I looked up at it.
“The roof’s not going to fall in,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t often darken the doors of . . .”
“A Catholic Church?”
“Any church.”
“Why’s that?”
“I work in an institution, but I’m not fond of them.”
“The institutional church has much to dislike, but it’s not all bad.”
“Wasn’t saying it was.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s not just one thing—and it’s me, it’s not—”
“Just give me a few.”
“Individuality, creativity, free thinking’s not always encouraged.”
“True. What else?”
“Answers. Too many answers. An answer for everything. Not enough questions. I prefer questions.”
“Well then, go ahead and ask me yours. You’re here to question me about the murder last night, right? Come on, let’s get out of this box.”
We stepped out of the confessional and took a seat on a pew near the back. The morning light filtering into the sanctuary was bright enough to reveal several coarse dog hairs on his old ill-fitting black suit. He wore a black clergy shirt that was a noticeably different shade from his suit, but without the white tab that made it a Roman collar. Whether the missing tab was intentional or not, it contributed to his unkempt appearance.
“Can you think out here?” I asked with a big smile.
A look of confusion on his red, puffy face was quickly replaced by widening eyes and a smile. “No wonder you don’t fit. Too much of a smartass.”
From the side door near the front, an elderly woman with a curved back hobbled in, genuflected as best she could, lit a candle, and knelt down to pray.
“So,” he said softly, “whatta you want to know?”
“What can you tell me?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said. “Cooperation.”
“I was concentrating on Mass. I didn’t leave the altar during that time.”
“See anybody around Menge’s cell?”
“Chris Sobel went by a couple of times. I think maybe he stopped one time, but I’m not sure. I saw him in front of it, looked away . . . a moment later when I looked back he was still there, but maybe he’d been to his cell and he was passing by again.”
“Or in Menge’s,” I said.
“He was acting so strange—coming so late, not wearing his shoes.”
“What about Menge? Were you surprised he wasn’t at Mass?”
“Yeah, but I was relieved, too. He’s such a little pain . . . He hated the church, but wouldn’t leave it—and he hated it for all the wrong reasons. He was always interrupting me. I always dreaded goin’ in there.”
“Why do you?” I asked.
“Because,” he said. “The little busybody wrote the bishop and demanded it. I don’t have time for it. I’m serving three parishes as it is. None of ‘em’re very big, but they’re spread out in three different counties. I spend most of my time in the car.”
“Will you stop doing it now that he’s dead?”
He nodded. “It’s why I killed him. Nah, if I were willing to kill to get out of doing Mass, I’d be a mass murderer.”
“Cute,” I said.
“Better than your lame ‘think outside the box’ thing.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
The flickering candles backlit the elderly woman as she prayed, making her movements clipped and jerky, highlighting her deformities, and she looked like a minor character in an old, under-cranked horror film.
“Did you go around to the cells prior to the service?”
He nodded. “Always do. Walk by each one so that everyone can see me. Let the regulars know I’m there. They’re usually open.”
He was right. Though the quad door always remained locked—or was supposed to—the cell doors for PM usually stayed open. In theory PM inmates weren’t a threat to each other or the staff as much as they were threatened by the rest of the population. The only reason one of G-dorm’s quads was used for PM inmates was because of how easy it was to isolate them from the rest of the population.
“They were closed and locked last night because of the threat I received,” I said.
“Didn’t do any good, did it?”
“You see anything strange when you walked by Menge’s cell?”
He shook his head. Didn’t see anything. It was dark.”
“Darker than the other cells?”
He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess it was. I really didn’t think about it at the time.”
“But you looked in?”
He nodded. “It was empty.”
“Did you look at the floor?”
He shook his head. “I never walk right next to the doors. So I can only see from about the waist up. Plus the windowpane is so narrow.”
I looked back at the elderly woman in the front. Even at this distance and in candlelight I could see that the fingers fondling the rosary were disfigured and arthritic.
“Anybody else outside the cells?”
“The man with you. Officer, the white one, and—”
“Potter?”
“Yeah. He was all over the place. Seemed hyper or upset about something. And a woman.”
“A woman?”
The elderly woman looked back at us for the first time.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“Sorry,” I said. “This is the first I’ve heard of a woman being down there. Was she an officer? In uniform? What?”
“No. She had on pants and a blouse.”
“Was she staff? Wearing a DC name badge?”
“Not that I saw, but I only saw her from a distance.”
“What’d she look like?”
His face contorted into a questioning frown. “Not sure exactly. I try not to look at attractive women too closely.”
“So she was attractive?”
“Yeah. Kind of exotic. Cuban maybe. Do they grow this far north?”
“And this was all prior to Inspector Daniels and myself coming in?”
“Just before.”
“What about the flyer? How long you been using it?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“Who printed it?” I asked.
“I did. On my computer. Why?”
“One announcing the murder looked identical to it.”
