Freak (25 page)

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Koscheck said under her breath.

And just like that, they had their confession. Torrance smiled and punched a few numbers into his cell phone. Turning away, he spoke in a low voice. Jerry knew that he was arranging for a team to go dig Jeremiah Jonas Blake Sr. out of the concrete garage floor.

“Tell us what happened with JJ,” Jerry said.

Blake didn’t hesitate. “He came home early, found weed in my room.” His eyes widened. “Oh shit, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Torrance disconnected his call. “I don’t think it matters, son. You’ve already confessed to murdering four women and your father. We’re not going to get too excited about a little marijuana.”

“Oh. Right.”

“So he laid into you because of the dope?”

“Yeah. He was also drunk, so he was extra pissed. Usually, when it comes to weed, he just yells how that stuff will fuck with my head, smacks me around some, and that’s about it. But this time, he threw a beer bottle at me. I ducked, and it hit the wall and broke and a piece of the glass cut my face.” Blake moved his shaggy hair away from his jawline and showed them. Indeed, there was a small scar on his cheekbone. “I was scared and mad. I wasn’t thinking. I went at him with the beer bottle and slashed at him. I cut his face. He shoved me against the wall and shook me, banged my head a buncha times. My dad’s a big guy, you know?”

“Not a fair fight,” Torrance said, the sympathy in his voice sounding sincere.

“I shoved the beer bottle into his neck.” Blake’s face had a faraway look as he remembered, his voice growing distant. “So much blood came out, it was so crazy. I thought it would spurt, you know? Like in the movies? But it didn’t. It sort of gushed out, warm. His face—you shoulda seen his face. He was like, all surprised, and his eyes were all big and round. He clapped a hand to his neck but the blood just kept gushing between his fingers. Then he collapsed to the floor. Then he died.” The kid blinked. “The end.”

“And you buried him in the garage.”

Blake nodded, looking distressed. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“How long has he been in the garage, Jeremiah?” Torrance asked.

“Two weeks and two days.”

Jerry shuddered.

“Will I get to go to the funeral?” Blake looked at them, his face crumpling. “He’s my dad. I loved him . . .”

The kid broke down then, and the tears were painful. His attorney, not seeming to know what else to do, awkwardly patted her client’s back.

“We’ll plead out.” The defeat was written all over Shannon Koscheck’s face.

Torrance finished off the curly fries and nodded. “Damn right you will.”

Jerry allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Finally, it was over.

He left the room, reaching for his phone. There was only one person he wanted to talk to.

JEREMIAH BLAKE HAD
confessed to the murders, and with Jack the Zipper off the streets and behind bars, Abby’s transfer was executed the next day, thanks to Bob Borden’s savvy legal maneuvering.

Abby was a little bit sorry Mark Cavanaugh wasn’t here to see this momentous occasion, but the corrections officer had been fired a couple of days ago. Sergeant Briscoe, the old hag, had turned him in for drinking on the job. Briscoe was a petty, bitter woman, yes, but how many times had Abby warned Mark to be careful? She hadn’t heard from him since the firing, and as of today, had no way of contacting him. She’d had to leave her phone with her cellmate, and while getting a phone at the new prison would be her first priority, it would probably take a few days.

The prison doors opened. The afternoon air was cool and refreshing, and even though she’d been outside at some point every day since she’d been incarcerated, the air somehow felt different now that she was no longer behind the fence. She’d only been at Rosedale for thirteen months, not long comparatively speaking, but it had felt like thirteen years. She stopped walking to take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of evergreens and sunshine. The corrections officer escorting her tugged on her arm.

Smiling, Abby said, “One sec.”

The CO, an older man by the name of Bush, gripped her arm tighter. “Come on, Maddox, it’s not like you’re being released. You’re just going from one prison to another. Let’s go.”

The gate in front of her buzzed open and Bush led her toward the bus waiting for her. It looked like a school bus, only gray instead of yellow, and it had the words
WASHINGTON DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
stenciled in large letters across the side beneath the tinted windows. Abby stepped up into the bus and gave the driver a warm smile. From inside his cage he nodded back.

