by Candice Fox
Keeps sat laughing quietly to himself.
‘So I do another formal questioning,’ Celine sighed. ‘I issue an official warning. I read him all the prison regulations about violence towards staff, breakout attempts, riots. I tried to write him up for threatening staff, get him sent to Special Handling, but the warden says it’s just a countdown, it’s not a threat – we don’t know what he’s counting down to. I’m up all night looking at calendars, astrological signs, looking at his case. When was his kid’s birthday? When was his wife’s birthday? What time of day did they die? The numbers keep coming down and down and down, and in the last three days I’m just . . . I’m pulling my hair out.’
Keeps was laughing harder now.
‘On the day the countdown was supposed to end I finally convinced the warden to put the prison into Code Orange. I organised a raid team to get all suited up and stand outside Kradle’s cell. I’m standing there, too, with a fucking helmet on. I’m a mess. I look at my watch and my whole arm is shaking.’
Keeps grinned. Celine glared at him.
‘It was nothing,’ Keeps said.
‘It was nothing,’ Celine confirmed.
‘Funny motherfucker,’ Keeps said.
‘It was about as funny as a brick to the face.’
‘You ever do anything back to mess with his head?’ Keeps asked.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Celine said. ‘Of course. I did everything I could think of. I put sand in his coffee. I sent him to the infirmary with a request for a brain scan. On the request form I wrote, Appears to be a moron. I know he hates spiders, so every couple of months I hide a tarantula in his cell somewhere, or I at least give him the impression that I have.’
‘Where the hell do you get a tarantula?’
‘It’s Nevada. You can get them at any pet store.’ Celine kicked her feet in the water. ‘They’re not expensive.’
Keeps kicked his feet beside hers. ‘You know, I didn’t ask you why you care so much about this Kradle guy being guilty. I said, When are you gonna tell me why you care so much.’
Celine froze.
‘How did you . . .’
‘I have my sources.’
Celine looked away, shook her head. She took a long time finding the words.
‘You change your name,’ she said. ‘You move to the other side of the country. You don’t tell a living soul. And still, every man and his dog knows your secret.’
‘Any of the guards at Pronghorn know?’
‘Maybe.’ She shrugged, the anger making her shoulders hot and tight. ‘Probably. Seems like all the inmates do. Warden Slanter knows, and her predecessor Wilke knew. He hired me. He had to know. But my personnel file is supposed to be confidential.’
She felt tears behind her eyes, found herself putting on that hard smile to make them stop. Minutes passed in which they sat and watched the water.
‘It’s fucked up, man,’ Keeps said. ‘It’s just about the most fucked up thing I ever heard.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘Is he still alive? Your grandfather?’
‘No,’ Celine said. ‘I visited him once when he was in prison. Never again after that. He asked his lawyer to ask me to come to the execution, so I said no. I just sent back a note back saying, I’m not coming. That was it. He killed himself three days later.’
‘Jesus.’
They fell into silence. Celine knew more questions were coming. All her muscles were hard, bracing for blows.
‘Were you not there that day, or . . .?’
‘I was there,’ Celine said. ‘Everybody was there. He spared me.’
‘Why? Were you the favourite?’
Celine looked away, swallowing a sob, which passed like glass down her throat. ‘No,’ she managed. ‘I wasn’t the favourite, Keeps.’
‘I’m sorry. I should keep my questions to myself.’
‘I’m not that person,’ Celine insisted. ‘I’m not what happened to me.’
‘And a part of not being that person is not letting it cloud your judgement,’ Keeps said.
‘Right.’ Celine looked at him. ‘Exactly.’
Keeps touched her hand with his, just barely, the knuckle of his pinky brushing against hers, and Celine felt a rush of warmth immediately doused with a torrent of ice.
His words returned to her from outside Brassen’s trailer.
You want to hook someone, you make them feel special.
Make them feel seen.
Like you understand them and what they’ve been through.
