by Chaz McGee
Instead, I made my way to the maximum security unit, where the rest of the patients were still asleep. The staff had that sleepy, slightly bewildered look that came with surviving another night shift. I paced the empty hallways and thought of where the pipe might feed into the unit. I knew it wasn’t in Parker’s room, but it had to be someplace where he could gain access without being noticed.
I went back over Parker’s actions in the past week, looking for a clue. There was little he had done that was out of character, at least not for a psychopath like him. But he had made his lawyer fight to get him out of solitary confinement – and Otis Parker was not a man who enjoyed the company of others. My guess was that the pipe fed into a common area. The most likely places were the dining area, recreational yard or the shower room, which could accommodate six people at a time to make it easier for the orderlies to supervise more than one man at once. Not that they ever took that chance.
My bet was on the bathroom. Parker had access to it nearly twenty-four hours a day and he was notorious for showering incessantly.
I reached the bathroom in time to see the lower half of a small tiled wall move straight toward me as if it was levitating in the air. It was then slowly lowered to the ground by an unseen person on the other side of it, leaving an opening in the wall about four feet square. Parker squeezed in through this opening, picked up the wall section and pressed it carefully back into place until he heard a click. The craftsmanship was meticulous. The edges of the hatch matched the rest of the wall perfectly. Once pressed back into place, the entrance to the drainage system pipe was invisible. You’d have to know exactly the tile to press to unlatch the lock in order to access it from this side. It was impossible to detect.
Before Parker had been able to maneuver it back in place, I had caught enough of a glimpse to know that someone – Parker, his accomplice? – had cut an opening in the side of the pipe on the other side of the wall as a doorway for Parker to enter and exit the drainage system at will. It would have been a noisy, messy task. It would have required skill and it would have taken time. I did not see how anyone less than an employee working for hours at a stretch could have accomplished it. Parker definitely had help on the inside.
I shrank from Parker’s presence as he stripped naked and turned on a shower, whistling as he adjusted the water temperature. As the unit slowly woke up around him, Parker scrubbed the sludge and grime from his body, removing all traces of his adventure. He rinsed the clothes he had been wearing and wrung them out, then tucked them under his arm and slipped back down the hallway to his room. Had anyone seen him, they would’ve thought he was simply indulging his incessant need to wash.
Parker climbed into his bed and his breathing quickly slowed. He fell asleep in moments, unfettered by conscience or concern for others. Innocence did not slumber as deeply.
The terror that had overcome me when I was inside the pipe subsided as he drifted off. Perhaps it, too, was sleeping.
THIRTY-ONE
I had to find a way to let someone know that Otis Parker was, for all intents and purposes, no longer confined. I could not depend on my Holloway friends for help. Olivia could see me, but I feared how she might be judged if I tried to get word through her. I wanted her to leave Holloway and resume her life. If she started talking about conversations with people who weren’t there, they’d keep her on The Hill for sure.
I traveled down to town early the next morning, unsure of what I could do. Even filled with distress, I enjoyed the morning sun and the feeling of being a solitary traveler wandering through sleepy fields and equally sleepy suburbs rising to greet the dawn. But as soon as I entered town, I could feel a change in the air. The atmosphere was tangy with suppressed energy. The feeling grew stronger as I approached the station house where the parking lot was nearly full and more cars were pulling up by the minute. It looked as if everyone on the force had been called into duty. There were faces I did not recognize, many of them dressed in body armor. A SWAT team had arrived, I realized, most likely called in by Gonzales from a larger jurisdiction.
Had they finally identified Parker’s accomplice? Perhaps they had discovered him in time and I had no need to fear Parker’s escape from Holloway.
I passed Gonzalez on my way up to the conference room on the fourth floor, where I knew Maggie and Calvano would be gathered with the other detectives assigned to the task force. I hurried, wanting to gauge the mood in the room before Gonzales arrived.
Whatever was going down was big. Most of the guys were juiced up on adrenaline. They were checking their guns, adjusting holsters and making way too many jokes for just another day. Tellingly, Maggie and Calvano stood apart from the others and were looking at a schematic of a large building, marking entrances and exits with a pen. Calvano was leaning over the blueprint, obscuring the drawing’s title. I did not know if it was Parker’s ward or some other building they were planning to storm.
As the clock on the wall ticked toward eight o’clock, the excitement in the room rose on an incoming tide of testosterone. Gonzales’s arrival only added to it.
‘Sir, a word,’ Maggie asked him the moment he entered the room.
He guided her out into the hallway. ‘Make it quick.’
‘I think this is a mistake,’ she told him. ‘It’s too easy. Something is off, it doesn’t make sense to me.’
‘Gunn, I’ve indulged your theories until now but, as of this moment, I am taking command. We set up a hotline and we set it up for a reason. We’ve had not one, but two, tips about this. We have a moral obligation to pursue action. Do you want off the task force? Are your personal feelings interfering with your ability to do the job?’
‘What do you mean?’ Maggie asked.
‘I’m not sure you’re objective enough to be in on this. It might be better if you stay here.’
