Nathan’s Run

by John Gilstrap

  “Nathan, I’m just afraid you’ll get hurt.”

  “Yeah, me too. That’s why I’m gonna keep running.”

  Jesus, this kid was good. “You’re making a fool of me out here, Nathan,” she said good-naturedly.

  “No, you’re doing fine,” Nathan comforted. “But you see my side now, don’t you? When I was in Juvey, I did everything I was supposed to do and got the crap beat out of me. I turned the other cheek, just like I was supposed to, and they just beat me up some more. I tell the supervisor, and he tries to kill me. I defend myself, and the people who listen to your show call me a murderer and want to put me in the electric chair. Nobody really…” His voice caught in his throat. He fell silent. The silence lasted a long time.

  “Cares?” Denise helped.

  Nathan’s lower lip was trembling now, and he hated himself for losing control on national radio. He’d felt so together at the beginning, but suddenly a terrible sadness poured over him, like a bucket of lukewarm water. “Yes,” he whispered.

  Denise’s eyes welled up unexpectedly at the sound of the tiny voice. “You’re frightened, aren’t you, honey?”

  “I’ve got to go,” he croaked. He hung up.

  In the dead air that followed, Denise looked to Enrique for guidance, but he just stared back.

  “Well,” Denise said at length, “that was something. Nathan, if you’re still listening, we wish you all the luck in the world, however this turns out. Sounds to me like maybe you’re due for some. I think everybody needs a minute or two to regain their composure. We’ll be right back after these messages.”

  Chapter 11

  Detrelli was on the line five seconds after the radio conversation ended. He must have had the number programmed into his speed-dial.

  “That lying son of a bitch is pandering for public sympathy,” Petrelli railed at Michaels. “The issue of whether or not he was treated well in Juvey has no bearing on this case whatsoever. What matters is that he escaped from a detention facility, and he killed a supervisor to do it! His act’s good enough to take on the road.”

  This tantrum, like so many others Petrelli had unleashed against Michaels over the years, was bullshit. Warren knew that Petrelli couldn’t have cared less about an escapee on the street, or about the deaths of a hundred supervisors. The issue here was the fact that J. Daniel had taken to the airwaves with partial information, convicting a minor of a capital crime even before the evidence was collected. In this oh-so-important election year, the county prosecutor suddenly stood a very good chance of looking less like a tough-on-crime law enforcer than a child abuser. Warren knew that these rantings on the phone were just the first act in a long drama of posturings and spin controls that would attempt to explain to the press how he never really said what they had all heard him say just a few hours earlier.

  For reasons that Michaels could never understand, it was important to Petrelli that all bad guys be portrayed as sociopaths whose actions were irrational. He had no tolerance for extenuating circumstances that might have driven the criminals to behave the way they did. His obsession with dehumanizing lawbreakers pushed him to be the first to the microphones with a hard-line prosecution strategy. His approach had certainly served his career well, but Michaels, as cynical as he himself had become, couldn’t help feeling sorry once in a while for the poor bad guy.

  In the case of Nathan Bailey, Michaels didn’t know what to believe. Prisons of all sorts, whether built for adults or for children, were inherently violent places, occupied by criminals with violent pasts and staffed by personnel whose primary function was to quell violence. It didn’t stretch his imagination at all to envision a staff member becoming homicidal. As unlikely as Nathan’s story was, the boy’s presentation of the facts was too detailed, too articulate, to be written off as a complete lie. Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that Ricky Harris was dead, Michaels might have been inclined to launch a second felony investigation.

  Yet, even if he accepted Nathan’s claim that he had killed in self-defense, it was still true that the boy had broken the law when he escaped from the Juvenile Detention Center, and he remained a fugitive from justice. As a law-enforcement officer, Michaels’s obligation to apprehend the escapee had not changed one whit. While he agreed with The Bitch that the kid was undoubtedly due a little luck in his life, Michaels would continue to turn the area inside out until he was caught. He’d also continue reminding his patrol officers and detectives that a prisoner capable of killing once was capable of killing a second time.

