by Robert Ellis
Holmes sighed and then hung up. They wouldn’t accept the call. No one wanted to talk to him, his plea falling on deaf ears. When he finally turned around, he looked ten years older, like the hopelessness of what was ahead for him had begun to sink in.
He lowered his eyes. Then the guards led him down the hall and placed him into an empty holding cell. There were no bars on the door, just glass. Teddy waited with the assistant warden as Holmes showered and was issued an orange jumpsuit. When the prison doctor arrived, he was given a physical, questioned about his general health, and samples of his blood were taken. Once the doctor had completed his required tasks, he removed the tape wrapped around Holmes’s hands and examined the wounds. Teddy approached the holding cell for a closer look. Holmes had been cut by the knife. Somehow his palms had been slashed in the struggle with the eighteen-year-old girl.
The doctor dressed the wounds, saying the cuts were deep but didn’t require stitches. Still, Holmes never looked at him. Since that aborted phone call, Holmes’s eyes never rose from the floor.
Teddy stepped back, following the assistant warden out of the holding area. He was on autopilot, observing the process and keeping everything as far away as he could.
“We’ll screen his blood,” Dean was saying. “For the next five days, Holmes will be in quarantine. After that, we’ll determine the risks and he’ll be transferred to another pod for permanent housing. He’s on suicide watch tonight. We’ll see how things go.”
They stopped at a door. Dean glanced at the camera mounted on the wall and nodded. After a moment, the lock clicked and the door opened revealing a hallway flanked by conference rooms. There were fourteen of them, seven per side—each with a sign beside the door designating them as OFFICIAL VISITING ROOMS.
Dean pointed to room eleven. “You can wait in here,” he said. “After you meet with Holmes, I’ll show you the way back to the lobby. It’s not far.”
Teddy watched the assistant warden vanish down the hallway. After a moment, he entered room eleven. It was about the size of a cell, with windows and doors cut into the cinder block walls on both sides of the room. A small table stood in the center of the space, along with three plastic chairs. Teddy had thought that if someone wanted to speak with an inmate, they’d be separated by thick plate glass and limited by the constraints of a telephone. The idea of sitting at a table like this, face-to-face with Holmes, never entered his mind.
As he considered meeting the man, he sat down and turned to the second door. On the other side of the glass was a large meeting room where inmates could visit with their families. The way the couches and chairs filled out the room reminded him of a hotel lobby minus the frills. Curiously, fifty oil paintings hung on the far wall as if the space doubled as an art gallery. The condition of the room matched what he’d seen throughout the prison. Teddy had read the sign by the entrance as he entered the lobby. He knew the building had been opened seven years ago, yet everything about the place still appeared waxed and polished and brand-new. The only graffiti he’d seen was on the inside wall of the holding tank.
He heard the door close. When he turned, he saw Oscar Holmes walk into the room and sit at the table less than a foot away. His eyes raced over the man’s body—no handcuffs or leg irons, just the orange jumpsuit. Teddy looked through the glass for the guards who escorted him here and saw them down the hall, talking to another man seated at a desk with their backs turned. Then Darlene Lewis’s dead body flashed into his head. He looked at the new bandages on Holmes’s hands, but all he could see were the man’s fingerprints on the girl’s skin jumping out at him under the black lights. His lips and the cuts left behind from his teeth. He thought Holmes might be fixed on the same image because the man lifted his elbows to the table, covering his eyes with his oversized hands.
“Who’d you try to call?” Teddy heard himself saying in a calm voice. The question had come out of nowhere.
Holmes remained silent.
“The collect call you made an hour ago,” Teddy said. “They wouldn’t accept the charges. Who was it?”
A moment passed, Holmes still burying his face in his hands. “My sister,” he said finally. “She wouldn’t talk to me.”
Holmes peeked through his fingers. His eyes were the color of a faded pair of jeans and looked just as ragged. Teddy pushed his chair back slightly and made a point of crossing his legs, trying to get some distance without Holmes noticing or becoming upset.
