CHAPTER TWO
They put prisons in the nicest places. This was a widely known and accepted fact amongst everyone who worked in law enforcement, to the point where one individual – rumored to hold high office in the Department of Justice – even operated an anonymous blogsite devoted to the hidden beauties of the U.S.
penal system. You could search it by prisoner names, crimes committed, or even the type of view you wanted to see.
Whoever owned and updated it clearly spent a lot of time on it; possibly more time than they devoted to upholding U.S. Law.
The scent of pine drifted through the open window of her black sedan, and Maine’s vast wilderness rolled out before her, hills blanketed in spruce and fir, still lakes reflecting the sky, with the distant form of the Appalachians shimmering at the horizon.
It was a rugged, untouched beauty: at once comforting and isolating.
And that was the real point, she thought, as her car slowly climbed a ridge, and a flock of birds shot over the scene in a perfect V.
Prisons were tucked away in the Great American Wilderness because people didn't want them in their towns and cities.
Near their schools, retirement communities, and playgrounds.
And who could blame them? Men like Elijah Cox had forfeited their right to live amongst others.
As the road banked inwards, she caught a sudden, reviving glimpse of the Atlantic, shimmering between groves of cedar. How could the world contain such beauty, she thought, alongside the horrors committed by men like Elijah Cox and Robert Denton?
She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. Tried to focus on the road, the sky, the stunning scenery. It gave her little comfort, not when she thought about what lay ahead. But she was ready for it.
Soon, she turned away from the coast and started driving through a thickly wooded area.
Lumber trucks thundered past her, and apart from the occasional mill or yard, the signs of habitation grew rarer, further apart.
Then the view gave way to fences, wire-topped, twenty-feet high.
And pretty soon after that, there was a barrier and a man in a booth with a gun.
Then she was swallowed up by the hulking prison and its system: much like airports and hospitals, these places have a secret way of stripping you bare.
You become bewildered, helpless, you go where the people point you to go, and they are, deliberately, not too clear about that.
So they bark at you, and they pat you, and they push you, they fix labels on you as if you were a parcel.
They take your prints, take your photo, make you stand there, stand here, sit right where you are, pass through this scanner.
You cease being you and become a unit; a unit within a unit.
Kate was used to it all. She went someplace else in her mind, away from the buzzers and the attack alarms, beyond the smells – detergent, distant cooking - and the ever-clanging doors.
After greeting her in a small, tidy sub-office, a ruddy, sturdy, friendly-seeming guy like a farmer showed her where she could sit with a view of the two-way mirror.
'He can't see you,' he said, more than once.
She was grateful, not so much for the assurance, just for him treating her like a human, and not as luggage.
She took out her notebooks, switched her phone to record.
The guard flicked a switch, and the mirror became a window.
A pair of psychiatrists were seated either side of a table: on the left, a man who looked as if he was playing the part of a psychiatrist in an H.B.O.
drama. Bushy dark beard, thick spectacles, tweed coat, nicotine-stained fingers.
As if to balance out the cliché, his opposite number looked like the bass player in an all-girl grunge band.
Black jeans, black undershirt, heavy on the mascara.
And was that a pentagram round her neck? Cox was going to love that.
‘Father, mother, first sexual encounter,’ said the man.
'Attitude to homosexuality, conceptions of justice.'
‘Death and the afterlife.’
‘Taboos and prohibitions.’
Kate watched them, fascinated. It was like they were playing a word game, or perhaps participating in some highly experimental theater. It took her a while to realise that they were thrashing out a running order for the forthcoming interview.
‘Danger, sources of fear.’
‘Snap!’ said the woman, twirling one of her many silver rings. For some reason, this was very funny, and they both laughed.
‘How’s Irving?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Still obsessed with the billing system.’
‘Someone should say to him, “Irv – these little envelopes, don’t they remind you of anything?”’
The woman laughed – it was an incongruous, girlish giggle, someone else’s laugh.
And who knew? Psych evaluators had in-jokes, too.
The woman leant closer to her colleague, clearly on the verge of saying more, but then was interrupted by the sudden clanking of chains.
As the door opened, both psychiatrists straightened up and put on serious faces, like schoolkids when the teacher has arrived.
