Down Here

“No. That’ll show he was committed, but not where he landed. We know he went Upstate somewhere, but not which institution. That’s what we’re looking for.”

“If it is in here, we will find it, mahn,” Clarence promised.

“There’s an easier way,” Terry said. “New York State’s got a Web site for it. ‘Inmate Lookup Service,’ or something like that. All we need is a guy’s name and we can get his prison record.”

“You mean his whole rap sheet?” I asked.

“No, no, I mean, his . . . ‘institutional status,’ I think they call it. Where he’s being kept, what his sentence is, when he sees the parole board . . .”

“But Wychek’s out,” I reminded him.

“Sure. They’ll show him as ‘discharged.’ But they’ll still have the place he was discharged from, see?”

“Damn.”

“Sure. We just need a phone line. A landline,” he said, quickly, before I could offer him one of my cells.

“Not up here, kid.”

“What about the man downstairs?”

“Gateman? Sure, he’s wired up. But won’t you need—?”

“This is enough,” Terry said, holding up a laptop and some cords. “I’ll tell him you said it was okay, right?”

“Right.”

“Come on,” Terry said to Clarence. The two of them took off, Wally and the Beaver, on an adventure.

^“It was just like Terry said, mahn,” Clarence exclaimed, deeply impressed. “Only took maybe fifteen minutes and we got all

the—”

“It would have taken a lot less than that if your friend downstairs had anything but a molasses dial-up,” Terry cut in. “I’m not nuts about the DSL they’ve got around here, but—”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, when I’m ready for stuff like that, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I am ready, mahn,” Clarence announced. “There is so much . . . value in it. Tell Burke and my father how you knew there was this place to find information about prisoners,” he said to Terry.

“It’s not such a . . .”

“Come on with it,” the Prof urged him. “If my son says it’s fun, I got to know how it’s done.”

“Well,” Terry said, sitting down, “there was this girl. At school.” He saw me exchanging looks with the Prof, said, “Not my girl. I wasn’t . . . interested in her like that. She was . . . my friend. Anyway, Tatrine’s very socially active. Mostly green stuff, but she never saw a cause she didn’t like.

“She met this guy at a teach-in she went to. It was all about prison conditions. This guy, he told her that he was an ex-con, right up front. Tatrine, she treated it like it was a credential. . . .”

Terry caught himself, turning red as he realized who he was talking to. And where his mother had spent some of her youth. “I didn’t mean it . . . I didn’t mean it was a . . . bad thing, all by itself. Just . . . what you always say, Prof.”

“Only thing that’s true is what you do,” the Prof acknowledged. “The Walls don’t make the calls.”

“Right. So, anyway, Tatrine was getting all caught up in this guy. I mean, quoting him, like he was an oracle or something. It made me nervous. So I asked her, just casual one day, what had he done time for.

“Tatrine said it had been an armed robbery. This guy—her boyfriend by then, I guess—said he had done it when he was, you ready for this, ‘pre–socially conscious.’ He had some half-baked idea that the merchant was ripping off the community, so he figured he’d do a little justice by stealing from him.

“He told her he came to realize later that the merchant was part of a system, pre-programmed to act a certain way, and robbing him wasn’t the right thing to do. Tatrine told me this guy, he was a ‘change-agent’ now.”

“You didn’t buy his riff, so you thought you’d take a sniff?” the Prof said, nodding.

“It . . . I don’t know how to explain this, exactly. Mom says, sometimes, when people talk, you just know they’re wrong. Not about the facts—I mean they’re wrong people. I never heard him talk myself, but, even secondhand from Tatrine, I was . . .

“So I poked around until I found the Web site. And I put in his name. There were actually four guys with the same name in their system, but one was still incarcerated, and the other two were white, so they couldn’t be him. His date of birth sounded about right, from the way Tatrine described him, too.

“But it wasn’t any armed robbery he’d been sent away for. It was sodomy in the second degree. I looked that one up, too. The only way he could have been convicted of that is if the victim couldn’t consent because they were drunk, or drugged, or . . .”

“Or a kid,” I finished for him.

“Yeah,” he said, teeth clenched.

“You showed this all to Tatrine?”

“Yeah.”

“And she didn’t believe you?”

“Not . . . not at first. After a while, she did, I know.”

“How?”

“Because she came over to where I was sitting, in the library, and asked me to come outside. She told me I had been right. About her . . . about him, I mean. He admitted it. He told her the whole thing had been a pack of lies, cooked up by his little stepsister, because she resented her mother’s new husband. That was his father—they were all living together.

“He told Tatrine he had pleaded guilty—he must have thought she knew more than she really did—because they promised him only a four-year max. And he couldn’t take a chance on a jury believing the little liar; then they might have put him away forever.

“He said he never told people about it because they wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t ashamed of being in prison, but he knew nobody would ever give him a chance to tell his side of the story.”

“But Tatrine did, huh?” I said, reading his face.

“Yeah.”

And you wanted to tell her a few things yourself, didn’t you, kid? I thought, into the silence.

“How did it end up?” Clarence asked. Obviously, he had only heard the beginning of the story.

“I don’t know,” Terry said, not hearing the desolation in his own voice. “I see Tatrine around campus once in a while. But she never comes anywhere near me. And the number I had for her—it’s no good anymore.”

Three nights later. The trackdown I was working on was taking a lot longer than I had expected. I knew that the woman I was looking for had to be somewhere in New York State. And that she owned a house, most likely in a rural area.

But what I really needed was a phone number. When I have to approach people who knew my old face, voice contact is the smartest first move.

Any other time, I would have gone to Wolfe’s network. But I figured they wouldn’t be operational, not with all this hanging over her.

I couldn’t see the DA’s Office investing in full-time surveillance, and I didn’t think anyone they had was good enough to shadow Wolfe without her picking it up, anyway. But I wanted to be sure I was the first one to see whatever got turned up.

The phone made its noise.

“What?” I said.

“Hi, chief!” Pepper, almost back to full bounce. “Got time to meet with an old friend?”

“If it’s a good enough friend, I’ve always got the time.”

“Great! She’s a very good friend, but not an old one. In fact, you just met her recently.”

“Is there going to be anyone else there?”

“Oh, no,” Pepper said. “You know how third wheels always spoil dates.”