Darkness, Take My Hand Page 17

  Then his mouth clamped shut and his eyes glazed and he looked as reasonable and gentle as a small-town librarian.

  “Why did you bring me here, Alec?”

  “You’ve tamed the cowlick, Patrick.”

  “What?”

  He turned his head, spoke to Lief. “Patrick used to have an awful cowlick near the back of his head. It stuck out like a broken finger.”

  I resisted the urge to raise my hand to my head, pat down a cowlick I haven’t had in years. My stomach felt weak suddenly and very cold.

  “Why’d you bring me here? You could have spoken to a thousand police officers, a thousand Feds, but—”

  “If I claimed my blood was being poisoned by the government or that alpha waves from other galaxies were infiltrating my faculties or that I’d been forcibly sodomized by my mother—what would you say to that?”

  “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Because you know nothing, and none of those things are true, and even if they were, it would be largely irrelevent. What if I told you I was God?”

  “Which one?”

  “The only one.”

  “I’d wonder how God got Himself locked up in the joint and why he couldn’t just miracle His ass out.”

  He smiled. “Very good. Very glib, of course, but that’s your nature.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “My nature?”

  I nodded.

  He looked at Lief. “Are we having the baked chicken again this week?”

  “Friday,” Lief said.

  Hardiman nodded. “That’s good. I like the baked chicken. Patrick, it was a pleasure meeting you. Drop by again.”

  Lief looked at me and shrugged. “Interview’s over.”

  I said, “Wait.”

  Hardiman laughed. “Interview’s over, Patrick.”

  Dolquist stood up. After a minute, I did too.

  “Doctor Dolquist,” Hardiman said, “say hello to Queen Judith for me.”

  Dolquist turned toward the cell gate.

  I turned with him, stared at the bars, and felt them holding me, closing me in, blocking me from ever seeing the outside world again, locking me in here with Hardiman.

  Lief walked up to the gate and produced a key, all three of us with our backs to Hardiman now.

  And he whispered, “Your father was a yellow jacket.”

  I turned around and he was staring at me impassively.

  “What was that?”

  He nodded and closed his eyes, drummed the fingertips of his cuffed hands on the table. When he spoke, his voice seemed to come from the corners of the room and the ceiling, and the bars themselves—anywhere but from his mouth:

  “I said, ‘Eviscerate them, Patrick. Kill them all.’”

  He pursed his lips, and we stood there waiting, but it was useless. A minute passed in complete silence, as he remained that way without so much as a tremor coursing his tight, pallid skin.

  As the doors opened and we walked out into the corridor of C Block past the two guards posted as sentries outside the cell, Alec Hardiman sang the words, “Eviscerate them, Patrick. Kill them all,” in a voice so light but rich and strong that we could have been hearing an aria.

  “Eviscerate them, Patrick.”

  The words flowed like birdsong down the cellblock corridor.

  “Kill them all.”

  23

  Lief led us through a maze of maintenance corridors, the sounds of the prison muffled by the thick walls. The corridors smelled of antiseptic and industrial solvent and the floors had the yellowish shine of the floors in all state institutions.

  “He has a fan club, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Hardiman,” Lief said. “Criminology students, law students, lonely middle-aged women, a couple of social workers, some church-group types. Pen pals who he’s convinced of his innocence.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Lief smiled and shook his head. “Oh, no. Alec has this favorite thing he does—he invites them to visit, to see his eminence in the flesh or some such. And some of these people, they’re poor. They spend a life’s savings just to get here. And then guess what ol’ Alec does?”

  “Laughs at them?”

  “He refuses to see them,” Dolquist said. “Always.”

  “Yup,” Lief said. He punched numbers into a keypad by the door in front of us and it opened with a soft click. “He sits in his cell and looks out the window as they walk back down the long road to their cars, confused and humiliated and alone, and he jerks off into his hand.”

  “That’s Alec,” Dolquist said as we came out into the light by the main gate.

  “What was that crack about your father?” Lief said as we left the prison and headed toward Bolton’s RV sitting halfway down the gravel walkway.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as I know, he didn’t know my father.”

  Dolquist said, “Sounds like he wants you to think he did.”

  “And that cowlick shit,” Lief said. “Either he did know you, Mr. Kenzie, or he made a hell of a guess.”

  Gravel crunched under our feet as we crossed toward the RV and I said, “I’ve never met the guy before.”

  “Well,” Lief said, “Alec’s good at fucking with people’s heads. I heard you were coming, I dug this up.” He handed me a piece of paper. “We intercepted this when Alec tried to send it by one of his couriers to a nineteen-year-old boy he’d raped after he knew he was HIV positive.”

  I opened the note:

  The death in my blood

  I gave it to you.

  On the other side of the grave

  I’ll be waiting for you.

  I handed the note back as if it were on fire.

  “Wanted the kid to be afraid even after he was dead. That’s Alec,” Lief said. “And maybe you never did meet, but he asked for you specifically. Remember that.”

  I nodded.

  Dolquist’s voice was hesitant. “Do you need me?”

  Lief shook his head. “Write me up a report, have it on my desk in the morning, and I think we’re okay, Ron.”

