Hush, Page 4

  “I was trying to encourage him to keep them private.”

  The guard said nothing. I looked over. All I could see through the hole in the cell door was a name badge that said “Steeler.”

  “What level of threat is that?” I asked.

  “Level two.”

  “What is it with you people and levels?” I asked. “It fascinates me that you would spend your every available moment assigning levels to things and not scrubbing the human waste off cell walls.”

  “This is a correctional facility, Inmate Blue,” Steeler said. “Not the Crowne Plaza hotel. You don’t want to stare at shit stains on the walls all night long? First, don’t murder people. Second, take care of your living space. The condition of the cells is a direct result of inmate behavior.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I’m not the one who painted the room with crap. I have no control over the—”

  “You kicked Officer Ridgen in the ankle. A level-two assault.”

  I yawned.

  “Do you agree with the charges?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Right.” Steeler stood. “It’ll go to the review board, and you can talk about it with disciplinary officers in a couple of weeks.”

  “When do I get my mattress and pillow?” I asked.

  “Someone will bring you your bedding shortly.” I heard the guard walk away. I sighed again. Whenever the guards say something in prison is going to happen “shortly,” it’s not going to happen. My threat to Ridgen meant I was sleeping on the concrete slab, and it was more than likely that someone was going to forget my dinner, too.

  I stretched and tried to settle, the base of my skull already aching against the cold surface. The constant noise of the prison—slamming doors, women shouting, guards laughing—seeming to reverberate through the slab directly into my brain.

  Forty-eight hours. That was what I had been assigned for the fight with Frida. There would likely be more time stacked on for the fire in the classroom, the threat, and the assault, but for now I decided to keep myself sane by counting down the first two days. Then I would decide how to handle whatever came next. You can only eat an elephant one bite at a time.

  There was shuffling nearby, and I heard a familiar wheezing. I got up and went to the slot in the door, looked through the tiny airholes in the flap. Across the hall, an elderly inmate was peering through her slot at me. I knew the old woman only by her nickname, Nanna. She had been in Johnsonborough for three years, awaiting trial for poisoning another resident at her nursing home. Even the guards called her Inmate Nanna. She was a biter, and was frequently in solitary for trying to take a chunk out of other inmates or guards with her blazing-white dentures. Though I’m a cop, and should be every inmate’s enemy, I had been to solitary frequently enough to befriend her.

  “Did they say you assaulted Ridgen?” Nanna wheezed.

  “A little kick. Nothing substantial.”

  “Shame.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I bet you’d like to get those chompers onto that son of a bitch.”

  “My word,” she said. Her wrinkled face bunched as she smiled. “Sounds like it was a big day up there. Were you there for the stabbing?”

  “What stabbing?”

  “The level-two lockdown,” she said. She stood and stretched, her back clicking at the effort of bending over to look through the slot. “The doctor.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The old woman bent to the slot again.

  “The guards were going on about it just before they brought you down,” Nanna said. “Someone knifed the doctor. Goldman. She’s dead.”

  Chapter 15

  EDWARD WHITTACKER COULD feel his soul in his body. It was warm, tingling, a thing that lingered just below the surface of his skin, stretching and swirling within the limits of his limbs. He could feel the boundaries and edges of it most in the tips of his fingers. His soul flexed and expanded there, as if his hand was in a glove, the fabric bending, trying to contain the spirit.

  “Counting back from ten slowly, now,” the instructor said from somewhere at the front of the room. “Inhaling, exhaling. Ten. Inhale. Nine. Exhale.”

  Whitt smelled cigarette smoke slicing through the echinacea and lavender incense. His soul recoiled. A pair of black boots clomped onto the yoga mat, either side of his face, and he opened his eyes.

  “Wakey-wakey, flower child,” Tox Barnes said.

  “Sir!” the instructor gasped. Around Whitt, there were dozens of sharp inhalations completely out of time with the group rhythm. Someone coughed. Tox Barnes ashed his cigarette onto the mat by Whitt’s face. “Sir, you can’t smoke in here.”

