Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  At the door, he stepped out onto the porch with me and pulled the door shut behind him. “Remember what you said in there about my family and my place? About how special they are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they are. I’d do anything to protect them. Anything. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep what’s mine. Nothing.”

  38

  “Juan did not kill Justin Menge,” Carlos Matos said. “I swear it on the soul of my children.” He crossed himself, then continued. “We were together the whole day. Even after we were back in the cells, we were talking back and forth the entire time. And I lied about him cutting me. I was trying to get him in trouble at the time. I was cut by someone else on another matter, but that has all been taken care of now.”

  It was the following afternoon, a Wednesday—one week since Justin Menge had been murdered. I’d joined Carlos Matos in the waiting area of the medical department where he was required to sit until the doctor could see him. We were the only two people in the large room. The officer assigned to watch it was leaning out the partially opened door smoking.

  I held a file folder with logs from the night of the murder and was on my way to confront DeLisa Lopez when I ran into Matos.

  “You lied?” I asked.

  “Si. I am very sorry, Father.”

  “Or did Martinez get to you again and you’re lying now?”

  “No, señor. I swear.”

  “Or were you lying then and now? I’m beginning to think I can’t trust you.”

  “I am telling the truth. Juan did not kill Justin.”

  “He could’ve had it done,” I said, suppressing a yawn.

  After leaving the Hawkins’s, I had driven around Pine County looking for Merrill for much of the night and had felt my sleep deficit all day.

  “He did not have a reason.”

  “Menge was going to testify against him,” I said.

  “No, he was not, and everyone knew it. Juan was not afraid of that. They did not have anything on him. Nothing. You think Juan told Menge something—confessed some crime to him. Why?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, he didn’t. He would not. Why would he?”

  “Then why was Menge going to testify against him?”

  “I already told you, señor,” he said. “The inspector’s trying to set him up.”

  “Fortner?”

  The medical officer might as well have been smoking in the waiting room for all the good leaning out the open door was doing. Every gust of the cool October wind blew his smoke directly at us. I coughed, attempted to breathe shallowly, and began to fan myself with the file folder I was holding.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head as if the thought defied all logic. “He could not do something like that. It was the big inspector. What is his name? Daniels? He has been screwing with Juan since he has been here.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated, looking at me as if wanting to tell me but thinking better of it.

  As I looked at him—at his thick shiny, black hair and dull black eyes, and the way his blue inmate uniform strained to hold in his thick body—I wondered what DeLisa Lopez was thinking. Could such a beautiful woman really be involved with such an average man?

  “Tell me,” I said. “It may be the only way to save your friend from a murder charge.”

  He leaned in close, looked around, then whispered, “Daniels’s thinks Juan raped his wife.”

  “Daniels’s wife or Juan’s?”

  “Juan does not have a wife,” he said. “Daniels’s.

  “Did he?”

  “He did not, but the inspector thinks that he did.”

  A large black nurse whose pants swished together as she moved, walked into the room and over to the vending machines in the corner closet. The soft hum of the machines grew louder as she opened the door and went inside. It took her a while, but she finally coaxed a diet Dr. Pepper and two Snickers out of the machines.

  “Menge was not going to testify against Juan. He did not know anything. Even if there was something to know, Menge did not know it. He and Juan never even spoke.”

  I nodded.

  The officer glanced back in our direction, blowing smoke out of his nose as he did. I waved to him, signaling everything was fine, but he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Was Ms. Lopez in your cell around the time of the murder?”

  Eyes growing wide, jaw dropping, he was stunned into silence.

  He started to say something, but stopped.

  The officer opened the front door all the way and Anna walked inside, waving the cloud of smoke away with her hand as she did. As she walked over to the door leading to psychology and classification, she gave me a polite nod and strained smile.

  “If you can give her an alibi, you should,” I said, “otherwise she could get charged with murder.”

  “She was not.”

  “I already know she was in the PM unit that night,” I said, holding up the file folder, “and I know you were one of the men she was there to see.”

  “Si. She came by earlier, but this was way before Menge got killed.”

  “You two having an affair?”

  “She would not . . .” he began, shaking his head as he trailed off.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said with a smile.

  “No, I mean . . .”

  I knew what he meant, but as he explained it, I wondered if he and DeLisa could fit in the roles of David and Bathsheba. If they were having an affair, they might. What if Menge caught them and was going to report it in his attempt to get out early to be with Sobel? They could’ve killed him to cover it up.

  I felt like a real bastard for what I was about to say next, but I figured his reaction would tell me more than his words ever would. Besides, I was angry at myself for what I had done to Anna, hurting inside, and felt like spreading some it around.

  “Listen,” I said, “you’re not going to get her in trouble. We’ve already got her for sex with inmates. Evidently, she’s carrying on with several in the institution. I just want to know if you can provide her with an alibi during the time Menge was murdered.”

  The muscles in his neck and arms tensed, his jaw flexed, his black eyes burned.