  Dolquist stopped just outside the van and shook my hand. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Kenzie. I hope everything works out.”

  “Same here.”

  He nodded but wouldn’t meet my eyes and then he nodded curtly at Lief and turned to walk away.

  Lief patted him on the back, a slightly awkward gesture, as if he’d never done it before. “Take care, Ron.”

  We watched the little muscular man walk down the path a bit before he stopped and seemed almost to jerk to his left and cut across the lawn toward the parking lot.

  “He’s a little weird,” Lief said, “but he’s a good man.”

  The great shadow of the prison wall cut across the lawn and darkened the grass and Dolquist seemed wary of it. He walked along its edge, in the strip of sunlit grass, and he did so gingerly, as if he were afraid he’d step too much to his left and sink through the dark grass.

  “Where do you think he’s going?”

  “To check on his wife.” Lief spit into the gravel.

  “You think what Hardiman said was true.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. The details were precise, though. If it was your wife, and she’d been unfaithful before, wouldn’t you go check?”

  Dolquist was a tiny figure now as he reached the edge of the grass and cut around the shadow of the prison into the parking lot before disappearing from view.

  “Poor bastard,” I said.

  Lief spit into the gravel again. “Pray Hardiman don’t make someone say that about you someday.”

  A sudden stiff breeze curled out of the dark shadows under the wall and I shrugged my shoulders against it as I opened the back door of the RV.

  Bolton said, “Nice interviewing technique. You study?”

  “I did my best,” I said.

  “You did shit,” he said. “You learned absolutely zero about these current killings in ther
e.”

  “Oh well.” I looked around the RV. Erdham and Fields sat at the thin black table. Above them, the bank of six monitors played five recordings of our interview with Hardiman, the sixth covering real time as Alec sat in the same position we’d left him in, his eyes closed, head thrown back, lips pursed.

  Beside me Lief watched the second bank of monitors on the opposite wall as a series of prisoner photos rolled across, angry faces being replaced by fresh angry faces at a rate of six every two minutes. I looked over and watched Erdham’s fingers whiz over a computer keypad and I realized he was rifling through the prison files of every inmate.

  “Where’d you get authorization?” Lief said.

  Bolton looked bored. “A federal magistrate at five this morning.” He handed Lief a writ. “See for yourself.”

  I looked up at the bank of monitors above his head as a fresh row of convicts materialized. As Lief bent beside me and went over the writ slowly, his index finger running under the words as he read, I watched the six convicts’ faces above me until they were replaced with six more. Two were black, two white, one had so many facial tatoos he could have been green for all I could tell, and one looked like a young Hispanic except his hair was a shock of pure white.

  “Freeze that,” I said.

  Erdham looked over his shoulder at me. “What?”

  “Freeze those faces,” I said. “Can you do that?”

  He took his hands off the keyboard. “It’s done.” He looked at Bolton. “None of them are a match so far, sir.”

  “What’s a match?” I said.

  Bolton said, “We’re running every inmate’s file against all prison documentation, no matter how minor, to see if there’s any sort of relationship with Alec Hardiman. We’re nearing the end of the “A”s now.”

  “First two are completely clean,” Erdham said. “Not a single incident of contact with Hardiman.”

  Lief was staring up at the monitors now too. “Run the sixth,” he said.

  I came up beside him. “Who is that guy?”

  “You seen him before?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He seems familiar.”

  “You’d remember that hair, though.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I would.”

  “Evandro Arujo,” Erdham said. “No match on cellblock, no match on work detail, no match on recreational time, no match on—”

  “Lot that computer won’t tell you,” Lief said.

  “—sentencing. I’m punching up incident reports now.”

  I looked at the face. It was smooth and feminine, the face of a pretty woman. The white hair contrasted starkly with large almond eyes and amber skin. The thick lips were also feminine, pouty, and his eyelashes were long and dark.

  “Major incident, number one—Inmate Arujo claims he was raped in hydrotherapy room, August sixth, eighty-seven. Inmate refuses to identify alleged rapists, requests solitary confinement. Request denied.”

  I looked at Lief.

  “I wasn’t here then,” he said.

  “What was he in for?”

  “Grand theft auto. First offense.”

  “In here?” I said.

  Bolton was standing beside us now and I could smell the Sucrets on his breath. “Grand theft isn’t maximum.”

  “Tell that to the judge,” Lief said. “And the cop whose car Evandro totaled, who was a drinking buddy of said judge.”

  “Second major incident—suspicion of mayhem. March eighty-eight. No further information.”

  “Means he raped someone himself,” Lief said.

  “Third major incident—arrest and trial for manslaughter. Convicted June eighty-nine.”

  “Welcome to Evandro World,” Lief said.

  “Print this,” Bolton said.

  The laser jet hummed, and the first thing out was the photo we were all staring up at.

  Bolton took it, looked at Lief. “Was there contact between this inmate and Hardiman?”

  Lief nodded. “Won’t find documentation of it, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s what you know and can prove and what you just know. Evandro was Hardiman’s bitch. Walked in here a half-decent kid to do nine months on a car theft, walked out nine and a half years later a fucking freak show.”

