MICHAEL LISTER'S FIRST THREE SERIES NOVELS: POWER IN THE BLOOD, THE BIG GOODBYE, THUNDER BEACH

by Michael Lister

  As quickly as I could, I pressed the hold button, then the second-line button, and punched in the number to the control room. Without going into much detail, I told the sergeant in the control room to find Simpson and get him to my office ASAP.

  I then punched line one again, praying that she was still there. She was. We talked for about five minutes, waiting for her husband to come to my office. Our conversation dealt primarily with all the pressures she faced being a single mom whose husband was incarcerated. I actually felt as if I did her some good, but chances were I’d never know.

  When Simpson finally did arrive, after what seemed like days, I quickly put him on the phone and went into the other office where I called the Tampa Police and reported her threat of suicide. While talking to her, I had discovered where she lived, and I told them. I then jotted down a few notes about what had transpired and called the OIC and filled him in. He advised me to fill out an incident report, which I did. I then walked back into my office and sat down at my desk.

  Noticing that Simpson was crying, I busied myself with opening the rest of my mail. My mail consisted of roughly fifteen requests from inmates for everything from Bibles and greeting cards to phone calls. There were also two letters from citizen volunteers who ministered at the prison saying what a blessing they themselves were, a memo from the chaplaincy administrator about upcoming religious holidays that were to be observed by the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian inmates, and a single piece of typing paper trifolded and taped together on the end with the word “Chaplain” typed on the outside.

  I unfolded the typing paper, tearing it slightly while removing the tape. It read simply: “I’ve seen you talking to her. I watch over her. If you don’t stay away from her, I will kill you like I did that punk. She’s an angel, and I’m her guardian angel. She’s mine. Stay away from her.”

  I reached into my desk and pulled out the request from Ike Johnson. I laid them both on the desk in front of me and began to compare them. Within seconds, I could tell they were typed on the same machine.

  I thought of Anna as I reread the note a final time—when I realized that Simpson was talking to me. “I’m sorry, what’d you say?”

  “Thank you, Chaplain. I thinks she going to be all right. I should have called her or written or something. It’s my fault, but this place is getting to me. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Why don’t you start coming to see me every week for a while, and you might want to think about seeing our psychologist as well.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I will.”

  “And, stay in touch with your wife. It’s tough in here, but it’s tough for her out there, too.”

  “I know. I will. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. I should have said more. I should have talked to him right then and there, but I couldn’t. All I could do was think about Anna. Was she in danger? I talked to her more than anyone. Johnson had been assigned to her. Was he killed because of her? It was probably because I had just been with her, but I thought of Sandra Strickland, too. I could think of no other female staff members I had talked to recently.

  Those questions would have to wait for now. I glanced at my watch and realized that I was already fifteen minutes late for my meeting with the inspector and the superintendent.

  Chapter 10

  The superintendent’s office was neat, orderly, and as conservative as he was, with one exception. In the center of his wall of fame, amidst the diplomas, merit certificates, and department commendations, was a hand-drawn picture of a family: husband, wife, and child. The artist used crayons and showed great potential—potential he never got to live up to because of his untimely death at eight years old. Mr. Stone and his wife never tried to have children again after that, or so I’m told; I had been waiting for an opportunity to present itself for discussing it with him. However, since Edward Stone was involved, I realized it might not come in this lifetime.

  When I arrived, Tom Daniels was already there. The two men grew silent when I walked into the room. Daniels looked as if a day’s work felt like a week’s. His shirt ballooned out just over his belt, the way you would expect it to if it had been worn all day without a retuck. His face was red. And large conspicuous drops of sweat trickled down the sides of his cheeks.

  Stone looked as if he had just finished getting dressed—morning-fresh and military-crisp. His shoes, which were just visible underneath the desk, gleamed as the sunlight from the window, the only window in his office, spilled onto them.