  Very slowly and deliberately he said, “She was down there that night, but she was not with me. If she needs an alibi, I am not the one to give it to her.”

  “So she could’ve killed him?” I asked.

  “Sounds to me like she could do anything,” he said, still seething, his knuckles cracking from how tightly he was clenching his fists.

  When Matos was taken into medical, I walked out of the waiting room and down the long corridor toward DeLisa Lopez’s office. On the way, I passed Anna in the hall. We both smiled and spoke, but it was strained and awkward, and I wasn’t prepared for how much more angry and empty it made me feel.

  My heart hurt, and I felt disconnected, adrift.

  I turned and called after her.

  When she slowly walked back toward me, I said, “Are you okay?”

  She nodded without really looking at me. “Any word from Merrill yet?”

  I shook my head. “I think Howard Hawkins is involved.”

  “I’m worried about him.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Please let me know when you find out anything.”

  “Sure.”

  She nodded, her full lips twisting as she frowned, and began to walk away.

  “Hey,” I said. “We don’t have to ignore each other.”

  She turned around slowly, her head down. “I can’t do this,” she said, lifting her deep brown eyes, wounded and sad, up to meet mine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I never meant—”

  “I’ve put in for a transfer.”

  “What?” I asked, loss and longing gripping my heart.

  “Central Office. There’s a position open and they think I can just lateral in. I won’t even have to interview.”

  “But—
”

  “It’d make it easier,” she said. “I need a change anyway.”

  “Anna, I never meant—”

  “I’ll miss you,” she said, lifting her hand and touching my cheek, before turning and walking away.

  For a long moment I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I just stood there, the scent of her perfume swirling around me.

  When I was able, I walked over to DeLisa Lopez’s office door and looked inside. Through the narrow pane of glass I could see that she was intently engaged in counseling an inmate. I watched for a moment before walking away. She was obviously a caring and compassionate counselor.

  As I waited, I opened the file folder I was carrying and pulled out the copies I had made of the control room logs from the night of the murder and looked through them again.

  Before, when I had studied the logs, I had concentrated on the ones from G-dorm, but my subconscious must have registered something wrong in the control room logs that my conscious mind, concentrating on G-dorm, missed.

  I found where DeLisa Lopez had been logged in that morning. It was just a few minutes after me. As I followed the list down, I saw the comings and goings of the staff and visitors of the institution.

  Anna and Merrill were logged in just a few minutes after Lopez, Fortner a few minutes after that. In the early afternoon, Tom Daniels was logged in and Merrill was logged out as his shift came to an end. I saw where I was logged out at the normal time and then back in for the PM unit Catholic Mass that night.

  I ran my finger down the page, examining every entry for the entire day and the following morning. I found where Daniels and I had been logged out in the early morning hours after we had secured and processed the crime scene. And then I saw where staff members began to be logged in the next morning. However, what I didn’t see was where DeLisa Lopez had been logged out.

  It wasn’t there.

  She had come into the institution early Wednesday morning and not left it again until the end of her shift on Thursday evening. She had spent thirty-two long hours inside the institution.

  It could go unnoticed easily enough. I wouldn’t have found it had I not been trying to identify the woman who was seen in G-dorm the evening of the murder. There was no other reason to look at the logs. Well over a hundred people entered and exited the institution every day, arriving when one set of officers were in the control room, leaving when there was another. Unless someone was really studying the logs, looking for discrepancies, like I was now, no one would ever know—and, even if someone asked, the person could claim that the control room officer simply failed to log him or her out. I thought about how many times I had worked late, catching up or covering a special program, and how surprised the control room was to see me when I walked through the gate because they had no idea I was still inside the institution.

  The how was easy. What I needed to know was the why? Why, on the night of the murder, had Lisa Lopez never left the institution.

  That’s what I was about to go in and ask her when the officer in the waiting room opened the door and told me I had an emergency telephone call. Rushing down the hall and through the door, I picked up the phone. It was Sharon Hawkins, and in a surprisingly flat, matter-of-fact voice she told me Merrill was in Howard Hawkins’s jail and would not survive the night.

  39

  The temperature was falling with the descent of the sun, and the heater in my old Chevy S-10 wasn’t working, but that wasn’t why Sharon Hawkins was shaking.

  “Why’re you doing this?” I asked.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “I’m leaving. They’ll hunt me down and kill me, but I don’t care. It might be different if I had children, but . . .”

  “We won’t let that happen. You can come with me tonight. Merrill and I will look out for you.”

  “For the rest of my life?”

  “For as long as it takes.”

  “I believed in his vision,” she said. “Howard’s. It makes sense, you know? Can’t save the world. We’ve got to take care of our families no matter what. That’s what God wants us to do. But he’s a dictator. He’s building a kingdom and he’s the king. I can’t do it anymore—living in his prison, watching him steal and kill and abuse, and all in the name of God, family, and community.”

