I’m too fired up to sleep.
I pace back and forth in my tiny cell. Two steps, turn, two steps, turn. The adrenaline from my altercation with Ross Sumner pumps through my veins. Sleep didn’t come last night. I’m not sure when it will again.
“Visitor.”
It’s Curly again. I’m surprised. “I’m still allowed visitors?”
“Until someone tells me otherwise.”
Every part of me aches, but it is a good ache. After the guards jumped in, both of us were taken to the infirmary. I was able to walk there. Ross had to be carried on a stretcher. Them’s the breaks. The nurse dabbed some peroxide on the bite marks and scrapes before sending me back to my cell. Ross Sumner, alas, was not so lucky. He was, as far as I know, still in the infirmary. I should be above feeling good about this. I should recognize that my private glee-filled gloating comes from a primitive place that this harsh prison has nurtured in me, but too bad.
I am taking great satisfaction in Ross’s pain.
Curly leads me down the same route to the visiting area in total silence. Today I strut more than walk.
“Same visitor?” I ask, just to see what I’ll get in return.
I get nothing.
I sit on the very same stool. Rachel does not bother hiding her horror this time.
“My God, what the hell happened to you?”
I smile and deliver a line I never thought I would: “You should see the other guy.”
Rachel openly studies my face for a few long moments. Yesterday she tried to be more circumspect. All of that pretense is over now. She points at me with her chin. “How did you get all those scars?”
“How do you think?”
“Your eye—”
“I can’t see much out of it. But it’s okay. We have bigger concerns.”
She keeps staring.
“Come on, Rachel. I need you to focus. Forget my face, okay?”
Her eyes trace over the scars for another few seconds. I stay still, let her get on with it. Then she asks the obvious question: “So what do we do?”
“I got to get out of here,” I say.
“You have a plan?”
I shake my head. “For mental exercise, to keep myself semi-sane, I used to dream up ways of getting out of here. You know, escape plans. Nothing I’d ever act on. Just for the hell of it.”
“And?”
“And using my investigative skills, not to mention my innate wiles, I came up with”—I shrug—“nada. It’s impossible.”
Rachel nods. “No one has broken out of Briggs since 1983—and that guy was caught in three days.”
“You did your homework.”
“Old habit. So what are you going to do?”
“Let’s put that aside. I need you to research a few things for me.”
When Rachel whips out her reporter’s notebook, the familiar four-by-eight-inch kind with the wire spiral on the top, I can’t help but smile. She’d used them for years, even before getting the job at the Globe, and it always made it look like she was cosplaying a reporter, like she was going to don a fedora with a card reading PRESS jammed into the rim.
“Go ahead,” Rachel says.
“First off,” I say, “we need to figure out who the real murder victim was.”
“Because now we know it wasn’t Matthew.”
“Know may be an optimistic word, but yes.”
“Okay, I’ll start with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”
“But don’t stop there. Go to any websites you can think of, social media pages, old newspapers, whatever. Let’s start by making a list of any Caucasian male children between the ages of two and, say, four years old who were reported missing within a two-month span of the murder. Try to keep the search within a two-hundred-mile radius. Spread out after that. Go a little younger, a little older, farther away, you know the deal.”
Rachel jots it down. “I may have a few sources I haven’t burned in the FBI,” she says. “Maybe one of them can help.”
“Sources you haven’t burned?”
She shakes it off. “What else?”
“Hilde Winslow,” I say.
We both go silent for a moment.
Then Rachel asks, “What about her?”
My throat closes. It is hard for me to speak.
“David?”
I signal that I’m okay. I put myself together one piece at a time. When I trust my voice again, I ask, “Do you remember her testimony?”
“Of course.”
Hilde Winslow, an elderly widow with twenty-twenty vision, testified that she saw me burying something in the woods between our homes. The police dug at that spot and uncovered the murder weapon covered with my fingerprints.
I feel Rachel’s eyes on me, waiting.
“I could never explain that,” I manage to say, trying to give myself some distance, pretending that I’m talking about someone else, not me. “At first, I thought that maybe she saw someone who looked like me. A case of mistaken identity. It was dark. It was four in the morning. I was pretty far away from her back window.”
“That was what Florio said on cross-examination.”
Tom Florio was my attorney.
“Right,” I say. “But he didn’t make much headway.”
“Mrs. Winslow was a strong witness,” Rachel confesses.
I nod, feeling the emotions start to rise up and overwhelm me again. “She seemed to be just a sweet little old lady with a steel-trap mind. She had no reason to lie. Her testimony sunk me. That was when those closest to me started having serious doubts.” I look up. “Even you, Rachel.”
