by Thomas Perry
The mayor said, “Since our May meeting each of us has been making quiet inquiries of our districts and pulling on the threads each of us has out in the community—neighbors, relatives, close friends, members of our clubs and churches. Mark Stein has completed a list of the people we’ve consulted and what they said. Mark, can you summarize for the lieutenant what we’ve learned?”
Mark Stein was a tall man with dark hair thinning at the top of his head. He was still dressed in the white shirt and tie he’d worn in his insurance company office all day. It was wrinkled and a little gray, and that was a sad sight to Leah. His wife had died during the prison escape two years ago, or she would have made him put on a clean shirt.
He said, “We’ve only got about three thousand citizens left on the voting rolls, but we’ve talked to three thousand four hundred and eight. Once you sort out the doubles and the triples, it looks like we got to about everybody in town who is young enough to be of sound mind and well enough to chat with his councilperson. There’s pretty much a consensus.”
He cleared his throat. “If you live here, you lost family or friends or both. Everybody feels the town is wounded, and a bit over eighty-five percent say that after giving it two years to recover, the wound is probably fatal. The town’s morale is at a new low and sinking. Twenty-five hundred were asked specifically if they thought it was time to leave, and two thousand and twelve said yes, and just over three hundred said they didn’t know but were leaning that way. A hundred and sixty-two said if we were going to do something about it, they wanted to put their names in to volunteer. Sort of a vigilante thing, I guess.” He held up a neatly typed sheet of paper. “Here are the names.”
“May I see that?” asked Leah.
He handed the sheet to her. “I made it for you. Keep it.” He sat down.
“Thank you.” She put it into her inner coat pocket without looking at it.
“The next issue on the police segment of the agenda is Lieutenant Leah Hawkins’s request for a sabbatical leave of absence to last up to one year. It will be spent studying the operations of a number of other police forces through on-the-job training and management studies. I propose that the city pay for her travel, living, and equipment expenses out of the federal grant for the rebuilding of the city’s police force. Any discussion?”
Donald Hall said, “How much money are we talking about?”
“For the travel and expenses, probably not that much,” said Nell Hoagland, who acted as the council’s comptroller. “I would guess it will be under two hundred thousand dollars, and the grant is for four million. She would also continue to receive her police department salary during her training, of course.”
“Thank you,” Hall said. “I’d like to second the motion.”
“More discussion?” asked Mayor Donaldson. “No? Then ayes? Nays?” He made a note on his yellow pad. “The motion passes unanimously.” Then he looked up and said, “Mr. Haymes, I believe you have a related motion?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “What Lieutenant Hawkins might discover is that there are pieces of equipment, vehicles, weapons, surveillance, communication, or other items that will have to be part of the federal grant’s use. She might need to purchase prototypes or the services of consultants. I would like to ask that Lieutenant Hawkins be given the power to spend additional money up to a limit at her own discretion.”
“I so move,” said Linda Harris.
“Discussion?” the mayor said.
“Once again, how much?” asked Donald Hall.
Haymes said, “I propose that one quarter of the grant, or one million dollars, be at her disposal.”
“Isn’t that a little high?”
“Yes,” said Haymes. “But since the commander of the police department will, in effect, be our main expert in deciding how to spend the entire grant to make the city safer, it seems that entrusting her with a quarter of the sum is not excessive. And there’s an incentive not to spend unwisely, since if she wastes any of it, she’ll have less to spend later. It can only be used on law enforcement, and we’ve spent exactly none of the grant so far.”
“Okay,” said Hall. “Just wanted to know.”
“Any more discussion?” said the mayor. “No? Ayes? Nays? The motion passes unanimously. Mr. Haymes?”
Haymes stood up, took a folder out of his briefcase, and set his briefcase on the floor. He opened the folder and took out four sheets of vellum paper with the city’s crest embossed on them, a buffalo and an antelope in a blue circle with points around the edges, like those of a gear, and gold lettering saying, “The City of Weldonville, Colorado, 1873.”
He set them on the conference table, then set his fountain pen beside them. “I took the liberty of producing two documents to record the two unanimous resolutions the council has just made. I ask that the mayor and council sign your names on the lines at the bottom of each sheet now so that Lieutenant Hawkins will be able to take a copy of each with her. We’ll retain the other copy, of course.”
The council members each got up and signed where he had indicated, and then the mayor signed with a flourish. Haymes was the last to sign. Then he waved each sheet back and forth to dry the ink, and put two in one file and two in another.
“Any other new business?” Mayor Donaldson asked.
There was silence.
“Motion to adjourn,” said Stein. Four voices called, “Second.”
“Meeting adjourned.”
Linda Harris said, “Leah, we’ll miss you around here.” She got up and hugged her. “You and Kathy were such good friends that to me you seem like a relative. If you ever need somebody to talk to while you’re far away, I’m available.”
