Washington Deceased (7 page)

“You are trying to piss me off, aren't you?”

“In what particular, precisely, do you feel I've been less than honest with you?”

Wendy sputtered for a moment in frustration at Michaelson's studied unflappability. She looked away, slapped her palms on the thighs of her jeans, sputtered some more, and finally looked back at him.

“What happened to your little finger?” she demanded, speaking very fast.

“I told you. I lost most of it in an accident.”

“You told me all right. What was the accident?”

“My finger was hit by a piece of flying metal.”

“Where did the metal come from?”

“It came out of the muzzle of a Kalyshnikov assault rifle,” Michaelson said with a smile. “Fortunately, my little finger was the second thing it hit instead of the first.”

“Aha! Then why in—
why
did you tell me it was an accident?”

“Because the chap who fired the rifle was aiming at my head.”

Chapter Nine

“From this station,” Correctional Officer/Grade 1 Kady said, “we can monitor 112 discrete venues within the compound, up to 6 at any one time.”

“Fascinating,” Michaelson remarked, glancing at the bank of small television monitors.

“You have a hundred-odd cameras scattered around the prison?” Wendy asked the earnest, uniformed young man.

“The, uh, facility, yes ma'am,” Kady said.

“Your escape rate must be minuscule,” Michaelson commented. He directed this observation not to Kady but to the older man in mufti whom Kady was nervously trying to impress. The older man's name was F. Whitmore Stevens. The inmates called him Half Whit, an epithet that was as inaccurate as it was inevitable. He was the warden. He had by now spent well over an hour showing Michaelson and Wendy Gardner around the Administration Building and patiently answering their questions.

“Our escape rate is zero,” Stevens said. “But the cameras have little to do with that. We don't post them at the perimeter. In a minimum security facility like this, the major security problem isn't unauthorized people getting out but unauthorized material coming in.”

“Drugs?”

“Mainly. We deal with that problem by keeping an eye on areas where contraband is most likely to be distributed or used by inmates. A secondary benefit of that approach is that it helps us protect the inmates from each other.”

“Is that a big problem?” Wendy asked.

“Fortunately not. And we intend to keep it that way.”

“On that point,” Michaelson interjected, “it occurs to me that while no one wants to be in prison, if one had to be behind bars one would much rather be here than in most other prisons.”

“That's sort of a two-edged comment, but the answer is yes,” Stevens acknowledged. “Doing time is unpleasant no matter where you do it. But there are many, many places where it can be a lot more unpleasant than it is here.”

“To a layman like myself, that raises an interesting question. Who decides whether a man sentenced to, say, three years for a federal crime is going to serve that time here or in some less congenial place of confinement?”

“It varies,” Stevens replied. “Sometimes the sentencing judge. More often the Attorney General.”

“Attorney General meaning, functionally, someone in the Bureau of Prisons?”

“Of course.”

“On the basis, no doubt, of an array of highly qualitative factors.”

“Standard bureaucratic procedure,” Stevens nodded.

“But subject, presumably, to specific direction in individual cases from higher up.”

“Sure,” Stevens shrugged. “It doesn't happen very often, but if the Attorney General or the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division says that Inmate X will be here instead of Leavenworth or Atlanta, here is where he comes.”

“Now,” Michaelson said, “once X gets here, who decides exactly where X will be lodged? As between, for example, an honor cottage and less privileged quarters?”

“I do,” Stevens answered.

“Based on—what?”

“A lot of things. The nature of the offense, the inmate's behavior while in custody, any known past history between this inmate and other inmates here—not to mention institutional considerations ranging from staffing levels to the laundry bill and the season of the year.”

“All being further informed by your own sound discretion.”

“As a matter of fact, yes. If I've got a funny feeling in my gut about somebody, that can keep him out of an honor cottage even if every objective factor says he belongs in one.”

“And once again your decision in this regard is subject to specific direction from your own superiors?”

For the first time since he had introduced himself to them, Stevens hesitated. Though not entirely guileless, he was essentially a straightforward man. Calculation played unambiguously across his features.

“I can't discuss that,” he said at last. “At least not without specific direction.”

