by T. E. Woods
A dangerous situation.
Chapter 17
“You sure you’re up for this?” Mort tried one last time to dissuade Larry from accompanying Rita and him to the Monroe Correctional Complex. They were going to interview Kenny Kamm, the man who’d murdered Larry’s wife. The same man Larry, Abraham, and Carlton made sure never had a chance to be granted parole. That was smelling like a motive to Mort, and he and Rita needed to know exactly what Kamm had to do with Carlton’s death.
Larry opened the door and climbed into the backseat of Mort’s Subaru. He said nothing as he buckled himself in, closed the door, and sat with his hands folded in his lap.
Rita looked at Mort. “That looks like a yes to me.” She settled herself into the passenger seat as Mort held Larry’s gaze and considered the hell pit his friend might be walking into. Then he got behind the steering wheel and backed the car out of the police parking lot. Forty-three minutes later he pulled into the visitors’ parking lot of the MCC.
It had been a near-silent drive.
The three of them left the Subaru and walked to a metal-roofed cinder-block kiosk. Mort greeted the uniformed guard. “Mort Grant, Seattle PD. Rita Willers, Enumclaw PD chief. And this is Dr. Clark. They know we’re coming.” The guard collected each of their IDs.
Mort surveyed the scene as the officer checked his clipboard. A fifteen-foot metal fence topped with coils of razor wire encircled the prison campus. A cluster of foreboding boxlike buildings with little space for windows stood fifty yards in front of them. Towers were positioned around the perimeter. Even from a distance on that cloudy morning, Mort could see rifle barrels pointed at the ground below. The guard nodded and pressed a button, and the gate slid open just wide enough to allow the three of them access onto the property. They walked forward on a weed and gravel path until another tall fence blocked their progress. The gate behind them closed. Mort heard the metallic clang of its lock before the gate in front of them opened, allowing the trio to walk onto the prison grounds.
They entered through the main visitor’s reception and faced similar start-stop practices as they made their way deeper into the facility. Rita and Mort surrendered their service revolvers. They each had their bodies scanned by handheld metal detectors. Finally, a heavy door was unlocked and the warden greeted them, ready to take them to the interview room where Kenny Kamm was waiting.
Mort shared a few pleasantries with Warden Robert Linton as they walked down halls with green walls and highly polished concrete floors. Linton had been a beat cop for two years before making the switch to corrections, and Mort remembered him as a levelheaded man more interested in resolving issues than escalating them. He imagined that trait served the warden well as he oversaw an institution housing nearly five hundred medium- and maximum-custody offenders, many of whom would live the majority of their days inside the prison. Despite its age, the building was spotless, a testimony to both the tight ship Linton captained and the dedication of the trustees plying mops and cleaning rags over every surface.
Larry remained silent. Rita walked behind him. She, too, said nothing, but Mort knew she was keeping her attention on Larry, ready to respond at the first sign that the situation was becoming too much for him.
They came to a stop in front of a door with a wired glass window. Warden Linton slid his ID badge into a reader mounted next to it and it clicked open. “He’s all yours. I got two COs with him. Kamm’s three-point secured, but they’ll be right outside the door should you need ’em. You want us to record this?”
Mort shook his head. “I don’t see the need to bother with that. We’ll have our notes. If he says something interesting we may come back asking for a video, but for now I think we’re good.”
They entered the room. Rita thanked the two correctional officers standing behind the shackled inmate and closed the door behind them while Mort watched Larry. Although his friend had attended Kamm’s entire trial and never missed a parole hearing, those encounters would have been sterile, limited, and remote, with Kamm surrounded by lawyers or advocates and speaking only what he’d been scripted to say. This would be the first time Larry would be across the table from his wife’s murderer. The first time he’d be able to speak directly to him.
Mort monitored Larry’s reaction to the broad-shouldered man in the orange jumpsuit chained behind the metal interview desk. Like his face, Kamm’s head was closely shaved. Only a dark shadow of stubble suggested he’d once had hair. Scar tissue grew in patches up his well-muscled arms, evidence of burned-off tattoos. His skin was pale, the result of twenty-five years spent under fluorescent lights, with only forty minutes each day for breathing outside air.
