for you.
“Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass who’s elected senator this year. I probably won’t even vote. All I care about is doing my job. Save your speeches for the press, J. And stay off my phone!”
He slammed the receiver onto the cradle. Damn, that felt good.
“Feel better?”
The familiar voice startled him. When Michaels looked up, he saw Jed Hackner’s form filling the doorway. “Jesus, Jed, I don’t need a heart attack today.”
Hackner smiled, helping himself to one of the straight-backed chairs in front of Michaels’s desk. “Lighten up, boss. Talking to your buddy Petrelli?”
“You got it. The asshole’s beginning to panic after Nathan Bailey’s radio debut. Did you hear it?”
Hackner nodded. “Yeah. Well, most of it. I missed the first couple of minutes. He sounded pretty convincing to me. Overall, I think Petrelli’s got reason to panic. He made the kid sound like young John Dillinger, when Oliver Twist might have been a better choice.”
Michaels smiled wryly. “Yeah, well, I don’t remember little Oliver killing any law-enforcement personnel.” He abruptly changed the subject. “I don’t suppose you have any good news for me.”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s good or not, but it certainly is interesting.”
Michaels’s thick eyebrows raised in anticipation.
“First of all, we haven’t been able to contact the kid’s uncle and ex-guardian, Mark Bailey. We tried on the phone; even sent a unit around, but if he was home, he wasn’t answering the door.”
“You think he helped in the escape?”
“Not likely. There’s not a lot of love lost between the two of them.”
“Give me the lowdown.”
Hackner removed the notebook from his pocket and started reading. “This all comes from the Juvey files. Judge Potter unsealed them for us this morning. Kind of a sad story, really. For the first ten years of his life, Nathan Bailey was raised by his father. His mother died when he was just a baby. Daddy was a lawyer with lots of bucks, but not much in the way of estate planning. Two years ago, Daddy’s car got whacked by a train, killing him. With no provisions for who was gonna take care of Nathan, custody went to Uncle Mark, way down in the Jackson’s Corner area. Apparently Mark thought that the kid would be supported by a trust fund, but Daddy had just sunk two-plus million into his practice, secured against every asset he owned. By the time his estate cleared probate, there was nothing left.
“Needless to say, Uncle Mark was not a happy camper. Not only did he have custody, but he had no way of paying for Nathan’s upkeep. So, he didn’t. Social Services was out to the house a half-dozen times over the year Nathan was there, responding mostly to neighbor complaints, but nothing ever came of it. Finally, about a year ago, Nathan stole his uncle’s car, claiming that it was the only way he could get far enough away from the son of a bitch. Of course, Uncle Mark pressed charges. Record shows that Judge Potter offered a sweetheart of a probation deal, but Uncle Mark didn’t want to hear it. He told the court, and I quote, ‘A little time in prison never hurt anyone.’”
“Nice guy,” Michaels snorted.
“No, he’s not,” Jed corrected, very serious. “Mark Bailey knows whereof he speaks, having logged seven years at Leavenworth for burning down an officers’ club in Texas. In the eight years he’s been in the county, he’s had three DWIs, two disorderly conducts, and an assault and battery charge that was dropped when the victim had a change of heart about testifying. He’s also logged about a million bar fights, almost all of them on the losing end.”
Michaels was incredulous. “Did Social Services know about all this when they assigned custody to him?”
Hackner shrugged. “I guess so. To be honest, there really wasn’t much of a choice. It was either Uncle Mark or foster care.”
Michaels shook his head slowly, briefly pushing aside his cynical cop’s perspective and seeing it as a father would. “Tough breaks for a little kid.”
Jed flipped a page in his notebook. “Yeah, well, it gets worse. Two different psychiatrists, paid for by Daddy’s lawyer friends, submitted petitions to the court for the kid to be kept out of the Juvey system, claiming that the emotional stress would be too much for him.” Hacker held up a yellow sheet of paper. “Report here says the two docs claimed the kid ‘lags behind his peers physically and emotionally.’ But you know Judge Potter. He feels for the kids whose cases he hears, but if you’ve broken the law, you’re gonna pay. So he shipped Nathan, who’d just turned twelve, up to Brookfield and put him in the general population. He arrived on a Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday night, he’s gang-raped with a broom handle and has to spend a week in the infirmary.”
Michaels winced and held up his hand. “That’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more. Is the rest just gossip, or does it have any real bearing on the case?”
Jed shrugged, his feelings hurt. He was a cop, not a columnist. He didn’t deal in gossip; every detail had a bearing on a case. But he had known Warren long enough to know his meaning. He flipped his notebook closed. “No, I suppose that’s about it. But there is more news.”
“And what might that be?”
“Turns out we’ve got a videotape after all.”
“I thought the camera was broken.”
“The camera in the Crisis Unit was. But we were able to catch Master Bailey on his way out through the in- processing area.”
“Were other cameras working, too?”
“Not all of them. The rec hall camera was off-line as well. All the others seem to be in good shape. But the Bailey kid only passed through that one zone. Plus, we’ve got another couple of seconds of him exiting the back door. You want to see the tape? I’ve got it set up in the conference room.”
Both men rose together, Michaels following Hackner out of the office. The squad room beyond the glass partitions of Warren’s office was crammed with twice the number of desks it was designed to contain, providing space not only for Michaels’s eight subordinate detectives and the clerical staff, but also for three building inspectors, a probation officer and a displaced Welfare staffer who never seemed to move up on the priority list for space at her own agency. Wedged into a third-floor corner of the forty-year-old Civil Defense Building, the view from the windows was dominated by the Adult Detention Center on one side and a sprawling magnolia tree on the other.
“So how come the only cameras that weren’t working were the ones we needed to see?” Michaels asked, navigating a serpentine route through the maze of desks.
Hackner shrugged. “Pretty convenient, isn’t it?”
“I want you to look into that angle, okay, Jed? I want to know if somebody helped him. Start with the uncle.”
Hackner agreed. “I’ve already got Thompkins trolling that line.”
They entered the conference room opposite Warren’s office and closed the door. The television was on, the tape cued. With the press of a button, the image on the TV screen wiggled and danced while the heads in the VCR took up the slack. In the fuzzy black-and-white shadows typical of security cameras, Michaels watched an empty room he recognized from the night before as the in-processing area. From the upper right-hand corner of the screen, a boy appeared, looking ridiculous in a hugely oversized pair of coveralls. He looked frightened; his movements were simultaneously quick and hesitant. He was barefoot. His clothes were smeared with what could have been ink, or even chocolate syrup in the colorless image, but what everyone knew was his victim’s blood.
“Stop the tape,” Michaels commanded. An instant later, the boy on the screen stopped, his legs slightly skewed from his torso, a fuzzy electronic line bisecting the two halves. “Bailey said on the radio that the guard— the supervisor—took away his shoes. Why did he do that? Is that standard practice?”
Hackner shook his head. “Don’t know for sure yet, but I don’t think so. If we believe Bailey’s story on the radio, could be that Harris was just trying to be nasty. I’m meeting with Johnstone this afternoon to find out what I can.”
Michaels motioned with a nod. “Go ahead. Start the tape again.”
The boy’s body became whole again, and he darted straight for the camera, looking over alternating
