Caged to Kill

by Tom Swyers

  The rising sun was peeking through the trees over Phillip’s field when they arrived. The crickets were fading; bumble bees were at the breakfast table feasting on the waist-high wild blue lupines. The flowers were past peak but the field still featured plenty of spires in bloom. Bunched together, they looked like sturdy, long violet fingers reaching up from the ground toward an azure sky. A honey-like fragrance wafted to the heavens as the temperature rose.

  The three family members walked off the trail into the lupines and stood side by side. Christy set Phillip down on the ground at their feet.

  “Do you guys have anything you’d like to say before we set Phillip free?” David asked.

  Annie and Christy looked at one another. “You go first, Mom, unless you want to pass.”

  Annie sighed. “David, there are so many thoughts and emotions rushing through my head. There’s a lot I’d like to say but I don’t want to ramble on because I don’t want anyone to see us here.”

  “I understand. Maybe you’d like to say something about what Phillip meant to you? Christy can do the same if he’d like. Then I can offer a prayer.”

  “I’ll try,” Annie said. She stood between Christy and David, reached for their hands, and held them tightly. “Phillip, I want to thank you for being a part of our lives. You really opened my eyes. I always thought that people in prison were bad to the core. You taught me that this wasn’t true, at least not for you, and it probably isn’t true for many others behind bars. Some people can and do change. I saw all the good in you despite what you did when you were so young. I feel horrible about what was done to you in prison. It was wrong. Lord knows you deserved better, and I hope you find the peace you deserve in the afterlife.”

  “Christy?” David said.

  “Mom shared some of my feelings. Mr. Dawkins taught me a lot of things, but if I had to choose one it would be about being mentally strong. One day I sat in my closet for an hour just to see what life was like for him. Let’s just say it was hard, and I couldn’t imagine doing it for thirty years. But he did and still tried to be a good man, even with all the horror that he went through. I’m not sure I could do that. I’ll never forget his inner strength. I’m going to miss him a lot.” Christy looked to his dad with misty eyes.

  “Dear God,” David said, “please bring justice to those in the CIA and others who used Phillip for their evil ends. That’s all I’m going to say about those who were directly involved in bringing about his death. Now for the rest of us, let me say this. Dear God, please forgive Phillip. He owned up to killing that innocent police officer. He owned up to the eternal damage he caused that officer’s family. Every second of every day for thirty years, he paid a very high price for his sin. God, please forgive us all for our sins in how we treated Phillip. Forgive us for lying to ourselves. We believed that we were merciful and compassionate for not putting Phillip to death for his sin. Instead, we wrapped Phillip up in a nice little soundproof box that was invisible to us, and we created a system that would either drive him mad and/or kill him. God, please forgive us for torturing Phillip for his sin by sentencing him to a box. We lied to ourselves and tortured Phillip over most of his adult life. I believe we committed a sin far greater than Phillip’s sin. But in the end, only you can be the judge of that. One person does not make a system. Our collective will over the span of generations has created this system. The system belongs to all of us, and so we own all of its sins. An unjust system is shared by everyone who tolerates it. All of us had a hand in torturing Phillip Dawkins. God, I pray that you can forgive all of us. Finally, I pray that Phillip’s life was not lived in vain. I pray that his life and death will change the system for the better. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Annie and Christy echoed.

  David picked Phillip up and split open the packing tape on the box with his car keys. He removed the plastic bag and unzipped the seal on the top. “Dear God, we now give you Phillip and ask for your mercy. We have come here today to set Phillip free in a general population of wild blue lupines. We pray that Phillip will now have in his afterlife what he could not have in this life on earth.” The scattering of cremains was imminent.

  David dipped his hand into the bag, took out a handful of Phillip’s ashes, and threw them up in the air. A gentle breeze spread Phillip among the lupines. Annie whimpered through the hands pressed to her mouth. David and Christy fought back tears. The slowly falling ashes nudged some Karner Blues out of their repose and the butterflies briefly took flight. The second and final brood of the season was enjoying life in the Pine Bush. When the bag was almost empty, David held it upside down and shook it until the last vestiges of Phillip floated away.

