Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  Hospital staff rushed back and forth along the hallway, and assorted cops and prison guards milled in and out of the now-open ambulance-bay doors.

  “Where’s Billy Cronk?” I demanded of one of the interchangeable guards.

  “Surgery.”

  Once more, I crossed the hall to the surgical wing. The operating rooms were all blockaded by thick-bodied men in uniforms. They didn’t want a repeat of what had happened with Chapman.

  I must have checked three different rooms and asked three different officers the same question.

  Finally one of them answered, “Yeah, Cronk’s in there. Why?”

  “Is he going to live?”

  “How should I know? I’m just guarding the door.”

  Someone tapped my shoulder. “Mike?”

  Skip Morrison had finally relocated me. The chief deputy gave me one of his Howdy Doody grins. “Nice abs!”

  I had almost grown accustomed to walking around bare chested. “There was blood and brains on my shirt. I had to throw it away.”

  “Likely story! I hope you’re telling everyone that it was me who told you to sneak in the back way. I want credit for taking down Chapman, too.”

  The idea of being credited with anything baffled me.

  “How the hell did he get loose?” I asked, knowing that Skip was such a busybody, he would already have the story.

  Chapman, it seemed, was one of the lucky survivors of the knife fight back at the prison. But he had been stabbed in the torso so many times he was springing leaks everywhere. The COs put him in restraints and kept him locked up for the ambulance ride. That’s standard operating procedure at the prison. Rancic rode along with the emergency medical technicians to provide security.

  The EMTs did everything to stop Chapman’s abdominal bleeding. Pressure, bandages, hemostatic gel—but an artery was giving them headaches. Five minutes out, the prisoner fell quiet. When the ambulance arrived, the emergency personnel rushed his stretcher into the ER, where a doctor waved them into surgery without a stop at triage.

  The attending surgeon requested that Rancic remove the cuffs because they were going to be in the way. After Rancic unlocked the manacles and before another officer applied the bed restraints, Chapman stopped pretending to be unconscious. He grabbed the nurse who was cutting off his clothes with surgical shears and pressed the scissors blade to her throat. Hostage taker and hostage backed from the room. Chapman was trying to feel his way toward safety even as cops convened from other parts of the hospital. Rancic followed the scrum, and when he had a shot, he took it.

  I had never transferred a prisoner from an ambulance stretcher to a hospital bed, but even I knew better than to remove restraints before new ones were in place.

  “You don’t think that’s weird?” I asked Skip.

  “The level of incompetence? No, I think that’s par for the course at the prison.”

  “I’m talking about the fact that the same CO who unchained the guy was the one who killed him.”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say Novak was trying to make up for having screwed up and nearly gotten a woman beheaded.”

  “Novak? Is that Rancic’s first name?”

  “The guy’s a Gypsy, from what I hear.”

  I crossed my arms against a sudden draft. “Romany.”

  “What?”

  “Gypsy is considered an ethnic slur. They prefer to be called Romany. I don’t know what the term is for an individual.”

  Skip pulled on his freckled earlobe. “I hope you haven’t gotten all PC on me, Bowditch.”

  “What’s Rancic’s résumé? I don’t remember meeting him when I was stationed here.”

  “He’s a new hire, six months on the job. I’m not sure where he worked before.”

  “He struck me as a veteran CO.”

  “A veteran CO wouldn’t have allowed a prisoner to get free.”

  It was a good point. “What can you tell me about the man he killed?”

  “Chapman?” Skip said in a faux-wistful tone. “That’s a different story. We held Darius in the county lockup briefly before his trial for armed robbery. You probably remember those banks that got held up around Rockland, a couple years ago. Anyway, Darius and I shared some quality personal time, and let’s just say I won’t be buying a bouquet of flowers for his grave. That man went from calm to crazy faster than a Porsche goes from zero to sixty.”

  “So there’s no known connection between the two of them? Rancic and Chapman?”

