The Prophet

by Michael Koryta

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You’ve been so good to me. The one person above all others who shouldn’t be, and you’re the one person above all others who is.”

  “You don’t belong in here,” he said.

  She sat up straighter then, sat up with excitement, and said, “Didn’t they tell you I get to leave?”

  He cocked his head and frowned. “Leave?”

  “I thought for sure they’d tell you,” she said. “I mean, I’m always sure they talk to you about me. Don’t they?”

  If there was one date Kimble knew absolutely, knew surer than Christmas or his own birthday, it was the scheduled parole hearing of Jacqueline Mathis. She was not leaving this prison. Not yet.

  “Jacqueline, where are—”

  “I’ve been approved for work release. It might not seem like much to you, but still… you can imagine how exciting it is for me. There’s not much change around here.”

  “What? Where?” He was embarrassed by the evident concern — check that, evident fear— in his voice. He liked to know where she was. He needed to know.

  “It’s a thrift shop,” she said. “Some little store just down the road. I don’t care where or what, though — it’s not in this place! I’ve made the petition three times. They finally approved it.”

  “Why did they now?”

  “Because I’m so charming,” she said, and laughed. He waited, and she said, “Oh, take off the cop eyes, Kevin.”

  She sat up straight now, dropped her voice into a low, formal tone.

  “They approved me, officer, because I’ve shown myself to be nonthreatening and of sound mind and character.”

  He stared at her, rubbing one hand over his jaw. It wasn’t an abnormal decision, not at this stage of her incarceration. They’d be readying her for release, assuming she made parole. She would make parole — there had been no problems and many were sympathetic to her — but that was still a year away. He had thought he had another year to get used to the idea of her being free. Why hadn’t he thought of work release?

  “So you’re happy,” he said finally, just to say something.

  She laughed. “Of course I’m happy. You think I’d prefer to stay in here?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Probably not. Master of the understatement.” She shook her head, then said, “I’ll be working the mornings, though. That will change my visitation hours. I hope that wouldn’t stop you, if you had to visit later in the day? I’ve always wondered if you’re ashamed of me after the sun comes up.”

  “No, Jacqueline. It’s just… well, you know, it’s a long drive. If I come early, I beat the traffic.”

  “The Sawyer County traffic,” she said. “Yes, that area around the courthouse gets pretty gridlocked for about two minutes each morning. Particularly now, with the students home for the holidays? Why, you might have to sit through one entire red light.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You don’t like the idea,” she said. “Do you? Me being out of here, even for a few hours.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he liked the idea an awful lot.

  “Well, I like it,” she said. “Out of these walls, out of these clothes. Do you know how long it’s been since I wore something other than this?”

  She grasped her orange shirt between her thumb and index finger and tugged it away from her body. He got a glimpse of her collarbone and below it smooth, flawless skin.

  “You could drop by there sometime,” she said. “You know — see me on the outside.” She shifted her tone to a theatrical whisper and capped it off with a wink. He could feel his dick begin to stiffen, performing against his will, his own body laughing at him. He got to his feet abruptly, making his arousal evident.

  “Kevin?”

  “I’ve got to get started back,” he said. “It’s a long drive. Too long.”

  “Why are you leaving so early? Did I say something —”

  “Be safe,” he said, the same thing he always said, and walked to the door, using his hand to adjust himself within his pants, not wanting the attendant CO to see that development.

  “I thought you would be happy for me. I thought if there was one person in the world who’d be happy for me, it would be you.”

  “I am happy for you, Jacqueline. Goodbye.”

  By the time the guards opened the door, he had his police eyes back.

  It had been a long drive for a short visit. That was how it went with her. He could never stay too long.

  Be careful with her, Wyatt French had told him.

  Yeah, buddy. Listen to the old drunk. Watch your ass, Kimble.

  Be very careful with her.

  Preview of

  A Welcome Grave

  Michael Koryta is "one of the best of the best" (Michael Connelly) and his A Welcome Grave is "addictively readable" (Chicago Tribune). Following is an excerpt from the novel's opening pages.

