“It’s even more amazing when it isn’t raining,” I told him. “Can I take your coat?”
He peeled it off and handed it over, revealing the unapologetic pearl-buttoned Western shirt underneath. As I walked away with the jacket I noticed that the only part that wasn’t wet was the part that had been under the backpack. Rather than putting the wet jacket in the closet, I draped it over the back of one of the kitchen bar stools in hopes of letting it dry.
“Coffee?” I asked.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Todd replied, “coffee would be great. Black, please.”
By the time I returned to the living room he had abandoned the view in favor of sitting in the window seat and examining the room itself. “Growing up in Benson, I never could have imagined a place like this.”
“Benson?” I asked.
“Benson, Arizona.”
“I think I’ve been there,” I said, handing him his coffee. “Isn’t Benson just down the road from Bisbee?”
He grinned. “You’ve actually heard of it? Most people never have. Benson is actually down the road if you’re in Tucson and up the road if you’re in Bisbee, and relative elevations have nothing to do with it.”
I went back to the kitchen and poured a second cup of coffee for me. First impressions are important. The fact that he looked like a hick just off the farm-or ranch, as the case may be-didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence, but we needed to know something about him. I took my coffee and returned to my recliner.
“What brought you to Washington?” I asked.
“An Ingmar Hanson Fellowship in economics,” he said. “I came here to finish my Ph.D.”
I didn’t know Ingmar Hanson from a hole in the wall, but clearly Todd Hatcher was a hell of a lot smarter than he looked.
“It’s done now,” he said. “My degree was awarded last June. I had a couple of offers to teach, but I wanted to do this first.” He glanced down at the sodden backpack.
“By ‘this’ you mean the study for Ross Connors?”
He nodded. “I had hoped to be able to use it for my dissertation. That would have broken new ground-a dissertation about something useful, for a change-but my adviser wasn’t having any of it. He told me no one’s interested in analyzing the need for geriatric prison beds, which, of course, is patently stupid, since prisons are still one of this country’s growth industries, and the prison population is aging everywhere.”
I tried to picture Todd Hatcher in his cowboy boots and Stetson sauntering across the U. Dub’s beloved Red Square. Talk about out of place! It came as no surprise to me that Todd and one or more of his professors wouldn’t have seen eye to eye.
“Presumably you are interested, though,” I said. “Mind if I ask why?”
Hatcher uncrossed his legs and gave me a speculative look. “I mind,” he said, “but since we’re going to be working together, I could just as well tell you.”
It appeared that we were starting our working relationship based on a certain level of mutual distrust. Maybe that was a good thing.
“Nobody ever expected me to amount to much,” he said. “My mother was a waitress; my father was a failed bank robber. When I was four, he went to prison for shooting a security guard in the course of an attempted bank robbery. Those are the first memories I have of my father, taking that long ride up to Florence every once in a while to visit him on weekends.
“Growing up, all my friends were fascinated with Luke Skywalker or Spider-Man, but we were too poor to go to movies. My mother took me to the library instead. While my friends were still playing with Transformers, I was working my way through Sherlock Holmes. By the time I was thirteen or so, I wanted to be Alan Greenspan when I grew up. My mother and I survived on almost no money, and Greenspan seemed to be someone who knew all about money and how to get it. While other kids were focused on high school sports, I was spending my summers working as a ranch hand and reading Ayn Rand on the side. I won a full scholarship to the University of Arizona. That’s where I got my B.A. and my master’s. I came to the U. Dub to earn my Ph.D.”
He stopped, but that clearly that wasn’t the end of the story.
“And?” I prompted.
“My father was sentenced to life in prison,” he said after a pause. “Five years ago they released him, sent him home to my mother in Benson. Claimed it was because the prison was overcrowded and they had determined he was no longer a danger to himself or others. That’s what they
“She had never divorced the man for the simple reason that she loved him. She had health insurance-major medical for herself-but not for him. There was no way for her to add him onto her policy, and he was too young for Medicare. She applied for disability Social Security benefits for him, but they kept turning her down. So she took care of him to the best of her ability. He died two years ago, and she died six months later. He would have died anyway. Sending him home like that was a death sentence for her.”
Now Todd Hatcher’s doggedly persistent interest in the aging prison population made a whole lot more sense. It was much more than just a “study” for him. It was a labor of love.
“If this country really buys the three-strikes-you’re-out mentality, then we’d better be prepared to pay the piper,” he added after a pause. “If we say someone’s going to prison for life and mean it, we’d better get ready.”
“So that’s why you’re here, then,” I said.
He nodded. “In order to know how many geriatric prison beds will be needed, I hope to create a computer model that will predict exactly how many current prisoners will end up dying there. In order to be accurate, however, I need to have some idea of how many new offenders will land in the prison system on a permanent basis as well as how many ex-cons are likely to reoffend and be returned to prison. Recidivists, of course, are far more likely to fall under three-strikes provisions and end up with lifetime sentences. That’s my expectation.”
“And everything was going along fine and dandy until you stumbled across a whole bunch of young dead ex- cons who screwed your so-called model all to hell.”
“Right,” Hatcher said. “If they’re dead, they won’t reoffend, and they won’t need geriatric prison care, either. The problem is, in the normal course of events some of them will be dead long before they grow old in prison, but they shouldn’t be dead yet. It struck me that this whole cluster of deaths was some kind of an anomaly. When I brought the situation to Ross’s attention he asked me to look into it in more detail. And here I am.”
I recalled Ross Connors’s somewhat cynical remark about Hatcher probably having a book deal waiting in the wings. From what I could see, the man’s motivation was much less self-serving than that-and a lot more understandable.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked.
“Mel told me I should work on the spreadsheet here. That way, I can consult with one or the other of you as I go along. If we’re all going over the files and picking out what strikes each of us as important, we’ll probably come up with better data. Once we have that, we’ll run a paradox analysis and see if anything pops.”
For all the sense it made to me, that last sentence could just as well have been uttered in Russian. Or Chinese.
“So what do you need from me?” I asked.
He opened the backpack and took out a slim laptop. His boots may have been on their last legs, as it were, but his computer was absolutely state-of-the-art.
“A place to spread out and work,” he said.
I pointed toward the granite counter of the breakfast bar. “Will that do?” I asked.
He nodded. “Sure,” he said. “What about logging on?”
There I had him. “We’ve got a WiFi network complete with a broadband connection.”
“Cool,” he said.
That remark came with no need of translation. I was gratified that our telecommunications system measured up to his expectations. And I was also glad that, despite the considerable difference in our ages, cool was still cool.
Somehow I found that reassuring.
