Chapter 12
Like all prisons, the structure was immense and
forbidding: bricks stretched upward toward an irrelevant sky, the
expanse of claustrophobic walls interrupted only by narrow windows
that resembled suspicious eyes looking out at an unwelcoming world.
Three separate barbed wire-topped metal fences surrounded the
prison, creating a barrier no man could hope to penetrate. A worn
exercise area near a side door curved in a red quarter moon,
hugging the prison walls, its clay surface tramped into barrenness
by thousands of feet over thousands of days filled with millions of
moments of despair. The courtyard was deserted and even the corner
guard towers looked desolate, though I knew steel-eyed men lurked
in their shadows, rifles in hand, ready and willing—maybe even
eager—to kill. This was a maximum-security facility. It held the
worst of the worst. It took hard men to guard them.
The day had grown cold and the sky had turned gray.
It was a fitting mood for the oppressive journey that lay ahead.
But Maggie was not one to contemplate the unhappiness of the world
within those brick walls. She hopped from the car determined to
emerge unscathed from the joyless atmosphere that awaited her. She
strode toward the front gate with a brisk competence, leaving
little need for the guard to request her badge number, though he
did, recording it carefully in a computer before checking it
against her physical badge and photo ID. It was not a familiar
process for me as I had cared too little about my cases to follow
up behind these distasteful walls and, god knows, few district
attorneys had wanted anything to do with either me or Danny once
one of our cases had passed into their hands.
I followed on Maggie’s heels, indulging in bursts
of nervous immaturity made possible by my invisibility to the
living. I made faces at the guards, stuck my hands through bars
that had no power over me, walked back and forth through the
bulletproof glass barriers, goose-stepping like Charlie Chaplin. I
could not help it. This was a place of confinement and yet here I
was, enjoying the ultimate of freedoms, freedom from the
constraints of the physical world.
As Maggie progressed through a series of guard
points, I grew bolder. I touched the guns of the guards and danced
in front of the security cameras. I was a nine-year-old boy in an
abandoned candy store, left alone to indulge my desires.
But every scrap of my enthusiasm evaporated in a
single, sobering moment when the last of the metal entry gates
clanged shut behind us and we stepped into a world of hopelessness;
of brooding, evil influences; of hatred made tangible; of lost
souls and despair; of the blackest, most base impulses our species
can harbor in the most secret recesses of our hearts and minds. It
was all there in a world that was relentlessly lit and yet choking
with darkness, a world where the air smelled triumphantly of
cruelty overpowering kindness and of the strong cannibalizing the
weak.
There was no Hell, I realized at that moment.
Because there was no need for a Hell. We built our own hells, we
dotted our world with them, we enclosed them and manned them and
fed their residents with hatred and peopled them with bodies as
dead to life as those moldering under the ground. We made our own
hells and then we forced others to live in them.
Nothing could be as bad as this, I thought, as I
felt all joy hoarded within me shrivel and shrink from the evil
surrounding me.
But I was wrong.
The prison was noisy with the shoutings and murmur
ings of men, yet underneath the cacophony of voices, I could detect
an undercurrent of endless agony, the echoes of unut tered screams
and the residual taste of eternal hopelessness. Though I could not
see them, I knew lost souls lingered here among the living, men
whose lives had been claimed within these walls, rendering them
into vengeance-filled spirits unable to move on, beings who clung
either to their murderers or to their confinements, bound by hate
to a world where all goodness had withered, exulting in the only
power they now had left—the power to torment the living.
This was where I had sent an innocent man.
My hands trembled as I followed Maggie down the
tiled floor between rows of cells. The catcalls started at once.
Men shouted lewd suggestions, grabbed at their crotches, and pumped
their hips, running their tongues over their lips.
I was ashamed for all men.
Maggie ignored it all. The light that surrounded
her, seen only to me, did not waver. It was as if she was protected
by a cocoon of grace that allowed her to move through their dark
world unscathed, unaffected by their ugliness.
I followed in her footsteps, cowed by the forces
around me, afraid I might run into evil spirits with the power,
somehow, to harm me. I had not yet felt fear for myself in this
existence, yet it now filled me like a poison—until, as I walked
down that long corridor, I realized that the noise that greeted
Maggie at each cell died as abruptly as it began, the men silenced
almost immediately by some unseen force even as the next cell in
line began their catcalls. Then I began to notice the faces of some
of the men as they rushed to the bars of their cells, staring,
mouths open, yet silent, their eyes disbelieving, their bodies
exuding the acrid odor of fear.
