EPILOGUE
Kate pulled to a stop in the visitor lot of the Augusta State Penitentiary and shivered before she even left the car. Marcus thought she was visiting Gabe in New York. Her mother… Well, her mother hadn’t answered Kate’s phone call or replied to her message, so Kate had no idea what she thought.
What Kate was actually doing was finding answers. Not the ones Cox offered, or at least that’s what she told herself, but real answers, ones that she hoped would lead to real truths.
The Augusta State Penitentiary was actually over forty miles outside of the state capital.
The wealthy residents of Augusta exemplified the most distilled version of Yankee pride, and none of them wanted to soil the beautiful, wealthy, superior environs of their lovely state’s lovely capital with a reminder that evil resided even in Maine.
Today, the hills, trees, and prison were covered in a thick blanket of snow.
Kate knew there were parts of the country where it never snowed but surrounded by the white stuff everywhere she’d been for the past two months, it was hard to believe that.
Only the road was free of snow, religiously plowed and salted by a prison intent on making sure its free occupants could come and go without interference.
Kate swallowed, but it was far too late to let fear control her now. She pushed her door open and stepped out of her car.
Security here varied from minimum-security special housing, which was essentially a gated apartment community for criminals harmless enough to earn their own rooms and wealthy enough to afford them, medium-security general population for the unwashed masses of minor to moderate felons, and maximum-security special housing for the most dangerous and severe of offenders.
Peter S. Gadd was held in this latter wing, no longer a convicted murderer, but one whose long rap sheet had earned him fifty years in prison, essentially life unless he managed to survive past the age of ninety-four.
Kate walked to the gate and submitted to a search. The officer wasn’t very thorough. He was male, and she was female, and though nothing in his demeanor made Kate think he was attracted to her, he was going out of his way to make it clear he wasn’t touching her inappropriately.
That was only one example of how different this prison was from the Special Management Unit that had most recently held Cox.
The SMU was a supermax, one of only a few prisons in the United States to earn that lofty certification with impregnable security, rigid visitation procedures, and strict control over every aspect of its inmates’ lives.
Not that it had kept Cox from finding a way out. The snake had made his own hole to slither through.
The prison where Peter S. Gadd shared the air with two hundred forty-five other hardened criminals was nothing like that.
It was secure enough with a tall double fence topped with razor wire, armed guards in towers and at the gates, and a healthy population of corrections officers strutting through the three blocks of the maximum-security wing, but it still paled in comparison to the state-of-the-art hole that had housed Cox.
Peter just didn’t rate the same level of care.
Several of the inmates catcalled Kate as she followed the officers to the interview room. Quite a few pointed out how her freckles made her look young and innocent. Others assured her they liked “skinny women” and they’d “be gentle” for her.
Looking at them, Kate doubted they were even entirely aware of what they were saying.
Their flat, dull eyes and listless mouths suggested they were only reciting something they’d learned long ago, an echo of a life outside that they no longer understood and only barely remembered.
It was almost pitiful how they were left only with the dregs of an already pitiful existence.
The escorting officer went over the rules before letting Kate into the room.
Kate knew them all and only half-listened as the officer explained that she would have twenty minutes, Gadd would be shackled, no physical contact was allowed, and the officers could hear if she shouted for help and would be inside instantly.
Her heart thudded as she stepped into the room. Her vision tunneled, and she had to feel ahead to know when she’d reached the chair where she would sit to conduct the interview.
She sat, noticing the ice cold of the non-upholstered steel but not truly feeling it. Her throat was dry, and her hands didn’t shake only because they were clasped tightly in her lap.
This would be the first time she saw the man accused of killing her father face to face.
Though his conviction for that crime had been overturned, Kate still felt like she was confronting the worst moment of her life.
She half expected Gadd to smile and hand her a picture of her father bleeding to death on the steps of St. Simon and St. Jude in Baltimore.
The opposite door opened, and the officers led Peter S.
Gadd inside. Kate was struck dumb by the gaunt figure who shuffled to the chair across from her and sat in half-lidded malaise as the burly corrections officer shackled his right foot to the floor.
His face was sunken almost to the point of emaciation, his steel-colored eyes dulled to a filmy gray.
His hair—close-cropped when he was on trial for her father’s murder—hung below his shoulders now, the same filmy gray as his eyes.
He regarded Kate with vague interest at first, but when the door closed, he inhaled sharply. His eyes widened, focused.
He spoke first, his voice surprisingly resonant and clear in contrast to his appearance.
“I know you.”