I had almost grown accustomed to walking around bare chested. “There was blood and brains on my shirt. I had to throw it away.”
“Likely story! I hope you’re telling everyone that it was me who told you to sneak in the back way. I want credit for taking down Chapman, too.”
The idea of being credited with anything baffled me.
“How the hell did he get loose?” I asked, knowing that Skip was such a busybody, he would already have the story.
Chapman, it seemed, was one of the lucky survivors of the knife fight back at the prison. But he had been stabbed in the torso so many times he was springing leaks everywhere. The COs put him in restraints and kept him locked up for the ambulance ride. That’s standard operating procedure at the prison. Rancic rode along with the emergency medical technicians to provide security.
The EMTs did everything to stop Chapman’s abdominal bleeding. Pressure, bandages, hemostatic gel—but an artery was giving them headaches. Five minutes out, the prisoner fell quiet. When the ambulance arrived, the emergency personnel rushed his stretcher into the ER, where a doctor waved them into surgery without a stop at triage.
The attending surgeon requested that Rancic remove the cuffs because they were going to be in the way. After Rancic unlocked the manacles and before another officer applied the bed restraints, Chapman stopped pretending to be unconscious. He grabbed the nurse who was cutting off his clothes with surgical shears and pressed the scissors blade to her throat. Hostage taker and hostage backed from the room. Chapman was trying to feel his way toward safety even as cops convened from other parts of the hospital. Rancic followed the scrum, and when he had a shot, he took it.
I had never transferred a prisoner from an ambulance stretcher to a hospital bed, but even I knew better than to remove restraints before new ones were in place.
“You don’t think that’s weird?” I asked Skip.
“The level of incompetence? No, I think that’s par for the course at the prison.”
“I’m talking about the fact that the same CO who unchained the guy was the one who killed him.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say Novak was trying to make up for having screwed up and nearly gotten a woman beheaded.”
“Novak? Is that Rancic’s first name?”
“The guy’s a Gypsy, from what I hear.”
I crossed my arms against a sudden draft. “Romany.”
“What?”
“Gypsy is considered an ethnic slur. They prefer to be called Romany. I don’t know what the term is for an individual.”
Skip pulled on his freckled earlobe. “I hope you haven’t gotten all PC on me, Bowditch.”
“What’s Rancic’s résumé? I don’t remember meeting him when I was stationed here.”
“He’s a new hire, six months on the job. I’m not sure where he worked before.”
“He struck me as a veteran CO.”
“A veteran CO wouldn’t have allowed a prisoner to get free.”
It was a good point. “What can you tell me about the man he killed?”
“Chapman?” Skip said in a faux-wistful tone. “That’s a different story. We held Darius in the county lockup briefly before his trial for armed robbery. You probably remember those banks that got held up around Rockland, a couple years ago. Anyway, Darius and I shared some quality personal time, and let’s just say I won’t be buying a bouquet of flowers for his grave. That man went from calm to crazy faster than a Porsche goes from zero to sixty.”
“So there’s no known connection between the two of them? Rancic and Chapman?”
Skip set a long hand on my shoulder with affection. “Have I ever told you what a beautiful thing your paranoia is?”
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I had unfairly labeled Billy Cronk as paranoid when the threat to him had been real. Meanwhile, my deputy friend was accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist.
“Tell me what happened at the prison,” I said. “How did it start? Who stabbed who?”
“Oh, there are rumors galore. But nothing I believe. At the moment it’s safe to say that the people who know aren’t talking. And the people who are talking don’t know. Listen, it’s been good catching up, but I’d better boogie.”
Before he could go, I asked him if he might have a spare shirt or jacket in his cruiser I could borrow. Five minutes later he returned with a self-satisfied grin and a novelty tee he’d picked up at the Maine Lobster Festival.
This one was red, white, and blue. An eagle clutched two pistols in its talons. On the back, words were written in an appliqué script meant to resemble the handwriting of the Founding Fathers: I’M SORRY BUT I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY FREEDOM.
Skip had professed ignorance, but it struck me that certain facts had been established. Billy Cronk, Darius Chapman (now deceased), and one unidentified prisoner (also deceased), had been in a knife fight. In this mêlée, a correctional officer had also been killed and Sergeant Dawn Richie had been wounded severely enough to require transport to the hospital.
I leaned over and put my face in my hands. Billy was only a few years from completing his sentence for manslaughter. I had professed to Skip that my friend would only have attacked a guard in self-defense. But given his recent behavior, his vague accusations against Dawn Richie, how certain could I be of that?
What am I going to tell Aimee?
I thought of her speeding south, her balky, rust-bitten Tahoe loaded with Cronklets. When she arrived, would the troopers even let her see her husband? Not if he was a suspect in the assassination of a correctional officer and the attempted assassination of another.
Although the hospital was still teeming with troopers, deputies, and municipal cops, I seemed to be the only game warden present. No surprise there. Unless a prisoner escapes and our tracking skills are needed, we are not generally brought in to deal with crises in the correctional system.
A smooth-faced