The phones bleeped, an unfamiliar tone, and Celine looked at hers at the same time that Keeps looked at his. A red bubble had appeared on one of the messenger apps. Celine opened it. At the top of the screen was Brassen’s message.
Brass_on: Need to talk. Situation changed. Urgent.
Underneath it, a new line of text had appeared.
Addam123: Situation changed?
‘Addam123,’ Keeps read.
‘Trinity will be crosschecking people named Addam who are known members of The Camp.’ Celine shrugged. ‘But it’s probably just a pseudonym.’
They waited, watching their screens.
Brass_on: I want more money.
‘He’s going in too hard.’ Keeps eased air through his teeth. ‘This is not what we talked about at all. This is not making them feel as if he knows their plan, as if he’s a threat. This isn’t the script.’
‘Trinity mustn’t be with him,’ Celine said. ‘She mustn’t be there to coach him.’
‘Or maybe she is,’ Keeps said. ‘Woman’s pretty direct.’
‘He’s typing.’
They watched the screens. Jake the cat had wandered over to Keeps’s side and was trying to muscle his way onto his lap. Celine sighed.
Addam123: Fuck off, man. You got paid.
Brass_on: It wasn’t enough. The marshals are grilling everybody at Pronghorn. They know there was someone inside and it’s only a matter of time before they get around to me.
Addam123: So run.
Brass_on: I need money to run. 50k isn’t enough. I’ll need to start a whole new life.
Addam123: Your problem, not ours. You served your purpose.
Brass_on: But it IS your problem. I know more about your plan than you think I do. If they decide to snatch me up I will talk.
Addam123: What do you know?
Celine realised she was gripping the phone with all her strength when her knuckles started to throb. Her fingers were sliding on the case with sweat. This was the moment. The con. The bluff. Brassen needed to do the impossible: to convey a poker-champion’s confidence in his hand without the aid of face-to-face acting. The flicker of a smile, the straightening of his back, the idle shuffle of cards. Every typed word was critical. The seconds that passed while he figured out what to say. Too long a response time and he would seem uncertain. Too quick and it would all seem too rehearsed. Celine saw the words appear on the screen and reminded herself to breathe.
Brass_on: I have copies of the drawings.
‘He made the play,’ Keeps said, his voice tight.
‘This is it,’ Celine said. ‘This is all we’ve got.’
‘It isn’t much,’ Keeps said. ‘But, hey, I’ve worked with less.’
They watched for the bubble that indicated Addam123 was typing. They didn’t come. After a minute or two they saw the bubble appear on Brass_on’s side of the screen.
Brass_on: This is a risk-free venture for you. I’m proposing you put a bag of cash in a locker or under a tree, or goddamn anywhere, I don’t care. Just drop the money and get out of there, then tell me where it is and I’ll go get it. Another 50k. Pretty cheap to buy my silence.
They waited.
Addam123: We don’t work with cash. You know that.
‘Oh, god,’ Celine said. ‘They’re calling it. They’re calling the bluff.’
‘Just hang on.’
Brass_on: Bitcoin is too risky for me right now. There’s a trail. It’s got to be cash.
<
br /> Silence. Celine chewed her lip.
Addam123: We’ll be in touch.
‘You think they’ll go for it?’ Celine asked.
‘They have to,’ Keeps said. ‘It’s all we’ve got. They have to.’
Jake had settled into Keeps’s lap and was curled into a thick ball, vibrating with purrs, his front paws tucked beneath his bulk. The tabby’s auburn mottles were flaming in the sun. Celine met eyes with the creature and the cat gave her a mean glare.
‘A match made in heaven,’ Celine said. Keeps stroked the animal’s back, running his fingers down to the tail.
‘This is trust,’ Keeps said. ‘I move my legs? Splash. Boy’s in the pool.’ He smiled. ‘It’s all about trust,’ he continued. ‘How fast you can get it.’
Celine’s phone rang. She picked it up.
‘Me again,’ Kradle said.