  Chapter One

  Sometime after midnight, on a moonless October night turned harsh by a fine, windswept rain, one of the men I liked least in the world was murdered in a field near Bedford, just south of the city. Originally, they assumed the body had only been dumped there. That Alex Jefferson had been killed somewhere else, dead maybe before the mutilation began.

  They were wrong.

  It was past noon the next day when the body was discovered. A dozen vehicles were soon assembled in the field—police cars, evidence vans, an ambulance that could serve no purpose but was dispatched anyhow. I wasn’t there, but I could imagine the scene—I’d certainly been to enough like it.

  But maybe not. Maybe not. The things they saw that day, things I heard about secondhand, from cops who recited the news in the distanced way that only hardened professionals can manage… they weren’t things I dealt with often.

  Jefferson was brought from the city with his hands and feet bound with rope, duct tape over his mouth. A half mile down a dirt track leading into an empty field, he was removed from a vehicle—tire tracks suggested a van—and subjected to a systematic torture killing that was apparently quite slow in reaching the second stage. Autopsy results and scenarios created by the forensic team and the medical experts suggested Jefferson remained breathing, and probably conscious, for fifteen minutes.

  Fifteen minutes varies by perspective. The blink of an eye, if you’re standing in an airport, saying goodbye to someone you love. An ice age, if you’re fighting through traffic, late for a job interview. And if your hands and feet are bound while someone works you over slowly, from head to toe, with a butane lighter and a straight razor? At that point an eternity isn’t what the fifteen minutes feel like—it’s what you’re begging for. To be sent to wherever it is you’re destined, and sent there for good.

  The cops were preoccupied with the basics for most of the first day: processing the crime scene, getting the forensic experts from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation involved, identifying the body, notifying next of kin, and trying to piece together Jefferson’s last hours. The locals were interviewed, the field and surrounding woods combed for evidence.

  No leads came. Not from the basics, at least, not from those first hours of work. So the investigation extended. The detectives went looking for suspects—people whose histories with Jefferson were adversarial, hostile. At the top of that list, they found me.

  They arrived at ten past nine on the day after Alex Jefferson’s body was discovered, and I hadn’t made it to the office yet, even though I live in a building just down the street. Below my apartment is an old gym I own and from which I occasionally make a profit. I’ve got a manager for the gym, but that day she had car trouble. She called me at seven thirty to say her husband was trying a jump start, and if that didn’t work, she might be late. I told her not to worry about it—no rush for me, so none for her. I’d open the gym and then leave whenever she made it in.

  I’d gone downstairs with a cup of coffee in hand and unlocked the gym office. Th
ere’s a keycard system that allows members to come and go twenty-four hours a day, but Grace, my manager, works the nine-to-five in the office and at the cooler. We make most of our money off energy drinks and protein shakes, granola bars, and vitamins, not the monthly membership dues.

  There were two women on treadmills and one man lifting weights when I opened the office, our typical crowd. One nice thing about working out at my gym: You never have to wait on the equipment. Good for the members, bad for me.

  I checked the locker rooms to make sure there were fresh towels and found Grace had taken care of that the previous night. I was on my way back through the weight room when I saw the cops standing just inside the office. Two of them, neither in uniform, but I caught a glimpse of a badge affixed to the taller one’s belt, a glint of silver under the fluorescent lights that made my eyebrows narrow and my pace quicken.

  “Can I help you?” I stepped into the office. Neither one was familiar to me, but I couldn’t pretend to know everyone at the department, especially now, a few years since I’d last worked there.

  “Lincoln Perry?”

  “Yes.”

  The one whose badge wasn’t clipped to his belt, a trim guy with gray hair and crow’s feet around his eyes, slid a case out of his pocket and opened it, showing a badge and identification card. harold targent, detective, cleveland police department. I gave it a glance, looked backed at him, nodded once.

  “Okay. What can I help you with, Detective?”

