by Candice Fox
‘That’s . . .’ Kradle shielded his eyes from the glare of the blazing white sun. ‘That’s exactly right. Okay? You get it. We get each other. So now that you understand my reasoning, you can split off and go your own way.’
‘You’re a smart guy.’ Homer smiled again. This time he showed all his teeth. Big, white, square teeth with that sizeable gap in the middle. Kradle was at once softened by the smile and also slightly creeped out. Kradle thought of a plush-toy tapeworm he saw once at a school science fair, its cute, buggy eyes and coiling, pale body.
‘Thanks,’ Kradle said. He decided to try a different tack. ‘But you don’t want to hang out with me. I’ll be one of the top priority targets in the search.’
‘Oh, man.’ Homer took a half step back. ‘You’re not a serial killer or—’
‘Very dangerous serial killer.’ Kradle nodded gravely. ‘John Kradle. I killed twelve women. Some of them young girls. And men. I’ve killed nine men. Very violently. So I’m going to be right up there on the hit list. I’m just going to try to get out of here as fast as I can.’
‘I guess that means I’ll be high priority, too,’ Homer said, a little sadly. He looked off towards the rise beyond which the prison lay.
Kradle felt the hairs on the back of his neck stiffen in unison. ‘You’re . . .’ He couldn’t use the words.
‘Probably best if we stick together,’ Homer said. He walked up and passed Kradle, thumping his shoulder in a way that made Kradle even more aware of the man’s dense, heavy, tree-trunk arms and the huge, skull-crushing hands hanging off them. ‘Two heads are better than one.’
In her time as a US Marshal, Trinity Parker had seen some colossal fuck-ups. She’d once attended a near-miss mass-shooting at a courthouse in Brampton, in which a guy had been able to smuggle a cache of sixty-five weapons into the building via a doughnut cart. He’d been wheeling parts of guns, knives and boxes of ammunition right through the front doors in Krispy Kreme boxes and stashing them in a disused broom cupboard not twenty yards from the judges’ chambers. The whole plot had only been discovered when an old lady buying a Boston cream to go with her cappuccino dropped the doughnut and spotted the barrel of an AK-47 poking out from under the cart. Another time, Trinity had seen a group of six sheriffs chase a serial rapist into a carnival, only to lose him in the mirror maze. It was like something out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon.
But as she stood surveying the scene at Pronghorn Correctional Facility, it occurred to her that she might be witnessing the greatest failure of privatised incarceration in the history of the state of Nevada, perhaps even the country.
As with all fugitive hunts, the ground zero action plan had been born on the hood of a patrol car, and had quickly grown and evolved across the facility as officers, information, and documents were added. The planning site now encompassed the prison chow hall. As Trinity commanded from the officers’ watch station on a raised platform at the front of the great room, a loud, unsettled gaggle of men and women ebbed and pooled at different steel tables around her. Many of them were facility staff in tan uniforms, commiserating, retelling the story of the breakout from their various perspectives, gesturing wildly, some of them with bleeding noses or split brows, or with chunks of hair torn off in fights to keep inmates contained.
Among these correctional officers were newly arrived deputy sheriffs, highway patrol officers and volunteer officers from the surrounding towns and counties, many of them listening to the tales of the breakout with incredulity. There was a special collection of people in the corner of the room: civilians in plain clothing, some of them still weeping quietly into phones or typing out long messages to family and friends. The bus people. Trinity saw toddlers bawling and traumatised teenagers madly reciting the experience to the outside world via their phone cameras.
Trinity turned and watched through the large barred windows as a couple of choppers landed outside the prison gates. SWAT, maybe, or journalists. A few leftover inmates and officers stood together, watching, at the fences, united in their bewilderment. She took the coffee that someone handed her and glanced at the slew of maps that had been placed on the table in front of her, a feast of information.
‘First thing I want is for someone to stop those kids,’ she said, jutting her chin at the livestreaming teenagers. ‘Take all the phones from the bus passengers. Information about the breakout needs to be locked down. And I want the prison closed again. No press are to enter those gates.’
A couple of deputies nodded and dashed away.
