EPILOGUE
They convoyed north in three vehicles. Fields drove the lead cruiser with Ella in the passenger seat.
Ripley sat in the back and said nothing, which was unusual enough that Ella glanced at her twice in the rear-view mirror to make sure she was still breathing.
Behind them, Dever rode in a black SUV with two U.S.
Marshals that the Bureau had flown in from Baton Rouge.
A third vehicle – a reinforced transport van with mesh windows and no rear handles – brought up the rear.
It was empty for now, but it wouldn’t be empty on the way back.
The road between New Orleans and Angola was seventy miles of nothing. It was mostly flat, mostly dark and entirely featureless. Ella spotted the occasional gas station, shut for the night, and the mile markers ticking past in the headlights.
Fields broke the silence thirty minutes in.
‘Creed’s been woken up and briefed. The warden pulled him out of his cell at eleven fifteen and sat him in the admin block with two guards.
He knows he’s being transferred. He knows where he’s going and he knows why.
He’s been told the terms of the deal and he’s agreed.
Life without parole in exchange for cooperation with the Doyle identification. ’
‘How’d he take it?’
‘The warden said he was calm. He asked for a cup of tea and what time the flight was.’
‘Prick,’ Ripley said. ‘Of course he asked for tea.’
Ella said, ‘If I just found out I wasn’t going to die, I’d ask for tea too.’
Fields glanced at her.’ I get the feeling you two don’t like this guy.’
‘We were the ones who caught him years ago, and I was the one who put him on death row.’
‘No kidding?’
‘No kidding.’
‘Well, the Bureau’s chartered a plane out of Baton Rouge Metropolitan. Wheels up at 3 AM if everything goes to schedule.’
‘It’ll go to schedule,’ Ella said.
‘Famous last words in this business.’
The convoy crossed the Mississippi on a bridge that hummed under the tyres. On the far side, the road narrowed, and the trees got thicker, and the mile markers stopped, and there was nothing but blacktop and darkness until the prison appeared.
Louisiana State Penitentiary. Angola. Eighteen thousand acres of former plantation land surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River and on the fourth by the Tunica Hills.
The largest maximum-security prison in the United States.
Six thousand inmates. A working farm, a rodeo arena, a golf course for the warden.
A death row. Ella was here just a few months ago.
The perimeter fence came first. Razor wire, triple-stacked, catching the light from the guard towers in thin silver lines.
Then the gatehouse. Fields pulled up and showed credentials to a corrections officer who looked like he'd been expecting them for hours and resented every minute of the wait.
He then checked Ella's badge, spoke into a radio, checked something on a clipboard, and spoke into the radio again.
Then the gate rolled open on a motorised track and they drove through into a holding area where a second gate waited for the first one to close behind them before it opened.
The gate rolled open. The convoy passed through and they parked outside the main entrance.
They got out of the car, and Ella could feel the heaviness of the Mississippi River a few miles away behind them.
Dever climbed out of the SUV and straightened his tie.
He'd put on a fresh suit for the occasion, which told Ella everything she needed to know about his priorities.
The two Marshals flanked him, both armed, both wearing body armour under their jackets.
A captain in a grey uniform met them at the interior doors.
He was a large man with a shaved head and a clipboard.
He gave them instructions about what to do with their weapons and they complied.
Ella unclipped her holster and placed her Glock inside a steel lockbox mounted to the wall of the reception building.
Ripley and Fields did the same. Dever handed over a compact SIG that looked like it hadn’t been fired in forever.
‘Follow me. Stay in the centre of the corridor. Do not speak to the inmates. Do not stop walking unless I stop walking. We all clear?’
‘Clear.’
Dever opened his mouth, likely to explain his rank, but the captain had already turned his back and badged through the first set of heavy doors. Two orderlies were waiting. ‘Wardens, ready when you are.’
They followed the captain and two wardens into the belly of the prison. Dever spoke up from the back: ‘Where is he?’
