“It may not matter. Sometimes no amount of preparing helps. If it gets to be too much, just leave the same way you came in. It’ll be okay.”
“Got it. And if I—”
That smell.
A sharp, acrid odor flooded her nasal cavities and burned her eyes.
The stench of death.
She hadn’t prepared herself for that.
They entered the cavernous factory floor, which was illuminated only by the investigators’ flashlights and a stray light from squad-car headlamps against the dusty upper windows. Kendra counted almost two dozen uniformed officers, detectives, and FBI agents pacing around the scene. Some looked busy, but most just looked freaked-out.
Then she saw why.
The remnants of several belted assembly lines could still be seen on the factory’s concrete floor, some more complete than others. Every fifteen feet or so, tall metal poles towered overhead, anchoring the conveyor-belt chassis to the slab.
Each pole had a human head impaled upon it.
Every single one of the victims on Jeff’s list, Kendra realized. The men, the women, the two children …
And their eyes were glued open.
Shock. Horror. Nausea.
“Are you okay, Kendra?” Jeff asked.
“No.” How could she be okay in a world that could produce a human being who could do this? She started to shake. “Terrible. It’s terrible.”
“Take deep breaths.”
If she took deep breaths, she’d smell the stench even more clearly. Didn’t he realize that?
“You can leave,” Jeff said quietly.
“No, I can’t.” Her gaze was held by those faces, by those staring eyes … “They’re looking at me. Can’t you see? They’re all looking at me.”
“Kendra, it’s not that they’re—” Jeff stopped. “This is too rough. You should go back to the car.”
“Too late.” She closed her eyes. But she could still see those faces. Particularly the faces of the two little children. She opened her eyes. “Too late for them. Too late for me.” She fought back the nausea and took a step forward. “And they know it. They know someone has to make him pay. I have to make him pay.”
“Kendra, I didn’t think that you would—”
“Get me closer to those heads. Maybe he left something, did something, that will let me find a way to help them.”
“Forensics will do that. It’s not your—”
“Don’t tell me that.” Her eyes were blazing as she whirled on him. “You brought me here. You almost made me come. Now you get me the help I need to make sure the monster responsible will never do this again.”
Jeff hesitated. “Stay here. I’ll talk to Griffin and the local police and get permission. I’ll be right back.”
She watched him start across the room, then forced herself to turn and look back at those heads.
She was becoming accustomed to the horror now that she had made her decision to not let herself be helpless before it. Sadness, anger, shock were still present, but there was also a burning desire for justice … and revenge.
Staring eyes. Broken hearts. Broken lives.
“I’ll find him,” she whispered to them. “Give me a little time. I’ll find him for you.”
Staring eyes …
San Diego International Airport
Present Day
6:40 A.M.
STARING EYES.
Block it out, Kendra told herself, as she looked up from her coffee. She had spent the night before being attacked by memories of that fever dream of a night at that factory and had gotten very little sleep. Now that the decision was made, she must not dwell on it any longer.
Easy to say. She had been able to suppress but never forget the eyes of those two little boys, seemingly following her around the factory floor.
Their faces were frozen, forever seven and eight years old, but their eyes were pleading, begging.
Dammit.
She parked herself at the Stone Brewing Co., well away from the Terminal 2 gate of the San Francisco flight. She didn’t want to run into any of the FBI agents yet.
In case she changed her mind.
She checked her watch. The plane was already boarding. She imagined Griffin standing on the jetway, neck craned, looking around the gate for her.
“Everyone knows you’re here, Kendra.”
She whirled around. It was Lynch. He was already at the restaurant, sitting with his back to the concourse.
He swiveled to face her. “Your bodyguard phoned Griffin the second he dropped you off at the curb outside.”
“Of course he did.” She shrugged. “Which would make it even more awesome if I decided not to go.”
“True.” He smiled faintly. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “I didn’t get much sleep. I was just thinking about my first night on the Eric Colby case. It was hideous, and I wanted to strike out at everyone and everything. I don’t know if I could have held it together without Jeff there. He believed in me so much … I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
“You didn’t. You made him proud.”
“I hope so.”
Lynch closed the newspaper app he’d been reading on his tablet computer. “Do you think about him a lot?”
She nodded. Of course she did. She had watched him die only a year before, in the case that had first brought her and Lynch together. Jeff had been abducted during the course of a murder investigation, and Lynch had made her believe she could save him. He was wrong.
“I miss him.” She hesitated. “But not in the way you might think. We’d broken up almost a year and a half before he died. We didn’t have a future together. But even though I never saw him anymore, I liked living in a world with Jeff Stedler in it. Does that make any sense?”
“It does.”
“And the world is somehow sadder without him in it. He was a good person.”
“So are you.” Lynch motioned toward the concourse. “Are we gonna do this?”