“How could an inmate do that?”
“Not sure,” I said with a shrug. “Maybe one of the inmates in the PRIDE printing program did it for him. Even so, don’t know how he’d get it into PM. Don’t know how any of it was done at the moment.”
“Then you’re wasting a lot of valuable time.”
“Oh yeah?”
“How can you hope to figure out who did it if you don’t even know how it was done?”
10
“I still can’t figure out how it was done,” Pete Fortner, the institutional inspector was saying. “I mean, it seems impossible. He’s alone inside a locked cell.”
Tom Daniels and I were sitting across from Pete in his office inside the security building of the institution. Tom had just given Pete the butt-chewing of his correctional life for not taking the flyer about the murder in PM seriously, and to make up for his negligence Pete was now trying to be helpful.
“It’s just impossible,” Pete added.
Daniels nodded. “That’s what I’ll put in my report, Pete. Inspector Fortner says it’s impossible.”
A short, pudgy man with unruly hair and a bushy mustache, Pete Fortner wore glasses, which he blinked behind a lot, out-of-date and too-tight slacks, and black athletic shoes left over from his former life as a coach and teacher at the local high school.
“What if somebody reached through the door?” he offered.
“Reached through the door?” Daniels said. “Solid steel?”
“Through the food slot. If Menge—
He
pronounced it as if it rhymed with hinge.
“It’s Menge,” I said. “Like thingy.”
“If Menge was bent over or squatting down near the food slot the way they do, someone could’ve slit his throat while walking by.”
“Sure,” I said, “then Menge lies on the floor, bleeds out, then hops up and gets on his bunk.”
I felt sorry for Pete, but his incompetence also made me angry. Perhaps if I weren’t so sleep-deprived and frustrated I could have shown more patience, but as it was I had none of my usual restraint.
“Well, couldn’t he?” he asked. “I mean not bled out all the way, but—”
I shook my head. “He was dead before he was moved to the bed—and had been for a while. Lividity was fixed.”
“Besides,” Daniels said, “the food tray slot was locked. We checked it.”
“It could’ve been locked afterwards,” Pete said.
“You mean after the guy reached through with his eight-foot Stretch Armstrong arms and lifted the body onto the bed?”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
Slumping in his chair with his head down added extra chins to Pete’s fleshy neck and made him look as if he had C-cup size breasts.
“It was a good thought, Pete,” I said. “We’ve just got to keep tossing them out and working through them until we find one that’ll fit.”
Pete’s office, like most of those in the prison, was cramped and nondescript. Four square cinder block walls painted pale gray, cold tile floor, one window, one door, one desk, one filing cabinet, and three chairs. He was seated behind his dented metal desk, which had been painted pea-green to match the two uncomfortable chairs Daniels and I sat in across from him.
Pete cleared his throat. “Did Potter tell you about the spoon thing?”
“Yeah,” Daniels said. “But it’s irrelevant. We know inmates got out of their cells to go to church. Getting out’s not an issue. How the killer got in Menge’s cell is.”
“What if a spoon was used to keep his cell door from locking?”
“Yeah,” Daniels said. “Menge came in and before he slammed his cell door shut, he put a spoon into the locking mechanism so he could get murdered. So you’re saying I gotta charge him with conspiracy and as an accessory?”
Fortner started to say something, but stopped, blinked a couple of times, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and looked down. When he looked up again, he said, “Maybe he was supposed to meet someone. Let them into his cell briefly on their way to church or later that night after lights out.”
“We were right there,” Daniels said, jerking his head toward me. “We’d’ve seen.”
Pete sat up a little and adjusted his glasses. “I still think it’s the food slot,” he said.
“That’s because you’re an idiot, Pete,” Daniels said. “Even if he was killed through the food slot, which he wasn’t, how was the body moved from the floor to the bed?”
Pete suddenly lit up.
“You havin’ a thought or a wet dream?”
“What if the sister slipped him something during the visit? Some kind of poison that made him bleed through all his—”
“He only bled through the big slit in his neck.”
“What if it wasn’t a slit from the outside, but the poison eating a hole in his throat from the inside?”
Daniels sat up, his face growing animated. “I think you’re onto something,” he said.
Pete smiled and sat a little straighter.
“But what if rather than poison, she impregnated him with some sort of alien that gestated awhile before bursting out of his neck. Remind me to have someone check the cell for aliens.”
“You think there could be more than one?” I asked.
Daniels nodded.
I thought about how often Daniels, Pete, and I had sat in similar circumstances discussing a case, tossing out ideas, and how tense it used to be. This was different. Daniels was different. Everything, including his anger and frustration with Pete, was out in the open. There was none of the usual subtext or underlying tension. It was refreshing. I was actually enjoying working with him, and it gave me real hope for my relationship with his daughter. Maybe we could be the family Susan wanted after all.
“Anything else you want to run past us, Pete?” Daniels asked.