“No one will talk to me,” Holmes said, closing his fingers and hiding in the dark again. “Everyone’s afraid. Even you.”
“What happened to your hands?”
“They got cut. You saw ’em. What kind of question is that? You trying to figure out if I really did it or not?”
Teddy grimaced. “How’d they get cut?”
“I don’t remember,” he said, jumping to his feet. “They’re gonna kill me for this, aren’t they? They’re gonna stick the needle in and watch me go to sleep. All those people watching me sleep. They want to get rid of me. They always have.”
Teddy wasn’t sure how to react. Holmes was working himself into a frenzy, pacing back and forth in the small room and slamming his fists into the cinder block walls as he made the turns. Teddy checked his watch. Ten-thirty. It’d been a long day on shit duty, and he decided he’d finally had enough.
“Fuck you, Holmes.”
The man stopped pacing like he’d been slapped in the face. Teddy lowered his leg, ready to spring for the door if he had to.
“That’s right,” Teddy said, staring at him. “I’m not gonna sit here and listen to you feel sorry for yourself. The girl’s dead. Her body’s all fucked up. Her parents are probably at the morgue looking at it right now. Merry Christmas, Holmes. If you want to sit down and talk, I’ll listen. But if you’re gonna rant and rave and get all worked up, then I’m out of here.”
Holmes was staring back at him with those ragged eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Teddy Mack.”
“You work for Barnett, not the police?”
Teddy nodded.
Holmes took it in, then seemed to relax some and sat down. Teddy thought about what he’d just done and couldn’t believe it. Scared shitless, he cleared his throat and moved on.
“Tell me what you remember,” he said.
“I want a trial. Even dogs get their day in court. Doesn’t matter what they’ve done. If you’re a person, you get a trial and go to court.”
“Tell me what you remember.”
“I can’t remember anything,” Holmes shouted in frustration.
Teddy looked through the glass and saw the guards staring at them, then turn away.
“I must’ve blacked out,” Holmes said. “I know I was there. I’m not saying I wasn’t because I woke up and saw the blood. It was all over the place. All over me and my clothes. It was like I was sleepwalking or something. I remember running to my truck. Next thing I know I’m in my own house, and I don’t even know how I got there.”
Holmes covered his face with his hands again and started weeping.
“What about Darlene Lewis? Did you know her very well?”
Holmes nodded behind his hands.
“How well did you know her?”
“I don’t want to get her into any trouble. She’s just a girl.”
“Not anymore, Holmes. Now tell me how you knew her.”
Holmes peeked through his fingers again. “She used to tease me,” he said.
Teddy shuddered, getting his first glimpse at a possible motive. “How did she tease you?”
“Sometimes it really got to me,” Holmes whispered. “In the summer when she was out at the pool with her friends, she’d make fun of me. I could hear them whispering and laughing at me. But when Darlene was alone, she treated me different.”
“How did she treat you different?”
“She used to let me look at her.”
Teddy sat up, trying not to show any emotion. “What do you
mean look at her?”
“She’d stand there in her bathing suit and let me look at her. She’d say something like, ‘Okay, you’ve got two minutes.’ Then she’d just stand there and let me look at her.”
“Was she always in her bathing suit?”
“A couple of times she was in her bra and panties.”
Teddy thought about the pair of panties he’d found in Darlene’s bedroom closet. They were almost transparent.
“Was she always wearing clothes?” he asked. “In her bathing suit or in her underwear?”
Holmes nodded.
“Did you ever touch her?”
Holmes hesitated, but eventually shook his head. “I used to think about doing things to her though. I couldn’t help it. When I started thinking, sometimes I couldn’t stop.”
“What kind of things?”
“... Just things.”
“Did you tell any of this to the police?”
“I don’t remember,” Holmes said, lowering his hands. “I’m tired. I want you to go away now. I wanna go home.”
