CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Her phone rang. Marcus.
“Morning, Vee. You on the move?”
“En route to the prison.” She kept her eyes on the ribbon of blacktop ahead. “You?”
“Office. Trying to convince a federal judge to give me a warrant for Stone’s office.” A pause. “Turns out even the tame ones—our so-called FBI fans—grow a sudden love for the First Amendment when the person under the microscope carries a bar card.”
Kate smiled without amusement. “Lawyers protecting lawyers. Who’d-a thunk it?”
“Yeah, well, I’ve handed it to Poppy. She’s like a bloodhound. If anyone can charm a warrant out of these robes, it’s her. Wait? What?" Kate heard muffled voices, then Marcus briefly came back loud and clear, saying, "I'll call you back.”
The line clicked off.
Kate let the quiet in. Through the windshield, the Maine landscape rolled away—silver-green pines, patches of early mist clinging to the Kennebec like smoke.
For a moment she was eight years old again, jolting along some county back-road in Illinois with her father at the wheel.
He'd loved weekend hikes, the kind where you came home muddy and scraped and smelling of wood-smoke.
The memory struck like a sudden punch. Her throat tightened, eyes stinging before she could blink it away.
Grief was an ambush; it never gave warning.
And it left behind the same questions. Would her pain be less sharp, if she knew why her father had died, why someone had performed an almost-professional hit-job on the world-renowned stem cell researcher in the grounds of a church?
And would she be able to cope with it better if she wasn’t in this job, surrounded daily by loss and death?
What else would she even do? She’d tried academia, and trying was enough.
Marcus called back. “Sorry,” he said. “We just got something weird. Angela Phillips was attacked this morning. Campus car-park.”
Kate gripped the wheel. “Is she—?”
“Alive. That’s all I’ve got. No details yet. I’ll keep you posted.”
Kate felt the old unease slide in behind her ribs. Cox stabbed in his cell, now Phillips. Coincidences stacked too high began to look like architecture.
The prison came into view, a slab of concrete and razor wire squatting against the pale sky. She parked, badge-checked her way through the metal detectors, and was met by the Governor of the facility, a heavy-set man with a weary dignity.
“This is… beyond me,” he said as they walked the corridor, their footsteps ringing against cinderblock walls.
“Father Santos has worked with prisoners for years. Outreach, counselling. The man’s record is spotless.
Yesterday he—” The Governor broke off, shaking his head.
“It’s as if something inside him just broke. A psychotic snap.”
“Yet one he planned for? I’m assuming he brought the weapon in with him.”
“This is something we just don’t understand.
It was a shard of Perspex: a classic prison shank.
But Santos was patted down, he and his briefcase went through the scanners.
I’ve watched the CCTV from the entrance; the officer did everything he should have done, and there was no rush, no distractions. It was a Sunday.”
“The only other possibility is that the shank was stashed somewhere inside the prison for Santos to collect.”
“I know. But he didn’t visit the restroom. Went straight to the visitation suite to see Cox.”
“Underneath the table?”
“It has to be. We checked, of course. There’s no sign that anything was stuck there. Nothing on the weapon, either, but of course that was covered in blood.”
“Can’t you see from the CCTV?”
The Governor shook his head. “It all happens so fast. Cox slides off his seat, choking. Santos kind of crouches on top of him, with his back to the camera, blocking the view of what happens. It’s extremely frustrating.”
That wouldn’t have been the word Kate would have used. She might have said convenient. Set-up. Staged. “Can you show me the footage?”
“Of course.”
“What’s the news on Cox?” Kate asked.
“Amazingly, the knife didn’t hit anything major, but he lost a lot of blood, and he’s running a slight fever, which we’re keeping a close eye on.”
“I see the usual voices are out in full voice on the web.”
“Oh yes. ‘Why cure a man in order to kill him?’ ‘Let that animal die slowly, like his victims did…’ I know there are a great deal of paradoxes and contradictions in our legal system, but it’s the best we’ve got.”
“Tamen lex, lex manet,” Kate said, mostly to herself, recalling the interview with Edward Stone.
“Sorry?”
“The law’s the law,” she said. “As in: it’s one of the few things we can rely on.”
The Governor nodded. “For that reason, I believe we can and should still take pride in our justice system,” he went on.
“Cox hasn’t been tried yet. When he does, if he’s found guilty, he can appeal the verdict.
And he can carry on appealing for decades beyond that.
Some people consider that a form of cruelty.
Some people call it an indulgence, a courtesy accorded to killers that was not extended to their victims. I can see the merits of those arguments.
But the right to a trial, and the right to appeal…
those things are the hallmarks of a civilized society.
The gangs in here might mete out their notions of justice with a bedspring or a shard of glass.
But we don’t. Even a prisoner has rights. ”
“Speaking of which, what about the bug in Cox’s cell? Has that yielded anything?”
The Governor looked sheepish. “He, er, located it on Saturday afternoon. Recited the Last Rites over it and flushed it down the toilet.”
“Right. Great.”
They stopped outside a solitary cell. A guard stood by the door, and opened a flap to reveal Santos inside, sat on the narrow cot, his face buried in his hands. The Governor gave Kate a brief nod in farewell, and the Guard let her into the cell.
Santos looked up when Kate entered. Eyes red-rimmed, cheeks streaked with tears.
“I am not an assassin,” he whispered. “I don’t know what came over me. One moment we were talking… and then it was like I was outside myself. Detached. And I knew—knew—that Cox had to die. I had this overwhelming sense of his malevolence, his pure evil. That it needed to be stopped.”
Kate kept her voice level. “Detached enough to hide a plastic knife in the prison? That’s not some wild impulse, Father. That’s serious planning.”
Santos looked startled. “I don’t remember anything.”
Kate was instantly sceptical of the whole amnesia act. But she gave Santos the courtesy of an answer. “If it was on your person or in your possession, then the guards would have found it.”
Even as she said that, though, Kate knew there were other possibilities.
Drugs got into the prisons, and telephones, even explosives and kits for building guns…
and only a percentage of them were smuggled.
Much as it would pain a man like the Governor to admit it, in every correctional facility from Alaska to Wyoming, prison staff themselves were a major conduit of contraband.
“I—perhaps. I’ve had… other episodes. These past weeks.
Blackouts, fragments I cannot recall. Maybe I prepared it then.
Maybe I don’t remember.” He pressed trembling fingers to his temples.
“Five years ago I was kidnapped—by a parishioner gone mad. I went to some therapy sessions, but I stopped... they weren’t helping but…
I think I never really processed the trauma. ”
Kate watched the man in front of her. His grief and shock seemed real. So did the shame. But the convenient gaps in memory, the ready-made past trauma? Hokum, or something darker?
“What’s going to happen to me?” His voice was almost childlike.
“You’ll be transferred to County Jail,” Kate said. “Charged with Assault with a Deadly Weapon, in the first instance. Murder in the first if Cox dies.”
She let the words hang. Santos let out a breath slowly, trembling, tears welling in his eyes. “You’d better get down on your knees and pray, Father.”
For a long moment he simply stared at her, lips moving soundlessly. Then he bowed his head and did exactly that.