The Bastille - a Thriller

by Victor Methos

  THE BASTILLE

  A Mickey Parsons Thriller by

  VICTOR METHOS

  1

  “You ain’t gonna believe who we transportin’ tonight.”

  Reginald Denser looked up from his coffee. He leaned back in his chair, staring at the other prison guard, Tony, across his desk. “Who’s that now?”

  “Zain Tamora.”

  A chill went up his back. Denser knew Tamora. Knew him up close. Tamora was the reason he was behind a desk instead of out with the general population. Tamora had faked a heart attack in his administrative segregation cell. When Denser ran in to check on him, Tamora broke his back, twisting Denser like a pretzel. It took four guards to subdue him, and then only with the help of tasers and Mace.

  “Fuck him,” Denser said.

  Tony had a glimmer in his eye. He was relishing telling him this. Later, Denser thought, he would probably go home and brag to his family about how he had transported mass murderer Zain Tamora and shown him who was boss.

  “You know the story ’bout him? I mean the whole thing?” Tony asked.

  Denser looked out the only window in the room. The sun was setting and darkness descended outside. No moon was hanging in the sky that he could see. “I don’t care.”

  “Killed his family, his neighbors, went into work and killed everyone there. He tried to kill everyone that he damn well knew. Took six rounds to put him down but the fucker lived.”

  Denser was growing uncomfortable. He moved his feet down from his desk and threw the paper coffee cup into the trash bin. He rose and pulled up his pants, which were too big for him. “I gotta take a piss.”

  Once out in the hall, Denser glanced back to the guard booth. This was the first and last stop any prisoner saw. The first thing going in, the last thing going out. If someone was trying to make an escape, his would be the last gate for them to go through.

  He went into the bathroom and tried to urinate, but didn’t have to go. The bathroom was an excuse to get out of the booth. He sat on the sink a while and only then noticed that his heart was pounding. He turned around and splashed water on his face and neck.

  The prison, the J. Keller Glenn Correctional Institute, sat seventy-five miles out of Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert. The inmates, thanks to some smartass history teacher that was in there for killing two of his students, called it the Bastille. Denser didn’t get it and didn’t want to. As far as he was concerned, all the inmates could go to hell.

  He marched back into the hall and went into the guard booth. Tony was gone. Probably to talk to somebody else about Tamora.

  Denser’s heart began to pound again, and he tried to calm himself by putting his feet up on the desk and picking up a magazine. But that didn’t help. He put his feet down and rose. He had to be standing for this.

  Within a few minutes, three guards were walking down the hall with a prisoner in between them. Tamora was tall and muscular. Denser had no doubt Tamora would have held several lifting records at the prison, at least bench and deadlift, if he could ever be convinced to interact with anyone long enough to sign up for the competitions.

  Denser swallowed when he saw him and knew his face revealed his fear. He puffed up his chest and put his thumbs in his belt loops to make up for it.

  The group got to the first gate and one of the guards tapped the steel door with a retractable baton. Denser swallowed, and opened the gate. Tamora had been in D-Wing for his entire stay at the Bastille. D-Wing was reserved for the most violent offenders—those who would kill other inmates if exposed to them. But for the past two and a half years, Tamora hadn’t had an infraction. In fact, he didn’t even talk. He just sat quietly in his cell.

  The psychiatrists said this was progress and that they should try integrating him back to the gen pop. Hell, Denser thought, what they should try was putting a bullet into his head. But the warden had approved the transfer and the warden was the boss.

  Tamora was filthy, covered in his own urine and feces. Denser could smell him from twenty feet away. He was shackled from head to toe and the chains rattled as he walked. His white prison jumpsuit looked brown from lack of care and his feet were black. No slippers or shoes—just black feet with long, curled toenails.