“I can appreciate that,” Michaelson commented. “And you would likewise wish to seek official guidance before discussing the assignment of any particular inmate here.”

“Correct.”

“Recognizing, of course, that if the wrong type of inmate manages to get into an honor cottage, being there might turn out to be not such a great honor for the others.”

“We're acutely aware of that.”

“I'm sure you are.”

“Honor cottages are an incentive—something for an inmate to strive for and try to hang onto if he already has it. They're an extra layer of insulation between a white collar convict and his own worst nightmares about prison. There are certain amenities, but the big attraction is physical and psychological security. We'd defeat the purpose of the honor cottage system if we started putting what you delicately call the wrong type of inmate into honor cottages.”

“And as you said the surveillance cameras actually serve to reinforce that sense of security,” Michaelson commented.

“That's right,” Stevens said. “We locate cameras in places inmates have access to that would otherwise often be out of sight in the ordinary course of things.”

“In the latrine, for example, but not in the guards' locker room.”

“Right. We can't monitor all locations all the time, but we can monitor any given location at any particular time. The transmissions from each camera are recorded on a continuous, selferasing, eight-minute loop. So if we see something interesting on a random shot, we can go back and pick up what happened up to eight minutes before. The bottom line is, an inmate in a place where we have a camera can't be certain at any given moment that we're not looking right at him.”

“Take Honor Cottage B-4, for example,” Kady said. “We have six cameras there.”

“All inside?” Michaelson asked.

“Yes,” Stevens said. “Inside's where trouble's most likely, and outside human eyes are more efficient than electronic ones anyway.”

“Anytime we want to,” Kady said, “we can punch up any one of the cameras in B-4, or all six of them for that matter.”

His fingers moved effortlessly over a keyboard in front of the bank of monitors.

“See? On Monitor One we have the main entry area and the doorway to the B-4 Building Security Office.” A flat, motionless electronic picture of the space he described appeared on the upper left monitor. “On Two we have the first floor corridor. On Three, the galley. On Four, the latrine. On Five, the main corridor in the basement. On Six—that's funny.”

“What's funny?” Stevens demanded.

“We seem to have lost transmission from Camera Six in B-4. Probably just—”

“Freeze 'em!” Stevens ordered. “Stop erasing and stop recording on all B-4 cameras.”

“Should I maintain transmission on the corridor cameras and freeze the rest?”

“I said all. Whatever's happened has already happened.”

“Yessir.”

“Where is Six supposed to be monitoring?”

“Um, lessee, Supply Room, basement.”

“Jenkins,” Stevens called over his shoulder to another guard, “buzz the duty officer in B-4 and tell him he has a problem in his basement Supply Room.”

“Yessir,” came from across the room.

“Play back what we have on tape from Six.”

The young guard's fingers were already moving deftly over the keyboard. Indecipherable gray shapes flickered at high speed across the sixth monitor. The images on the other five monitors had frozen. Jagged, horizontal noise bars ripped across their screens.

The shapes on the sixth monitor stopped flickering and the screen shuddered into a normal picture. This picture consisted of Tony Martinelli's head, shoulders and upper chest, facing the camera, diagonally across the room from it. He was standing in front of a flat, white background. His expression conveyed at once swagger, boredom and indifference.

In an eyeblink this expression transformed. Surprise, incomprehension and feral terror replaced the arrogance. The new expression lasted for a heartbeat.

Then, a small, black mark appeared in the center of Martinelli's forehead. His head jerked backward. His body seemed to leap back. His head and shoulders then began to pitch forward. Suddenly, impenetrable, fuzzy, electronic snow replaced the image on the screen.

“Where's my father?” Wendy asked urgently.

“Hush,” Michaelson told her, squeezing her shoulder decisively to emphasize the command.

But this admonition was unnecessary. Stevens was rattling out staccato orders and paying no attention to his two guests.

“Code 1,” he barked. “Lockdown until further notice.”

“Yessir,” a voice behind them acknowledged amidst a sudden, raucous clamor of sirens and bells.

“Call the FBI Washington Field Office and tell them to get a scene-of-crime team out here as fast as they can.”