SEVEN
He used to think about doing things to her. He couldn’t help it and couldn’t stop....
Teddy walked out of the lobby into the parking lot, looking for his car in the freezing rain and wet snow.
Things...
The things Holmes had done to Darlene Lewis were so brutal, the slob blacked out and couldn’t even remember driving home. What Holmes had said didn’t amount to a confession, but the motive was clear enough.
Teddy checked his watch. It was after eleven. When the day started, he was about to win his first ruling in civil court. Now he was helping Jim Barnett shepherd a maniac through the system who insisted on a trial. It would be prolonged. Loud and painful for everyone.
He spotted his car ahead, keeping his eyes on the ground and pretending to check the wet asphalt for ice. He knew Holmesburg Prison was on the other side of I-95, and didn’t want to look at it. He was afraid to look at it because he thought he might break. It had been a long day of keeping everything down. Turning off his memories, forgetting what was past—he hadn’t told anyone that this was the stuff of nightmares for over half of his short life. Having to meet Holmes had only been the hideous icing on a poisoned cake.
When the assistant warden told him about the Curran-Fromhold murders, Teddy had acted like he was hearing it for the first time, even though he wasn’t. His father had told him the same story when he was just fourteen. Teddy had heard the rumors at school and asked him about it while making a Saturday visit to the prison with his mother. His father admitted they were true, while trying to reassure his worried son that this kind of thing didn’t happen anymore.
Everything would be okay.
Teddy wiped the snow off the windshield. As he started the car his eyes went directly to the temperature gauge on the dash. Thirty-three degrees. The roads might be slippery, but they wouldn’t have turned to ice yet. He switched on the heat. While he waited for the car to warm up, he dug his cell phone out and checked his messages. There were three.
The first was from Brooke Jones, requesting his original files on that personal injury case. She said she couldn’t find them in the canvas tote bag she’d taken from his office, and tried to make it sound like what she was doing for him amounted to a big favor. She was a bitch from the word go, and he couldn’t stand the affected tone of her voice. Jones was one of those people you see so often on the road these days. In a hurry going nowhere. Teddy deleted the message before she was through.
The second message was from Jill Sykes, warning him that Brooke Jones was going to call. He smiled at her timing, listening to her urgent whisper with the sounds of the office in the background. As she hung up, he couldn’t help hoping that the firm would hire her once she got through her exams. He needed an ally. Someone who wasn’t always keeping score.
The third message would be from Barnett. Teddy switched on the interior lights and grabbed a pen in case he had to write something down. The phone beeped and the message started. Two seconds later, the phone beeped again. It had been a hang-up, probably from Jones. Barnett hadn’t called, and Teddy found it incredible. He punched Barnett’s cell number into his phone. When the message center kicked in, he swore. Obviously, Barnett had turned off his phone. Teddy flipped open his address book and found Barnett’s home number. He punched it in, trying keep cool. The phone rang four times and then Barnett’s service picked up.
Teddy slipped his cell phone into his pocket, wondering what the hell was wrong with Barnett. After a moment, he switched on the wipers and backed out of the parking space. As he pulled past the gate and out of the lot, the car made a sudden shift and slid. He couldn’t tell if the roads were slick or it was just his car. He knew all four tires needed to be replaced, but had been trying to put off the expense until after the holidays. His credit cards were maxed out, and when he applied for a new one last week, they had turned him down. Either way, he could feel the Corolla slipping on the pavement. Teddy backed off the gas, easing the car up to speed in short bursts. As he climbed the exit ramp onto I-95, the lights from an approaching truck hit the rearview mirror and Teddy looked away from the glare. His eyes swept through the darkness and stopped on the abandoned building hidden in the falling snow.
Holmesburg Prison.
The building was completely dark, the ancient prison silhouetted against the wrecked cityscape of North Philadelphia. He hadn’t wanted to look at it. He hadn’t wanted to see it, but there it was—rising out of the muck after being buried in his mind for so long.