  For Michaels, the most telling and convincing words the boy spoke on the radio were his vow never to return to the JDC. They were the words of desperation; and desperate people were known to do foolish things, even in the face of outrageous odds. Nathan still was a very dangerous young man indeed.

  On the other end of the phone line, J. Daniel Petrelli had built a much more complicated world for himself than the one in which Warren Michaels lived. In addition to considerations of mere guilt and innocence, Petrelli had to consider how each prosecution would play in the press, constantly weighing the political impact of every win and every loss. There were times when pollsters in his employ could barely keep up with the changing tides of investigations. The perceived guilt of any defendant was a key element in determining how public and how aggressive the pursuit of a guilty verdict would be.

  This morning, it had seemed so clear in the Bailey case. People were sick and tired of being frightened of out-of-control kids, and the blatant and willful murder of a corrections official by an escaping convict had been more than the public could bear. Rarely had there been such an opportunity to show strong leadership in the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office.

  True, the initial stages of the investigation had begun to unearth some dirt on Ricky Harris, but Petrelli and his staff had already devised a strategy whereby any leaks about violence in the detention facility would be made a secondary issue. It would be stressed that no child had the right to take the life of a corrections officer just because he claimed to be frightened.

  Who in the world would have thought that the kid would take his case directly to the people on a nationally syndicated radio show? The little shit’s performance was perfect. It was still way too early to have any hard polling numbers, but there was no doubt what they would show. Americans loved the underdog, even underdogs who killed. In twenty short minutes, Nathan Bailey had placed the police and the prosecutors on the defensive.

  Petrelli saw it all so clearly. The Bailey kid had been incarcerated by a judge for stealing his uncle’s car, and for being declared incorrigible. He was to have remained in detention for eighteen months. He had taken it upon himself to unlawfully leave the Juvenile Detention Center, and in the process killed a supervisor. He was a thief, a jailbreaker and a murderer, and he deserved to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

  But Petrelli knew, even before the first polling question was asked, that all the public would see was a small, beaten boy being pursued and outnumbered by big bad cops. Petrelli was reminded of the old television series The Fugitive. Everyone knew from the outset that Richard Kimble was a fugitive from the law, and that Lieutenant Gerard was just doing his job, but who did everyone see as the villain?

  The senator-to-be was sitting on the edge of a public relations nightmare, and he held Michaels responsible. If the police hadn’t botched the response, the, kid would have been reincarcerated before dawn. Now he’d been on the run all night, and he had done incalculable damage to a political career in its infancy.

  “So listen to this carefully, Lieutenant Michaels, because I will only say it once. I expect you to apprehend Nathan Bailey by this afternoon at the latest. And I don’t want to hear any excuses!”

  That was it. Michaels had been able to tolerate Petrelli’s rantings to this point, busying himself with other trivial tasks on his desk. But the prosecutor had crossed the line.

  “All right, J. Daniel, I’ve listened carefully,” Warren said in
measured tones, “and I guarantee you’ll only say it once. Here’s how I see it: You just couldn’t wait to open your big mouth this morning and make wholly unjustified comments to the press. I’m the cop, J., you’re the mouthpiece. If you’d have waited for us to collect evidence before you rested your case, you wouldn’t be looking like such an asshole now. My heart fucking bleeds for you.

  “Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass who’s elected senator this year. I probably won’t even vote. All I care about is doing my job. Save your speeches for the press, J. And stay off my phone!”

  He slammed the receiver onto the cradle. Damn, that felt good.

  “Feel better?”

  The familiar voice startled him. When Michaels looked up, he saw Jed Hackner’s form filling the doorway. “Jesus, Jed, I don’t need a heart attack today.”

  Hackner smiled, helping himself to one of the straight-backed chairs in front of Michaels’s desk. “Lighten up, boss. Talking to your buddy Petrelli?”

  “You got it. The asshole’s beginning to panic after Nathan Bailey’s radio debut. Did you hear it?”