She sat in the first row right behind him, as the only passenger, and caught her reflection in the rearview mirror. They’d put her in bright orange scrubs this time, protocol when moving from one prison to another. Bush removed her cuffs and took a seat behind her.

Creekside Corrections was technically a minimum security prison, but from what Abby had heard, it wasn’t even really a prison in the traditional sense. She’d overheard a couple of inmates talking about it at chow the other day. She suspected they’d wanted her to.

“Visiting hours are every day from ten to eight p.m., and visitors can hang out with you in the rec room,” the inmate named Delilah had said to her friend. With a name like Delilah, you would have thought she’d be pretty. She was not. “And you can do that new Be Smart program if you’re good, get out of the prison, talk to kids about staying straight. It’s like going to fucking summer camp.”

“Well, shit,” her friend Trix had said. They had both turned and eyeballed Abby, who had continued to eat her lunch at the next table as if she weren’t listening. “What do I gotta do to get moved in there?”

“Get famous.” Delilah’s voice was louder than it needed to be. “Or fuck a guard. Take your pick.” The two women had cackled with laughter.

Yes, Abby supposed now, looking out the window at the long stretch of wild grass racing along beside her, everybody had known about her relationship with Mark. Not that it mattered anymore. He’d provided a valuable service to her by getting her that smartphone, which she’d wiped clean of all messages and emails before leaving it with Celia.

Abby sighed. There’d be no time to relax once she got to Creekside. She needed to get friendly with a CO at the new prison immediately if she was to procure a new phone. It wouldn’t be hard, but it would definitely take some work.

Stay focused
, she reminded herself as she looked down at the cars passing by below. She saw faces looking up at the bus curiously, but they couldn’t see her through the dark glass.
Stay focused and keep your eyes on the finish line
.

So far, the plan was working.

She leaned her head against the window, watching the world go by, looking at the sky and the trees, allowing herself to daydream a little. The hum of the bus was soothing.

“We’re here,” Bush said from behind her as they pulled up to Creekside’s gate. Abby sat up in surprise. It felt like five minutes had passed. “Don’t move until the bus stops. And don’t move while I cuff you. I’d hate to bruise you on your first day in your new home.”

Abby held her wrists out, looking thoughtfully at the building through the bus windows. Home sweet home. If it weren’t for the modest-sized sign across the brick wall that said
CREEKSIDE CORRECTIONS CENTER FOR WOMEN
, she might have mistaken this building for a library, or something equally benign. There was even a landscaped courtyard at the front with wooden
benches, flowers, and trees. A high fence surrounded the back of the property, but that was really the only evidence that this place was a prison.

She was off the bus a moment later and walking toward the gate, which buzzed open immediately. A few steps down a concrete path was another heavy metal door, where they buzzed her into the building.

Intake—also known as the “dirty room” because the inmates hadn’t been searched yet—would take maybe ten minutes. Two guards were waiting for Abby in the dirty room, a petite older woman with a neat graying bob and a clipboard, and a younger female with a crew cut who wore latex gloves.

“I’m Sergeant Roland,” the older one said. “This is Officer Pasco.”

“Abigail Maddox,” Abby said, and they all smiled.

Polite, calm, and respectful all around. They always were at Intake, because they didn’t want you to freak out, as so many did on their first day. It took about a minute to get inked for fingerprints and cheek swabbed for DNA, and then Pasco said, “Open your mouth, please.”

The CO’s gloved fingers felt around inside Abby’s cheek pockets and underneath her tongue, searching for any contraband. “Step into the bathroom, please, and undress.”

Abby stepped into a tiny tiled room with no door, just a toilet against one wall and a shower stall with a thin curtain against the other, and quickly stripped. Lifting her arms up over her head, she turned toward the corrections officer, completely naked.

Pasco’s glance lingered a split second longer than necessary on Abby’s naked breasts, enough for Abby to catch it. She allowed Pasco to see her small smile, letting the woman know she wasn’t offended. Hiding a smile of her own, the young CO
gently probed Abby’s armpits, then folded back Abby’s ears. She ran her hands lightly through Abby’s hair.

“Lift your breasts, please.”