  Skip set a long hand on my shoulder with affection. “Have I ever told you what a beautiful thing your paranoia is?”

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. I had unfairly labeled Billy Cronk as paranoid when the threat to him had been real. Meanwhile, my deputy friend was accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist.

  “Tell me what happened at the prison,” I said. “How did it start? Who stabbed who?”

  “Oh, there are rumors galore. But nothing I believe. At the moment it’s safe to say that the people who know aren’t talking. And the people who are talking don’t know. Listen, it’s been good catching up, but I’d better boogie.”

  Before he could go, I asked him if he might have a spare shirt or jacket in his cruiser I could borrow. Five minutes later he returned with a self-satisfied grin and a novelty tee he’d picked up at the Maine Lobster Festival.

  This one was red, white, and blue. An eagle clutched two pistols in its talons. On the back, words were written in an appliqué script meant to resemble the handwriting of the Founding Fathers: I’M SORRY BUT I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY FREEDOM.

  * * *

  Skip had professed ignorance, but it struck me that certain facts had been established. Billy Cronk, Darius Chapman (now deceased), and one unidentified prisoner (also deceased), had been in a knife fight. In this mêlée, a correctional officer had also been killed and Sergeant Dawn Richie had been wounded severely enough to require transport to the hospital.

  I leaned over and put my face in my hands. Billy was only a few years from completing his sentence for manslaughter. I had professed to Skip that my friend would only have attacked a guard in self-defense. But given his recent behavior, his vague accusations against Dawn Richie, how certain could I be of that?

  What am I going to tell Aimee?

  I thought of her speeding south, her balky, rust-bitten Tahoe loaded with Cronklets. When she arrived, would the troopers even let her see her husband? Not if he was a suspect in the assassination of a correctional officer and the attempted assassination of another.

  Although the hospital was still teeming with troopers, deputies, and municipal cops, I seemed to be the only game warden present. No surprise there. Unless a prisoner escapes and our tracking skills are needed, we are not generally brought in to deal with crises in the correctional system.

  A smooth-faced trooper tapped my shoulder. “The hospital is asking nonessential personnel to clear the ER, Warden.”

  I caught sight of a black-haired man dressed in a fancy suit on the far side of the surgical suite.

  “Just a second,” I told the trooper. “Hey, Steve! Steve Klesko!”

  The state police detective paused midstep and searched for the person who’d shouted his name. When he finally saw me, he made an exaggerated face signaling dismay.

  Detective Steven Klesko and I had cooperated on an investigation the previous November on an island twenty miles off the coast. A negligent hunter had mistaken a woman for a deer, we’d been told. What had actually happened was far more twisted than that simple scenario.

  I hadn’t covered myself in glory during the Ariel Evans case. After it was over, I’d received reprimands from my superiors for failing to communicate my findings, for refusing to coordinate my actions with them, and for exceeding the scope of my authority in arresting a suspect in the killing.

  But at least one good thing had come out of my first homicide investigation. Klesko and I had become friends. Along with some of his college buddies, I had j
oined him on a marathon snowmobile trip over the winter—five hundred miles across northern New England. To my surprise, he’d even asked me to be a groomsman in his upcoming wedding.

  “Mike, what are you doing here?”

  “I was nearby, heard what happened at the prison, and thought I might be of help.”

  “That’s bullshit. You couldn’t control your curiosity.”

  “Are you in charge of this thing?” I asked, meaning the Gordian knot of interlocking crimes that needed to be untangled.

  “Lucky me, right?”

  In Maine all felonies committed by incarcerated persons and all suspicious deaths of inmates are investigated by the state police. The policy was put in place by a former governor who realized it was an obvious conflict of interest for prison wardens to investigate their own officers for potential negligence or misconduct.

  “If you have a minute, I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “I don’t have a minute. But I never pass up free coffee.”

