“In custody. Lawson’s with them in the security building, making the handoff to your dad. He’ll hold them for FDLE. Both kept sayin’ they ain’t killed nobody and can prove it.”
“Hahn?”
“She the one brought backup down here. Saying something about Allen’s granddad. Told Lawson you’d explain everything when you woke up. She took Phillips back to the quad. Down there checking him out now.”
I tried to get up again, and again I got about halfway up and fell back down.
“Help me up.”
“Just tell me what to do. You stay—”
“We gotta get down there.”
He pulled me up as I snatched out the IV. The nurse ran in, but we waved her away.
“Tell me Hahn ain’t involved in this,” he said.
I stepped and stumbled and he half carried me through Medical, out into the night, and through the center gate toward the lower compound.
My hands were tingling, my whole body stiff and weak, not responding the way I wanted it to.
“Did Hahn help the docs kill Jacobs and Allen?”
I shook my head, still finding it difficult to talk.
“They didn’t . . . Why this was the last one.”
“Hell, I usually can’t follow you when you able to talk . . . so this’ll be . . .”
I said, “What . . . would their . . . motive be . . . for trying to kill Lance?”
“Cover-up.”
“Before . . . they operated . . . on him? They took organs . . . from inmates . . . didn’t kill . . . them. When Allen was killed, the autopsy revealed what they had been doing.”
“Not that, who tryin’ to kill Phillips?”
“Allen was the real target all along.”
“Got to be Emile Rollins then. Only one left.”
Even with his help, I was moving slowly. The best I could do was small shutter steps like an inmate in shackles.
“First attempt on Lance was in a confinement cell.
Emile couldn’t’ve done that.”
“Got to be staff. Baldwin? Alvarez? Foster?”
“Only one person . . . could’ve done it,” I said.
I could feel myself waking up, the stiffness in my muscles breaking up and dissipating, the fogginess in my brain clearing, my vocal chords loosening, but my head throbbed and my vision was blurry.
“Who?”
I took in a breath.
“Lance himself. His cell door . . . was never unlocked. No one drugged him or . . . hypnotized him. Danny brought him the rope, but he did it to himself. It was smart. Make himself look like the intended victim from the very beginning. It was convincing too. In fact, I think he pushed it a little too far and nearly killed himself. If the nurse hadn’t gotten in the cell in time . . . He continued to play the victim and deflect suspicion by hiring the inmates to stage the attack on him in the chapel.”
“So he killed . . .”
“Danny and Brent. Switched bunks with them, made up that shit about his mattress being more comfortable and Danny feeling safer up there to make it look like their deaths were really attempts on him. This whole thing was never about an attempt on Lance or the actual murder of Danny. Those were attempts to disguise the real motive for the murder of Brent Allen.”
“Which was?”
“Money. The motive for all this elaborate deception, and the taking of life, is money. It is all about greed.”
Up ahead the dorms rose up out of the darkness, floodlights illuminating their bulky, blocky gray masses.
“That why he used the cards?” he asked. “Make sure everybody know it was murder and not suicide so insurance company would pay?”
I shook my thick head slowly. “Nothing to do with that. He used the cards so he could make himself look like a victim. It was never about the life insurance. The Suicide Kings was something he used for subterfuge.”
“Thought you said it was about—”
“Money, yeah. The small fortune left to Brent Allen by his grandfather. The life insurance scheme was just a cover for the real motive. The coverage had already lapsed. What he wanted was to be in Allen’s will, not the beneficiary of the policy. He’s about to get out. Allen’s grandfather just died. He will inherit. A lot.”
Merrill shook his head.
“I think maybe he talked Danny into attempting or pretending to attempt to hang himself since he had just done it in Confinement, and then he made sure it really worked—or maybe he didn’t care. Just wanted it to look like another attempt. But with Brent . . . he couldn’t take any chances. He traded bunks with him, strangled him, then let him lie on the floor beside his bunk before he hung him. He’s the only one who could’ve. He was right under him.”
“So Baldwin and Alvarez . . .”
“Didn’t have anything to do with the murders,” I said. “In fact, they were the last thing they wanted. They got caught because one of their victims, Allen, was also Lance’s. They didn’t kill their victims—that brings autopsies and investigations. They just stole their organs.”
“You think he knows you know?”
I nodded. “He didn’t stick around Medical—and Hahn to take him back. I think she might be—”
“Think you can move your slow ass any faster, or I gotta carry you?”
“I’m starting to come out of it.”
“Then quit doin’ the inmate shuffle and get you ass in gear.”
Chapter Forty-six
We were buzzed in to the massive hangar-like structure of D-dorm, then into Quad-3 to find Hahn standing on the top rail of the second-story catwalk, a noose tied around her neck.
Lance stood just behind her.
Made of several sheets tied together, the noose was looped through a metal support beam in the high ceiling. The beam worked as a pulley. Every time Lance pulled down on the noose, it pulled up on Hahn’s neck.
Her hands were tied at her sides with an inmate belt, the tips of her shoes barely touching the top bar of the railing.