‘No,’ she said at once. ‘I want to be there. We’ve agreed that you are only taking in one of them. You said you would let me handle the other one. You promised me. It’s the only time I’ve ever asked you directly for something, sir. And you owe me.’
‘Don’t ever play that card with me again,’ Gonzales warned her. ‘And don’t interfere with the rest of the operation.’
‘I won’t, sir,’ she promised. ‘But I am telling you, this is a mis—’
‘Save it,’ Gonzales ordered her. ‘We can’t afford to wait. Both callers were very clear. The danger is imminent. Now go inside that conference room and pull the trigger.’
He walked away, leaving Maggie standing in the hallway, looking grim. As she re-entered the room, she nodded at the SWAT commander. He gave his men the order to move out and, just like that, the crowd seemed to evaporate. Their energy was irresistible. I followed them out into the hall and on to the elevator, just to feel like I was one of them. They piled into vans and sped out of the parking lot in a convoy headed toward the north of town. I chose a spot on a SWAT van and snagged an empty window seat toward the back. Having missed the chance to participate in their front page raids while alive, I was not about to give up the opportunity now.
I enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by men who crackled with energy and exuded confidence. They joked in that familiar way of cops: relentless and offensive ridicule of each other. God, but I had missed it. I had been a lousy member of the team, but I had enjoyed belonging to the brotherhood.
The wind whistled in through the windows of the van and someone in the front row burst out in laughter, shedding nervousness. I had been reduced to being an ineffectual hitch-hiker in life – but at least I could experience it all through better men.
Maggie’s car was in the lead. She drove quickly once she reached the highway then veered off at the exit that led to one place and one place only: the high school that had been built a few years before to accommodate the never-ending growth of suburbs on this end of town. It had opened up just in time for Michael to enter its magnet program. We were heading to the high school.
What if Adam Mullins was
involved after all?
What if he took Michael down with him?
School had started nearly an hour before. The parking lot was deserted when the convoy pulled up. Men and women leapt from the official cars and Maggie was met at the back entrance by the school’s somber-looking principal. He clearly had been alerted beforehand. He opened the entrance doors wide, allowing a dozen officers to flood into the school and take up points along the hallway. A bomb specialist leading a German shepherd on a chain hopped from a pickup truck and hurried inside. The principal led him down the hall with Maggie and Calvano following close behind. The dog slowed on instructions from its owner, but barked when it reached the lockers near the end of the hall and refused to go further. The principal looked frightened. After a nod from Maggie, he went into the classrooms closest to the locker and spoke to each of the teachers in a rapid whisper. Maggie and the other officers tried to melt into the sides of the hallway, to no avail, as frantic-looking teachers ushered kids from their classrooms and hurried them down the hall and through a pair of double doors that lead outside to the athletic fields.
Bolt cutters were produced and the combination lock securing the locker clipped. By now, the German shepherd was quivering with anticipation. It had assumed a rigid position, its gaze never leaving the locker. Maggie started to stop the dog’s owner from opening the locker, but he reassured her and reached up and opened its doors. Inside, leaning up against the back of its wall, I saw two assault rifles, with handguns arranged on the locker floor below. Maggie exchanged a glance with Calvano, who waved over four men. They followed him to the other wing of the school, which had remained oblivious to what was happening nearby. Accompanied by the principal, Calvano entered a classroom filled with restless students sleeping and doodling and napping in various stages of boredom as a teacher dressed in khakis and a polo shirt spoke earnestly at the front of the classroom, a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 held in his hand. He looked up, startled, as cops swarmed the room. His lecture had become very real.
The teacher opened his mouth to speak and then abruptly shut it. He looked frightened and took a step back. The kids were silent, wondering if this was some sort of stunt to illustrate what a police state was like. But when Calvano marched over to Adam Mullins and dragged him out of his chair and threw him on the ground, then two uniformed cops leapt forward to help him, pandemonium broke out. Students began shouting, books were thrown, even the teacher lost his composure and rushed over to Adam before being jerked roughly away by a pair of plain-clothes men. I looked for Michael in the chaos and found him at the back of the room, standing on a chair, trying to see what was going on. He looked stricken. Some of the other kids cast him sidelong glances. They knew that he and Adam were friends. They wondered if Michael was a part of this or knew what was going on.
Maggie was staring at Michael, too. A feeling of dread flooded through me and I ached for my son. I could feel his heart hammering in my chest, as if it were my own, when he realized that Maggie was looking at him. A uniformed officer moved toward Michael, but Maggie stopped him. She shook her head slightly and beckoned for Michael. My son stepped forward numbly, pale with shock, automatically obeying her command. She whispered something in his ear and he nodded.
She was taking Michael with her back to the station.
I was gripped with a sudden, terrifying doubt. Did I really know my own son at all? I had never paid attention to him when I was alive, I had left him without a father’s influence to grow up on his own, finding male guidance wherever he could. What if he was involved? What if he had made one silly, stupid adolescent mistake and ruined his life forever? I thought of the prisons I had visited and the animals who lived inside them – and I felt sick in every fiber of my being. Not my son, not my Michael. He would not last a day.
Michael stared down at Adam, held face down on the floor by four different officers as they handcuffed his hands tightly behind his back. Adam twisted his head and looked up at Michael. Their eyes met, but I could not read the look that passed between them.