CHAPTER 29
John Kradle shut the driver’s side door of Shelley Frapport’s car after the black dog leaped out. He knew from one of the probably hundreds of crime novels he’d read in his cell on death row that burning the vehicle wasn’t a good idea. That it would only draw attention, bring looky-loos and cops, and the car would be identified pretty quickly anyway. The smartest move was to leave it in a bad neighbourhood and hope it was stolen or stripped before the police located it.
He pulled his hoodie up, took out the phone he’d snatched from the Frapports’ kitchen table and dialled Celine. Kradle knew it would only be a matter of time before, in all the chaos of the scene at the Frapport residence, somebody noticed the boy’s phone was missing. It felt as though, in the hours since he had left Pronghorn, a dozen tools of sanity and survival had slipped through his fingers. This would just be another of them. He had slid the knife with which he had killed Homer Carrington into his back pocket, and a pistol taken from one of the dead officers into his waistband. In the pocket of his hoodie he clutched dearly to the phone records Shelley had given him. The handcuffs were also there, one shackle still closed on his wrist, the other closed on nothing and sticky with blood. He watched the dog trotting faithfully beside him as he walked the streets north of the Riverside district and wondered whether the beast was just another comfort, a survival tool, that would eventually be tugged away from him.
Celine gave a kind of huff he couldn’t interpret when she heard his voice on the line.
‘You again,’ she confirmed.
‘So, I just sawed off a dead serial killer’s thumb with a kitchen knife. How was your day?’
‘What? Why? Urgh. Never mind. My day was tiring,’ she said. ‘I was up all night trying to figure out the truth about you.’
‘You mean “How wrong you are about me?”’
‘Oh, I’m not wrong about you,’ she said. ‘I know you’re an A-grade jerk. Everybody knows that.’
Kradle found himself smiling, despite everything. There was silence on the line for a moment and the smile faded.
‘But your crime,’ Celine said. ‘Maybe . . . maybe there’s something there.’
‘A “shadow of doubt”, even?’
‘Something,’ Celine said. ‘I spoke to Dr Martin Stinway.’
‘How?’ Kradle rounded a corner, tucked his head low against his chin as he passed a group of teenagers. When he snuck a sideways glance he realised they were all staring at their phone screens, oblivious to him. ‘How did you talk to Dr Stinway? He’s been stonewalling my lawyer for years.’
‘We pretended to be from the Times.’
‘What?’
‘People always talk to journalists. Or so I’m told.’
‘That’s good. I might use that,’ Kradle said. ‘Who’s “we”?’
‘You said to find someone impartial. Give it an hour. So I did.’
‘My man Jake.’
‘Jake is a cat, Kradle.’
Kradle thought for a moment. ‘Oh.’ He laughed. ‘Ohhh!’
‘Yeah.’
‘So what did you find out?’
‘I found out there was a confession.’
Kradle stopped walking so suddenly his sneakers skidded on the cracked concrete. ‘I never . . .’ He could barely form words. The fury clamped down hard and fast around his throat like a manacle. He put a hand on a fence for support. ‘I have never, ever—’
‘You never confessed,’ Celine said. ‘I know.’
Kradle was trembling with rage. The dog stood watching him, alert, ready to fight again.
‘Frapport said that?’
‘Yeah, to Stinway.’
Kradle couldn’t speak.
‘If you’d confessed, it would have come up at the trial,’ Celine said. ‘It would have been in the media. They’d have recorded it. I mean, they recorded all your interrogations. Why not that? And why not have you sign a sworn confession?’
Kradle stood and shook and said nothing.
‘No mention of it,’ Celine continued. ‘Except by Stinway, on the phone to us.’
‘Frapport told Stinway I’d confessed so he would fall into line on the forensic stuff,’ Kradle finally growled.
‘Maybe,’ Celine said.
‘I’ve just seen Frapport’s wife,’ Kradle said. ‘She thinks he phoned it in on my case. Actually, she’s so certain about it she let me into the house and sat me at a table with her son. She thinks her husband played quick and dirty, pinning the murders on me so he could spend his time at home trying to save his marriage.’