Linda Harris’s mentioning Kathy was a complicated gesture, and Leah Hawkins saw all sides of it. Kathy had been one of seven civilian workers at the prison on the night of July 19 two years ago, and she had not lived through it. In high school Kathy had been one of Leah’s special friends, a member of the league championship basketball team with her, and a great spiker on the volleyball team. Sports had been part of their solution to being two extra-tall girls in a small town. Boys were too self-conscious to ask them out, but they were invited to everything. Linda Harris was reminding Leah why she didn’t want Leah to go, but Kathy’s death was why she was right to learn to make people safer.
“Lieutenant Hawkins?” Mayor Donaldson said. “Can you stop in my office so we can get the paperwork done?”
“Sure,” she said. “Thanks, Linda.”
The other council members shook her hand or hugged her, and then she followed City Attorney Haymes and Mayor Donaldson down the hall to the mayor’s office. They went inside and the mayor shut the door. They kept going into his inner office and sat in the old oak chairs upholstered in green leather.
Haymes took the first piece of vellum out of the file folder. He said, “This is the resolution composed and unanimously approved by the council and signed by the mayor and council and me. It transfers the first million dollars of the federal government’s four-million-dollar disaster grant into a second fund accessible only to Weldonville PD commanding officer Lieutenant Leah Anne Hawkins, to be used at her sole discretion to fund additional law enforcement efforts necessary since the escape from the federal penitentiary at Weldonville.”
“I didn’t ask for anything like that. I asked for a leave of absence. Is that even legal, Phil?” Leah asked.
“It’s legal enough,” Haymes said. “The city council gets to say how the grant money is spent. You just watched them do it. If the feds were to audit it, they would be forced to find that we used it in a public effort at restoring the rule of law. The fact that the town is speeding up the process of quietly dying is not something they can prove or punish. It may also mean the rest of the money will probably never be spent. That will make the accountants among them happy.”
Leah said, “All I asked for was a leave of absence. What you two did was present the council with a fiction and get them to pay for it.”<
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“The city has turned your request for a leave of absence down,” Haymes said. “It has decided instead to make sure you have resources to do what all three of us know you’re planning to do anyway. The million dollars has been deposited in the five largest banks in the United States. It will be accessible to you by five debit cards in your name. They’re in the white envelope. Use them like credit cards, or make withdrawals in cash. If you need to pay for something by check, any branch can issue a cashier’s check. Don’t keep financial records. The banks will record every expenditure as a matter of course. Any explanations will come from the city.”
He took out the second sheet of vellum. “This one is your commission from the council, essentially. It says you are engaged in enforcing the state laws of Colorado, and have the full support of the police force, the district attorney, and the city government. The city will cover any matter of legal counsel, bail, and criminal or civil liability for you and your deputies.”
He put the two sheets in the folder and handed it to her. “That’s everything we want in writing. The more you say, the more you might have to explain. The police department will remain open, partly to keep writing tickets and maintain order, and partly to back you up and send you anything you need. With the department still open, you’re a sworn police officer on assignment. If it’s closed, you’re a civilian.”
“I understand that. What I don’t understand is why you two want to become accessories to murder.”
Phil Haymes said, “Stein said it. We all lost people. Two years ago, we both heard you say that if the FBI didn’t find those twelve killers within two years, you were going after them yourself. Now, exactly two years later, you tell us you’re leaving. We know what you’re doing. We want you to succeed. We want them dead and you alive. What we’re doing is trying to make that more likely.”
Mayor Donaldson said, “Do you have any questions about anything, Lieutenant Hawkins?”
“How could I?” she said.
“All right. You can still think about it while you’re getting ready over the next few weeks. During the time while you’re gone, more people—ones you grew up knowing—will probably be packing up and moving away, but you’re working for them too. It’s up to you if you want to say goodbye to anybody. No matter what, City Attorney Haymes, Sergeant Tim Munson, Sergeant Art Sprague, and I are committed to staying at least another year to wait until you get back here. After you return we’ll each still have time to start deciding what we’ll do with the rest of our lives. If you change your mind, just let us know and we’ll make up another story.”
Leah put the folder under her arm and said, “It’s probably best if I’m gone in the next couple of days. The story you just spun is fine. I’d appreciate it if after I’m gone nobody contradicts that lie.”
Haymes said, “You can count on us. Even the council has no idea what they just approved, and we won’t enlighten them. Have you given any thought to who you’re going to take with you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going alone.” She got up and shook their hands, then accepted a hug from Mayor Donaldson. He had been a good friend of her father’s, and she had been reminded tonight that they had a lot of the same mannerisms. He even hugged like her father. She took a last look, turned, and walked out the door of the office.
Leah walked back along the marble floor of the corridor past the council chamber toward the entrance where Sergeant Munson was taking her phone and her belt with her gun and badge out of the steel box.
6
As Leah drove past the apartment building where Bill Halvorsen lived, she was tempted to stop her car, get out, and ring the bell. She could see a light on behind the curtain in a second-floor window. She kept going.
Halvorsen was a marine who had been out of the country more since high school than he had been in it. She had been about eight years older and had watched him growing up. Two years ago, when he had come home from Afghanistan, he had gone to the police station and knocked on her door. When she said, “Come in,” he had stood in the doorway for a moment.
