JJ08 - Blood Money (12 page)

“So
Jacobs
hadn’t
threatened anything?”

“Not a thing,” she said, shaking her head.

Unlike me, Hahn kept her entire library in her office at the prison. Mine was strung out
over
every room of my trailer. Her books were neatly stacked on nice bookshelves that stood against every wall of her office. She had works by Freud, Jung, Rogers, Fromm, Erickson, and
Zimbardo,
and titles like
Social Psychology, Psychology and
You,
Short-Term Psychotherapies for Depression, Crime and Delinquency,
and
Child
Sexual
Abuse
.

“He seeing you for anything?” I asked.

She shook her head again. “I think
Dr.
Baldwin was seeing him. I can ask her for you, but
it’d
probably be better if you saw
her.
She can tell you a whole lot more about this than I can.
She’s
worked
inside prisons for
over
ten years. She teaches the suicide prevention class for the
staff.”

I noticed that mixed in among her psychology textbooks and testing and diagnostic manuals, she had numerous modern pop psychology books as well:
works
by
Peck,
Bradshaw,
and Moore, none of which surprised me. What did surprise me were all the self-help relationship books—new additions since
my
last visit. I smiled when I saw the spine for
Ten
Men
Who
Mess Up a
Woman’s
Life
.

Following
my gaze, she said, “
What
?”

“
Am
I one of the ten?”

“Huh?”

I pointed to the book.

“Of course not.
You’re
one in seven billion. Wish we could’ve given it a real
go.”

“You
think we
didn’t?”
I asked.

She laughed.
“You
kidding? Of course we
didn’t.

Can’t
when
one’s
heart already belongs to
another.”

“
Sorry
about that.”

“No
you’re
not,”
she said.
“And
now
you’re
with her and all is right with the
world.”

“Are
you . . . Do you want to talk about it?”

We
hadn’t
dated
much
and had never gotten serious in any
way,
but maybe I had missed something that she needed to
process.

“Said everything I had to
say,”
she said.
“Would
you say it again?”

“Wish
we’d’ve
gotten a real
go.
That’s
it. No big deal.

You
wanna know about suicide or not?” I smiled at
her.

She smiled back.

“I’m very cynical regarding suicide in general, but especially in
prison,”
she said.
“It’s
all about manipulation. About getting what they want. Most of the threats
we
get are from inmates in confinement, and every one of ’em are trying to get a transfer.
That’s
what
it’s
become—a
way
to get a transfer.
It’s
not even a
cry
for attention or
help,
just a
way
to beat the system. Some of them even scratch at their wrists a little, but
it’s
so superficial
it’s
laughable. And yet we
have
to treat everyone the same as if it were a genuine threat.”

I nodded.

“They’re placed in the isolation cell,” she continued. “Either by us or by Medical if
it’s
at night and
we’re
not here, in which case we
have
to see them within one hour of arriving at the institution the next morning. They get a complete physical, and we
give
them a complete mental status evaluation.”

“You
mind walking me through the procedures?”

“
We
have two
isolation cells. S-1 and S-2. S-1 is for those who’ve made an actual attempt. S-2 is for those who’ve just made verbal threats. In S-1 they are monitored every fifteen minutes, S-2, every
thirty.
In both cells, they’re in there naked and without any of their
property.
They’re given a canvas shroud sewn with nylon thread, a
canvas
blanket, and a plastic mat on the bare floor.
Usually,
within
two
days they realize
we’re
not going to transfer them and they’re begging us to put them back in confinement.”

“Which you do?”

“Which we do
gladly.
Even if they wanted to kill themselves in that situation it would be very difficult. They
don’t
have
anything to kill themselves with and
they’re
being monitored so
closely.”

Where there
weren’t
bookcases in
Hahn’s
office, there was Oriental art, reproductions of paintings mostly
—
lotus
leaves,
dragonflies, bamboo, garden
walls,
figures engaged in conversation, Chinese symbols in black and red. All in inexpensive Dollar Store frames.

“The ones who successfully commit suicide in prison never threaten it?”

“Those’re the more likely but there’re
exceptions.”

“
What about Jacobs?” I asked.
“You
think he committed suicide?”

A look of bewilderment crossed her face.
“Don’t
have
any reason not
to.
Do you?”

I told her about Lance Phillips.

“You
think
someone’s
trying to kill Phillips?”

“Finding the card gave his story a lot of
credibility.

Having someone about his size, sleeping in his bunk, killed in the same manner gives it even
more.”

L
eaving
Hahn’s,
I let
my
mind drift back
over
why the body of the
woman
killed at
Potter
Farm and found at the prison was stolen.

We
had immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was the killer attempting to hide evidence, but what if it
wasn’t?

Why else steal a body?

Maybe it was about concealing the
victim’s
identity and had nothing to do with evidence.

