110: Poole heard the warden step back into his office and close the door behind him.
“Oh hell, we’ve got a problem,” the man said. “This is worse than we thought.”
Another man had returned with the warden.
Poole stood up from the rickety chair at the warden’s desk, his legs still stiff from the flight.
Warden Vina gestured to the man beside him. “This is Captain Fred Direnzo. He runs security for the prison. Captain, this is Frank Poole with the FBI. Please tell him what you told me.”
Poole shook his hand. It was cold and clammy. The man was nervous.
He didn’t like where this was going.
He didn’t like it one bit.
Direnzo cleared his throat. “After SAIC Hurless called, we put a tight noose around Weidner. We didn’t want to spook him, so the plan was to let him go about his normal day and keep an eye on him through the security cameras until you got here. This way, you could talk to him and he wouldn’t get a chance to concoct some kind of story to cover his tracks. Always best to approach these scenarios with the element of surprise, right?”
Poole nodded.
Captain Direnzo glanced at the warden, then back at Poole. “He slipped out. I’m not sure how, but somehow he got out.”
“When?”
The warden raised both hands, palms out. “Before you get too excited, we got him. I called the local PD, and they cornered him in his apartment, not far from here. Caught him in the middle of packing a bag. They’re bringing him back, shouldn’t be more than twenty or thirty minutes. Please continue, Captain.”
Direnzo nodded. “The cameras are meant to monitor the inmates, not necessarily the guards, so there are blind spots in various places the guards can access. He changed out of uniform in the locker room and left with the three p.m. crew, but like the warden said, we got him. He’s not going anywhere, I promise you that. We started backtracking Weidner’s steps today, tried to get a better handle on whatever he was up to. Looks like he used a fraudulent court order to arrange for the release of a prisoner at 0800 this morning.”
“Who?”
The warden handed a file to Poole. “We don’t have a name on her. No ID, and she’s not in the system. Just another Jane Doe, picked up for felony grifting. Here’s the thing, though. Your detective, Sam Porter, he was here to see her yesterday, spent three and a half hours with her and her attorney in one of the interview rooms. He told me she was somehow connected to the 4MK murders in Chicago.”
“Is there tape?”
“Cameras are disabled whenever a prisoner is in consultation with their attorney.”
“Who’s her attorney?”
“A local, Sarah Werner,” the warden said. “We’ve got a trace on Jane Doe’s ankle monitor. She’s at her attorney’s office. The data is live. She’s not going anywhere without our knowledge.”
“Can I see her cell?”
“We already tossed it. There’s nothing there.”
“I’d like to see it for myself.”
Her cell truly had been tossed.
Poole stepped into the small room, feeling the walls on all sides closing in on him.
The mattress stood on its side, up against the wall, revealing the metal cot beneath it. Some clothing was scattered on the floor: a T-shirt and two pairs of sweatpants. The contents of a shampoo bottle and toothpaste tube had been emptied into the sink.
“Sometimes prisoners hide small objects in those. Shivs, mostly.”
“Find anything?”
“Nope.”
Poole stepped over to the mattress and began running his fingers across the edges, the seams.
“We checked that too,” Captain Direnzo said. “Nothing.”
Poole looked anyway but didn’t find any openings in the material.
“Like I said, there’s nothing here.”
Poole sighed and dropped the mattress back onto the cot. The metal rattled. His eyes fixed on the wall, on the words scratched into the paint. They weren’t alone. The entire cell was covered in text, years’ worth of prisoners’ thoughts captured in time, left for the next occupant. Poole knew these words, though. They jumped out at him:
Let us return Home, let us go back,
Useless is this reckoning of seeking and getting,
Delight permeates all of today.
From the blue ocean of death
Life is flowing like nectar.
In life there is death; in death there is life.
So where is fear, where is fear?
The birds in the sky are singing “No death, no death!”
Day and night the tide of Immortality
Is descending here on earth.
Home, fear, death, all underlined, as they were in the house back in Chicago. This was followed by one additional line:
Original sin will be the death of you.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Captain Direnzo stood behind him, reading over his shoulder. Poole hadn’t noticed him enter the cell.
Poole ran a finger over the words, bits of paint flaking off beneath his touch. This had been added to the wall of words recently, new graffiti among the layers of old. “It’s a play on the Bible, original sin. Shakespeare said it meant ‘the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.’ Essentially, we are responsible for the sins of our ancestors, and they are responsible for ours.”
“Shakespeare, huh? Our little Jane Doe didn’t seem like much of a Shakespeare fan to me.”
The radio on Captain Direnzo’s shoulder beeped, and he pressed a button. The warden’s voice crackled through the small speaker. “Captain? Weidner’s back. Please escort our friend to interview room three when you’re done.”
“Copy that.”