“She was lucky. Most of the guards at that prison lost their jobs.”
“She was lucky all right.” He cast a stealthy glance at Pegg, who was standing against the wall, nibbling his nails. “I need you to do something for me, Mike. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“You know I’d do anything for you, Billy.”
“I need you to look into Richie for me.”
“Look into…?”
“Investigate her. Learn as much as you can about her past. No one can know you’re doing it. You can’t tell a soul. Not even your new girlfriend. Especially not Dani. If word gets out, I’m a dead man.”
My heart had become a dead weight inside my chest. “You want me to secretly investigate a Maine State Prison sergeant?”
“You’ve got to do it fast, too.”
“Why?”
He folded his powerful arms across his chest, showcasing the green dagger tattooed along his ulna. “I can’t tell you that.”
It wasn’t the request that gave me pause. Nobody who knew me—certainly none of my superiors—would have accused me of being a stickler for protocol. The problem was Billy’s overactive imagination. The man saw conspiracies everywhere. More than once he had sent me on a chase for a nonexistent wild goose. At what point are you hurting, not helping, a friend by indulging his make-believe suppositions?
“You need to give me a reason.”
“You want a reason? How about you do it because you owe me.”
For the past four years he had never once uttered those words. I realized now that my reluctance in coming to the prison today was because I had sensed my long-unpaid bill had finally come due.
Billy Cronk was behind bars, separated from his wife and children, because of me.
Four years earlier, two lowlifes had tried to murder Billy and me in a gravel pit in the woods of easternmost Maine. They had almost succeeded. They would have succeeded if Billy, the veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, hadn’t gone into berserker mode. What started as self-defense ended with bloodshed of a kind I’d never before witnessed. When Billy had blown apart a helpless man’s skull with a burst of .223 rounds, he had, in his blind fury, unquestionably crossed a line that I couldn’t ignore and remain a law-enforcement officer.
It was the hardest decision of my life. But I chose to uphold my oath and testified truthfully to what I’d witnessed in the gravel pit. The judge sentenced Billy to seven to ten years in prison for manslaughter.
The searing memory of Aimee Cronk’s sobs in the courtroom made it harder to say what I had to say now. “Billy, there’s no way I can do what you’re asking me to do. I’m a warden investigator, not a PI.”
My refusal—after his having called me on my debt—seemed to catch him off guard. “But you know all the tricks.”
“You know I’d do anything for you, Billy.”
His nostrils flared. “Except this.”
“The last time I was here you accused the infirmary staff of having trustees sneak olanzapine into your food because you refused to take it. Only the symptoms you described—hyperactivity, insomnia, paranoia—are the opposite of the effects produced by that drug. Before that was the incident of the ‘stolen’ wedding ring that you forgot you’d hidden. And the time someone was supposedly embezzling funds from your canteen account that turned out to be a math error. Do you want me to go on?”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“I’m the boy who cried wolf then.”
To avoid disclosing my concerns about his mental state, I trotted out an excuse even I recognized as lame. “What you’re asking me to do today would be against the law.”
When he sneered, his mustache revealed the curl of his upper lip. “Because you never broke the law before.”
He had me there. “This is different.”
“How?”
The pain I felt at refusing him came out as petulance. “Because you won’t tell me why, for one thing. Who is this woman? Why do you need to know about her background? Is she into something illegal? Is she in mortal danger? What?”
Billy shot to his feet so fast he overturned his chair. Pegg, who had been watching us from a distance, snapped to attention and reached for his radio. He was unarmed, as was standard for correctional officers when in places where they could easily be ambushed by prisoners.
“Is there a problem, Cronk?”
The prisoner burned me with his glare. “Forget I asked.”
“Billy?”
“You don’t have to visit again—not for a while.” Then he drove the shiv through my heart. “Tell Aimee I love her.”
2
I left the prison in a daze.
What was I going to tell Aimee Cronk?
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help your husband because his acute paranoia has become chronic?”
I knew that the correctional system dealt with “problem” prisoners by handing out mood-altering medications like biscuits to begging dogs. But to the best of my knowledge, Billy had never taken any prescriptions, not even the antidepressants we had encouraged him to try during the first dark days of his incarceration. If anything, he looked healthier just now than he had in ages.
I could still recall Billy Cronk’s first months in prison, when, out of despair and disgust, he had stopped exercising and told the barber to shave off his hair: a voluntary Samson. His regimen of self-punishment didn’t stop with letting his muscles go soft. He’d also allowed himself to be battered and bloodied by inmates he could have knocked cold with a single punch. Every time I visited him, he seemed to have a fresh bandage, a new set of stitches. He lied to me about how he’d received them, just as he lied about the incident that sent him to the Supermax the first time. He’d claimed he defended himself from a new prisoner looking to show his hardness by coldcocking the largest guy in the pod. The real story was far more disturbing.
Because Billy had taken beatings without fighting back, he acquired a reputation as a punk. Inevitably some of the wolves had gotten it into