  “Call me Hal.”

  The taller one beside him, who was maybe ten years younger, lifted his hand in a little wave. “Kevin Daly.”

  Targent looked out at the weight room, then back at me. “You mind shutting that door? Give us a little privacy?”

  “My manager’s late. Don’t want to close the office up until she gets here, if that’s okay.”

  Targent shook his head. “Going to need some privacy, Mr. Perry.”

  “That serious?” I said, beginning to feel the first hint of dread, the sense that maybe this had nothing to do with one of my cases, that it could be personal.

  “Serious, yes. Serious the way it gets when people die, Mr. Perry.”

  I swung the office door shut and turned the lock. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  To their credit, they didn’t waste a lot of time bullshitting around without telling me why they were there. No questions about what I’d done the previous night, no head games. Instead, they laid it out as soon as we’d taken seats in my living room.

  “A man you know was murdered two nights ago,” Targent said. “Heard about it?”

  My last contact with the news had been the previous day’s paper. I hadn’t seen that morning’s yet, and I get more reliable news from the drunk who hangs out at the bus stop up the street than I do from the television. I shook my head slowly, Targent watching with friendly skepticism.

  “You going to tell me who?” I said.

  “The man’s name was Alex Jefferson.”

  It was one of those moments when I wished I were a smoker, just so I could have something to do with my hands, a little routine I could go through to pass some time without having to sit there and stare.

  “You remember the man?” Daly asked.

  I looked at him and gave a short laugh, shaking my head at the question. “Yeah. I remember the man.”

  They waited for a bit. Targent said, “And your relationship with him was, ah, a little adversarial?”

  I met his eyes. “He was sleeping with my fiancée, Detective. I spent two hours working my way through a twelve-pack of beer before I beat the shit out of Jefferson at his country club, got pulled over for drunk driving, got charged with assault. Pled the assault down to a misdemeanor but got canned from the department. All of this, you already know. But, yes, I suppose we can say that my relationship with him was, ah, a little adversarial.”

  Targent was watching me, and Daly was pretending to, but his eyes were drifting over my apartment, as if he thought maybe I’d left a crowbar or a nine-iron with dried blood and matted hair stuck to it leaning against the wall.

  “Okay,” Targent said. He looked even smaller sitting down, as if he weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds, but he had a substantial quality despite that, a voice flecked with iron. “Don’t take it personally, Mr. Perry. Nobody’s calling you a suspect. Now, if I can just ask—”

  “Were you there when she was notified?” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Karen. His wife. Were you there when she was notified?”

  He shook his head. “No, I was not. Lots of people are working—”

  “I can imagine. He was a very important man.”

  Targent blew out his breath and glanced at Daly, whose eyes were still roving over my apartment, looking for any excuse to shout “probable cause” and begin tearing the place apart.

  “I was out with a friend till about eleven Saturday night,” I said. “We had dinner, a few drinks downtown. I’ve probably got the receipts. Came back here, read for an hour, went to bed. No receipt for that.”

  Targent smiled slightly. “Okay. But you’re getting ahead of us.”

  “Like he said, nobody’s calling you a suspect,” Daly said.

  “Sure.”

  “Just covering bases,” Targent said. “You were on the job not long ago, you know how it goes.”

  “Sure.”

  He leaned back and hooked one ankle over a knee. “So you had an admittedly adversarial relationship with Mr. Jefferson.”

  “Three years ago.”

  “And had you—”

  “Seen him since? No. The last time I saw him he was on his back in the parking lot, doing a lot of bleeding, and I was trying to make it to my car.”

  That wasn’t true. I’d seen him twice after that, but always from a distance, and always unnoticed. Once in a restaurant; he’d been standing at the bar, laughing with some other guys in expensive suits, and I’d walked in the door, spotted him, and turned right back around and walked out. The other time was the day he and Karen were married. I’d parked across the street and sat in my car, watched them walk down the steps as people clapped and whistled, and I’d thought that it was all kid stuff, really, the marriage ceremony, and that when people like Jefferson—nearly fifty years old and trying a third wife on for size—went through it in public, it was pretty sad. Pathetic, even. Almost as sad and pathetic as being parked across the street, eighty-eight degrees but with the windows up, watching another guy marry your girl.

