothy spires and ragged fissures.
The supermax prison sat on eighty acres of pristine wilderness and housed some of the state’s worst criminals. The staff was polite and professional. Natalie filled out a visitor’s form and stopped at the security checkpoint for a pat down.
A beefy guard with a crew cut escorted her to the warden’s office in the east wing. Warden Edward Northcutt had the look of a man who’d forfeited his soul a long time ago—weathered, rumpled, and as if he hardly ever slept. “Welcome to MCF, Detective Lockhart. Please, have a seat.”
“Thank you, Warden.”
“First of all, I wasn’t aware of the situation until I received Lieutenant Pittman’s call last night. You can rest assured, this sort of thing won’t ever happen again.”
“I appreciate that, but I’d like to know how it could’ve happened in the first place.”
“I promise you, we’ll be looking into it,” he said gruffly. “Our policy is to examine all incoming and outgoing mail, so I assume that one of our department staffers made an error in judgment.” Northcutt started typing on his keyboard. “Any contact between inmates and minors is restricted—the child would have to get her parent’s permission.” He opened a database on his computer. “What’s the name again? Ella?”
“Ellie Guzman.” She spelled it for him.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” He typed Ellie’s name into the database. “Ah. I see what the problem is. The correspondences weren’t flagged by our records office because your niece contacted Inmate Fowler through an outside registry.”
“A what?”
“An outside registry for prison pen pals,” he explained. “There are hundreds of them. Anybody can go online nowadays and communicate with our inmates. We encourage them to stay in touch with the outside world as much as possible, since it keeps them hopeful while they’re doing time. We’ve found that, statistically speaking, those who have contact with folks on the outside are less likely to re-offend. Anyway, we have our own registry at MCF, but your niece appears to have used an outside source. There are so many of them nowadays that, unfortunately, we can’t police them all.”
“What outside source did she use?” Natalie asked.
“I’ll print out the information for you.” He typed a few commands and hit the PRINT button. “Of course, if she showed up for a visit here at MCF, we would’ve asked for her ID and been able to confirm her age. However, since your niece was using an outside registry, we didn’t have any control over it. At any rate, we’ll be reviewing our procedures going forward.”
“I still don’t understand, she’s only fifteen. How could you not know?”
“To be blunt? Your niece fudged the guidelines.” He scrolled through the directory. “Our records office has a strict protocol for assessing all correspondence, but in this case, your niece disguised her identity to get past the restrictions. She listed her age as twenty-two.”
“I see,” Natalie said, deeply concerned. She’d caught Ellie in numerous lies so far, pointing to potentially deeper deceptions. “How many times did she write to him?”
The warden studied the monitor. “She stopped corresponding five months ago. We only received three incoming letters from her.” He leaned back in his seat. “Again, Detective Lockhart, my sincerest apologies. However, you can rest assured that Inmate Fowler has been a model prisoner. He received his correspondent’s college degree—not an easy feat, and now he tutors other prisoners. He’s earned his privileges. The guards have never found him to be threatening in any way. It’s been nineteen years, and there’s barely a blemish on his record.”
“I’d like copies of all the correspondence, if that’s okay,” Natalie said.
“As long as the prisoner doesn’t object, I don’t see why not.”
“Did you talk to him about my request?”
“Yes, and he’s willing to meet with you.”
“Can I see him now?”
Northcutt stood up and shook her hand. “I’ll have a guard escort you to C block.”
The inmates were monitored twenty-four/seven by armed personnel using state-of-the-art technology. Doors hissed open and shut. Justin Fowler was housed in C block—three tiers of cells made of thick concrete walls and iron bars under a cavernous forty-foot ceiling, an enormous space that echoed Natalie’s footsteps back at her.
The guards were all built like linebackers, and C block was hard core—populated by killers, rapists, and assorted sociopaths. This morning, post-breakfast, the gallery stood empty and the prisoners were locked inside their cells. Some of them clutched the iron bars and stared at Natalie as she walked through the lower level on her way toward the supermax visitors’ room, a windowless cinder-block cube painted life-sucking gray.
The taciturn guard didn’t flinch at the clanging, metallic bang of the massive steel doors as they boomed shut behind them. This morning, the visitors’ room was sterile and empty, full of government-approved plastic-molded chairs and tables, their legs screwed into the cement floor so they couldn’t be used as weapons. Natalie took a seat in front of a bulletproof barrier, and several minutes later the prisoner was escorted through a back entrance into the enclosed Plexiglas booth, from which escape was not possible.
“Hello, Detective Lockhart,” Justin Fowler said politely as he took his seat.
“Hello,” she said, returning the greeting and choking back a cloying sense of outrage. This was going to be more difficult than she thought. He had a pensive mouth and sober eyes. Oh God, how painful—they let him have eyeglasses. They let him read books, whereas Willow was dead. “Thanks for agreeing to talk to me,” she said.
“I’m glad to have the opportunity.” His prisoner number was printed on the breast pocket of his beige uniform. He wasn’t shackled or restrained in any way. She remembered the slender, good-looking boy he used to be; and now here he was, a middle-aged man wearing dark-framed glasses, his salt-and-pepper hair combed neatly behind his ears. He held a cup of orange liquid, a disgusting-looking brew of unfiltered tap water and powdered institutional indifference.
Back in high school, Justin had been a bad boy from the other side of the tracks with a sexy Ryan Phillippe pout and Johnny Depp hair. He was deeply in love with Willow. Nobody ever doubted that. All through the trial, he maintained his innocence, despite the mountain of evidence against him. Now he was serving a life sentence and would most likely die in this place.