She braced herself and nodded. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
San Quentin State Penitentiary
Marin County, California
“THERE’S A CROWD UP AHEAD.” Kendra was gazing out the window of the rental van she was sharing with Lynch, Griffin, Metcalf, and Reade. Metcalf was driving, and they had just completed the forty-five-minute drive from the airport. As they approached the penitentiary’s East Gate, they were greeted by the sight of twenty protestors. “They all have anti-death-penalty signs. Are they here for Colby?”
“They’re here for everybody on death row,” Lynch said. “But yes, Colby’s upcoming execution is what brings them here now. There will be hundreds more this weekend. By Monday night, there will be thousands. On both sides of the issue.”
For an instant, those staring eyes were once more with Kendra, haunting her. “Thousands…”
“It’s their right,” Griffin said.
“I know that.” She looked straight ahead and away from the protestors. “Just as it was our right to put that bastard here in the first place.”
After checking in at the gate, they were escorted to a two-story administration building where they soon found themselves in the office of Warden Howard Salazar, a sixtyish Latino man with wire-rimmed spectacles and close-cropped gray beard.
“When people ask what I do for a living, I say I just take meetings about Eric Colby,” Salazar said sourly as he hung up his phone and rose to his feet. “Or answer the phone from journalists about what happened at the last meeting. It’s pretty much all I do these days.”
“Sorry to make you take this one more meeting, Warden.” Griffin shook his hand and introduced him to the team.
“At least you may have a different agenda.” Salazar motioned for them to join him in a seating area beneath a large leaded-glass window. “I’m curious about your agency’s sudden interest in Colby. When law-enforcement officials come to see me about a prisoner
this close to his being executed, it usually means he may be responsible for more killings than those for which he was convicted. Are you trying to close some old cases while you can?”
“No, nothing like that. But it is possible there’s some connection between him and a current investigation.”
“I see. Well, we’ve pulled together the information you requested. I hope it will help you.”
Reade leaned forward. “Mr. Salazar … What kind of prisoner has Colby been?”
Salazar shrugged. “From the moment he arrived, he’s been a model prisoner. He keeps to himself, he reads, he writes in his notebooks, and that’s about it.”
“How can you say that?” Kendra said. “I’ve been keeping track of him. I know for a fact that he murdered a man within these walls.”
“Self-defense. Child murderers aren’t treated kindly by the general prison population. Over the years, he’s been targeted a few times, but he’s always been able to take care of himself. One of those attacks involved a sharpened railroad spike that had been smuggled in from a work detail. It happened at the athletic track. During the confrontation, Colby wrested it away from his attacker and almost decapitated him with it. There were plenty of witnesses, two of whom were guards. They testified that it was a clear matter of kill or be killed. Of course, the media just saw ‘Eric Colby’ and ‘decapitate’ in the same sentence, and all those other details receded into the background.”
“Does his family visit him?” Lynch asked.
“He won’t allow it. His parents, sister, and a few other relatives have submitted applications to be included on his visitor list, but he won’t approve them. They tried again just last month. They wanted to see him before the execution. He hasn’t laid eyes on anyone in his family since his trial.”
“So who visits him?” Griffin asked. “Friends? His legal team?”
“You’d know better than I if he actually has any friends. From what I understand, he sees no one from the life he had before he came here. But one of the products of worldwide notoriety is that he gets mail every day and he has a mile-long visitor’s list of people with whom he’s exchanged e-mails. Plus, a lot of television and documentary crews come to interview him. He’s an unrepentant monster, and they just eat that stuff up. As for attorneys, he dismissed his early on. His case would probably be tied up in appeals for the next ten years if he wanted it that way.”
“So he wants to die?” Kendra asked.
“He’s never come out and said that. He has agreed to meet legal representatives provided by anti-death-penalty groups. But each time, he’s sent them away. He says they’re trying to tamper with his legacy.”
“Yes,” Kendra said. “He’s become very philosophical about his crimes. He considers them his life’s work. He thinks he’ll live on through them. He believes that will mean he’ll outlive us all.”
“Like an artist and his paintings,” Reade said thoughtfully.
“Exactly,” Salazar said. “Colby is being interviewed for a British news show right now. But if you’d like to see his cell, I’ll walk over with you.”
“Good,” Griffin said. “I’d appreciate that.”
“No problem.” Salazar headed for the door. “Come along.”
Accompanied by a pair of guards, they followed Salazar out of the administration building and through a tall gate that led to the main detention complex. Two gates later, they entered the East cellblock.
“This is where most of our death-row inmates are housed,” Salazar said. “We classify them as either Grade A or Grade B. If they behave themselves, they’re Grade A and put here. Our more troublesome death-row inmates are classified Grade B and put over in the Security Center. Colby has spent time over there after some of his altercations, but he usually stays here.”
Kendra looked up at the huge, double-sided cellblock. It was five tiers high, with each tier holding about fifty cells on each side. The cell doors were standard-issue prison bars, covered by metal security gates with a diagonal crosshatch pattern.
Salazar pointed to a contraption that looked like a ladder on wheels. A telephone was mounted on its upper surface. “Prisoners have telephone privileges every other day, in the morning and evening. This cart is wheeled in front of their cell, and they can reach through their food port and use the phone.”