‘Now that I’m here, we can take the fluffy-bunny initial response and give it some teeth and claws,’ Trinity said, looking over the maps. ‘The cordons – push them out by fifty miles and beef them up. I’m giving shoot-to-kill approval for any vehicles that try to rush the barricades. Most of these meatheads will be headed straight for Vegas to have a good time before they’re rounded up. The really dangerous ones will go to ground, try to go on the run for the long-term. They’ll be taking hostages in cars and houses, looking for supplies. Money. Clothes. Food. Licences and papers. Put up the heat-seeking drones and send out alerts to cell phones in a five-hundred-mile radius.’
People were rushing everywhere to enact her commands, phones to their ears, repeating her words. Trinity looked for a cookie to go with her coffee, but there was not a single bite of food visible in the entire chow hall.
‘Someone get me something to eat, and someone drag in some partitions,’ she said, sipping her coffee. She waved towards the long east wall of the food hall. ‘I want a wall of photographs erected of the inmates we have on the loose. I want to see all their faces. I’m a visual person. Somebody categorise them by security level. The really dangerous cases up this end of the room, by me.’
More people rushed away, and others took their place around her. Everyone wanted to be near Trinity. She’d experienced it before. The attraction of a calm island in a tumultuous sea. Wayward boats were drifting in, taking shelter but also wanting to witness her undertaking the plainly unfathomable task of cleaning up a mess as breathtakingly ridiculous as this.
And it was a spectacular mess. It wasn’t so much the number of prisoners set free that concerned Trinity. Sure, it was the biggest mass breakout she’d ever dealt with – but the response was immediate. If she got a proper grasp on the personnel assigned to her, and they all followed her directions, there would be a huge number of inmates scooped up within the first few days simply because they were idiots who didn’t know what to do when presented with sudden freedom. There would be clusters of inmates to be found in bars, brothels and casinos all over Vegas. Trinity had worked on a mass breakout in Chicago – twenty-one prisoners escaped from a transport vehicle – and the week’s delay in calling her in had meant Trinity was trying to hunt down some of the guys as far away as Venezuela.
No, it was the high-profile inmates on the loose in this particular case that gave Trinity a sense of unease. Three of them, in fact, should never have been in Pronghorn at all.
There was Abdul Hamsi, the failed terrorist, who had wound up in a state prison rather than a federal control unit because the one death he had actually managed to chalk up was a parking-lot security guard he’d run over with his getaway car.
There was Burke David Schmitz, who should also have been a federal inmate, but who was saved from a fed stay in Louisiana, where his crimes were committed, because he also killed while fleeing the scene. Schmitz had shot two Black police officers who tried to pull him over in Nevada as he headed for California. He was not extradited back to the state where he’d conducted a massacre for fear he would be a travel security risk.
And then there was serial killer Homer Carrington, who had confirmed kills in several states, which had landed him in a federal prison in north Nevada. Until an attack on a guard had him temporarily shipped to Pronghorn for containment.
The biggest tickets on Trinity’s bill should have been rapists and wife-killers. Instead she was chasing mass murderers and terrorists.
She rubbed at her temple, trying to subdue a growing headache.
A slender woman in a tan uniform appeared by her side, and Trinity could tell from the collapsed look of her frame and the restlessness of her hands that this was probably the warden.
‘Grace Slanter.’ The woman gave a dead-fish handshake. ‘This is my disaster.’
‘An excellent choice of word,’ Trinity said. ‘Disaster. Congratulations, Ms Slanter. You’re about to make history as the world’s worst prison warden.’
‘In defence of myself, and my staff’—Grace held a hand up—‘we never anticipated anything like this. No one was trained in this. All our hostage protocols are designed to deal with inmates inside the facility taking control of staff. We were presented with a situation today in which—’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Trinity said. ‘You put thirty-four civilians – the family members of prison staff – on a single unarmoured vehicle and let them drive towards the facility without any kind of protection?’
‘The annual softball game is something we’ve had in place at this prison for eleven years,’ Grace said. ‘There’s never been an issue.’
‘Okay.’ Trinity nodded. ‘So not only did you wrap a bunch of children in meat and send them unguarded into shark-infested waters, you made sure you did it on the same goddamn day eleven times in a row.’
