Life Sentences (21 page)

Daisy had been searching for
over an hour now for the girl with the bronze skin and the golden eyes, poking
into hair salons, skateboard shops and art galleries. Too many tourists
were out on the promenade tonight, getting drunk and buying things. Parking
was a nightmare. The palm fronds quivered in the sultry heat as she gritted
her teeth with determination and approached complete strangers in
her quest to find the girl who had Anna's earrings. She walked past a group
of teenagers hanging around outside an ice cream parlor and said,
"Do you know Anna Hubbard? Have you seen this woman?"

She could smell incense in the
air. Nobody had any idea who Anna was from her picture, and Daisy was beginning
to suspect that there would not be a feel-good ending to this story. She
pointed out the earrings in the picture. "What about these?"
she said. "Have you seen a girl wearing these earrings? She's in her
teens, she's got these gold-colored eyes…"

One of the boys flashed his bad teeth.
"You mean Gillian?"

"Who?" Daisy said.

"Long hair? Rolls her own cigarettes?"

"That's the one."

His face had a remarkably timeless,
weathered look. "I know where you can find her."

Down by the bike path, several
yards away from the dollar-a-slice pizza shop, Daisy found a drum circle
in the sand. A dozen or so shabbily dressed beach bums sat around drinking
and getting stoned.

Too tired to stand another moment,
she flopped down in the sand and watched the drummers for a while. The sky
blazed with pink and orange streaks. The air throbbed with drumbeats. Two
boys played
Hackey
Sack, kicking a small ball around.
A teenage girl was taking self-portraits with her camera phone. Her hair
was tucked under a scarf, and she wore granny glasses and a peace T-shirt,
but Daisy recognized her just the same. "Gillian?" she said.

The girl shot up and ran away.

Daisy chased her down the boardwalk
and onto the beach. "Gillian, wait!"

Down by the water, the sound of
the surf was like the drum circle, booming and receding. The setting sun
cast a rosy glow over everything, and you could see the pink mountains
in the hazy distance. Daisy bounded after her. "Gillian!"

The girl tripped and fell in the
sand, and Daisy caught up with her, grabbed her by the hands and hoisted
her to her feet. "Where's my sister? Where's Anna Hubbard? Do you
know?"

She just stood there, looking
hungry and scared.

"Do you know Roy Gaines?"

The girl let out a small cry and lobbed
a fist at Daisy's sternum. Daisy grabbed her thrashing fist and twisted
her arm around, and they landed clumsily in the sand, tangled together
and exhausted. Breathing hard. Too tired to run anymore.

Gillian curled herself up in a fetal
position and just lay there, scooping handfuls of sand and letting them
spill through her fingers.

"I want to find my sister,"
Daisy told her softly. "That's all. She needs my help."

Gillian stopped scooping sand.

"Will you help me?" Daisy
pleaded.

And she gave the smallest of nods.

Jack had everything he needed.
It was a warm night, around eight o'clock by the time he pulled into the
parking garage of the psychiatric prison. There were plenty of spaces
to choose from, since most of me staff had gone home. He reached for his
briefcase and got out, then paused for a moment with his keys in his hand.
He was having second thoughts. Maybe he should turn around and go home.
After all, he could lose his job for what he was about to do.
Think, Jack. Is this what you really want?
He slammed the door and locked his car, then headed for the elevator,
his footsteps echoing throughout me underground garage.

Inside the main building, he approached
the reception, desk. "I'm here to see Roy Gaines," he said.

Corrections Officer Bob Barrows
was a Joe Lunch Bucket kind of guy, an ex-football tackle with beefy layers
of muscle who belonged to that brotherhood of wayward guards who sometimes
beat their prisoners and often fired their weapons into the recreation
yard whenever a fight broke out. Jack's heart rate soared as he produced
his badge.

Officer Barrows scanned the appointment
book and checked Jack's name off a list. "Surrender your weapon,"
he said.

Jack gave up his gun and signed
the waiver. "Put your briefcase on the counter." The officer
had a broad, impassive face and a holstered steel-blue 9mm Beretta.
An idiotic song was playing on the radio on his desk, some boy-band
dreck
. On the wall behind him was a row of plaques commemorating
the eight prison guards who'd died during a riot in the 1960s. Twitching
with adrenaline, Jack placed his briefcase on the marble countertop.

Officer Barrows spun it around and
opened it, his eyes ticking back and forth as he rummaged through the storage
pockets. After a moment, he lowered his chin and studied Jack over his
bifocals.

The bile-green walls began to ululate.
Not a word was spoken between them, not a syllable exchanged. Jack could
feel the sweat building on his brow as he slouched beneath the weight
of the enormous risk he was taking. There were things inside his briefcase
that any other guard would have confiscated immediately.

"You look like your dog just
died," Barrows said with a conspiratorial smile.

