Sanctuary (7 page)

The mist to my left suddenly thinned, offering me my first view of the valley. I blinked at the sight and veered to the left shoulder. Shoved the car into park. Threw the door open and stood with one foot in the car and the other on the graveled shoulder.

Below me in a large clearing half a mile away lay a fenced compound. In the center of that compound rose a beautiful stone building shaped like a cross. I saw it all in a glance and my pulse thickened.

The only similarity between Basal and Ironwood were the tall fences, three of them running in parallel, set back from the institution. Where Ironwood looked like four huge factory buildings, Basal looked more like an oversized mansion. Or an old sanitarium for the mentally ill. Or a massive cathedral. No guard towers that I could see.

The walls rose high and were topped by a green metal roof that sloped upward to meet a glass dome that allowed light to filter into the area below. Windows every ten or fifteen feet peered out from the cells, but they were tinted, the one-way kind used in some office buildings. There were no bars, only leafy vines that crawled up the walls at each corner.

And then I saw what could pass as guard towers, built into the corners of the building with a clear view of the exterior compound. If so, the guards were out of sight. A green lawn, maybe a hundred yards wide, separated the monolithic structure from the three fences, which alone marked the compound as something other than a uniquely designed resort.

Haze drifted by, thickening to obscure the valley for a few moments before thinning again.

There were no patrol cars driving along the perimeter road, no correctional officers pacing the lawn. A single paved road bordered by a shorter fence stretched between a sally port near the perimeter and what I took to be the front entrance. The sally port was a system consisting of two gates that could not be opened at the same time. Any vehicle coming or leaving would have to pass through the first gate, then wait for it to close behind before being admitted through the second gate—a security measure used at all prisons.

A large fenced parking lot with a pedestrian sally port encompassed thirty or forty cars on the far left side. Otherwise there was no indication that the building was even occupied. Deliveries probably came in from the back, where there would be a third sally port, but I couldn’t see over the building.

For a moment I imagined that Danny’s world had just been filled with a ray of bright hope. Surely this would be a better place than Ironwood. But then the voice from the phone drifted through my mind and the illusion faded.

Danny was somewhere within those walls, cut off from the reality known by the rest of the world. For all I knew they were conducting experiments on the inmates inside. Even if they weren’t, someone was going to kill him.

“Can I help you?”

I spun back and saw that a car with an orange light on its roof had approached without my hearing it. A man dressed in black slacks and a white collared shirt stood at the open passenger door, hand on the frame, looking at me. Inside the car, a driver watched me through the windshield, idly tapping his thumb on the steering wheel. I stared, caught completely off guard.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Ah…no. I just…” I stepped around the hood of my car. “But maybe you can help me.”

He didn’t respond. He was a kind-enough looking fellow with blond hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. The car’s door sign identified it as Grounds Control. No weapons that I could see. Not even pepper spray.

“My husband was brought here from Ironwood this morning and I’m having trouble getting a message to him. This is Basal, right?”

“Go through his attorney. Quickest way. It’ll still take at least a week.”

“A week?”

He was eyeing my body and I glanced down. Only then did it hit me that in my frantic haste to leave the condo, I had quickly pulled on a pair of jeans but forgotten to change my top. Or fix my hair. Not that my hair needed fixing—I normally wore it down, and messy hair was somewhat in style. But my yellow-checkered flannel top screamed pajamas…

“I don’t have a week.”

“I’m sorry, but this is a restricted area. You need to turn your car around and leave.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“You don’t understand. You have an inmate inside whose life’s in danger. I have to talk to the warden. Please, I’m begging you.”

“And you know his life’s in danger how?”

I hesitated. “I was told.”

The guard didn’t look impressed. “Ma’am, if even one in a hundred threats made in correctional institutions were carried out, the prisons would be graveyards. Let me put your mind to rest. Your…husband, did you say?”

“My friend.”

“Trust me, your friend’s in the safest prison in California,” he said, “in part because of Basal’s strict policies regarding isolation. He’s been selected for the program for a reason, and you’re going to have to trust in that.”

I looked back at my car, scrambling for an angle, but I couldn’t find one. Maybe I was overreacting. It wouldn’t be the first time. Then again, maybe not.

I faced the man, who clearly had more patience than I did. “I got a phone call from a stranger this morning threatening to kill him.”

“Kill who, did you say?”

“I didn’t.”

The corners of the man’s mouth pulled up into a cockeyed smile. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I got a shoe box.”

“A what?”

No, I couldn’t go there.

“Someone’s threatening to kill him, so like it or not, I am worried.”