Who was she? Why was she there? Why show up uninvited to such an event?
Or,
if she was invited, who invited her?
Was
it just for a rendezvous with the inviter or was the invitee there as part of some sort of sinister scheme?
To
derail a campaign? Embarrass a candidate?
For
revenge of some stripe or another? Maybe a
setup.
Could her role
have
been about blackmail? Maybe instead of discrediting, it was about controlling a candidate. Blackmail not to get a candidate to drop out of a race but to control him once he was in office.

But why steal the body?

If not because who she was or some evidence left behind could connect her to the killer . . . then what?

What about necrophilia? Why
hadn’t
that occurred to me before?

What if she was stolen for something unrelated to her murder at all?

It was a stretch. A big one. But the fact that I
hadn’t
even thought about it until now bothered me.

Was
the driver involved?

What else
wasn’t
I thinking of ?

O
n my
way
to Medical I stopped
by
the property room to see if Sergeant Helms had found any other cards in the property of inmates whose deaths were deemed suicide.

“Any
joy?” I asked.

“I’ve only found one so
far,”
she said. “The others must be further back than I thought—or just misfiled.”

“Anything
in the one you found?”

She shook her head.
“A
whole deck. Not a single.

You
find a link between Phillips and Morales?”

I shook my head.
“Doesn’t
look like there is
one.”

“
Sorry,”
she said. “Maybe I’ll
have
better news for you
later.”

“Mind if I look at the deck you found?”

“
Sure,”
she said.
“Give
me a sec. I’ll grab
it.”
I waited while she found it. It
wasn’t
quick.

Eventually she placed the deck on the counter. “Here ya
go.”

It was a cold-case deck like the card I found in
Lance’s
pants pocket, but an earlier edition. Same concept. Same agencies. Different cases.

As Helms moved about sifting through the stacks of inmate
property,
I took out the deck and began to sort it according to suit.

When I had all the cold-case cards in
order,
I could see that none were missing. But I could see something else
besides.

None of the cards were missing, true, but there
was
an extra one.

“What is it?” Helms asked. “Extra card.”

“Really?” she asked in surprise. “I should’ve looked closer.
You
think the killer . . . what?”

“If he put it in the
victim’s
pocket or cell—anywhere in his
property,
whoever gathered his things could’ve stuck it with the other
cards.”

“What is it?”

“King of
hearts,”
I said. “But a different crime. Murder of a white female in Naples. Which probably means the card is
what’s
significant, not Miguel Morales. Morales just happened to be the king of hearts in the other
deck.”
said.

“Unless
there’s
a connection between them,” she said.

“This is a much older edition,” I said. “The case on this one is ten years older than
Morales.
And what are the chances
they’d
be on the same card? But
you’re
right, we need to look into
it.”

She nodded. “But
it’s
probably the card, not
who’s
on it.
We’ve
got an honest to God murderer
here.”

“Lots of them,
actually,”
I said.

She laughed.
“You’re
right. Forgot where I was for a
minute.”

Before she could say anything else, her phone
rang.
As she turned to get it, I looked at the card again, and began to get that little buzz, that addictive sensation somewhere inside, I always do at moments like these, when possibility turns into
probability.

Helms thrust the receiver at me.
“For
you.”
I took it. “Chaplain
Jordan.”

“Guess what I found in
Jacobs’s
pocket?” Sally said. “King of hearts playing card.”

“I wish you were on this one,
John,
I really
do,”
she said. “Interim inspector’s an arrogant
asshole.”

A
ccording to a recent article I had read, most men in America
don’t
have
close male friends. They
have
co-
workers,
or golf buddies, or hunting or fishing or ball game partners, but they
don’t
have
friends—and certainly not a best friend.

That was most men. I was different. I had Merrill.

Merrill Monroe was my best friend—and had been for
over
twenty years.

I ran into him as I was entering the medical
building.
I was on my
way
to question one of the inmates who slept near Danny
Jacobs
the night of his death.

“How’s
your mom?”

I shook my head and frowned. He said,
“Anything
I can do . .
.”

“
I
know,”
I said. “Thank
you.”

As usual, Merrill’s correctional officer uniform was neat and pressed and stretched tautly
over
his enormous muscular bulk. His dark black face glistened under a small patina of sweat in the mid-morning sun and his eyes were wide and had that wild look that made most people uncomfortable, especially if they were white.

“How you holdin’ up?” he asked.
“Okay,”
I said,
nodding.
“I’m
okay.”

All around
us,
inmates were entering the medical building for sick call and morning meds and exiting to
go
back to their dorms or to work. Most of them were noisy—laughing loudly or yelling to one of their
boys,
until they saw Merrill. Then without his even looking at them, they grew quiet and respectful and either nodded or spoke as they walked
by.
He
didn’t
acknowledge any of them.

We
stood there for a while longer, neither of us with much to
say,
enjoying one
another’s
company,
and I thought how much more pleasant the prison
was,
my life
was,
because he was here.