Of course, you could come through a perimeter fence––well, the two razor wire–covered perimeter fences, which would immediately trigger an alarm in the control room, then continue through a series of other fences while being fired at by the towers and response teams, your vehicle covered by the looping razor wire designed to collapse in on whatever goes through it.
If breaking into the prison with a vehicle especially built to do such things wasn’t impossible, it was the next thing to it.
The other breakout scenario that came to mind was landing a helicopter on the rec yard or in the field between the chapel and the perimeter fence. You’d have to have a chopper, a pilot willing to do it, which meant involving others in the plan, you’d have to do it while being fired at, and you’d have to coordinate the landing with the inmate’s movements and hope somehow he wouldn’t be shot as he ran toward and climbed aboard the chopper.
Again, not entirely impossible. Just nearly entirely impossible.
I abandoned thoughts about the how for a few moments to think about the who.
Who could the inmate be?
Not many inmates in the state prison system come from families with money.
Had I counseled any inmates lately whose mothers were sick?
Of course, the caller could be lying about the motive––probably was. It could be a simple lie––a different loved one sick or a completely different but still benevolent motive, or it could be an altogether dark motive and the inmate’s life could be in danger.
If the last, would it change anything? Would I not only risk losing my job and doing jail time, but actually deliver an inmate to be tortured or killed to save Anna?
I would. I will. I have to.
If I can keep the inmate from escaping, regardless of the motive, I will, but getting Anna back is far and away the first priority.
The kidnapper was putting me into a position of seeing what I was capable of on a lot of different levels. Under nearly all other circumstances, I’d never consider aiding the escape of an inmate––no matter the reason. But . . .
Anna trumps all.
He’d mentioned that Thursday night, the night we were supposed to trade Anna for the inmate, was a blood moon. Though I had heard the term, I wasn’t sure exactly what that was, so I took a minute and looked it up.
A blood moon is a total lunar eclipse of a full moon.
The earth casts its shadow on the moon. The sun’s rays that still manage to reach the moon travel through the earth’s atmosphere, turning the light dark red.
Some see a blood moon as an omen or portent, a sign in the sky of great spiritual significance.
The sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord.
14
That night I dreamed of Suicide Kings, Wayne Williams, Hahn Ling, Martin Fisher, and my mom’s funeral.
Graveside. At Mom’s funeral. The living and the dead side by side in the folding chairs on the green AstroTurf spread out beneath the small awning and before the dark wooden casket.
Mom was among them. Smiling at me, nodding her support of what I was saying to comfort those mourning her passing.
I’m so proud of you, she mouthed.
Danny Jacobs was sitting beside his mom, Cheryl. You couldn’t tell one was dead and one was alive.
Dad’s old Irish Setter, Wallace, was sitting just outside the tent on the grass, tongue out, panting loudly, his red hair shining in the sun.
Wallace had been dead a while. Dad’s inseparable companion for much of his too-short life, he had gotten sick and not left Dad’s house during the last several years before he died.
Why hadn’t Dad replaced him? Grief? Busyness? Had he found companionship somewhere else? Why hadn’t I asked him?
Martin Fisher was next to LaMarcus Williams.
Where is Anna? Why isn’t she here?
“The faceless man has her,” Martin Fisher said aloud, though I hadn’t voiced my thoughts.
“You’ve got to get her back,” LaMarcus said. “And fast.”
“She’s not here so she’s not dead,” I said.
“That’s not necessarily true, my brother,” Wayne Williams said. “People can be dead and you not even know it.”
The two Mollys were sitting together on the second row of chairs.
Molly Gellar was a nurse I had dated briefly when I first moved back to Pottersville from Atlanta. Molly Thomas was the wife on an inmate involved in the first investigation I had conducted at PCI.
“She’s not dead,” Molly Thomas said, her hair still wet and matted from where she had been pulled from the river.
“She can’t be,” Molly Gellar added, bullet hole still in her head, the small round wound haloed by a reddish abrasion ring and the darker tattooing, stippling, and burn marks of the barrel.
“People can be dead and they not even know it,” Williams added.
“Don’t listen to them, honey,” Mom said. “We’re all alive––and all dead, I guess. Go back to the eulogy.”
Suddenly there was an inmate in the last chair on the last row.
No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t really see him.
“I’ve got a question,” I said. “How can I break him out of PCI?”
“You can’t,” Hahn said. “We all die there.”
“You’ll lose your job,” Molly Gellar said.
“You’d go to jail,” Molly Thomas said.
“It’s easy,” the inmate said. “I have to be someone else.”
I nodded.
“Can’t be me,” he added.
“But how? How can you be somebody else?”
“Put that big brain of yours to work on it,” Jordan Moore said.