  Hackner nodded. “Yeah. Well, most of it. I missed the first couple of minutes. He sounded pretty convincing to me. Overall, I think Petrelli’s got reason to panic. He made the kid sound like young John Dillinger, when Oliver Twist might have been a better choice.”

  Michaels smiled wryly. “Yeah, well, I don’t remember little Oliver killing any law-enforcement personnel.” He abruptly changed the subject. “I don’t suppose you have any good news for me.”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s good or not, but it certainly is interesting.”

  Michaels’s thick eyebrows raised in anticipation.

  “First of all, we haven’t been able to contact the kid’s uncle and ex-guardian, Mark Bailey. We tried on the phone; even sent a unit around, but if he was home, he wasn’t answering the door.”

  “You think he helped in the escape?”

  “Not likely. There’s not a lot of love lost between the two of them.”

  “Give me the lowdown.”

  Hackner removed the notebook from his pocket and started reading. “This all comes from the Juvey files. Judge Potter unsealed them for us this morning. Kind of a sad story, really. For the first ten years of his life, Nathan Bailey was raised by his father. His mother died when he was just a baby. Daddy was a lawyer with lots of bucks, but not much in the way of estate planning. Two years ago, Daddy’s car got whacked by a train, killing him. With no provisions for who was gonna take care of Nathan, custody went to Uncle Mark, way down in the Jackson’s Corner area. Apparently Mark thought that the kid would be supported by a trust fund, but Daddy had just sunk two-plus million into his practice, secured against every asset he owned. By the time his estate cleared probate, there was nothing left.

  “Needless to say, Uncle Mark was not a happy camper. Not only did he have custody, but he had no way of paying for Nathan’s upkeep. So, he didn’t. Social Services was out to the house a half-dozen times over the year Nathan was there, responding mostly to neighbor complaints, but nothing ever came of it. Finally, about a year ago, Nathan stole his uncle’s car, claiming that it was the only way he could get far enough away from the son of a bitch. Of course, Uncle Mark pressed charges. Record shows that Judge Potter offered a sweetheart of a probation deal, but Uncle Mark didn’t want to hear it. He told the court, and I quote, ‘A little time in prison never hurt anyone.’”

  “Nice guy,” Michaels snorted.

  “No, he’s not,” Jed corrected, very serious. “Mark Bailey knows whereof he speaks, having logged seven years at Leavenworth for burning down an officers’ club in Texas. In the eight years he’s been in the county, he’s had three DWIs, two disorderly conducts, and an assault and battery charge that was dropped when the victim had a change of heart about testifying. He’s also logged about a million bar fights, almost all of them on the losing end.”

  Michaels was incredulous. “Did Social Services know about all this when they assigned custody to him?”

  Hackner shrugged. “I guess so. To be honest, there really wasn’t much of a choice. It was either Uncle Mark or foster care.”

  Michaels shook his head slowly, briefly pushing aside his cynical cop’s perspective and seeing it as a father would. “Tough breaks for a little kid.”

  Jed flipped a page in his notebook. “Yeah, well, it gets worse. Two different psychiatrists, paid for by Daddy’s lawyer friends, submitted petitions to the court for the kid to be kept out of the Juvey system, claiming that the emotional stress would be too much for him.” Hacker held up a yellow sheet of paper. “Report here says the two docs claimed the kid ‘lags behind his peers physically and emotionally.’ But you know Judge Potter. He feels for the kids whose cases he hears, but if you’ve broken the law, you’re gonna pay. So he shipped Nathan, who’d just turned twelve, up to Brookfield and put him in the general population. He arrived on a Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday night, he’s gang-raped with a broom handle and has to spend a week in the infirmary.”

  Michaels winced and held up his hand. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more. Is the rest just gossip, or does it have any real bearing on the case?”