  When the scattering was done and Phillip had found his rest, the three hugged one another in a family embrace. As they separated to begin the walk back to the car, Christy said, “Wow, Dad, don’t move.”

  David froze. “Why not?”

  “Look, there’s a butterfly on your shoulder,” Annie said, pointing to it.

  David turned his head to look. A butterfly faced David, slowly flapping its wings. The wings vibrated as they moved, as if it was stretching them. It was the motion of a newly hatched butterfly, fresh from the cocoon, drying out and preparing for its brief life journey.

  “It’s a Karner Blue,” David said.

  “Is that what they call it? It is a beautiful powder blue color,” Annie said.

  “I love the orange crescents underneath,” Christy said. “Is it a male or female?”

  “It’s a male,” David said.

  “Looks like you have a friend, Dad. He won’t stop staring at you.”

  After a breeze faded to stillness, the butterfly lifted off and flew among the three of them in a jerky flight pattern. It touched David on his forehead, Christy on his nose, and Annie on her cheek before zigging and zagging around them.

  David smiled as it all came together. Phillip had mailed the Karner Blue brooch to Janet. He had departed his life on a pitch pine wrapped in a sheet like a caterpillar in a chrysalis waiting to emerge. The last line in his goodbye letter announced: I’ll always be there for you, David. I’ll always be there for Annie and Christy too. I’ll be there in spirit. Look for me.

  As the butterfly climbed toward the sun and faded from view, David said, “Peace be with you, Phillip.”

  ~ The End ~

  I sincerely hope that you enjoyed Caged to Kill. If you did, please share your experience with your friends and family!

  I invite you to read the other two standalone books in the Lawyer David Thompson Legal Thriller Series: Saving Babe Ruth and The Killdeer Connection. Click the links embedded in the titles and take a look at them.

  Also, please sign up to join my Readers Group by clicking HERE. You’ll get updates and special offers only available to members.

  Finally, please take a few seconds to write a few words about your reading experience with Caged to Kill on Amazon by clicking HERE. Your support is so very much appreciated. Thank you!

  One more thing! You can read the first chapter of The Killdeer Connection. It follows the acknowledgements page at the back of the book!

  Acknowledgments

  When I first started writing Caged to Kill, I didn’t think that writing about solitary confinement would affect me so deeply. Was I ever wrong! To write this novel, I had to mentally put myself in a cell all alone. For the past two years, I had a taste of solitary confinement because I had to think about it, on average, about five or six hours per day while I sat at my keyboard. If I wasn’t writing about solitary, I was researching it. The more and more I wrote about and performed research about the topic, the less and less I was able to, over time, seamlessly reenter my life away from my writing world. The daily transition from my writing and researching life in solitary to my everyday life became increasingly more difficult. Solitary confinement was getting to me and I hadn’t even experienced it firsthand.

  If Caged to Kill was difficult to write, it was certainly difficult to read and
edit, not once, but multiple times. If it were not for my editor, Chris Perham, Caged to Kill would not exist. Period. Chris stood my side every step of the way, even while she went through major surgery not once, but twice, while the book was in production. She made it a point to get her latest round of edits to me before she went under the surgeon’s knife each time over the span of a few months. Much of her post-surgery recovery phase was spent with the manuscript in hand while she painstakingly edited it one more time. She shares a passion for this novel and her support steered me to the finish line. She is one smart, tough lady and I know Dennis, her husband, and Gayle, their dog, supported her throughout. I am indebted to the entire Perham family.

