“Glad you liked it.”
“Is there more?”
“Not tonight.” As he spoke the denial, Harvey was half prepared for an argument, and surprised when it didn’t come. The kid merely nodded, and put his plate on his lap.
Harvey picked up the plate and poured some boiling water onto it from the pot on the burner. With the water balanced in the center, he used a ratty dish towel to clean it off. Through it all, Jeremy said nothing. But he stared a lot, and that was annoying.
“You got something on your mind, son, it’s best to get it out,” Harvey said.
The observation seemed to startle the boy. “I want to go home,” he said.
“I imagine you do,” Harvey said. “Where is home?”
“I go to a school in Fisherman’s Cove. I live there. It’s called Resurrection House.”
Harvey had heard of the place. It was affiliated with St. Katherine’s parish, the very one that had given him tonight’s dinner. Except he’d always thought it was an orphanage. “Well, let’s take that on in the morning. It’s a long walk, and I don’t have a car. It’s even longer in the dark.”
“But what if they come back for me?”
Now that was the panic-inducing question, wasn’t it? “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Harvey said. “They’ve had all day to come back for you. If they were coming, they would have come then.” Maybe if he said it definitively enough, Harvey would believe it himself. The simple truth of the matter was that Jeremy wasn’t yet ready to make that kind of trek.
Jeremy thought for a while before asking, “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“Of course I do. But only if you want to tell me.”
“I got… kidnapped,” he said. He stumbled on the last word, and in the uneven glare of the lantern, Harvey could see Jeremy’s eyes glistening.
“A bunch of men crashed into my room.” Jeremy struggled to keep his tone even. “They tied up Anthony, and then they…” His voice trailed off, but then he settled himself with a deep breath. “And then they killed Mr. Stewart.”
A knot formed in Harvey’s belly. “Who’s Anthony?” he asked.
Jeremy covered his eyes. “My roommate,” he squeaked.
Harvey’s head swam. This was worse than he’d thought. “A bunch of men came into your room and took you away?”
Jeremy let his hands fall away, and nodded as he pulled his legs up into the chair Indian style.
“And who is Mr. Stewart?”
Jeremy answered to his lap. “The janitor. He was my friend.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“They took other kids, too,” Jeremy said. “At least one.”
“Are you sure?”
As he sat there in the camp chair, Jeremy seemed to shrink, as if growing younger and smaller. His shoulders slumped, and his head drooped. For a few seconds, Harvey thought maybe the boy had fallen back to sleep.
But then he looked up again. He drew a huge breath, and he told his story.
CHAPTER SIX
Granville George looked up from his daily log reports and leaned back in the medieval torture device that posed as his chair. He swore that the sheriff had specially ordered this uncomfortable piece of crap just to make his six-month sentence as miserable as possible. As if the mind-numbing work weren’t painful enough.
As he arched his back and stretched, he caught a glimpse of himself on the security monitor. Without paying attention, he scanned the other monitors as well. In the women’s wing he saw Terry Milan strolling her patrol, just as she was supposed to, while in the men’s wing, the hallway remained empty-not unexpected, given the fact that Rob Shenton would be babysitting Agent Harris for the time being. Meanwhile, three other guards attended to their various admin duties in the center security section.
But that didn’t really add up, did it? Granville shifted his gaze to the interview room, and sure enough, there was the Henry kid sitting at the interview table across from his Fibbie visitor. So where was Rob? He must have been standing in the corner where there was no camera cover.
Only, that didn’t make sense either. Chase Battles had told him during shift change that the asshole from the FBI was very specific about wanting to talk to his prisoner alone.
In fact, there was Chase Battles on the screen right now, leaving the interview room and beginning his patrol.
Not Rob Shenton. Chase Battles. From evening shift.
“Oh, shit!” Granville spat. “Oh, fucking shit!” He snatched the phone from its cradle and mashed the emergency alert button with his palm.
Venice knew something was wrong from the way the desk attendant launched upright. She shot a look to the feed monitor, and right away saw what had happened. He recognized the guard.
As he reached for the phone, she was a step ahead of him, and she typed in the code to shut the phone system down. It was one of the emergency precautions she’d planned for.
“Scorpion, we have a problem,” she said into her boom mike. As she uttered the words, she saw the desk attendant reach for something on his console, and an instant later, her monitor speakers erupted with an earsplitting squeal.
“What the hell is that?” Jonathan barked.
She ignored him, because she hadn’t a clue what to tell him.
“The fuck?” Jimmy Henry said, though his voice was lost in the squeal of the alarm.
He’d articulated Jonathan’s thoughts exactly.
The radio on Shenton’s belt crackled to life. “Emergency. Emergency in A-Wing.”
Jonathan planted his hand in the center of Jimmy’s chest. “We’re still on plan,” he said, feigning calm. “We’re just on a tighter schedule. Stay close to me.” He reached for the door and pulled.
It was locked.
“Mother Hen?” Jonathan asked over the radio. Venice recognized the concealed rage. “The door is locked.”
None of this had been built into their contingencies. “The panic button must have locked everything down,” Venice said.
“Then how about you un lock something?”
Venice refused to reward his snarky attitude with an answer. She wasn’t going to reward him with an unlocked door anytime soon, either. The panic button had done something to wipe out all of her prepared codes. All of the door annunciators were showing red, meaning they were locked, but when she glanced up at her screen, she saw the front desk guy typing furiously, and then the annunciator for the front Receiving Area blink to green. The guard was selectively undoing the lockdown protocol to allow guards to respond.
Now it was a race to see who was the better keyboard operator.
Granville tried to push his mind away from figuring out who had overridden the cell-opening protocols in the computer. Neither the who nor the why mattered right now, and they sure as hell didn’t affect the immediate future. Right now, all that mattered was that someone was trying to escape on his watch.
And that, sports fans, was not going to happen.
Back when they’d designed the system, they’d put in a fail-safe mechanism that would lock down all the cells simultaneously in the event of a prisoner disturbance. That done, it would be a simple thing, according to the manual, to mouse-click individual doors to reopen them as necessary. Only that wasn’t working tonight. Whoever had been fucking with the computer system must have screwed up the presets, leaving him with no choice but to enter key codes individually.
There was a manual for this somewhere on the shelf behind his desk, but he only had time to wing it from memory. In the boredom of desk duty, he’d actually read all that shit-probably the only deputy in the department
