years.”
“I haven’t been in long,” he said, then hesitated before adding, “Sounds like you’re trying to find the killer.”
I nodded.
“Why bother if God loves him as much as Nicole?”
“First of all, love doesn’t make allowance for lawlessness, doesn’t negate the need for justice-in fact, it demands it,” I said. “And…”
“And what?” he asked.
“And,” I said, “I didn’t say I loved him as much as Nicole-or as much as God loves either of them.”
That evening I drove down to Mexico Beach for an AA meeting. As the small county road rose slightly to come to an abrupt stop at what seemed to be the end of the world, my breath caught at the beauty, and I felt, as I always did, that this ending was also the beginning, and I had come home somehow.
Beyond the unpolished sunstone-colored sand of the pristine beaches, the Gulf rolled away toward the northwest coast of Cuba, its calm waters the color of uncut Columbian emerald. The setting sun was low in the sky, hanging just above the horizon, and cast a coral-colored shaft of light across the Gulf, as if illuminating a path to another dimension.
I had driven down here to ensure my meeting would be truly anonymous, but already feeling the Gulf’s effect on me knew I had been drawn here in ways I could never fully understand.
Pausing at the stop sign as long as I could, I breathed deeply, gazed carefully, felt fully, and once again let the mending begin.
CHAPTER 22
The moment I walked through the chapel doors the next morning, Mr. Smith, my elderly inmate orderly, motioned me past the inmates waiting to see me and down the back hallway to the kitchen.
Mr. Smith was not only the oldest clerk I had, but was the one who had been with me the longest, and the only one I trusted. Unlike most of the inmates in the institution, Mr. Smith was quiet and respectful, his thoughts and actions deliberate, and I wasn’t sure if it was his personality or a product of his age. Probably the latter-and the fact that he had been incarcerated for so long.
When we were in the kitchen and the door was closed behind us, he slid the large gray garbage can out from the wall.
The chapel kitchen was small and plain, functional, but not much else. The pine cabinets had been built by inmates and were thin and uneven, their earth-tone counter tops peeling up on the ends.
“I’s goin’ through the trash, you know, for security purposes- ”
I knew he didn’t have to go through the garbage, but that he took pride in the chapel and the work he did in it, and that he was constantly looking out for me.
“-and I come across these,” he said.
He lifted the clear plastic bag from the can and emptied its contents onto the floor. Withdrawing from his back pocket two of the plastic gloves we kept around for food preparation, he handed me one, and we each slipped a hand in one and knelt down to examine the trash.
“They wrapped ’em in paper towels and shoved ’em down in the middle,” he continued, “but they didn’t fool nobody.”
Beneath his closely cropped gray hair, Mr. Smith’s skin seemed dry and paper-thin like parchment, his half- closed eyes wise but weary, as if the one was the price for the other.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said, “but they didn’t fool you.”
I watched his long bony black fingers beneath the clear plastic glove sifting through the trash, raking it aside until he found what he was looking for.
“When I saw ’em,” he said, “I left ’em where they was ’til you seen ’em.”
“See what?” I asked.
“There,” he said.
Spreading apart the rough brown paper towel, he revealed the two used condoms it was meant to conceal. As he held the paper towel up in the palm of his gloved hand, the condoms unfurled like worms, their elongated forms revealing the moist residue still on them.
“You have a lot better idea of what’s on the compound than me,” I said. “How available are condoms?”
“They’s a lotsa sex, but no condoms,” he said. “I been down a long time and these the first I seen.” A small, self-amused smile danced across his lips and he added, “No one ’round here practice safe sex.”
I nodded.
“I’ve heard a few hardcore punks talk ’bout a officer usin’ a condom before, but they bring one in, use it, and take it out-or flush it.”
“These the only ones?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Seein’ these got me lookin’ closer ever’where, and I found one other in the visitor bathroom.”
The visitor’s bathroom was in the same small side hallway, just closer to the main hallway door. Unlike the inmate bathroom, which couldn’t lock, the visitor’s bathroom stayed locked and was only used by staff or visitors during a special program.
Turning around slowly, he opened the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink and pulled out a smaller clear plastic bag.
“This was in the little trash can inside the visitor’s bathroom at the bottom of a bunch of tissues, paper towels, and a tampon.”
“A tampon?” I asked.
“Uh huh.”
Unlike the other two condoms, this one was wrapped in toilet tissue instead of a paper towel.
“It’s different from the others,” he said.
And he was right. Whereas the others were amazingly clean, blood and fecal matter, judging by the smell of it, streaked this one.
“That shit’s rank,” he said, jerking his head back when he had fully unwrapped the tissue. “Sorry,” he added, and I knew he was apologizing for his language, “but…” He shook his head, wrinkling up his face, beginning to breathe through his mouth.
I reexamined all the condoms, studying them in relationship to each other, trying to account for their differences.
“Why they so different?” he asked. “These used in a woman and this one in a man?”
Vaginal versus anal use would certainly explain the differences, though the one seemingly used for anal intercourse in the visitor’s bathroom wouldn’t necessarily have had to have been used by two men.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “We can’t really know until a lab processes them.”
Just then the door behind us swung open quickly, and Abdul Muhummin said, “What the hell’re y’all doin’?”
I turned to see him straining to see what we were looking at.
“Go back in the library,” I said. “I’ll be in there in a minute.”
“You need any help?” he asked, still not looking at me, but trying to see what was behind me. “No,” I said. “Go back in there now, and keep everybody else away from here until I get there.”
“What did you find-a clue or somethin’?”
“Muhummin, if you don’t go now I’m gonna have you locked up for disobeying a verbal order.”
“I’m goin’, I’m goin’,” he said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture. “Just relax.”
When he was gone, I turned back to Mr. Smith and asked, “When was the last time the trash was picked up?”
“Not since we was cleanin’ for the program,” he said. “After what happened, we wasn’t able to get in here
