Then, up at the college, Valley’s drawing instructor, distraught and shaken, had been a dead end, unable to supply them with anything more than the number for campus security. A couple hours ago, frustrated, Finn had gone home to shower and sleep, taking with him the Eales case files he’d pulled. Kay had her own copies at home, and in their pages she’d found the reference to Dutton Mannequin.
Deeply embedded in transcripts and office reports, Eales had listed Dutton as one of more than two dozen places ofemployment in his past. He’d been twenty-six, and the job had lasted ten months.
She’d reached Vicki on her cell, somewhere between the State’s Attorney’s Office and the courthouse, their conversation broken as the cell picked up static in the downtown core. Just keep the interview focused on links to the new murder, Vicki had warned her. No reference to Spence and the upcoming trial. And as protocol would dictate, Vicki advised her to bring Finn, even though she agreed Kay would likely get more from Eales on her own.
So here she was. The passenger seat of the police car empty.
The smell of old cigarette smoke lingered, the stained velour seats saturated with it from years of her and Spence sharing their habit. She’d cleaned the ashtray months ago and wiped down the interior. A faded air-freshener dangling from one of the vent knobs had lost the battle.
Kay’s craving rose. She felt the half-empty pack of Camels in her suit pocket. Her emergency stash. It had taken work to dig it out of the clutter on the top shelf of her closet, but that had been the point. And now they would be Eales’s. The cost of information.
Kay closed her eyes, imagined tapping one of the unfiltered cigarettes from the pack right now, lighting it up and savoring the smooth smoke as it filled her lungs and calmed her nerves. She resisted and at last reached for the door handle.
The glass-enclosed lobby of the Reception and Diagnostic Center was cool. Sterile. At the front desk, Kay was handed a visitor’s pass and reported to Administration. There, she accessed the prison records and Eales’s visitation logs.
She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for. A name. Someone who came to see Eales regularly. Orrecently. Someone who might have done him the favor of killing Valley. But aside from his defense attorney, Eales’s only recorded visitor was a woman—Patricia Hagen.
A clerk of Grogan’s? An intern? Or maybe Eales had some fanatical girlfriend. An inside-outside relationship, Kay guessed as she took stock of the frequency of the visits. What kind of woman spent that much time with a sour, ill-tempered South Baltimore billy-boy awaiting trial for multiple murders? It took all kinds.
From Admin, Kay was escorted through the barren, blue-gray maze of the Metropolitan Transition Center and led to a twelve-by-sixteen-foot iron cage.
“You’re in here.” The guard motioned her into a holding cell, two sides flanked by barred hallways, the other two, solid cinder-block. And in the center, a table and two steel-cased chairs.
Tension tightened in Kay’s gut at the realization of what she was about to do. She certainly hadn’t expected to sit face-to-face with Eales with nothing but three feet of stale prison air between them. Back home, when she’d convinced herself to come here, she’d imagined a visitation booth, with its reinforced, Plexiglas partition and handsets.
From somewhere deep in the bowels of the MTC, gates slammed and a yelled chorus started up, then died just as abruptly. Five hundred and forty hot cells, most of them double-bunked, made up Blocks A and B of the west wing alone. A thousand violent men crammed into an oven. And one of them was Bernard Eales.
“Listen”—she turned to the guard—“I didn’t request a holding cell.”
“Front desk said this was a police interview. Figured you’d want some privacy.”
“It’s not necessary.”
“Look, you got this cell,
Deeply embedded in transcripts and office reports, Eales had listed Dutton as one of more than two dozen places ofemployment in his past. He’d been twenty-six, and the job had lasted ten months.
She’d reached Vicki on her cell, somewhere between the State’s Attorney’s Office and the courthouse, their conversation broken as the cell picked up static in the downtown core. Just keep the interview focused on links to the new murder, Vicki had warned her. No reference to Spence and the upcoming trial. And as protocol would dictate, Vicki advised her to bring Finn, even though she agreed Kay would likely get more from Eales on her own.
So here she was. The passenger seat of the police car empty.
The smell of old cigarette smoke lingered, the stained velour seats saturated with it from years of her and Spence sharing their habit. She’d cleaned the ashtray months ago and wiped down the interior. A faded air-freshener dangling from one of the vent knobs had lost the battle.
Kay’s craving rose. She felt the half-empty pack of Camels in her suit pocket. Her emergency stash. It had taken work to dig it out of the clutter on the top shelf of her closet, but that had been the point. And now they would be Eales’s. The cost of information.
Kay closed her eyes, imagined tapping one of the unfiltered cigarettes from the pack right now, lighting it up and savoring the smooth smoke as it filled her lungs and calmed her nerves. She resisted and at last reached for the door handle.
The glass-enclosed lobby of the Reception and Diagnostic Center was cool. Sterile. At the front desk, Kay was handed a visitor’s pass and reported to Administration. There, she accessed the prison records and Eales’s visitation logs.
She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for. A name. Someone who came to see Eales regularly. Orrecently. Someone who might have done him the favor of killing Valley. But aside from his defense attorney, Eales’s only recorded visitor was a woman—Patricia Hagen.
A clerk of Grogan’s? An intern? Or maybe Eales had some fanatical girlfriend. An inside-outside relationship, Kay guessed as she took stock of the frequency of the visits. What kind of woman spent that much time with a sour, ill-tempered South Baltimore billy-boy awaiting trial for multiple murders? It took all kinds.
From Admin, Kay was escorted through the barren, blue-gray maze of the Metropolitan Transition Center and led to a twelve-by-sixteen-foot iron cage.
“You’re in here.” The guard motioned her into a holding cell, two sides flanked by barred hallways, the other two, solid cinder-block. And in the center, a table and two steel-cased chairs.
Tension tightened in Kay’s gut at the realization of what she was about to do. She certainly hadn’t expected to sit face-to-face with Eales with nothing but three feet of stale prison air between them. Back home, when she’d convinced herself to come here, she’d imagined a visitation booth, with its reinforced, Plexiglas partition and handsets.
From somewhere deep in the bowels of the MTC, gates slammed and a yelled chorus started up, then died just as abruptly. Five hundred and forty hot cells, most of them double-bunked, made up Blocks A and B of the west wing alone. A thousand violent men crammed into an oven. And one of them was Bernard Eales.
“Listen”—she turned to the guard—“I didn’t request a holding cell.”
“Front desk said this was a police interview. Figured you’d want some privacy.”
“It’s not necessary.”
“Look, you got this cell,
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