  Jed shrugged, his feelings hurt. He was a cop, not a columnist. He didn’t deal in gossip; every detail had a bearing on a case. But he had known Warren long enough to know his meaning. He flipped his notebook closed. “No, I suppose that’s about it. But there is more news.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Turns out we’ve got a videotape after all.”

  “I thought the camera was broken.”

  “The camera in the Crisis Unit was. But we were able to catch Master Bailey on his way out through the in-processing area.”

  “Were other cameras working, too?”

  “Not all of them. The rec hall camera was off-line as well. All the others seem to be in good shape. But the Bailey kid only passed through that one zone. Plus, we’ve got another couple of seconds of him exiting the back door. You want to see the tape? I’ve got it set up in the conference room.”

  Both men rose together, Michaels following Hackner out of the office. The squad room beyond the glass partitions of Warren’s office was crammed with twice the number of desks it was designed to contain, providing space not only for Michaels’s eight subordinate detectives and the clerical staff, but also for three building inspectors, a probation officer and a displaced Welfare staffer who never seemed to move up on the priority list for space at her own agency. Wedged into a third-floor corner of the forty-year-old Civil Defense Building, the view from the windows was dominated by the Adult Detention Center on one side and a sprawling magnolia tree on the other.

  “So how come the only cameras that weren’t working were the ones we needed to see?” Michaels asked, navigating a serpentine route through the maze of desks.

  Hackner shrugged. “Pretty convenient, isn’t it?”

  “I want you to look into that angle, okay, Jed? I want to know if somebody helped him. Start with the uncle.”

  Hackner agreed. “I’ve already got Thompkins trolling that line.”

  They entered the conference room opposite Warren’s office and closed the door. The television was on, the tape cued. With the press of a button, the image on the TV screen wiggled and danced while the heads in the VCR took up the slack. In the fuzzy black-and-white shadows typical of security cameras, Michaels watched an empty room he recognized from the night before as the in-processing area. From the upper right-hand corner of the screen, a boy appeared, looking ridiculous in a hugely oversized pair of coveralls. He looked frightened; his movements were simultaneously quick and hesitant. He was barefoot. His clothes were smeared with what could have been ink, or even chocolate syrup in the colorless image, but what everyone knew was his victim’s blood.

  “Stop the tape,” Michaels commanded. An instant later, the boy on the screen stopped, his legs slightly skewed from his torso, a fuzzy electr
onic line bisecting the two halves. “Bailey said on the radio that the guard—the supervisor—took away his shoes. Why did he do that? Is that standard practice?”

  Hackner shook his head. “Don’t know for sure yet, but I don’t think so. If we believe Bailey’s story on the radio, could be that Harris was just trying to be nasty. I’m meeting with Johnstone this afternoon to find out what I can.”

  Michaels motioned with a nod. “Go ahead. Start the tape again.”

  The boy’s body became whole again, and he darted straight for the camera, looking over alternating shoulders with every step. He moved like a dog encountering a shadow in the night, not sure whether to stand and fight or to run away. The boy on the screen was visibly startled when he noticed the camera. He turned completely around, presumably checking to see who would be following him.

  When Nathan turned back to the camera, Michaels’s heart stopped beating for just the briefest of moments. The expression in Nathan’s eyes was one he had seen before.

  “Stop the tape!”

  The command was louder this time. The body was cut in half again, more severely this time, but the face and eyes were untouched by the interference. Nathan’s eyes spoke of fear and uncertainty, the wrinkled brow showing greater age than the smooth features should allow. Beyond the blood and the fear was the face of a young boy begging for help.

  Michaels had seen that very expression dozens of times from the face of another insecure, introverted twelve-year-old who’d once depended upon him for so much, but now was silent forever. An image flashed though his mind of that other boy’s face—now expressionless—reclining against a satin pillow, looking so uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit, a ridiculous gap around the shirt collar. So confined in a narrow box.

  Michaels felt suddenly light-headed, and lowered himself clumsily into a chair at the conference table. His face was drained of color.

  Hackner reached out to help his friend into the chair. “My God, Warren, are you all right?”