‘Well—’
‘If I’m to understand my briefing correctly’—Trinity shifted some blueprints of the prison on the table in front of her—‘on that bus you had the wife of a watchtower guard, the wife and son of a death row guard, the husband and two daughters of a gateman, and a family member of at least one guard from every single accommodation block in this institution.’ Trinity looked at a list of staff members with names highlighted in bright yellow ink.
‘That’s what I’m led to believe.’ Grace swallowed.
‘Well.’ Trinity widened her eyes, shook her head in astonishment. ‘I don’t know whether to send you home to enjoy your last few moments of professional anonymity, or to put you in a room with a couple of my investigators so that you can be questioned about any possible leads on who your inside man was.’
‘The inside man?’
‘Yes.’ Trinity sipped her coffee. ‘Obviously.’
‘Marshal Parker,’ Grace said carefully. ‘Nothing is obvious to me right now. I’m still recovering from this morning’s events.’
‘Ms Slanter, every hostage on that bus was linked to a key staff member inside the prison,’ Trinity said. ‘That was deliberate. Somebody arranged that. Otherwise you might have had all the guards in one cell block falling over each other to meet the shooter’s demands and no one else willing to do so.’ Trinity squinted, examining Grace’s face. ‘Are you following me, dear?’
‘I am,’ Grace said. ‘I just—’
‘Go home, Ms Slanter.’ Trinity gave a thin smile and patted the older woman on the shoulder. When she looked away, there was a petite woman with a bloodied, bruised face standing at her elbow. Trinity jumped, almost dropping her coffee. ‘Jesus!’
‘You Marshal Trinity Parker?’
‘The very same.’
‘They tell me you’re heading up this operation.’ The woman scratched at dried blood on the collar of her uniform. ‘I’m Captain Celine Osbourne. Death row supervisor.’
Trinity looked the woman over. Trinity was tall, which suited her, because she found herself most effective when talking down to people. But even then, the Osbourne woman was particularly short. Trinity felt the muscles in her neck tightening as she looked down at her, something she decided she didn’t want to do for very long.
‘So you’re the one who let the worst of the worst out.’ Trinity turned her back on Grace Slanter, who was still hanging around for some reason. ‘Congratulations, you—’
‘Ma’am, don’t start in on me. I didn’t let anybody out,’ Celine said. ‘My second-in-command locked me out of the control room and flipped the switch. In fact, we’ve got one inmate already back in his cell on the row. Willy Henderson. Wife killer.’
Trinity cocked her head, reassessing the short woman with the pixie-cut blonde hair. ‘Uh-huh. I see. And was it Henderson who . . .’ She twirled a finger around Osbourne’s pummelled face.
‘Yup.’
‘Right.’ Trinity beckoned a deputy with her finger. ‘You. Yeah. Write a statement for this woman to give in front of the cameras. Osbourne, you tell the media you single-handedly fought off one of your most violent inmates to keep him contained.’
‘I don’t want to fuck around in front of cameras.’ Celine flapped a stapled sheaf of papers she had been holding by her side. ‘I want in on the hunt for the top fugitives. They’ll all be from my row. I know these guys. Top priority needs to be a man named Kradle. I can give you the lowdown on him, and—’
‘That’s not the best use of your time right now.’ Trinity held up a hand. ‘We need to get out in front of this. We’ve got a female warden in this story. Understand? I don’t care how much she actually had to do with letting the inmates out’—Trinity glanced at Grace Slanter—‘but she’s going to be the face of this thing. It’ll be Woman Warden Released Killers Into Public. Woman Warden Responsible for Slaying of Dozens. This fiasco is going to decimate the progress of women in management positions in law enforcement for the next two decades unless we can change the narrative.’
‘I couldn’t give a shit about narratives!’ Celine pointed at the partitions being dragged to the side of the room, the photographs of men already being pinned up. ‘I want to catch those guys before they hurt anyone!’
Trinity gestured with her coffee cup, kicking an offer over to the mouthy little shrimp. ‘Do a five-minute bit to the press and you can be part of the lead team.’
