I caught sight of a black-haired man dressed in a fancy suit on the far side of the surgical suite.
“Just a second,” I told the trooper. “Hey, Steve! Steve Klesko!”
The state police detective paused midstep and searched for the person who’d shouted his name. When he finally saw me, he made an exaggerated face signaling dismay.
Detective Steven Klesko and I had cooperated on an investigation the previous November on an island twenty miles off the coast. A negligent hunter had mistaken a woman for a deer, we’d been told. What had actually happened was far more twisted than that simple scenario.
I hadn’t covered myself in glory during the Ariel Evans case. After it was over, I’d received reprimands from my superiors for failing to communicate my findings, for refusing to coordinate my actions with them, and for exceeding the scope of my authority in arresting a suspect in the killing.
But at least one good thing had come out of my first homicide investigation. Klesko and I had become friends. Along with some of his college buddies, I had joined him on a marathon snowmobile trip over the winter—five hundred miles across northern New England. To my surprise, he’d even asked me to be a groomsman in his upcoming wedding.
“Mike, what are you doing here?”
“I was nearby, heard what happened at the prison, and thought I might be of help.”
“That’s bullshit. You couldn’t control your curiosity.”
“Are you in charge of this thing?” I asked, meaning the Gordian knot of interlocking crimes that needed to be untangled.
“Lucky me, right?”
In Maine all felonies committed by incarcerated persons and all suspicious deaths of inmates are investigated by the state police. The policy was put in place by a former governor who realized it was an obvious conflict of interest for prison wardens to investigate their own officers for potential negligence or misconduct.
“If you have a minute, I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee,” I said.
“I don’t have a minute. But I never pass up free coffee.”
Klesko wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense. His hairline was too low, his eyebrows too close together, his eyes too sunken in their sockets. Decades of playing hockey, including a stint in the minor leagues, had left him with a dented nose he hadn’t bothered to straighten. But he carried himself with an athlete’s grace. Most important, he seemed utterly at ease inside his own skin. And isn’t that the essence of charisma?
After we’d found the coffee machine and a quiet corner, I asked, “How is Dawn Richie doing?”
“She’s got a facial laceration and some superficial defensive wounds on her extremities, but nothing life-threatening.”
“Have you interviewed her yet?”
“I’ve been waiting for the docs to give me the go-ahead, but it should be any minute now. Sergeant Richie was the first one transported. Why are you asking me these questions, Mike?”
“I’d like to sit in on your interview.”
“I’m sure you would!” It took him more than a few seconds to realize I was serious. “I hope you realize how out of the question that request is. On what basis should I allow you to be in the room?”
Once again I found myself at a decision point. I was the friend of one of the inmates who had, perhaps, attacked Dawn Richie. That same inmate had instructed me to pry into her private life. Sharing that information with the police would be yet another betrayal of a man I had already doomed once.
But Steve Klesko was a fellow law-enforcement officer, and my duty was to share whatever information I possessed that might assist his investigation. I couldn’t save Billy from himself. If that reality hadn’t been obvious before, it was now.
“One of the injured prisoners is a friend of mine. I actually visited him yesterday, and we had a disturbing conversation. His name is Billy Cronk. Can you tell me how he’s doing?”
“The docs think he’s going to pull through. I take it you believe your conversation is relevant to the stabbings.”
“It might be.”
His conjoined eyebrows rose. “Well?”
“Before I tell you, I’m hoping you can give me some assurances.”
“Come on, Mike. You know I can’t do that.”
“I don’t want to worsen his legal situation.”
Klesko scratched a temple where a few gray hairs had recently appeared among their darker fellows. “What exactly do you think happened this morning?”
“I don’t honestly know.”
“Your friend Billy Cronk was the one who saved Sergeant Richie’s life. If not for him, those two other inmates would have cut her throat. Your friend’s the hero of the day, dude.”
6
It took a moment for Klesko to register my stunned reaction to his words. “What were you under the impression happened at the prison this morning?”
“My first thought, when I heard Billy was involved, was that something had triggered him to go berserk. He has a history of flashbacks to the war. They sometimes end in violence. It was how he landed in prison.”
A note of caution crept into his voice. “When you talked to him yesterday, did he seem like he was on the verge of a psychotic break?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you warn anyone?”
“The COs would have locked Billy up in the Supermax as a precautionary measure. If he wasn’t crazy yesterday, he would have been after a couple of weeks in solitary. I couldn’t do that to him based on nothing but gut feelings.”
Klesko stared straight into my pupils. The unsettling sensation was of being appraised by two different people with two different agendas. There was Steven Klesko, the detective with the Maine State Police, coldly assessing my actions. And there was my friend Steve, who heard the pain in my voice despite my attempts at hiding it.
After a moment he said, “You were the one who arrested Cronk, right? After he blew that guy’s head off?”
“I didn’t want to, but he told me it was the right thing to do. He said if I broke my oath, it would eat me