  “Pipe down, Bhagwan,” Tox said. “We’re outta here.” He grabbed Whitt by his T-shirt. Whitt struggled as he was hauled to his feet, the Bikram yoga room pulsing around him as he came out of his meditative state.

  “Jesus Christ.” He tried to gather his mat, towel, and water bottle. “What are you doing here?”

  “Leave that shit.” Tox dragged Whitt along. “You won’t need it. We’re going back to the real world.”

  “Sir, this is a private session!” The instructor was standing on a small platform with her hands on her hips, a tiny microphone clipped to the side of her sweaty face. “You can’t just…Sir? Excuse me, sir?”

  Two dozen people watched them leave. Tox heaved a sigh as the door to the room shut behind them.

  “Thank fuck. It’s hot as hell in there. Why do you have it so hot?”

  “It helps you center your mind.” Whitt brushed back his wet hair. “It’s good for your flexibility and helps you sweat out the toxins.”

  “Being toxic is a big part of my charm,” Tox said, watching the arses of a group of women in yoga outfits as they walked by. When he turned back to Whitt he stumbled a little in shock. “Jesus. I couldn’t tell when you were lying down, but you’re huge!”

  He poked Whitt in a pectoral muscle. It was hard as tire rubber.

  “I’ve been working out,” Whitt said.

  “Working out? You look like you’ve had a head transplant. This is not your body.” Tox put his cigarette in his mouth, squeezed both of Whitt’s biceps at once. “Mother of Mary, you could tour with the Thunder Down Under. Where’s your locker, Arnie? We’ve gotta go.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “I need you. Consider this your spiritual calling. Deputy Commissioner Woods’s daughter and grandkid are missing.” He’d started walking, following a sign that read “Lockers.”

  Whitt grabbed the older man’s shoulder.

  “Wait a minute,” Whitt said. “Slow down. I’m suspended. You’re suspended. And how the hell did Woods get you on board? You told me you wouldn’t piss on that guy if he was on fire.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Tox took Whitt’s locker key from his hand and opened his locker, grabbed a pile of stuff and threw it at Whitt’s chest. “But my curiosity got piqued. I went and looked at the girl’s apartment and what I saw was marginally more interesting than the tits and arses I’ve been staring at for the past four months down at Eruptions. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting than the ferocious wankery you were doing in that sauna.”

  “That ferocious wankery is part of my treatment.” Whitt wiped his face with a towel. “I’m still a resident at the rehab facility. I’m only on day release.”

  “I’m your rehab now,” Tox said. “You so much as glance sideways at any illicit substances and I’ll smack you in the face with a brick. That work for you?”

  Whitt had a lot of problems with what was happening, but he followed Tox down the stairs anyway, past the water cooler to the front doors of the yoga studio.

  “What happened to the girl?” he asked, his heartbeat rising as he caught up with his partner’s feverish pace. There was an electricity coming off Tox that he had not felt in what seemed like forever. The thrill of a mission. “You got any leads? Was she abducted?”

  “She wasn’t abducted,”
Tox said as he took his car keys from his pocket. “But someone rigged her motel room to make it look that way.”

  Chapter 16

  DARKNESS GREW QUICKLY. I curled on my side and thought about Doctor Goldman. Hunger pangs came and went, as did the sounds of prisoners being transferred in and out of solitary, sometimes swearing and shouting, sometimes not. The impulse to cry or mourn did not come. I had shut down my emotional responses when I first entered prison, the way I had entering each and every foster home of my childhood. The best way to protect the heart and mind while in a dangerous situation was to become like a robot. Anger was about the only acceptable reaction, and even that was quickly smothered like a flame with no oxygen. I stared at graffiti on the back wall of the cell and considered who might have killed the good doctor, weighing the possibilities against what I knew of the woman.