“Look, Basal has a zero-tolerance policy regarding violence. Without weapons at their disposal, inmates use words. All the time. That’s assuming the threat came from Basal, which is highly unlikely.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He just got here this morning?”

“Yes.”

The guard shook his head. “I doubt he’s met any of the prisoners yet, much less had time to make enemies. Besides, all phone calls are monitored. Is your friend a violent man?”

“No.” Not anymore, anyway. Although I had no doubt Danny could put both of these guards on their backs without breaking a sweat.

“He make a habit of screaming obscenities at people who walk by?”

“Of course not.”

The guard shrugged. “He’s perfectly safe here. Wherever that call came from, it wasn’t Basal. And whoever made it will have an even harder time getting in here than you. Follow? What prison did you say he was transferred from?”

“Ironwood.”

“There you go. Impossible to spend time at Ironwood without making enemies. Now, if you don’t mind, you really need to turn your car around and leave. And just so you know, the minute any car hits our blacktop, we know. Go home and take a deep breath. If you still think you need to get a message inside, you best work with an attorney.”

“Do you know an inmate named Bruce Randell?”

The guard’s eyes flickered and I knew I’d hit a chord.

“Not directly, no. I’m not at liberty to speak about any members. I think it’s best for you to leave.”

I knew then that I had no hope of getting in to see Danny without someone’s help. That’s when I decided to start with whoever had first put Bruce Randell behind bars. Know your enemy’s enemy, Danny had once taught me. They will likely be your ally.

“Thank you,” I said, eager to leave. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.” He grinned. “Martin. Please don’t return until you have the right paperwork. There’s an armed gate around the corner a hundred yards up. No one gets past it unless we want them to. Follow?”

“Follow,” I said.

But the only path I was following was the one that led me to Danny, and that path now led me to Bruce Randell, Danny’s newest enemy.

THE DINING HALL
was located in the south wing, just off the hub, a self-serve affair that rewarded those who lined up for chow with a compartmentalized plate not unlike those sold as TV dinners. Today’s lunch consisted of one spoonful of fake whipped spuds, three or four small chunks of corned beef, a dozen green beans, an apple, a thick slice cut from a French roll, and something like margarine spread thinner than a snitch’s word across the surface. Choice of drink: water, apple juice, lime soda, or lemonade.

The hall contained thirty long tables, three rows of ten. According to Godfrey, the prison had a maximum capacity of 300 but was considered full at 250, allowing the warden the spare cells needed to shuffle members between wings as required. Lunch was served to the commoners in two shifts, although privileged members, currently numbering forty-seven, could eat in the hall if they so desired. At least half took advantage of the better meals delivered to the guest rooms, as the privileged cells were called. Members in the basement meditation wing were fed rolls of highly enriched bread in their cells.

On Danny’s first day there were roughly a hundred members in the room, seated at the tables or in line, talking quietly, casting glances only occasionally at the table where Danny sat alone with Godfrey and a very shy Pete Manning.

The boy looked young for his twenty years, hardly more than a pubescent teenager, not because he was small but because his features were fine. Short blond hair covered his head, straight but slightly disheveled. The lashes above his light blue eyes were long, and the fingers holding his plastic spoon as he toyed with his whipped spuds looked like they hadn’t seen a day’s labor in years. He was pale and his skin was unblemished except for a bruise on his right cheekbone.

The only sign that he was anything but perfectly normal came in the way he carried himself, delicately and on edge, as if he knew of some imminent danger hidden from the rest of them.

A quick count identified seven privileged members eating at the tables, and five employed in the serving line, all easily distinguished by their street clothes in a sea of members dressed in blue pants and tan shirts. Roughly half were white, perhaps a third were black, the rest, Latino. Danny found this odd, considering the overwhelming percentage of minorities imprisoned in California’s prison system, one of the great injustices of law enforcement.

A single CO—or facilitator, Godfrey had called them—lounged in a chair near the door, apparently bored stiff. In most prisons, guards were sparsely stationed for efficiency in high-traffic areas. A show of force was only required when trouble erupted. In some larger institutions, inmates might see corrections officers only a few times over the course of several days unless there was trouble nearby.

The custody and security operations at Basal were fairly typical. One captain, Bostich, oversaw three lieutenants, one for each wing: the east privileged wing, the west commons wing, and the basement meditation wing. Under each lieutenant were three sergeants, one for each eight-hour shift, for a total of nine sergeants. The sergeants oversaw the corrections officers, ranging in number from two to seven depending on the shift and the wing. Each of the four towers on the perimeter were manned by an armed officer, who made up the balance of the security detail.

