Chapter 98
CHAPTER
Three days after leaving the Pine Barrens, John Sampson and I took a long drive to the southwestern tip of Virginia and the Red Onion State Prison.
One of the commonwealth’s two supermax facilities, the Red Onion squatted in a large clearing in a forested unincorporated area near the town of Pound.
In aerial photos I’d seen, the prison was laid out in four repeating geometric patterns, like the design of an American Indian blanket.
Seen from the parking area, the facility looked like what it was: a place for dangerous criminals to be caged for the safety of inmates in other correctional facilities.
“They’ve got the poor bastard with the worst of the worst these days,” Sampson said when we climbed out of his new Ford F-150 into ungodly heat. He loved that truck.
Before I could reply, I heard a man say, “Dr. Cross? Detective Sampson?”
We turned and saw a sharp-suited man hurrying toward us with an awkward gait; he carried a briefcase and kept pushing a pair of heavy black-framed eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose.
He was in his late forties and wore a nice suit, but that move with the glasses and his wild tousle of now-graying hair gave him away.
“Ryan Davis,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m glad you could come, Counselor.”
“It’s the least I could do,” he said. “Except for a little gray at the temples, you guys look the same. I mean, it’s kind of amazing. Like it all could have happened yesterday.”
“Some ways, it feels like it did,” I said. “Shall we?”
We went to the gate, showed our credentials, and turned over our weapons while Davis’s briefcase was searched. Then we were led through six different security doors and gates before being met by Warden Daniel Celt, a tall whippet of a man in his fifties.
“Does he know we’re coming?” Sampson asked.
“He has no idea,” the warden replied.
I said, “And he’s heard nothing from the outside world?”
“Been in solitary for breaking the rules,” Celt said. “Twenty-three hours a day in his cell. One hour of exercise in the yard, which is where he’ll be coming from.”
Celt led us to an interior room with booths that faced bulletproof glass.
I said, “Given the circumstances, can we meet with him without the glass?”
The warden hesitated, then nodded and took us to a second room with a long table and benches made of concrete. Eyebolts jutted up out of the other side of the table and the floor.
The warden left through another door. A few minutes later, it opened.
A slight, older man in an orange jumpsuit with sweaty gray hair, glasses, and a furious expression shuffled in. An armed guard followed. A short chain linked the handcuffs he wore to a leather belt around his waist. A longer chain linked the cuffs around his ankles.
He sat, rage on his face, glasses fogged from coming out of the heat and into the air-conditioning. He said nothing as the guard connected his restraints to the eyebolts in the floor and on the other side of the table.
When the guard left, the inmate said angrily, “Can’t see you for nothing. But I told the guard and the warden, I don’t want to talk to no lawyer, much less three. Got no use for goddamned lawyers and I’m missing my fresh-air time.”
“Mr. Beech,” Ryan Davis said. “You probably don’t remember me, but I was your attorney when you were held in the state police barracks in Coatesville.”
“Here,” I said, “let me clean your glasses before we go on. Is that okay?”
“Go ahead,” Harold Beech said, sounding even more infuriated.
I took the glasses, wiped them clean, and put them back on his face.
Beech blinked, looked at Davis. “You’re right. I don’t remember you.”
“How about us?” Sampson asked.
The inmate stared at each of us in turn and then nodded, stony. “Cross and Sampson. You put me here.”
“We did,” I said. “And now we’re going to get you out.”