CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Daniel Barton had played pool every Tuesday for the better part of forty years, and the only thing retirement had changed about it was that he could now lose all afternoon instead of just the evening.
He pulled the Buick into his driveway a little after six with twenty dollars less in his wallet than he’d left with.
He’d waged a bet with a man named Pete that he could clear the table, but he’d fallen at the third ball and subsequently been humbled.
Then the bartender had charged him ten dollars for a double whiskey, and if this was just a couple of years ago, Barton would have sent the man down for daylight robbery.
Retirement was an odd beast, he’d realized.
Most people spent their lives wondering what the next chapter would bring, but once you gave up the job, you’d consigned to the fact that there’d be no more chapters.
This was it, until your number got called and you went to the great courtroom in the sky, sentenced to eternity in a wooden box with only the insects for company.
Barton killed the ignition, left the car, and made for the front door.
His driveway was annoyingly vast for his old bones, and he idly considered downsizing now that he’d reached his twilight years.
And why not? At his age, it was time to give back, because God knows he’d taken enough over the years.
Daniel Barton would be the first to admit he hadn’t always acted morally or even legally, and perhaps if he sacrificed some of what he’d earned, it could be his way of atoning for his sins.
He aimed for the lock with his front door key, but the moisture on his hands caused them to slip and clatter on the ground. Barton bent down, scooped them up, and when he returned to a standing position – no easy feat for a man of his condition – he found he was not alone at his front door.
From the passageway beside the house, a figure had emerged without sound and without ceremony. Barton had lived in Massachusetts for many years, and back then it hadn’t been uncommon to find a giant bear hanging around your property in the colder months.
That was Barton’s first thought as the shape materialized: a hulking black bear with paws like pavement slabs had decided to take up residence in his garden.
But this wasn’t the colder months, nor was it Massachusetts, and that was when Barton realized the figure had human proportions, as exaggerated as they were. It was a man so large that for a half-second Barton thought he was looking at two men, one in front of the other.
He had a pistol in a drawer in the bedroom and another in the glove compartment of the Buick. The Buick was behind him. The bedroom was beyond a door he had not yet unlocked.
Barton got as far as asking who the devil this person was before a gigantic hand wrapped consumed his vision.
One sting in his neck later, and Daniel Barton, going down into a black he hadn’t seen coming, felt the great arm take his weight and lower him with terrible care, and his last thought, absurd and almost sweet, was that he had been wrong as he’d contemplated the rest of his life not two minutes ago.
Maybe there was one more chapter after all.
***
It had been right in front of Ella since Monday and she hadn’t seen it.
Now it was time to find out this man’s name.
The barrier at the outer gate went up faster than it had any right to, because the guard manning it had been on the same post two nights ago and he recognized the car and the woman in it, and a federal badge held flat to the windscreen at thirty miles an hour was enough to make a man choose the easy option.
Ella was through before he’d finished waving her on.
She took the visitor lot at an angle that left the car straddling two bays and didn’t go back to fix it.
The reception desk was a woman she hadn’t met before, on the phone, mid-call. She looked up at Ella and said something into the receiver and put it down.
‘Roy Kowalczyk. I need to see him,’ Ella said.
‘Ma’am? Do you have a meeting?’
‘No. Agent Dark. FBI.’ Ella slapped her badge down. ‘Is Roy here?’
‘I’m afraid he’s in a meeting.’
‘Where?’
The receptionist pointed to a door with a frosted glass panel and a light on behind it. Ella rushed toward it.
‘Ma’am, you can’t-’
Ella banged on the door non-stop until it burst open. Roy Kowalczyk was standing there with a phone pressed to his ear. He moved it away.
‘Miss Dark? I’m in a meeting.’
‘Cancel it.’
‘It’s the union rep.’
‘Call them back, Roy. I need to know something, and I need to know it now.’
Roy gingerly brought the phone back to his ear and said, ‘Davies, can I call you back? Got an emergency here.’
Ella waited.
‘Great, thanks.’ Roy ended the call. ‘Okay, what do you want?’
‘Classes. Workshops. You ran them here, yes?’
‘Yes. Of course. We have some kind of workshop every day. Why?’
‘Sewing. I need to know about your sewing class. Who was the teacher in the sewing class?’
That was what it came down to. Ella could confidently rule out the possibility of her killer being a prisoner or guard here. Ella had scoured the details of all of them and none of them fit the physical characteristics.
But there was one type of staff member that Ella wouldn’t be able to find, because they weren’t public.
‘Our sewing teacher? We don’t have one. It wasn’t exactly a popular workshop, so we ditched it.’
‘I don’t mean now. I mean years ago, when Thomas Greaves and Billy Hayes were still here. Who ran your sewing class?’
Roy puffed his cheeks and let the air out.
‘I’m not going to be able to tell you off the top of my head, Agent Dark.
I didn’t run the workshops. I oversaw the wing, not the classroom.