“How about my resignation?”
“No, you hang around a while and take your medicine. A man is dead because you didn’t take the threat seriously. I’m not saying we could’ve stopped it, but the chaplain shouldn’t’ve been the only one who tried.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” Daniels said. “We know the door was locked when Pitts checked it.”
“No,” I said. “We know that’s what he says.”
“Good point.”
Pete smiled.
“And why’d he leave the officers’ station and come down to the quad to do a walk through during the service when you, me, and Potter were already down there?”
“Good question.”
“Maybe he was coming down to lock the door,” I added. “It’s possible that the killer had an accomplice. It’s a somewhat sophisticated crime.”
“God, I hope an officer’s not involved,” Fortner said.
“We know when Menge arrived back at the dorm and went into his cell,” Daniels said. “We saw him. What else do we know?”
“That approximately twenty-five minutes later he was found murdered alone in a locked cell,” I said.
“Yeah?” Daniels said.
“That’s it.”
“Then we don’t know shit,” Fortner said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but at least we’re used to it.”
“We also know who went anywhere near his cell,” Daniels said, pulling a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. “Inmates: Chris Sobel, Milton White, Jacqueel Jefferson, Carlos Matos, Juan Martinez, and Mike Hawkins. Staff: Tom Daniels, John Jordan, Michael Pitts, and Billy Joe Potter. Volunteer: the priest, James McFadden.”
Pete smiled. “The priest did it,”
“I hear there wasn’t any love lost between them,” Daniels said.
“You say Hawkins?” I asked.
“Yeah. He came in from medical while we were there and went to his cell. Why?”
“Menge’s sister said Mike Hawkins was a deputy in Pine County where his dad’s sheriff and that they’re the ones who set Justin up.”
Daniels narrowed his eyes and shook his head slowly, then turned to Fortner. “Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“Why the hell not? How could you not know a cop was in the same unit with a man his department put away?”
“Only way I’d know is if an investigation had been initiated by a classification officer because one of the inmates involved requested it.”
“Well, whoever missed this can kiss his correctional career goodbye.”
Please don’t let it be Anna, I thought.
“Did Martinez know Justin was going to testify against him?” I asked.
Daniels shrugged. “I didn’t think so, but there’s really no way to know for sure. We have to consider it a possibility. After all, the notebook with his notes and written testimony was taken. As far as I can tell, that’s the only thing missing from the cell.”
I nodded. “So Hawkins, Martinez . . . and we know Sobel had a connection with him.”
“Of the most intimate kind,” Fortner said.
“There’re probably all kinds of connections we’re not even aware of yet.”
“We’ve gotta divide ‘em up and do interviews,” Daniels said.
“But it doesn’t really matter who’s got a motive,” Fortner said, “if none of ‘em have means or opportunity. We still don’t have any idea how it was done.”
“That’s true,” Daniels said, “but the chaplain’s working on it.”
“I am?”
“At least we know when it was done. And just maybe we can find out who did it by the tim
e we find out how they did it.” He looked over at me. “You know how they did it yet?”
“Not quite. Give me another minute.”
“We’ve got to figure out how that cell door was unlocked,” Pete said.
“And how it was locked back,” Daniels said.
“And how a room full of people, including the inspector general of the department didn’t see it,” I said.
We grew silent a moment, and a possible scenario occurred to me.
“What if the door wasn’t unlocked after Menge went in?”
“Huh?” Pete said.
“Maybe the killer didn’t have to get in at all—merely get out.”
Daniel’s eyebrows shot up.
“Maybe the killer was already in the cell waiting for Menge to return.”
“All the cells were open earlier in the day,” Pete added.
“Speaking of which,” I said to Daniels. “Did you see a woman in the quad when you were in there earlier?”
He shook his head. “Why?”
“Father James said there was one down there,”
“Whoever she was, she didn’t come out of Menge’s cell while we were there.”
“Still like to talk to her.”
“Sure, but you were saying the killer was waiting inside Menge’s cell when he got back from his visit. He kills him, then when it’s time for Mass, he calls out the cell number and goes like everybody else.”
“Just thinking out loud, but it doesn’t fit.
“Why not? It’s the best theory so far.”
“If an inmate had been in Menge’s cell rather than his own, count wouldn’t have cleared.”
“Could’ve been faked,” Daniels said.
“Maybe.”
“Officer counting could be an accomplice.”
“The killer would’ve been covered in blood. Besides, Potter didn’t call out Menge’s cell number.”
Pete said, “If it was the woman the priest saw, there any way she could’ve snuck out while you guys were looking at something else?”
Daniels shook his head. “One of us was watching the area the whole time.”
I added, “Couldn’t’ve gotten past all of us, through the quad door and the dorm door without being seen.”
“Empty cells on the end,” Pete said. “She could have slipped into one of them.”
Six John Jordan Mysteries Page 69