  Sharon Hawkins sat rigid in the seat, her right arm outstretched, French-manicured acrylic fingernails drumming on the door. Her hair was a blonde dye job that should’ve been better considering how much money the Hawkins family had. Her makeup was too heavy, thick globs of mascara sticking her eyelashes together. Yet for all her attempts at cosmetic improvement, she was still a very plain looking woman.

  “He didn’t start off being a monster,” she said, still looking out the window at the darkness. “In the beginning, back when I first met them, he was different. His vision seemed pure, but as his power grew, he became a monster.” She turned suddenly and looked at me. “He’s killed four people that I know of. Maybe more. Probably more. Your friend may already be dead.”

  “I doubt it.”

  She laughed again. Her laugh was devoid of humor, full of futility.”What’re you planning to do?”

  “Find out what they’re holding him on, and—”

  She looked at me in astonishment. “What they’re holding him on? They’re not holding him on anything. Jesus. You don’t get it. This isn’t a regular jail. Things aren’t done in a regular way here. He hasn’t been charged with anything. He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t been arrested. He’s been abducted.”

  I had encountered men like Hawkins before, though not many as extreme—people, usually men, who, in their small realm, had unlimited power and no accountability—people who had lost all touch with reality. All it takes is a lot of wealth or charisma, a little madness, and a total lack of responsibility, and in time you have a monster. The Howard Hawkins of the world, and there are many, are the Saddam Husseins, the David Koreshes, and the Bin Ladens at the local level, whose low profile enables them to remain beneath the radar, inflict damage for decades until they finally self-destruct or draw outside attention to themselves. Otherwise they’re never apprehended. And men like Howard are most often to be found in the small rural areas where their authority goes unquestioned, their power unchallenged, where decent country folks are not equipped to deal with them. I may not understand what Hawkins does or why, but I can’t imagine any of it will come as a surprise.

  “They’re not even keeping him in the jail,” she said. “They’ve got him in the dungeon.”

  “The dungeon?”

  “That’s what they call it. It’s an underground room that was part of the old jail. It has a cell where they keep all the unofficial prisoners. No one’s ever gotten out of it.”

  “Until now.”

  She gave me that same futile laugh I was already weary of hearing.

  “Why is he doing this?”

  “Why do men like Howard do most of the things they do? If you do whatever the hell you like long enough, you begin to think you’re invincible. Plus he thinks God is on his side, that he’s some special visionary. I can tell you his reasons aren’t based on any logic most people would understand.”

  I thought about how nice it’d be to have Merrill in on what had gone from an information-gathering and bail posting mission to a jailbreak. I could call Dad or Jake, but I didn’t want this to become official yet. We needed to keep everyone in play until we could find out who killed Justin and why, and amass enough evidence to put him away. Still, if the Hawkins clan were as lawless as Sharon suggested, I would need backup. As a compromise, I left a message on Daniels’ voicemail to get backup and come get me out of the Pine County Jail if he didn’t hear from me again within an hour.

  “Any suggestions on the best way to get Merrill out?”

  “Wait ‘til seven. Kevin’ll be on duty by himself. I could distract him.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “Fuck him,” she said in a dispassionate monotone.

&
nbsp; “That won’t be—”

  “Do it all the time. Since Mike’s been in prison, Kevin sneaks into my room at least twice a week and does what he wants to me.”

  “By force?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t exactly rape me, but I can’t say no.”

  “Tell you what, just pretend, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever. Just get your friend and get the fuck out of this county.”

  “I will, but you’re going with us.”

  To that, she responded with her signature laugh again. It said things were foreordained, resistance was futile, that people like us were merely pawns of the powerful.

  “He sat there and lied to you,” she said. “And you’d never have known it. He’s amazing. The nicest man in the world—on the surface. Only the surface. He told you he hadn’t seen your friend while at that very moment he was being tortured in the basement of his jail.”

  “I didn’t believe him.”

  “I’m not saying you believed him, just that he’s a good liar. And acting like Mike couldn’t have possibly killed that other inmate when that’s what they sent him there to do. He should’ve gotten an Academy Award for that one.”

  “Run that by me again. Who sent Mike in to do what?”

  “Howard. When Mike was arrested, Howard got him sent to PCI so he could keep an eye on Justin Menge. He was inside anyway, so why not?”

  “What’s Mike in on?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He’s a bad drunk. Wouldn’t be a problem if he’d just stay in Pine County where daddy can fix everything, but he’s got to hotdog all over the place. He’s in on three different third-degree felonies. He got his third DUI, driving with suspended license for the third time, and resisting an officer with violence all at the same time.”

  “And Howard couldn’t help him?”

  “Happened in Bay County. Nothing he could do.”

  “But he got him moved to PCI once he was inside? That wouldn’t be easy.”

  She shrugged. “It’s what he claims. Howard’s crazy, but most people don’t realize it. He’s still got a few friends in power here and there, and he’s got enough money to turn the wheels—that’s what he calls it.”