“Yessir.”

“Get six men with flak jackets and M-16s over to B-4 on the double.”

“Yessir.”

“I want a report from the duty officer in B-4 right now.”

“Trying to raise him, sir.”

“And call Internal Affairs at DOJ and tell them we have a situation here.”

“Yessir.”

Wendy turned around and looked at Michaelson.

“Will they let us stay here and find out what happened?” she asked.

“Unless I'm very much mistaken,” Michaelson answered, “they will insist on it.”

Chapter Ten

Sweet Tony Martinelli lay face down on the floor of the B-4 Supply Room, diagonally across from the surveillance camera mounted in the corner nearest the door. The camera lens was shattered and the jack at the end of its transmission cord had been jerked out of the wall socket behind it. Martinelli lay in front of a neutral, cream-colored tarpaulin draped over something door-shaped that seemed a bit too small for a door.

On the floor in roughly the center of the room lay two small brass shell casings, a pair of white and blue cotton work gloves, and a long-barreled, semiautomatic pistol with a slanting, walnut grip.

“Colt .22 caliber Targetmaster,” Smith said from the doorway, nodding toward the gun.

“What're the civilians doing here?” Stevens' deputy stage-whispered to his superior, nodding toward Wendy and Michaelson.

“That's exactly what I was trying to find out when things blew up,” Stevens murmured in response. “He's got some reason for being here and until I figure out what it is, he's not going to be making himself comfortable in my office while I'm a quarter mile away, and he's not going to be wandering around the Administration Building asking people questions when I'm not there to hear the answers. As long as he's on the grounds, he's going to be wherever I am.”

“Even a crime scene?”

“Especially a crime scene. Now that this has happened, the only way I'm letting him out of my sight is when I see his taillights going through the main gate.”

“You're the boss.”

“Officer Smith,” Stevens said then, “let's hear it.”

“Yessir.” Smith seemed to snap to attention, a throwback to his first career. “I was—”

“First things first, Smith. Are all of the other inmates accounted for?”

“Yessir. That is, well, I mean, sir, Martinelli's accounted for too, sir.” Smith nodded toward the corpse. “I ordered a lockdown as soon as the trouble signal came, and all surviving inmates immediately complied.”

“And has a search been undertaken of all inmate quarters?”

“In progress, sir.”

“Very well, Smith. Now would you please tell me what you were doing when one of the inmates for whom you were immediately responsible was murdered, presumably by another of the inmates for whom you were immediately responsible?”

“Yessir. At approximately 12:50 p.m. this afternoon I had completed the morning's paperwork and I left the Building Security Office to make the rounds I usually make early in the afternoon work detail. As I was starting, inmate Banich came in the main entrance. The alarm went off when he went through the metal detector. It turned out he was carrying a rusty bolt from outside with the intention of throwing it away and he'd forgotten about it. I relieved him of that and had him pass through the metal detector again, to make sure he was clean.”

“All right. Then what happened?”

“Approximately 12:57 p.m., continuing my rounds, I got to the top of the stairs at the back of the building. I heard someone coming up the stairs hurriedly—turned out to be inmate Gardner. Almost the same moment, I got the walkie talkie squawk from the Administration Building that there was a problem in the Supply Room.”

“You're certain it was Gardner on the stairs?”

“Of course, sir.”

“What did you do then?”

“I told him to return to his room. I hurried to the Supply Room in the basement and tried the door. It was locked. I unlocked the door, opened it, and found the scene you see here. I hit a button mounted on the wall a few feet from the door to activate the lockdown bell. I called for assistance and kept this room under surveillance until it came.”

“All right. I take it there weren't any inmates in the Supply Room at the time you opened the door.”

“You mean other than Martinelli, sir?”

Stevens glared at Smith.

“Ah, that is, sir, you are correct,” Smith continued hastily. “There were no other inmates in the room at the time I opened the door, 12:58 or 12:59 p.m. at the latest, and there have been none in there since.”

“And you have already told me that all of the inmates returned to their quarters in obedience to the lockdown bell, and have since been accounted for there.”

“Yessir.”

