Michelle turned to Sean. “I think he’s lost the love for us.”
“Can we go?” asked Sean, his voice rising.
Murdock turned back. “After we take fingerprints, DNA swabs, and impressions of your shoes.”
“For exclusionary purposes, of course,” said Sean.
“I let the evidence lead me wherever it goes,” replied Murdock.
“They already checked my gun,” said Michelle. “And we both passed a GSR test.”
“I don’t care,” retorted Murdock.
Sean said, “We were retained by Bergin. We certainly had no reason to kill the guy.”
“Well, right now we only have your word for it that you two were working for him. We’ll need to check that out.”
“Okay. And after you’ve taken your samples from us tonight?”
“You head on to where you’re staying. But you are not to leave the area without my permission.”
“Can you do that?” asked Michelle. “We haven’t been charged with anything.”
“Material witness.”
“We saw nothing that you haven’t seen,” countered Sean.
“Don’t get in a pissing contest with me over this,” said Murdock. “You’ll lose. I know Chuck thinks you guys are great stuff, but I always thought he made up his mind too fast. So the jury’s still out as far as I’m concerned.”
“So much for professional courtesy,” groused Michelle.
“This is a homicide investigation. It’s not a friendship contest. And the only courtesy I owe is to the dead guy over there.”
He stalked off.
“I really think he’s lost the love for us,” said Michelle.
“Can’t blame him. We were on the scene. He doesn’t know us. And he’s under pressure. A lot of it. And he’s right. It’s his job to find the killer, not make friends.”
“On a pair of wings in minutes. All the way from Boston. They got here so fast I’m thinking chopper instead of a plane. Pretty high priority tag on Edgar Roy.”
“And I’m wondering why.”
As they were getting back in their car after being processed by a pair of field techs the lieutenant sidled over to them. “My guy told me he was the source for you about the FBI. Appreciate you covering for him,” he said. “That could’ve really dinged his career.”
“No problem,” said Michelle. “What’s your name?”
“Eric Dobkin.”
“Well, Eric,” said Sean, “it looks like the FBI is throwing its typical eight-hundred-pound-gorilla act, so the rest of us have to help each other out.”
“Help how?”
“We find out stuff we bring it to you.”
“You think that’s wise? I mean they are the FBI.”
“I think it’s wise until it turns out not to be.”
Michelle said, “But it’s a two-way street. We help you, you help us.”
“But it’s a federal investigation now, ma’am.”
“So the Maine State Police just turns tail and runs. Is that your motto?”
He stiffened. “No, ma’am. Our motto is—”
“Semper Aequus. Always Just.” She added, “I looked it up.”
“Also Integrity, Fairness, Compassion, and Excellence,” Dobkin said. “That’s our set of core values. I don’t know how it works in D.C., but we stick to them up here.”
“All the more reason for us to work together.”
“But what’s there to work on? You were retained by a guy who’s now dead.”
“And now we have to find out who killed him.”
“Why?”
“He was a friend of mine.” Sean leaned in closer to the officer. “And I don’t how you do things in Maine. But where I’m from, we don’t abandon our friends because someone killed them.”
Dobkin took a step back. “No sir.”
Michelle smiled. “Then I’m sure we’ll be seeing you. In the meantime.” She handed him one of their business cards. “Enough phone numbers on there to find us,” she added.
Michelle started the car and punched the gas, and the Ford hurtled off.
CHAPTER
5
THEY BOTH SLEPT.
In separate rooms.
The proprietress was a seventy-three-year-old woman named Mrs. Burke who possessed an old-fashioned idea about sleeping arrangements, in which a wedding band was required for cohabitation on the premises.
Michelle slept heavily. Sean did not. After only two fitful hours tossing in the sack, he rose and stared out the window. To the north and even closer to the coast sat Eastport. The sun’s rays would be tickling the town shortly, the first city in the United States to receive the morning light each day. He showered and dressed. An hour later he met a sleepy-eyed Michelle for breakfast.
Martha’s Inn turned out to be cozy and quaint, and close enough to the water to walk down to the shoreline in five minutes. Meals were served in a small, pine-paneled room off the kitchen. Sean and Michelle sat in ladder-back chairs with woven straw seats and had two cups of coffee each, eggs, bacon, and piping hot biscuits pre-slathered in butter by the cook.
“Okay, I’ll have to run like ten miles to burn this goop off,” said Michelle, as she poured a third cup of coffee.
He looked at her empty plate. “Nobody said you had to eat it.”
“Nobody had to. It was delicious.” She noted the local paper in his hands. “Nothing on Bergin, right? Happened too late.”
He lay the paper aside. “Right.” He tugged his sport coat closer around him. “Pretty nippy this morning. I should’ve brought warmer clothes.”
“Didn’t you check the latitude, sailor? This is Maine. It can be cold anytime.”
“No messages from our friend Dobkin?”
“None on my cell. Probably too early yet. So what’s the plan? Not hang around here?”
“We have an appointment to meet with Edgar Roy this morning. I plan on keeping it.”
