“Do you?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away. Turning toward the window, he seemed to stare at the approaching storm.
“I used not to,” he said, still staring out the window, his voice barely audible.
The darkening day made my office seem far brighter, the harsh overhead light accentuating the pale, taut skin of Sandy’s face and the bruise-like bags beneath his hollow eyes.
“Now I’m not so sure,” he said.
“He’s not invincible or inhuman,” I said. “We’re going to catch him.”
“We?” he asked. “You didn’t tell the—”
“DeLisa Lopez,” I said. “She’s the one who brought him to my attention in the first place. She’s going through the medical logs and duty rosters right now to narrow down our field of suspects.”
“Does she know about me?”
I shook my head.
He looked relieved.
“I haven’t told anyone and I won’t,” I said.
He nodded slowly then fell silent for a long moment.
After a while he said, “I want to help y’all catch him.”
I paused for a moment before saying, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
“It’s not about vengeance or anything like that,” he said. “You know I’m not that kind of person. I just want to help stop him from hurting anyone else.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I couldn’t imagine he’d be much help and there was a chance he’d get in the way or wind up being more traumatized, but if there was a chance it might empower him, might help him take back his life, it might just be worth the risk.
“Please.”
“If you do Ms. Lopez will probably guess why.”
He nodded. “It’s okay. I just really need to do this, to help in some way, to face my fear, stand up like a man and to quit feeling like a victim.”
34
“We’ve got some likely candidates,” Lisa said, “but there’re so many it’s overwhelming.”
Sandy and I had joined Lisa in her office inside the medical building and were now seated across her desk going over possible suspects in the rape case.
“Here’s a list of possibles,” she said, handing me a sheet of paper with two columns of names on it.
She hesitated before handing Sandy one. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
He nodded and held out his hand.
She handed him a copy of the list. “Do you know how we arrived at this list?”
He shook his head.
“What John asked me to do was take the . . . ah, attacks that we know about, the logs from the officer’s desk in the waiting room, the duty rosters, and the control room logs and cross-reference them. Anyone—staff, officer, or inmate—who was in or around the building at the time of all the attacks we know of made the list.”
“This is a lot of names,” Sandy said.
She frowned and nodded, then looking at me said, “This doesn’t include all the women like me who work in the building—nurses, classification officers, secretaries.”
“It’s not a woman,” Sandy said.
His voice was tight and a little shaky, which matched the rest of him. From the moment we walked into the medical building, a visible change had come over him. Tremors were running the length of his body, his eyes darted around, and he was continually looking over his shoulder.
She looked at him then back at me when he looked down at the list again.
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m glad I left them off.”
We were all silent a moment, looking at the list.
“How do we even start to narrow it down?” Sandy asked.
“We have records for all the inmates,” I said. “If they’re in for rape, they stay on the list automatically. For the rest let’s look at what they’re in for and see who we can mark off. As far as staff, the ones we know the best and suspect the least we’ll move to the bottom of the list and see what we’re left with.”
“We’re still gonna be left with a lot,” Lisa said, “and we can’t be absolutely certain that he’s even on here. What if he slipped in and out without being seen?”
I shrugged. “All we can do is work with what we have. It’s as good a place to start as any.”
“Then let’s get started,” Sandy said. “The sooner we get this prick the better.”
I looked back at the list and began to draw a pencil line through the names of officers and staff we didn’t need to waste time on.
“I see that I made the list,” I said.
She nodded. “You spend a lot of time in Classification,” she said with a smile. “Or you used to. Though a couple of times you were in Confinement. Since one of the attacks occurred between Confinement and Medical I included everyone in Confinement during all the attacks.”
“Not the inmates in cells?” Sandy asked.
She shook her head.
“Do you object to me crossing my name off the list?” I asked.
She smiled and shook her head.
“Am I on here as a victim or a suspect?” Sandy asked.
“I’m sorry,” Lisa said. “I wasn’t even thinking. I’ll need to take the other victims off before we go any further. Give me those and let me redo the list.”
She held out her hand.
“We’ve looked at these a good bit already,” I said. “If you take them off now, chances are we’ll notice that they’re missing. The only way to ensure their anonymity is to just leave them on.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should’ve thought about that before. I was just in such a hurry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I just appreciate you doing it.”
We spent the next hour or so going through the list line by line, examining inmate files, discussing the staff we each knew well. When we were finished, we had narrowed our list to a dozen inmates.
“I really don’t think we should exclude staff,” Sandy said. “I see a few names on here—like Shane—that . . . I don’t know. I just think we need to look real hard at staff too.”
“We will,” I said. “But we’ve got to start somewhere. And since he uses a shank . . .”
