next go-round. He did a year, maybe two, as a zookeeper before finally coming over to KOP.
I walked through the front gate. I stayed inside the yellow lines painted on the asphalt as I stepped across the no-man's land between the outer walls and the facility itself. Just outside the yellow lines, I could see the evenly spaced laser heads embedded in the ground, ready to fry anything bigger than a fly that crossed their path. There were plenty of rotting lizard parts littering the trail, some of them still smoking. I strode through the entrance. A zookeeper sat at the desk. “What you want?” he asked.
“I'm here for visitation. Adela Juarez.”
The guard gestured at the scanner. I stepped through as another guard checked his monitor and saw that I was unarmed. He made me wait a minute while the system looked up my DNA. My identity established, he signaled me through. I walked through a series of gates, finally entering the prison proper.
When I reached the warden's office, nobody bothered to greet me. I knocked and entered, immediately catching an earful from the block super about how I didn't have the authority to enter that office. The food stains on the front of his shirt and the piece of what could be fish stuck in his beard told me he was more upset about me interrupting his early lunch than anything else. I went back into the hall and waited for a good five minutes before he came out with a wiped face and a bulging stomach that exerted maximum button stress. He called to one of the zookeepers and assigned him the job of being my personal escort.
The guard opened the gate and led me down a long corridor, past the infirmary and the library. The walls were alive with mossy growth. I couldn't see the floor through the ferns. As we waded through the overgrowth, the floor popped with activity, insects and lizards both going airborne. I brushed a beetle from my shoulder. I felt something in my hair that I swiped away with a swat.
I heard somebody screaming. His protestations echoed through the block for a few seconds before they were drowned out by cheers. Probably rape. Maybe guard-on-inmate, maybe inmate-on-inmate. No way to tell.
We took a set of steps down a level. The stairs had been recently torched to keep them fern free. Each step we took was accompanied by a poof of ash that quickly turned my pant legs black. A right turn took us onto death row, though it wasn't really a row. It was more of a square with evenly spaced cages arranged into rows like desks in a classroom. Each cage was a simple cubical structure, the entire cage composed of latticed rebar. My escort snatched up a wooden stool and zigzagged me through the cages, the soon-to-be-dead peeking out through the openings. My escort set the stool next to a cage near the center then moved out of earshot to allow some privacy.
I took a seat on the stool, lifting my feet up onto the rungs to keep them off the infested floor. I looked through the food hole at the face of young Adela Juarez sitting on her cot. Her eyes looked like they'd aged years since her interrogation. She passed a pot through the hole. I took it from her hands and knew not to check inside. I held the almost full piss pot up for the guard who came and took it off my hands.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name's Juno Mozambe.”
“You a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Are you here to take pictures?”
“No. I don't work for the press.”
“I know that. My father ran the vid station for the Libre. I'd know you if you were a reporter.”
“Then why did you ask if I wanted to take pictures?”
She shrugged.
I honed in on her eyes, looking for that same dark twinkle I saw in her interrogation, that little something that said there was a whole lot more to her than what was visible on the surface. I saw sadness, and I saw fear, but I couldn't find that same spark that I knew so well from looking into my wife's eyes. A couple months in this cage must've driven it out of her. Time I got this over with. “You killed your parents.”
“You gonna tell me who you are?”
“A friend sent me.”
“What friend? Did Raj send you?”
From the case file, I remembered that Raj Gupta had been tagged as the accused's boyfriend. She'd claimed she was with him all night the night her parents died. Problem was the kid didn't back her up. He admitted that she was at his house earlier that night, and that they had sex in his bed, twice. But then he went on to say that she left a little after midnight, which gave her plenty of time to get home since her parents weren't attacked until 1:52 A.M. It was an analysis of the maggots retrieved from the Juarezes' wounds that nailed down the time of attack so accurately. The maggots had just reached fifth generation and from there, it was simple math: one hour and twenty-three minutes per generation, plus a mere four minutes for initial infestation. Lagartan flies act quick.
I could imagine the look on Adela's face when she'd found out her boyfriend didn't alibi her. The little vix thought she had the kid pussy-whipped. She thought he'd do anything she said to keep getting between her legs. She must've thought she was the hottest lay on the planet. Turned out her boyfriend was thinking, “Not so much.”
“You killed your parents,” I said as I brushed some flying roach from my shoulder. “I saw what you did to them.”
“You a cop?”
“You must've really hated them, the way you sliced them up.”
“I'm not saying another word until you tell me who you are.” She made a show of clamming up tight by crossing her arms across her chest and squeezing her lips together.
This might take a while. All I wanted was a simple admission so I could go back and tell Maggie that Ian arrested the right person. Then I could collect my fee. I needed that money.
We stared at each other for a few, and then she started looking around, like there were a lot more interesting things to look at than me. I needed a strategy. I could hint around about her father and see if she'd just come out with it. My father raped me. That was all I needed to hear. She hadn't admitted it to Ian, but that was before she'd been sentenced to death. She'd had some time to think about it since then. I'd tried the same hinting around with Niki. There were times over the years, especially during her down periods, where I thought she'd be better off if she admitted what her father did to her. I'd drop little hints, give her little openings to bring it up. I thought it might make a difference if she could unbury the secret. It never worked. She locked that history down so long ago that I wasn't even sure she still had a key.
And now Niki was in that hospital, paralyzed, breathing through a fucking tube…
All the sudden, I found myself going at Adela full bore. “How'd it feel to slice up your own mother?” I had no control. The words shot out like daggers. “I wish I could've seen it. You swingin' that whip around, lashin' out at her. Can you imagine what it was like for her? I bet you can. One minute she's sleepin' and the next she's got this whip comin' at her. She puts up her hands to protect herself and a second later her hands are gone, whipped right the fuck off.”
Her eyes began to water. She fought to keep her trembling lips pressed together.
I got on a roll, the venom spraying from my mouth. “And your father, I bet you were going for his crotch, weren't you? You wanted to whip his cock off so he couldn't hurt you anymore. But he rolled over, didn't he? That must've made you sooo angry…”
“Who are you?” It came out as a whisper.
I had my face pressed up against the bars. “Oh, but you taught him, didn't you? He'll never touch you again, will he?”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Tears were streaming now.
“He used to come in the middle of the night, right? He'd wait until your mother fell asleep before he came to visit his little princess. He'd tell you that there was a special way for a daughter to show how much she loved her father. He'd press himself up against you, wouldn't he? I bet his cheek felt scratchy when it rubbed against yours.”
“Stop it,” she said as she swiped away the tears.
“Why won't you admit it? People think you're a spoiled little brat. They think you killed your parents because they wouldn't let you see your boyfriend. They think you're a petty little bitch that never got spanked. Is that how you want people to remember you after they gas you?”
She was crying full out now. She stuttered out a “No.”
