The Sniper's Wife (25 page)
T
he Portsmouth naval prison is one of the region’s oddest landmarks. Located on the eastern edge of the large island housing the Navy Yard, the now-empty prison dominates most inland vistas like a cross between an ancient fortress and a gigantic, Stalinist apartment block. It is at once stately and hideous, alluring and repellent. Built at the turn of the twentieth century and nicknamed the Castle, it was designed as the Navy’s premier highsecurity facility and made to the then-popular template of Leavenworth and comparable hellholes, complete with stacked and terraced jail cells, electrically controlled sliding doors, and shooting galleries for the guards—a James Cagney movie hauntingly frozen in concrete and steel.
Unaware his car had been identified and was now under surveillance, Willy drove to Seavey’s Island, showed his badge to the guard at the gate, and was waved through without further effort. Once a beehive of Eisenhower’s “military/industrial complex,” the Navy Yard was thinly manned now, enough that periodically it had to justify its existence before congressional subcommittees—an unheard-of humiliation in the old days. As a result, while parts of the island were still closely guarded, a good chunk of it was virtually open to the public, an aspect some initial investors had hoped to bank on by transforming the prison into a business condo with some of the best views in town. Until their funding crumbled with only a few rooms gutted and refitted with new windows.
Willy had no idea what Andy Liptak’s plans were when he bought the lease from those disappointed visionaries, but he suspected money-laundering probably played a role.
The day had fully arrived by the time he parked nearby. There was a modern bachelor-officer’s housing unit within twenty yards of the prison’s west wall, so the presence of vehicles went without notice, and it was already late enough that the owners of those cars were at work elsewhere on the island.
Willy took his bearings. The building lay along a roughly north-south axis. It had a central portion resembling a castle keep—ergo the nickname—complete with four looming, crenellated corner turrets, and two asymmetrical wings, both shorter and narrower and equipped with smaller, evenly spaced turrets of their own. The whole was utterly massive, if neglected and weatherbeaten, and seemed well endowed with windows, until closer scrutiny revealed that all of them had been tightly boarded up, lending to the place the look of a medieval Playmobil toy hormonally run amok.
Architectural integrity, however, had been altered long before the windows had been sealed. The “new” section, also called the Fortress, had been tacked onto the tail end of the southern wing to handle World War Two’s excess population. Its axis was east-west, it was as tall and massive as the central Castle, but while it tipped a hat to the Castle’s architecture with a single turret and some arched windows, the turret was square and the windows were graceless, and the overall aspect was so bland, white, and blockish, it ended up looking like a Montgomery Ward warehouse in need of repair.
But it was also where Willy saw his best hope for gaining entry. The Fortress had been where the developers had done their truncated remodeling and in the process had both breached the exterior walls and punched holes in some of the rusty chain-link fencing designed to keep out trespassers.
Willy cautiously crossed to the foot of the Fortress’s walls and cut around to the south wall to get a feel for his surroundings. Before entering this abandoned behemoth, he wanted to know how the ground lay around it.
In fact, it was remarkably desolate. Despite its location in the middle of a major city’s harbor and on the edge of a military base, the prison had a distinctly lonely feeling to it. Virtually surrounded by water on three sides and at the farthest distance possible from the island’s busiest spot, the building seemed shunted aside, as if not just history but geography had decided its usefulness was firmly in the past.
This isolation became an advantage on the other side, however, and helped explain the eagerness with which those long-vanished developers had eyed the property. The harbor; the city of Portsmouth; the string of bridges spanning the Piscataqua River; Kittery, Maine; and Castle Island, all stretched before it like a peaceful, unblemished maritime panorama. And as if in poignant and ironic contrast to the building he was about to enter, Willy was startled to see the ancient, tumbledown Wentworth-by-the-Sea Hotel just across the water, once host to moneyed visitors from Boston and elsewhere, standing in stark contrast to the far harsher quarters behind him. What feelings those jailed sailors must have had a half century ago, watching the rich and famous being liveried to and from this monumental watering hole, and listening to the laughter and music that once must have emanated from its open windows on a summer night.