He nodded. “So of these who do we start with?”
I glanced at the list again.
“Ronnie Taunton,” I said.
35
Ronnie Taunton, an inmate orderly assigned to Medical, was a stocky white man of a little over five and a half feet with pale skin and bushy mouse-brown hair. He was quiet in a creepy way. A loner. Intelligent. He was serving time for aggravated assault, but on more than one occasion had been accused, arrested for, but never convicted of, rape.
His white meant-to-be-loose inmate uniform was stretched tightly over the large frame of his muscular body. His smile, on the rare occasion he flashed it, was wolfish, and if the dull eyes behind his big black glasses were windows to his soul, he either didn’t have one or the one he had was as vacuous as dark matter in a black hole.
I found him mopping the back hallway of Medical outside the infirmary. I had come alone. Lisa has suggested that I might get more out of him this way, and there was no way I was going to let Sandy interview someone who might possibly be the monster who had scarred him for the rest of his life.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
He stopped mopping and raised up.
“Hey, Chaplain,” he said. “How are you?”
“Good,” I said. “You?”
He shrugged.
Expecting me to pass by like I normally did, he began to mop again, but stopped when he noticed I was still standing there.
The tile floor gleamed—even in the dull, greenish light of the Fluorescents overhead—and didn’t appear to need cleaning.
“You down here playing detective?” he asked.
“Why do you say that?”
“You got the look,” he said. “You always speak, and if any o
f us got something to say, you’ll stop and listen to us, but when you stop on your own . . .”
I nodded. “Pretty perceptive,” I said. “Sounds like you’ve thought about it.”
“What else I got to do?”
With his green-and-black prison tats, his hospital-pale skin, and his thick, big-framed glasses, Ronnie Taunton looked like a rapist, and I was trying not to let that have too big an impact on my impression of him.
It wasn’t easy.
“Some people say talkin’ to you’s no different from talking to a cop or CO,” he said.
I laughed. “Not even close. I have very different priorities, a lot less restrictions, and I just help out occasionally. I’m strictly amateur hour.”
Down the hallway not far from where we stood, the suicide cells were empty and dark, their doors slightly ajar, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
“You seen or heard anything strange down here?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Anything.”
He shrugged. “Always something strange goin’ on. I just try to keep my head down and do my time so I can get out.”
“How much longer you got?”
“Couple a years.”
“What’re you in for?” I asked.
“A misunderstanding.”
“People usually don’t go down for those,” I said.
“This one put the other guy in the hospital.”
I nodded.
We were quiet a moment.
Through the windows of the left wall, I could see that the rows of beds in the infirmary were empty, their bright white sheets and pillow cases crisp and clean.
The infirmary bathroom, like the inmate bathrooms in the dorms, was open, its entrance and stalls as devoid of doors as the inmates were of privacy. From it came the constant monotonous, watery thump of a leaky shower head dripping onto the tile floor.
He leaned in and said in a low voice, “Listen, Chaplain, I see and hear a lot. It’s almost like I’m invisible. But I don’t want to say somethin’ about somethin’ you’re not here about, so why don’t you just tell me what it is and I’ll tell what I know.”
“You’re a helpful guy, aren’t you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Do what I can. ’Specially for a man of the cloth.”
“You religious?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said with a half shrug. “As far as it goes.”
From the break room at the end of the hallway, I heard a can drink dislodge, roll through the machine, and bang out at the bottom. It sounded like a cue ball hitting a pocket and rolling through a pool-table. After a moment a large African-American nurse in a bright pink uniform strolled slowly out of the room with a Coke and a Snickers.
When she had made it past us and through the door at the other end of the hall, I said, “You familiar with Salvador Dalí’s work?”
“Salva-what?” he asked. “She got something to do with something going on down here?”
“What about assaults?” I asked. “You know of any unreported assaults taking place down here?”
“Could you be more specific?” he asked. “All kinds of assaults.”
“Have you heard anyone mention the mark of the beast?” I asked.
He smiled his wolfish grin. “That’s what you’re here about? Some boys being made to butt-fuck themselves? Why didn’t you just say so.”
“I heard it’s a lot more than that,” I said.
He shrugged. “That’s all I’ve heard.”
“Who’d you hear it from?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Just around. Here and there.”
I smiled.
Another inmate orderly emerged from the infirmary bathroom, a bottle of cleaning solution in one hand, a white rag in another. Like the nurse, I had no idea he was even in the vicinity, and I was reminded again of how many places there were to hide in this building.
“What can you tell me?” I asked.
“Guy’s very good,” he said. “Seems invisible.”
“You think he’s gay?” I asked.