  If it wasn’t for Billy Blake, I wouldn’t have been inspired to write this story. I talked about Billy earlier in the preface to this book, but I’d like to recount another story about him. I’ll never forget the first time I visited him in his maximum-security home at Great Meadow Correctional Facility. It was January 23, 2019 and I had sent the manuscript to him a few weeks earlier. I was afraid it might be confiscated, but it made it to Billy intact. When I first met Billy he apologized profusely for not reading the entire book before my arrival. He said he had a difficult time concentrating because a mental-health inmate in solitary was screaming while banging on his steel walls around the clock. My jaw dropped as I imagined Billy lying on his back, on his mattress, on the floor, while he read my manuscript overhead, as some poor soul had a mental breakdown a few cells away. Billy was in hell, trying to read a novel about the hell he was living, while some poor soul was losing it in this hell a few cells away. And yet here was Billy politely apologizing to me for taking so long to read Caged to Kill.

  Please take a few seconds of your time to sign the petition I linked to in the preface. It’s time for Billy to get the opportunity to live outside of solitary confinement after thirty-two years alone. Here is the LINK again.

  I want to express my loving gratitude to my better half, Cher, and my family. Cher has always supported my writing passion and I’m so blessed that she’s been in my life since high school. My son, Randy, has always been there for me too. The same can be said for my parents, Dick and Betsy, and my mother-in-law, Arden, her best friend, Ellen, and my entire family. Thank you one and all.

  I want to thank my wonderful group of early readers for their feedback and support. I’ve always said that a writer isn’t much of anything without readers, and I’m blessed to have so many very loyal ones. Thank you for adopting this author! If you want to be an early reader of my work, drop me a note through my website.

  I want to also express my gratitude to Marquina Iliev-Piselli, Sophia Heller, Maggie Graham, and Andrea McCoy for their special contributions. Each one took the time to help me in some phase of the book. Thank you for your kindness.

  Finally, I want to thank you, the reader, for taking the time out of your life to read Caged to Kill. I know you’re a special person in my life because you actually read my entire acknowledgments page!

  Ch. 1: The Killdeer Connection

  The last thing on earth he wanted to do was to open that door. But he had no choice.

  He believed that his brand-new key copy should work just as well, if not better, than the original. But he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “Helpless” and “mistaken”—two words that would come to define David Thompson’s life.

  Why doesn’t this thing work?

  The copy in his hand shimmered like a gold coin in the evening sun. He put it back in the hole, wiggling and jiggling it into the dead bolt of Apartment 1B, a ground-floor unit.

  Come on already.

  Nothing.

  Some big-box worker must have made this copy.

  With each wiggle and jiggle, he swayed his hips, hoping that his body language might help. On the fifth try, the door finally opened.

  Facing David and standing upright with his back against the living-room wall some fifteen feet away was Dr. Harold Salar: his friend, client, and an oil-industry expert. He was slouching a bit and was staring at David with a silly grin on his face. A waist-high stack of papers and folders were piled in front of him; on either side, stacks of boxes and crates reached toward the ceiling and pressed against his shoulders. Harold, in his midfifties, was dressed in a plain navy-blue baseball jersey tucked into his pleated matching golf slacks. His jet-black hair matched the color of his belt; it was perfectly combed, parted to one side. His right-hand thumb was hooked between his jersey and his slacks so that his hand covered his belt buckle. His face was olive toned, almost tanned, chiseled, and neatly creased in all the right places. All in all, Dr. Harold Salar looked pretty darn good for a dead man.

  “Harold . . . Harold!” David boomed as he moved his athletic frame down the narrow aisle toward him in disbelief. No response. As an attorney with an eldercare and estate practice, David had walked in on his share of stiffs. He had developed a keen sense of smell for a decomposing corpse. The stench screamed to David, “Dead man ahead!” But Harold was upright, almost standing.

  Harold’s head leaned to one side, like he was nodding off with his eyes wide open. His knees pressed up against the waist-high stack to his front that helped to keep him upright. His Baltimore Orioles baseball cap was on the floor. Through the narrow opening that allowed entrance and exit to Harold’s space, David grasped the left hand hanging down by his side. It was cold to the touch, and David felt the stiffness of rigor mortis when he moved it. He didn’t need to check for a pulse, but he did anyway, just to make sure.