Face puffy and pale, eyes bulging, little helpless, fearful whimpers escaped from her constricted airway, out of her tight mouth, and into the enormous open space of the concrete-and-steel enclosure.
To our left, the empty metal staircase leading to the upper rows of cell doors and the cement catwalk provided a clear path to Hahn, but it was too tall, would take too long to climb. She would be dead before we could get to her.
Below the walkway, the solid steel cell doors in front of us were closed, dark behind their small strip of glass.
“Don’t come any closer,” Lance yelled.
The quad was so large, its ceiling so high, his words were quickly lost in that airy, white-noise sound of the huge space.
He yanked on the sheet wrapped around his arms and it snatched Hahn up, her shoes slipping off her feet and falling down to the bare concrete floor below, taking a moment to reach the floor because of the distance, bouncing as they smacked the cement, the loud sound of their crash ricocheting off the hard surfaces.
Hahn gasped, the pitch of her whimpers becoming more shrill, more childlike, more panicked.
Most of the men had been in their cells, many of them sleeping, but a small group was beginning to gather on the ground floor. They looked up in silence, obviously shocked at what they were seeing.
“Get them outta here,” Merrill said.
A CO had just rushed in from the officers’ station, but was too busy looking up wide-eyed at Hahn to respond. “Now.”
He began to slowly herd the resistant inmates.
Merrill turned and took a few steps toward them and they began to move much faster.
Within a few moments we were alone with Lance and Hahn in the quad.
If he didn’t release some of the tension in the sheets soon, there would just be three of us.
“Ease off on the pressure some,” I yelled up at him. “Lower her down just a little. Please.”
“Why should I?”
“What do you want? Why’re you do
ing this?”
“My whole life . . . nothin’ ever works out for me.
Everybody’s always . . . everything’s been against me. I’m . . .”
“You’re a very rich man now,” I said. “The world is a different place for someone with the kind of money you have.”
He cocked his head and seemed to think about it.
Looking down at me, he said, “But they’ll never give me the money now.”
“It’s yours. Nothing anyone can do. Oh, they may try to get it back, but you can hire the best lawyers.”
“Hell,” Merrill said, “you can OJ all this shit away.
Beat the charges. Live the good life on the golf course every day. All it takes is money.”
“If you let Hahn go,” I said. “You can’t kill her in front of us, with us standing here watching, and expect . . .”
He fed a little slack to the noose.
Hahn’s feet touched the rail again and some of the color began to come back into her face.
“The response team will be here any minute. Place’ll be full of officers with guns. Let her go now. Let us take you in. We can protect you. You know I will.”
The PCI riot squad was a group of trigger-happy adrenaline junkies with far more testosterone than judgement. Its members were correctional officers who were good shots and gung-ho, all of whom had the required ego and requisite sophomoric swagger. We had to resolve this before they stormed the quad.
“I let go, she hangs,” Lance said. “She’ll fall and snap her neck. They shoot me, she dies.”
“Don’t let that happen. Go ahead and let her down.”
“It took you a while,” he said. “I almost fooled you, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“I’m smarter than people think.”
“You are.”
As we spoke, Merrill slowly eased under the overhang of the second-story walkway and over toward the stairs.
“If you could’ve just made them look like suicides and not used the cards . . .”
“But I had to look like a victim. I knew I’d be suspected as soon as people found out about Brent’s will.”
“Hiring the inmates to attack us in the chapel was a nice touch.”
“You like that? I thought so too. I told ’em the most they could be charged with was assault and I’d make them rich for it. I knew they’d talk eventually, but I’d be long gone by then. Some warm tropical place without extradition, sipping champagne and earning interest.
Fuckin’ doctors fucked it up for me.”
“It was a great plan. Ingenious. I mean really, really smart. I think you could get a book deal out of it.”
He seemed to think about that, but only for a moment.
His head exploded a split second before the deafeningly loud report rang around the enormous concrete-and-steel box.
The riot squad ran in. Boots on concrete.
Barking orders. Radios blaring.
As Lance fell, he released his hold on the noose.
The sudden release of tension made Hahn lose her balance.
She tried to get it back, but couldn’t and fell off the rail.
She didn’t fall far.
The slack snapped out of the sheets, the noose tightening around her neck.
From the moment the shot was fired, Merrill was running up the stairs.
I tried to get beneath Hahn to catch her, but she didn’t fall far enough. Not even close. She was some two stories above me. Dangling. Dying.
When Merrill reached the place where Hahn had been a moment before and where Lance now lay dead, he couldn’t reach the rope. Hahn was hanging from the high ceiling, the noose caught in the beams, too far away from the balcony for him to reach.
“What the fuck do I do?” he yelled. “I can’t reach her.”
I didn’t have an answer.
The riot squad was yelling “CLEAR” and other congratulatory exclamations, seemingly oblivious to Hahn. They probably thought it was another inmate.
I spun around looking for something we could use to reach out from the balcony and pull the sheet rope in so we could grab her, but there was nothing. Anything that could’ve worked could’ve also been used as a weapon and wouldn’t be in an inmate dorm.