‘I’m going with you, man,’ Michael told his friend. ‘You won’t have to go through this alone.’
Adam Mullins was hauled to his feet and did not resist. He looked confused and frightened as the officers pulled him toward the door and still more members of the SWAT team surrounded him, creating a wall of authority. As Adam was marched down the hall, Maggie escorting Michael right behind him, students exchanged looks of shock and some of the girls began to cry. No one looked titillated, no one looked entertained. No one even pulled out a cell phone to begin recording. These kids were devastated.
Of all of the things that had happened so far that day, I thought this reaction by his classmates the most telling. Whatever was going on, there wasn’t a kid in the school who thought it was possible that Adam Mullins would be involved.
I wondered if their confidence extended to Michael.
Maggie kept my son close by her side, twice signaling other officers to back off as she led Michael to her car. She wanted to put him at ease and waved him into the back seat as if it were entirely his decision to come along for a ride.
For the first time since I had known her, I felt myself on the other side of one of Maggie’s battles. I did not know if she was trying to protect my son or was simply being a good detective. Michael would be no match for her.
Calvano did not look happy at the approach she was taking. He climbed into the front seat looking like he had just swallowed a fish hook. I wondered if I had misread the mild animosity between us when I was alive. Had he resented me more than I realized? Was he now going to take it out on Michael?
I was not about to let my son ride in the back seat of a police car for the first time alone. Although I would get no credit for it from him, I climbed in next to Michael, determined to give him what strength I could. He was close to tears and I could feel the panic welling in him. I prayed word would get to Connie soon, and that Michael would have the good sense to shut up until she arrived.
My prayers were answered. Michael knocked on the bulletproof partition that separated him from the detectives. ‘Am I going to get to call my mother and tell her where I am?’ he asked. ‘She’ll get worried if she hears about this from someone else.’
‘Call her now,’ Maggie suggested. She handed Michael her cell phone. Michael looked confused at this show of trust, but took it and dialed Connie, reaching her on the department store sales floor where she worked each day.
I could hear her horrified squawking from where I sat. This was going to get interesting.
Up front, Calvano was arguing with Maggie. ‘What the hell?’ he said, not bothering to whisper. ‘You ever hear of a kid going on a rampage alone? Isn’t the whole point of it to be a badass with your buddies? Why the hell is one of them in handcuffs and the other sitting in our back seat, acting like we’re on the way to Dairy Queen for a friggin’ ice cream cone?’
Maggie looked surprised at Calvano’s reaction. ‘Look, Adrian, he’s the son of a fellow officer. He hasn’t been directly implicated. On top of that, you met his mother. You really think we’ll get anything from him if we go the formal “talk to my lawyer” route?’
Calvano sat back, accepting her judgment but unwilling to acknowledge it out loud.
Michael had overheard the last of their conversation. He passed the cell phone through the partition opening. Calvano grabbed it out of his hands like a petulant child.
‘My mother’s going to meet us at the station,’ Michael said timidly. ‘She wants to know what this is all about.’
It was his way of asking what was going on and Maggie understood this.
‘You know Adam better than anyone,’ she explained to him. ‘We just want to ask you some questions about his other friends, what his habits are. That sort of thing.’ She glanced at Michael in the rear-view mirror. I knew she saw the same thing that I saw: a frightened kid, torn between loyalty and honesty, sitting back against the seat, arms crossed, his mouth
clamped shut as a sign of his determination to stand by his friend.
‘He’s not going to talk,’ Calvano predicted.
‘I’m definitely not talking to you,’ Michael told Calvano angrily. ‘My mom’s right. You’re a complete asshole.’
‘See?’ Calvano said to Maggie. ‘The kid’s just like his mother.’
Maybe. But when it comes to you, he’s just like his father.
THIRTY-TWO
I knew Adam Mullins was on his way to processing and would be facing arraignment within hours. But for once in her life, Maggie drove slowly enough that, by the time she reached headquarters, most of the unfamiliar vehicles were pulling out of the parking lot as the borrowed manpower headed out to a less exciting part of their day. I liked to think she did that for Michael, to spare him the side of his friend being dragged inside like a dangerous animal, surrounded by dozens of armored men holding rifles on him. I had seen the drill before, and no matter how guilty the prisoner might be, the spectacle always left me feeling diminished. It would have scared Michael out of his wits.
Maggie led Michael inside past the desk sergeant, who recognized him as my son and looked a little startled. His eyes darted from Michael to Maggie as he gauged how much he should say. ‘Your mother on her way?’ he asked, trying to sound unconcerned.
‘I already let him call her,’ Maggie assured him, understanding the code of loyalty. ‘When she gets here, send her up. We’ll be in Conference Room B on the second floor.’
The desk sergeant looked relieved and I suddenly wished that I had been nicer – much nicer – to him when I was alive. I felt an overwhelming wave of gratitude toward him for looking after my son.
But Maggie did not wait for Connie to arrive to start the interrogation. The moment she seated him in the conference room, she sent Calvano to get Michael a soda and turned to my son. ‘Tell me what you know about your friend,’ she asked.