Jack didn't know how to respond to
this.

"Relax." The big guard
closed the briefcase and handed it back to him. He was giving Jack a
pass, just like Jack had given Harold
Bregman
a
pass. Congratulations, you 're my bitch. He'd just joined the brotherhood
of corrupt prison guards.

Never in his life had Jack considered
crossing that line before. Now he took a deep breath and blew the hair
out of his eyes, feeling no remorse. No shame. He was surprised how little
emotion he felt. After all, why shouldn't Roy Gaines or Roy
Hildreth
or whoever the hell he was… why shouldn't he
suffer the way his victims had suffered? Why shouldn't justice be served
for once?

"Step over to the door,"
Officer Barrows said, and Jack did as he was told. But before buzzing
him in, the guard paused and said, "Say hello from me while you're at
it."

Jack turned. "Excuse
me?"

"The guy's an eight-cylinder
psycho. That son of a bitch told me I've got six months to live. Says my
pump's
gonna
give out." He spit the next word.
"Cock-sucker."

Jack made a vague gesture of
sympathy.

"So go on. Do your worst. You
have my blessing."

The big steel blast doors opened
with a mechanical hiss, and, gripping his briefcase by its leather handle,
Jack walked inside, where a tired-looking armed guard escorted him
down the wide corridor toward the attorney conference room.

The room had no monitoring devices.
You could literally get away with murder in here. There was nothing but
a bolted-down table, two chairs, a wrought-iron
grafe
on the floor and an overhead fluorescent light strip. Jack could see the
full moon through the barred, wire-reinforced windows. He set his briefcase
down on the table and waited for his heart rate to slow to normal. The
last thing he needed was to show Gaines a crack in the armor.

After an interminable couple
of minutes, the door
thunked
open and two officers
carrying an assortment of Berettas, pepper spray, blackjacks and stun
guns on their utility belts escorted the prisoner inside. Handcuffed
to a waist chain and manacled with leg irons, Roy took shuffling steps across
the floor.

Jack swallowed back his revulsion
as he held Roy's eye. It was quiet as feathers in here. The prisoner's
waxy complexion suited his new environment. The prison was designed
to prohibit daylight, and patients lived in a constant netherworld of
solar neglect. The guards plopped Roy down in his seat, then quickly retreated.
Something was wrong; they feared him. Jack didn't like that.

Roy snorted derisively.
"What're they so scared of?"

Jack stood up too quickly, his head
going light, then waited for his equilibrium to return. "Notice
where we are, Roy," he said quietly. "There are no monitoring
devices in this room. No closed-circuit TVs. No guards. It's just you
and me, pal."

Roy watched him closely as he spoke,
observing his face and lips with narrowed eyes. He would react critically,
Jack was sure, to any hesitation on his part.

"My job calls for an unusual
amount of restraint," he went on, "but I draw the line when it
comes to the victim's family. I've given you plenty of chances, my friend,
and what have I gotten for my troubles? More bullshit. More games. I
won't allow it."

Roy's shoulders lifted as he took
a shallow breath.

"You really had me fooled,
Roy. I honestly believed you wanted to clear your conscience and end
this family's suffering. But whenever I think you're about to cooperate
with us, you go ahead and prove to me how wrong I am." He fed off the
prisoner's discomfort as he opened his briefcase and produced a roll
of duct tape. "So. Here we are. Now it's my turn to fuck with your head."

Roy stirred. 'Touch me, and I'll
sue your ass."

"Ask yourself: Do I look like
I give a shit?" In one swift move, Jack unwound a generous length
of tape-it made a sticky sound coming off the roll-then looped it around
the prisoner's chest, binding his upper torso to the chair. He slapped
another piece of tape over Roy's mouth and pressed it shut. "Officer
Barrows says hello, by the way."

Roy bucked in his chair, straining
at his binds. He made strangled guttural sounds from behind the duct tape,
but nothing happened. No guards came running. No lights flashed. No
alarm bells rang.

It gave Jack a nasty thrill. He removed
the file folders from his briefcase-quite a healthy stack-and slapped
them down on the table. "Luckily for me," he said, "I know people
who know people. People who owe me favors. People who don't necessarily
follow life's little rules."

Breathing hard through his nose,
Roy glanced at the stack of paperwork.

"You know, it's curious,"
Jack said, wiping the slippery sweat off the back of his neck. "You
respond-to physical threats the way most ex-cons do. Only you aren't an
ex-con, are you, Roy? Your record is clean."

Roy gave him a blank, unfriendly
stare.

"You're innocent.
Right?"

He didn't react, except for the
slightest uptick of an eyebrow.

"Well? Are you or aren't
you?" He stared at Jack, sweat beading visibly on his forehead. It
was the first time Jack had seen him sweat, and he considered that to be
a small triumph.