They were seeing me. And they knew I was not
of their world.
They could see me.
Yet not one of them said a word.
Not every man had this power. But those that could
see me were frightened and it was that thought that calmed me. I
did not need to be afraid of them. They were afraid of me. I began
to move closer to their cells, enjoying the way they would back
mutely to the far wall of their enclosures, looking around to see
if anyone else had noticed their cowardice, ashamed to say anything
aloud.
Yes, I thought: see me and fear me. For I shall
visit the righteous terrors of unspoken worlds upon you if you
sully the uncorrupted splendor of the woman who walks before
me.
But why was it that some prisoners could see me and
others could not? Did it have to do with their crimes? Did killing
open up a terrifying window into the world of the dead—was that the
punishment the universe visited upon its murderers? Or was it
simply that the profane atmosphere within the prison walls and the
lack of distraction had fine-tuned their senses, much like a blind
man who develops hearing beyond the acute? Had their solitude
caused some of them to see what they might otherwise only have felt
in passing?
Or was it because I was one of them, a dark
prince who could only emerge from nothingness when the time came to
parade down the halls of hate? Had they recognized me as one of
their own? Perhaps the devil did not wait until death to claim his
followers. Maybe prison was just an anteroom to Hell, a holding pen
where few escaped and where many waited, weighing their mortality
and their inevitable demise against the far more terrifying
prospect of anagogic immortality?
At last we passed through a final guard point and
into the interview area, a maximum-security room rimmed with
picture windows—though we were in the very heart of the prison,
with only unspeakable views to speak of. Guards were stationed
outside the room, along each wall, looking in. Bobby Daniels, once
Alissa Hayes’s boyfriend, and later labeled her murderer, waited
for Maggie inside the room. His hands were spread wide against the
metal tabletop, his body unnaturally immobile. He’d gained a lot of
muscle over the last three years. Indeed, he had bulked up
massively and his shoulders strained against his prison jump-suit.
His face had grown larger, too, somehow, all traces of the boy he
had been banished beneath an emotionless veneer. Only his sandy
hair, still worn short, and his fussy gold-rimmed glasses seemed to
belong to the same man I had sent away.
The guards had not manacled him hand and foot,
though I thought it was protocol. And that told me Bobby Daniels
was a model prisoner, that he had given no one grief since entering
here over three years before.
He looked up as Maggie entered the room, but his
blank face did not so much as twitch. He had hardened beyond
comprehension, his humanity replaced by a granitelike facade that
had one purpose and one purpose only: to endure.
I tried to penetrate his thoughts, as I could do
with others, to uncover his essential life moment. But his mind was
strong, and while I could sense a light within it, he had
surrounded his memories with layers of impenetrable blankness. I
concentrated harder until an image of a young woman came to mind.
She was dressed in jeans, a waterproof jacket, and hiking boots,
her body framed by sunshine that obscured her surroundings. I could
hear the sounds of rushing water. I concentrated harder still until
a clearer image emerged: the woman was standing on top of a boulder
before a waterfall, her head thrown back as she stared up at the
torrents that poured forth behind her. Then she turned her head and
looked back over her shoulder, her smile joyous and inviting.
It was Alissa, Alissa gloriously alive, and with
Bobby still, if only in the core of his deepest memories.
She had kept him alive in here.
I circled the room, unseen and free to wander,
running my hands over the walls, making faces at the watching
guards through the glass, sniffing the corners like a dog,
searching for traces of what had gone before. But Bobby’s presence
had banished all evidence of prior human occupation. He carried a
curious stillness about him, and while he gave off no light, he
also gave off no darkness. It was as if he had been granted a poor
man’s state of grace, a form of spiritual suspended animation. He
was neither here nor there. But he was, it felt, somehow inured
against the darkness that flowed around him, by some sort of
neutral, protective strength. Granted by what? His innocence? God?
The universe? Was there really a source of goodness out there
somewhere, something with the power to protect a man like Bobby
Daniels, a lamb sent to slaughter in a den of hungry wolves?
Maggie showed him her badge. His eyes flickered. “I
thought you were my new lawyer,” he said in a voice creaky from
disuse. “I filed another appeal.”
