How they’d become trustees, Richie had no idea, but she claimed to have been unafraid of them. Plus, she had the most fearsome officer in the prison as her wingman. This was the previously unidentified guard killed in the encounter. His name was Kent Mears, and he had weighed three hundred pounds.
Billy had mentioned the brute to me during one of our recent visits. CO Mears sounded like one of those sadists who sometimes bluff their way through written tests, oral interviews, and personality assessments and secure their dream jobs as professional punishers. He had risen through the ranks to command the Supermax’s “extraction team”: the armored squad that invaded the cells of disorderly inmates to beat them to a pulp and haul them off to bleed, naked, in a restraint chair.
With Mears for a bodyguard, it was no wonder Richie had considered herself safe. Despite knowing about the spotty surveillance in the laundry room—that she might be invisible to the guard in central control—the possibility of being ambushed never crossed her mind.
She’d been grilling Trevor Dow when she heard Billy Cronk cry out, “Hey! What are you doing?”
The shouted question caused Mears to turn his back on Darius Chapman, who used the distraction to jab a concealed shiv into the guard’s carotid artery. Richie never even saw the improvised weapon. All she saw was cartoonishly red blood jetting through the fingers of her bodyguard. Mears banged off a steel dryer as he toppled to the floor. Dying, he kicked the machine so hard with his duty boots they made black dents.
The next thing Richie knew, Trevor Dow was whipping his hand toward her throat. This time she saw a flash of metal. She raised a hand but felt the razor edge slice through skin and tendons all the way to the metacarpals. But her reflexes at least deflected the shank. The blade missed the arteries and veins in her neck but slashed deeply down the length of her face.
Dow came at her again, this time grabbing her bleeding hand, but she got her uninjured arm between them, taking cuts to her wrist and hand.
Her next memory was of Dow raising the shank for a backslash across her windpipe, when his eyes seemed to pop from their sockets. He began to jerk as if an electrical charge were flowing through him, short-circuiting his nervous system. Then suddenly he was toppling over: a dead tree in a gale.
Behind him stood Billy Cronk, panting, blood-spattered, the shiv clenched in his huge hand. He must have wrestled it away from Chapman, she concluded. On the floor behind Billy, Darius hissed obscenities as he clutched his stomach.
Richie braced herself against the laundry table, but she felt her legs give way as the shock wore off.
Billy Cronk caught her in his arms. Gently he laid her down on an unbloodied section of concrete.
“You’re OK, Sarge,” she remembered him saying, his glacier-blue eyes close to hers.
No one ever called her Sarge.
Then armored men were dragging Billy away. They hammered him with plexiglass shields, beat his arms and legs with batons. One of the guards sprayed an entire can of mace into those same icy eyes she had stared into, spellbound.
The correctional nurse from the infirmary appeared and began pressing what looked like a maxi pad to Richie’s face. She felt hands all over her while the RN shouted for the clueless officers to maintain pressure.
Meanwhile, out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Cronk refused to submit. She saw him on his hands and knees while the blows fell hard upon his back and shoulders.
7
Klesko produced two plastic bags from a leather duffel at his feet. The first contained a strange rust-red object that seemed mostly made of plastic with a point at one end. I’d heard stories about the inventiveness of inmates, but fashioning a lethal weapon from picnic cutlery and a sharpened wood screw took a special kind of ingenuity.
“Does this look familiar, Sergeant Richie?” Klesko asked.
“That’s the shiv Chapman used to kill Officer Mears, I’m guessing.”
“The same weapon Billy Cronk used to stab Darius Chapman and kill Trevor Dow?”
“It’s got to be, right?”
“What about this item?”
The second plastic bag contained a T-shaped hunk of stainless steel. The crossbar had been honed to a cutting edge while the short descender was wrapped in box tape to provide a crude grip.
“Did that come from a clipboard?” I asked.
Indeed it had, said Klesko. It was the metal section that normally springs shut against the backing.
“These are nothing special,” he said, leaning over to me, the smell of peppermint on his breath. “Sometime at the crime lab I’ll show you some of the shivs and shanks confiscated over the years.”
“Are we finished?” Richie said from her bed.
Klesko glanced at his notebook. “I’d like to go back to something you mentioned earlier. You said that Officer Mears lost focus when Billy Cronk said, ‘Hey! What are you doing?’”
“Yeah, so?”
I felt my heartbeat begin to accelerate. Steve is wondering whether it was Billy’s role to provide a distraction.
“How would you describe Cronk’s tone?” he asked.
“His tone?”
“Did he sound confused, surprised, rehearsed?”
Finally Richie got the gist. “You’re wondering if he was in on it? Have you met Cronk, Detective?”
“Not yet.”
Smiling seemed to cause her pain. “The man isn’t smart enough to be part of a conspiracy. What’s that line from Winnie-the-Pooh? Billy Cronk is a bear of very little brain.”
All his life people had misjudged my friend’s intelligence, me included upon our first meeting. While Billy was far
