“There’s always that, but . . . If it were just motive, that would be one thing, but it’s means, as well. If someone like Skipper wanted to kill an inmate, he wouldn’t do it in the garbage truck. He’d do it by having him killed on the rec field or shot during an escape attempt or beaten to death in Confinement.”
“Like he tried with you.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But there’s more. All but one of the murders were particularly bloody, and the third would’ve been. I think Skipper interrupted that one. They were all stabbed and disfigured. It’s personal, not business. A business kill is dispassionate. A single gunshot wound to the back of the head. But stabbings, beatings, cutting, knives, blood, pain, that’s personal.”
“So who do you think did it?” she asked.
“Someone who has a very personal stake in all of this,” I said. “This is about love that’s been twisted into hate, not money or cover-up. Unless, of course, it was made to look like something it wasn’t.”
“You think all the brutality could be a cover?”
I shrugged. “Could be, but it feels like what it is—twisted love, dark passion, revenge. Because even when something is made to look like something it’s not, it usually still feels like what it really is. When Molly Thomas was explaining why she had made the accusation against me, that she’d do anything for Anthony, I thought about how much love and devotion was wrapped up in what she did. She loved him so much. I think that’s the key.”
“You don’t think Molly had it done, do you?” she said. “She could have hired someone to do it then gotten killed by him.”
“Takes us back to Skipper again.”
“Everything in this case does, doesn’t it?”
After leaving Anna’s office, I walked out into the waiting room.
A couple of the men nodded at me.
I nodded back.
A few others were so were engrossed in paperbacks they never looked up.
I recognized Zane Gray, Robert B. Parker, and Stephen King.
As I started to walk out of the building, I heard the faint tappings of an electric typewriter coming from behind the door to Medical.
Turning back around, I pulled out my keys and opened the door.
Standing next to the storage room where the typewriter was, Nurse Anderson jumped when I opened the door. The door to the storage room was parted slightly, and she moved in front of it.
“Chaplain,” she said as the typing stopped. “How are you?”
“Who’s in there?” I asked.
She looked puzzled. “Where do you—”
I pushed past her and opened the door.
Inside, Allen Jones was stuffing a sheet of typing paper into his pants pocket. I reached out and ripped it from his grip, tearing the corner as I did.
One glance let me know it was another letter warning and threatening me. I looked at Jones.
He was looking down at the floor, his weary shoulders slumped forward, his head downcast. “I’s just trying to protect her,” he mumbled.
Nurse Anderson appeared behind me. “What’s this all about? What is that?”
“Another piece of the puzzle,” I said, and walked out of the room.
“Chaplain, wait,” she called after me. “You don’t understand. I was only—”
39
That night, alone and lonely, I focused the full weight of my attention on the case, the crimes, the murders.
I was sore and aching, but thought better when I moved around, so paced up and down the length of my trailer as I went over everything.
Something was bothering me, needling a small spot of my subconscious with the irritation at the frustrating edge of my memory like a name once known but now forgotten.
Before finally giving in to pacing and thinking, I had tried to do many things when I came home after work—among them, watching the local news, reading, cooking, anything—but nothing worked but bumping around my trailer.
As I paced through the tight quarters I was temporarily calling home, I occasionally careened off the thin walls and the cheap furniture, the pain further focusing my thoughts and attention.
As I walked and thought and ricocheted around my rooms, I wondered how Molly’s death figured into the others. Skipper most likely killed her in order to keep her quiet. She was the only one who could link him to all of the crimes he was involved in, and she had nothing to lose by telling all. Nothing to lose, that was, except her life.
The thought at the edge of my consciousness slowly drifted in. I saw the stack of videotapes, images of Maddox, Johnson, and Thomas flickering on the screen.
What was it? What had I missed when I previewed the tapes?
I walked over and pulled the tapes out of the linen closet. I placed them on the floor in front of the TV stand and pulled the chair over in front of the TV.
I turned on the TV and VCR and pushed the first tape in. As it began to play, the images that had been floating around in my head the past few days filled the screen, accompanied by the tape’s dull moans of both pleasure and pain.
I tried to watch other parts of the screen this time, forcing myself to look away from that which most drew attention to itself in each frame. Nothing. I did this with all the tapes, and still nothing.
I sat there staring at the TV screen, now playing the late news. The anchorperson was saying that Molly’s car accident was believed to be suicide. She went on to say how distraught she had been over the death of her husband, an inmate incarcerated at PCI.
I wasn’t really listening to her, though. I was still trying to think of what I had missed. I was sure it was on one of the tapes.
What had it been?
And then it hit me like a tire iron across the face. I jumped up and ran toward my bedroom, bumping into the walls of the narrow hallway as I went. I retrieved the other tape—the eight-millimeter one—from the drawer in my bedside table and ran back into the living room, where the light was better.
We had started a video recording production service at my church in Atlanta. Having a limited budget to begin with, we used Hi8 tapes and equipment and did most of the work ourselves.