His father had said it would be okay, but it really wasn’t.
Teddy tightened his grip on the wheel, knowing he was losing it. He checked the temperature gauge and watched the cold air drop six degrees below freezing as he reached the city, then left it behind, heading west on the expressway. The roads were covered in a black glaze, and the freezing rain had given way to heavy snow. Digging into his pocket, he fished out the pack of Marlboros and lit one. Then he cracked the window open and flipped on the radio, hoping that if he concentrated on the chatter, his mind wouldn’t slip from the surface the way his car was skidding down the road.
It would be okay. His father said it would. Teddy had been so young at the time, he believed him. Two weeks later, the phone rang and his mother got the big call....
Jonathan Mack had been an architect and builder of moderately priced homes in the suburbs fifteen miles west of the city known as the Main Line. He’d formed the business with a high school friend upon graduation from the School of Architecture at Yale, and after ten years of struggling, people began to notice their innovative designs. A few years after that, they couldn’t build houses fast enough. But Teddy’s father had been a visionary. He could see the sprawl eating up the countryside and had an idea he thought could save it. Instead of building one development of single-lot homes after the next, he’d been playing with the idea of designing a self-contained community. People needed a place to live, and the government wasn’t up to doing anything about the population, which was out of control. The choice seemed clear. Either you compacted the living space or you cut every tree down. Jonathan Mack’s goal was to save the land.
A site was found for the project, a team of architects commissioned to assist with his father’s design. Teddy could remember watching his father go over the drawings every night at the game table in his study. His father seemed so happy, and Teddy would sneak peeks at him, hiding behind the rail of the staircase in the living room. There were lots for hundreds of townhouses, a space for a shopping center so no one would have to drive very far and waste gas, and then just as much space for three corporate parks. It was like his dad was designing an entire city.
The amount of money required to develop the project was enormous. Yet his father secured the financing easier than anyone anticipated. It was in the genius of his plan. It made sense and it was by Jonathan Mack. Everyone wanted to be in on it, Teddy remembered—except for the env
ironmentalists. One night he’d been allowed to attend a town meeting with his mother and younger sister. They sat in the back row and watched the presentation and the questions that followed. Some of the people seemed mean, Teddy thought at the time, and many of them were angry at his father. But Jonathan Mack never batted an eye. Instead, he told the environmentalists that he agreed with them. Then he turned the slide projector back on and showed them aerial photographs of what the area would look like in twenty years if it were developed as single-lot homes. They were caught up in the short-term view, he said, just as he had been less than two years ago. In spite of all the construction, his father pointed out that they were only using forty-five percent of the land. The rest of the property would remain untouched forever. By the time his father was done, the mood in the room changed and even the key environmentalists were on-board.
Six months later, they broke ground. Everything seemed to be going according to schedule. Then one Saturday, Jonathan Mack’s friend and partner was found dead in the office by the cleaning staff. Teddy was too young to get details, but he heard his parents whispering and knew that the man had been shot to death with a gun. Several weeks passed with his parents going into the den every night after dinner and talking behind closed doors. The joy was gone, the house filled with a new kind of tension Teddy had never experienced before. He tried to compensate for the change by taking better care of his little sister, doing his chores before he was asked, and keeping his room neat—things he’d never been able to manage very well in the past. At night he went to sleep wishing everything would change back to the way things were. Who needed big building projects when a single house would do? Then one afternoon he was in the kitchen helping his mother get dinner ready when the doorbell rang. Teddy ran to answer it and saw four cops standing on the other side of the storm door.
They said all they wanted to do was talk, but as Teddy climbed the stairs with his sister, he knew they were lying. He watched from his bedroom window as his father was led out of the house in handcuffs. His mother was crying and he could see that his father was, too. She kept trying to touch him before he got into the car, hug him and give him a last kiss. But one of the cops grabbed her and pulled her away, yelling at her to stop.