I knew from his file he had only been accused of raping women and that one of the things he was charged with was a hate crime for assault on a gay couple. If he was the rapist, being reminded his victims were men should trigger him in some way.
“The fuck should I know?”
“Just asking what you think. Why’d it make you so mad?”
“It didn’t,” he said. “I just don’t know why you’re asking me all this.”
“I was told you were a guy who knew things,” I said. “Especially things that happened in Medical.”
“I’m not one of these ignorant assholes around here you can flatter into telling you what you want to know,” he said.
I nodded. “Anything else you’re willing to tell me?”
He smiled. “Sure,” he said, “but you won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“I know you think I’m the one doing it, but I’m not. You made the faggot comment to try to get me to react, but it didn’t work because it isn’t me. Got no interest in any part of a man—least of all his anus.”
I nodded.
“You believe me?”
I shrugged.
“I can make you,” he said.
“Oh yeah? How’s that?”
He turned his head and pulled back his collar to reveal the scar on his neck.
“I’m not the beast,” he said. “I just bear his mark.”
36
Rachel and I were back on the river.
Bouncing between the three cases––the escape, the rapes, and the murders––was difficult, and it kept me from gaining a normal rhythm or much momentum, but there wasn’t much I could do about it––especially with my chaplaincy duties and everything I was doing being scrutinized by Matson and Singer. It was as if this entire thing was a complicated offbeat jazz piece. The key was to play it as it arose––not rush it, not drag behind, and to do so I’d have to fight frustration every step of the way. Impatience was the enemy.
Rachel had commandeered a boat from a fellow FDLE agent and was driving us toward Turtle Mason’s houseboat a lot faster than she should.
It had rained recently and the leaves shimmered in the afternoon sunlight, beneath them steam rising off the hot earth. The waters of the Apalachicola seemed clearer and greener, resembling more closely the bay and beyond it the Gulf they were flowing toward than the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers they were flowing from.
As we raced down the wide waterway, I took in the radiant river and felt myself begin to relax, the tension and turmoil in my mind and body being released and carried away, as if washed out to sea.
I took in a deep breath, held it, and let it out slowly, surrendering to my surroundings and a more primal way of being.
Without slowing she turned toward Turtle’s and cut the engine, the boat rising on its own wake and riding it in.
Beyond the sagging crime scene tape the small porch area held several of the aquariums and croaker sacks from inside.
“They say all the snakes are out,” she said.
“Be sure to let me know,” I said.
She punched me in the arm. “I brought you for protection.”
“Why are we here again?” I asked.
“They’re towing it in today.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“I want one more look before it’s moved. No telling what evidence might be lost or destroyed when they do that.”
Lifting the crime scene tape and stepping beneath it, we climbed aboard the boat, each of us careful not to step too close to the croaker sacks.
Pulling a small knife from her pocket, she slit the crime scene tape near the handle and pushed the door open with her foot. Pocketing her knife, she withdrew two pairs of latex gloves and a small flashlight.
“You got anything else in there?” I asked, nodding toward her pocket. “Snake-proof boots? First-aid kit?”
She lau
ghed and handed me a pair of gloves.
We snapped on the gloves and she shined the small light inside.
“Oh, that’s a big help,” I said.
Standing there side by side, I was reminded again of the difference in our height. She was nearly a foot shorter than me but it seemed like more.
“Don’t see anything moving,” she said.
“And with that light you definitely would.”
“Nobody likes a smart ass,” she said.
“I’ve always wondered what it was,” I said.
We stood there looking in for another moment.
“We ready to do this?”
“Sure,” I said, “but there’s no way they got them all.”
We slowly edged our way inside, looking closely, stepping carefully, and began our search.
Much of what had filled the room the first time we were here was now gone. Someone had removed a board from the top of the rear wall to let in more light and we could see more than before.
Most of the aquariums were gone, but the board and cinder block shelves that held them remained. Most of the croaker sacks were gone, but a few still littered the uneven plank floor. The smell of stale smoke still tinged the edges of the air, but it wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been.
In the back left corner of the room, a stack of plastic milk crates facing outward held Turtle’s clothes—faded T-shirts with beer and rock band logos and well-worn blue jeans and cutoffs, the ends frayed. We looked through every crate, but turned up nothing.
“If this were your house,” Rachel said, “where would you hide your JOM?”
I turned and looked down at her. “Where’d you hear that expression?” I asked.
“Jack-off material? I have four older brothers. I’m an investigator with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”
I nodded.
“Plus,” she added with a smile, “why would you think I didn’t have some of my own hidden in my house? My brothers never went blind from what they did but I might as well have.”
“Alanis,” I said. “Classic.”
She smiled appreciatively. “You know a lot of shit for a chaplain.”
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