Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  Jonathan shifted his gaze. “Ven,” he said. “Catch us up on what you found about the parents involved.”

  Venice pulled a file folder from her stack of meeting-prep materials and opened it. “Let’s talk about Frank Schuler first,” she said, spreading the papers out in front of her. She held up a mug shot labeled with the man’s name. “This is Jeremy’s father. He’s on death row here in Virginia for murdering his wife, Jeremy’s mother.”

  Boxers made a noise like air escaping from a canister.

  “She was cheating on him with a guy named Aaron Hastings. Schuler shot her. He maintained his innocence all the way through the trial, but the jury didn’t buy it. Unless a miracle happens, he gets the needle in nine days.”

  She slid the Schuler papers back into their folder and opened another. She displayed another mug shot. No one would doubt the relationship between Evan and his father. They had the same light hair and blue eyes, the same angular features. “This is Arthur Guinn,” Venice said, “and here is your connection to the mob. He was an enforcer.”

  “Hit man,” Gail said.

  Venice tossed off a shrug. “If you’d prefer. He killed people for money and got caught.” She looked at her notes again. “He murdered an aide to then-Congressman Mark Levy from New York. Guinn said he was bent out of shape because of the congressman’s politics, but according to the record, the feds always suspected a connection to the Slater mob.”

  Jonathan noted her satisfied smile as she delivered that last line. “Where do he and Schuler intersect?”

  The smile went away. “They don’t,” Venice said. “At least not so far as I can tell. I don’t see where they’ve ever occupied the same state, let alone town.”

  “There’s got to be a link,” Boxers said.

  “No kidding?” Venice returned. “Golly, I wish I’d thought of that.”

  Boxers reared back in his seat. “What the hell did I do?”

  “You implied that Venice didn’t know how to do her job,” Gail said.

  “I did not! All I said-”

  Jonathan held out both hands, like a cop stopping traffic in both directions. “Nobody start,” he said. “Gail, I want you to interview both of these fathers. With their kids missing, maybe they’ll be willing to open up a little. Work with Doug Kramer if you get push-back from the prison guys.”

  Gail jotted something in the speckled composition notebook that was as attached to her as her arm. “You bet.”

  “That’ll get a little frustrating when you go to talk to Arthur Guinn,” Venice said. “I called the Illinois Department of Corrections to see what I could find out, and I learned that Mr. Arthur Guinn is no longer in the system.”

  Jonathan stopped in mid-stride and turned. “What does that mean?”

  “You tell me.”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers and Gail, and saw no indication of a theory. “What did they say?”

  Venice consulted her notes. “They said that there’s no immediate disposition of the case against him, but that he is no longer part of the Illinois system. When I asked him if that was double-talk for him being moved to someone else’s system, I got ‘I can neither confirm nor deny.’”

  Jonathan saw where Venice was leading him. “You’re thinking witness protection,” he said.

  She smirked.

  “The feds want him to testify,” Gail said. “They must be going after Sammy Bell, and to get him to talk, they made him a deal.”

  Jonathan liked it. He pointed to Venice and said, “I know Dom is swamped right now, but I need him to contact-”

  Venice beamed. “I already talked to him,” she said. “You’re meeting Wolverine at one.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Evan Guinn followed every direction to the letter. They’d led him from the tiny hut, flanked by the two guards who had nearly shot him, to a spot about twenty yards away that looked like it had been turned into a movie set. They’d cut a swath out of the dense green foliage to expose a large rock, which had been painted with stripes of white. The ground all around the rock had been painted white, too, and sprinkled with what appeared to be that fake plastic snow stuff that you put around Christmas decorations.

  Through words and gestures, they directed him to stand in front of the rock. They handed him a copy of The Washington Post and told him to hold it just so under his chin, and pantomimed for him to smile. The squat man from the shack did all of the communicating while taking direction from a darker skinned man dressed in black slacks and a long white shirt who held a cell phone camera at arm’s length, composing his shot, Evan assumed. Clearly, they wanted to make the picture look like he was somewhere cold, but he was sweating like a pig and barefoot. Who was going to believe it?

