“Mrs. Winslow was a strong witness,” Rachel confesses.
I nod, feeling the emotions start to rise up and overwhelm me again. “She seemed to be just a sweet little old lady with a steel-trap mind. She had no reason to lie. Her testimony sunk me. That was when those closest to me started having serious doubts.” I look up. “Even you, Rachel.”
“And even you, David.”
She meets my glare without the slightest flinch. I’m the one who turns away.
“We need to find her.”
“Why? If she was mistaken—”
“She wasn’t mistaken,” I say.
“I’m not following.”
“Hilde Winslow lied. It’s the only explanation. She lied on the stand, and we need to know why.”
Rachel says nothing. A young woman, still a teen, I would bet, walks behind Rachel and takes a seat on the stool next to her. A beefy inmate I don’t recognize, blanketed in razor-scratch tattoos, comes in and sits across from her. Without preamble he starts cursing at her in a language I can’t make out, gesturing wildly. The girl hangs her head and says nothing.
“Okay,” Rachel says. “What else?”
“Prepare.”
“Meaning?”
“If you have any affairs to get in order, do it now. Max out your ATM card every day. Same with your bank. Get out as much cash as you can, keeping it below ten grand a day so it doesn’t signal anything to the government. Start today. We need as much cash as possible, just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“I find a way out of here.” I lean forward. I know that my eyes are bloodshot, and judging by the look on her face, I look…off. Scary even. “Look,” I whisper, “I know I should give you the big speech now—about how if I manage to escape—I know, I know, but just hear me out—if I manage to escape, you’ll be aiding and abetting a federal inmate, which is a felony. If I were a better man, I would hand you a line about how this is my fight, not yours, but the truth is, I can’t do that. I have zero chance without you.”
“He’s my nephew,” she replies, sitting up a little straighter.
He’s. She said “he’s.” Present tense. Not “he was.” She believes it. God help us both, we really believe that Matthew is still alive.
“So what else, David?”
I don’t reply. I’ve gone quiet. My eyes wander off, my thumb and forefinger plucking at my lower lip.
“David.”
“Matthew is out there,” I say. “He’s been out there all this time.”
My words linger in the still, stilted, prison air.
“The last five years have been hell for me, but I’m his father. I can take it.” My gaze locks on to her. “What have they been like for my son?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel says. “But we have to find him.”
*
Ted Weston liked using the nickname Curly at work.
No one called him that at home. Only here. In Briggs. It gave him distance from the scum he had to work with every day. He didn’t like these guys using or even knowing his real name. When Ted finished work, he showered in the correctional officers’ locker room. Always. He never wore his uniform home. He showered with very hot water and scrubbed this place off him, these horrible men and their horrible breath that may still linger on his clothes and in his hair, their sweat and DNA, their evil which feels to him like a living, breathing parasite that attaches itself to any decent microcosm and eats away at it. Ted showers all that away, scrubs it off with scalding water and industrial soap and a harsh-bristled brush, and then he carefully puts on his civilian clothes, his real clothes, before he goes home to Edna and their two daughters, Jade and Izzy. Even then, when he first gets home, Ted showers again and changes clothes, just to be sure, just to be certain that nothing from this place contaminates his home and his family.
Jade is eight and in the third grade. Izzy is six and autistic or on the spectrum or whatever damn term the so-called specialists use to describe the sweetest daughter God ever created. Ted loved both of them with all his heart, loved them both so much that sometimes at the kitchen table, he would look across and just stare at them and the love would pump into his veins so hard, so fast, that he feared he would burst from it.
But right now, as he stood in the prison infirmary by the bedside of a particularly evil inmate named Ross Sumner, Ted scolded himself for even thinking about his daughters, for letting that kind of purity enter his mind while he was in the presence of a monster like Ross Sumner.
“Fifty grand,” Sumner said.
Ross Sumner was in the infirmary. Good. David Burroughs had put a beating on the guy. Who knew Burroughs had it in him? Not that either guy was what Ted would call “hardened,” as opposed to simply awful. Still, Sumner’s pretty-boy face had been busted open. His nose was broken. His eyes had swollen mostly shut. It looked like he was in pain and Ted was happy about that.
“Did you hear me, Theodore?”
Sumner, of course, knew his real name. Ted didn’t like that. “I heard you.”
“And?”
“And the answer is no.”
“Fifty grand. Think about it.”
“No.”
Sumner tried to sit up a bit. “The man murdered his own child.”
Ted Weston shook his head. “You’re the killer, not me.”
“Killer? Oh, Ted, you have it all wrong. You wouldn’t be a killer. You’d be a hero. An avenging angel. With fifty thousand dollars in his pocket.”
“Why do you want him dead so badly anyway?”
“Look at my face. Just look at what Burroughs did to my face.”
Ted Weston did. But he wasn’t buying it. There was something more going on here.
“A hundred grand,” Sumner said.
Ted swallowed. A hundred grand. He thought about Izzy and the price of all those specialists. “I can’t.”
“Of course you can. You already tipped us off about Burroughs’s visitor with the photograph.”
“That was…That was just a little favor.”
Sumner smiled through the bruises.
“So think of this as another favor. A larger one perhaps, but I have a plan. An utterly flawless plan.”
“Right,” Ted scoffed. “Never heard that one in here before.”
“How about I tell you what I’m thinking? Just theoretically. Just listen, okay? For fun.”
Ted didn’t say no or tell him to shut up. Ted didn’t walk away or even shake his head. He just stood there.
“Let’s say a correctional officer—someone like you, Ted—brought me a blade of some sort. A prison shiv, as they say. As you know, there are plenty around in a place like this. Let’s say, just hypothetically, that I clutch the shiv in my hand to make sure my fingerprints are on the weapon. Then, again hypothetically, let’s say the correctional officer dons gloves. Like, for example, the ones here in the infirmary.” Ross smiled through the pain from the beating. “I then take the blame. I then confess, freely, easily—after all, what do I have to lose? If anything, this will help me get free.”
Ted Weston frowned. “Help you how?”