But at Basal they were all simply called facilitators, regardless of position. Danny could account for five of them—two at the commons wing, one in the hub, one in the dining hall, and one rover—as he ate and listened to Godfrey’s philosophy.

“You do realize that most get locked up without a violent bone in their body. Two percent for rape. Ten percent for murder. That’s it, Danny boy. There’s been no increase among violent offenses per capita in this county for decades. There has, on the other hand, been a seven hundred percent increase in the number of nonviolent offenders put in prison since the seventies. You ever wonder why?”

“Since the warden mentioned it,” Danny said.

“There aren’t more rapists out there to justify the increase. Not more murderers. Not more violent husbands. Instead, there are simply more laws.”

The older man continued with a twinkle in his eye.

“The land of the free has only recently undertaken a grand experiment of sorts, incarcerating far more of its citizens than any other society in history has ever attempted, Hitler’s incarceration of Jews notwithstanding. Is it working? Is America now safer than it was in the seventies, eighties, or nineties? Nope. Is it safer than Canada, which is far more lenient? Not close. Europe? Again, not even close. You ever think about that?”

“I haven’t dwelled on it, no.”

“Well you should. Politicians are obsessed with passing new laws that give them power and satisfy smug constituents. Fact is, hundreds of thousands of the inmates inside are no worse than those who live in freedom. Know what their problem is?”

Danny didn’t answer.

“They were caught out of sync—wrong place, wrong time. They crossed the road on the wrong day. They said the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong country and were accused of hate speech. They placed the wrong chemical in their mouths. You ever do drugs?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Me neither. Still, an interesting case. In the early nineteen hundreds, most of the drugs now prohibited in the United States were legal. Millions consumed elixirs and medicines loaded with cocaine and opium and other drugs on a daily basis. No one considered their consumption immoral any more than the consumption of wine or fast food was immoral. But then the laws changed, making first drugs and then wine illegal. You see?”

Godfrey paused only a moment, then answered himself.

“New time, new law. Same species: human.”

He took a bite of egg and went on, speaking around his food.

“Predictably, the consumption of alcohol was hardly suppressed by the new laws—people who wanted to drink still did and always will—but prisons began filling with those who were caught deviating from the new norm. And then the laws changed again and the country went about happily selling and drinking wine in freedom. You see?”

“I guess I do.”

“New time, new law. Same species: human. Humans don’t change their behavior to conform to new laws as much as they take pains not to get caught breaking the new laws. Fact is, more than half of all Americans have broken federal laws—mostly tax and drug laws—for which the penalty is prison, but have never been caught. You think we should put half the country behind bars, Danny?”

“Doesn’t make sense.”

“What will happen when society changes its political mind and makes wine illegal again? Or decides that all unregulated herbs like ginger root should be illegal to possess? Or that anyone caught using trans fats or selling fast food should be imprisoned?”

Godfrey liked to talk.

“And it ain’t just alcohol and drugs. Take murder. Murder is murder, course it is, but not all forms of taking human life are illegal or considered immoral. Infanticide is legal in some societies, partial-birth abortion in others. Abortion in most. But what if the laws change, as they invariably do?”

Godfrey glanced at Peter, who sat beside him, keeping to himself.

“Or take sexual deviance as defined by law. Pete here is in for statutory rape, right? But based on current California law, Jesus himself, the so-called son of God, was raised by a statutory rapist. Isn’t that so, Priest?”

It was. Joseph had been at least thirty years older than his fourteen-year-old bride. Joseph would have been sent to prison for statutory rape if he’d lived in the United States of America.

“Different time, different law, same species: human,” Godfrey said. “Were Joseph and Mary stupid? No. Were they immoral? No. But change the laws and they would be classified as deviants along with all of their peers. It’s cultural, not moral. But a politician makes a new law to get elected and, suddenly, previously acceptable behavior is deviant. So the question is, what to do with all those deviants created by changing laws?”

“Build more prisons,” Danny said.

Godfrey smiled. “Now you’re thinking. Build more prisons. You’ll need them. Not for the scumbags of society, like you and me, but to segregate and punish those caught deviating from the rules. Just like the rules at Basal. Don’t break the rules, Danny. There’s a price to pay. Isn’t there, Peter?”

Peter nodded without looking up. “Yup.”

The efficiency and order on display among the members of Basal was nothing short of unnerving. Pape’s system seemed to be working surprisingly well. The program was too new to account for any early paroles, but the reports coming out of Basal, which Danny had read in his handbook, would undoubtedly be a source of pride for reformers and a thorn in the side of those who wanted to keep prisons just the way they were.

