The Bastille - a Thriller

by Victor Methos

  “What can I do for you, Agent Parsons?”

  “Quite the place you have here, Warden,” Mickey said, trying to make some small talk before digging into what he needed.

  “I’m glad you approve. Now what did you need?”

  Mickey forced a grin. “I need information on Zain Tamora.”

  “I’d be happy to make his file available for you to read. You understand of course that I can’t make copies without a court order.”

  “I can read the file later. I’m more interested in how he escaped.”

  “Ah yes, that.” The warden leaned back in the seat with his arms on the armrests. “He was being transferred to the mental health wing of the institute.”

  “For almost twenty years, he was in the general population. That seems like a long time to miss that he had mental health issues.”

  The warden pursed his lips. “It was not by choice, I assure you.”

  “What then?”

  “The details of that, I’m afraid, I cannot discuss.”

  “You can’t or won’t?”

  “Can’t.”

  Mickey watched him a moment. “There’s a gag order, isn’t there? Did someone lobby to have him transferred?”

  “Our prison has been under attack practically since the day of its inception. There are those that feel our methods are… inhumane, I suppose you’d say. Most of the time, the Attorney General’s Office wins the court battles. Sometimes they lose. The ACLU filed a petition about four years ago to have him transferred. We won in the district court, and they appealed and won in the appellate court. So he was transferred. The results, of course, you can see.”

  “How about the physical actions he took?”

  “We’re not entirely sure. But it appears he simply broke his handcuffs. We found a pair with the chain shattered. He must’ve fractured both his wrists doing it, but he did. Then he overpowered the three guards he was with.”

  “Overpowered?”

  “Have you ever seen a picture of Zain Tamora, Agent Parsons?”

  “Just what was in the paper twenty years ago.”

  “He’s quite an… imposing man. Enormously strong. A guard, one of the ones he ended up killing, actually, once had his back broken by Tamora. He simply wasn’t paying attention and Tamora got a hold of him. He was like a cobra. If you lost your concentration for a second, he would bite.”

  “How did he get off the prison grounds?”

  “He stole one of the prison vans and rammed it through the gates. We found it abandoned about a mile from here. He disappeared into the desert. A single person on foot could hide out there forever. No helicopters could ever spot him if he didn’t want to be spotted.”

  Mickey looked behind the warden at a shelf of photographs. The warden wasn’t smiling in any of them.

  “You’re aware he’s killed an FBI agent as well as three other people at a gas station?”

  “Yes, I’d heard. Unfortunate. But if I had been allowed to run my prison as I see fit, it never would’ve happened.”

  “The gas station is on the way to Las Vegas. Do you know why he would be going there?”

  “Haven’t a clue. His entire family is dead, he has no known friends… other than causing havoc, I have no idea why he would go there.”

  Mickey waited a beat. Silence, he had learned through hundreds of hours of interrogation, was almost always more effective than words. An insecure person, or someone with something to hide, couldn’t handle silence. Even those who had nothing to hide and were confident began a journey of self-doubt in silence.

  Mickey sat quietly a good half minute, pretending to look from photo to photo in the office. The warden didn’t move. He didn’t sigh or say a single word. He simply waited patiently for Mickey to speak again. He, too, was a man who found silence useful.

  “I think I will read through that file, Warden.”

  “Of course. Please, use my office. I have to make a few arrangements anyhow.”

  The warden rose and rigidly walked to the door. Mickey thought he might be gripping something in his buttocks.

  “I’ll have the guard bring in the file.”

  “Thanks.”

  Mickey leaned back in the seat and watched the sun outside in a blue, cloudless sky. He rose after a minute and went to the window. The guard tower directly in front of him was manned by two guards. One of them saw him and nodded. Mickey nodded back, and then sat down at the warden’s desk and waited for the file.

  13

  The car screeched to a stop in front of the home. Carrie Fetcher got out and dashed inside. The alarm sounded and she typed the code on the keypad. Taking a second to think, she entered it again and reset the alarm.

  She ran through her home at a sprint. Grabbing a suitcase out of the closet, she threw it on the bed. The amount of clothes didn’t matter at this point. She just needed a few changes. Wherever she ended up going, she could buy more clothes there.

  Carrie grabbed several pairs of jeans and a few blouses, some shoes, and plenty of underwear, stockings and socks. The suitcase was overflowing and she trimmed her selections down to one pair of jeans, two blouses and some shoes and underwear. The bathroom was just off the master bedroom and she shoved as many toiletries into her suitcase as she could think to get.

  She ran back into the kitchen and wondered if she should bring some food with her. Then she realized she could buy food anywhere. Next, she thought about taking her laptop or photo albums. None of it was essential. In the end, the only other thing she grabbed was her iPad.

  Racing out of her house, she nearly tripped on her welcome mat. She tossed the suitcase into the trunk and was about to get into the driver’s seat when she heard tires squealing on the pavement behind her.

