40: “Is that . . . ?”
“Nicolas Cage, yeah,” the warden said, leading Porter into his cramped office. The framed mug shot hung on the wall to the left of his desk. “He was our guest in April 2011, after getting wrapped up in a fight at a local bistro. Even busted a window. Them Hollywood types sometimes forget when the camera stops rolling. He enjoyed his stay so much, he stopped back a month later after a couple too many drinks. He got into a loud argument with his wife in the middle of the French Quarter. We would have let it pass, but he kept pushing the officers. They had no choice but to arrest him. Great actor. I loved him in Con Air.”
“Is that the one with Sean Connery?”
The warden held up a finger and picked up his phone. “CO Weidner to the warden’s office, CO Weidner to the warden’s office,” he said into the receiver. A moment later Porter heard his words echo through the prison’s intercom system.
“The film with Sean Connery is The Rock,” the warden told him, hanging up the phone. He gestured to one of the empty seats in front of his desk. “We get our share of celebrities through here, being a bit of a party town. We let them sleep it off, just like the college kids who get a bit too rowdy, and put them out the door the next day. Unless there’s property damage or someone gets hurt, there’s not much need to push charges. If we charged every D&D who passed through the Quarter, the prison would be full inside of a week, and there’d be nobody for the women to flash their tits at.”
A knock at the warden’s door.
Porter looked up and immediately recognized Vincent Weidner from the photograph. His dark hair was a little longer than most prison guards’, hanging above his collar, and he had a close-cropped goatee. There was a scar on his neck, about two inches long, below the base of his chin. Porter figured it to be a few years old. It was ragged, not a professional incision but an injury resulting from a knife or broken glass. Porter thought about the scar on his own leg, where Bishop had stabbed him in the thigh. It itched in return, and he fought the urge to scratch.
Weidner’s eyes fell on Porter for a moment, and then he turned back to the warden. “Good morning, sir. What can I do for you?”
The warden pointed to the other vacant chair, and the guard sat, moving slowly. Prison guards always seemed to move with caution, running every possible scenario before making a move—at least the good ones did. The rest tended to get hurt. Considering the scar, Porter wasn’t quite sure which camp Weidner fell into.
“This is Detective Sam Porter with Chicago Metro. He’s chasing down a lead and asked for our assistance,” the warden explained. He nodded at Porter. “Do you have that photograph?”
Porter pulled the photo from his jacket pocket and handed it to the guard. “He pointed at the woman walking between the two guards. “Do you recognize her?”
Weidner tilted his head a little to the right. “She’s a doe.”
“A what?”
“A doe. Unidentified. Jane Doe number 2138, I believe,” Weidner said, returning the photograph. “What’s this about?”
The warden pulled his computer keyboard closer and typed with both index fingers. “Jane Doe number 2138. She joined us on January eighteenth of this year, a little over three weeks ago. She’s been arraigned, pled guilty, and is awaiting sentencing. Picked up for grifting down on Bourbon.”
“I guess your catch-and-release policy doesn’t apply to petty theft?” Porter said.
The warden scrolled through the screen. “She stole the wallet of a man from Jersey, and it contained . . . oh, that’s rough.”
“What?”
“He had five hundred and twelve dollars in his wallet,” the warden said. “Theft of anything over five hundred in Orleans Parish carries a felony charge. If the man had bought one more hurricane, she would have most likely been tagged with a misdemeanor and would be heading home soon. As it stands, she’s looking at a minimum stay of two years, maybe longer, if this isn’t her first offense.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Well, if you’re gonna play, though, you gotta be ready to pay,” Warden Vina said. “Apparently, she had three other wallets on her person. None of the identification matched her, and she hasn’t given her name.”
“What about her prints?”
Vina shook his head. “Not in the system, ours or national. She has one identifying mark, a small tattoo on her wrist.” He turned the monitor around so Porter could get a better look.
Porter’s eyes widened. He leaned over the desk. It was a small figure eight, identical to the one found on the wrist of Jacob Kittner, the man killed by a city bus and originally believed to be 4MK. Bishop branded Emory Connors with the same tattoo. “I need to see her,” he said.
The warden turned the monitor back around. “We’ll need to get permission. She’s lawyered up.”
Porter frowned. “How’d she get a lawyer without providing a name?”
Weidner cleared his throat. “I was there for that. It happened on intake during her initial interview. She didn’t say a word from the moment we took her off the bus until more than an hour after we sat her down in Interrogation. She just stared at the detective running the questioning, Detective Dunleavy. She had this grin on her face the whole time. After an hour or so, she leaned across the table and said three words: ‘Lawyer, Sarah Werner.’ Then she leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and smiled again. I don’t know how Dunleavy kept his cool. I sure as shit couldn’t.” He caught his language and glanced at the warden, who waved him off.
“Who’s Sarah Werner? A local?” Porter asked.
“You’d have to ask Dunleavy,” Weidner replied.
The warden put his phone on speaker and dialed a number.
A gruff voice answered. “Yeah?”
“Dunleavy? This is Warden Vina at the OPP. I’m here with a detective from Chicago and one of our guards. What can you tell me about that Jane Doe from a few weeks back? Represented by Sarah Werner?”
“Oh, hell. That bullshit again?” Dunleavy sighed. “Not much to tell about the crime. She got caught grifting the wrong pocket. He said he’d been pickpocketed in the past and had a habit of checking his wallet sporadically when he walked in public. She gave him a light tap walking past, his fingers went to his pocket, discovered the lack of wallet bulge, and he grabbed her arm. She countered with a mean scratch to the side of his face and started screaming at him, random shit like ‘I’m not coming back, you’ve got to let me go! I’m not gonna let you hurt me anymore, I’ve had enough!’ That got the attention of a couple local boys who had been partaking in happy hour at the Crooked Broom. They came stumbling out, pulled the two apart, and proceeded to beat the hell out of the guy.”
“Crap,” the warden said.
“Broke two ribs, knocked out three teeth, and blackened up both his eyes real good. Could have been much worse, but the man’s wife came out of the bar at that point, saw her husband at the wrong end of the shitkickery, and screamed.” Dunleavy took a breath and went on. “Scream number two was enough for the local boys to snap out of caveman mode, and one of them grabbed our little grifter before she could disappear in the crowd. A tourist saw the local grab her, thought he might hurt her, and nearly got into a fight of his own pulling her away from him. PD showed up at that point and pulled everyone off everyone and sent them to neutral corners in zip-tie cuffs until they could sort things out.” Dunleavy covered the phone and shouted something to someone. Porter couldn’t make it out. He came back a moment later. “I didn’t have the privilege of meeting Ms. Doe until they got her back to HQ and set her up with accommodations in one of our interview rooms. At that point the conversation was decidedly one-sided. I worked her for a bit, got absolutely nowhere, and then she played the lawyer card.”
“Sarah Werner.”
“Yeah, Sarah Werner.”
The men went quiet. The warden looked at Porter, who nodded, then glanced down at the phone. “Thanks, Rick. If we need anything else, we’ll be in touch.” “Wonderful, you do that.”
The line went dead, and Warden Vina pressed the Off button, leaning back in his chair. “Getting you in to see her will be tough. As a civilian, you’d have to have her agree to meet with you and put you on her visitors list. As a detective, you can’t be allowed in to see her unless her attorney clears it first. Either way, there is some hoop jumping in your immediate future.”
Porter said, “Where can I find Sarah Werner?”