  “Good afternoon, Chaplain. You’re late,” the superintendent said as I was taking my seat beside Daniels, who neither looked at nor spoke to me.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Stone. I’m sorry I’m late. How are you doing?” I replied.

  “Better now that something is being done about this situation we have on our hands,” he said, nodding his head toward Daniels.

  “Let’s have a full report,” Mr. Stone continued. “But first, shut the door.”

  He said this to no one in particular, but I quickly responded. Daniels never even flinched in that direction.

  “Inspector, what do we have so far?” Stone asked.

  “In some ways, a great deal of information,” he said sitting up and leaning forward slightly. “But in other ways, not very much at all. I am finding your people very uncooperative.”

  “Surely the chaplain has been helpful with this,” Stone said.

  Daniels began to speak, but I beat him to the draw. “Mr. Stone, as soon as you left us this morning, the inspector expressed his desire to work alone.” I could feel Daniels’s anger; it was palpable, but he never looked in my direction.

  “Inspector?” Stone asked, raising an eyebrow, which caused his glasses to rise slightly.

  “I’ve made it clear from the very beginning that I do not wish to work with him,” Daniels said, the sweat on his forehead increasing. “I am fully capable of conducting this investigation on my own. I certainly do not need someone who is not even an investigator helping me. He would only botch up the case.”

  “If, as you say, you are fully capable of conducting this investigation on your own, how is it that you are having difficulty doing any investigating?” Stone asked.

  “I’m not having difficulty investigating. I am having difficulty with these mother-loving rednecks around here. I have gathered a lot of information about the inmate who was killed, though.”

  “But that is only one investigation or one part of a larger investigation,” Stone said.

  Daniels withdrew a wrinkled, soiled handkerchief from his back left pants pocket and wiped his forehead. It merely smeared the sweat around. It also left some lint on his eyebrow.

  “That’s true, but,”

  “But, you will work together, or I will call the secretary. Understood?”

  Daniels did not respond.

  “Understood?” Mr. Stone asked again.

  Daniels made a slight nod with his head.

  “Understood?” Mr. Stone looked at me.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I understood it the first time.”

  “Now, tell me what you have, Inspector,” Stone said.

  “I can tell you that Johnson was murdered,” Daniels said with a swell of pride that changed his posture.

  “Murdered? Being killed while trying to escape is justifiable homicide not murder,” Mr. Stone said.

  “Yes, but,” Daniels said with obvious pleasure at the prospect of enlightening us, “it is murder when the inmate was unconscious before he was ever placed in the bag.”

  “And he was?” Mr. Stone asked with great surprise.

  “That’s what the ME says.” Daniels looked at me to gloat. His face registered surprise at my obvious lack of it. He turned away abruptly. “Says he was full of enough chloral hydrate to be dead soon anyway.”

  “What is chloral hydrate?” Stone asked. It was obvious he was interested, but he was not excited. He didn’t get excited.

  “Sleeping pills,” Daniels
said with a small snort as if everyone should know it.

  “Could he have taken them himself?” Stone asked. “Maybe to relax during his escape?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It would seem that someone drugged him. Someone who knew that putting him in the trash bag would get him stabbed to death.”

  “Did the ME say how the drug was administered?” I asked.

  The superintendent said, “Why on earth would that matter?”

  “Because,” I said, “medical personnel would probably use a syringe, an officer might put it in food, and an inmate might give it to him in pill form as if it were some other kind of drug.”

  “I see,” Mr. Stone said. “Interesting. Well, Inspector, how was it administered?”

  Daniels’s face registered his obvious embarrassment. “He was unable to say conclusively. We should know shortly.” After this, Daniels, acting nonchalantly, made a few notes to himself on his legal pad. I was able to see that one of them read, “Ask ME dickhead’s question.” I assumed he was referring to me.

  “What else do you have?” the superintendent asked.

  “He had an abnormal amount of lacerations, even for an inmate. A few abrasions that were not related to his death.”

  Outside, a rather large female officer passed by the window. It looked like walking was difficult for her. She moved like she was on another planet with three times the gravity of Earth. I wondered how she would fair during a riot.