I learned a lot about video production during that time. One of the things I learned was that it is best to fast forward a new tape all the way to the end and then rewind it to the beginning before starting to record on it. This caused all of the loose magnetic particles on the tape to drop off so there’d be fewer fade-outs during recording and playback.
Of course, most people didn’t practice this technique.
On the tapes that hadn’t been fast-forwarded to the end and then rewound to the beginning before being used for recording, it was obvious how much of the tape had been recorded on. This was because once the tape had been rewound, the part that had been used was not level with the part that hadn’t on the spool. This was because the tape that had been used was looser and uneven, whereas the tape that was unused was still wound tight and smooth.
As I looked at the eight-millimeter tape from Maddox’s collection, I could tell that an amateur had done the recording. Over half of the tape was loose and uneven, while the other half was smooth and tight. This meant that only half of the tape had been used before it was rewound. This also meant that an hour of footage was on the two-hour tape. An hour had been recorded, but we had only viewed a few minutes. There was more footage on the tape. I had let the tape play some after the scene had ended but now I wondered if I hadn’t waited long enough for the next scene to come on.
There was one way to find out.
Uncle Tyrone’s eight-millimeter VCR was still at the prison in the conference room next to Stone’s office where I had used it to show him and Daniels the footage of Anthony and Molly Thomas in the chapel.
Unable to carry everything given how I was feeling, I had left the VCR and just brought home the tapes in order to protect them.
I raced to the prison and parked in front of Admin.
One of only two buildings outside the fenc
e, I was able to enter Admin through the front door without checking in or being seen by the control room.
Rushing down the dark corridor in only the tiny red glow from the Exit sign above the door on the far end, I entered the conference room and turned on the TV and the eight-millimeter VCR still hooked to it.
Like the rest of the building, the conference room was dark and quiet, the occasional creaks of the structure and the hum of the central air the only sounds.
I put the tape in and pushed the fast forward button.
After passing through the chapel scene at rapid speed, the screen turned to white noise and then to blue. I continued to fast forward it. In about three minutes, an image appeared on the screen again.
The infirmary at night. The camera positioned in the hallway outside, shooting through the windows.
Johnson and Thomas. No Jacobson. Both on the far wall. Three beds in between them.
The screen turned to snow and then blue again.
Before I could hit the fast forward button, another image flickered on.
It was a close-up of Johnson and Thomas having violent sex together on one of the beds in between them. They looked like animals, gnawing and pawing at each other. I saw no evidence of love or affection. Both men were drunk or high or both.
In another minute, Sandy Strickland entered the room and caught them. She walked right up to where they were before they knew she was there.
No sound could be heard from inside the infirmary, but there was plenty of sign language.
She raged at Anthony. It was obvious that she cared for him, that she was hurt by what she had just seen. The look on her face was undiluted disgust.
Anthony at first bowed his head and looked like a wounded little boy, but as she continued to berate him, something changed.
He glanced over at Johnson for his response to the whole scene, and that set him off.
He pulled back and punched Sandy hard in the stomach.
She bent over and stepped back. Within seconds, Johnson was behind her forcing her down on the bed.
It was difficult to watch but I didn’t look away—even as my pounding heart filled with pain and nausea spread through me.
They ripped her clothes off and began to beat and rape her.
The violence and brutality was even more surreal because it was silent.
Even more disconcerting and discordant were the expressions on the two men’s faces. As they beat and brutalized her, they smiled and laughed wickedly.
The entire attack took less than ten minutes, but in those sadistic six hundred seconds, both Thomas and Johnson had raped, beaten, and sodomized Sandy Strickland.
Molly Thomas then Sandy Strickland. Skipper had made his own little rape tape. I could tell that the second rape had actually occurred before the first one—Jacobson wasn’t in the infirmary like on the night of the murder, and Sandy Strickland wore the old gray nurse’s uniform that had since been abandoned by the department for something a little brighter.
Skipper must have recorded a lot of footage during the first rape that he deemed unworthy or that somehow showed him and so recorded over it.
As I continued to watch, a couple of things caught my eye.
At some point near the end, a door opened into the hallway where the camera was positioned.
I rewound the tape and played the same footage again. This time when the door opened and the light poured into the hallway, I pushed the pause button.
There he was.
When the light came into the dark hallway, it made the glass the camera was shooting through reflect the image like a mirror, revealing that the cameraman was Matthew Skipper.
Just over his right shoulder, standing just behind Skipper in the doorway to the caustic storage room, was the inmate orderly Allen Jones.
40
The veil of darkness covering the compound seemed much more than only the absence of light.
I was alone in the pervasive darkness. I was in it and it was in me. Or so it seemed.
I had entered the institution just a few minutes before.
“Everybody’s working late tonight,” the control room officer said.
“Who else?”
“That tall, pretty classification officer. Medical called her in on an emergency transfer.”
My heart started racing.
I spun around and quickly scanned the parking lot.
