by Ethan Cross
“Ms. Spinelli,” one of the techs said.
Spinelli looked up and said, “Not now, Rachel.”
The young blonde tech said, “Mr. Spivey is about to antagonize the new intakes again. Do you want me to stop him?”
Spinelli growled. “That guy really gets on my nerves. Mr. Powell, should we give him another verbal warning?”
Marcus said, “What’s going on?”
Spinelli continued to type on Reese’s laptop but said, “Spivey, that robust African-American gentleman on her screen, thinks it’s hilarious to provoke the new arrivals. About every fourth guy gets ticked off, forgets about the restraints, and tries to take a swing at Spivey.”
“In which case, they get shocked for trying to harm another inmate,” Marcus said as he watched Spivey moving with purpose across the yard.
But then Marcus saw where Spivey was headed. Straight toward his big brother, Francis Ackerman Jr.
Spinelli started to give further directions to the other technician, but the Director interrupted by saying, “Let it happen. I want to see how that new arrival handles a little provocation.”
Marcus opened his mouth to argue but stopped himself. He was also curious as to how Ackerman would react. Of course, he supposed that he was wanting to see Ackerman handle it well, while the Director likely expected Ackerman to lash out and receive the shock.
He watched as the tech zoomed in on Ackerman. His brother cocked his head at the big black man approaching him. The gesture reminded Marcus of the look of a curious puppy. Then Ackerman bent over and picked up a handful of the dry sandy soil covering that portion of the yard. Ackerman let the sand and tiny gravel slip through his fingers and be dispersed by the wind. Then he grabbed up two big fistfuls of the sand and stood back up, arms at his sides, waiting for Spivey to arrive.
Marcus rubbed at the cross tattoo on his neck and prayed that his brother wasn’t about to do something really stupid.
*
Ackerman held the handfuls of sand and dirt at his sides. He supposed it made him look tense, fists balled up, ready for a fight. But he also supposed that a guy who couldn’t read the giant neon sign saying danger that hung over Ackerman probably wouldn’t register any other nonverbal cues.
Ackerman said, “How can I help you, gentlemen?”
There were three of them. Ackerman ignored the convicts on the right and left. He focused in on the one in the center: the large black man in the white tank top and black bandanna. He was clearly the leader. He even walked a step ahead of the others, the trio naturally falling into a V-formation, like a tiny flock of geese.
The big man’s voice rumbled deeply as he said, “Hey, Fish, I’m Spider.”
Ackerman said, “I’m sure you are.”
“And you’re going to be my new dessert.”
“That sounds nice.”
“I’m going to eat you up every night from here on out. You’re gonna be like a little white mint on my pillow. You know what I’m saying, Fish?”
The smaller man beside Spider chuckled. Ackerman cocked his head at them and said, “Is that it? Is that your whole thing?”
Spider leaned forward, puffed out his chest, and started to speak. Ackerman stopped him. “Yeah, you’re done.”
Spider looked like he wanted to take a swing but was just smart enough to know better.
Ackerman continued, “I thought that maybe we could have a little fun with this exchange, but after that display, I realize that you’re not even taking this seriously. And you’re wasting my time. You calling me Fish was mildly amusing, but the whole sexual innuendo thing, that was weak and boring. I don’t tolerate boring very well.”
Spider’s lips curled back into a snarl, and he said, “Listen here, Fish—”
Ackerman said, “You’re just going to make it worse.”
Spider’s muscles coiled up. He looked like he was preparing to pounce, but he kept stopping himself.
Ackerman laughed. “The funny thing about this is that you came over here with the intention of provoking me into attacking you. And now, with very little effort on my part, I have you tugging against your own leash instead.”
Spider ground his jaw together and tensed his muscles. Ackerman would have guessed, after hearing the prison’s description, that such reactions would have garnered an electric shock. He supposed that the big black man was still too far away. The software’s algorithms must factor proximity. He filed that data away in his mental storehouse. Spider had proved to be a better test subject than he had expected.
But now it was time to take the experiment to the next level.
*
The tech had switched the audio to the control room’s speakers, and Marcus and the others listened to the exchange between Ackerman and Mr. Spivey or Spider, as he referred to himself. Marcus thought they might have reached a stalemate with both men knowing that a violent move would be futile, but then Ackerman proved him wrong.
Nothing in Ackerman’s expression or behavior betrayed what he was about to do. The blur of movement from Ackerman was so quick and unexpected that it caught Marcus by surprise.
Ackerman tossed the two handfuls of sand into the air, lunged forward through the cloud of particles, and with his fingertips, struck Spider in the Adam’s apple.
Ackerman immediately fell back as the fail-safe system shocked him into submission. But he wasn’t the only one on the ground. Spider was writhing on the ground also, clutching his throat.
Marcus leaned forward over the dark-gray surface of the desk. He held himself up on his fists and took a deep breath.
Ackerman had been there for only a few hours and already he had perpetrated the first incident of inmate on inmate violence in the prison’s history and possibly killed a man.
Marcus wondered what the hell he had been thinking by campaigning for Ackerman to be allowed to work cases. His brother was just too far gone.