  “Where did the fatal blow strike him?” Stone asked.

  “Bottom part of his heart. The rod got stuck in his rib cage. Shutt broke several of them trying to get it free.” Daniels hesitated a minute for effect and then added, “But that’s not what killed him.”

  “What?” Stone asked.

  “ME says that the rod scraped the bottom of the heart, but really didn’t pierce it. The loss of blood would have killed him eventually. He lost a shitload of it in a hurry, but it still takes a while.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, sick of the suspense.

  “I’m saying that he didn’t die immediately,” Daniels said.

  I thought about those lifeless black eyes and wondered if they were really lifeless or just drugged.

  “He died as the result of a blow to the throat that dislocated his windpipe,” Daniels said.

  I thought about falling on top of Johnson and wondered if I had landed on his neck. I tried to remember, but I couldn’t. Had I killed him? Did Shutt use me as a weapon like the rod?

  “Could the officer have done that or even known what he was doing?” Mr. Stone asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Your prime witness is sitting right across from you. Why don’t you ask him?” Daniels said, tilting his head in my direction.

  “I’ll get to him in a minute,” Stone said with a quick glance in my direction. “What else can you tell us?”

  “He was a drug user. There were traces of crack and alcohol in his blood.”

  “Crack?” Stone said in shock. “I know we have the occasional marijuana smuggled in here, but crack—that is not possible.”

  Dust was visible in the sunlight shining in through the window. Specks danced around in the single shaft of light like performers in a spotlight. Amazingly enough, the dust seemed to avoid Edward Stone’s shoes.

  “Could his death be drug-related?” I asked, thinking that I should say something just to let them know I still could.

  “That’s an obvious possibility that we must consider,” Daniels said to Stone, as if he were the one who had asked the question. “As you say, it’s difficult to get drugs on the compound, crack especially.”

  “Aren’t drug screenings done periodically?” I asked.

  “Yes, they are. And to answer your next question, he was tested as recently as a week ago, and it was negative. Besides, he was in confinement most of the time, which makes it virtually impossible to get drugs —or anything else, for that matter.”

  As Daniels wiped his forehead again, the small piece of lint that was on his left eyebrow fell down and landed on the end of an eyelash, bobbing up and down as he blinked. It was very distracting. I found myself looking at it more than anything else in the room.

  “That’s not what I’ve heard,” I said.

  “Oh really, and just what have you heard?” Mr. Stone asked.

  “I’ve heard that some very strange things go on during the first shift around here,” I said, then added, “especially in confinement.”

  Daniels started to speak, but Mr. Stone lifted his hand and when he does that, as easily as a cop stops traffic, people stop talking. “I’ll get to you in a minute,” Mr. Stone said to me. Then looking back at Daniels, “Okay, drugs, what else?”

  “He was a faggot. He had AIDS. Of course you already knew that. There were traces of dried semen around the anal region. It is being processed at FDLE. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get something from it. Who knows?”

  “Pardon my ignorance, but who has unprotected sex with an inmate who has AIDS?” I said.

  “There are other inmates who have AIDS so they have nothing to lose, inmates who do not know because the other inmate has kept it secret, and then there are plenty of inmates who do not have unprotected sex.”

  “There are condoms on the compound?” I asked.

  “No, of course not,” Daniels sighed with impatience. “But many of the inmates use the latex gloves they wear when working in medical, food services, or caustic cleaning—and that’s with no lubrication.”

  “Ouch,” I said, giving Daniels the response he was looking for. He smiled.

  “Sounds like your FDLE crime lab is working overtime,” Mr. Stone said.

  “They’re good. Very good. Probably the best state lab in the country,” Daniels said proudly, not realizing that Stone seemed to be saying that the lab was working hard but Daniels was not.

  “How about you, Chaplain?” Stone asked. “Have you discovered anything useful?”

  “I have more,” Daniels said, playing it for all it was worth.

