Glauer looked up at the clock over the bar. “Almost. Places like this set the clock ahead about fifteen minutes, because they know when last call comes, it’ll still take the patrons that long to finish their drinks and get out. They call it bar time.”
Clara smiled at the big cop. She probably knew a lot more about closing down bars than he did. “Listen, I know Fetlock doesn’t want to bring Laura into this investigation. But I’m going to run her through it anyway and see what she says. I’m going up to Tioga County today to visit her.”
“Really? He’s not going to like that,” Glauer said. “For one thing, he’s definitely going to want you on call, and if he can’t reach you—”
“It’s only a four-hour drive,” Clara told him. It was almost noon and she really needed to get on the road. “You… heard, right? About where she is now?”
“That they segregated her?” He shrugged. “Yeah.” Every cop knew a few corrections officers—they ran in the same social circles. And any time an ex-cop ended up inside it made for excellent gossip. Probably every state trooper and sheriff’s deputy in Pennsylvania had heard about Caxton’s descent to the hole. “Probably the safest place for her is in an SHU. She can’t have a lot of friends in the general population.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not all good. Prisoners in the SHU only get one hour of non-contact visitation a month. If I don’t get up there by five o’clock today it’ll be the end of April before I can get another appointment. It’s four hours up there, an hour visit, and four hours back. I’ll be back here by ten at the latest. So if Fetlock comes calling, stall him for me, will you? Just pretend you can’t reach me, that I’m out of cell phone range or something. Please. It’s really important that I talk to her now.”
Glauer smiled at her. “You know I will. It’s got to mean a lot to her, to have someone come see her as regularly as you do.”
“Yeah,” Clara said. “It must.”
“You’re a good person,” he told her. “A lot of people wouldn’t have wanted to wait for her to get out. Maybe they would hold out for a while, you know, but eventually they wouldn’t be able to handle it. They would have to break things off.”
“Um. Yeah,” Clara said.
His eyes went wide. “Oh,” he said. “You’re going to—”
“I’m going to be late,” Clara said, “if I don’t get going right now.”
Glauer turned his face away from her. “Tell her I said hi.”
9.
They checked Clara’s ID at a guard post, then waved her through. She drove up a long gravel drive toward the prison complex, a group of low brick buildings connected by brick walkways. There were fences everywhere, and rolls of barbed wire, and signs telling her not to get out of her car, not to use cameras or cell phones on the grounds, and whatever she did, to never, ever pick up hitchhikers. She pulled into a small parking lot directly underneath a looming brick wall between two watchtowers. Men with assault rifles looked down at her from the towers, waiting for her to try something.
Her stomach hurt. It was nerves, just nerves—nobody could really relax in a setting like this, and Clara had a lot to be nervous about anyway. She was going to tell Laura that it was over. She’d wrestled with the idea for a long time. She’d gone over and over in her head all the reasons why it had to be done. Why it was better to do it now than to wait. Why she had to say it in person. Her reasoning was sound. She didn’t need to feel guilty.
Their relationship had started at a bad time in Laura’s life.
Her previous girlfriend, Deanna, had been succumbing to a vampire’s curse. She had ended up taking her own life. Laura had clung then to Clara like a drowning woman holding on to a floating tree branch, and for a while it had been so good— she’d been so attentive, so affectionate. Clara had never had a relationship like that before.
But then the vampires hadn’t gone away. They kept coming back, and suddenly every time she reached out for Laura, Laura wasn’t there. She’d thought it was a temporary thing, maybe. That Laura would learn to balance her job and her love life. Instead the love life had been sacrificed for Laura’s obsessive quest to wipe out vampires once and for all. And even that had been okay—for a while. Because when your lover isn’t there, but it’s only because she’s out saving the world, well. You feel guilty if you start making demands. If you start drawing attention to your own needs. So Clara had done her best to support Laura, to always be there for her whenever she finally did come home.
Now she wasn’t coming home for years. It was too much to take. Clara was hardly of one mind about breaking up with Laura. But she knew she had to do it if she ever wanted to have any kind of life of her own. It was the smart thing to do. The mature, grown-up thing. To just make a clean break of it, so they could both get on with their lives.
And yet, she still felt like a sixteen-year-old about to take her first driver’s license test. Her stomach hurt, and she had a weird headache that wouldn’t go away. She hadn’t eaten anything all day because she hadn’t been hungry, and now, perversely enough, she felt ravenous. She could get something to eat when it was done.
Just do it, she told herself. Do it quickly, like pulling off a—
A big black dog shoved its wet nose against her window. Clara screamed a little. The dog wasn’t barking or snapping at her, but it had a suspicious look in its eye.
“Please step out of the car, ma’am,” a corrections officer in a blue stab-proof vest said. Clara nodded and opened her door. The dog lunged inside the car, sniffing at her skirt and her shoes. Clara held her hands up where they could be seen. She stepped out of the car and let the dog smell her, let it do its job.
“You here for a visitation?” the CO asked. “ID, please.”
Clara nodded and reached for her purse. The dog sat back on its haunches and stared at her, daring her to try something.
This wasn’t her first time visiting Laura. Clara knew the drill. The silver star on her lapel should have been enough, but she handed over her driver’s license and her U.S. Marshals Service ID card anyway. The CO shoved them in his pocket. “I’ll make a copy of these and they’ll be returned when you leave,” he told her. “This way.”
He grabbed up the dog’s leash and walked her toward a low, narrow gate in the wall. Inside she was led to a waiting room where a number of other visitors, mostly women, were sitting on plastic chairs watching a videotape about what they were allowed to bring inside the prison and what was expressly forbidden. COs with dogs circled the room, searching for contraband.
“Ms. Hsu? You’re with me,” another CO said. This one didn’t have a dog. “I’ll take you to the SHU visiting area now.”
Clara nodded gratefully. Behind her someone shouted, “Hey!”
It was a visitor, a middle-aged woman with dry hair wearing a tie-dyed sweatshirt.
“How come she gets to go first? I been waiting an hour,” she insisted.
“Watch the tape. We’ll come for you when it’s time,” a CO said.
“Shit,” the woman said, sitting back down. “And you can’t even smoke in here!”
Clara was taken through a series of gates, each of them designed to be opened electronically by a CO behind a bulletproof window. Finally she was brought into a little antechamber where her fingerprints were taken and a female CO brushed a long cotton swab across her shoulders and down the side of her skirt.
“Is this really necessary?” Clara asked. She hadn’t gone through this the last time.
The COs didn’t answer her. The female one pushed her swab into the waiting maw of an Ionscan machine that could detect even minute traces of explosives or narcotics. Everybody waited for forty-five seconds until the screen lit up red. “Gunpowder residue,” the female CO said.
The male CO, Clara’s guide, pulled a stun gun off his belt and held it down by his thigh. “Empty your pockets, now. Everything goes in the bucket.” He kicked a plastic bin at her so it skidded across the floor. “Watch, belt, shoes, too. Wallets, keys, cell phone. You have a camera on you?”