  Tamora paced the corridor slowly, as though measuring each step. One guard was behind him and another one on each side. Tamora kept his head down, staring at the linoleum as the guards brought him near. Denser held his head high and flexed his back, thinking it made him look bigger. As Tamora walked by, he didn’t seem to notice. He was lost in his own world of staring at whatever he thought was interesting on the floor. Denser had been holding his breath and he breathed out, relieved.

  And suddenly, Tamora stopped. He looked up at Denser. No smile, no nothing. Just glowered at him. Denser thought he might piss himself, but he couldn’t look away.

  “Keep goin’, asshole,” the guard behind said as he pushed him.

  Tamora turned back to staring at the floor and continued past Denser. They pushed him to the second gate and Denser swallowed and opened it for them, his hands trembling. The steel door slid open and the four of them walked through before it closed again.

  Denser collapsed onto his chair. He felt dizzy and weak. At night, when he was alone, he’d see Tamora in his sleep, standing over him in bed. One night, he even woke and thought he was right there—a dark figure dressed in black, hovering over him, his eyes sparkling like gems. Denser screamed and it woke his wife. It took her nearly ten minutes and a couple of fingers of whiskey to calm him down.

  Denser inhaled a deep breath and put his feet up. He chuckled to himself. That was the first meeting since five years ago when Tamora had broken his back. Denser had thought he’d faint when he saw him, but he’d held his own, kept the man’s gaze without flinching. And now Tamora was gone to A-Wing, where they kept the mental health patients. He’d be allowed two hours a day outside with the other inmates and could, as the psychiatrist put it, “try to reintegrate with society.”

  Yeah. Right.

  A solid five minutes passed. Denser suddenly realized he hadn’t gotten a confirmation. When a prisoner was transferred from one wing to another, it was regulation to call back to the wing he’d been transferred from and let them know the prisoner had arrived. A-Wing was always busy, though. The crazies were constantly throwing fits and attacking each other. They were probably just occupied.

  Denser waited another five minutes and still no call. It was paranoid of him, but he called over to A-Wing.

  “A-Wing, this is booth one in D. Have you received custody of prisoner 0454?”

  Static and then a female voice said, “Negative, booth one. Prisoner has not arrived.”

  Denser thought a moment. A-Wing was less than three hundred feet away. He stood up and grabbed his jacket. The last thing Denser wanted was for anyone to think he was still affected by Tamora’s attack. If he went out there, everyone would know it still bothered him. The guards would know first and then the inmates. With these inmates, you couldn’t show a single weakness. They would exploit it for all it was worth.

  He paced the corridor a few times, his boots echoing against the walls, and then checked back in with A-Wing.

  “A-Wing, booth one again. Any word?”

  “Negative.”

  “Roger that.”

  Denser flipped through the cameras. Between D and A-Wing was a single video camera in probably the worst spot: right before entering A-Wing. He couldn’t see anything. He tapped his fingers against the sidearm in the holster on his hip, and then radioed for Tony to come down.

  “What do you need?” Tony asked through the intercom.

  “Watch the booth, would ya? Somethin’s wrong.”

&
nbsp; “What?”

  “Just watch the booth.”

  “You got it.”

  Denser waited until Tony came down and opened the gate for him. Beyond that was a corridor, and the locked front entrance to the building, where he swiped his ID badge and was out into the warm night air.

  He saw the moon, hidden behind some gray-black clouds, just a slit of light in the sky. A paved walkway led around D-Wing, past several other buildings, and over to A-Wing. Denser walked quickly, keeping his hand on his sidearm. High chain-link gates tipped with barbed wire surrounded him. Two gates protected the perimeter, each at least eighteen feet high. In the fifteen years he’d been there, no one had ever escaped.

  He rounded a corner and had a clear view of A-Wing. But no one was on the path leading there. They must’ve taken a quick pit-stop for something before reaching A-Wing. Denser thought about heading back, but since he was so close, he might as well head over to A-Wing and make sure everything was all right.