She hadn’t been there before. Now she was sitting in the front row looking as fresh as the morning and beautiful as ever.
She was my first college girlfriend. She had been so much more than a girlfriend. She was the embodiment of pain and tragedy for me like few people were.
“You’ll figure it out.”
I woke haunted.
Not afraid or disturbed, just haunted.
I missed my mom. Was she really dead?
I missed many of the others who attended her funeral in my dream, and felt as if I had just spent actual time with them. Now they were all gone. I was alone and lonely.
If I could just roll over and touch Anna, hold her and have her whisper how much she loves me.
But she too was gone.
And in her absence I was utterly alone.
15
The call that came the next morning wasn’t the one I was waiting for.
“Chris Taunton is asking to see you again,” Dad said. “Says it’s extremely urgent and important. What’s going on?”
“With him? I have no idea.”
“Why’s he talkin’ to you and not us?”
“I was surprised when he asked to see me the first time,” I said. “I’m even more surprised this time.”
“You know more than you’re saying,” he said.
I had nothing for that so I left it alone.
“You gonna go see him?” he asked.
“Not sure,” I said. “Don’t want to. But I’m curious about what he has to say.”
“Would you go for me?” Dad said. “Let me know what he has to say.”
“Okay.”
“How are you?” he asked. “I mean about your mom and everything.”
Still haunted by the dream, I was unable to answer.
I waited for a while but no call came.
I spent some time in prayer and meditation, showered and dressed. Still no call.
Drove to the hospital with my phone in my hand, held it the entire time I talked to Chris Taunton, but the call never came.
“Have they made contact yet?” Chris asked. “What do they want?”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Like shit. What did they say? Is she okay?”
“Seems
so. I think she is.”
“What do they want? Do they know I’m still alive?”
“Don’t think they do.”
“We could use that.”
I shook my head.
“Let me help.”
“Do what?” I asked. “You can’t even sit up. And I’m not going to do anything but what they say.”
“What did they say? What do they want?”
“Get better, Chris.”
“You’re playing with Anna’s life. Let me––”
“I’m not playing at all.”
“Why won’t you let me help?”
“Already told you.”
“You’ve got an unknown––something they know nothing about. Use it. We can go back to hating each other after she’s back safe and okay.”
“I don’t hate you, Chris.”
“Then I’ll go back to hating you. But until then, let’s do all we can to make sure she gets back safely so I have something to hate you for.”
I shook my head again. “I’ve got to go.”
“What if you fail?” he said. “Somebody should know what’s going on, what you were trying to do.”
I nodded. “You’re right. Somebody will.”
As I drove to work, phone in hand, I thought about what Chris had said.
I couldn’t use him, could I?
He was in no shape. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t want to do anything but what they said to do.
Is that the wrong play? Am I making a mistake? Not using the one element of surprise I have?
He was right about one thing. I needed a contingency plan in case something went wrong. But what?
When I pulled up to the prison and saw Merrill in the parking lot I knew what.
I parked beside him and got out, pausing a minute to look at my phone one last time.
Why hadn’t I heard from the kidnapper this morning? What should I do?
Cell phones weren’t allowed inside the institution. The caller seemed to know a lot, but maybe he didn’t know that.
What if he calls while I’m inside?
I could try to sneak the phone in––something risky and very difficult to do––or I could come out here and check it often.
All staff entering the institution each morning were subjected to a full search. Depending on which officers conducted them, the searches were far more thorough sometimes than others. I could hide it somewhere and act as if I had forgotten it, but chances were it’d be found.
Of course, I could just not go into the institution, but the kidnapper had emphasized again for me to have the most normal day possible.
“Anna still sick?”
I nodded, dropped the phone on the seat, and locked her car. “Gettin’ better though.”
Across the lot, I saw Rachel Peterson pull up and park next to the warden in front of Admin.
“Need a favor,” I said. “It’s important.”
“Name it.”
“It’s the no-questions-asked kind.”
He nodded. “Lot of yours are.”
Are they? I’d never thought about it, but I guess they were. And yet he always responded the same way. Name it. You got it. Shore thang boss. Shoot.
“Tomorrow night. If I don’t call you by one, there’ll be a note in my trailer explaining why and what to do about it.”
“K.”
“Thanks. Thank you.”
“You said no questions asked, but . . . This not somethin’ I can be involved in before one?”
“Wish to God it were,” I said.
Rachel Peterson had been lingering by her car, evidently waiting for us to reach her.
“Workin’ on your story?” she asked.
“We’re caught in a trap,” Merrill said.
Her eyes widened.
I smiled.
“Can’t walk out,” I said.
“Why can’t you see what you’re doin’ to me?” Merrill asked.
