PROLOGUE
A silvery fog rolled in across the prison compound, thick and damp and filled with echoes from the nearby swamps and bayous. The fog unfurled over the thirsty sun-wilted grass; it wrapped itself around the chain-link fences and concertina wire surrounding the prison; it covered the buildings in thick -- yet insubstantial -- blankets, forming blockish gray lumps on the landscape, like heavy square clouds set against the earth.
The fog set the pace of that summer morning at the Oakdale Federal Correctional Institution in Central Louisiana. Inmates were released from the housing units in small, controlled groups to the chow hall between 6:15 a.m. and 7:05 a.m.; then, after breakfast, everything -- rec yard, work call, library, hospital -- remained shut down. Everything waited for the fog to lift.
And the fog took its time.
Everyone waited; the inmates, the guards, and, most patiently of all, the fog itself.
When the fog eventually lifted -- when it unwrapped and faded and sheared itself away from the prison compound -- the huge, emotionless, Infernal Machine comprised of men and women in blue uniforms conducted what is known as a fog count.
Counting inmates is routine. It is one of the primary functions of the Infernal Machine; random census counts to make sure inmates are where they’re supposed to be during the day; the 4 p.m. stand-up count, to ensure that everyone has returned from work assignments; the 9 p.m. in-the-cell count; and counts throughout the night to make certain that no one is out-of-bounds after lights out.
And then, of course, there is the fog count.
On the morning in question -- a particularly humid Memorial Day -- the fog didn’t begin to dissipate until approximately 8:15 a.m.. A stand-up fog count was conducted throughout the prison housing units starting at 8:30 a.m..
The Acadia housing unit, which ordinarily housed 200 men at full capacity (although it was designed to house only 70 men), had a count of 198. In spite of the meticulous and ingenious counting methods employed by the Infernal Machine, the count was always two men short each of the three times it was repeated.
The officers eventually took the extraordinary measure of conducting an actual rack book count -- determining not only how many inmates were present, but also the names of the inmates. As a rule, members of the prison staff did their best to avoid calling inmates by name; they avoided any activity which reminded them that prisoners were actual human beings.
The rack book count revealed the absence of Ronaldo “Blade” Gutierrez, and Miguelito “Ice” de la Rosa, two low-level drug dealers. Blade was from West Texas, and Ice was from New Mexico. They were both members of the same gang (although officially there were no gang members at Oakdale).
At 10:34 a.m., an intensive prison-wide manhunt was initiated.
The manhunt stalled at 11:02 a.m., when the body of an unidentified Hispanic man was discovered tangled in the concertina wire at the top of the northern-most rec yard fence, blood-soaked and glistening with beads of moisture left behind by the still-retreating fog. Prison officials were unable to identify the body because the head and hands had been sheared off by the razor edges of concertina wire. Strangely, the head and hands were nowhere to be found.
One inmate was dead, another was missing, and the vanishing fog was the only witness.
CHAPTER ONE
Memorial Day, 7:32 a.m.
Joshua Cardiff gazed down at the fleshy objects in the road. He balanced his idling motorcycle with one leg, staring hard at the human head and hands lying on the asphalt. After a long minute he sighed heavily, killed the engine, popped the kickstand, and stepped off his bike.
He took off his helmet, hung it from one of the handlebars, then squatted down for a better look. The head looked to be that of an Hispanic man in his thirties. The left cheek lay against the black, cracked pavement, and the right half of the face, the part that Joshua could see, seemed to be grinning.
“Just who are you, hombre?” Joshua whispered, not really expecting an answer. He brushed hair away from the decapitated man’s forehead with his leather-gloved hand, as if that would help him identify the corpse. Joshua’s eyes moved from the body parts in the road to the high fence set back a few yards from the road. A sign on the fence warned him to keep his distance from this dangerous federal facility. Above the sign, through the clearing fog, he saw the silhouette of a body tangled in the concertina wire at the top of the fence.
Joshua stood, and looked up and down the road. “Still quiet this time of mornin’, hombre,” he said quietly. “By 8 o’clock the traffic on this road will be pretty lively, though.” He went back to his bike, and opened the hard saddle bag at the back. He removed his insulated lunch bag, opened it, removed the two tuna sandwiches and Doritos from inside, and placed them back in the saddle bag. He then walked over to the body parts in the road, picked up the hands, and placed them inside the lunch bag. He looked at the head in the road, then shook his own head, knowing it wouldn’t fit in the bag. He closed the lunch bag, took it back to the bike, and placed it back in the saddle bag. He then grabbed his helmet, stepped back to the severed head, bent over, scooped it up deftly with one hand, and firmly maneuvered the head into the helmet. He returned to the bike, went back into the saddle bag for the helmet’s visor, then snapped it on the helmet, obscuring the dead man’s face with the dark opaque plastic. He strapped the helmet to the back of the seat with some bungee cords, mounted the motorcycle, kicked the engine to life, and motored full-throttle down the road.
Joshua traveled eastward at exactly 55 miles per hour, enjoying the wind blowing through his helmet-free hair. He realized he was violating state and municipal laws by riding without a helmet, but he knew there was very little chance of him being stopped or ticketed, since he was Oakdale’s chief of police. He wasn’t worried at all about the helmet being off of his head. He was worried about the helmet’s gruesome content, however, and the pair of hands in his saddle bag.
He wouldn’t have been able to explain to anyone why he had done it -- picked up the body parts off the road -- because he wasn’t able to explain it to himself. It was something akin to a hunch; he simply had the feeling that something bad was going to happen to the head and hands if he didn’t secure them. He thought he remembered someone long ago saying to him, “Sometimes the best way to preserve the evidence is to steal the evidence.”
But who was he stealing the evidence from? Wasn’t he, after all, the chief of police? Wasn’t the road he was traveling on within the city limits, making this his jurisdiction? Wouldn’t he have been justified in establishing a crime scene then and there?
His doubts and fears all had to do with the prison, of course. It seemed that whatever had happened -- murder, escape attempt, misadventure -- had happened inside the prison, making it federal jurisdiction. The body parts had merely spilled out onto his road. That’s the way it looked, anyway. However, something churned in his gut… a hunch that something was amiss. It had been a long time since Joshua had felt that unsettling churning within him, and he had learned long ago not to ignore it.
No comments:
Post a Comment