  David’s eyes welled up when the certainty of his friend’s death hit. His hands plowed through his silvery-brown hair as he looked around for a place to sit and gather his thoughts. But there was no chair anywhere. Just mounds of stuff piled high. The only clear space was the narrow aisle that led him to Harold and another aisle that branched off to the left and right as he stood facing the corpse. David cleared some bottles and cans out of the way on the floor, and he sat down.

  A breeze blew inside past the door he had left open, causing some papers to ruffle, or so he first thought. He looked over his shoulder to find the source of the sound, and he saw, for a split second, what he thought was the shadow of a bat or a bird—maybe even a large insect—against the door as it flew out of the apartment.

  He rubbed his cobalt-blue eyes in an effort to process everything, but the shock of it all disoriented him. He was too shocked to cry. He simply didn’t believe what had happened. Every single conversation and shared experience with Harold raced through his mind at random, all at once. Nothing made sense. After a minute or two, David could generate only one solid thought: he needed to call Pete McNeal, his friend and the chief of the Indigo Valley Police Department. He took his cell out of his jeans front pocket and dialed.

  “What’s going on, D?” Pete asked. D was short for David, a nickname left over from high school.

  David sighed into the phone before speaking. “I’m calling on official business, Pete. You need to come over to the Hilltop Apartments, Unit 1B. I . . . just discovered . . . a dead body.”

  “What happened?”

  “I . . . walked into Harold Salar’s apartment and found him dead. That’s all I know at this point.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said before hanging up.

  David tucked the phone back into his pocket and looked up. He felt like he was back in the canyons of New York City, except there were towers of junk above him instead of towering office buildings. It all threatened to bury him alive with one false move, but that’s the way he felt in New York, too. That fear, and the feeling that Harold was staring at him, was enough to get him on his feet again.

  The picture-window drapes were drawn, hiding the colossal mess from view. From somewhere in the room, a lamp cast beams of light across the ceiling. There was no longer any breeze blowing through the doorway to refresh the air. If the smell of the rotting body wasn’t bad enough, it was soon joined by the smell of rotting food from somewh
ere over the mountains of stuff, probably in the kitchen. It smelled like a garbage disposal that hadn’t been flushed in a week. David looked at Harold again. His frozen smirk suggested he was quite comfortable living in the squalor. On the floor, a family of cockroaches merrily crossed the aisle, probably en route to the kitchen to visit friends and family for a night out in the big city.

  David gagged, did an about-face, headed for the front door, and closed it behind him. The setting sun cast long tree shadows over the parking lot. A gentle breeze cleared the stench that had followed David out the door. Red-maple leaves fell by his feet. He looked up. It was mid-October and the trees were half-bare, except for the oaks. They’d hold on to their brown litter through November and beyond, and certainly after the town was done vacuuming the loose leaves raked to the curb. Then they’d dump them all purely out of spite and David would have to bag them before the first snow or in the spring. David called it the Oak Conspiracy; he’d hated these evil trees ever since he was in charge of raking up after them as a kid.

  Over the years, the oaks had come to remind David of his nursing-home clients: refusing to let go until the worst possible time, usually around the holidays, when flu season went into overdrive.

  Down the road, David could see the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. The fall foliage had peaked, and the colors were starting to fade into the gray of November. In his line of sight, flashing red lights floated in his direction; a siren screamed.

  Pete McNeal parked in front of David and swung open the door before coming to a full stop. A giant hand appeared on the roof of the car, helping to guide the former high-school football tackle out of the driver’s seat so that he didn’t hit his head on the ceiling. Out popped the chief, a man too tall and too wide for any midsize police cruiser. He was totally bald by choice. He decided to get rid of it all years ago when he first started losing his hair. He told David back then that he didn’t like to face the mirror every morning and wonder how much hair he’d lost the day before. “I just want to be done with it,” he’d said to David before shaving it all off. Afterward, he grew a mustache, combed straight down over his upper lip, to offset the loss.