‘Well, I don’t know anything about that.’ Celine sounded distant, as if she was pulling the phone away from her mouth.
‘But you’re still in?’ Kradle said.
‘I’m still in,’ Celine said. ‘The Stinway stuff, it’s dodgy. I’m not all the way to believing you’re innocent, but I’m some of the way to believing something fishy went on with your case. And I want to know where that goes.’
‘Because you’re personally invested.’ Kradle felt the corner of his mouth twitch with a dark smile.
‘Personally invested?’ Celine asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re obsessed with me.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ The phone crackled as she huffed. ‘Look, I know you’re not real smart, so I’m going to say this slowly. You need to hand yourself in, before somebody shoots you. We can get Stinway and Frapport’s wife to say what they know. It might get you a new trial, at least.’
‘Sure. Sounds great. I’ll just do another ten years on the row waiting for it to go through the courts.’
‘Urgh, Kradle—’
‘Celine, you’re wasting your breath.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘I’m going to send you pictures of some documents,’ he said. ‘Phone records. This is every number Patrick Frapport dialled in the months after my family was killed. It might help us. You start at the bottom, I’ll start at the top.’
Kradle pulled the phone away from his ear, looked at the numbers ticking by as the call ran on. Precious, dangerous minutes.
‘I’ve got to dump the phone after that.’
‘How am I supposed to—’
‘I’ll call you,’ he said. He hung up.
Kradle stopped in the street and looked around. There were people at a nearby bus stop. An old woman, two more teenagers, a stringy guy with a ball cap pulled low. All of them were watching their phone screens, heads bowed as though in prayer. Kradle crouched and spread the sheets of paper from his pocket on the sidewalk. He photographed the pages with the phone, spent some precious moments fiddling with the message functions on the device, trying to understand how to send the images to Celine’s mobile. In the seconds he paused there, swiping and tapping, she didn’t attempt to call him back. Kradle told himself that didn’t mean she was going to stop helping him. That she wasn’t lying when she said she wanted to know the truth.
That’s why he’d chosen her. Because she had to know the truth about a crime like his.
The phone made a whoosh sound as the pictures fl
ew away to their destination. He popped the phone open with his bloody fingernails, took out the sim card and tossed it over a chain-link fence. The phone he dumped down a storm water drain. He glanced at the people at the bus stop as he passed, but none of them looked up.
Celine looked at the phone screen, watched it go dark in her fingers, the call ended. Keeps was standing at the fence, watching the red desert sunset. Celine imagined that, all over Nevada, criminals she knew were feeling the effects of their incarceration through their bodies, and this would be the time their institutionalised brains told them they were hungry for dinner. Even as a correctional officer, Celine reacted to sounds – the ringing of a certain type of bell, the blaring of a horn, the snap of heavy switches – and she felt tired, hungry, alert or relaxed in response, as if chemicals had been dumped into her system, powerless to resist the prison routine. Keeps turned and walked towards her and she felt her stomach lurch, her fingers restless, remembering the touch of his hand against hers.
‘He’s sending pictures. Phone records,’ she said. She looked at the device in her hand. ‘He sounded tired and weird.’
‘Well, he just killed a dude.’ Keeps shrugged. ‘If you believe his story, he’s never done that before.’
‘I don’t know what I believe anymore,’ she said. Keeps’s hand was just by hers again, and Celine felt as though her very skin was alive with desire, tingling and singing, sensations rushing up her arms, anticipating a touch that had not yet and might not ever happen. ‘Everything is inside out.’
He touched her cheek, lifted her face, and he was kissing her, and Celine heard a clear voice in her mind telling her that he was taking advantage of what she had just said. That he knew her brain was spinning and now was the moment to strike. But she also didn’t care. Celine grabbed his hips and dragged him to her and she felt so good with his hands around her head, cradled, kissed, wanted, that by the time the sun gave its last flicker of light she was following him back into the house with her hand in his.