“On grounds of inadequate representation?” Maggie
guessed.
“Yeah,” he said, looking her up and down as she
arranged herself across the table from him. He was still human : I
felt his interest in her form, his silent acknowledgment that she
was a woman and that it had been a long time since he’d been in the
presence of one. But it was a detached, almost clinical interest.
He was too self-contained to allow such base emotions their
freedom.
“You read my file?” he asked her.
Maggie nodded. “You have grounds. There were a lot
of things your lawyer could have done and didn’t.”
He ignored her comment, asking instead, “Why are
you here?”
Maggie stared, trying to gauge him. I could feel
her failing to penetrate the wall he had raised around him. I felt
her explore sympathy, then falter and change course, opting for
directness instead.
“I’m here because there’s been another murder and
I’m certain whoever did it also killed Alissa Hayes,” she said.
“I’m here because I think you’re innocent and I have enough proof
to free you almost immediately. I’m here to tell you that I will do
everything I can to see that your new lawyer gets this information
this afternoon.”
He stared at her, mouth agape. It was as if he were
a stone wall transmuting into clay and cracking into ten million
pieces before my eyes. His resolute exterior crumbled, his
shoulders slumped, his muscles trembled—then he covered his face
with his hands and he wept.
He cried without explanation and without apology.
He cried from the bottom of his soul, from the core of his heart,
with all of his body and all of his might. He cried without
stopping for over five minutes, washing away three years of hatred,
of fear, of loneliness, of overwhelming despair.
Maggie waited, holding the guards off with a hand
signal. The guards looked on with a mixture of astonishment and
awe, each wondering what Maggie could have said so quickly to break
a man they believed to be immutable.
Maggie did not try to stop him from crying. She
waited, her compassion a peculiar, practical sort I had never
experienced before. She was making a list, I realized, while Bobby
Daniels cleansed himself of the past, she was making a list of all
the things she needed to do to see that the man before her was
freed. Freed before something terrible could happen to him first in
that unexplained and all-too-heartless way of fate. She did not
want to lose him now to some murderous impulse by a jealous inmate,
or let him be blackmailed into committing crimes on the outside by
lifers who knew he had family and how to get to them. She was
covering every eventuality and cataloging what it would take to get
Bobby Daniels back safely to those who loved him.
By the time Bobby Daniels had used up his reservoir
of tears, she was ready. Maggie touched his hands lightly and he
withdrew from her touch. Then, almost apologetically, he slid his
hands back across the table toward her, as if offering her his
trust, as rusty as it was, as hard as it was for him to feel
anything again.
“I’m going to ask them to put you into solitary
confinement until you are released,” she said quietly. “Don’t take
it as punishment. You understand why? You should avoid all contact
with other prisoners from this moment on.”
He nodded, still shaking from the shock, I thought,
until I realized that he was not so much shaking as realigning his
entire sense of being. Hard emotions close to the surface receded
and others, long buried, rose to take their place: hope, gratitude,
relief, and more. He became a new man before my eyes and I
realized, with awe, that Maggie had been the instrument of his
resurrection.
“Can you answer a few questions for me?” she asked
him softly. “Things that should have been asked of you the first
time around?”
By me, I thought, questions that should have been
asked by me. Maggie was cleaning up after my failures.
“Of course.” Bobby Daniels sat up straighter. “Ask
me anything.”
“How did you meet Alissa?”
“At her house. Her father was my faculty advisor
and I went over one night to drop off an application to grad school
I wanted him to look over. She was there. Her father wasn’t. He was
still on his way home from teaching a late class, so she and I got
to talking while I waited. We really hit it off. She was different.
I liked her right away.”
“Different how?” Maggie asked him.
“Alissa was very straightforward, yet delicate,
too. She was unadorned and honest. Not at all like the other girls
I went to college with. And maybe a little shy. I had to ask her
three times before she’d go out with me and, even then, we had to
keep it secret from her parents. She said they’d disapprove if they
found out, even though she was nineteen and in her second year of
college.”
“She was still living at home?” Maggie asked,
eliminating a dorm as a possible link between Alissa and the new
victim, Vicky Meeks.
Daniels nodded. “Her father’s a big-deal professor
and they live in this huge house right by campus. I’d have lived at
home, too, if I could have slept in an extra hour each day and had
someone to cook and clean for me.”