  She jumped, breathless, and looked behind her. A car was speeding up the street. Her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it in her ears. Without taking her eyes off the car, she began backing away up the street to a neighbor’s house. Any neighbor. She tripped on the curb and nearly fell over but caught herself.

  As the car neared, she turned and ran for the house to the north of her. A couple lived there. Older. Maybe they’d have a gun. She dashed up the lawn and pounded on the door.

  The car had reached her now. She glared at it, at the two occupants, as they drove by.

  Two teenage boys. One of them made an obscene gesture with his tongue and they sped away laughing. She closed her eyes and bent over, feeling like she might pass out any second. Her neighbor came to the door still chewing on whatever he was eating for dinner.

  “Carrie? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Nothing, Taylor, I’m sorry… I’m sorry I interrupted your dinner.”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine. Listen, someone might come by looking for me. If you see anyone near my house, will you please call the police?”

  “The police? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. It’s personal business. Just… if you see anyone, call the police. Okay?”

  “Okay, if you say so. Where are you going?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know yet.”

  With that, she raced back to her car, leaving Taylor on his porch staring at her. She felt bad scaring him like that, but they certainly needed to know to get the police out here right away.

  She flipped a U-turn and sped down her street. Rolling through the stop sign, she headed for the nearest freeway onramp until she happened to glance down and see she was nearly out of gas.

  “Shit.”

  The gas station wasn’t far from her house, maybe five minutes. And it was near the onramp.

  She got there in less than two minutes, blowing through two red lights and nearly getting clipped by a Mercedes. The sky was getting dark, and the lighting from the gas station irritated her. Something about the harsh fluorescence reminded her of a hospital or a morgue—neither of which she wanted to remember.

  Carrie got out of the car and ran her credit card on the
pump. After inserting the nozzle, she clicked it on and set it at its highest setting. The gas was pouring in but it couldn’t move fast enough for her. She folded her arms and paced around her car, her eyes darting up and down the street.

  Her mind was scrambled and she couldn’t hold any thought for very long. Just when she thought she had calmed herself, another rush of adrenaline shot through her, and her hands trembled.

  The dispenser clicked off and startled her. She withdrew it and hooked it back on the pump before getting into her car and speeding away.

  14

  The guard brought the file in and laid it on the desk. He was chewing gum and popped it before asking, “Need anything else?”

  “I’m good, thank you.”

  Mickey waited for the guard to leave before opening the file.

  Zain Tamora’s early childhood and upbringing were a blur. No records, like report cards or a juvenile history, were available until he hit sixteen and garnered his first arrest. He grew up in a town called Cedar City in Utah, somewhere Mickey had never heard of. An address was listed for a stepmother who would be, based on her birth date, ninety-two years old.

  The file contained copies of the original police reports from Tamora’s murders. Mickey scanned them. He remembered the story vividly. He wasn’t yet a federal agent. He’d only been back from Vietnam about six years, and was still trying to adjust to civilian life. He’d heard about the killings and was afraid Zain Tamora was a vet. At the time, vets weren’t treated pleasantly and certainly weren’t honored like today’s veterans. They had a hard enough time without one of their own murdering their family and having their face splashed in all the papers.

  But Tamora hadn’t been a veteran. As far as Mickey could tell, he had no real affiliation with any group. At the time of the murders, he’d worked at a meat processing plant. After murdering his wife and children, he killed an innocent jogger and pedestrian on the way to the plant. There he managed to kill the receptionist and his boss, as well as several other coworkers.

  While in custody awaiting trial, Tamora racked up several counts of aggravated assault and mayhem, including one instance where he bit out the eye of another inmate. When he was convicted, they spared him the death penalty due to mental illness and he was shuffled away to J. Keller Glenn.

  No history existed for him here at the prison, which Mickey found odd. How was someone unable to conform to societal norms even long enough to get to trial able to go nearly eighteen years without a single incident?

  The visitor logs for him were in the file. No one had come to visit him in the entirety of his time here.

  Mickey read through the rest of the file, then started over and read it again. It had a lot of information, but none of it was really useable. It was almost as if the file had been padded with useless facts, nothing about the man himself.

  He took out his phone and snapped a photo of the police report’s cover page listing the detectives working the case. Then he closed the file and rose. He stretched his back and neck as fatigue slowly crept over him. His watch began to beep, and he decided he’d take his medication after he ate. It left a coppery taste in his mouth for hours afterward and made eating unpleasant.

  As he left the office, he noticed the guard sitting in the hallway.

  “All done?” the guard asked.

  “Yeah. Tell the warden thanks for letting me look at the file.”

  The guard rose and began leading him out. “Find anything useful?”

  “Not really. Did you know Tamora at all?”

  “No one knew him. That’s the wrong way to look at it. He didn’t speak the whole time he was here.”

  “You telling me he didn’t talk for eighteen years?”

  “Not a peep that I knew of. He’d just sit in his cell. See, we’re required by law to take ’em outta their cells once every other day for an hour by themselves. We chain ’em up and let ’em walk in a circle out in the yard. He never went. He just sat in the dark staring at the walls. Only time he ever did anything was when he pretended to have that heart attack. Then he almost killed the guard that ran in there to help the son-of-a-bitch.”

