bank. Gambling addicts didn’t normally leave fifty grand in savings. Still, they studied the lieutenant colonel.
“Have Shane and Brian returned to Foxwoods lately?” Bobby asked.
“You would have to ask Trooper Lyons.”
“Trooper Leoni ever mention any financial stress? Ask for extra shifts, more OT hours, that sort of thing?”
“To judge by the duty logs,” Hamilton said slowly, “she’s been working more hours lately.”
But fifty grand in the bank, D.D. thought. Who needed OT when you had fifty grand in the bank?
“There is something else you probably should know,” Hamilton said quietly. “I need you to understand, this is strictly off the record. And it may have nothing to do with Trooper Leoni. But… You said the past three weeks, and as a matter of fact, we launched an internal investigation exactly two weeks ago: An outside auditor discovered funds had been improperly moved from the union’s account. The auditor believes the funds were embezzled, most likely from an inside source. We are trying to locate those monies now.”
D.D. went wide-eyed. “How nice of you to mention that. And to volunteer it so readily, too.”
Bobby shot her a warning glance.
“How much are we talking?” he asked in a more reasonable tone.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Missing as of two weeks ago?”
“Yes. But the embezzlement started twelve months prior, a series of payments made to an insurance company, which it turns out, doesn’t exist.”
“But the checks have been cashed,” Bobby stated.
“Each and every one,” Hamilton replied.
“Who signed for them?”
“Hard to make out. But all were deposited into the same bank account in Connecticut, which four weeks ago was closed out.”
“The fake insurance company was a shell,” D.D. determined. “Set up to receive payments, a quarter of a million dollars’ worth, then shut down.”
“That’s what the investigators believe.”
“Bank’s gotta have information for you,” Bobby said. “Same bank for all transactions?”
“The bank has been cooperating fully. It supplied us with video footage of a woman in a red baseball cap and dark sunglasses closing out the account. That has become internal affair’s biggest lead-they are pursuing a female with inside information on the troopers’ union.”
“Such as Tessa Leoni,” D.D. murmured.
The lieutenant colonel didn’t argue.
23
If you want someone dead, prison is the perfect place to do it. Just because the Suffolk County Jail was minimum security didn’t mean it wasn’t filled with violent offenders. The convicted murderer who’d just served twenty years at the state maximum security prison might finish up his or her county sentence here, completing eighteen months for burglary or simple assault that had been in addition to the homicide charge. Maybe my roommate Erica was locked up for dealing drugs, or turning tricks, or petty theft. Or maybe she’d killed the last three women who’d tried to get between her and her meth.
When I asked the question, she just smiled, showing off twin rows of black teeth.
Unit 1-9-2 held thirty-four other women just like her.
As pretrial detainees, we were kept separate from the general inmate population, in a locked-down unit where food came to us, the nurse came to us, and programming came to us. But within the unit, there was plenty of intermingling, creating multiple opportunities for violence.
Erica walked me through the daily schedule. Morning started at seven a.m., with “count time,” when the CO would conduct head count. Then we would be served breakfast in our cells, followed by a couple of hours “rec time”-we could leave our cells and roam unshackled around the unit, maybe hang out in the commons area watching TV, maybe shower (three showers located right off the commons area, where everyone could also enjoy that show), or ride the squeaky exercise bike (verbal insults from your fellow detainees not included).
Most women, I quickly realized, spent their time playing cards or gossiping at the round stainless steel tables in the center of the unit. A woman would join a table, pick up one rumor, share two more, then visit a neighbor’s cell, where she could be the first to provide the big scoop. And around and around the women went, table to table, cell to cell. The whole atmosphere reminded me of summer camp, where everyone wore the same clothes, slept in bunks, and obsessed over boys.
Eleven a.m., everyone returned to their assigned cell for the second session of count time, followed by lunch. More rec time. Count time again at three. Dinner around five. Final count time at eleven, followed by lights out, which was not to be confused with quiet time. In prison, there was no such thing as quiet time, and in a corrections facility that housed both men and women, there was definitely no such thing as quiet time.
The females, I quickly learned, occupied the top three floors of the Suffolk County “tower.” Some enterprising woman (or man, I suppose) determined that the plumbing pipes from the upper floors connected to the lower floors. Meaning that a female detainee-say, my roommate Erica-could stick her head inside the white porcelain toilet bowl and proceed to “talk” to a random male on the lower floor. Though, talking isn’t really what any man wants to do. Think of it more as the prison version of sexting.
Erica would make lewd comments. Nine floors beneath us, a faceless man would groan. Erica would make more lewd comments:
Faceless man nine floors below us, however, wouldn’t know that. In his mind, Erica was probably some buxom blonde, or maybe the hot Latina chick he’d spotted once in Medical. He would whack off happily. Erica would start round two.
As would the woman in the cell beside us, and the cell beside her and the cell beside her. All. Night. Long.
Prison is a social place.
The Suffolk County Jail involves multiple buildings. Sadly, only males in the lower floors of the tower could communicate via the toilets with the females on the top three levels. Obviously, this posed a great hardship for the men in other buildings.
The enterprising males in Building 3, however, figured out that we could peer down at their windows from our cells. As Erica explained to me, first thing in the morning our job was to check for messages posted in the windows of Building 3-say, an artful arrangement of socks, underwear, and T-shirts forming a series of numbers or letters. Only so much could be spelled out with socks, obviously, so a code had been developed. We would write down the code, which would direct the women of 1-9-2 to various books during library time, where a more complete message could be recovered (
Prison poetry, Erica told me with a sigh. Spelling wasn’t her strong suit, she confessed, but she always did her best to write back, leaving behind a fresh note (
In other words, inmates could communicate between units, female pretrial detainees to males in general pop and vice versa. Most likely, then, the entire prison population knew of my presence, and an inexperienced detainee in one unit could gain assistance from a more hardened inmate from another.
I wondered how it would happen.
Say, when my entire unit was escorted down nine floors to the lower-level library. Or the couple of times we’d go to the gym. Or during visitation, which was also a group activity, one huge room filled with a dozen tables where everyone intermingled.
Easy enough for a fellow inmate to saddle up beside me, drive a shiv through my ribs, and disappear.
Accidents happen, right? Especially in prison.
I did my best to think it through. If it were me, a female detainee trying to get at a trained police officer, how