Kendra heard dozens of television programs wafting down the cellblock. “They have TVs in their cells?”
“They can, if they want to pay for it. It’s two hundred and fifty dollars as a onetime fee. I don’t believe Colby has ever requested one. Though, as you know, money has never been a problem for him. He was a rich kid who became a rich monster.”
They stopped in front of a ground-floor cell. One of the guards spoke into his walkie-talkie, and the door unlocked with a distinct “thunk.”
Salazar turned back. “I came here this morning with the cellblock commander after we finished gathering the information you requested, Griffin.” He turned to Kendra. “Dr. Michaels, I’d like you to be prepared for what you’re going to see in here.”
Kendra found herself bracing defensively. “Why?”
Salazar grimaced. “Because Eric Colby appears to be as interested in you as you are in him.”
“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
The guard swung the door open.
Kendra stopped short.
Almost every inch of the cell, from floor to ceiling, was papered with pictures of her.
“Holy shit,” Metcalf blurted out.
Her own face, thousands of times over, stared at her from every direction. She took a deep breath, but it suddenly seemed impossible to get enough oxygen.
Don’t freeze up now. Just move.
Kendra slowly stepped into the cell, which was approximately eight feet by ten feet. There was a bed, a toilet, a small table, and wall-mounted shelves with four open compartments. And the thousands and thousands of Kendra Michaels photos, all of varying sizes and quality.
She was ice-cold, drowning, as she stared at them.
Get a grip.
“These were downloaded from the Web,” Kendra said. “Crime-scene shots, courthouse appearances, even some pictures taken at educational symposiums.”
Reade turned to the warden. “Do prisoners have Internet access?”
“No. We don’t even allow them to receive regular mail that includes printed Web pages. Photos are permitted, as long as they’re downloaded and printed by themselves. Colby obviously put the word out that he wanted pictures of you.”
“And his followers were only too happy to oblige,” Lynch said.
Kendra scanned the room, trying not to let the pictures unnerve her more than they already had.
Focus. Block it out.
“How long has he had the Kendra Michaels photo collage?” Griffin asked.
“I asked the block commander about it this morning. It’s a fairly recent phenomenon. The pictures started coming in about eight months ago, and they immediately went up on the walls.”
“Is it possible that they’re all from the same person?” Griffin asked.
“Doubtful,” Kendra cut in before the warden could respond. “Almost all of them are from different printers. Some ink jet, some laser, a few thermal. And they’re cut differently, with various types and sizes of scissors, razor blades, and paper cutters.”
Warden Salazar nodded. “We open every piece of mail that comes through here, but if it isn’t contraband, we don’t log individual senders. But apparently these have been coming from all over the country. By the way, Colby has to take them down every few days so that we can inspect the walls.”
“In case he’s trying to pull a Rita Hayworth/Shawshank Redemption number over on you?” Lynch asked.
The warden smiled. “Or using them to help hide contraband. As soon as the search is complete, he spends the rest of the day putting each picture back up.”
“A lot of work,” Metcalf said. “Though he doesn’t have a lot else to do.”
“Is this cell telling you anything?” Lynch asked.
“Surprisingly little,” Kendra said. “Or maybe not so surprising. Prisons are designed to strip inmates of their individuality.”
Griffin knelt beside the small table, examining it. “Maybe you’re just being distracted by the thousand pictures of yourself.”
“Possibly.” She glanced up at the ceiling, one of the few spots in the room where her face wasn’t staring back at her. Griffin was right. The photos had rattled her.
Close your eyes. Concentrate.
After a moment, she resumed her scan of the cell. “Are smuggled mobile phones a problem in this prison, Warden?”
“They’re a problem in every prison. Guards are the biggest offenders. If they’re caught, they usually just wind up with probation. Not much of a deterrent, especially since they can get a thousand bucks a pop for passing them along to inmates.”
Kendra continued her search. “Well, Colby has used two of them here fairly recently.”
The warden’s jaw went slack.
Lynch chuckled. “When I’m around her, I get that same look on my face.”
“How did—?”
She glanced up. “And did he attack a guard in the last week or so?”
The warden nodded warily. “Yes, there was a slight altercation. May I ask how you—”
“The room smells vaguely of bleach. None of the other cells we passed had the smell. That led me to think there was a special reason. There are a few drops of blood on the ceiling. I’m guessing there was more.”
“There was. The guard was actually trying to take away some of these pictures of you, Dr. Michaels. Colby objected, and there was a bit of a scuffle. Colby took the brunt of it.”
“But he obviously got to keep his shrine,” Lynch said.
“He … bargained.”
“With what?” Kendra asked.
“Information. He gave us the name of the guard who had sold him some prescription meds. The guard is now on administrative leave pending an investigation, and Colby got to keep his collection. It’s rare for a prisoner to inform on a guard, but I guess he figured he won’t be here that much longer.” The warden turned toward Kendra. “How did you know about the phones?”
Sight Unseen Page 14