  Doctor Goldman had been well liked in the prison. She provided a refuge, an oasis of calm in the otherwise chaotic mess of buildings that made up the facility. Her offices were safe, and she was safe—she did not have a reputation for physically or emotionally abusing patients. Inmates called her Goldie, and one wall of her private office, which I had seen only once, was plastered with letters from former inmates thanking her for her kindness while they were locked up. She had not only offered me no-questions-asked respite periods in the infirmary, but she had always tried to keep an eye on my mental state whenever I came in battered and bruised. She wanted to know if I had visitors, if I took phone calls, who my supporters on the outside were. She weighed me and insisted that I eat, asked if I had had thoughts of suicide, wanted to know what I was reading and watching when I had access to books or television.

  There were things I didn’t know about her. I didn’t know if Goldie’s warm, caring reputation also held true among the prison staff. I knew she had access to painkillers and drugs that would be appealing both to prison staff, who might sell them to inmates, and the inmates themselves. Had an inmate or a staff member killed her? Nanna didn’t know when I asked. All the old woman had heard was that the doctor was dead and had been “knifed.” A stabbing suggested an inmate had committed the crime.

  When the slot in my door slid open I went over to it, hoping for dinner. Instead a manila folder slid through the hole and slapped onto the floor of my cell, spilling its contents.

  “What’s this?”

  “From Woods,” the guard said.

  “Ugh.” I slid the folder away. “I said no to that guy.”

  The guard didn’t answer, just flipped the slot shut. I pushed it open again before she could lock it, peering out into the dim light of the hall at the guard’s belt, inches away from the slot. She was the same guard who had interviewed me earlier, Steeler. From this angle I could see short-cropped, almost-white blonde hair. A tattoo of barbed wire running around her wrist was just visible below the cuff of her shirt.

  “Hey,” I said. “Is there any word on who killed the doctor?”

  “You’ll be questioned about it tomorrow morning.”

  “Me?” I said. “Why me? I wasn’t there. I was with Ridgen.”

  The guard tried to close the slot again.

  “If it wasn’t me, why do they want to talk to me?” I held the flap open with my palm. “It doesn’t make sense. Unless…Unless it was someone I know. Was it someone I know?”

  Steeler smiled.

  A chill ran through me. There was only one inmate in Johnsonborough I knew well enough to be questioned about them.

  I was so shocked I forgot about my hand on the flap. The guard’s baton rapped hard on my knuckles. I hadn’t even seen her extract her baton from the back of her belt. I snarled a dirty word and cradled my throbbing fingers as the flap slammed closed in my face.

  Steeler crouched, and I saw the blueness of her eye through the tiny airholes. “That junkie bitch had better sleep with one eye open over in ad seg,” she sneered. “The doctor was a lovely lady, and she didn’t deserve to go like that.”

  “It wasn’t Dolly.” I eased the words through my teeth. “It couldn’t have been.”

  “We’ll see.” Steeler stood and walked away.

  I knelt on the concrete, sucking my knuckles, thinking about Dolly. She would be over in administrative segregation on suicide watch, preparing to be forensically processed and interviewed about the murder. The investigation team at the prison would want to ask me if Dolly had been planning it, if she had mentioned a grudge against the doctor. I knew that gentle, naive, plainly stupid Dolly couldn’t have murdered Doctor Goldman. My very bones ached with the knowledge that what was happening upstairs was a grave mistake, that the killer, whoever he or she was, was still walking the halls of the prison somewhere.

  I sat against the door of my cell and picked up Woods’s manila folder. My mind wanted to retreat from Dolly, from Doctor Goldman, from the emotion trying to break through the barrier that had held in place for so long. But when I opened the folder, there on the front page of the Missing Persons file was a photograph of Woods’s daughter and her two-year-old child. I slammed the folder shut.

  “You know…” a voice said. I knelt and looked out the holes in the slot. Nanna was crouched by her door again. “I think I got some information that could help.”

  Chapter 17

  “WHAT IS IT?” I asked.

  Nanna was silent for a long time, pausing to stretch her back, which popped and clicked like logs in a fire.

  “If this Dolly person killed the doctor, and you don’t think she would have done it for her own reasons, she might have been hired,” Nanna said. “I think I heard the doctor and the Spanner had a thing.”

