She shrugged without saying anything, which made her seem even younger.
She was a little less than five feet, so petite she probably did most of her shopping in the children’s department, and I was sure her nurse uniform had to be special ordered—that or she sewed it herself.
“You have no idea?”
“Wait,” she said, holding up her tiny hand. “Give me a minute.”
“Take two,” I said. “It’s important.”
“We bagged it up, but I don’t think it’s been sent anywhere yet. Let’s see . . . Check the back counter of the infirmary.”
I did.
As I walked back to the nurses’ station, my impatience ballooning, I tried to breathe up some zen. “It wasn’t there?” she asked.
“Amazingly, no. Any other ideas?”
“Wonder if this is it?”
Without standing up, without much movement at all, she reached over and grabbed a clear plastic bag with an inmate uniform in it.
I took the bag and began to empty its contents.
The tag sewn onto the shirt had Lance’s full name and DC number on it. I looked through it, returned it, and withdrew his pants. A single playing card fell out and fluttered to the floor.
Returning the inmate blues to the bag, I handed it to the helpful nurse, and bent to retrieve the card.
It was from the Florida cold cases deck, a king of hearts—sponsoring agency seals on the back and information about Miguel Morales on the face.
“What do you know about Miguel Morales?” I asked.
I had just returned to the SOS cell from examining Lance’s property and was sitting in the rickety old folding chair again.
He looked genuinely perplexed, his pale forehead making waves like a child’s depiction of water. “Who? Did you find—”
“Morales,” I said. “Miguel Morales.”
“Never heard the name before. Who is he?”
“You don’t know?”
He shook his head. “He who tried to kill me?”
“A missing person. Hispanic male. Last seen in Sarasota three years ago.”
“What’s that got to do with—”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“What was in my pocket?” I stood.
“You gonna look into this for me? I get out soon. I’ve worked real hard to be ready. I just want my second chance. I’ve almost made it. Don’t let them kill me. Not when I’m so close. Please.”
10
Suicide is an epidemic in prison.
And though it has been on a sharp decrease since the 1980s, it still accounts for more deaths in prison than murder, accidents, and drug and alcohol overdose combined.
In state and federal facilities, suicide accounts for about 6 percent of all deaths. In county jails it’s much higher.
Because inmates don’t have easy access to drugs or weapons, they often employ methods that are as creative as they are torturous. The three most common types are strangulation, poisoning, and self-inflicted wounds. Strangulation is the easiest, poisoning the most difficult, self-inflicted wounds the most brutal. With asphyxiation you drift off to sleep. With poisoning, toxic cleaning chemicals damage your kidneys beyond repair. But with self-inflicted wounds, you cut and rip and tear and gash your own skin with makeshift blades and sharp objects and wait to bleed out.
But maybe Lance Phillips didn’t try to kill himself.
Maybe there had been fewer suicides at PCI than we thought.
I looked at the cold-case king of hearts again.
One card didn’t make for a good hand—no hand at all, in fact—but I was willing to bet on homicide over suicide, and I was counting on the property sergeant to reward my wager.
“Ever see one of these—” I began. “Of course.”
I was holding up the cold-case king of hearts. “In the property of an inmate who supposedly committed suicide?”
“Oh.”
The heavy makeup on Sergeant Carrie Helms’s fifty-eight-year-old face emphasized rather than de-emphasized the laugh lines and wrinkles, but she had a youthful bearing, and her bright blue eyes still sparkled mischievously beneath her short gray hair.
She took the card and examined it.
Cold-case playing cards are created and distributed by several statewide law enforcement agencies, including the DOC, FDLE, sheriffs’ and police chiefs’ associations, and crime stoppers. Each deck features information about fifty-two unsolved homicides or missing person cases, with the crime stoppers toll-free tip line and the cold-case team web address. The decks are doled out to inmates in hopes they’ll come forward with information that’ll help solve the very, very cold cases.
Thinking about the cold-case cards triggered something inside me, and I thought I recalled seeing a deck mixed in among the other playing cards on the poker table in the farmhouse at Potter Farm this morning.
“Supposedly?” she repeated. “Seen any of these?”
“I’m sure I have,” she said. “These decks are all over the place.”
“Not a deck,” I said. “A single card.”
Her eyebrows shot up, smoothing out the skin of her wrinkled forehead. “Hmm,” she said, eyeing me with a conspiratorial expression. “I’d have to check. What’s this about?”
“It was with Lance Phillips’s property,” I said. “Not the deck. Just the single card. He says whoever tried to kill him and make it look like suicide slipped it in his pocket.”
She looked at the card again, reading the information about Miguel Morales who went missing in Sarasota three years ago.
“I’ll only have the property of recent suicides,” she said. “Older ones will already be gone.”
“Do you mind checking?”
“It’ll take a while. Probably tomorrow morning at the earliest. You think Phillips had something to do with Morales disappearing?”
