“So you have no idea why Chapman and Dow ambushed her in the laundry room?”
“Fuck no.”
“Really?”
“Those guys were fucking animals. They didn’t have to have a reason.”
“I’m not sure I believe you, Tyler.”
In a split second the anger was gone, replaced by manifest fear. “Is Richie saying something? What is she saying?”
I held up a hand. “The sergeant didn’t even mention your name. But I’m getting the feeling that you know something—or maybe suspect something—and it’s causing you stress.”
Now the anger flared back up, but it was a poor cover for the terror inside him. “A CO was killed and I had to mop up his blood. So, yeah, I am feeling a little stressed out.”
“I know what it’s like to lose colleagues in the line of duty. Some of them were friends. I found it helpful to talk it out afterward.”
“You don’t know me, man. You don’t know the first damned thing.”
8
While I was waiting for Billy to emerge from his cocoon of anesthesia, yet another detective pulled me aside. He needed a statement on the role I’d played in disarming Darius Chapman. My interviewer didn’t approve of the word execution to describe what Novak Rancic had done, but it scarcely mattered: a dozen other eyewitnesses, including the nurse who had been taken hostage, would claim it had been a righteous kill.
The hospital having returned to normal, I drifted down to the cafeteria at the opposite end of the building. I ordered a couple of eggs and two grilled English muffins and was shoveling in my second breakfast while I checked the messages on my phone.
Word had gotten out among the Maine law-enforcement community, and the majority of my texts and emails were of the “What the hell happened?” variety. I answered my friends with candor, my supervisors with circumspection, and ignored the rest. The busybodies could get their gossip elsewhere.
Dani Tate had left a four-word voice message: “I’m on my way.”
It occurred to me that I didn’t know how to feel about that statement. She would have finished her shift and would be driving without sleep under the assumption that I needed moral support—or perhaps she was merely eager for an excuse to come visit.
Through the cafeteria window I watched a mixed flock of cedar and Bohemian waxwings alight in a crab apple. It took the birds mere minutes to pick the tree clean, and just like that, they disappeared into the air. I felt a wave of calmness pass through me: the first in days, it seemed.
“Warden Bowditch?”
I turned to see a man in a pin-striped suit tailored for a power lifter. He had dark curls, but his goatee was touched with frost. The graying beard gave me trouble because I knew I recognized him—by his physique, by his dapper dress, by his unusually long eyelashes—but couldn’t remember where we’d met. Then came the spark. He was Angelo Donato, yet another official from the Maine State Prison. He looked to have aged a decade in the four years since I’d last seen him.
The two of us had locked horns when I’d visited the prison to ask about a mutual friend, Jimmy Gammon—who’d served alongside Donato as an MP in Afghanistan—and who had later committed suicide.
I gripped his outstretched hand and felt the calluses on his palm where he gripped the barbell. “Sergeant Donato.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d remember me. But I’m a deputy warden now.”
“Congratulations.”
Not until then did I notice a uniformed CO standing a short distance from us. He was whip thin with a trimmed mustache that made him look like a British subaltern and stood as if called to attention by a commanding officer. There could be no question that the military-looking man was Donato’s minion.
“I wondered if you had time to answer a few questions.” Donato sat down across the table without waiting for my permission. He moved aside a vase of dried flowers to have an unobstructed view of me.
“Do you want a Gatorade or a vitamin water, sir?” asked the mustached guard, whose uniform sleeve bore sergeant stripes.
“I’m fine, Hoyt. But maybe you could give the warden investigator and me a few minutes?”
“Ten-four.”
After the guard had marched off, I said, “You’ve done a better job of keeping up with my career than I have with yours. So I take it these questions are sensitive as well as important or you wouldn’t have wanted to ask them in private.”
He had a disarming smile. “You always were a smart guy, Bowditch.”
“Thanks.”
“Too smart for your own good.” He folded his big hands on the tabletop. No wedding ring. Just a circle of lighter skin where a band would have been. But most people who worked at the prison removed their valuables before going to work. “I want to know what Billy Cronk talked to you about yesterday.”
“The dismal state of the Patriots’ secondary.”
“Be serious.”
“I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
“It’s my business if your friend had foreknowledge of the attack on Mears and Richie.”
I crossed my knife and fork on my yolk-stained plate. “If he had foreknowledge of anything, I doubt he would have come near that laundry room. I don’t know if you have had a chance to speak with your sergeant yet, but she’s claiming it was Billy Cronk who saved her life.”
“I’ve heard what Dawn is saying,” Donato said in a skeptical tone that hinted at some secret knowledge.
With his hands resting on the table, I reconsidered the sallow circle of skin on his ring finger. There was no indentation in the flesh. Donato hadn’t worn a wedding band for a long time. I remembered a photograph on his desk at the prison of a wife and young children taken the day of his return from the war.
I pushed my chair away from the table so I could cross my legs. “I was under the impression the investigation into this morning’s attacks was being handled by Detective Klesko of the Maine State Police.”
“That’s correct, but