Now, both abandoned, empty, and falling apart, they stood as mute witnesses to bygone times, as anachronistic and retrospectively romantic as the contrast between Sing Sing and Jay Gatsby.
Willy, however, saw all this only in passing. What caught his eye and heightened his anticipation was the black BMW parked out of the way, under a tree, as discreetly as possible. Running the risk of being seen, he trotted over to the car and glanced inside, finding what he thought he might—a smear of blood across the backseat—but which still didn’t look as bad as he’d been fearing. From that scant evidence alone, he took heart that Sammie was still alive.
He returned to the most likely breach in the prison’s exterior wall and slipped inside.
Joe Gunther pointed to the tall, blond, athletically built woman in uniform who was standing by the edge of the helicopter landing pad.
“That’s Janet Scott,” he told Phil Panatello, shouting over the sound of the rotors.
They waited until the crew chief gave them the thumbs-up before jumping out of the aircraft, instinctively ducking as they jogged over to where Scott was waiting.
She gave Gunther a smile as he drew near. “Hey, Joe. Long time. You’re traveling in style. I didn’t know you were a part of this.”
“More of an outrigger than a real part,” he admitted, and made introductions all around.
She directed them away from the prop wash into a small concrete building that doubled as a waiting room.
“This is what we’ve got so far: Your Willy Kunkle apparently broke into the Liptak house—smashed the door down—smacked her around a little and forced her to tell him that Liptak might be holding out in the old naval prison on Seavey’s Island.” She cast a glance at Gunther. “He really one of yours?”
“As is the one who’s missing.”
“Granted.” She held her hand up as Panatello opened his mouth to say something. “Anyway, that was her story, and it’s true that we found her hog-tied on the bedroom floor. But we also found a twelve-gauge hole in the bedroom door where she tried to kill Kunkle as he entered, except that he came in through a different door.”
“What about Kunkle?” Panatello asked.
“He went straight to the prison. He was seen scoping it out, including the beemer parked on the far side, and then he ducked inside.” She checked her watch. “That was about twenty minutes ago. I’ve since assembled a multidepartmental tac team and parked them out of sight all around the place, on the water as well. There is blood, by the way, covering the car’s backseat.”
That introduced a pause in the conversation.
“And there’s been nothing since?” Joe Gunther finally asked.
“Not a peep.”
Gunther stepped away and absentmindedly watched the chopper crew through the window as they secured their craft to the helipad. Behind him, Scott and Panatello coordinated how to get to the prison without attracting undue attention.
“Worried about your people?”
Gunther turned at Ward Ogden’s quiet, resonant voice.
“Willy especially,” he admitted. “Mostly because of what he might do. I mean, Sam could be dead by now, which would damn near kill me, but Christ only knows about Willy. He’s already in enough hot water—but that’ll probably be nothing compared to what he comes up with next.”
Ogden smiled enigmatically. “Water may not be that hot.”
Gunther’s eye narrowed. “Meaning what?”
“Panatello and I were talking during the flight. If he agrees to play along, Wild Willy might just duck this bullet—for the most part, at least. Roughing up Casey Ballantine’ll need a closer look by the locals, but right now, from a legal standpoint, what he did in New York might not even surface.”
“He shot Cashman, for God’s sake.”
Ogden shook his head. “Somebody did, but we don’t have any evidence and Riley’s not talking. Same thing with the assault on Budd Wilcox—he never saw who hit him—thought it was Cashman. And Lenny Manotti’s never going to say he was pushed around by a one-armed man. Panatello’s bunch are going to be busy enough without dragging Willy into it.
“And,” he added, “the Casey Ballantine thing up here’ll probably end up in the same place. She’ll be way too busy trying to stay out of jail to be pointing fingers at Willy Kunkle.”
The voices behind them rose up as people began crowding the exit. Ogden laid a hand on Gunther’s shoulder. “I’m not saying I’m right, and I’m not saying it won’t all be moot depending on how crazy he gets today, but if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about his legal problems too much.