Abby placed a hand under each breast and complied.

“Wiggle your toes and lift your heels. Good. Now turn around and bend over, please. Cough twice, then spread your cheeks.”

Again, Abby did as she was instructed.

“Ready for scars, birthmarks, and tattoos?” Officer Pasco directed the question to Sergeant Roland once the physical search was completed.

The older CO nodded and clicked her pen. “Ready when you are.”

All of Abby’s scars were noted on the clipboard. There weren’t many. A small one on her shoulder from where she’d once burned herself with a curling iron. A puckered scar on her arm from where her foster brother had burned her with a lit cigarette when she was sixteen. She’d met Ethan shortly after that incident, and he’d taken a bat to the foster brother’s head when she told him what had happened.

Ethan
. She felt a dull ache in her chest whenever she was reminded of him. Would she ever be able to think of him and not feel pain?

Abby only had one tattoo, and it was a purple butterfly at the base of her neck. In the body of the butterfly were the initials E.W. Lifting her hair, she waited patiently as Pasco snapped a photo.

“All right,” Officer Pasco said. “Take a shower. Please wear the shower shoes and shampoo your hair.”

Ten minutes later Abby was dressed in her prison issues—blue this time, much better than Rosedale’s gray—and was led down the hall. Creekside seemed brighter than Rosedale, and a fellow inmate actually smiled at her as she passed.

A moment later Abby was seated in front of a round, soft-spoken black woman named Alicia Elkes, who was the superintendent of the prison. This was technically Abby’s orientation. She listened politely as the superintendent gave a speech she had obviously given a hundred times before.

“We have just over two hundred offenders here, and we’re nearly at capacity. That should give you some idea of how small this place is compared to the facility you just came from.” Elkes’s voice was soothing, almost musical. Abby thought of it as the “It’s the first day of your sentence here and I don’t want you to lose it” voice.

“Seems quite intimate,” Abby said.

The superintendent smiled, her cocoa eyes searching Abby’s face closely. “Not much gets by me. I have personally met and spoken to every single offender in my facility, several times, and I expect that over the next eight years of your stay here, you and I will get to know each other quite well.”

“It won’t be eight years.” Abby returned the smile. “I plan to be on my best behavior. I want to be out in the real world in three.”

“Good to hear.” Elkes consulted the paperwork in front of her. “You have been assigned a cellmate, whom you’ll meet shortly. We don’t have many single cells here, but you might be able to earn one, in time, with good behavior. Another change you’ll find is that the cells are dry. Your showers, toilets, and sinks will be down the hall from your cell.”

Abby nodded.

“Everybody who comes here starts working in the kitchen,” Elkes continued, “so that’s where you’ll be until we decide whether you might benefit from a different kind of job.” The superintendent glanced down at Abby’s file again. “I see you have a bachelor’s degree. In what, may I ask?”

“Applied mathematics.”

“And you were pursuing graduate studies?”

“Yes. In combinatorics and optimization. I’m almost finished, just three courses shy.”

Elkes smiled and leaned back in her chair. “I can’t say I even know what that is, but it certainly sounds impressive. What did you plan to do with your degree?”

“Teach.” It was the standard answer Abby gave everybody who asked. But the truth was, she had never really thought about it. She’d stayed in school to stay close to Ethan.

“Perhaps you could finish your master’s in here. And we have a serious need for tutors, especially in the math area. I see you worked as a tutor at Rosedale. Your experience would be most welcome.”

Inwardly, Abby shuddered. Tutoring inmates for their high school equivalencies had been torture, and she had no intention of doing that again here. “I definitely enjoy teaching.”

“I have to admit, Miss Maddox, that I initially was not very happy when they told me you were transferring here.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Elkes’s gaze stayed on Abby’s face. “Allow me to share my concerns. You’re not here because of your stellar behavior at a higher-security facility, as most transferred offenders are, nor are you here because you were convicted of a nonviolent crime. On the contrary, you’re here because you were convicted of a
very
violent crime, but you managed to cut a deal with the prosecuting attorney in exchange for helping in the arrest of a serial killer. I have to tell you, it all leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.”