by Mark Dawson
“We were burgled.” He stood and pointed to an open cabinet. There was a shelf with loose cables trailing down from it. “They took the hard drive for the cameras.”
Josie went over to the cabinet and looked down at the empty space where the drive had been. “It was in here?”
“Yes,” he said. “It was a cheap one. All the cables from the cameras fed into it.”
Josie turned. “The door looks okay, though. Not forced.”
“It was open,” the man said shamefully. “With everything that was going on, I forgot to lock it.”
“They take anything else?”
“We had some money to pay the staff,” he said. “That’s gone. And maybe some documents. I can’t be sure. I haven’t had a chance to check everything yet.”
“When did this happen?”
“I only noticed when I sat down to go through the video for you. Could have been yesterday or last night.”
Josie stood back. There wasn’t much that she could say. There was no obvious reason for the man to lie to her.
“Thank you,” she said.
He swept an arm around him to indicate the office. “What about this? What do I do? I need to tell the insurance company something.”
“Call the station again and ask for someone to come over,” she said.
“But you’re here,” he said.
“They’ll look after it for you.”
“Can’t you—”
“Call the station, sir. Goodbye.”
She opened the door and stepped out into the sticky heat. Traffic rushed over the flyover, a constant hum that lodged in her brain. She heard the sound of horns as angry drivers confronted one another and then, almost as pervasive, the up and down yowling of a siren.
Josie slid back into the car, flinching from where the cooked leather touched her skin. She laid her hands on the wheel and tried to think. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. She had long since learned to trust her instincts, that it was always worth digging a little deeper when the equations didn’t add up. And this investigation, while it had been so obvious yesterday, was now starting to peel and fray at the edges. It might very well have been a coincidence that the owner of the bar had been killed just a few hours after she had visited him. It was possible that he was involved in drugs—many people were—and, heaven knew that was a dangerous occupation to be involved in these days. Mendoza had told her that there had been another killing outside the bar the same day. So, yes, it could be one of those things.
But what if it wasn’t?
So much about what she had discovered was peculiar.
The way Smith had behaved during the interrogation.
The murder of the owner of the bar.
And now the missing hard drive.
Josie swung the wheel and saw Santos watching her from the doorway of the office.
She wasn’t ready to go to the station yet. She merged onto Visayas Avenue and retraced her path, heading back to Quezon City.
The prison was there.
Smith was there.
She wanted to speak to him.
28
JOSIE KNEW that there would be nowhere to park on the street near the jail, so she drove around the block and parked in the lot of Police Station 10. She walked across Bernardo Park, made her way to the entrance of the facility and went inside. The reception area was overcrowded as relatives of the men held inside the jail waited in line for opening hours to begin. Josie went to the front of the line, showed her badge, and thanked the attendant who opened the door to let her go inside.
She went to the office and waited in line to speak to the harassed clerk, who was trying to juggle telephone enquiries with the questions of the people waiting before her desk.
Josie waited for her to put the phone down.
“Yes?” the woman said, shooting her a withering look.
“You’ve got a prisoner I need to speak to. John Smith. He’s English.”
The woman turned to her monitor and tapped out Smith’s name on her keyboard.
“He’s not here anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s been transferred.”
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“He’d only just got here!”
“I’m just telling you what happened.”
“Where to?”
“New Bilibid.”
Josie shook her head. “But he hasn’t been convicted.”
The woman shrugged. “I know.”
“But that’s not how it works, is it?”
“No, Officer, it’s not. I did the transfer. I thought it was strange, but everything else was in order. It’s not my place to argue.”
“Can I see the papers?”
The clerk shrugged with a mixture of irritation and disinterest. “Hold on.”
The clerk tapped another key and a printer whirred to life beneath the desk.
Josie was confused. Suspected men were always kept in Quezon City until their trial. Smith hadn’t been tried. He hadn’t even been charged. New Bilibid was the facility where men were sent to serve their sentences. Josie had never heard of another instance where a man had been sent there at this stage.
The woman reached down, collected the printout, and handed it to Josie.
“There. Anything else?”
“Thank you.”
There was an empty chair at the other end of the room. Josie sat down and scanned through the transfer papers. She recognised the handwriting and knew who had filled it out before she reached the familiar signature at the bottom.
Bruno Mendoza.
She stared at his signature. Why would he arrange for Smith to be transferred? There was no reason for it.
Josie looked at her watch. It was half past twelve.
Smith might have been moved, but she still needed to speak to him.