“Of course,” he put in almost as an afterthought, “I’m also not sure I’d let him out of Vermont for ten to twenty years, either.”
The first floor of the Fortress looked like the aftermath of an earthquake. As Willy picked his way carefully through the debris left by the remodelers, he was impressed by both their ambitions and their destructiveness. Walls had been sledgehammered through, holes chopped into ceilings, and massive piles of glass block windows had been gathered where more conventional windows had replaced them. The logic of their plans was just barely discernible through the rubble, and he had to admit, what with the open spaces and the generous views, it did look like a potentially attractive workplace.
But it was also empty of any signs of life. If Liptak was here, he’d apparently tucked himself away inside the building’s older, so-called Castle section.
Willy found a single door connecting the addition to the mother ship: a narrow hallway on the ground floor, a concrete tunnel with a gaping, open steel-barred gate, leading into a void so dark, he felt he was stepping into pure space.
His already cautious progress slowed to a tentative creeping, and he placed each foot carefully before the other, gently pushing aside any trash and rubble on the floor to avoid crunching it underfoot. He even opened his mouth to breathe so that he could better hear whatever might be awaiting him.
By the time he reached the end of the connecting tunnel, he was walking blind. He extracted from his pocket a small flashlight he always kept on hand, and, after listening carefully, held it as far away from himself as possible, in case it was used as a target, and switched it on.
What appeared before him was like a still from a black-and-white movie: a long, constricted, towering slit of a corridor, with a wall of boarded-up windows on one side and a stacked tier of rusty caged-in galleries on the other. Both the ceiling and the end of this long room extended beyond the reach of the tiny flashlight, and in the silence he could imagine the voices of thousands of confined men, their hands gripping the bars, or playing cards on the floor between cells. In the still dampness of the air, he could all but smell the sweat, the bland food, and the stink of hundreds of toilets. Willy had visited old, overcrowded prisons before, some almost as decrepit as this one, and knew too well what was missing from the picture now before him.
Satisfied that his light hadn’t given him away, Willy took his bearings and found a staircase leading up, walled with more bars. Still moving gingerly, he climbed to the next level, which also took him to the building’s west side. There, he came to a balcony inside the second-floor gallery, a row of cells on the right, and instead of a conventional railing to the left, a wall of open vertical bars as far as he could see. The same gloomy silence prevailed, but the sense of vastness was reduced. Now he felt truly entombed, wrapped up by darkness, silence, and aging steel. Everything was made of metal, from floor to overhead canopy, and from everything hung large flakes of peeling gray paint, making him feel he was brushing alongside an endless length of stretched-out alligator skin. As he walked as softly as possible across the debrisstrewn floor, past cell after devastated cell, each with its own rusty bedsprings, toilet, and sink, and each choked with the small, accumulated rubble of the ages, he felt himself being swallowed whole.
The trip felt interminable, but eventually he came to the end of the gallery, to another set of stairs, and finally to a passageway leading to the prison’s central administrative area—the heart of the Castle proper.
There he found himself on a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron, mahogany-topped railing, overlooking an immense, three-story-high reception area with an enclosed section in the middle, much like a teller’s cage, and several grand staircases more suitable to a Europeanstyle hotel. It was like stepping from Devil’s Island into the lobby of the Ritz, albeit right after a bombing run.
Now he was at a loss. The mezzanine he was standing on split in two directions, surrounding the great hall below him, and he also had a choice between the stairs leading both up and down to the ground floor, all with nothing to indicate which direction to follow. Instinctively, he killed his small flashlight to help himself rely solely on his hearing.
A faint scraping sound drew his attention toward the northwest. Turning the light back on, he took the left branch.
This led him to another door, a second slightly smaller room with erstwhile offices lining the walls, and the first trickle of daylight presumably from an unboarded up window.
He pocketed his flashlight and replaced it with his gun. The scraping he’d just barely heard earlier was now loud, rhythmic, and definitely coming from one of the offices ahead.
