I walked into my bedroom and glanced at the green-and-yellow-checkered comforter pulled smooth under twin matching pillow shams. Atop this was a fluffy white tiger. There were two nightstands holding crystal lamps, the oak rocking chair in the corner, the small walk-in closet filled with every article of clothing I could possibly want, which wasn’t all that much. The golden corduroy-covered sofa set in the living room, the desk and computer in my office—none of them was really mine. Danny had bought them for me.
Danny Hansen, the priest who was no longer a priest, incarcerated in my place, serving a fifty-year sentence. My husband who had never legally been my husband, though that made no difference to me. I didn’t need a piece of paper to prove my love for him.
The phone out on the breakfast bar rang and I swiveled my head. It wasn’t often I received a call at nine o’clock in the morning. My first thought was that it would be a sales call of some kind. Either that or the prison, calling to inform me that something terrible had happened to Danny.
I hurried back to the kitchen and snatched up the receiver on the fourth ring, saw that the caller ID read
For a moment I thought I could hear gentle breathing. I was tempted to feel some alarm, but I let it go, reasoning that it was only the hiss of distant static. I was too paranoid.
My imagination knew no bounds. It was no one. Or maybe it really was someone breathing.
No, only static.
I hung up and turned back toward the bedroom, dismissing unreasonable thoughts as they strung through my mind. Danny was calling me from a guard’s cell phone, bloodied and lying on the side of the road where the transport van had tipped over, killing everyone but him. He was hurt and couldn’t speak. He needed my help.
But I knew it wasn’t anything like that. It had to be a wrong number.
A knot tightened in my gut as I headed into the bathroom. It’s hard for me to express just how much I loved Danny. Maybe if you knew him the way I did, you’d understand.
He’d grown up during the war in Bosnia and at fifteen watched Orthodox Christians rape and murder his mother and sisters. Danny had done what any devastated young man might do in such a violent setting: he found a gun, hid behind the stove in his house, and then shot the men who killed his family.
Over the next four years he threw himself into the war and became one of the best-known assassins in that gut-?wrenching conflict. When the fighting ended he came to the United States and became a priest in honor of his mother, a devout Catholic. He wanted to do his part in righting what was wrong in the world from the vantage of someone who’d seen horrible injustice.
But Danny’s desire to help brutalized victims like his mother and sisters was his undoing. It began several years after he’d become a priest, while he was aiding a boy who’d been victimized by a pedophile. The pedophile managed to get out of prison, thanks to his father, who was a judge. Then he killed the boy whose testimony had helped convict him.
Outraged, Danny had forced the pedophile into a warehouse and cut off his penis. He didn’t mean to kill, but the man had bled out. Rather than turn himself in, Danny justified and covered up the murder, something he came to regret years after meeting me.
That was Danny’s first victim in this country. Over the next decade there were more, many more, all as deserving of harsh judgment, all untouched by the law. He always gave his subjects one chance to change, and if they refused, he changed them permanently, as he put it. He wasn’t a serial killer with a pathological compulsion to kill, but a vigilante of sorts, all the while also serving the oppressed as a priest, however unorthodox his methods.
He was an outlaw, in the same way those who assisted Jews in Nazi Germany had been outlaws. In the same way Martin Luther, Gandhi, and Jesus had all stepped beyond the law to serve truth and justice in their day.
In that way, Danny and I were similar. I was one of those abused victims he’d come to save. I too took the life of a man who would have otherwise destroyed his wife and children, knowing the law would never save them. I’m not trying to justify what either of us did. It was terribly wrong. I had accepted responsibility for my crimes and fully intended on paying the price, really, I had.
But Danny and I fell in love, and at the last minute he stepped in and took the fall for what I had done, demanding that I remain free. He knew war; he knew prisons. He insisted that the prison system would chew me up and destroy me, and he couldn’t live with that. No amount of objection on my part could change his mind.
After receiving the breathy phone call, I stepped up to the bathroom mirror, withdrew my week-old toothbrush from its holder, applied a thin line of toothpaste to the brush, turned on the faucet, wet the bristles, and started on my lower left molars. Teeth are far more delicate than most people realize. Even a small speck of food can quickly cause a rotting mess if left alone.
Danny was in prison and I was alone. Desperately alone and all too aware that it was my fault.
The phone rang again and I hurried to rinse my brush and mouth. An image of Danny struggling to push the buttons on a cell phone as he lay in a pool of blood next to a transport van returned to my mind. Or maybe he’d crawled into the tall grass by now and was hiding from the guards until I could come to his rescue.
Crazy, I know, but that’s what went through my mind.
I rushed back through my bedroom, rounded the door frame, and snatched the phone from its cradle.
This time there could be no mistaking the sound on the line. It wasn’t static. It was breathing.
I listened for a long moment, undeniably unnerved. The difference between static and heavy breathing is actually quite distinct, and when the certainty that I was listening to the latter settled into my mind, my own breathing became shallow.
It could be some morning drunk who’d called the wrong number twice in a row. It could be Danny hidden in the grass unable to speak because his throat was cut, or afraid that he’d be heard if he tried. It could be a maniac breathing down my neck.
I had to know which.
“Danny?”
More breathing, heavy. A man filled with perverted fantasies. One of my neighbors peeking at me through a hole in the wall. A grocery store clerk who moonlighted with a knife and a rope.
I started to hang up the phone but only got as far as the first twitch of my bicep when the breathing became a low, thick voice that short-circuited the nerves in my arm.
“I know about you, Renee.” Another breath. And then, “The priest is going to die.”
My full meltdown began then, when I first learned that Danny was going to die.
2
AT THE PRECISE moment that Renee Gilmore heard those fateful words, Danny Hansen sat in a waiting room outside the warden’s office in the Basal Institute of Corrections and Rehabilitation, southeast of Wrightwood, just west of Interstate 15. The transfer from Ironwood State Prison had started at 2:00 a.m. and taken seven hours, fewer than three of which were spent in the transport van, or “the chain” as some called it.
He’d followed instructions without misstep as he always did. He was polite, spoke only when spoken to, stayed to himself, and arrived a few hours earlier in relatively good spirits. Three years of incarceration in the overcrowded California prison had convinced him that he truly was an outlaw, on the inside as much as on the outside. He would do his time as required by the law, but in his heart he still lived beyond any law that conflicted with the greater truth.
The system liked to say that an inmate had the choice of doing either hard time or smooth time. Danny had done neither. He was doing
They said that in prison it’s better to fight and gain respect than to run and lose your dignity. They said that steering clear of trouble has a price. That the fight picks you—you don’t pick the fight.
All true, of course, but Danny didn’t care about the injustice inflicted upon him and didn’t try to change the