She said, “Bill! Come in. I’m so sorry about Nick.” She got up and went to the door, closed it, and gave him a hug. He was shorter than she was by about four inches, so his chin was on her shoulder, but he was muscular—even more than when he was young—and she sensed he could pick her up with one hand. Nick was his older brother, who had worked in the prison.
Bill hugged her back, then released her. “Hi, Hawk. I’m sorry about—hell, everybody.”
On the basketball court they’d called her the Hawk, but she hadn’t heard it in years. “Did you just get back?”
“I flew into Denver last night and made it here this morning.”
She accepted that the responsibility to bring it up was hers. “You know most of it, right?”
“Some,” he said. “What I saw was a week-old television report that lasted maybe five minutes, and a couple of newspapers. I figured the only person who would know everything and still tell me the truth is you.”
She told him. “There were two thousand four hundred and ninety-eight inmates housed at the prison. About twelve hundred left the prison that night. The FBI, the state police, and our department managed to account for nine hundred and sixty-two of them during the first night and most of the rest within forty-eight hours.”
“Pretty impressive. You did a good job.”
“Not really. Those were all the easy ones. What happened was that there were a dozen men who broke out of prison. On the way out, they jammed the gates and doors and left the gun room open, so the others would go too.”
“That was to make it harder to find the twelve?”
“I think so. The smart inmates stayed in the prison and waited. About half of them saw what was going on and went back into their cells to wait it out.”
“And the other ones?”
“The stupid ones who used the opportunity of the prison break to make a run for it came out and found themselves out there in the middle of twenty miles of wheat and alfalfa fields. Most of them were city boys. They were wearing orange prison jumpsuits, and sandals and white socks instead of shoes. None of them had any civilian clothes when they ran out of the prison. None of them had a dime, and probably none of them had a clear idea of where they were or which way to run. By daylight we had nine hundred sixty-two in custody. The problem for us wasn’t capture. It was transport and incarceration. We used any trucks we could commandeer, and then had to lock them in areas that could be closed off and chained shut with padlocks because the electronic locks were sabotaged.”
“How did Nick die?”
“He was working in the out-processing area near the main gate. The twelve came through on their way out, saw him and Dave Culbert, the man working with him, and shot them.”
“Good,” said Bill. “I read that most of them were caught and strangled. Strangling would have been worse.”
“They had full-auto M4s, so Nick and Dave went fast.”
“What happened in the town?” Bill asked.
“Well,” Leah said, “first the twelve ringleaders came into town. They were wearing the street clothes from the lockers of twelve guards they had killed. They had guns from the armory of the prison. They were driving the cars the guards had parked in the lot. They had the addresses of the guards too. And they had the cell phones the guards left in their lockers. In other words, they had directions to a dozen addresses where the man of the house wasn’t ever coming home.”
“What happened?”
“Pretty much everybody’s worst fear. There were a dozen brand-new widows raped in their homes. Four of them were killed afterward. A couple of the inmates went to the warden’s house and made a big production out of making him see what they did to his wife and daughters before they killed him.”
“Why do all that stuff?” said Bill. “They had a limited time to get as far away as they could.”
Leah shrugged. “I wondered at the time, and I still do. At first, I
thought they were just a bunch of psychopaths who had found each other in prison, and that’s the kind of thing psychopaths do. Now I think they had two things in mind. One was practical. They wanted to pillage those houses to get everything they could—more clothes, food, money, and any valuables. In order to do that, they had to at least silence the families in the houses—tie them up and gag them, cut the phone wires, and take the cell phones. After that, they had the opportunity to do what they wanted. But there was something else.”
“What?”
“They were trying to kill the town—to ruin it for the people who lived here and make it into someplace where nobody would ever want to live again. They wanted people’s houses to be places where horrible things happened, so the families couldn’t bear to be there anymore, to sleep there, knowing what some member of the family went through in the next room, or even in the same room. They wanted to demonstrate to the people of the town that as long as there was a prison here, the idea of being safe was an illusion.
“The prison is actually between three and four miles from Weldonville, which the Bureau of Prisons considered enough of a margin for safety. If somebody broke out, they couldn’t get on a road and hitchhike, because the road there went right from the interstate highway to the penitentiary, so it missed the town. The only people ever on that road were guards, supply trucks, and families trying to visit a prisoner.”
Leah shrugged. “That night the twelve leaders had cars, but the other escapees didn’t, at least at first. A few saw the mountains in the distance and went toward them on the theory that forested high country would hide them. But the mountains look much closer than they are because they’re so huge. Quite a few inmates have learned how to hotwire a car, and these prisoners saw the other cars that belonged to dead guards and workers. There were forty-two guards and ten civilians there that night, and eventually the forty other cars in the lot got started and driven off.”
“Where did they drive to?”
“Whenever an inmate got one started, five or six others would pile in, sometimes even more, and the first place all of them headed was to town. They wanted the same things the first escapees did—civilian clothes, money, food and water, credit cards, keys for the cars that were parked in people’s garages. And by the end of an hour, the first escapees on foot began to arrive. As I said, there were about twelve hundred men in all. They were like an invading army.”