That’s a different department. And most of the time I worked the evening or night shifts – still do, as you can see – and workshops were done in the daytime. ’
‘Then who would know?’
‘Miss Dark, you’ve got to understand. The workshops were never our priority. The wardens before me, and me when I took over, we were happy to have someone come in and run them. We didn’t pay much attention to who.’
‘Someone signed off on it. Someone had to vet them.’
‘Vetting happened higher up than me. By the time anyone got to my desk, they’d already been cleared. I’d see a name on a roster and that was it. I couldn’t have told you who was teaching what on any given Tuesday.’
‘It depends. Some do a few weeks. Some stay years.’
Ella was scrambling for an angle here, because the answer was somewhere in this building. She just needed to dig deep enough. ‘Were they paid?’
‘The teachers? Only the good ones. The ones who came in to run the vocational stuff, the craft classes especially, they came through outside outfits. Referral schemes, charities, that sort of thing.’
Ella latched onto that. ‘Wait. Charities?’
‘Well, rehabilitation programs, mostly. You’d get a former inmate who’d done his time and come out the other side and made something of himself, and the program would send him back in to teach a skill.
Woodwork. Ceramics. Sewing. It’s good for everyone, on paper.
The man teaching gets to give something back, feels useful, stays out of trouble.
The men in the class look up and see a guy who was sat where they’re sat a few years back and now he’s walking in and out of the front gate a free man with a trade.
It’s the whole point of the thing. You can reform. Here’s a man who did.’
Ella’s pulse was loud in her own ears.
A former criminal, mingling with other criminals.
‘You must have a log. You must have names!’
Roy bit his lip and looked unhopeful. ‘Can you narrow it down?’
While Ella hadn’t mocked up an official behavioral profile, she had everything she needed circling her brain.
‘The person I’m looking for is almost seven feet tall.
He’s built like a wall. He’s white, male, between 28 and 40.
He would have been quiet, reserved, perhaps even a little timid.
He’d have come up through one of these programs himself.
He wouldn’t have come to you out of nowhere.
Somebody put him on a referral list because somebody wanted to give him a second chance at being a person.
He’d have done time, but not for anything violent.
He’d have been the only one in his class growing up who looked the way he looks, and people would have either left him alone or taken it out on him, and either way he’d have been on his own a lot.
He’d have a mother in the picture, or the memory of one, and not much else.
He’d have been looking for somebody to tell him how to be in the world.
He’d have found it in here. Somebody in this prison taught him what a man is, Roy, and the man who taught him is dead now, and our killer is finishing what he thinks his teacher started. ’
She stopped.
Roy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he stood, went to the filing cabinet in the corner of the office and hauled the bottom drawer open hard enough that the whole unit rocked.
He started going through it with both hands.
From where she stood, Ella could see what it held, rows of laminated cards stood up in dividers like records in a crate, and every one of them was a prison ID.
Photographs and names and barcodes, hundreds of them, the dead and the released and the transferred all filed together.
‘You said you didn’t keep them,’ Ella said. ‘Visitors, instructors. You said they signed in and out and that was it.’
‘We don’t.’ Roy didn’t look up. He was walking his fingers along the dividers, lips moving. ‘We didn’t keep his because we had to. We kept his because he needed it kept.’
‘Needed it?’
‘Held here. So he could pick it up at the desk every week and hand it back when he left.’ He pulled a card halfway out, frowned at it, pushed it back. ‘It was the arrangement.’
‘What are you talking about? Who?’
Roy continued ransacking the drawer. Then he stopped, gripped one hard and pulled it out. ‘Got it!’
He handed it over. Ella took it, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in the hand that held the card.
SIMON VARRO.
WORKSHOP INSTRUCTOR.
TEXTILES.
And above both, in the little window where the photograph went, a face.
She’d been carrying an idea of the man in her head for three days; a wall of shoulder in a doorway, a hood with two holes cut for the eyes.
Now there was a face inside that outline.
He was looking just off the camera, his head was too small for the breadth of him, and there was something in the set of the heavy features that turned the back of her neck cold.
Plenty of innocent men photographed badly. This was not that.
This was him.
‘Why does the prison have this, Roy? Why hold one man’s badge and nobody else’s?’
‘I told you. He needed it.’
‘Why?’
‘Miss Dark, Simon Varro couldn’t talk. He was completely mute.’
The note.
Reuben Hoy’s note.
I cannot give you a phone number because phones are of no use to me.
He had carried his name on a card around his neck so that people would know who he was, because his mouth couldn’t tell them.
A person who couldn’t talk could only listen, Ella realized.
And Simon Varro had listened to Billy Hayes confess. He’d listened to Thomas Greaves tell his story. And then Simon Varro had drawn the battle lines.
Ella looked at the dead flat eyes in the photograph one more time.
Simon Varro was her killer, and now she had to find him.