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For Charles Spicer
PART 1A Civil Death
1
I passed the morgue’s meat wagon on my way up the hill to the prison.
Another inmate overdose, I figured. Maybe a suicide. If it had been a homicide, I would’ve heard about it. Natural causes were always a possibility. So many prisoners, especially those condemned to life behind bars, seemed to give up the ghost prematurely, dying being their only real chance at escape.
I wondered if the corpse belonged to one of the men I’d arrested.
The sun had broken through the clouds, but the American and the Maine state flags hung damp and dripping from a steel pole before the complex of whitewashed buildings. The architect had done a good job disguising the essentially retributive nature of the penitentiary. From the parking lot you could barely see the three sets of razor-wire fences or the guard towers with riflemen in them watching the distant tree line. At night it was different. The misty glow of the klieg lights radiated so high into the sky it illuminated the bellies of the clouds.
I locked my service weapon and automatic knife in the steel box I kept under the seat of my personal vehicle, an International Harvester Scout. Then I made my way across the lot to the gleaming façade, still wet with rain.
“My name is Mike Bowditch,” I told the guard behind the desk, showing him my badge and identification card. “I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. I should be on your list.”
The correctional officer, or CO, was a paunchy, pouch-eyed man I didn’t recognize and whose name tag was obscured by a nonregulation fleece vest. Over the past four years, most of the guards I’d gotten to know had quit or been fired. Prisons never make those best-places-to-work lists. He half rose from his chair to appraise my outfit: waxed-cotton jacket, thermal tee, damp jeans, and muddy Bean boots.
“You been working undercover?” he asked.
“More like underwater.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve just come from fishing.”
“Catch anything?” he asked with utter disinterest.
“Some decent-sized salmon. What happened to CO Tolman?”
“Never heard of him.” He squinted through a pair of thumb-printed reading glasses at his computer. “You’re here to see inmate Cronk?”
“That’s right.”
“You need to leave keys, coat, spare change, in one of those lockers. Anything that might set off the detectors or conceal contraband.” He slid a pamphlet at me. “Here’s a list of prohibited items.”
“I have it memorized. Look, I drove four hours from Grand Lake Stream to get here before visiting time was over. That’s fifteen minutes from now if I’m not mistaken.”
The guard put down his readers and studied my windburned face. The lobby of the Maine State Prison was this man’s personal fiefdom. He didn’t know me. He could have made me wait.
“Is this visit business or personal?”
“A bit of both.”
He hadn’t anticipated that answer. Or maybe he didn’t care one way or another. He waved me through with the back of his hand.
The two guards manning the body scanners had high-and-tight haircuts and muscles you only get from pushing and pulling barbells. Like the CO at the desk, they wore midnight-blue uniforms with gold badges pinned to their shirts and portable radios fastened at the top buttons.
“How’re you doing today, Warden?” the lighter skinned of the two asked. He was one of those pale-eyed, white-haired, pinkish people who’d missed being born an albino by a flip of the genetic coin. According to the tag on his chest, his name was Pegg.
“How am I doing? That depends if you let me out of here at the end of my visit.”
“I hear that, bro. I ain’t even claustrophobic but sometimes this place makes me feel like I’m in a trash compactor—and I got a motherfucking key.”
Pegg was so white he was translucent, yet he talked as if he’d come straight out of Compton. I sensed he must be a recent hire since he still had a gloss on him that hadn’t been worn off or fouled by the existential filth of his workplace.
“The warden’s good to go, Pegg,” said the other guard, who was as dusky and dark eyed as his counterpart was colorless. He had the permanent scowl of a veteran CO. His ID gave his surname as Rancic.
But Pegg, I had already surmised, was a talker. “You’re here to see Killer Cronk, right?”
“Is that what you’re calling Billy now?”
But Pegg was too busy performing for his older colleague to listen to me. “So maybe you can settle a bet for us, dog. Rumor around B-Block is that Billy was a supersoldier back in the ’Stan. Is it for real he cut out a Taliban dude’s heart after the raghead shot up a school?”
“Sounds like a tall tale to me.”
Not that my friend was incapable of such an act.
Pegg winked at me through pallid lashes. “That means it’s the truth, yo! What did I tell you, Rancic?”
The protocol was for the two COs to take turns guiding in a visitor or group of visitors.
“How about taking the warden in before he runs out of clock?” Rancic sounded eager to be rid of both of us.
Chastened, the white shadow escorted me down the cinder-block hall to the visiting room. He instructed me to have a seat in a gray plastic chair while he went to fetch Billy from his cellblock.
Weak sunlight from the prison atrium shimmered through a window onto the pressed-wood table.