Larry stood behind the table, his eyes scanning Kamm. Mort saw his jaw churn at the sight of the web of heavy chains encircling the murderer’s waist, hands, and ankles before they connected to the lock on the concrete floor. When he seemed to have his fill, Larry was the first to sit. He chose the chair at the center of the table, directly across from the man who’d smashed his young wife’s beautiful face into an unrecognizable bloody pulp.
“Why?” Larry’s voice was firm. “Why did you kill Helen?”
Kenny Kamm turned his brown eyes toward Mort. “Am I allowed to know the reason for today’s visit?” His voice gave no trace of confrontation. He sounded like nothing more than a curious man.
Mort took the seat to Larry’s left. He introduced himself and Chief Willers. “The man asked you a question. While it’s not the purpose of our visit, I’d say he’s entitled to an answer.”
Kamm considered his response for several seconds. Then he nodded and looked Larry in the eye. “I don’t have an answer.” His tone was soft, as though he acknowledged responsibility for his crime but was respectful of the fact he’d never begin to know the magnitude of the pain he’d caused. “I remember a night of wild drugging. Meth, ludes…and a whole lot of tequila. There was probably more, but I don’t remember. I was up there for the old man’s party.” Kamm looked toward Mort and Rita, in case they didn’t know the context. “Abraham Smydon.” He nodded to Larry. “Your wife’s father. I’d picked up some work down on his boats. Word went out there was extra money to be had if anybody wanted to go on up to the island and help set up the party. Hauling ice, setting up tents and chairs. Moving the portable toilets around. That kind of thing. Only requirement was a strong back.” Kamm dropped his gaze. “I don’t have much, and back then I had even less. But strength? I had that all right. Probably too much.” He paused. “Physical strength, that is.”
Larry looked like a man unconvinced. “Did you have accomplices in the kidnapping? Or did that great physical strength of yours allow you to overcome Helen all on your own?”
Kamm looked toward Mort, as though verifying he was allowed to speak. Mort pointed to Larry.
“Answer the man.”
“Like I said when I was arrested, I don’t know nothing about any kidnapping. I don’t know nothing about that night except I was there to party. Next thing I know I wake up in the gully of some forest. I don’t have a clue how I got there or even how long I was flat out in that ditch. But I was covered in blood.” Kamm lifted his hands as much as the chains allowed and looked at them, as if to reenact seeing Helen’s blood for the first time. “I thought maybe a bear had gotten me. There was so much of it. All over my clothes. My boots. Everywhere. I remember running my hands over my body. I seemed in one piece. My head was on fire with pounding pain, but I was used to that back then. That was how I felt every morning when I woke up from a night spent doing what I wished I hadn’t.” His voice softened. “But that never stopped me from doing it the very next night. Again and again.”
L. Jackson Clark, the man who advised world leaders and preached the power of love and forgiveness, stared at Kenny Kamm through narrowed eyes. He held his hands firm against the tabletop. Mort wondered if it was to keep them from curling into fists.
“I pulled myself up out of that gully and started walking.” Kamm hunched one
shoulder then another, trying to find a comfortable spot within his confines. “I remember the sun was warm. I figured it was sometime in the late afternoon. I just picked a direction and kept putting one foot in front of the other. After a while I heard what I thought was a car. Couple of minutes later I heard it again. I thought maybe it was a road so I walked toward the noise. Sure enough, I found myself climbing up a berm, leaving the forest behind me, and walking on asphalt. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I stuck my thumb out, hoping for a ride back to the motel Abraham’s event planner had us staying at. A couple of vehicles passed me by. Can’t blame ’em. I must have looked a sight. Next thing I know three squad cars come racing down that country road right at me. Officers got out. Guns drawn. Screaming at me to hit the dirt. Turns out the good folks who’d passed me stopped to drop a dime on some blood-soaked loser hitchhiking out in the woods.”