  Mickey was silent for the rest of the trek out of the prison. Visualizing Tamora sitting in a dark cell, not speaking for nearly two decades, and then suddenly murdering four guards, was unsettling. It seemed… inhuman.

  “Thanks again,” Mickey said as he was let out into the parking lot.

  “You bet.”

  Mickey got into his car and pulled up the photo of the cover sheet on his phone. He attached it to an email and sent it to the records division of the Bureau with a note to give him all the information they could find on the two detectives who originally worked the case. The records division would just think he was following up on a request for aid and hopefully wouldn’t probe any further.

  He waited a few moments, catching his breath, and then pulled out of the parking lot and headed back to the freeway.

  Mickey passed a fast food restaurant on the way into Vegas, but decided to wait for something better. He left the highway for a section of the city known as the Old Strip, where the original casinos had set up camp. Now it was tattoo shops and liquor stores.

  Mickey pulled in at a dive Mexican restaurant and parked. By the time he got inside and sat down, his phone was vibrating, indicating he had an e-mail. He ordered a chicken enchilada with a Sprite and then opened the e-mail. It was from the records division.

  The two detectives that worked the original Zain Tamora case were both with Las Vegas Metro PD. Every county had a sheriff’s department, and major cities had their own police units. But Las Vegas Metro actually contracted with Clark County to be their sole police department. That made it one of the largest departments in the nation.

  Because of their vast resources, each detective was given fewer cases to work. A note in the file said the two detectives on the Tamora case worked it almost to the exclusion of everything else for a month. Odd that they would do that, Mickey thought. Considering that they had their collar the first day.

  One of the detectives had passed away from liver failure three years ago—an occupational hazard in most departments. The drinking reached epic proportions and alcoholism was rampant.

  The second detective, a man named Cornelius Red, was still alive. He lived in an apartment complex not far from the Strip.

  Mickey could only eat half his enchilada. The medication frequently made him nauseated. He drank most of his Sprite and left a good tip.

  When he was back on the road, he entered the apartment complex’s address into the GPS. The drive was quick, no more than fifteen minutes, and passed directly by the Strip.

  The complex was brown brick with a white roof and was composed of about a dozen separate buildings. Mickey parked and got out. It took him two buildings before he found the one he was looking for.

  He put his ear to the door and listened a moment. Inside, a television was on. Mickey knocked softly. He heard a male voice say, “Just a minute.”

  The door opened a moment later. An older man with glasses and a thick sweater—though the temperature was probably in the upper eighties—stood there and looked him up and down.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Mickey Parsons with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Are you Cornelius Red?”

  “Yes. What’s this concerning?”

  “Zain Tamora.”

  The man’s face changed. His features went slack, as though watching something he would rather not see. “Yes. I saw the news. He’s out, huh?”

  “So it seems.”

  “Well, come in, I guess.”

  The apartment was sparse and the furniture appeared unused, except for a recliner parked in front of the television. In a cupholder on the side was a can of beer. Cornelius sat down with a groan as his knees cracked. He lifted the can of beer and took a long drink before replacing it and saying, “Well don’t just stand there, sit down.”

  Mickey took a seat on the couch. I
t felt like sitting on cardboard. The television was tuned to a basketball game and Cornelius turned the volume down.

  “So, what’dya wanna know?”

  “There’s just some discrepancies in the reports. I had some questions.”

  “No shit there’s discrepancies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we did that on purpose. The reports are useless.”

  “Why would you write useless reports?”

  Cornelius took another sip of beer. Mickey could see a wedding ring on his finger, but he didn’t get the impression that anyone else lived in the apartment.

  “Lot happened in that case that wasn’t released. We had to make the reports as vague as possible.”

  “What happened?”

  He sucked air through his teeth as though attempting to dislodge something. “Back then there wasn’t all the bullshit there is now. I remember in, oh, seventy-two, we had this perp in the back of the precinct and we—”

  “I don’t have much time, Cornelius. Tamora killed three people at a gas station on his way to Las Vegas. He had a clear shot to Mexico and he didn’t take it. I need to find out what he’s coming here for.”

  Cornelius was silent a moment. “You ever met him?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “Zain Tamora ain’t a person. You look into his eyes and ain’t nothin’ there. Nothin’ starin’ back at ya. He’s like… I don’t know. A ghost or something. Just vacant.” Cornelius drifted off a moment. “Scariest fucking man I ever met.”

  “Cornelius,” Mickey said, leaning forward, his elbows on his thighs, “what happened? What did you keep out of these reports?”

  He sighed. “We was just tryin’ to protect her.”

  “Protect who?”

  “His wife. That’s why he’s comin’ here. He’s comin’ for her.”

  15

  Angela Listz lay on her back staring at the ceiling. The hospital sheets, comfortable when she’d first gotten here, now felt like sandpaper on her skin. She’d shift to the left and then have to shift to the right. Every position was uncomfortable.