"Maybe this'll help." He
took a cheap plastic hand mirror out of his briefcase, the kind you'd
find in any drugstore, and held it in front of Roy's face. "Take a good
look."

He averted his gaze.

"Look at yourself, Roy. Is
this the face of an innocent man? Does this sweaty, pitted, pathetic-looking
creature seem innocent to you? Does he?" He grabbed the prisoner
by his hair and held the mirror close. "You don't like looking at yourself,
do you? Is that why you removed the medicine chest mirror and the
full-length mirror from your closet door?
Whatsamatter
,
Roy? Your conscience bothering you? I'm surprised you even have a
conscience."

The prisoner swung his head from
side to side, but Jack held him fast by the roots of his hair and forced
him to look at his reflection.

"Is that why you took all your
mirrors down? Because you hate peering into those guilty eyes of yours?
Or is it simple vanity? It's probably vanity."

The prisoner let out a muffled
groan.

"I hate to ruin your strategy,
my friend. But I know who killed those people. And it wasn't Anna Hubbard.
Not even close. So what's really going on here, boys and girls? Anybody?
Oh, wait. I get it. You're 'psychotic'"

He made quote signs with his fingers.
"You have a 'mental illness.' It's called 'antisocial personality
disorder.'"

Roy inhaled deeply through his
nose and stared at Jack, who put the mirror down and picked up a file.

"You left quite a trail of
bread crumbs behind you, Mr.
Hildreth
. I have here
copies of your juvenile records and psychiatric evaluations going
back thirty years."

The prisoner's face looked like
it was about to hatch. He bucked and jerked in his seat, but the duct tape
held him fast to the bolted-down chair. Behind the iron bars, the room's
windows were painted shut.

"You were born thirty-four
years ago to Benny
Hildreth
and Linda
Pratt."

Roy stopped fighting and closed
his eyes, his muscular body sagging against the chair.

"Born in Arizona, an only
child," Jack went on. "Your mother died when you were eight, and
over the course of the next three years, you ran away from home a total of
twenty times. At thirteen, you started dipping into your father's prescription
drugs."

Roy tried to form words through
the tape. He rolled his eyes and made poignant gagging sounds, which
Jack ignored.

"You dropped out of high school
your sophomore year, then bounced in and out of juvenile hall until
you were nineteen, when…"

Roy's body strained against the tape.

"You got a girl pregnant. She
was seventeen and. Catholic. She didn't believe in abortion, so she
went ahead and had the baby, which later died. A year later, you did time
for check forgery. Two years after that, you were busted for a parole violation.
At twenty-three, you did a stint in a mental institution after slashing
your wrists with the sharpened edges of your driver's license."

Roy emitted a miserable groan.

"At the hospital, you ate your
own fingernails, the claimed you'd been poisoned." Jack looked up.
"Should I go on? Yes? No? Maybe?"

The prisoner shook his head no.

"Want me to stop?"

Roy nodded, his eyes wet with defeat.

Jack put the folder down.
"Okay. So tell me. Where did you bury her?"

Roy gave a loud grunt.

"Are you going to tell me where
she is? For real this time?"

He snarled behind the tape.

"Let's put a fucking end to
this charade."

Roy tried to break free again.

"No? You're not going to cooperate?"

His gaze grew defiant.

"Fine with me." Jack picked
up the file and continued. "Your mom was a hypochondriac. She
used to lie around in bed all day long, and the only way you could ever get
close to her was by reading her medical textbooks out loud to her. You
learned about diseases that way. The two of you would discuss her
symptoms and diagnose her imaginary ailments, but in the end, she failed
to diagnose the one thing that ultimately killed her-overmedication."

Roy stared at Jack, seething with
hostility.

"Your father was a bone trader,"
he went on, "which means he sold and traded the remains of dead people
for a living. Fingers, skulls, blood samples, eyeballs… eyeballs? What
a great guy your dad must've been.

Fucking Father of the Year. Says
here there's a huge underground market for this sort of crap." Disgusted,
Jack turned the page. "Your father sold photographs of dead celebrities
and videotapes of necrophilia. Lovely. He sold slides of Marilyn Monroe's
blood and slices of President Reagan's polyps. He retailed in snips of
hair, bone fragments, pieces of brain matter, the list goes on. Gee
whiz. Sounds like you had a real Brady Bunch upbringing."

The prisoner's head sagged. He
refused to look up.

Jack noticed this. He relished
this. He selected a psychiatric file from the stack on the table.
"At the hospital, when you tried to slit your wrists… why'd you want
to die, Roy? Was it your bone-trader father? Your miserable past?
What?"

Roy hissed through his nostrils
like a cornered animal. He coiled like a snake, then raised himself up
as far as he could in his seat, leg muscles quivering, and shook his head
in an exaggerated way, all the tendons in his neck popping.