  He’d seen this trick with the newspaper before in movies about kidnapping victims. They used the headline on the paper as proof that the victim was still alive so that they would pay the ransom. He felt a sudden flash of fear. Who was going to pay ransom for him? Mom was dead, Dad was in jail, and there wasn’t anyone else. Nobody had anything of value to trade for him. There wasn’t a reason in the world to keep him alive.

  But apparently there was. They’d gone to a lot of trouble to get him here to wherever the hell he was. And where was that, exactly? Mexico? South America?

  Jesus, how long had he been asleep? South America and Mexico were both a long way from Virginia. Geography was one of his worst subjects, but he knew that much.

  What were they going to do with him? Another jolt of fear. He’d been alone in the company of sweaty men before, with the last foster family before moving to RezHouse. He knew what they were capable of, and the fact that he saw no women around made his stomach churn. Evan had meant what he’d said to Father Dom during one of his counseling sessions: He’d never allow himself to be used that way again. The last time, he was little and didn’t have the strength to break their bear hugs.

  He was nearly fourteen now, though, and he knew a thing or two that he hadn’t before. He knew what was worth killing for, and what was worth dying for. More to the point, he knew what wasn’t worth living after.

  The whole picture-taking process took less than ten minutes.

  Apparently satisfied with the results, Shack Man beckoned Evan away from the rock and handed him a pair of well-worn short pants of an indefinable color. Somewhere between gray and black. Evan wondered if they’d once been white.

  “You…wear,” Shack Man said, and he pointed to the shack. Then he prattled about something while he made a sweeping motion in the air up and down the length of the boy’s body.

  “Huh?”

  Shack Man pinched the shoulder of his sweater and tugged lightly. “ Esto… sweetshirt?”

  Evan processed it. “Sweater?” he guessed.

  Shack Man nodded and pointed to Evan’s jeans. He searched for a word. “Give back.”

  Evan didn’t hesitate for a moment to shed the sweater and turtleneck. He pulled them over his head, and handed them over, leaving him bare-chested. He got that he was supposed to return the pants, too, and for that he walked back to the shack. He noted for what it was worth that the guards didn’t follow him this time.

  Inside, he changed into the shorts and lay back down on the plank door, after folding the blue jeans and using them for a pillow. He draped his forearm over his eyes and took a deep breath. I will not cry, he told himself. It doesn’t accomplish anything, and it shows weakness.

  Worse, the weakness hands power over to the people who want to hurt you.

  Who were these people? And what were they planning to do with him?

  What were they planning to do to him?

  His stomach fluttered, and he closed his eyes tighter. You have to learn to cope with the reality of what is, he heard Father Dom telling him. When bad things happen to us-especially as children-we want there to be a reason. We search so hard for meaning in yesterday that we can lose sight of today. Today is all that matters. Today and tomorrow. Yesterday is past and needs to be sho
ved aside until the Lord makes it our business to understand.

  Lying in this sweaty stinkhole, he felt homesickness sliding in. He felt sadness knocking at the door. They were the same sensations that threatened to suffocate him in the first months after the social workers finally listened. He had been nine years old then. It was hard not to allow the darkness in; but maybe it was supposed to be hard.

  “What’s happening to me?” He spoke just loudly enough for him to hear his own voice.

  When God wants you to know, He’ll tell you.

  Evan brought his arm down quickly and whipped his head to the side, expecting to see Father Dom standing there. His voice had been that clear in his head.

  When He wants me to know, He’ll tell me.

  A sense of utter clarity washed over him, flooding away the darkness.

  He didn’t have time for a pity party. Evan needed to grow a pair and embrace the reality of today. That meant he had to wrap his arms and his mind around the fact that he’d been taken from a place he liked and shoved into a place that smelled like mold and was hot as hell. He had no friends, so that meant he was on his own.