“And even you, David.”
She meets my glare without the slightest flinch. I’m the one who turns away.
“We need to find her.”
“Why? If she was mistaken—”
“She wasn’t mistaken,” I say.
“I’m not following.”
“Hilde Winslow lied. It’s the only explanation. She lied on the stand, and we need to know why.”
Rachel says nothing. A young woman, still a teen, I would bet, walks behind Rachel and takes a seat on the stool next to her. A beefy inmate I don’t recognize, blanketed in razor-scratch tattoos, comes in and sits across from her. Without preamble he starts cursing at her in a language I can’t make out, gesturing wildly. The girl hangs her head and says nothing.
“Okay,” Rachel says. “What else?”
“Prepare.”
“Meaning?”
“If you have any affairs to get in order, do it now. Max out your ATM card every day. Same with your bank. Get out as much cash as you can, keeping it below ten grand a day so it doesn’t signal anything to the government. Start today. We need as much cash as possible, just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“I find a way out of here.” I lean forward. I know that my eyes are bloodshot, and judging by the look on her face, I look…off. Scary even. “Look,” I whisper, “I know I should give you the big speech now—about how if I manage to escape—I know, I know, but just hear me out—if I manage to escape, you’ll be aiding and abetting a federal inmate, which is a felony. If I were a better man, I would hand you a line about how this is my fight, not yours, but the truth is, I can’t do that. I have zero chance without you.”
“He’s my nephew,” she replies, sitting up a little straighter.
He’s. She said “he’s.” Present tense. Not “he was.” She believes it. God help us both, we really believe that Matthew is still alive.
“So what else, David?”
I don’t reply. I’ve gone quiet. My eyes wander off, my thumb and forefinger plucking at my lower lip.
“David.”
“Matthew is out there,” I say. “He’s been out there all this time.”
My words linger in the still, stilted, prison air.
“The last five years have been hell for me, but I’m his father. I can take it.” My gaze locks on to her. “What have they been like for my son?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel says. “But we have to find him.”
* * *
Ted Weston liked using the nickname Curly at work.
No one called him that at home. Only here. In Briggs. It gave him distance from the scum he had to work with every day. He didn’t like these guys using or even knowing his real name. When Ted finished work, he showered in the correctional officers’ locker room. Always. He never wore his uniform home. He showered with very hot water and scrubbed this place off him, these horrible men and their horrible breath that may still linger on his clothes and in his hair, their sweat and DNA, their evil which feels to him like a living, breathing parasite that attaches itself to any decent microcosm and eats away at it. Ted showers all that away, scrubs it off with scalding water and industrial soap and a harsh-bristled brush, and then he carefully puts on his civilian clothes, his real clothes, before he goes home to Edna and their two daughters, Jade and Izzy. Even then, when he first gets home, Ted showers again and changes clothes, just to be sure, just to be certain that nothing from this place contaminates his home and his family.
Jade is eight and in the third grade. Izzy is six and autistic or on the spectrum or whatever damn term the so-called specialists use to describe the sweetest daughter God ever created. Ted loved both of them with all his heart, loved them both so much that sometimes at the kitchen table, he would look across and just stare at them and the love would pump into his veins so hard, so fast, that he feared he would burst from it.
But right now, as he stood in the prison infirmary by the bedside of a particularly evil inmate named Ross Sumner, Ted scolded himself for even thinking about his daughters, for letting that kind of purity enter his mind while he was in the presence of a monster like Ross Sumner.
“Fifty grand,” Sumner said.
Ross Sumner was in the infirmary. Good. David Burroughs had put a beating on the guy. Who knew Burroughs had it in him? Not that either guy was what Ted would call “hardened,” as opposed to simply awful. Still, Sumner’s pretty-boy face had been busted open. His nose was broken. His eyes had swollen mostly shut. It looked like he was in pain and Ted was happy about that.
“Did you hear me, Theodore?”
Sumner, of course, knew his real name. Ted didn’t like that. “I heard you.”
“And?”
“And the answer is no.”
“Fifty grand. Think about it.”
“No.”
Sumner tried to sit up a bit. “The man murdered his own child.”
Ted Weston shook his head. “You’re the killer, not me.”
“Killer? Oh, Ted, you have it all wrong. You wouldn’t be a killer. You’d be a hero. An avenging angel. With fifty thousand dollars in his pocket.”
“Why do you want him dead so badly anyway?”
“Look at my face. Just look at what Burroughs did to my face.”
Ted Weston did. But he wasn’t buying it. There was something more going on here.
“A hundred grand,” Sumner said.
Ted swallowed. A hundred grand. He thought about Izzy and the price of all those specialists. “I can’t.”