  As he started over, he heard something. A rustling in one of the bushes surrounding the cafeteria building. He looked over and saw boots sticking out of the bush. Denser pulled out his sidearm. He took a step so he could peek over the bush.

  “Who’s there?”

  He saw the uniform. A guard.

  Denser, without thinking, stepped closer around the bush. One of the guards he’d seen not twenty minutes ago lay on his back. He was choking on his own blood. A bloody stump kept darting in and out of his mouth. The man’s tongue had been ripped out.

  “Holy shit!” Denser pulled out his walkie-talkie when he felt someone watching him. His thumb was over the comm button and he held it there, frozen.

  Denser spun around… but no one was there. He lifted the walkie-talkie to his lips but it fell from his hand. His body wasn’t responding to him anymore. He glanced down and saw the metal tip of something sharp sticking out of his chest. A fiery pain shot through him and he vomited blood as he was lifted into the air, the blade tearing through sinew and organs before he slipped off and hit the ground hard. He tried to scream, but no sounds came.

  Denser watched the moon as he felt his organs flopping out of him. He placed his hands over his belly, trying to catch them, and then lay his head back.

  The last thing Reginald Denser saw was a black figure standing over him, eyes sparkling in the blackness of night.

  2

  The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, once the inspiration for countless movies and television shows, had become just an advisory and training unit. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Unit had taken over the BSU’s primary task of apprehending an extremely rare kind of criminal: ones who could function just well enough to mask the insanity inside them. Local law enforcement could rarely deal with this type of killer effectively. They moved around too much, or came from a law enforcement background themselves, and were incredibly difficult to catch.

  So when Mickey Parsons parked his car in the Behavioral Science Unit’s lot, he knew he was working somewhere on the decline. Funding to the Behavioral Science Unit had been cut drastically after 9/11. All the FBI’s efforts went into terrorism—serial murder, organized crime, white collar crime, political corruption and a host of other areas the FBI investigated took a backseat.

  Mickey could understand cutting funding to, and efforts in, many of those fields. But serial murder, he felt, should not have been on that list. Over the years, or even decades, that most serial murderers worked, they could rack up as many as thirty victims. He didn’t see how that wasn’t just as important as stopping terrorists.

  Mickey stepped out of the car and headed into the building. Technically, his job was still screening. Whenever requests from local law enforcement agencies came in, a screener in Behavioral Science would look over the request, verify it, and send it to the Violent Criminal Apprehension Unit. Mostly it was running blood samples in Quantico’s labs, or fiber analysis, or DNA matching. Every once in a while, it would be a request for an agent to come out and actually help in an investigation.

  The last one of those Mickey had been sent on had almost gotten him killed.

  These days, Mickey only handled screening and would send any requests for field agents to younger men. But his favorite job, and the sole reason he still worked when he nearly qualified for retirement, was teaching.

  He taught Psychopathology at the Academy to agents in training or new field agents that needed refresher courses. Some of the older agents took his seminars as well, and he never shunned them. He had always believed you had to be constantly learning to keep the mind sharp.

  Mickey entered the dimly lit lecture hall building and trudged through to the bathroom. While he was there, his watch started beeping. It was time for his medications. He had switched to Atripla, an HIV medication that reduced the number of pills he had to take without reducing their potency. But the pills seemed to be the size of grapes, and he had to cut them in half before swallowing.

  Mickey took each half of the pill with water from the faucet, used the urinal, washed his hands, and stared at himself in the mirror. He didn’t see himself staring back in the mirror. He saw his father. Almost gray hair for gray hair. He wondered just when in the hell he’d gotten so old.

  Mickey walked out of the bathroom and strolled into the auditorium. Whenever possible, he tried to avoid rushing—even when he was late. Soon after he’d been diagnosed as HIV positive, he’d found that the disease wore him down. Even minor exertion could lead to exhaustion.

