CHAPTER NINE
Once through the main gate, they’d been directed through two more checkpoints where they’d surrendered their weapons, and eventually led into the beige waiting area where they were now sitting.
According to the receptionist, the shift commander would be along shortly.
Ella was reading a poster about contraband.
It listed everything you couldn’t bring into the facility, and the list was long.
Ella found her eyes going down it for something to do.
‘Dark, don’t pretend to read a sign. It’s unbecoming.’
‘I’m not. I just can’t hear any more about prison snitches.’
Ripley had spent the drive here walking Ella through what she’d called the trade. She’d run a year on the BAU prison liaison detail twenty years ago and had never quite lost the knowledge of how the inside actually worked.
As it turned out, snitches weren’t who Ella’s training had suggested they were.
The popular picture was a terrified man in a corner whispering to a guard about something they’d seen.
Ripley said the real ones were the opposite.
They built friendships, built connections, lent commissary to new arrivals and remembered every detail they heard from other inmates.
They then gave that information to the guards to stop anything from happening that would make their jobs harder.
A working snitch at a place like Jessup could earn himself a private cell, his own television, double commissary, and family visits at irregular hours.
He could earn his sentence shaved a year or two by a word to the right people at parole.
He could get protected status when the wind changed, which was what had happened to Billy Hayes.
The job was a good one if you had the temperament for it.
The downside, Ripley had said, was that there was no coming back.
Word traveled quickly inside, and once you committed to the role of snitch, you were in it until you were killed or released.
But even if you were released, those people you snitched on didn’t forget, and one day they might be released too.
That could be exactly what had happened with Billy Hayes.
A door opened on the far side of the waiting area and a man came through it. The lanyard around his neck said MARYLAND DPSCS and below it a name strip that said R. KOWALCZYK.
‘Hello, agents. I’m sorry to keep you. I’m Roy, the shift commander tonight. What can I help you with?’
Ripley shook his hand first, then Ella. Ripley did the introductions and said, ‘We’re investigating a homicide that took place last night. We believe the victim is a former inmate here.’
‘Gotcha. Can you tell me which inmate?’
‘Billy Anthony Hayes. Remember him?’
‘Oh, lord.’ Roy bit his lip then sighed. To Ella, he seemed genuinely upset by the fact. ‘That’s a shame. Billy was fine, as far as inmates go. Can I ask what happened?’
‘Hanged in Rock Creek Park,’ Ripley said. ‘You’ll find out soon enough from the press, but that’s the gist of it. Did you know Hayes well?’
‘Not well. I transferred over from Hagerstown last spring. By then Hayes had a year left on his sentence and his unit wasn’t one of mine. I knew his name. I’d seen him in the corridor. That’s the lot.’
‘Anything special about Hayes?’ Ella asked.
Roy laughed. ‘Sounds to me like you already know.’
‘Know what?’
‘Hayes was our man on the inside, as much as we tried to hide that fact. But nothing stays secret in here for long. People found out.’
Ripley asked, ‘Anyone in particular dislike Hayes? Could be an inmate, guard, anything.’
‘Not my area. I don’t do politics, but follow me and I’ll take you to some guys who might be able to help you.’
***
Anyone who said prisons were a holiday camp had never been in one.
As far as Ella was concerned, aside from war zones, these were the closest things to hell on earth.
The noises that emerged from the closed cells were unique to prisons.
It was the music of bored, caged men who were either barreling towards or had already succumbed to madness.
Ella and Ripley split at the bottom of the stairwell.
Ripley peeled off with the shift commander toward another part of the jail, and Ella took the long way round with one of the prison officers.
They agreed to meet at the hobby-craft shop when they were done.
A lot of prisons in the US had little stores where they sold things made by inmates in hobby programs. In a lot of cases, it kept them busy and out of trouble.
‘Billy Hayes was the best prisoner I ever worked with, at least,’ Ella’s escort said. His name badge read A. PELL.
‘How so?’
‘No hassle. He kept to himself and followed orders. And of course, he gave us the intel. We couldn’t ask for more.’