Another, even bigger guard escorted Cox inside the room, and there was a protracted unlocking and unravelling of chains and cuffs. Eventually, he was seated in between the two psychs, his hands free but a long steel cable tethering him to the table.
He'd shaved his gray hair off, she noted, the chiselled look more pronounced now he'd lost some weight.
But the piercing gaze seemed less intense.
And overall, she thought, he seemed diminished.
But perhaps she just wanted to see him that way.
Five weeks ago, he'd soaked her in diesel and attempted to blow her and himself up in a church.
Not just any church. The church where her father had been murdered years before.
She was bound up in the case, from start to finish, or rather, from the start to where it had got now. And she longed to be free of it.
He looked calmly at his hands while the pair introduced themselves as Doctors Hugo Frisch and Eleni Katzoulis.
Inevitably, they followed this up with what psychiatric professionals called ‘the neutral gaze’.
Having been on the receiving end of no small amount of neutral gaze, Kate could confirm that it was anything but neutral.
It was extremely irritating. It essentially meant them staring at you until the awkwardness forced you to speak.
It didn’t go quite as expected this time, though, because Frisch was eventually the one to speak up, asking quietly, ‘What does the word ‘Father’ mean to you, Elijah?’
Cox opened his mouth, probed his teeth with his tongue, and then closed his mouth, all without giving any sign of having heard.
‘And Mother?’ asked Katzoulis.
Cox chuckled, as if at a private joke. The psychs scribbled notes.
‘How old were you when you lost your virginity?’
Cox shot Dr Frisch an inscrutable look, but still said nothing.
‘Your first sexual encounter. Was it your choice, Elijah?’
Cox suddenly stared straight ahead for the first time; his eyes met Kate’s. Kate involuntarily shifted in her chair, her heart banging.
He can’t see you.
She knew he couldn’t see her, but it was unnerving nonetheless.
‘Are you going to speak to us, Elijah?’
‘Why does God let bad things happen, Elijah?’
‘What disgusts you?’
‘When did you light your first fire?’
The psychs kept the questions coming. Elijah said nothing, and after that first sardonic laugh, gave no further recognition of their presence. His eyes, a cold blue, kept looking ahead, but roaming a small area, as if he was tracking the movements of an insect on the wall.
‘Where do your thoughts come from, Elijah?’
His eyes stopped roaming. They fixed again. They fixed right on Kate, and as they did so, a thin smile emerged on his lips. He leant forward in his seat.
He knew she was there.
Cox had sat in enough interview suites in his time; he knew that the mirror was more than a mirror.
Why would they put a mirror in an interview room anyway?
So that everyone could fix their hair and their make-up?
He knew the score. And he was good at enough at reading people to have picked up a good half-dozen tells from the shrinks: he’d have caught the micro-glances in Kate’s direction, the sense, in the way they positioned themselves, held their heads, adjusted their volume, of there being another body in the room. Dammit. The bastard knew.
The psychs had had enough of asking and not being answered, and they finally called for the Guard.
Two of them came in and started to chain Cox up; he didn’t fight them, but he made sure he was always staring right at Kate as the cuffs and the leg chains went on.
Staring right into her soul until they hauled him out of the room, he started to mouth some words.
She couldn’t lip-read, but that didn’t matter; the effect was still, deeply unsettling.
She made it as far as the car park before she was violently sick. Got back to the car, drank some water, felt a little better. Realised she’d had three missed calls from Marcus. She drank some more, splashed her face and then she rang him back.
‘Heard of Brandon Ashworth?’ Reid asked, or rather shouted. He sounded like he was somewhere busy: crowds, sirens, music.
‘Rings a bell. Dead country star?’
‘Nowhere near.’ The noise died away, suggesting that Marcus had gone somewhere quieter. ‘He’s a controversial artist. Or rather he was a controversial artist. Now he’s a body, in Brooklyn.’
‘And why are we involved?’
‘He’s had death threats from various quarters before, making it a federal case. How soon can you get here?’
‘Let me search up flights, then I’ll get back to you with an E.T.A.’
‘Okay. Er… Kate?’
She knew there’d be more to it. This was how it went with Marcus. There was the job. Then there was the thing he didn’t want to tell you about the job. And there was always something.
‘What is it?’
‘There could be a religious angle. The victim was… he appears to have been stoned to death.’