I shrugged. “The killer might. Or maybe the card itself and not the cold-case info means something to the killer. Or maybe there’s no killer.”
“Know anything about the Morales case?”
I shook my head. “Will the next time you see me.” She smiled. “Never doubted that, John Jordan.
Never doubted that.”
11
I stopped by the chapel on my way up to the warden’s office and called Dad.
Chaplain Singer, the staff chaplain forced upon me by the new warden and the one he was working hard to give my job to, was out this week and I had the chapel to myself.
“Driver for Kent Clark says he’s no hero,” Dad said. “Oh yeah?”
“Didn’t try to stop the robbery of the body in the back of his hearse. Didn’t even get much of a description or bother to write down the plate.”
“What happened?”
“Says he was on a long, empty stretch of Highway 22 between Pottersville and Panama City when a nice black car pulls up beside him and a guy in a mask with a gun motions for him to pull over.”
“What kind of mask? What kind of gun?”
“Halloween. Monster mask of some kind. Shotgun as best I can gather from his description. Says the guy told him he wouldn’t hurt him. That he just wanted the girl.
Took his keys and his phone. Tied his hands to the wheel. Took the body. Tried to stuff it in the trunk but it was too stiff. So laid it in the backseat. Tossed the driver’s keys and phone into the woods and took off.”
“He seem credible?” I asked.
“I find his incredibility credible. If he were faking stupidity or ineptitude, I think he’d bring it down several notches.”
“What’s his story?”
“Grandson of Kent or Clark. I forget which. Student at Gulf Coast. Musician. Just your general all around genius.”
“What’re y’all doing now?” I asked.
“Tryin’ to figure out how to put out a BOLO for a nice black car.”
I laughed.
“I have no idea what the hell is goin’ on,” he said, “but the body being stolen this wa
y makes me think it’s someone tryin’ to embarrass me before the election.”
“Could be,” I said. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”
“What’re you dealing with there?” he asked. I told him.
When I finished, we were quiet a moment.
“Oh,” I said, remembering something I wanted to ask him. “Is Jake with you?”
“No. Why?”
“When you see him would you ask him if one of the decks they were using in the poker game last night was a cold-case deck? And who brought it?”
“Sure. Why?” I told him.
“I know you got a lot on you, son, but if you could help me with this thing . . . I’d be grateful.”
“Of course,” I said. “Absolutely. You got it. I was gonna see Mom during my lunch break, but if you need me to do something—”
“No, see her. If something comes up, I’ll call you. Otherwise just check with me after work.”
“I told you to be in my office first thing,” Matson said. “This is the very thing I’m talkin’ about. It’s always somethin’ with you. When I give an order I expect it to be followed to the letter. No exceptions.”
We were in his office with the door closed.
Of course, that didn’t prevent anyone outside his office or in the admin building from hearing what he was saying.
The office, like the man, was stark and severe, minimalist and utilitarian. Everything was institutional and state-issued except for a few framed photographs of inmates working on the farm at Angola, Florida and Louisiana DOC citations, some trite religious and motivational posters, and a little LSU memorabilia.
“I run my prisons a certain way,” he said. “It’s why I’m good at what I do. It’s why I’ve been brought here. I’m going to whip PCI into shape and then it will be the model for the rest of the state. It takes a certain type of person to work at a Bat Matson institution. Not everyone’s cut out for it. In fact, most people aren’t. It’s nothing personal. I just don’t feel as though you are.”
I started to say something but he stopped me. “Just think about that last eighteen hours,” he said.
“I see you having an altercation with a respected attorney. Find you here in the middle of the night pretending to be a deputy sheriff. And when I tell you to be in my office first thing this morning, you show up over an hour late.
Showing up late to work on a day like today of all days—”
“A day like today?”
“When I gave you an order to be in my office first thing.”
“Oh, that kind of day,” I said. “Actually, I wasn’t late. I was early. I was called in to deal with an attempted suicide. I came to your office following that.”
“Oh, well . . . okay then. But you should’ve gotten word to me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I figured you knew.”
I stopped short of saying I thought he knew everything that went on in his institution.
He started to lean back, but stopped and took a sip of coffee from a Styrofoam cup on the edge of his desk. The sip was loud, accompanied by various swallowing sounds––the kind made by the unselfconscious and uncouth. In big and small ways, Matson was the sort of man who gave no consideration to anyone else in the room. In any room anywhere.
When he did lean back in his chair, he straightened his tie.
I wasn’t sure if the cheap black tie was the only one he owned or if all the ones he owned were identical to it, but he wore it or one like it every day. Black poly/cotton, flat-front work pants. Black Polyurethane lace-up shoes. White cotton shirt with button-down collar. Black too-wide tie. Never a coat. Never any variation. A self-styled uniform as severe as the middle-aged man wearing it.
“Now, on to these other matters,” he said. “What do you know about the young woman killed last night?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“But––”
“I saw her a few minutes before I left Potter Farm,” I said. “She seemed like she might need help. I gave her my card. I never even got her name. Did you see her?”