  Klesko wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense. His hairline was too low, his eyebrows too close together, his eyes too sunken in their sockets. Decades of playing hockey, including a stint in the minor leagues, had left him with a dented nose he hadn’t bothered to straighten. But he carried himself with an athlete’s grace. Most important, he seemed utterly at ease inside his own skin. And isn’t that the essence of charisma?

  After we’d found the coffee machine and a quiet corner, I asked, “How is Dawn Richie doing?”

  “She’s got a facial laceration and some superficial defensive wounds on her extremities, but nothing life-threatening.”

  “Have you interviewed her yet?”

  “I’ve been waiting for the docs to give me the go-ahead, but it should be any minute now. Sergeant Richie was the first one transported. Why are you asking me these questions, Mike?”

  “I’d like to sit in on your interview.”

  “I’m sure you would!” It took him more than a few seconds to realize I was serious. “I hope you realize how out of the question that request is. On what basis should I allow you to be in the room?”

  Once again I found myself at a decision point. I was the friend of one of the inmates who had, perhaps, attacked Dawn Richie. That same inmate had instructed me to pry into her private life. Sharing that information with the police would be yet another betrayal of a man I had already doomed once.

  But Steve Klesko was a fellow law-enforcement officer, and my duty was to share whatever information I possessed that might assist his investigation. I couldn’t save Billy from himself. If that reality hadn’t been obvious before, it was now.

  “One of the injured prisoners is a friend of mine. I actually visited him yesterday, and we had a disturbing conversation. His name is Billy Cronk. Can you tell me how he’s doing?”

  “The docs think he’s going to pull through. I take it you believe your conversation is relevant to the stabbings.”

  “It might be.”

  His conjoined eyebrows rose. “Well?”

  “Before I tell you, I’m hoping you can give me some assurances.”

  “Come on, Mike. You know I can’t do that.”

  “I don’t want to worsen his legal situation.”

  Klesko scratched a temple where a few gray hairs had recently appeared among their darker fellows. “What exactly do you think happened this morning?”

  “I don’t honestly know.”

  “Your friend Billy Cronk was the one who saved Sergeant Richie’s life. If not for him, those two other inmates would have cut her throat. Your friend’s the hero of the day, dude.”

  6

  It took a moment for Klesko to register my stunned reaction to his words. “What were you under the impression happened at the prison this morning?”

  “My first thought, when I heard Billy was involved, was that something had triggered him to go berserk. He has a history of flashbacks to the war. They sometimes end in violence. It was how he landed in prison.”

  A note of caution crept into his voice. “When you talked to him yesterday, did he seem like he was on the verge of a psychotic break?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you warn anyone?”

  “The COs would have locked Billy up in the Supermax as a precautionary measure. If he wasn’t crazy yesterday, he would have been after a couple of weeks in solitary. I couldn’t do that to him based on nothing but gut feelings.”

  Klesko stared straight into my pupils. The unsettling sensation was of being appraised by two different people with two different agendas. There was Steven Klesko, the detective with the Maine State Police, coldly assessing my actions. And there was my friend Steve, who heard the pain in my voice despite my attempts at hiding it.

  After a moment he said, “You were the one who arrested Cronk, right? After he blew that guy’s head off?”

  “I didn’t want to, but he told me it was the right thing to do. He said if I broke my oath, it would eat me alive.”

  “You also testified against him at trial?”

  “Hildreth subpoenaed me. I wasn’t in any position to deny the state attorney general.”

  “Tell me if it’s none of my business. But have you talked to anyone about this? A professional?”

  “There’s a priest in Bangor I sometimes go to for confession.”

  Since my childhood, the church had rebranded it the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. The penance part I got; I understood suffering. But reconciliation with my Creator had so far eluded me.

  “What did the padre say?” Klesko had also been raised a Catholic and still attended mass.

  “That God forgave me for sending my friend to prison.”

  “What more do you need than that?” Klesko deposited the empty cup in a trash can. “To make sense of this, I’m going to need to talk with Cronk. You can’t be part of that. As for Sergeant Richie—”

  A rotund orderly in multicolored scrubs chose that opportune moment to lumber over.