“Will they let us in without Bergin?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“You really want to do this? I mean, how well did you know Bergin?”
Sean folded his napkin and set it down on the table. He looked around the room; there was only one other occupant. A man in his forties, dressed all in tweeds, was drinking a hot cup of tea with his pinky extended at a perfectly elegant angle.
“When I resigned from the Service, I’d hit rock bottom. Bergin was the first guy who thought I had something left in the tank.”
“Did you know him before? And did he know what had happened?”
“No to both questions. I just ran into him at Greenberry’s, a coffee shop in Charlottesville. We started talking. He was the one who encouraged me to apply to law school. He’s one of the main reasons I got my life back.” He paused. “I owe him, Michelle.”
“Then I guess I owe him too.”
The initial approach to Cutter’s Rock took them on a circuitous path toward the ocean. It was high tide, and they could see the swells slamming against the outcrops of slimy rock as they drove along. They made one hard right, then doglegged left. Another hundred feet carried them around a rise of land, and they saw the warning sign on a six-foot-wide piece of sheet metal set on long poles sunk deep into the rocky earth. It basically said that one was approaching a maximum security federal facility, and if one didn’t have legitimate business there, this was the last and only chance for one to turn around and get the hell out.
Michelle pressed the gas pedal harder, hurtling them faster at their destination. Sean looked over at her. “Having fun?”
“Just working off some butterflies.”
“Butterflies? What butterflies can you—” He caught himself, realizing that not that long ago Michelle had checked herself into a psych facility to work out some personal issues.
“Okay,” he said, and returned his gaze ahead.
A man-made causeway consisting of asphalt bracketed by built-up and graded-solid Maine stone led them out to the federal fa
cility. The entry gate was steel and motorized and looked strong enough to withstand a charge by a herd of Abrams tanks. The guard hut held four armed men who looked like they had never smiled in their lives. Their utility belts each contained a Glock sidearm, cuffs, telescopic head-crushing baton, Taser, pepper spray, stun grenades.
And a whistle.
Michelle looked at Sean as two guards approached them. “Bet me ten bucks that I won’t ask the bigger one if he’s ever blown his whistle to stop a rampaging psycho from escaping.”
“If you make even one joke to those gorillas I will find a gun and shoot you.”
“But if I did ask they’d be mad at me, not you,” she said with a smile.
“No. They always beat up the guy. The girl never gets the speeding ticket. And thanks.”
“For what?”
“Now I have butterflies.”
The perimeter wall was locally quarried stone, twelve feet tall with a six-foot-high stainless steel cylinder riding on top. It would be impossible to get a grip on, much less climb over.
“Seen that equipment on some supermax prisons,” noted Sean. “Latest whiz-bang technology in keeping the bad guys inside.”
“What about suction cups?” asked Michelle, as they both stared at the metal wall topper.
“It rotates like a hamster wheel. Suction cups won’t help you there. Still fall on your ass. And it’s probably loaded with motion sensors.”
Their car was analyzed by an AVIAN, or Advanced Vehicle Interrogation and Notification System, which used seismic sensors placed on their car to capture shock waves produced by a beating heart. An advanced signal-processing algorithm concluded in just under three seconds that there was no living person concealed in their Ford. The car was then subjected to a mobile trace handheld unit that screened for explosives and drugs. The portable unit was then run over them, and Sean and Michelle were personally searched the old-fashioned way, questioned by the guards, and had their names checked against a list. Michelle had instinctively started to explain to them about her weapon before realizing the police still had it. Then they were turned loose on a rigidly narrow path bracketed by high fences to continue their ride. Michelle let her gaze wander over the perimeter.
“Watchtowers every hundred feet,” she noted. “Each manned by a pair of guards.” She squinted into the sun. “One looks to be carrying an AK with an extended clip and the other a long-range sniper rifle with a mounted FLIR,” she added, referring to a Forward-Looking Infrared scope bolted to the rifle. “Bet they have a CCTV subsystem, digital recording, and terabytes of data storage. And multizone intrusion and escape detection systems, microwave and infrared technology, biometric readers, high-security IT network grafted onto a fiber optics backbone, multistage uninterrupted circuits, and big-time backup power in case the lights go out.”
Sean frowned. “Will you stop sounding like you’re casing the place? With all the bells and whistles they obviously have here, we have to assume people are watching and listening.”
She pulled her gaze back and saw that there were three rings of interior fencing around the two-story rebar-reinforced concrete building housing America’s most wildly psychotic predators. Each fence was an eighteen-foot-high chain-link with concertina wire on top. The top six feet of each fence was angled inward at forty-five degrees, making it nearly impossible to clear. The middle fence carried a lethal electrical charge, as a big sign next to it made crystal clear. The open ground in between each fence was a minefield of razor wire and sharp spikes pointing up from the ground, and the glint of the sun told her that there were myriad trip wires strung everywhere. At night, the only time anyone would dare attempt to escape from this place, the wires would be invisible. You’d bleed to death before you ran into the middle fence, and then only to get charred for your troubles. But by then the watchtower guards would have finished you off anyway with bang-bang taps to the head and heart.