'Admin segregation. Down the hall, through two checkpoints. He's been processed and prepped. Ankle chains, waist chain, handcuffs. Standard transfer restraints. He's not going anywhere, he doesn't want to go.'
The corridor was long and brightly lit. They passed through the first checkpoint into a connecting hallway that was much narrower.
Here, the sounds of the prison reached them properly for the first time.
It was past one in the morning, but the prison was not quiet.
A facility holding six thousand men never achieved actual silence.
Ella heard the distant slam of a metal door, a toilet flushing, someone coughing a rattling hack that sounded like fluid filling a lung.
They passed through three more secure checkpoints. Each time, a heavy steel grate rolled open, they stepped into a holding cage, the grate locked behind them, and the door in front of them opened. It was an airlock system designed to crush any illusion of freedom.
At last, they reached Camp F. Death row.
The captain stopped. He looked at Fields, ignoring Dever completely.
‘We’re bringing him out of cell four,’ the captain said. ‘He’s fully compliant so far. Stay back, all of you. Don’t get within ten feet of him. ‘The transfer paperwork is signed and on the desk inside. Once you confirm identity and sign off on the receiving documents, he’s yours. Any questions?’
Nobody had questions.
The captain nodded to his team. They moved down the tier. Ella followed. The cell block was a long concrete canyon with solid steel doors on either side. Instead of bars, the doors had small reinforced glass viewing slits and a narrow horizontal slot at waist height for food trays and handcuffs.
Down here, the atmosphere was different.
The men in these cells rarely left them.
They slept all day and paced all night. As the tactical team marched down the corridor, faces appeared in the narrow slits and watched these strangers go about their business.
Ella kept her eyes straight ahead. She felt the throb of her split lip and the bruising near her ribs.
Edgar Borden had nearly killed her two hours ago.
Borden, who had been built into a weapon by Lindsey Doyle.
Doyle, who had learned the trade from the man sitting behind the steel door at the end of this hallway, and had no doubt walked this same path herself many times.
The whole investigation, the entire brutal week, had been a journey upstream to reach this exact source.
They stopped outside cell four, and the captain stepped up to the door. He keyed a radio on his shoulder. ‘Open four.’
The lock disengaged with a loud clanking sound. The steel door slid sideways on its tracks and disappeared into the wall.
Austin Creed stepped out of the cell.
Ella stopped walking. Ripley stopped beside her.
She’d first laid eyes on him years ago, when she’d tracked him down to a battered woman’s shelter after he’d killed five people.
They’d fought and Ella had taken him down.
Then she’d seen him again seven months ago in October at his trial, where she’d helped secure him the death penalty.
Then she’d seen him again two months ago when she’d come to this very prison to interview him about the Doyle situation.
Every time he’d looked different, and this time was no exception.
Prison had boiled him down further still, and his head was shaved to the skin.
He'd lost weight he didn't need to lose, but probably had no choice.
His skin had turned yellowish-pale due to the absence of sun, and he'd changed from a standard grey jumpsuit to an orange one.
His hands were cuffed to a waist chain. His ankles were chained together with about eighteen inches of slack.
He was weighed down with about five feet of steel, so if by some miracle he managed to escape, he wouldn't get very far without bolt cutters.
Creed took in the swollen purple mass of Ella’s left eye, then he looked at the dried blood on her collar. He looked at the rigid posture she was holding to keep the pain in her ribs from showing.
‘You’ve been in the wars, Ella.’
‘So have you.’
'Something like that. I understand we're going for a trip.' He looked over at Ripley, Dever, and the others, then back at Ella. 'Just us on a plane. All those things we never got to talk about. Maybe now's the time.'
‘I think we’ve talked enough.’
‘Let me be the judge of that.’ He turned to the wardens and smiled. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get going, then.’
‘You seem excited,’ Dever said.
‘Oh yes. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and trust me, it’s going to be a lot of fun.’