  He sauntered to the front of the auditorium and turned to face the class. Mickey did all of his lectures without notes. He knew them by heart. Everything he taught had been used at one time or another in a case. It was all useful in an investigation—even if the younger agents in training couldn’t see how.

  “Let’s begin,” Mickey said. “Today we’ll be discussing the predominance of psychopathy in the professions and the Bob Hare checklist.” He stopped and poured water out of a pitcher into a paper cup and took a sip. “We used to believe psychopathy was a disorder that affected a certain region of the brain and always produced certain results. For example, if you were a psychopath, you would have been expected to be cruel, maybe even a killer. You’d be expected to have a long criminal history. That was later found to not be true at all.

  “Psychopaths fall on a spectrum. And many of them are not only successful members of society, they’re productive members. There’s even some argument that our society could not have existed were it not for psychopaths at the helm. Does anyone know what profession has the highest percentage of psychopaths?”

  The students remained mostly quiet. There was never an assigned textbook in Mickey’s classes. He didn’t believe they learned anything from them. He assigned the psychology classics like The Gift of Fear or the History of Murder instead. That strategy had its benefits, but it also had the drawback that, much of the time, it was difficult for the class to participate.

  One young man raised his hand. “Lawyers?”

  “Good guess. Lawyers are number three. The percentage of psychopaths in the general population is one percent. Lawyers and CEOs have three percent and four percent respectively. One other profession has a higher average. Anyone know what it is?”

  A young woman in a T-shirt with the words “FBI” over her heart said, “Law enforcement.”

  “That’s right,” Mickey said, looking at her. “Law enforcement, because of the direct power the position has over the general population, attracts the highest number of psychopaths—we think somewhere around five percent, but it could be as high as ten percent. And those are just the ones that get in. A massive number of psychopaths apply for police jobs and are denied. Occasionally, they’ll go into peripheral law enforcement jobs, like security guard or dogcatcher. The BTK killer was a property code enforcement officer for the city, and routinely wrote people five or six tickets just for the thrill he got from exercising his power. Statistically, out of this class of fifty, at least two of you will be ps
ychopaths.”

  Mickey took another sip of water. He spoke for another ten minutes about the incidence of psychopathy in the professions of business and politics. He spoke of the high-functioning psychopath: someone who couldn’t feel the pain of others, but who nonetheless was able to generally conform their behavior to the norms of society.

  And, briefly, he discussed a type of psychopath that no textbook yet had discussed, called the empathic psychopath—a psychopath who had gone the opposite direction from the rest. Rather than an inability to feel emotion, an empathic psychopath felt too much emotion. This gave them incredible insight into the minds of madmen, but also put them at risk of taking on the traits of the monsters they studied, which would then lead to pure psychopathy, a shutting off of the emotions. They literally felt so much they shut their emotions off.

  Mickey knew two such empathic psychopaths; Gillian Hanks, the head of the Behavioral Science Unit and therefore his boss, was one. Of course, he’d never bring it up to her. But he saw her make leaps in cases where others couldn’t. She recognized this trait in herself to some extent and used it for the betterment of society by rising in the FBI.

  The other was a homicide detective who was, as far as Mickey had heard, with the Honolulu PD: Jon Stanton.

  Stanton, unlike Gillian, didn’t recognize what he was. That frightened Mickey. He’d seen Stanton take on the speech patterns of people he’d been around, their style of walking and moving… and he’d done it completely unconsciously. Mickey always worried about what would happen if Stanton studied one too many monsters.

  Mickey then went into a discussion about a 1998 FBI study he’d worked on called Killed in the Line of Duty: A Study of Selected Murders of Law Enforcement Personnel. Mickey and his colleagues had found that of all offenders who had killed a law enforcement officer, forty-four percent were psychopaths. Given how rare psychopaths were, that so many of them would kill police demonstrated their rebellion against authority and their inability to conform to the law. One of the subjects of the study had killed a police officer in Georgia for no other reason than that the officer was going to write him a speeding ticket.