Marcus’s sweep of emotions went from disappointment to anger as he realized how much Ackerman’s little display was distracting him from the case at hand. There was a mother and her little boy missing. People were dying, and instead of focusing his energies on that, he was going to have to answer for his brother’s actions.
The room was silent.
The prison’s tactical team arrived and carried Ackerman off in chains. Another group checked on Spivey.
Spinelli was on her feet now. She had taken the other tech’s headset and pressed it to her ear. After a moment, she announced, “Spivey’s fine. Just got the wind knocked out of him.”
Powell looked like he was about to fall over. His voice shook as he said, “Who the hell is that resident?”
Spinelli started typing, pushing the other blonde tech out of the way and usurping her system.
The Director said, “Don’t bother. He’s one of ours.”
Powell said, “That’s the agent you put on the inside? He’s sure not keeping a low profile. What was that all about?”
The Director shrugged. “Consider it a favor. He’s just pointing out a mis-calibration in your system. Nothing that can’t be adjusted, I’m sure.”
Powell looked as if he was about to throw up. “Absolutely. Just a little recalibration. After all, the system did shock him before he could actually hurt the other man.” Powell laughed, but Marcus could almost see the dreams dying in the older man’s eyes. First the shooting, and now this. Nails in the coffin of his life’s work. Both Powell and Marcus and probably half the other people in the room knew that if Ackerman had had a knife, as in Powell’s earlier demonstration, he could have slit Spivey’s throat.
Marcus felt sorry for Powell, but this was no time to mourn dreams. He placed a hand on Spinelli’s shoulder and said softly, “The thumb drive.”
“Of course,” she said and shifted back to the laptop. “It’s a video file.”
“Play it,” he said.
*
FILE #750265-6726-691
Zolotov, Dmitry - AKA The Judas Killer
State Exhibit F
Description: Diary Entry
It didn’t take long before Father’s game was the biggest money-maker on the Midway.
But The Judas Game started out as just an idea involving betrayal with no startup costs. I remember the night he worked out the details to his golden goose. He had just spent the last of our money on paying our way into one of the biggest fairs in the Midwest. And not just for our normal spot, but TWO rented spaces, TWO privilege payments—one for the wheel, and one for “The Judas Game.” Which at that point in time was just a title for a game about betrayal.
I take back what I said earlier, now that I think of it. Father did not spend the last of our money on the two privilege payments. He spent the last of our money on two bottles of Russian vodka.
Father paced back and forth outside our camper, drunk, at three in the morning the night before the fair, using me as a sounding board for his ideas. I always hated when he did that. Not the drunk part. Or the pacing. I hated when Father spoke to me. A conversation with him, for me at least, was a game in itself.
You see the ideas he was sharing in situations like this were what would keep me from going hungry. I genuinely wanted him to succeed. I wanted to give good advice. And tell him when he was out of his mind.
But he didn’t really want my opinion. He just wanted to talk “at” me, not “with” me. And I had to be careful to walk the line of helpful but not critical.
“It needs be something like a guessing game. But something so different and intriguing that people won’t need prizes or care about any fancy displays. Guess my age but with chance betray someone,” Father said. His Russian accent always grew stronger when he was drinking, but he had insisted that we both speak English at all times, for practice. Russian was only to be used if we were being secretive for some reason, which did come up now and again. To his credit, he never even broke that rule when he was slobbering drunk.
I replied with something like, “But there will already be three other guessing games at the fair tomorrow.”
And Father said, “How about I put this cigarette out in your eye?”
Luckily, inspiration struck him quickly. I remember the first words he spoke after the lightbulb turned on in his head. “What if we set up a mouse race but with people who don’t even know they’re the mice?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I didn’t want a cigarette in my eye, so I remained silent.
Father went on to explain his idea. A game with six players. We had a small PA system that had come with the wheel game. Father liked to use his “acting” skills to draw in the customers. A six-person game gave him the opportunity to draw in people using lines like, “We only need one more person to play!” It was easier to get someone to stop and play when they saw that five other idiots had already signed up. Father described it as social currency. The people who were already signed up were giving a silent testimonial to those walking by.
So Father brings in six players, and he has each one of them pick one of six (or however many are remaining) cards. The card represented their player number. They would then whisper a “sin” or a “secret” in Father’s ear. Once he had all the answers, he would betray all of the players and reveal each of the sins or secrets and what player had given that answer. It was all part of the game because the people who had the cards would now walk up and place them on the table in an area designated with six numbers, one for each of the players. Father would instruct the players to use their cards as a vote for the best, or worst, sin or secret.
Father liked the idea of giving people a chance to hear some gossip and have someone else’s sin exposed. Of course, it was just for fun and the “sins” and “secrets” typically ranged from “I have three nipples” to “I really don’t like Mom’s mashed potatoes.” Father would, of course, sensor everything for inappropriate content, but he was sure to let some crude humor sneak in.
And the most appealing part of the game from the player’s standpoint was that you could win the money of the other players. You won the game by being the player whose secret received the most votes and your prize depended on how many votes you received.