“Me?”
“At the farm I mean. When you were in the house or out in the pasture before you left?”
“Oh. May have. I’m not sure. So you don’t know anything about her?”
I shook my head, wondering why he was so keen to know. It may have just been because she was found at the prison, but it seemed like more.
“And you got called because her card––I mean your card was in her . . . on her person?”
He seemed flustered, something I’d never seen before.
I nodded.
“Not because you’re going to be investigating her death.”
“I was called because of the card,” I said.
“If you do your job the right way, there won’t be any time left for anything else. And like I’ve said all along . . . if you want to be a detective then be that. You might be good at it––better than chaplain. Just stop trying to be both.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But the most troubling issue I needed to talk to you about is what Chris Taunton said at the gathering last night. I’ve asked around. I didn’t just take his word for it. He was drinking . . . and I wanted to be sure. I’m now satisfied that I know the answer––and it appears to me that it goes far deeper than what he even accused you of. But I’ll ask you directly. Are you living in sin with another man’s wife?”
Phrasing it the way he had, the way so many do, made Anna sound like Chris’s property, like he owned her, like the real question wasn’t what we were doing but did we have his and society’s permission to do it, did I have property rights to her.
One of the aspects of prison chaplaincy I liked most was the privacy it afforded me. Unlike when I pastored a church, as a chaplain I didn’t live in a fishbowl, watched every second by parishioners who felt like they owned me and that I owed them. As a chaplain, my personal life was personal.
At least until now.
“I am not living in sin,” I said.
What Anna and I had was sacred. There was nothing sinful about it. Matson was not the kind of man who could understand that.
Anna’s relationship with Chris was over. We planned to marry as soon as her divorce was final, but we were not going to wait until then to be together. We had waited for far, far too long already.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I simply do not believe you.”
Something inside me broke loose a bit and I just couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Believe this,” I said. “I’ve loved Anna Rodden my entire life and will love her for a million more lifetimes long after the sun has burned itself out and the universe has collapsed. Nothing will ever change that. Not Anna’s duplicitous husband, not any laws of man or social conventions, not you or the Department of Corrections. My private, personal life is just that.”
“No chaplain of mine is going to be shackin’ up with another man’s pregnant wife,” he said. “Believe that. I’ve reported this to the chaplain supervisor of the state and the secretary of the department. I’m waiting to hear back from them on exactly how to proceed. Until then, do your job and nothing else. Understand?”
12
Sometimes I think about killing myself,” Mom said.
I didn’t say anything. Just listened. “That surprise you?” she asked.
I shook my head.
Actually, my mom was already dying from suicide—the slow suicide of alcoholism, cirrhosis eating away at her body—her pickled brain and nervous system failing, shutting down. She had fought the good fight during her illness, she had regained her faith, her sobriety, and her family. But now she was weary, ready, it would seem, for complete surrender.
“You’d understand?” she asked, eyebrows raising slowly, unfocused eyes searching, entreating. “If I did, I mean.”
I hesitated a moment, but then nodded, and said, “I would.”
The downstairs room Mom had chosen to spend her final days in reminded me
of a confinement cell. It had the same hopeless sense of isolation, the same smell of inactivity, of sleep, the same view of the world, of life passing by outside of here, happening everywhere but here. “You’d be okay with it?”
I didn’t want my mama to die. I didn’t want to have to face a world she wasn’t in, though such a world wouldn’t seem to be all that different from the one I inhabited now. She wasn’t a big part of my life––and hadn’t been for a very long time.
My visits to her sickroom, my vigils over her deathbed, that was the extent of our interaction and relationship.
“I would understand.”
It was not the same thing, and she nodded that she caught the distinction.
Before I left the institution earlier, I had made several phone calls and had found no connection between Lance Phillips and Miguel Morales. I had also followed up on a few inquiries relating to the murder victim from the farm. Both cases fascinated me, but I was pushing them back, keeping them at bay as best I could, doing my best not to let them intrude into this moment with Mom.
“You don’t think I should, do you?” she asked.
Mom had been so pretty once. Now, spent, her body older than its years, only occasionally did her eyes sparkle, her face brighten, the young girl she had been peek out of the infirmed old woman she had become.
“I think it’s not for me to say.”
“You think I’d go to hell?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Certain?” I nodded.
“Certain enough not to stop me?”
“Notions of punishment and reward are juvenile.
There is only love.”
I thought about the old notions of suicide being a mortal sin––the kind only committed by those who had despaired of God’s mercy. Of how those who had committed it were refused religious burial, their loved ones left behind refused comfort and reassurance.
Of course, that she could even ask me if I thought she’d go to hell reminded me the notions weren’t just old ones. I couldn’t even think in those terms, and that she could made me feel like a failure.
Innocent Blood; Blood Money; Blood Moon Page 25
