an inmate… but I would find that odd.'
'Huh.'
THE EXTERIOR DOOR slid open as they came up to it. They stepped through it, into the middle space where the cage was, and the door closed behind them. Cale had called ahead, and when both the interior and exterior barred doors were closed and locked, one of the people inside the cage popped a door and Jansen led them inside.
'We need to look at some tapes, people,' Jansen said to the three people in the booth, two women and a man. 'Dr. Cale has probably talked to you, so you know that we're required to view them privately.'
'What're you looking for?' the male guard asked.
'Don't know,' Sloan said genially. 'We're looking at the Big Three, and anything would help.'
'This way,' Jansen said. He took them into a second small room, where one wall held three dozen small monitoring screens and a couple of larger ones. Only half of them were turned on.
'We monitor the isolation rooms constantly, and tape them. We also monitor what we call 'watch rooms,' where we put people who might be at some risk of attempting suicide, and also the high-risk individuals, like the Big Three,' Jansen said. 'The rest of the cameras are scanners and are meant to pick up disturbances in the hallways and recreational areas and so on.'
'We're interested in the Big Three, back three days,' Lucas said.
BY FAST-FORWARDING, they got through the tapes for the Big Three in two hours. The three had no privacy at all: they used the toilet, masturbated, exercised, slept, screamed, ate before, the unblinking camera eye. At first, it carried a voyeuristic fascination; two days in, they just wanted it to end. The boredom was grinding, and Lucas began to empathize with Chase's wish to die. Lucas looked for seams in the tape, where it might have shut down; but it was seamless. Nobody, as far as they could tell, had said anything about the Peterson killing.
'Could it be a code word, telling them that the killing was done?' Sloan asked. Jansen glanced sideways at him, an idiot glance, and Sloan said, defensively, 'All right, it's not a code word.'
'There's gotta be something,' Lucas said. He'd written down a list of names of the people who'd gone through the security area; there were thirty of them.
'Every single person you've seen in there-half the staff, I didn't know that many people went in and out, to tell you the truth-but every single person knows he's on tape,' Jansen said.
'You can't see them very well, unless they're right up against the viewing panel,' Lucas said. 'Is there another angle?'
'Yeah, we have one of the scanning cameras at the end of the hall.'
'Let's see that.'
They spent ten minutes fast-forwarding through three days of the staff coming and going. 'I keep thinking, the food,' Sloan said. 'It's the only thing that consistently goes into the cells.'
They thought about that for a moment, and then Jansen said, 'Suppose one of the guys delivering the food wrote down what happened, like a little strip of paper, and put it in the mashed potatoes…'
'Let's look at the guys bring in the food.'
Seven different staff members delivered food over the three days. The food went into the cell on a kind of metallic lazy Susan device. 'Wouldn't even have to put it in the food-you could just drop it on the tray when you put the food in the slot,' Sloan said. 'The cameras aren't so good that you could pick that up.'
They watched the three men eating, saw nothing out of the ordinary, except that Biggie had bad manners, eating with his hands as much as with his spoon.
'Okay,' Lucas said, when they were done. He was discouraged. 'Maybe this isn't it. Goddamnit, I thought I was on to something.'
'Want me to go down and drop Peterson's name on Biggie? Or on all three of them?' Jansen asked. 'I could mention 'a Peterson thing' in passing, see if we get any reaction.'
'It's an idea,' Lucas said, considering him. 'You're not going to get anything from Chase, though. He was hypermanic this morning.'
'He's gone over the top and is on the way back down,' Jansen said. 'If I go now, I might catch him before he crashes. You could watch from here, in real time.'
Lucas nodded. 'Let's do it.'
CHASE GAVE IT AWAY. Jansen rolled the observation window back and said, 'How're you doing? Sleepy?'
'Man, I'm dying,' Chase whimpered. 'I'm going out. I'm like a light, I'm going out.' He put his hands on both sides of his head and squeezed: 'Why am I like this, Mr. Jansen?'
'We don't know, man.' There was a note of sympathy in Jansen's voice, and it resonated.
Chase said, still holding his face, 'If I could just, if I could just… If I could get out of here just for a couple of hours…' He sounded desperate, like a man who needed water.
'That's gonna be tough, since the Peterson thing. The director is adamant about keeping the three of you under wraps. That might not seem fair…'
Lucas liked the way he did it: in passing, as part of another idea, the raisin in the rice pudding. Chase's hands came down; his face was brighter, and his thin lips turned up in a joker's smile. 'You know about that? How he got her…'
'I've heard the usual stories,' Jansen said, noncommittally. He looked over his shoulder, as though he shouldn't be talking about it.
'So cool. He fucked her all night. He had her tied up, he had this rope around her neck like a fuckin' bridle, he fucked her all night. Six, seven, eight times. The bitch could hardly walk in the morning. He took her up there, rolled her out of the car, naked as the day. Then he says, 'You got a hundred yards and then I'm coming.''
'She ran, but there was no place to go, so she ran into the woods.' Chase was leaning on the viewing glass now, face only inches from Jansen's.
'She was screaming: but there was nobody out there. He caught her by this big tree, and she tried to run around it, keep the tree between them. Then he caught her and there was a creek and she fell into it, and that's when he got her; right on her shoulder blades. She had this long black hair and he pulled it up and zip with the razor. Then you know what he did? He did like this victory scream, he screamed…'
And Chase screamed, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his eyes glazed… and then he staggered backwards onto his bed, as though he'd been struck by lightning, his tongue out now, his body vibrating, words bubbling out, all nonsense.
Jansen disappeared from the camera view, and they could hear his voice from down the hall. Calling for help?
Sloan said, 'That's not something you see every day.'
THEY WERE BACK in Cale's office: 'They got the message somehow. In detail. There's nothing on the tape, so it wasn't oral. It must have been written and delivered with the food,' Lucas said. 'We've got a list of the people who were around when food was delivered. Seven orderlies, three therapists. There were also two doctors and two more therapists in and out of the hallway, who looked or spoke to the Big Three at one time or another.'
'Goddamnit. I can hear them building the crucifix, up at the Capitol,' Cale said. He spun his chair, looking out his window. 'And it's so hard to believe. I've known Dr. Hart for ten years, and he's a fine man. So is O'Donnell, despite all the hair and the hip bullshit. Dr. Sennet has been controversial sometimes, but he's a good therapist.'
'I'm most interested in O'Donnell, Sennet, and Halburton,' Lucas said. 'They were both nearby when the food deliveries were made, I mean, right there.'
Cale spun back to face them and shook his head. 'I can make one suggestion: we could hope that whatever went into the cell stayed there. They could have flushed it, or eaten it, but sometimes… people like this will hold on to something as an artifact. A trophy. If we lock them down and shake down the cells, we might come up with one of the notes. That might give us something.'
