I didn’t say anything.
I was angry and embarrassed. My ego had flared up, and I had to get it under control.
I took a deep breath.
“Understand?” he said, his eyes wide and challenging.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s your crime scene. When they called I just assumed they wanted me to—”
“If we need any help, we’ll call you.”
“What should I tell the family?” I asked. “Homicide or suicide?”
His eyes narrowed and his forehead seemed to cave in toward them in ridges like layers of a cavern. “What?” he asked. “You serious? Of course it’s a suicide. It’s obvious.”
As I was leaving the dorm, the FDLE crime scene team was entering.
“You’re headin’ the wrong way,” Sally said.
She was a tall tech with big blond hair, big glasses, and big teeth, who had played basketball in college. We had worked together on a few of these before.
“New sheriff,” I said. “I’m being kicked out.”
“His loss. Anything I need to know?”
“Check his pockets, will you? Let me know if you find anything.”
“Will do.”
Chapter Sixteen
“My son didn’t kill himself,” Cheryl Jacobs said.
This after several minutes of sobbing uncontrollably. Was it normal reactionary denial or something else?
Was she saying what most do in the face of such news or, shocked mother or no, was she right, her son not both victim and murderer?
I had started to call her last night shortly after being kicked out of A-dorm, but decided to wait until morning.
It was early. I was back in my office after only a few hours’ sleep. But I didn’t want to take the risk of her finding out from one of Danny’s friends once the dorm phones had been turned back on.
“I know my son . . . He’s been . . . doing good.
Finally getting a handle on everything and how it works in there. He’s been going to church, making a few friends. His letters have been so hopeful.”
I made a small noise to let her know I was listening. “I guess you just think I’m in denial, but I’m not. I know my son. I just spoke with him a few days ago.”
She paused for a moment, but I could tell she wasn’t finished.
Outside my window, inmates streamed by on their way to the property room in the early morning sun of what promised to be a bright, clear, warmish September day. “You probably think I’m just trailer trash,” she said. “No, ma’am. I—”
“What kind of woman raises a criminal? Right?
Well, let me tell you. I’m a school teacher. I have a master’s degree. Come from a good family. Danny just got mixed up in drugs and could never get out.”
“I understand,” I said. “Happens to a lot of people.
I’m not unfamiliar with addiction myself.”
There was complete silence on the line for a moment, and I thought she might have hung up, but eventually I heard her take a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, beginning to sniffle again. “I’m just upset. I . . . I’m . . . He can’t be dead. It must be some sort of horrible mistake. Please let it be.”
“I wish I could.”
There was something about Cheryl Jacobs’s voice—a profound sadness that was there before I gave her the worst news a parent can ever be given. It was rich with loss and pain and raw-boned life—one that resonated with resignation and regret.
The intensity of her voice combined with the clear line created an intimacy between us, as if she were in the room, not a town or two away.
“I just can’t believe he’s . . . ” she continued. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My God,” she said slowly, sighing, and in her words I heard the echo of My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?
Mr. Smith, my elderly African-American inmate clerk, had been at PCI since it opened and was one of the most well-regarded men on the compound—by officers and inmates alike. In my time as chaplain here, he had been one of the most honorable men I had met. It was fitting that he was assigned to the honor dorm. It was also helpful.
He shuffled into my office, head bowed, back bent, the round bald spot that crowned his large head showing. “You lookin’ into Danny Jacobs’s death?” he asked as he eased into the seat across from my desk.
“Very unofficially. New inspector and warden don’t welcome my involvement.”
“No, suh. Don’t imagine they do. They not gonna last long. They’a screw up somethin’ important and get a promotion.”
“You obviously know how the department works.”
“Whole world,” he said. “The whole world.”
We both sat in silence for a moment, thinking about, I assumed, the way of the world—I was. I was also admiring a man like Mr. Smith who could see so clearly.
“You know he’s sleepin’ in Lance Phillips bed last night,” he said.
I nodded.
“And Phillips try the same thing in Confinement just a few nights ago.”
“Coincidence?”
“Be a hell of one.”
“It would.”
He leaned forward in the chair because of his bent back and winced in pain—something he did every time he had to move. Over his left shoulder on the wall was a picture Susan, my ex-wife, had bought me. It was a black-and-white photo of a giant cathedral whose pews were city buildings and aisles were busy streets. It reminded her of what I often said quoting John Wesley, that the world was my parish. It was one of the few pieces of evidence that she was ever in my life. Call her. Stop procrastinating. Do it as soon as Smith leaves. do it.”
“They’s pretty tight,” he said. “Danny and Lance?” I asked. He nodded.
“They seem suicidal to you?”
He shook his head. “But they both try it before.”
“They have?”
He nodded. “Neither the type to finish it though.”
“Why you think?”
“Not serious. That somethin’ you wants to do, you I thought about what he was saying.