“That electric fence has five thousand volts and low amperage, plenty lethal enough,” said Michelle in a low voice. “I’m betting there’s a concrete-grade beam under it so no one can dig out.” She paused. “But something is weird.”
“What?”
“You put in an electric fence to save labor costs. And in the world of prison perimeter security labor costs are basically tower guards. But every single tower is still manned by two shooters.”
“I guess they really don’t want to take any chances.”
“It’s overkill, at least to my mind.”
“What’d you expect? Our federal tax dollars at work.”
She noted a large array of solar panels off to one side, angled just right to take in the maximum amount of sunlight.
“Well, at least they’re going green,” she said, pointing them out to Sean.
They passed three more gates and three more checkpoints, and endured three more electronic scans and body searches, until Michelle assumed the guards collectively knew every contour of her person better than she did. At the entrance to the building massive portals resembling blast doors on a nukeproof bunker swung back on air-powered hydraulics. Michelle said in an impressed voice, “Okay, I’m thinking this place is escape-proof.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Do you think they know Bergin’s been murdered?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t bet against it.”
“So they might not let us in.”
“They let us come this far,” replied Sean.
“Yeah, and now I’m wondering why they have.”
“Little slow this morning?”
“What?”
He said nervously, “I’ve been wondering that ever since they cleared us through the first gate.”
CHAPTER
6
THERE WAS ONE more checkpoint inside the facility. A magnetometer for any stray weapons the other searches didn’t reveal, another probe of their persons, an X-ray for Michelle’s small bag, an ID and document check, a cross-reference on the visitor’s list, an oral interview that would have done Mossad proud, and a few phone calls. After that they were told to wait in an anteroom off the reception area, if one could call it that. The windows were at least three inches thick and presumably bullet-, fist-, and footproof.
Sean tapped on one. “Feels like the windows in the Beast.”
Michelle was examining the interior wall construction. She rubbed her hand up and down one section. “Don’t think this is run-of-the-mill drywall. Feels like a composite. A composite made of titanium. I doubt a round from my .45 could pierce it.”
“Called a buddy of mine who knew about this place,” said Sean. “It’s set on a rocker platform like they do the skyscrapers.”
“You mean in case there’s an earthquake.”
“Right. Must have cost a pretty penny.”
“Like you said, it’s only taxpayer money. But I wonder if its floodproof? We’re pretty close to the ocean here.”
“Retractable seawall. They can raise it in twenty minutes.”
“You’re kidding.”
Sean shook his head. “What my buddy told me.”
Michelle looked around the small, Spartan space. “I wonder how many visitors there are here? They don’t even have any magazines. And I doubt you could find a vending machine.”
“Would you want to come and visit someone here? Even if the person was family? I mean, it’s a facility for the criminally insane.”
“They don’t call it that anymore, do they?”
“I guess not, but it is what it is. They are criminal and they are insane.”
“Now look who’s being judgmental. Roy hasn’t even been tried.”
“Okay, you got me there.”
“But he’s still probably a psycho,” added Michelle, drawing a raised eyebrow from her partner. She said, “How many inmates—sorry, patients—here, do you reckon?”
“That’s classified, apparently.”
“Classified? How can that be? This isn’t part of the CIA or the Pentagon.”
/> “All I can tell you is I tried to find that out and ran right into a stone wall. I do know that Roy is probably the most high-profile inmate they have right now.”
“Until he’s supplanted by an even crazier psycho.”
“Excuse me?”
They turned to find a young man in a blue smock standing at the doorway. He held a small electronic pad. “Sean King and Michelle Maxwell?”
They rose together, towering over the shorter man. “That’s right,” said Sean.
“Here to see Edgar Roy?”
Sean was prepared to have a fight on his hands about them being able to see the man. But Blue Smock merely said, “Please follow me.”
A minute later he handed them off to a woman who was far more intimidating. Nearly as tall as Michelle but considerably wider and heavier, she looked capable of holding down the nose tackle position for a Division I football team. She introduced herself as Carla Dukes, the director of Cutter’s Rock. When her long fingers clamped around Michelle’s in a handshake, Michelle wondered if the woman used to call herself Carl.
Her office was a fourteen-by-fourteen square. A desk with a computer, three chairs counting hers, and nothing else. No file cabinets, no pictures of family or friends, no paintings on the wall, no view outside the room, nothing personal whatsoever.
“Please sit,” she said. They sat. She slid open her drawer, retrieved a red file, and opened it on her desk. “I understand that Ted Bergin is dead.”
Thanks for getting right to the point, thought Sean. And now here comes the fight.
He said, “That’s right. The police and FBI are investigating. But we’re still scheduled to meet with Edgar Roy today and we didn’t want to forego that opportunity.”
“The appointment was for Ted Bergin and you accompanying him.”
“Well, he obviously can’t be here,” said Sean, his voice calm but firm.
“Of course not, but I’m not sure that in light of the circumstances—”
Michelle said, “But his defense will continue. He will be tried at some point. He is entitled to representation. And Sean is also a licensed attorney working with Ted Bergin.”
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