  “How’d he get that hair?” I said.

  “Shock,” Lief said. “After the gang-bang in hydro, he was found on the floor bleeding from every orifice with his hair shocked white. After he got out of the infirmary, he went back into population because the previous warden didn’t like spics, and by the time I got here, he’d been bought and sold a thousand times and ended up with Hardiman.”

  “When was he released?” Bolton said.

  “Six months ago.”

  “Run all his photos and print them,” Bolton said.

  Erdham’s fingers flew back over the keyboard and suddenly the bank of monitors showed five different photos of Evandro Arujo.

  The first was a mug shot from the Brockton PD. His face was swollen and his right cheekbone looked broken and his eyes were tender and terrified.

  “Crashed the car,” Lief said. “Hit his head on the steering wheel.”

  The next was taken the day he arrived at Walpole. Eyes still huge and terrified, cuts and swelling gone. He had rich black hair and the same feminine features, but they were even softer, still carrying a hint of baby fat.

  The next one was the first I’d seen. His hair was white, and the large eyes were altered somehow, as if someone had scraped off a layer of emotion the way you’d scrape the thinnest film of egg-white from the shell.

  “After he murdered Norman Sussex,” Lief said.

  In the fourth, he’d lost a lot of weight and his feminine features seemed grotesque, the face of a haggard witch on a young man’s body. The large eyes were bright and loud, somehow, and the full lips sneered.

  “The day he was convicted.”

  The final photo was taken the day of his release. He’d streaked his hair with what looked like charcoal and gained weight, and he puckered his lips at the photographer.

  “How did this guy get out?” Bolton said. “He looks completely deranged.”

  I stared up at the second photo, the young Evandro, dark-haired, face clear of bruises, eyes wide and afraid.

  “He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter,” Lief said. “Not murder. Not even man two. I know he cleaved open Sussex without provocation, but I couldn’t prove it. And wounds on both Sussex and Arujo at the time were consistent with those of men who’d been in a shank fight.” He pointed at Arujo’s forehead in the most recent photo. There was a thin white line creasing the forehead. “See that? Shank mark. Sussex couldn’t tell us what happened, so Arujo claimed self-defense, said the shank belonged to Sussex, and he draws eight years, because the judge didn’t believe him, but he couldn’t prove otherwise either. We got a serious overcrowding problem in our prisons, in case no one told you, and Inmate Arujo was in every other respect a model prisoner who served his time, earned his parole.”

  I stared up at the various incarnations of Evandro Arujo. Injured. Young and scared. Blighted and ruined. Gaunt and barren. Petulant and dangerous. And I knew, beyond any doubt, that I’d seen him before. But I couldn’t place where.

  I rifled through possibilities:

  On the street. In a bar. On a bus. In the subway. Driving a cab. At the gym. In a crowd. At a ballgame. In a movie theater. At a concert. In—

  “Who’s got a pen?”

  “What?”

  “A pen,” I said. “Black. Or a marker.”

  Fields held up a felt tip and I snatched it, pulled a photo of Evandro out of the laser printer and started scribbling on it.

  Lief came up and looked over my shoulder, “Why you drawing a goatee on the man, Kenzie?”

  I stared down at the face I’d seen in the movie theater, the face in a dozen photos Angie had taken.

  “So he can’t hide anymore,” I said.

  24r />
  Devin faxed us a copy of Evandro Arujo’s photo from the set Angie’d given him and Erdham fed it into his computer.

  We crawled north on 95, the RV stuck in a midday traffic snarl as Bolton said, “I want an all-points issued on him immediately,” to Devin, then turned and barked at Erdham, “Punch up his probie’s name.”

  Erdham glanced at Fields and Fields hit a. button and said, “Sheila Lawn. Office in the Saltonstall Building.”

  Bolton was still talking to Devin. “…five eleven, one hundred sixty-three pounds, thirty years old, only distinguishing mark is a thin scar, one inch long, on his upper forehead, just below the hairline, shank wound…” He cupped his hand over the phone. “Kenzie, call her.”

  Fields gave me the phone number and I picked up a handset and dialed as Evandro’s photo materialized on Erdham’s screen. He immediately began to punch buttons and enhance the texture and color.

  “Sheila Lawn’s office.”

  “Ms. Lawn, please.”

  “This is she.”

  “Ms. Lawn, my name’s Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private detective and I need information on one of your parolees.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The RV lumbered into a lane that was moving an inch or two faster per minute and several horns blared.

  “You don’t think I’m going to reveal anything about a client to a man claiming to be a private investigator on the phone, do you?”

  “Well…”

  Bolton was watching me as he listened to something Devin said, and he reached out and grabbed the phone from me, spoke into it out of the corner of his mouth while still listening to Devin through his other ear.

  “Officer Lawn, this is Special Agent Barton Bolton of the FBI. I’m assigned to the Boston office and my identification number is six-oh-four-one-nine-two. Call and verify who I am and keep Mr. Kenzie on the line. This is a federal matter and we expect your cooperation.”

  He tossed the phone back to me and said to Devin, “Go ahead, I’m listening.”