  How do you run away if you don’t know where you are to begin with? You’ve got to start from someplace, and Evan didn’t even have a compass point to shoot for-as if he had a compass in the first place, or would know how to use it if he did.

  His first decision, then, was easy: He’d wait things out for a while. So far, he saw no reason to tempt people to kill him. If the time came to risk death, Evan figured he would know it, and he would make the big decisions then. For the time being he’d just hold tight and-

  His door slammed open, revealing Shack Man silhouetted against the harsh light of the day. “Come,” he said, beckoning with his whole hand. “Time to go.”

  “Go where?” Evan asked.

  “ Appurate,” the man said. Evan knew “hurry” when he heard it. He left the jeans where they lay, folded on the plank, and he walked cautiously to the door. As he approached, he saw that a beat-up four-wheel-drive vehicle was waiting for him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Sussex 1 State Prison on Musselwhite Road in Waverly, Virginia, sprawled like a concrete cancer in the former tobacco fields south of Richmond. First opened in 1998, the place featured the overly sterile look of the modern supermax prisons that are so popular these days.

  This was home for the worst of the worst, and they were treated accordingly, closed into their soundproofed concrete cells for twenty-three hours a day, the twenty-fourth hour dedicated to indoor recreation. In its own way, the stifling nature of the new cell design had to be even more oppressive than the barred cages of days gone by.

  After a lifetime in law enforcement-first as an FBI agent and later as sheriff of a small community in Indiana-Gail Bonneville still could not abide the oppressive tightness of the air inside a prison. The filtered body odor seemed harder to breathe than air on the outside. She wondered if it was possible to lock the doors so tightly that the oxygen levels actually dropped. Add to the general misery of the place the meter-pegging humidity of the otherwise stifling July day, and you begin to realize just how little the penal system in the United States has evolved from the torture chambers of medieval Europe. Where, she wondered, were the protesters who forced the closing of Guantanamo when places like this-new construction, no less-continued to thrive?

  At least the noise levels that were so common of older prisons were kept in check here.

  The deal that Gail had made with Marie Brady, Frank Schuler’s attorney, had left no room for variation: She would allow her client to appear in the same room with Gail, but all questions would be addressed to the attorney. She would then make the decision as to whether or not he could answer. At this stage, with Schuler’s execution date less than two weeks away, they could afford for nothing to go wrong. In a perfect world, Schuler would speak to no one even distantly related to law enforcement. This exception was being made only because his son had been kidnapped.

  Per Jonathan’s instructions, Gail had mentioned nothing about the boy having been recovered safely.

  In deference to the hopelessness of Frank Schuler’s situation, she’d dressed plainly and unprovocatively. That meant gray slacks with a black blouse, chosen in part to help conceal any filth she picked up from the furniture.

  Marie Brady had arrived first and was waiting in the reception area for Gail when she arrived. Neither tall nor short, the lawyer was likewise dressed plainly, but less formally than Gail had come to expect from attorneys. Her black slacks and top were clearly off-the-rack, and her shoes hadn’t seen polish in a long, long time. They were the clothes of the working poor, and it occurred to Gail that such was the lot of a lawyer who specialized in saving the condemned from their court-ordered fates.

  The women greeted each other cordially, and then Marie walked Gail through the process of gaining entry into the death row interview room. Throughout the process, Gail noted with interest the respect shown to the attorney by all of the correctional officers. It bordered on deference, in fact. As they ran through the perfunctory checklist of dos and don’ts, she got the feeling that they wanted to apologize for the inconvenience.

  “You seem comfortable here,” Gail said as they cleared the security air locks and followed their escort down the brightly lit concrete hallway.

  “Comfortable is not the word,” Brady said. “Not when you factor in the mission. But I am certainly a regular. Secretly, I think they all want me to prevail in the cases I represent.”