“Like so many punks around here, they use it to check in to a private cell for a weekend,” he continued. “Or spends time with one of the hot psych specialists.”
Inmates have a limited number of ways to exert any control over their lives.
“Problem with they bunks,” he said, “can’t see shit in that back corner, ’specially at night. Calls it lover’s lane and up-the-back-alley . . . It where some of the mens go to hook up after lights out.”
“Can you tell me who sleeps near there?”
He nodded. “I can have them come up here and see you.”
“Even better. Thanks.”
The front door of the chapel opened and inmates noisily rushed inside.
When the inmates didn’t find Mr. Smith at his desk, they came to my door and stared through the narrow pane of glass. Mr. Smith waved them toward the chapel library and told them he’d be with them in a minute.
“Last night in A-dorm,” I said. “What went on?”
“Ten o’clock, lights went out,” he said. “TV in the day room turned off. Weekends and holidays lights still go out at ten, but the TV stay on to about two.”
“How dark is it after lights out?”
“Pretty damn dim,” he said. “They gots a few lights with yellow bulbs in them they turn on, but it’s dim—’specially back in lover’s lane. Officers can’t see it from they station.”
“How quiet is it in A-dorm after lights out?”
“Very. We got mainly old cons, been around a while, know how to act, don’t be makin’ a bunch of racket like the jitterbugs. He was killed, had to be quiet.”
“Could’ve drugged him,” I said. “Or put him in a choke hold to put him to sleep—it’s easier than most people think. Or they could’ve acted as if they were helping him stage a fake suicide and told him they would call for se
curity, and then when he passed out they let him die.
Who was on duty?”
“Foster and Davis.”
“They obviously didn’t make rounds,” I said. “Or they’d’ve seen him.”
He shrugged. “Don’t know what they do after I go to sleep. Usually they make rounds at ten and then a little before eleven. Then the new shift come on at eleven and they make rounds sometime after that. Few times I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t see any officer out on the floor between, say, eleven-fifteen and maybe four-thirty.”
“You think Jacobs committed suicide?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “Don’t seem like the type. I don’t know. My gut tellin’ me somethin’ might be wrong.”
I smiled. “Mine’s telling me the same thing.”
When Mr. Smith left, I reached for my receiver. With my hand on it, I paused for a moment, took a breath, said a prayer, then lifted it and punched in Susan’s number.
“Hello.”
“Susan?”
“Who?”
“Susan Jordan,” I said. “Daniels. Susan Daniels.”
“Must have the wrong number,” she said.
I repeated the number.
“Right number. Wrong person.”
“You mind if I ask how long you’ve had this number?” I said.
“Few months,” she said. “Six maybe.”
Makes sense. That was around the last time I had called her.
Chapter Seventeen
“I take it this isn’t a social call,” Hahn Ling said.
We had dated briefly a few months back, so there was a time when a visit to her office was social.
She was an extremely petite young Asian-American woman of about five feet, with olive skin, shoulder-length straight, silky black hair, and big black eyes. She was one of three psych specialists at the institution, and so pretty she made her parents an argument for interracial relationships even the most strident racist would have to consider.
She closed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and returned it to the corner of her desk.
Sitting across from her reminded me just how young she looked. I had no idea how old she really was. She would never tell me her age.
“You here about the suicide last night?” she asked. I nodded.
“Well, don’t ask me. I’m clueless about human behavior. Though . . . if you’re gonna commit suicide in prison, that’s the way to do it. They just threaten to commit suicide or act suicidal, we’re gonna place them in an SOS cell for observation. It’s why we have so few suicides at this prison—that and the great mental health care I provide them. But if a guy really wants to do it, all he has to do is act normal and when no one’s looking do the deed.”
“So Jacobs hadn’t threatened anything?”
“Not a thing,” she said, shaking her head.
Unlike me, Hahn kept her entire library in her office at the prison. Mine was strung out over every room of my trailer. Her books were neatly stacked on nice bookshelves that stood against every wall of her office. She had works by Freud, Jung, Rogers, Fromm, Erickson, and Zimbardo, and titles like Social Psychology, Psychology and You, Short-Term Psychotherapies for Depression, Crime and Delinquency, and Child Sexual Abuse.
“He seeing you for anything?” I asked.
She shook her head again. “I think Dr. Baldwin was seeing him. I can ask her for you, but it’d probably be better if you saw her. She can tell you a whole lot more about this than I can. She’s worked inside prisons for over ten years. She teaches the suicide prevention class for the staff.”
I noticed that mixed in among her psychology textbooks and testing and diagnostic manuals, she had numerous modern pop psychology books as well: works by Peck, Bradshaw, and Moore, none of which surprised me. What did surprise me were all the self-help relationship books—new additions since my last visit. I smiled when I saw the spine for Ten Men Who Mess Up a Woman’s Life.