“Of course you can. You already tipped us off about Burroughs’s visitor with the photograph.”
“That was…That was just a little favor.”
Sumner smiled through the bruises.
“So think of this as another favor. A larger one perhaps, but I have a plan. An utterly flawless plan.”
“Right,” Ted scoffed. “Never heard that one in here before.”
“How about I tell you what I’m thinking? Just theoretically. Just listen, okay? For fun.”
Ted didn’t say no or tell him to shut up. Ted didn’t walk away or even shake his head. He just stood there.
“Let’s say a correctional officer—someone like you, Ted—brought me a blade of some sort. A prison shiv, as they say. As you know, there are plenty around in a place like this. Let’s say, just hypothetically, that I clutch the shiv in my hand to make sure my fingerprints are on the weapon. Then, again hypothetically, let’s say the correctional officer dons gloves. Like, for example, the ones here in the infirmary.” Ross smiled through the pain from the beating. “I then take the blame. I then confess, freely, easily—after all, what do I have to lose? If anything, this will help me get free.”
Ted Weston frowned. “Help you how?”
“My appeal is based on my mental sanity. Killing Burroughs will make me appear to be even more loony. Don’t you see? They’ll have the murder weapon with my fingerprints on it. They’ll have my confession. Dozens of witnesses just saw our altercation, a fight nearly to the death, which will thus add in motive for me.” He turned both palms to the ceiling. “Case closed.”
Ted Weston couldn’t help but squirm. A hundred grand. That was more than a year’s salary. Plus it would be cash, no taxes taken out, so it was closer to two years’ worth. He thought about what he and Edna could do with that kind of cash. They were drowning in bills. That kind of money wouldn’t just be throwing them a life preserver. It would be throwing them a damn yacht. And he knew Sumner was good for it. Everybody knew that. He had already transferred two K into his and Bob’s account to look the other way in the cafeteria, which they’d done until it went south.
Looking away for two grand was one thing. Getting $500 a month to report on what Burroughs was up to, as Ted had for years now, that was nice too. But one hundred grand—man oh man, the number staggered Ted. And all he had to do was stab a worthless baby-killer who should have gotten the chair anyway, a man who, if Sumner wanted him dead, would end up dead no matter what. So what was the harm? What was the big deal?
Sumner was right. Nobody would finger Ted. Even if it went wrong, Ted was liked in here. His colleagues would back him.
It would be so easy.
“Theodore?”
Ted shook his head. “I can’t.”
“If you’re trying to negotiate for more money—”
“I’m not. This isn’t who I am.”
Sumner laughed. “Oh, you’re above it, is that what you think?”
“I need to be right with my family,” Ted said. “With my God.”
“Your God?” Sumner laughed again. “That superstitious nonsense? Your God who lets thousands of children starve every day but lets me live to murder and rape? Do you ever think about that, Theodore? Did your God watch me torture people? Was your God too weak to stop me—or did he choose to watch my victims suffer horrible deaths?”
Ted didn’t bother replying. He stared down at the floor, his face reddening.
“You don’t have a choice, Theodore.”
Ted looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I need you to do this. You’ve already taken money from us. I can let your bosses know—not to mention local law enforcement, the press, your family. I don’t want to do that. I like you. You’re a good man. But we are desperate. You don’t seem to appreciate that. We want Burroughs dead.”
“You keep saying ‘we.’ Who is we?”
Sumner looked him dead in the eye. “You don’t want to know. We need him dead. And we need him dead tonight.”
“Tonight?” Ted couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Even if I—”
“I can make further threats if you’d like. I can remind you of our wealth. I can remind you that we still have resources on the outside. I can remind you that we know all about you, that we know where your family—”
Ted’s hand shot out for Ross Sumner’s throat. Sumner didn’t so much as flinch as Ted’s fingers closed around his neck. It didn’t last, of course. Ted let go almost immediately.
“We can make things bad for you, Theodore. You have no idea how bad.”
Ted felt lost, adrift.
“But let’s dispense with such unpleasantries, shall we? We are friends. Friends don’t make idle threats. We are on the same side. The best relationships are not zero-sum, Theodore. The best relationships are win-win. And I feel as though I’ve behaved poorly here. Please accept my apology. Plus a ten-thousand-dollar bonus.” Sumner licked his lips. “One hundred and ten thousand dollars. Think about all that money.”
Ted felt sick. Idle threats. Guys like Ross Sumner don’t make idle threats.
Like the man said, Ted had no choice. He was about to be pushed across a line from which there was, he knew, no coming back.
“Tell me your plan again,” Ted said.