29
IT WAS a two-hour drive to get to New Bilibid. Traffic was fair, although the long queues as drivers tried to get into the city for the Independence Day celebrations did not augur well for her return trip. She reached down to the radio and turned the dial until she found Jam 88.3, a station that played the alternative and indie music that she liked. Green Day was playing, and she distracted herself with it as she left the city limits and settled down for the trip.
The song ended and, as ‘High and Low’ by Empire of the Sun started in its place, Josie’s phone buzzed. She had dropped it into the cup holder and, as she reached down for it and held it up to see who was calling, she recognised Mendoza’s number. She held the phone for a moment, her finger hovering over the button to accept the call.
She decided against it. She put it into her pocket and left it until it rang out.
Josie didn’t want to speak to Mendoza right now.
He could wait until after she had spoken to Smith.
JOSIE HAD never been to New Bilibid. There was no reason why she would need to come. Her work was in assembling the evidence so that crimes were solved, the by-product of which was the fact that men she helped convict were brought out of the capital and transferred to this facility.
She pulled into the parking lot, switched off the engine and waited in the car for a moment. She knew that she was taking a chance by coming. Smith’s unorthodox and unexplained transfer, and the role that Mendoza had played in that, made her more certain than ever that something was wrong.
But she was here now.
No going back. She needed to know what she was involved in.
She was opening the door when her phone rang again. She didn’t even bother to take it out of her pocket. It would be Mendoza calling again, frustrated, no doubt, that he had been unable to get through to her. She let it ring out and then, thirty seconds later, felt the buzz against her hip that signified that a message had been left. She would deal with it later.
She got out of the car and set off toward the entrance to the facility.
JOSIE SAT down on the hard woode
n chair. She rested her hands on the table, but couldn’t stop her fingers from fidgeting. She must have looked nervous. Surely it was obvious to anyone who looked at her. She laced her fingers together so that she couldn’t fret with them.
The visiting room was plain and sparse. She had hoped that she would be given a room with a little privacy, but that had been wishful thinking. Instead, the guard had led her through the complex to the communal meeting room, where those prisoners fortunate enough to be able to entertain visitors were allowed to meet them.
The room was busy. Josie was grateful for that. She had used her police credentials to gain entry to the compound and then to request the meeting with Smith. There was nothing unusual in that save that Smith shouldn’t have been in this facility and that she had travelled from the capital to visit him. At least their meeting would be hidden among the others that were taking place that morning.
That assumed, of course, that Smith would see her.
There were two ways into the room. One—guarded by two armed men—offered visitors a way in and out of the room. The other was a pair of double doors that led into a holding area, where inmates were searched before and after their meetings.
She was wondering whether Smith would turn her down when she heard the squeak of the double doors as they caught against the vinyl floor.
A man was standing in the doorway with a guard next to him. The side of his face was blackened with an ugly bruise and it took Josie a moment before she recognised him. It was Smith. The guard pointed across the room to her table and he started toward her with an awkward gait that suggested that it was a painful effort to walk.
“Mr. Smith,” she said.
“Hello, Officer.”
“What happened to your face?”
“I met some of the other inmates.”
“Have you—” She was going to ask whether he had reported it to the guards, but stopped herself when she realised that wouldn’t have got him very far.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I can look after myself.” He rearranged himself on the seat, the effort triggering a wince of pain. “Why are you here, Officer? I thought you said the case was closed.”
“It is.”
“And you’re still here.”
“There are some things I’m not happy with. I’d like to talk to you about them.”
He grimaced; it took her a moment to realise that he was smiling. “I’m not going anywhere. You can talk about whatever you want.”
“I was looking through the evidence again. There are some things that don’t make sense.”
“Like?”
She glanced around the room. She knew that she was taking a risk coming here. The guards were watching, and if any of them recognised her, it might provoke questions for her that would prove awkward to answer.
She said, “Is there anything you haven’t told me?”
He paused. “I don’t think so. I’ve tried to remember what happened, but I can’t.”
She paused, unsure whether she should continue. Discussing her concerns about the investigation with the man who was likely to be charged was the kind of foolishness that could kill a career. Yet, she reminded herself, she had already ignored a direct order from her commanding officer and then driven all the way down here to speak to Smith. It was too late for qualms now.
“All right,” she said. “I went back to the bar where you met Miss Sanchez. I spoke to the man who served you.”
“Mid-thirties? Long hair?”
“And tattoos. That was the owner. He said he didn’t remember you or her. So I asked for the video from the security camera.”
“And?”
“And my senior officer turned up and said that he’d handle it for me. But when I checked the evidence, there was no tape. So I went back. I was going to speak to the owner again, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s dead. He was shot the night I spoke to him. It looks like a drug killing.”
“But you don’t think it was?”
She lowered her voice. “I don’t know.”