‘Deal,’ Celine said, just as Trinity expected her to.
Trinity took the papers the woman had been waving and started spreading them out on top of the maps and blueprints on the table before her. Thankfully, Grace Slanter took the hint and slumped away. Trinity’s eyes flicked between the papers as she lay them down. She had seen plenty of prisoner profiles in her time and skipped right over the names, sorting them into piles according to body count. She flipped a couple of sheets to the corner of the desk, and Celine snatched up one of those before it could slide onto the floor.
‘This is the guy who should be top of the shit pile.’ Celine smacked the sheet down in front of Trinity. ‘John Kradle. He—’
‘Three victims?’ Trinity cocked an eyebrow. ‘You kidding?’
‘He came home from work one day and blew his wife and kid away. Sister-in-law, too. This guy is a cold, calculated—’
‘Look.’ Trinity straightened. ‘I know you’re new to this. You haven’t been trained for anything like this before, blah blah blah. But I’m going to be looking for the terrorist who organised this whole clusterfuck.’
She pointed to the room around them, two hundred people working like ants.
‘I don’t know for sure who he is, yet,’ Trinity said. ‘But he’s got to have connections. We know there was a man, possibly more than one, on the inside. We know he recruited at least two people on the outside, the shooter and the caller. Probably a driver and a lookout, too. So, “top of the shit pile”, as you so eloquently put it, is going to be someone like this.’ She picked up a sheet and waggled it in front of the woman’s eyes, then turned it back towards herself. ‘Burke David Schmitz. White nationalist neo-Nazi terrorist. Mass shooter responsible for fifteen deaths and eighteen injuries.’ She picked up another page. The shrimp’s face was slowly filling with colour. ‘Or this guy. Abdul Ansar Hamsi. Islamic state. Killer of—’
‘John Kradle is a family annihilator,’ Celine snapped. Trinity waited. The little woman just panted and looked aggrieved.
‘You use that term like it’s supposed to mean something to me,’ Trinity said.
‘It means he slaughtered the people he loves most,’ Celine said. She snatched up Schmit
z’s paper and crushed it in her fist. ‘These guys? We can go after them. I get it. They’re an extreme danger to the public. But they kill the people they hate. Kradle murdered his own child in cold blood while the kid was taking a shower. He gets equal weight in the hunt.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Trinity said.
‘Yes, he does, or I don’t do the bit to camera.’
‘You do the bit to camera or I’ll have you imprisoned in your home,’ Trinity said.
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Oh, yes I can. I’ll put three agents on you. Dear, you said it yourself. These are your guys. It was your row. It’s reasonable to expect that one of them might come after you, so perhaps the best thing to do is put you in protective custody for the duration of the hunt. There are a lot of inmates on the loose.’ Trinity widened her eyes, blew out her cheeks at the sight of the papers before her. ‘Might take months, a year, to round them all up.’
Celine had started shaking. Trinity felt a flush of pleasure roll over her. She liked putting people exactly where they belonged. It was no different to organising her linen closet, or stacking cans in a cupboard. She liked order. Celine had started crawling up the shelves, and now she had been taken down and tucked away in her spot. The woman turned and stormed away, and Trinity shook her head in disbelief for the benefit of anyone who might have been watching.
1990
He found her in a newspaper.
He would always find something interesting on his trips into town. They were rare enough at that time that something special always happened. Interactions with people who weren’t gator hunters or the swamp witches they married were always ripe for magic. Once, when John Kradle came onto land because the rudder on his houseboat had cracked, he found a pair of hapless Russian tourists on an unnamed back road. He’d been walking to his favourite shack bar and saw the woman sitting on a log, fanning herself in the choking heat. The guy was in the driver’s seat of their RV, trying to interpret a hand-drawn map probably given to them by some gas station attendant, which had led them to this exact spot. Nowhere. A subtle little ‘New Iberia is not New Orleans’ message the locals sometimes dished out. Kradle made his case as a trustworthy local, jumped into the vehicle and saw the Russians back to the main road, which took him well out of his way. But they paid him a hundred bucks, which bought the supplies to fix the rudder and get a beer afterwards.