  Anna “the Spanner” Regent was another frequent visitor to solitary. I knew little about her, other than that she was the only child-killer in the prison who didn’t spend her whole life in ad seg. She was so big and intimidating that no one messed with her, even though her crime should have made her everyone’s favorite punching bag. Anna had beaten her four-year-old nephew to death with a large steel spanner, the kind used to take the bolts off truck tires. Though she was carefully avoided by most of the prison population, now and then a downright crazy inmate, or someone wanting to make a name for themselves, challenged her and was immediately splattered on the concrete like a bug on a windshield, and Anna ended up in solitary. I’d never spoken to Anna, but I’d seen her being walked past my own cell in solitary a number of times. She was always locked in the cell at the end of the hall, the darkest and dirtiest of them all.

  “What do you mean, they had a thing?” I asked Nanna.

  “A romantic thing.”

  “What? The doctor was gay?”

  “So I heard. With the Spanner.”

  I sat on my haunches and thought about Doctor Goldman holding my face in her hands, looking at my eyes. The strange tenderness of it, those few seconds, when I let her take the weight of my head and rested with her warm palms against my cheeks. Why had she let me do that? How long had the moment lasted? Almost all prison gossip is bullshit. Rumors and lies circulated and embellished for entertainment purposes. The idea that a violent, child-murdering inmate and the prison doctor could conduct a romantic relationship was far-fetched. But it wasn’t impossible. Guards were targeted with violence all the time, and sometimes that was because they had secret relationships with inmates that went sour.

  I looked through the holes in the slot again.

  “Is Anna down here?” I asked.

  “I think so.” Nanna looked right, like she’d be able to see through the eight cells between hers and the end cell.

  “Will you take a kite?” I asked Nanna.

  “Sure. I like mysteries.”

  I opened the manila folder Woods had given me, ignoring the photograph on the front page, and tore a strip of paper from the file. I worked the shoelace loose from my right shoe and found a solid patch of dried muck on the wall beside the door, probably human waste of some kind. I spat in my palm, wet the hard plastic tip of the shoelace and scratched at th
e muck until I had a kind of faint brown ink on the end of the plastic. The primitive writing tools wouldn’t allow me to say much. In the light from the slot holes, I wrote on the strip of paper.

  Dr. dead, I wrote. U know?

  I’d never spoken to Anna the Spanner before. I didn’t know what level of intelligence I was dealing with, or what kind of mental illness a person capable of bludgeoning a small child to death was likely to be harboring. I hoped Anna would be able to interpret my message, not only “Do you know this has occurred?” but also “Do you know anything about it?”

  It was a long shot. But I felt desperate for Dolly, confused and in need of answers. I picked open the clean end of the shoelace with my teeth and divided the woven fibers until I had thin strings, which I tied end to end. I folded the note so it was tiny and flat, bound it at the end of the string and lay down on the floor.

  Nanna was already lying near her cell door, having taken as long to get down there as it had taken me to make the kite. I could see one eye in the gap beneath the door. I listened for guards, and when I heard none, I set the note on the floor at the crack and flicked it out into the hall. The note came up short, a foot or so in front of Nanna’s door. I pulled it back, tried again. Nine attempts, and finally the tiny note slid through the crack in Nanna’s door. She pulled the note from me, and I let the string go.

  I sat against the door in the dark and listened to Nanna as she tried to flick the kite to the cell diagonally across the hall from her, the cell adjacent to mine. Heard her whispered directions to the accepter of the note. It would take hours, perhaps, for the note to zigzag all the way down to Anna the Spanner’s usual cell. Somewhere down the hall, a woman screamed and banged against the door. Nanna paused her mission to pass my kite as guards approached, doing rounds. The guards tramped past in their leather boots, making the line of light from under the door blink on the folder in my fingers.

  I didn’t know what message would return, or if Anna would answer me at all. But I had to do something. Somewhere, in another lonely, dirty cell in the prison, I knew an innocent woman was relying on me.