I could see it dawn on her, followed by what was almost a smile twitching in her lips. “Cute,” she said. “But my mind is only suspicious of suspicious people.”
“Of course it is,” Merrill said in his most condescending you’re-full-of-shit voice.
16
Were you told to stay out of the investigation into the apparent suicides here at the institution?” Rachel Peterson asked.
“I was.”
“By who?”
Whom popped into my head but not out of my mouth. I wasn’t in the habit of correcting anyone’s grammar, and no matter how hostile this interview might become, I had no plans to resort to anything like that.
“The warden and the interim institutional investigator,” I said.
We were in my office at my insistence, an accommodation she seemed willing enough to make.
I wanted to be here in case the kidnapper called my office phone, but she probably thought it was so I could feel more comfortable and secure. That she was willing to conduct the interview here demonstrated her confidence in my guilt and in her ability to break me. I had told her it was because I was the only chaplain on duty and needed to be in the chapel to supervise the inmates and be available for emergencies.
She was sitting across the desk from me in one of the two chairs normally occupied by inmates, a small digital recorder between us, its red indicator light on. She wore dark well-fitting jeans, a white button-down, and round-toed Justin Gypsy Roper boots. Her longish brown hair was gathered into a ponytail, and she looked more like a modern cowgirl than the IG of the Florida DOC.
“Did you?” she asked.
“Did I what?” I asked.
“Did you still investigate?”
“Some, maybe, but not really,” I said. “I didn’t have access to the investigation so I was on the outside. Wasn’t much I could do.”
“But you still did some investigating on your own?” she said.
“A little, yes, but––”
“Even after you were told not to?”
“Yes.”
“What were you about to say?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“You said but like you were about to say something else.”
“Oh.”
“You seem distracted. Are you okay?”
She held nothing, never looked at a note, never wrote anything down, just kept her brilliant blue-green-gray eyes intently trained on me.
“I was going to say that at a certain point in the investigation the interim inspector asked for my help and began to involve me more.”
“He did?”
I nodded.
“Verbal responses for the recording, please,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “He did.”
“It’s your testimony that the institutional inspector asked the chaplain to help with his investigation?”
“He asked me. I’m the chaplain. So yes.”
“Why would he do that?” she asked. “Why would he and the warden tell you to stay out of the investigation and then ask you to join in? Why would a trained investigator ask a chaplain to assist in a possible homicide investigation?”
“Because of my background. I was an investigator before I became a chaplain. As to why he changed his mind and asked for my help after telling me he didn’t want it, you’d have to ask him. He told me it was because he needed help with the investigation, that he really wanted the job of institutional inspector and he thought clearing his first case would help him get it.”
“But he didn’t clear it. You did.”
I shrugged. “It was a group effort. His case. His clear.”
“I’ve interviewed Inspector Lawson,” she said. “He and the warden both say they told you to stay out of the investigation, but he never mentioned asking you later to join it.”
“Regardless,” I said, “it’s what happened.”
“According to you.”
“Yes,” I said. “According to me.”
“Okay, we’ll come back to that. What were you doing in the dorm when Hah
n Ling was killed?”
“Trying to save her.”
“How’d you know she needed saving? Why didn’t you report it to the inspector?”
“When I regained consciousness, I––”
“You had been drugged, is that right?”
I nodded.
“Verbal,” she said.
“Yes. When I regained consciousness I was told where she was and with whom. I was also told that she had mentioned something in front of the killer that would let him know we were closing in on him. The inspector had made two arrests and was up in Admin waiting for FDLE. We were in Medical.”
“We?”
“Sergeant Monroe and myself. We rushed down to the dorm to try to save her.”
“You had been unconscious?”
“Yes.”
“So you were still woozy, not thinking clearly.”
“I was thinking just fine.”
“According to you. But you would think that, wouldn’t you? You acted in a manner you shouldn’t have even if you had had all your wits, but you were severely compromised because of the drugs you had been administered. Shouldn’t you have reported what you knew instead of rushing down to the dorm while you were still dazed and not able to think? Would Ms. Ling be alive if you had?”
Rachel Peterson was a professional. She never raised her voice, never took too strong a tone, mostly remained flat, with only the occasional hint of disbelief and eyebrow raised incredulously.
“I wasn’t dazed or unable to think. We had the situation under control, had talked the inmate into surrendering, into letting Hahn go, and then he was killed by the response team sniper and––”
“Who gave the order to fire?”
“I have no idea. Never heard one given. The shot was fired before the response team rushed into the quad. If they hadn’t come in, if the sniper hadn’t fired the shot, Hahn would still be alive. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Innocent Blood; Blood Money; Blood Moon Page 45