“Just let me be absolutely clear about this, Smith,” Stevens said. “It is totally impossible for any inmate in B-4 to have left the Supply Room by any means from the time you got here and opened the door, at no later than 12:59 p.m., and the present.”

“Yessir. For any inmate or anybody else.”

His hands clasped behind his back, his face a mask of complacent dispassion, Michaelson carefully surveyed the Supply Room. He didn't see anything that looked very much like a false door or the entry to a hidden passage. Wooden shelves built from unpainted lumber took up most of the wall space. Paint, cleansers, toilet paper, paper towels, rags, scouring brushes, buckets and similar material filled up the shelves. Michaelson tried to imagine an adult slithering through the iron bars, spaced no more than three inches apart, on the window in the upper part of the opposite corner of the room. He concluded that that couldn't be done. Even if it could, he didn't see how the hypothetical slitherer could have gotten through the thick pane of glass that glared behind the bars and that appeared to be latched tightly shut from the outside. Stevens' questions seemed to Wendy to take on an ominous significance.

“Were there any visitors at B-4 today other than Mr. Michaelson and Ms. Gardner?” Stevens asked Smith.

“Nossir.”

“Was any inmate assigned to any other building anywhere near B-4 any time today?”

“Nossir.”

“Any guards, prior to the time you called for assistance?”

“Nossir.”

“Any other authorized or unauthorized personnel of any kind?”

“Nossir.”

“So the only people in or near Honor Cottage B-4 today, up until the time you found Martinelli's body and called for assistance, were the inmates assigned to this building, yourself, Ms. Gardner and Mr. Michaelson?”

“That is correct, sir.”

“Did you see or hear any inmate other than Gardner anywhere in the vicinity of the Supply Room while you were making your rounds?”

“Nossir.”

Stevens paused for a moment.

“Smith,” he said then, “do you have any idea in the world how anyone could have gotten an unauthorized firearm into this Honor Cottage?”

“Nossir. Standard security procedures were in force at all times.”

“What about the window?” Stevens demanded, nodding toward it. “I take it that glass can't be opened?”

“Negative, sir, it can be opened. The room has to be ventilated because we store paint in there. But it can only be opened from the outside.”

“Smith,” Stevens said, “if a bad person were outside, couldn't he open the window and throw a gun inside this room?”

“Well I suppose he could,” Smith admitted, “but it'd set off an alarm—like Banich did with that bolt. The window's rigged with a metal detector, and all the metal detectors are tied into an alarm in the Building Security Office. The detectors on the windows aren't adjustable and they're not as sensitive as the one at the entrance, but anything the size of a gun would certainly set it off.”

“How about part of a gun?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“What if the gun were disassembled and thrown in a piece at a time?”

“I don't think so, sir,” Smith said, shaking his head dubiously. “I'm sure that the clip or the barrel on that gun alone would be enough to trigger the window alarm.”

Before Stevens could think of anything else to ask Smith, another subordinate announced the scene-of-crime team's arrival. A troop of men in blue overalls with FBI stamped in white block letters on the back bustled onto the scene. They bristled with cameras and compact, black, fitted attaché cases. The leader said his name was Clark Grissom and introduced the group perfunctorily to Stevens.

“Anything been touched inside?” one of them asked.

Stevens looked at Smith.

“Negative,” Smith answered promptly. “Immediately after getting here and taking the steps I've already described, I walked far enough into the room to feel Martinelli's carotid artery with my fingertips and satisfy myself that he was dead, but otherwise there has been no entry and no exit since my arrival.”

“Martinelli the decedent?” Grissom asked.

“Affirmative.”

“Could anyone have been hiding in the room?”

“I don't see how. Look around if you like. You can see from here that there's no place for anyone to conceal himself.”

“What's behind that tarp?”

“Not sure,” Smith responded, a bit hesitantly. “Probably a mirror.”

“What's a mirror doing down here?” Stevens demanded, incredulous.

“Awaiting repair, sir. Yesterday I directed inmate Stepanski to take the mirror from the Building Security Office down here so that it could be cleaned.”

The FBI agents exchanged glances. Grissom looked at one of the other team members, who had been energetically snapping pictures and who nodded briskly.