There in the employee parking lot was Anna’s car.
“Who’s the OIC?” I asked.
“Captain Skipper.”
I shook my head and frowned.
“What is it, Chaplain?”
“Will you call Sergeant Monroe and ask him to meet me in Medical?” I said, rushing down the compound before he responded.
The daytime noise and movement of inmates and officers was replaced by the eerie silence and lonely stillness of night.
When I reached the medical building, the officer’s desk was vacant.
I walked down the hallway past the nurses’ station where an elderly nurse dozed with her head on the counter.
I continued toward the infirmary to find that there was no officer stationed here either. There were no inmates in the infirmary so there was no need for an officer.
When I walked into the infirmary, I saw Sandy Strickland sitting alone on an exam stool beside one of the beds. Her upper body was slumped down on the bed, her right hand extended, rubbing the bed gently. I could hear her crying from the moment I entered the room.
As I approached, she jerked up, looked puzzled, and began wiping her eyes.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked.
“I just came from viewing a videotape of what Thomas and Johnson did to you here in this very room.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said nervously. “What video? What do you mean?”
“I mean Skipper recorded it. Thomas and Johnson assaulting you.”
She began to cry and I could tell she was on something. Something strong.
“Oh my God,” she said. “He could’ve stopped it. That sick . . . prick. He just watched . . . stood there filming as they . . .”
“I understand why you’d want to kill them,” I said, “but why not just turn them in. Why not let the—”
“I didn’t want Anthony punished. I loved him. I just wanted him free of that little nigger faggot and that fat bastard banker faggot. They turned him into . . . He used to be so . . . They infected him. Fucked . . . HIV . . . right into his . . . Gave him AIDS. Then he gave it to me. Or maybe it was Johnson. I . . . I’m . . . I’m dying. Fucker killed me too. I’m dying. Me. Not you. You’re not. I . . . I gave you my results, not yours. I was just so . . .”
The room around us, the building around it, was still and night-quiet.
“I blamed you,” she said. “Blame everybody . . . at this fuckin’ place. Y’all are all part of the . . . Skipper’s the worst but . . . you’re all to blame. All you pricks stick together—when you’re not sticking each other.”
“Sandy, I want you to come with me,” I said. “Let’s go talk to . . . some people who can help. Let’s go tell them what you did to Anthony and the others. I’m sure they’ll understand. I’m sure they’ll help you.”
She looked confused. “I didn’t do anything to Tony. I could never . . . I loved him. Took care of those other two buttfucks to protect him. I didn’t . . . I could never . . . hurt him. I . . . I’ll hurt everybody . . . else here . . . you . . . all of . . . but not him. I’m . . . not goin’ to . . . talk to . . . any . . . I’ve got that nosy bitch from Classification . . . you’re so . . . in . . . I’ll kill her. I’ll slice her open.”
She spun around on her stool to the bed behind her, pulling off the sheet to reveal Anna, bound and gagged and crying.
When Anna saw me a quick flash of relief danced in her eyes. But it didn’t last long. Her eyes filled with terror again when Sandy pulled the scalpel from her pocket and placed it at Anna’s throat.
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“So . . . pretty . . . So . . .”
“Sandy, no, please. Don’t—”
She pressed the knife hard against Anna’s throat.
Sandy had obviously administered some sort of paralytic or something because Anna didn’t move or scream as blood began pouring out of the small opening on the right side of her neck.
“Miss Sandy, you okay?” Allen Jones asked as he stepped into the infirmary.
Walking over toward her, he glanced at Anna with neither expression nor comment.
I had to come up with something quick, but what? How long did Anna have?
I thought about Sandy saying she hadn’t killed Anthony, that she loved him and would never—
“You didn’t kill Anthony, did you?” I said.
She looked back at me. “I told you . . . I wasn’t even . . . here . . . when it . . . happened. Oh God, I want him back.”
The blood was flowing more freely from Anna’s neck now.
“In a way you did kill him,” I said.
“What . . .”
“Your love for him got him killed. He was killed by someone who loves you.”
“What . . . Who?”
“Him,” I said, gesturing toward Jones.
I could see the look of realization as the truth of what I’d said dawned on her.
“He was watching that night,” I said. “He can be seen just behind Skipper watching what they did to you on the video. He was going to kill them all but you beat him to Johnson and Jacobson’s been in Confinement, but Thomas . . . When his wife got him released from Confinement . . . he . . . did to him what he had done to you—only with a scalpel.”
She looked over at Jones with utter contempt.
“You . . . stupid . . . fuckin’ . . . old useless nigger. What the fuck? What the fuck did you do? What did you think? That . . . you . . . had a shot. I loved him, not you. Never you. He was my everything. You are nothin’ to me. A worthless . . . old . . . You mop the floors for fuck sake. You . . .”
She started toward him with the scalpel.
When she reached him, she brought up the weapon, but slapped him first hard across the face with her open hand.
Six John Jordan Mysteries Page 16