“You’re not telling me anything I didn’t hear at the trial.” Larry’s voice was thin but even. “I need to know why. Why did you kill my wife? Did you know her?”
Kamm studied him a moment. “No, sir. I did not. I seen her a time or two. With her father. Down on the docks. But that’s all. Never was introduced or nothing like that.”
“Then why?” A hint of a plea entered Larry’s voice. “You’ve taken so much from me. Can you please give me a reason?”
Kamm squirmed again in his chair. He glanced up at Rita and Mort, then dropped his gaze to his chained hands. The three waited in silence until he lifted his eyes back to Larry. Mort figured no one was in a hurry. They’d wait a year in that interview room if that’s what it took for Larry to get an answer to the question Mort knew ate away at his soul.
“I wish I could tell you for sure.” Kamm’s voice was humble. “Like I said, I spent most of the day, every day, stoned or high or drunk back then. Most times a combination. But I haven’t so much as taken a hit off a joint since the day those cops picked me up.” Kamm looked up at Rita. “And don’t let anybody tell you a guy can’t get stoned inside.” He turned his attention back to Larry. “When those cops told me what I’d done, I didn’t believe ’em. But there was so much blood. I knew I’d done something bad. Real bad. And then all them tests come back. Teeth marks. Blood types. Fingerprints.” Tears fell from Kamm’s eyes. He couldn’t reach his face to wipe them away. “I had to face the fact I killed that woman. It was me. I hope to God, Mr. Clark, that you never find out you’ve done something…even something small or something good…I hope you never find out you really did something and you don’t remember doing it. Because it makes you crazy. The kind of crazy that follows you like your own skin. The kind of crazy that makes you question whether you know anything at all about yourself. You just keep waiting to find out what else. What else has the monster inside you done?”
No one answered his question.
Kamm inhaled ragged gasps. “For a long time I kept myself from everybody. Just hid in my cell, doing what I had to in order to keep from getting wrote up or beat up, but otherwise steering clear of people. I kept rolling it over and over in my mind, but it was like walking into a wall that wasn’t going to budge. I tried to kill myself four different times. The fourth time I did enough damage the guards had to call for help. That got me into the hospital and hooked up with a prison shrink. I didn’t want nothing to do with her at first, but she’s good. Patient. She waited me out and I started to talk. She got me doing some exercises that might help me come to accept what happened that night I killed your wife.”
“And?” Larry asked.
Kamm was sobbing quietly. “I never remembered a thing. I did start having dreams, though. Same dream over and over. Each time a little more clear. More detailed. Doc says maybe that’s my subconscious telling me to accept things as they are.”
“You mean like repressed memory?” Rita Willers was frowning.
“I asked Doc about that. She says there’s no such thing. Doc says if something really bad happens, we can’t forget it. Says I was probably so whacked out of my skull that night no memories had the slightest chance of being laid down. But I don’t know about all that science stuff. All I know is that when I have the dream, as painful as it is, I feel a little less crazy.”
“Tell me about the dream,” Larry said.
Kamm nodded. “I’d been seeing this woman from time to time back then. She was as wild as I was. Couldn’t call it dating. We were both too in love with the chemicals to pay attention to anything else. But we had needs, you know? I guess we used each other to fill them. Anyway, this gal, Clara was her name, Clara DuBois. Creole gal straight out of the bayou. Never learned how she made her way up here. Anyway, she gets all het up when I tell her I’m going to be on Orcas for three days setting up and tearing down this party. She wants me to get her a gig on it, too. Tells me we can have ourselves a time out there in the woods. Course, I can’t. Like I said, strong back was what they needed and Clara didn’t go eighty pounds straight out of the shower. She’d been riding the needle for a few years by then and was nothing but skin over bones. I got word she OD’d about a year after that, but back then she still had some sass. So I promise her one big party before I took off. I spent every penny I earned from two days throwing salmon off a boat to buy whatever the dealer had to offer. Clara had this one-room apartment over a palm reader’s place. We partied up there. She tried to get me to drop the gig. Stay with her and not go to Orcas.”