It looked as if Fowler’s lawyer had prepared him for Natalie’s visit. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said emphatically. “I didn’t kill your sister. I’m completely innocent. This is a gross injustice. I’ve been saying it for decades.”
“Okay,” she said cautiously, giving the devil his due.
“And even though my latest appeal for parole was denied last month, my lawyer’s looking into this latest killing as a possible means for a new trial.”
“Daisy Buckner’s homicide?” Natalie said, taken aback.
The prisoner nodded. “Same death date.”
“Yes, it’s quite a coincidence. But they’re entirely different cases. Different MO’s. Different everything.”
“He told me he was looking into it.” Justin sipped his beverage. “Anyway, let me just say up front … I’m very sorry about your sister, Detective. I loved Willow. I never would’ve hurt her, not in a million years. But the media kept pressuring the police to make an arrest. My conviction was a fiasco of biblical proportions.”
“I’ve seen the transcripts of the trial,” Natalie told him. “I’ve read your statement. You deny everything, and yet the police found plenty of evidence—your footprints and tire tracks at the scene, Willow’s blood on your clothes. You had no alibi. Why should anyone believe you?”
“I had nothing to do with her death. All I know is, I was at home when she called me after school and told me to meet her at the Hadleys’ farm in half an hour, and I said okay. She had a surprise for me, she said. So I drove over to the farm and found her dead. I tried to revive her. It ruined my life. I went into shock and never recovered. A year later, I found myself locked up in this place. Guess I came across as cold and heartless to the jury, which worked against me. But I was in shock. What happened, all that blood … it blanked me out. Imagine finding yourself locked up in prison for something you didn’t do.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” she asked.
“They already had me on possession charges. I’d been to juvie my freshman year. Come on. I figured they’d assume I did it, so I panicked.”
“You found her dead and fled the scene? You didn’t call the cops, and instead you dumped your bloody clothing in a dumpster … but somehow you’re innocent? Because those are the actions of a guilty man.”
“Look, I’ve been over this a million times in my head, wondering how it could’ve turned out differently,” he said in a low, circumspect tone. “So, okay. Maybe if I’d called the police, maybe if I’d cooperated. Maybe if I hadn’t tried to get rid of my clothes? In prison, your thoughts bounce off the walls. Sometimes you can’t turn them off. The gears keep turning. But you have to, for your own sanity. Like I told the judge at my trial, I was a dealer at the time—it’s in the court records. I was up front about my mistakes. I came clean. I’m from the west side, with all that implies. I wasn’t one of those middle-class kids, headed for Harvard. My parents couldn’t afford to hire a decent attorney, and I got stuck with a public defender. Justice was lopsided.”
“But why would somebody kill Willow and frame you for it?” Natalie asked.
He waved a dismissive hand. “Willow had lots of guys chasing her. She was gorgeous, she was funny, she was smart as hell. She could really put a guy in his place if she wanted to. I watched her slam a few dudes pretty hard. Maybe one of them wanted vengeance?”
“Who’s your top contender?”
“You aren’t going to like it.”
“Why not?”
He put down his plastic cup and said, “Brandon used to call me a poseur, but he’s the one who was slumming it. There he was, this swaddled upper-class kid, the trust-fund baby driving around in daddy’s Prius. Only one of us was the real deal. Only one of us grew up dirt poor. Of course, I didn’t have much in my life back then, but I had style. Doc Martens, motorcycle jacket, safety pins, studs and spikes. I listened to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, and so of course Brandon had to listen to them, too. He was a wannabe.”
“Brandon Buckner?” she repeated.
“He was a head case over her.”
“Willow?” She drew back—she’d never heard of this before.
“He had a thing for her, but she blew him off in a big way.”
“Brandon? Everyone knows he had a lifelong crush on Daisy Forester. And I never once heard Willow talk about him.”
“I’m telling you, for a period of time there, she had to shake him off plenty of times. She used to get super annoyed. The putz was two years her junior. It drove her nuts. He used to leave notes on her car,” Justin insisted. “He followed her home a couple of times. He’d stare at her in the parking lot. He acted like a fucking weirdo.”
“And you think he killed her because she rejected him?” Natalie pressed.
“He worshipped her,” Justin said. “I’m telling you, the guy was certifiable. And now he’s a fucking detective with the BLPD. And here I sit, locked up in prison. You tell me how justice was served.”
Natalie recalled the crime scene photos—Willow’s slender arms frozen in repose above her head, her blood-soaked blouse, twenty-seven stab wounds. A crime of passion.
Justin sighed heavily, and she could see it in his eyes—this was all he ever thought about. “You’ve read the court documents, right?” he said. “There were several unidentified partial footprints in the mud—not mine—that the rain hadn’t completely washed away. Willow’s Nokia phone logs show her in the vicinity of the Hadleys’ farm up to an hour before she told me to meet her there. The murder weapon was never found. Willow’s phone was never found.”
The guard poked his head in the door. “Two minutes,” he announced.
“Thanks, Jesse.”
The guard nodded and disappeared.
“Look,” Justin said quietly, “I’ve been locked up for twenty years now, and I’ve got nothing to do all day but stare out my window at the razor wire. I didn’t do anything wrong, and yet I’m being punished every day for it. It gets tedious in here. Boredom’s a real killer. The world goes on without you, and nobody seems to care. One of the few things that cheers me up is the mail. Your niece. That was nice of her. To write me like that.”
“Those letters should’ve never gotten through,” Natalie said. “She’s fifteen.”
“Hey, I had nothing to do with that. The warden’s in charge of who gets the mail.” He shook his head. “But I’m grateful, just the same. One thing you find out when you’re locked up is who your friends are. Anyway. Tell her I said thanks.”