Many of the rules for the commons were plainly objective. Lights out at 9:00 p.m., no later than 9:02. Follow pathways where marked, in the lunch line, for example. No swearing. No contraband, the list of which filled three single-spaced pages including such items as tobacco, alcohol, drugs, a long list of “weapons,” images of half-naked or fully naked men or women, and novels that contained inappropriate language including any swearing, nakedness, sexuality, or excessive violence.

Shirts could not be unbuttoned below the first button. No jewelry of any kind could be worn. New tattoos were prohibited. Nicknames were prohibited. Cleanliness was held next to godliness, and as such each member was required to shower and brush their teeth once per day using only cold water. The list went on and on.

But some of the rules were entirely subjective, placing members at the mercy of the facilitators’ judgment.

No raised voices, for any reason at any time, including but not limited to yelling, laughing, cursing, threatening, or questioning. But what constituted a raised voice?

In addition to swearing, no coarse language at any time for any reason. But what constituted coarse language?

No displays of affection, which might be construed or mistaken as an invitation to sexually deviant behavior. Again, how many ways might a simple glance be interpreted?

No threats to members or facilitators. No disrespect to any member unless authorized by the warden for disciplinary reasons. In addition, members were required to demonstrate a progressive attitude and a full willingness to learn nondeviant behavior. Yet again,
threats
,
disrespect
, and
attitude
were all wide open for interpretation.

And perhaps the most disturbing of all: no questioning authority, or the rules, or the doctrines upon which the facility stood, except as a matter of formal petition and due process. In other words, members weren’t free to spout off complaints. Instead they were required to file a petition and could voice such questions or complaints to the warden only if permitted. As in a courtroom, free speech in Basal was limited, forfeited as part of the waiver Danny had signed in the warden’s office.

This was Basal’s cultural norm, and deviation from that norm constituted deviant behavior, and deviant behavior would be punished.

What kind of punishment? Restricted privileges. Isolation. Shunning. Meditation. An eye for an eye. What precisely that meant, Danny didn’t yet know.

The other members watched Danny with interest, but as Godfrey had predicted, they didn’t speak to him as they passed through the hub, nor during a quick survey of the tiny yard nestled between the east and south wings, nor in line for lunch. Not a word anywhere. Speaking to the priest was prohibited.

Godfrey ran down a short list of members in the dining hall that he thought might interest Danny. Carter Beagle, a convict who’d been locked up for over twenty years, transferred in from San Quentin. He was in for homicide, a gas-station robbery that went wrong when the proprietor’s girlfriend came out of the back room with a shotgun. Carter’s first shot went off by accident and struck the proprietor in the chest. He had taken half a load of buckshot in his right leg, which was why he limped.

Now he was an old-timer like most at Basal—those who just wanted to do their time in peace, unlike younger inmates who still thought they could prove something on the inside.

There was Max Demarko, a mob guy in for grand larceny, also an old-timer; Sterling Maxwell, in on weapons charges in the sixties; Pedro Rivera, a teddy bear of a man who had raped a woman twice his age while strung out on crack back in the day. Godfrey knew them all, and most of them shared one thing in common: they were program convicts who’d long ago abandoned any desire to buck the system.

Their silence was part of Danny’s indoctrination, but at the heart of that programming was the young man who Pape claimed would determine Danny’s fate at Basal.

Peter Manning.

Danny studied the boy while Godfrey murmured that the knuckleheads must have eaten their lunch at the first serving. His mention earned an apprehensive sideways glance from Pete.

During the ten minutes since Godfrey had motioned the boy to the table, Peter had looked Danny in the eye only once, and then for less than a second. He ate quietly, eyes fixed on nothing of note, lost in a world trapped in his mind.

That this boy could have been convicted of statutory rape was hard to imagine, much less believe. And yet here he sat, locked up to keep society safe and to help him see a better, nondeviant way.

Godfrey nodded at Danny, took a drink of lemonade, and cleared his throat. “Pete, why don’t you tell Danny your story? Hmm? The one you told me. The truth.”

Peter made no sign that he’d heard Godfrey. He remained hunched over his plate with one hand on his lap and the other around his spoon. Perhaps a more direct approach was called for. Confession wasn’t new territory for Danny.

“Maybe it would be better if I told you my story, Pete,” Danny said. “Sometimes we do things because we’re hurt. We wish we could take it back but it’s too late. I know, because when I was fifteen I killed some men, and now I wish I hadn’t.”

Pete glanced up at him, held his gaze for two seconds, then shifted his stare into space as he chewed his food.