“Did you mention any of this to your boss?”
“No. Because—” She stopped.
“Because you think he might have done it,” Smith finished for her.
“I don’t know,” she said, unable to hide her confusion. “He’s been telling me I need to stop looking into your case. And then I went to Quezon City to find you. That’s where you should be—everyone awaiting trial goes there. But you weren’t at Quezon. They brought you here. They showed me the transfer papers. He signed them.”
“You have any idea why he’d do that?”
“I don’t. You haven’t even been charged yet. It doesn’t make sense.”
Smith was quiet for a moment; the silence made her uncomfortable.
“I don’t know why I came here,” she said. “I was hoping you might have remembered something.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve tried, but I can’t remember anything. Everything after I got to the bar is gone.”
Smith looked as if he was about to say something, but then changed his mind and looked down at his hands.
“This is ridiculous,” Josie said, overcome with frustration. She stood. “Look around, Mr. Smith. You’re in prison. The way it stands now, you won’t be getting out of here for a very long time, and that’s if you’re lucky. You’ve got to give me more than this. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”
“There is something you could do,” he said, “to help me.”
“What?”
“Make a phone call.”
“Not until you tell me everything.”
He gave a gentle shake of his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve told you all I can.”
“Then I can’t help,” she said.
She pushed the chair back beneath the table and signalled to the guard that she was ready to leave.
“Can I make a suggestion?” Smith said.
“Sure.”
“Be careful.”
30
MILTON WAS returned to his cell after his meeting with the policewoman. He had only been there for a few minutes when he heard the sound of a guard’s footsteps echoing on the metal catwalk.
The man stopped outside his cell. “You have visitor.”
“Who?”
“Come,” the guard snapped.
Milton thought of the policewoman again. Had she had second thoughts and come back?
The guard unlocked the door and stepped back, his hand on the handle of his billy club.
“You come now,” he said.
MILTON CONCLUDED that he wasn’t being summoned to see a visitor.
The guard was behind him, and, with sharp jabs from the tip of his club, he prompted him in the opposite direction to the visiting room, taking him instead back toward the canteen. A second guard joined them as they continued on their way. They continued until they reached an open archway. And then the guard told him to stop.
Milton had been past the room this morning and he remembered it. It was a shower room. He looked inside: it was filthy. A row of shower heads had been arranged along the left-hand side of the wall. They dripped, leaking a stream of dirty water onto a sloped floor that deposited the run-off in a gulley that, in turn, led to a clogged drain. The showers faced a series of chipped china sinks and there was an open archway in one corner of the room through which emanated the unmistakable stink of an open latrine.
The guard jabbed him in the back again and Milton stepped inside.
He turned. The guards had stayed in the corridor, and, as he stepped back, they stepped up to block the way out.
Milton clenched his fists. “What do you want?” he said.
The men stepped back and then stood aside.
A big Filipino came between them.
Milton’s stomach dropped.
The man filled the doorway. Milton guessed that he gave up at least a hundred pounds to him. The big man was much taller than he was,
too, with an advantage of at least four inches. The top of his head was only an inch or two from the top of the doorway. His shoulders were broad, his arms were thick with muscle and his body, while fat, was dense and solid. He looked like a pro wrestler or an NFL lineman.
Milton backed away and looked around the room. The windows were barred and there were no other exits. The only way out was through the door he had used to come inside, and now that way was blocked.
If he was going to get out, he was going to have to fight.
The big man rolled his shoulders, laced his fingers together and then cracked his knuckles. He grinned, revealing a mouth full of vulgar gold caps. He didn’t speak, but, instead, he stepped all the way inside the room.
Milton took another step back. He glanced around for a weapon, but there was nothing that he could see.
The big man took another step into the room.
The guards in the corridor watched intently, their eyes gleaming with the promise of violence.
Milton launched himself straight ahead.
He fired out a right cross, putting all of his forward momentum into it and aiming for a point six inches behind the man’s face. His fist drilled him and, for a moment, Milton thought that he was going to fall. He staggered to the side and was forced to reach out an arm to prop himself up against the wall.
The guards reached for their batons, worried, perhaps, that they might be next.
The big man shook his head and spat out a mouthful of blood.
Milton shook out the sting from his fist and started forward.
The big Filipino loomed up to his full height and grinned; the gold caps were stained red.
Milton charged. The man caught his fist in his big hand and squeezed. Milton’s progress was arrested and, as he tried to free his hand, he was unable to defend himself against a left hand that clobbered into his ribs.
He buckled, arching to his right and dropping his free arm to cover the sudden blaze of pain.
The man yanked on Milton’s arm to draw him into range and then butted him flush in the face.