Hahn was hanging above me and there was nothing I could do about it.
She had kicked a bit at first, but now the only movement was coming from the slight sway of the sheets, the only sound the small, sad creak that accompanied it.
“Why the fuck you shoot him?” Merrill yelled. No one had an answer for that.
Someone yelled, “Get a ladder from maintenance down here. Now.”
It would take too long, do Hahn no good. Helpless.
Powerless.
Frustration and futility.
Unable to do anything else, I stood beneath Hahn, looking up at her.
And I stayed that way. Long after anything could be done, long after she was dead, I still stood there, being with her mortal remains, being with my guilt.
I had been unable to save her, unable to prevent her death. I had failed her.
Now all I could do was stand, stay here with her as long as what was left of her was here. All I could do was be present, bear witness, watch over, grieve, and feel guilty.
Chapter Forty-seven
“He was killed over money?” Cheryl Jacobs said. “Not even—but to cover up the fact that someone else was being killed for money.”
I frowned and nodded.
We were standing under the gazebo extending out over St. Joseph’s Bay. I had just told her all I knew and guessed about her son’s death.
“How do I live with that?”
“I’m not sure.”
It was day’s end, and beyond the bay, the entire, expansive horizon glowed a vibrant coral beneath a clear blue sky, both of which reflected on the gently bobbing surface of the bay waters below.
I thought about Hahn.
“There’re things I can’t live with,” I said, “but I do.”
She turned to me, her hurting, glistening eyes penetrating. “You ever lost a child?”
I shook my head. She was right. What did I know?
We were quiet for a long moment, the breeze coming in off the bay stinging our eyes, but not enough to account for the volume of water they were producing.
I had been unable to do anything for Hahn. I was unable to do anything for Cheryl. Except maybe just to be with her, silently suffering alongside her. Wasn’t much, but it was something.
“This is all so fucked,” she said. I nodded. “Yes it is.”
We stood there long after the glow of the horizon turned from coral to salmon to apricot to the charcoal gray of dusk.
Before us now the bay was growing black, a glass darkly reflecting the lights of the small town on either side of us.
I would stand with her for as long as she wanted, this childless mother, this stricken, inconsolable woman, weeping with those who weep, mourning with those who mourn, grieving with those who grieve.
I was sad.
For Cheryl. For Hahn. For my mom. For myself. It was a little later that evening, dusk edging into darkness, and I was sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair down by the river behind my trailer.
Thinking. Feeling. Processing.
No bottle. Nobody. Just me and my mind––my sometime enemy, sometime friend.
Guilt.
I could’ve saved Hahn. Should have.
I had been too distracted, too divided, too scattered.
Between my new relationship with Anna, dealing with Mom’s dying and death, the murder at Potter Farm, the Suicide Kings, the warden wanting my job, and Andy Bearden’s body being found in the woods, I had not focused to the extent I should have.
I wasn’t blaming anything I had going on––only my approach, only my management.
I had been given enough time to keep Hahn from dying, but I had failed.
I had been given the grace of time to repair my relationship
with my mom but I had not taken full advantage of it, had done only part of the work.
I had not devoted enough time and energy to finding out who killed the young woman propped up on the prison fence and had barely begun to investigate what really happened to Andy Bearden.
Well, I could do it now.
With nothing left to do in the Suicide Kings case, I could put aside my mourning for my mom for the moment and concentrate completely on the Potter Farm victim.
Sitting up and taking three deep breaths and letting each one out slowly, I opened more than just my mind to what I knew and what I didn’t know.
I had something earlier, when I got the little jangling inside about real motive for Brent Allen’s murder. Something. What was it? Money. Life insurance policies.
Last will and testaments. Greed. Subterfuge. Black market organs. Blackmail. Money motive. Blackmail. That was it. Private blackmail. Private humiliation and coercion, not public, not political. Private.
Why was she at the farm that night? What was her real motive for being there?
Had she really not gone into the house?
Who had killed her? Why? Why stage her body against the fence at the prison? Why steal her body? Had the killer stolen the body? Was it even related? I thought about when it had happened and where. I thought again about what the driver had said.
What secret did her body hold? Why take the risk of stealing her like that?
I thought about Judge Cox’s crazy proclamation that it was part of the gay agenda and Don Stockton saying everything ultimately came back to the money motive.
Ralph Long was in the closet. He was also as motivated by money as anyone I knew.
Names. Faces. Andrew Sullivan. Chris Taunton.
Deacon Jones. Hugh Glenn. Donnie Foster. Dad.
Hugh wanted to embarrass Dad. Who else wanted to embarrass any of the other candidates?
I thought about possible motives for murder. Money.
Greed. Jealousy. Rage. Revenge. Sociopathy. Power. To silence. To cover another crime. To––
That was it.
The right key inserted, the pins aligned in the tumbler, rotation of the plug, and everything began to fall into place.
Unlocked. Opened.
Chapter Forty-eight
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