  “Murderers?” Gail’s voice demonstrated more shock than she wanted it to.

  “Human beings,” Brady corrected. “Over the years, the corrections staff develops relationships with these men. It’s hard to watch them walk off to their deaths for crimes that were committed so long ago.” As they approached yet another door, the attorney added, almost to herself, “If politicians were half as human as the worst of these guys, we’d be done with sanctioned murder.”

  Under the circumstances, those were the politics that Gail had expected.

  “Sometime soon,” Brady continued as they walked, “probably in the next three or four days, they’ll transfer Frank to the death house at Greensville. That’s about thirty-five miles from here. I’ve even seen a few tears among these COs when inmates depart for the final trip. This is an emotional business.”

  For reasons that no doubt made sense to someone, the Commonwealth of Virginia had decided to separate death row from the execution chamber. In fact, the death house was located in a medium-security prison. You had to love bureaucrats.

  After another door, Gail and Brady arrived at the tiny glass-walled interview room. To Gail’s utter shock, the furniture was spotless-shiny, even, carrying forward that oppressive, astringent sterility.

  “You know I’ve got to have the recorder on, right, Marie?” the guard asked, his first words since they started their long walk.

  “I do,” Brady replied with a smile. To Gail, she explained, “Normally, my talks with Frank are privileged. But since you’re not an attorney, and you’ll be hearing what he says, the state gets to listen in, too.”

  Gail found this alarming, though she could not say why.

  “That explains the importance of all questions being directed at me,” Brady went on. “If anything you ask even knocks on the door of something Frank shouldn’t be saying, I’ll cut you both off. I’ll ask you not to question that decision until after we are out of the prison.”

  Gail agreed. The lawyer was impressive, she thought. It wasn’t everybody who could rattle off instructions like that and not seem patronizing or haughty.

  Within a minute or two, a door opened on the opposite side of the room from where they’d entered, and a different guard escorted Frank Schuler into the room in a full shackle rig. He looked twenty years older than his eight-year-old induction photo. Thin to the point of appearing frail, he sported a pate of sparse gray hair. He moved with the institutional shuffle of a life
r. He needed no instruction as he turned to make his wrists more accessible to the correctional officer’s key.

  With his hands free, and clearly resigned to his ankles remaining restrained, he shuffled to the table and accepted Brady’s warm embrace. “They said something about Jeremy,” he said in a rush. “Do you know something? Tell me it’s good news.”

  “Frank, this is Gail Bonneville, a private investigator from Fisherman’s Cove.”

  Recognition came instantly. “That’s the town where the school is,” he said.

  Gail offered her hand, and he eagerly shook it. “It is the same town, but I’m afraid I have no news for you,” she said. The lie tasted especially foul under these circumstances.

  The prisoner’s face fell. “Then why are you here?”

  Gail indicated the chairs. “Let’s sit.”

  “Let’s stand,” Schuler countered. “Why are you here?” Desperate fear emanated from him like a hot flash.

  “I’ve been hired by the school to do an independent investigation.”

  “How could something like this happen?” Schuler said, his institutional pallor reddening along his jawline. “They’re children, for God’s sake! Why isn’t there security?”

  Gail again swallowed the temptation to set his mind at ease. “I’m working for Resurrection House, Mr. Schuler. I don’t work at Resurrection House. I’m trying to get a handle on who might have taken your son, and why they would have done it.”

  “How about finding where they took him?”

  Gail paused before answering, a tactic used in interviews to take some of the wind out of angry people’s sails. “It’s all part of the same packet, sir. We’re hoping that the who and the why will lead us to the where. I know you’re upset-”

  “You think?”

  “-but ranting about what is past does nothing to advance the future.” Gail tuned her voice to being the ultimate in reasonableness.

  The redness deepened in Schuler’s face, but something changed behind his eyes. He shot a look to his lawyer.