If you were good at the game and came up with the best or worst secret, you could get all of the other players to vote for you and multiply your initial entry by five. You, of course, couldn’t vote for yourself, which meant that for every game played, the house always made at least the price of one entry. But most of the time, we would bring in about three entry fees per game and pay out three. We had initially started out asking for a one-dollar entry fee. That soon became three dollars and then five dollars. And then we purchased another booth space so we could run both higher and lower stakes games.
People ate it up. We were attracting lines and crowds of people who just wanted to watch.
There were always jokesters who would come up with hilarious sins and secrets and lots of good-natured fun was had by all. But the moments Father loved, the moments he had envisioned from The Judas Game’s inception were those when people realized the potential for betrayal. When people playing the game figured out they had been given a rich environment to win money through collusion and cheating.
People would form alliances and cheat ten bucks out of a few people with no risk of losing any money themselves. People would reveal horrible secrets in order to piss off a family member and get their vote and their money. My personal favorite was the time a young junky played with his mother, father, and three siblings. He revealed something that I can’t recall, but I do remember that his secret made his mother cry. He received all of the votes at a five-dollar entry fee and walked away with twenty-five dollars that he could shoot into his arm.
As the game grew, Father changed things up and introduced bigger and grander set pieces. He incorporated numbered silver coins as the “thirty pieces of silver” and had me hanging from a rope and a fake tree at the back of the booth. I would hang there for hours, jerking or gasping every once in a while for theatrical effect. And Father insisted that my eyes remain open. No sleeping on the job, even if your job is just hanging there like a dead person.
Fortunately, he quickly figured out that a dummy worked just as well for our Judas, and I could be doing something that would make him more money.
Father was running the players through like cattle as quickly as he could at some of the busiest fairs in the country. I would guess that he was averaging twenty to twenty-five games an hour at a five-dollar entry fee times six players. The rake depended on the votes cast, but we were bringing in probably two hundred and fifty dollars an hour clear money from The Judas Game.
Life was as good as it had ever been for Father and I.
It was also around that time that I committed my first murder.
*
As Spinelli started the video, Marcus felt like he was playing Russian roulette. At this point, he had no idea what to expect from this killer. It could have been instructions on where to find their bodies. It could have been ransom demands. It could have been the slow deaths of Renata and Ian Navarro.
It turned out to be none of those things.
The killer’s movie started with the image of a woman. She was bound at her wrists and ankles with white nylon rope. A white hood covered her head. Blood had soaked through the hood. Besides the hood and the rope, she was nude. That was, of course, if you didn’t count the blood as clothing. Even though that’s how it clung to her small, pale body, like a coat of crimson.
Despite the blood and the hood, he could tell the woman was not Renata Navarro. Her shape was different. Her arms. Her complexion. But he could have been wrong. They’d send it to Stan for digital analysis to be sure.
Marcus said, “Anyone who doesn’t want to see this in his or her dreams should leave this room immediately.”
The camera angled, zoomed, and moved slowly down the woman’s body. It was meant to show off every small cut, every second of torture. The filmmaker had spent a disproportionate amount
of time inflicting pain on her pubic area and breasts.
Marcus felt others quickly leaving the control room or gasping, but his focus didn’t waver from the show. It was his job to watch. To experience it as the killer would. Marcus had no choice but to study every detail.
At first, he didn’t see much that would be useful.
She had a tattoo, but it wasn’t the type they could track. It was more like something a teenage girl would get on spring break from some guy at a party. It was a butterfly.
The video was excruciatingly slow. The woman was shivering. The longer he stared at the screen, the colder he felt and the more his surroundings faded away, and then Marcus was inside that torture chamber with her, feeling what she was feeling.
Then he saw the scar. Right across her bicep. A big pink X on the side of her left arm.
It seemed familiar; a fresh memory. He felt like he had just bumped against a mental tripwire.
He glanced around the room to see who had left and who had stayed. All of his team had stayed, of course. Spinelli had stayed but was only stealing glances and listening. Powell had stayed but was looking away from the screen. Major Ingram was trying to be a good soldier, but it seemed as if he might throw up at any moment. Reese and Dunn had both left the room, along with all the other technicians.
The movie zoomed back out far enough to show that the woman was inside a large, glass-walled enclosure. Nothing happened for a moment, but then sand started sprinkling down on the woman from the enclosure’s ceiling. The sand fell all around her, but it was a very slow seeping. The video faded to black, apparently to show the passage of time because when the enclosure reappeared, it was one quarter filled with sand. The picture faded to black again, and the sand was halfway up on the enclosure’s sides.
The woman was clawing and punching, but the sand kept coming.
The picture faded to black and reappeared again, and this time the woman was gone. The enclosure was filled with sand from top to bottom.
The camera’s angle held on the shot of the massive enclosure, and a man in a black robe walked into view. He pulled a metal chair along with him. The chair’s legs scraped and squeaked against a metal floor. It looked like they were inside a shipping container or storage unit of some kind. The robed man sat down in the chair very slowly and carefully. It was all a big production. Marcus wondered how many times the bastard had practiced this routine.