  That was during my bad phase, though. Fresh out of the job, shiftless and angry. Time had passed, things had changed. Alex Jefferson, while never really gone from my mind, no longer weighed on it, either.

  “You’re wasting time,” I said. “I understand you’ve got to go through the motions, but this is a dead end, gentlemen. I hadn’t seen him, I hadn’t seen her, and I didn’t kill him. Happy he’s dead? No. Sad? Not particularly. Apathetic. That’s it. He and his life were of no concern to me and mine. Not anymore.”

  Targent leaned forward, ran a hand through his hair, and looked at the floor. “They took their time on him.”

  “Pardon?”

  He looked up. “Whoever did kill him, Mr. Perry? They took their damn sweet time doing it. Slow and painful. That was how he went. With forty-seven burns and more than fifty lacerations. Burns from cigarettes and a lighter, lacerations from a razor blade. Sometimes the blade was used to cut deep, like a knife. Other times, it was used like a paint scraper across his flesh. He had duct tape over his mouth, and at some point, trying to scream, maybe, or maybe just going into convulsions from the pain, he bit right through his own tongue.”

  I turned and stared out the window. “I don’t need the details, Detective. I just need you to scratch me off the list and move on.”

  They lingered for about ten more minutes before finally clearing out. They would check out my history with Jefferson now, try to prove that our contact hadn’t stopped when I’d said it had, pro
bably verify what they could of my activity the night he was killed. If things went well, went the way they should, I wouldn’t hear from them again.

  When they were gone, I left the gym office locked, walked up the street, and bought a newspaper. I sat on a bench outside the doughnut shop, a cool breeze ruffling the pages as I read. Jefferson made the front page, of course, but it was brief. A rewritten police press release and a note that the attorney’s wife, Karen, was unavailable for comment. They’d gotten the tip late—classic police public relations. We might have to leak the news eventually, but you can be damn sure that when we do it’ll be as close to your deadline as possible.

  I didn’t recognize the name of the reporter who’d written the story. I could call my friend Amy Ambrose at the paper, see if she knew anything more—but what the hell for? At the end of the day, why did I care? I threw the newspaper away and walked toward my office.

  I came to the corner and crossed the street, went up the stairs, unlocked the office door, and stepped inside to be greeted by silence. My partner, Joe Pritchard, was out indefinitely, had been for a couple of months. Right now he was probably at physical therapy, where he went three times a week, trying to regain as much use of his left arm as possible. A bullet had gone in his shoulder not long ago, and although it came out, it left behind plenty of damage. And an empty chair at the desk beside me.

  I turned my computer on and sat behind my own desk, staring out the window. Maybe I should call Joe, let him know what had happened. Hell, he probably knew already. Joe always seemed to. He hadn’t called me, though, and that was surprising. Unless, as usual, he was a step ahead of me and a hell of a lot smarter and realized that, despite the police reaction, this thing wasn’t personal to me.

  “It was a long time ago,” I told the empty office.

  I pulled the stack of case files on the desk toward me and flipped the first one open. There was work to do, and nobody else would be coming in to do it for me.

  Karen’s call came at ten in the morning on the day after her husband was buried. I was in the office again, alone again, typing up a report on a custody case. The father was my client, and he wanted proof that his ex-wife’s new boyfriend was a drug dealer. Thought it would help him in the court battle for the kids. During the two weeks I spent on the case, I determined that the ex-wife had no boyfriend and that my client was a prick. Although he found time to call me six times a day, complaining that I must not be doing my job because “that bitch” most definitely did have a boyfriend, and a drug-dealing boyfriend at that, he somehow managed to miss his seven-year-old son’s birthday by three days. When he realized that, he blamed the ex-wife, naturally.