The walkway up to the top tier ran along the open face of the cell block. It was a steel gallery with a mesh barrier on the drop side and a row of doors on the other. The inmates were all locked away for the night, but it didn’t stop them making noise.
‘Anyone in here have it in for Billy Hayes? Enemies, grudges, anything?’
‘Suffice to say, nobody in here had a problem with him at first. Once word got out Hayes was our inside man, he became public enemy number one. We had to guard him day and night. We couldn’t even escort him through the kitchen when a single inmate was out. Hayes had a schedule all to himself.’
‘Someone snitched on the snitch,’ Ella said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Any idea who?’
Pell gestured around. ‘Got your 8 Ball on you?’
‘Left it at home.’
‘Then you’re out of luck. Sorry. Could be anyone.’
‘What do you remember about Hayes?’
Pell shrugged. ‘He had what the guys underneath us would call luxury items. He had a radio, books, sewing equipment. Used to stitch these little patterns together. He even had a football.’
‘What? Seriously?’
‘Give a man a football and he’ll be happy for hours.’
Ella backtracked. ‘Not that. Hayes used to sew? As in, knit?’
‘Yeah. He used to take sewing classes, actually. Probably because nobody else wanted to, so there was no risk of him getting pool balled. Know what I mean?’
Ella caught the shifty eyes of a prisoner peering through the hatch in his door. She did her best to ignore him, despite his jeers. She and Pell picked up the pace and went down a narrow corridor, out of the main area. They came to a dead end, with two doors on either side.
‘End of the line,’ she said.
‘Not quite. This right here was Hayes’s cell.
It’s away from everyone else’s.’ Pell unlocked the door.
The inside was a nondescript prison cell with a steel bed sans mattress on one side and a sink and toilet on the other.
‘We cleaned this place out and haven’t stuck anyone in here since.
No one has earned the privilege. You can’t tell, but this is four feet bigger than every other cell in Jessup. ’
She took a quick look inside, then stepped back. As she did, her eye caught the door of the cell directly across the gallery.
Someone had carved into it. The letters were deep and crude, gouged into the steel paint with something that had taken time and a hard edge, and they spelled DEAD MAN WALKING.
‘Dead man walking. What’s that about?’ Ella asked.
Pell looked over it and scrubbed the carving with his finger, as though skin alone might rub out letters gouged into the steel. ‘Oh, that was the other guy we had in here. Greaves. The guys here used to call him the Greave Digger. Staff and prisoners alike.’
‘Greaves?’
‘Yeah. He’s gone now. Lethal injection, actually. Nasty stuff.’
Ella looked at him. ‘Huh? Maryland doesn’t have a death row. The state hasn’t had the penalty for years.’
‘Not state, no. Greaves was federal. Killed a woman, carved her up and buried her body parts in graves all over some field, hence the nickname. Started in Maryland and ended up in D.C. It crossed our state line, so you know what happens then.’
‘It becomes the FBI’s problem.’
‘Correct. He was being held here on a housing contract while the lawyers argued over where he went next. Must be three years back now. He sat with us the best part of a year while it all dragged through the courts, long enough to settle in, join the workshops, the lot. He ended up going to Terre Haute. A week later he got the needle. But that’s another story.
Regarding Hayes, that’s all I’ve got. We haven’t released any inmates recently, so there’s nobody on the outside that knows about his snitching past.’
‘What about inmates who have contact with the outside world?’
‘Plenty of them, too. We keep copies of all incoming and outgoing correspondence, so you can check that if you want. Same goes for visitations. We record all conversations, but that’s not to say we listen to them.’
Seven hundred inmates. Ella did the math and didn’t like the five-figure number that emerged.
Ella stood in the dead-end corridor and tried to find the next move, and the next move wasn’t there. The killer was outside. The motive was inside. Somewhere between the two was a door she hadn’t found yet, and standing here looking at an empty cell wasn’t going to find it for her.
‘Alright,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve got what I’m going to get up here. Can you show me to the gift shop?’
‘Sure. Follow me.’
Ella took one more look at the cleaned-out cell, four feet bigger than every other box in Jessup, earned and now empty, and then she turned and went to find Ripley.