“Her mother did that for her?”
“Her stepmother. Her mother died when she was
pretty young, like eleven or twelve. Her little sister was even
younger, just a baby.”
“You ever share any classes with Alissa?”
He shook his head.
“Did she make jewelry?” Maggie asked.
“Jewelry?” Daniels sounded surprised. “She didn’t
wear jewelry, much less make it.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Right now, we’re comparing
her class schedule with the new victim’s schedule to see if there’s
any overlap. You can help.”
“Overlap?” Bobby hesitated. “Is the . . . was the
girl you just found the same age as Alissa when she died?”
“Just about,” Maggie told him.
“Then any overlap wouldn’t be with friends or
classmates, right? I mean, Alissa was killed four years ago. Any
overlap would have to be—”
“People who worked at the college,” Maggie finished
for him. “Or maybe someone who lives or works near the college. Can
you help?”
Bobby was silent, thinking back to what must have
seemed like a lifetime ago to him by now.
“Did Alissa ever monitor any classes not on her
official schedule?” Maggie prompted him. “Or hang out on campus
somewhere a lot, belong to any clubs we might not know about, maybe
had a favorite coffee shop?”
Daniels shook his head. “She wasn’t a joiner. It
was really just . . . me and her. We had this private world when we
were together and it was enough for both of us.” He was silent,
gathering his strength. “When I lost her, our world was gone. I
went to this dark and terrible place instead. And then it felt like
I never got out of it once I ended up in here.” His voice had
fallen to a whisper and his eyes dropped to his hands. They were
shaking.
Maggie barely touched his arm, afraid to intrude on
his so carefully protected space. “You won’t have to be here much
longer,” she promised.
He put his head back down on the table and began to
cry again, hiding his face, afraid of the hope that flooded through
him.
“Do you want me to call your parents?” she asked
quietly.
He nodded. “They moved to Kansas City three years
ago,” he mumbled. “To get away from the phone calls and stuff.
People can be . . . very cruel.”
“I’ll find them. Is your new lawyer on record
yet?”
“Yes. Her last name is Esposito. I can’t think of
her first name right now.”
“I’ll see she gets the information this afternoon,”
Maggie promised.
He cracked again, overwhelmed by emotions. He put
his head down and Maggie patted the top of his head gently.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “You made it through.
It’s over now. I promise you, it’s over.”
He could not answer her, or thank her, though I
don’t think Maggie needed that anyway. She patted him on the
shoulder and rose to go, gesturing to one of the guards to let her
out of the room.
“What the hell did you say to him?” a guard asked.
“Did his folks pass on?”
Maggie shook her head. “No, but can you keep him
here for another hour? I want to talk to the warden. He’ll see me.
He’s an old friend of my father’s.”
The guard stared at her, then his hand touched the
brim of his hat. “Sure. We can keep him here awhile. Why?”
Maggie did not answer him; who knew what might
happen, how Bobby Daniels’s good fortune might spread through the
prison population, leaving him prey to the spiritual vultures, the
blackened souls whose only pleasure left was to rob all others of
happiness? “Can you take me to the warden’s office now?” she asked
instead. “It’s important.”
The guard conferred with his coworkers, then led
her back down the same hallway we had taken to the interview room.
Curiously, as we passed between the cells of imprisoned men, most
remained silent this time. They shrank back from Maggie’s passing
as if aware that she, somehow, wielded a power they could neither
comprehend nor ever hope to triumph over.
She was just human, I knew that, though she gave
off more light than most. But to me, at that moment, she was once
again an avenging angel, a seraph of such immense might that at any
moment great argent wings might spring forth from her shoulder
blades, unfolding in a flash of light so intense that the very
walls of the prison would crack asunder, banishing the dark to the
darkness and sending the righteous upward on beams of glory.
An angel. My angel.
The men who lived in this bleak world also sensed
this power in her. They cowered in the corners of their cells,
ashamed of themselves with rare self-awareness, afraid of something
they did not understand. Those who saw me behind her cast me
glances of fear before their eyes slid to gaze upon Maggie, then
looked away again.
I knew then, beyond all certainty, that though
there was evil in the world, and far, far too much of it, it did
not have the power of the light we held within ourselves. Which
meant that I had a chance, that I had a future—and that Maggie had
given more than one man hope that day.