  “Let’s have it.”

  “The lab also found some unusual trace evidence—a PRIDE chemical, on his blues. It may very well give us an idea of where he was before he wound up in the trash heap. Which in turn may give us insight into who was responsible for him winding up in the trash heap.”

  “Thank you, Inspector. Now what did you learn around here today? All of this information seems to have come from the lab.”

  Daniels stopped smiling. “As I said earlier, your staff was not cooperative. Perhaps if you spoke to them.”

  “Perhaps I will. Chaplain, did you make any inquiries today?”

  “A few rather discrete ones.”

  “Discrete?” he asked in shock. “That little fiasco in confinement wasn’t very discrete.”

  “No, sir, it didn’t turn out that way, but it was intended to be discrete.”

  “The road that leads to the opposite of where your boss lives is paved with good intentions. Well, no matter. But, did you meet with resistance from the staff?”

  “No, sir, I can’t say that I did, but I only interviewed a few of them. I just tried not to do it like an interview.”

  “What about you being our prime witness? Can you tell us anything else about the actual stabbing yesterday?”

  “I really don’t think that I can add anything to what I’ve already said. In fact, the further I get away from it, the more difficulty I’m having remembering it.”

  “Should Shutt be looked into?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. To eliminate him as a suspect if nothing else.”

  “Okay,” he said, and then he looked at Daniels again. “Have you ever heard the old saying, ‘You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar’?”

  “Sure, I’ve heard it,” he said.

  “Well, the chaplain here is your honey. He is well liked and respected, and he knows at least half of the staff pretty well. So, you are to work with him and not without him or you are not to work in this in
stitution at all. Understand?”

  “Yeah, I understand,” Daniels said in a tone that said, I’m not an idiot.

  “Understand, Chaplain?” Stone said to me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Now both of you get out of here. And go find out what’s going on in my institution.”

  Chapter 11

  Nights were the worst. The tin man alone in his tin house. Loneliness, fear, isolation, and guilt tormented me mercilessly. I couldn’t sleep. When I first got married, I found it rather difficult to sleep with another person in the bed. Every time she tossed, I turned. Every time she turned, I tossed. And the sounds that she made—the breathing, the little grunts and moans—I would lie awake in the dark listening to them. And then I got used to it—needed it, in fact.

  After the divorce, I had many nights in which I would lie awake in the dark listening to the silence, trying to readjust to sleeping alone. I tossed and turned in the huge bed. Susan and I shared a king size, which dwarfed the double bed I did not sleep in now. Every move I made rumbled like a voice in a deep well; my movements were exaggerated and echoed in the absence of someone to absorb them.

  At night, too, the demons came. I faced my greatest fears: those of meaninglessness—no hope, no future, no God, no purpose. Self-doubt and accusation rumbled in my head like thunder in a canyon. Also, the desire to drink was overwhelming. Alcohol offered a baptism into its depths that would cause the fears, demons, and, most of all, the loneliness to drown. I wanted to drown beneath the golden ripples of its surface and never come up for air. I didn’t, but I don’t know how I didn’t. This, more than anything else in recent memory, convinced me of the existence of God. Alone, I could not stay clean and sober. And I was completely, utterly alone.

  Earlier that night, I had gone to an AA meeting. I drove into the next county to attend it to ensure my anonymity. It helped, but not enough. I returned home and, in the absence of the prospect of sex with anyone other than myself, went jogging. Actually, much of the time I ran. I ran away from the case, the bottle, the loneliness that eventually chased me down and overtook me, no matter how fast or how far I ran. As I did, I thought about Bambi. She wasn’t the answer—I knew that—but it doesn’t mean that she couldn’t be part of the answer. I came home, showered, changed, ate, and watched It’s A Wonderful Life on cable—none of which occupied enough time. I then scratched out some notes on a legal pad, which I had recently heard was no longer used by the legal profession. I thought of everything I knew about the case and then wrote it down. It didn’t take long.