Silent tears dripped off his nose and chin. “That’s another thing that drives me crazy. What if I would have done it? Just stayed with Clara…” He squeezed his eyes shut and gave his head a shake. “She starts telling me tales about what happens up in the deep woods of them islands. About spirits living in the trees and the rocks. Says some of them look just like humans, but they aren’t. They’re demons. Out to kill the real humans and take over their bodies. I ask her, you mean like zombies? She says no. It’s ten times worse than zombies. She tells me these demons are trapped in the woods, longing for the freedom of the world. If they come across a human, they trade places. Clara said they’d take me and trap me. Leave me up there in the woods while they danced a jig in my own body.”
“What’s this have to do with Helen Clark?” Rita asked.
Kenny Kamm opened his eyes. “That’s what I see in my dreams. Over and over. I see a demon. Chained to a tree. It looks like a woman. I hear her laughing. She’s chained to a tree and she’s laughing. That don’t make sense, but I guess dreams aren’t supposed to. In my dream I walk up to her. She warns me to go away. Says it’s dangerous for me to stay. So I turn, but I fall. Sometimes it’s because I trip on a log, sometimes I get my leg caught up in her chain. It’s different things. But I always fall. Then the demon starts screaming. I tell her to leave me alone. She can’t have me. But she just screams and laughs and screams and laughs.” Kamm’s shoulders shook with the strength of his sobs. “So in my dream I kill the demon. I pick up a rock. And I hit the demon again and again. Until the screaming stops.”
Kamm stopped speaking. His tears subsided. He breathed through an open mouth. When he finally spoke, it was with great effort. As though he spent his last gasp of energy to give rise to the words.
“My brain is telling me I did it. I killed your wife. My brain knows it. I have to accept it.”
The room was silent for a while. Mort wondered if Larry had anything more he needed from Kamm before Mort started with his own questions. He got his answer when Larry’s chair scraped across the concrete floor. Larry stood, towering above the prisoner in shackles. He reached a hand into his pocket. Mort and Rita pushed their own chairs back, ready to react before Larry did something on impulse they’d all regret. Before Mort could stand, however, Larry pulled his hand out of his pocket. He held a freshly pressed white cotton handkerchief.
Larry stepped around the table and wiped the tears from Kenny Kamm’s wet face. When he was finished, he laid a hand on Kamm’s shoulder. The two men seemed frozen in that tableau for achingly long seconds, Kamm looki
ng up into the face of the man whose wife he’d killed. Larry looking down with an expression Mort could not identify. It was Kamm who spoke first.
“Thank you.”
Larry said nothing in reply. He gave Kamm’s shoulder one quick pat before pulling his hand away and turned to Mort.
“I’ll wait for you and Rita outside,” he said.
Larry walked to the door and knocked. One of the COs standing guard opened it and asked if everything was all right.
“No. Nothing’s right,” Larry responded. “But it’s done.”
Mort threw a glance toward Rita, who picked up her notebook and stood when he did. Rita turned to follow Larry out the door. Mort looked down at the man slumped and chained to his chair.
“The name Jerry Costigan.” Mort searched Kamm’s face for any giveaway the murderer might display. “That ring a bell?”
Kamm’s left eyebrow twitched. “Everyone at MCC knows Costigan.” His voice had lost its previous tone of penance. Mort wasn’t sure what he heard in its place.
“How’s that?” Mort asked.
Kamm was quiet for a heartbeat or two. “Those demons I dream about?”
“What about them?”
“Those demons are like golden butterflies on a sunny summer day compared to Jerry Costigan.”
Mort suddenly recognized the emotion in Kamm’s voice.
It was fear.
Chapter 18
Larry sat in the backseat, as remote on the drive back to Seattle as he had been on the one taking the three of them to Monroe Correctional Center. Mort called in to the station.
“See what you can learn about Jerry Costigan.” Mort used the speaker system mounted into the Subaru’s dashboard to talk to Jimmy DeVilla as he drove south on Highway 203. “Released a few months ago from MCC. Where’s he been? Who’s he associating with? Everything.”