  “Detective Klesko?” he said in a high-pitched voice that didn’t match his body mass index. “The docs say it’s all right for you to talk with the sergeant now. If you want to follow me…”

  Klesko didn’t say anything, but he gave me a sidelong glance that I read as permission to follow him. I didn’t hesitate.

  * * *

  Dawn Richie wasn’t remotely what I had imagined. I had expected a thick-limbed woman of late middle age. Instead I found an athletic person in her mid-thirties. Half her face was concealed beneath layers of tape and gauze, but her undamaged features were delicate, and the color of her eyes—a hazel that changed from brown to green—was mesmerizing. Only her helmet of mouse-brown hair fit the prejudicial stereotype I had carried inside the room.

  She was sitting upright on a bed that could be adjusted for that purpose. She wore a papery hospital gown. Both of her hands were wrapped and rewrapped with bandages so that they looked like soft, white clubs or giant Q-tips. She had an IV, pumping saline I assumed, in the crook of one of her buff arms.

  “I’m Detective Klesko with the Maine State Police.”

  She raised her bandaged limbs. “Excuse me if I don’t shake hands.”

  “We’re wondering if you feel up to giving a statement.”

  “Frankly, I’d like to get it over with.” Richie turned her chameleon eyes on me. “Who’s tall, dark, and silent over there?”

  “I’m Mike Bowditch. I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service.”

  “A game warden! I don’t hunt or fish so it can’t be that I have an outstanding warrant against me.” The bandages on her face made her smile seem lopsided. “I know why you’re here, Warden Bowditch. You’re a friend of Billy Cronk. I’ve seen your name on the sign-in sheets.”

  “I can leave the room if you’d like, Sergeant.”

  “Stay if you want. It won’t change what I have to say.”

  From her specific Maine accent—Down East, coastal—I gather
ed she’d grown up close to the prison in Machiasport, where she’d started her career. People from away often assume there is a single Maine accent, but there are at least a dozen subtle regional varieties.

  Klesko removed his smartphone from his pocket. “Have the doctors given you any medication that might impair your memory or otherwise affect what you have to tell us?”

  “No, but if you want to bring me some, I’d appreciate it.” She was a bit of a smart-ass, this Dawn Richie. “Just kidding! I’ve never been one for drugs or booze. I don’t like the feeling of being out of control.”

  “I’m going to record this if you don’t mind,” said Klesko.

  “Knock yourself out. Before we get started, I need to ask you about that gunshot. So I hear it was Rancic who took down Chapman?”

  “That’s correct,” Klesko said.

  This confirmation of the latest gossip seemed to please her. “How did he allow Chapman to get free of his cuffs? Darius wasn’t exactly the Great Houdini. I know, I know. That’s a question for later. You want to hear from me what happened in the laundry room.”

  “We’ll also be reviewing the security footage,” said Klesko.

  “A lot of good that’ll do you! Chapman and Dow were smart where they chose to ambush us. The washers and dryers block the cameras in that section of the room. It’s a blind spot.”

  “Dow?” I said, already breaking my self-sworn oath of silence. “Which Dow?”

  She let her gaze wander over me again with renewed interest. “We have a few Dows in the prison, but Trevor was the one who sliced up my face.”

  Klesko voiced his displeasure with me by clearing his throat.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Trevor Dow had been one of a handful of men I hated. He was a murderer and a drug dealer who had terrorized an entire town for years before I’d helped send him to prison.

  And it was Billy who had stabbed the son of a bitch to death.

  Jesus.

  With the video recorder going, Klesko began his interview with the usual preliminaries; he stated his own name, the location, the date, the time, and identified everyone present in the room. Then he asked Dawn Richie to give her complete name and also spell it, which she did with amusement, then added, “Richie as in Richie Rich. Except I don’t have two nickels to rub together.”