I saw no need to respond. The smell of a frying hamburger wafted from the hospital kitchen.
Donato picked up the salt shaker as a plaything. “Cronk wanted to talk with you about Sergeant Richie, right? What did you talk about?”
“We agreed that the Patriots need to draft a cornerback, which means they’ll probably take a long snapper instead.”
He spoke without looking at me. “It would be a mistake to test my resolve.”
I found the expression odd, almost old-fashioned. “It wouldn’t be my first mistake of the day.”
My phone vibrated on the table. I turned the screen faceup. A luminous photograph shone up at me, identifying the caller as Aimee Cronk.
“I need to take this.”
Donato rose to his feet. He adjusted his cuffs and straightened his tie. He smoothed his goatee with his fingers. The purple shadows under his eyes seemed pronounced from this angle. The man wasn’t much older than I was, but he looked as if he’d barely survived a head-on collision with middle age.
“Billy Cronk is no hero,” he said, looming above the table. “The man’s a wild animal who should spend the rest of his life in a cage.”
As he stalked away, pursued by his right-hand man, Sergeant Hoyt, I answered the phone.
“Aimee?”
“Mike, where are you?”
“In the cafeteria.”
“We’re here at the hospital, but they won’t let us see him!”
“Billy was still anesthetized when I was last there. He had just gotten out of surgery.”
“But the guard says he’s awake. A detective’s in his room interviewing him. He should have a lawyer in there. He has a right to an attorney!”
I rose from the table. “I’ll be right down.”
I heard Aimee Cronk even before I rounded the corner to the waiting room.
“You had no business interrogating Billy without him having legal counsel present.”
Steve Klesko said with strained patience, “Your husband isn’t being investigated for a crime, Mrs. Cronk.”
“It don’t matter. It’s the prosecutor who’ll decide if it was self-defense, and if he says otherwise, you’ll wish you’d Mirandized the shit out of him. Not to mention that our lawyer will claim Billy was drugged up when he spoke with you. So there’s a consent problem for you there, too, Dee-tective.”
Aimee was standing toe-to-toe with Klesko, although she was close to a foot shorter than he was. She wore a man’s chamois shirt that hung on her curvy body like a tunic, jeans she’d patched herself, and a stunningly white pair of sneakers. Her red-blond hair was cinched in a topknot, and she was wearing what Billy called her “sexy librarian” glasses.
Klesko seemed to be bending backward from the short woman’s frontal assault. “Please, Aimee—”
“It’s Mrs. Cronk to you. And how come his own family can’t see him if he’s alert enough for the third degree?”
“He’s still an inmate in the custody of the Maine State Prison. It’s up to them if he can have visitors. You need to take it up with an official—”
“Really? You’re gonna play that card?”
Klesko needed rescuing fast.
“Aimee?”
I’d been nervous about my reception, but she threw her arms around me with such force I was glad her hyper-jealous husband wasn’t there to see it.
Across the room, I could see her children, the five blond Cronklets, occupying couches and chairs beneath the lone television set. They had already spilled sunflower seeds all over the carpet. Someone had tuned the TV station to a financial news network, and the backwoods ragamuffins were watching it with the intensity of day traders waiting for the next earnings report to drop.
“They won’t let us in, Mike,” Aimee said.
“So I heard.”
“What are you going to do about it, I want to know.”
I might have repeated Klesko’s line that the decision remained in the hands of the prison officials, but I knew Aimee Cronk well enough to know how poorly that excuse would fare with her.
Fortunately, the deputy warden, Angelo Donato, had also made his way to the surgical wing. He stood in the doorway, conferring with three guards: the mustached sergeant he’d called Hoyt; the white shadow, Tyler Pegg; and a big guy with a shaved head who kept his back to me.
“Deputy Warden Donato!”
“Warden Investigator Bowditch.”
“Your guard won’t let Mrs. Cronk in to see her injured husband.”
The twinkle in his eye announced his pleasure in having something to hold over me. “The rules are to protect the safety of everyone involved, including the medical personnel.”
I glanced back at Klesko, figuring a good word from the detective might help, but he was already beating a retreat.
I tried an appeal to whatever heart powered Donato’s massive chest. “You were an MP at Bagram Air Base, correct?”
“I know where you’re going with this. I am aware that Cronk did a tour in the Sandbox.”
“And Afghanistan.”
“The Maine State Prison isn’t a branch of the VA. His military record isn’t our concern. His criminal record is.”
Most bureaucrats, in my experience, have a fear of unknown outcomes.
“What do you think the TV reporters out there are going to report,” I said, “when they learn you wouldn’t permit an injured hero to see his wife and children?”
“What makes you think I give a shit what those bubbleheads have to say?”
I should have known that particular threat wouldn’t work. Donato and his boss, the head warden, were protected by the governor, whose contempt for journalists was the stuff of legend.
“How about a trade then?” I played the last card in my hand. “I tell you what Billy and I talked about in exchange for letting Mrs. Cronk and her kids see him.”
He rubbed his goatee in a way that suggested he’d only recently grown it. Facial hair was still a novelty. “The wife only, and she will be supervised by one of my men.”
Aimee was watching me with a bottled fury. She