Grissom walked over to the tarpaulin and pulled it away. This revealed the mirror that Smith had surmised was there. A substantial, cloudy blotch spread over the upper third of the glass.

“Okay,” he said decisively. “We'll be at least forty-five minutes in here.”

Michaelson, Wendy Gardner, Smith and Stevens responded to this hint by moving well away from the Supply Room doorway and walking toward the rear of the basement corridor.

“Have we got a rundown yet on what's on the frozen videotapes?” Stevens asked the subordinate who had told him about the scene-of-crime team's arrival.

“Yes. All cameras were frozen at 12:56 and 42 seconds. The entry area camera opens with the business between Banich and the metal detector that officer Smith described, after which they both move out of the range of that camera. This is followed by several minutes of an empty lobby.”

“All right. Next camera.”

“The ground floor corridor camera shows Banich policing the corridor and officer Smith walking down the corridor toward the back and eventually entering the stairwell, out of camera range. It was apparently frozen before inmate Gardner would have come into the picture.”

“Clear enough. What else?”

“The galley camera shows nothing.”

“That seems odd,” Stevens said. “Smith, wasn't an inmate assigned to the galley this afternoon?”

“Yessir. Squires.”

“Wouldn't he have shown up if he were there?”

“Yessir, unless for some reason he were standing directly beneath the camera.”

“All right,” Stevens said, nodding to the subordinate in civilian clothes, “go on.”

“The latrine camera shows inmate Squires entering the shower room, removing something unidentifiable from his pocket, glancing around, and then retreating to a position that he apparently thought was hidden from the camera, but from which his left shoulder and arm were still visible.”

“Okay. How about the basement corridor camera?”

“That one shows the following: inmate Lanier pushing a dustmop down the corridor, toward the stairwell; he stops near the Supply Room door, knocks on it, waits, knocks again, shrugs and starts pushing his mop again, this time in the opposite direction, toward the camera; then, when he's so near the camera that he's barely visible any more, inmate Gardner enters the picture from the right of the screen—that would be coming from the intersecting hallway and entering the corridor on the same side as the Supply Room door; Gardner walks to the Supply Room door, takes a key card out of his pocket, unlocks the door and goes inside; then, there's empty corridor again for a short time….”

“How short?” Stevens demanded.

“Couple of seconds, maybe five at the most.”

“Then what?”

“Then the door opens and Gardner comes back into the corridor in a hurry. He runs toward the back of the building and disappears into the stairwell.

“And we've still been able to raise nothing other than noise and what we've already seen from the Supply Room tape?”

“Right.”

“What about the other two inmates? Where were they during this period?”

“Inmate Stepanski was working outside the building,” Smith explained, “spraying the grass. McCutcheon was cleaning the first floor lounge.”

“Okay. Has the search of the inmates' rooms turned up anything?”

“This,” the subordinate said, showing Stevens a piece of sharpened tile. “We found that in Squires' room. Along with a quarter gram of cocaine. In Lanier's room we found fifteen-hundred dollars in cash, which is fourteen-hundred-and-seventy-five dollars over the maximum inmates are allowed to have by the regulations, but we didn't find anything else out of the ordinary.”

“What about Martinelli's room?”

“Just this.”

The subordinate put before Stevens a Polaroid photograph. It depicted a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair and a deeply tanned face, looking with cool appraisal directly at the lens. She was wearing a scarlet riding coat with black velvet facing on the lapels, ivory-colored riding pants, black, knee-high boots, and black gauntlets. In the white margin below the picture was written in neat, black, felt-tip pen, 3096.

“Hm,” Stevens said.

“My reaction precisely,” Michaelson commented. “May Ms. Gardner and I speak with her father?”

“You may not.”

“I see. Do you think you'll be requiring us much longer?”

“Yes,” Stevens said. His voice was a trifle chilly. “I think we will.”

***

They did. The FBI spent another ninety minutes going over the Supply Room. After they had done that, they took statements from everybody, Michaelson and Wendy Gardner last. It was close to 4:00 p.m. before Grissom told Michaelson that he and Wendy could go.