Following my gaze, she said, “What?”
“Am I one of the ten?”
“Huh?”
I pointed to the book.
“Of course not. You’re one in seven billion. Wish we could’ve given it a real go.”
“You think we didn’t?” I asked.
She laughed. “You kidding? Of course we didn’t.
Can’t when one’s heart already belongs to another.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No you’re not,” she said. “And now you’re with her and all is right with the world.”
“Are you . . . Do you want to talk about it?”
We hadn’t dated much and had never gotten serious in any way, but maybe I had missed something that she needed to process.
“Said everything I had to say,” she said. “Would you say it again?”
“Wish we’d’ve gotten a real go. That’s it. No big deal.
You wanna know about suicide or not?” I smiled at her.
She smiled back.
“I’m very cynical regarding suicide in general, but especially in prison,” she said. “It’s all about manipulation. About getting what they want. Most of the threats we get are from inmates in confinement, and every one of ’em are trying to get a transfer. That’s what it’s become—a way to get a transfer. It’s not even a cry for attention or help, just a way to beat the system. Some of them even scratch at their wrists a little, but it’s so superficial it’s laughable. And yet we have to treat everyone the same as if it were a genuine threat.”
I nodded.
“They’re placed in the isolation cell,” she continued. “Either by us or by Medical if it’s at night and we’re not here, in which case we have to see them within one hour of arriving at the institution the next morning. They get a complete physical, and we give them a complete mental status evaluation.”
“You mind walking me through the procedures?”
“We have two isolation cells. S-1 and S-2. S-1 is for those who’ve made an actual attempt. S-2 is for those who’ve just made verbal threats. In S-1 they are monitored every fifteen minutes, S-2, every thirty. In both cells, they’re in there naked and without any of their property. They’re given a canvas shroud sewn with nylon thread, a canvas blanket, and a plastic mat on the bare floor. Usually, within two days they realize we’re not going to transfer them and they’re begging us to put them back in confinement.”
“Which you do?”
“Which we do gladly. Even if they wanted to kill themselves in that situation it would be very difficult. They don’t have anything to kill themselves with and they’re being monitored so closely.”
Where there weren’t bookcases in Hahn’s office, there was Oriental art, reproductions of paintings mostly—lotus leaves, dragonflies, bamboo, garden walls, figures engaged in conversation, Chinese symbols in black and red. All in inexpensive Dollar Store frames.
“The ones who successfully commit suicide in prison never threaten it?”
“Those’re the more likely but there’re exceptions.”
“What about Jacobs?” I asked. “You think he committed suicide?”
A look of bewilderment crossed her face. “Don’t have any reason not to. Do you?”
I told her about Lance Phillips.
“You think someone’s trying to kill Phillips?”
“Finding the card gave his story a lot of credibility.
Having someone about his size, sleeping in his bunk, killed in the same manner gives it even more.”
Leaving Hahn’s, I let my mind drift back over why the body of the woman killed at Potter Farm and found at the prison was stolen.
We had immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was the killer attempting to hide evidence, but what if it wasn’t?
Why else steal a body?
Maybe it was about concealing the victim’s identity and had nothing to do with evidence.
Who was she? Why was she there? Why show up uninvited to such an event? Or, if she was invited, who invited her? Was it j
ust for a rendezvous with the inviter or was the invitee there as part of some sort of sinister scheme? To derail a campaign? Embarrass a candidate? For revenge of some stripe or another? Maybe a setup. Could her role have been about blackmail? Maybe instead of discrediting, it was about controlling a candidate. Blackmail not to get a candidate to drop out of a race but to control him once he was in office.
But why steal the body?
If not because who she was or some evidence left behind could connect her to the killer . . . then what?
What about necrophilia? Why hadn’t that occurred to me before?
What if she was stolen for something unrelated to her murder at all?
It was a stretch. A big one. But the fact that I hadn’t even thought about it until now bothered me.
Was the driver involved?
What else wasn’t I thinking of ?
Chapter Eighteen
On my way to Medical I stopped by the property room to see if Sergeant Helms had found any other cards in the property of inmates whose deaths were deemed suicide.
“Any joy?” I asked.
“I’ve only found one so far,” she said. “The others must be further back than I thought—or just misfiled.”
“Anything in the one you found?”
She shook her head. “A whole deck. Not a single.
You find a link between Phillips and Morales?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t look like there is one.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have better news for you later.”
“Mind if I look at the deck you found?”
“Sure,” she said. “Give me a sec. I’ll grab it.” I waited while she found it. It wasn’t quick.
Eventually she placed the deck on the counter. “Here ya go.”
It was a cold-case deck like the card I found in Lance’s pants pocket, but an earlier edition. Same concept. Same agencies. Different cases.
As Helms moved about sifting through the stacks of inmate property, I took out the deck and began to sort it according to suit.
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