SEVEN

Prisons were like hospitals and gas stations: No matter where they were, or what size they were, or who ran them, or who was in them, they always smelled the same. Cleaning products and sweat, with a slight aftertaste of urine and ennui.

“Urine and ennui”? Get a grip, Chambers.

Detective Jason Chambers put his book (The Gashlycrumb Tinies: A Very Gorey Alphabet Book) aside to focus on the Drake contingent, who were nearly finished jumping through the bureaucratic hoops necessary to visit an inmate in the state of Illinois.

He’d inherited the Drake file from his predecessor, a dour grouch who had never warmed up to Angela Drake and didn’t mind if she—or anyone within bitching distance—knew it.

“One of them Insighter freaks,” Detective Kline had confided. “Had the fucking balls to tell me I was Joey Vacher!”

“Who— Oh. You mean Joseph Vacher?”

“Yeah, if you can fuckin’ believe it.”

“This was upsetting news?” Chambers guessed, barely making an effort to appear interested.

“Yeah, no shit.” Kline had been packing his desk, an exhausting (judging by the moon-shaped sweat stains on his tan shirt) and smelly (going by . . . well . . . the smell) task he seemed glad to break off from. He slumped into his desk chair, which let out a wheeze as it took his weight. “Said it right to my face! ‘Hey, Kline, you used to be some dumbass frog serial killer.’”

Chambers, who had spent far too much time with Kline in the last month, had an idea what the problem was. “Which you took exception to. Not the part about you being a killer . . .”

“No way was I ever that loser.”

“Just not that killer.”

“Damn right!” Kline rubbed his sweaty forehead, turning drops of sweat into dark streaks. It was amazing how filthy you could get just pushing files around.

“Your standards,” Chambers guessed, “would have been too high in any life.”

“Hey, if I was ever gonna kill myself like a pussy, I would have done it right the first time. Stupid SOB managed to fuck that up twice. Cut his own throat—lived. Shot himself—lived. In the face! Twice! Lived! How the fuck can you fuck that up?”

“I’ll assume that’s rhetorical.” Chambers himself had taken a statement from someone who had jumped off a three-story building and lived (a quadriplegic to the end of her days, but alive) and met a teenager who had aimed for his own eye, but the bullet ended up plowing a path around the circumference of his skull, leaving him with a shocking scar and no loss of cognitive function. He hadn’t even lost the eye. In other words: Such things happen, as any doctor, cop, or Insighter could testify.

Kline ignored him and plowed ahead. “Even setting aside that bullshit, if I was gonna be some creeper frog psycho—”

“Isn’t your wife French?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I wasn’t.”

“If I was gonna kill anyone, I woulda stuck to one sex. This guy was all over the place—a woman, teenage girls, teenage boys. And shepherds! He’s creeping around the countryside murdering friggin’ shepherds! What the fuck? No way was that me.”

“You would have eschewed shepherds,” Chambers guessed. “And killed a higher class of people.”

“Like hookers!”

“You think herding sheep is worse than prostitution?”

Kline ignored the question. “I wouldna been sloppy about it, either, I don’t care if we’re talking this month or fifty years ago.”

“Or a hundred twenty years ago, since that’s when Vacher was active.”

Kline made a waving away motion with both hands. “Snatched his last victim in earshot of her family. She kicked up a fuss and boom! Fucker’s caught. I wouldna got caught. And if I did get caught, I wouldna confessed. And if I did confess, I wouldna pussy out by trying for an NGI. And if I did pussy out with an NGI, when it didn’t work I’d have taken my death sentence like a man. This guy, they had to drag his pussy ass to the chopper.”

“Guillotine.”

“I mean, fuck!”

“That sounds upsetting,” he allowed as an alternative to Kline, are you familiar with the theory about people who protest too much? And are you unaware that slapping on cologne isn’t a substitute for a shower?

“They’re all fulla shit,” was the closing argument. Kline meant Insighters, presumably, or killers, but the older man was sour enough that he could have meant mankind in general. And it wasn’t the job. Kline had been a dour rookie and a jaded patrolman and, as a detective, was more or less dead inside. And clearly not at all pleased with his French wife.

Chambers figured that was about as good as it was going to get, so he left, but not before Kline got the last word (again): “We got the right guy, kid!”

Chambers turned back around. “This again? I’m thirty-two.”

“Nobody confesses to murder and then calmly sits in a cell for over a decade without a peep if they’re innocent!”

And there it was. One of the many things about the Drake file that bugged anyone who came in contact with it.

And here came one of the other things that bugged the hell out of anyone who came in contact with it: Angela Drake. She was doing what she usually did: pacing like a thwarted tigress as her cousin handed over the PVI forms crucial to IDOC procedures.

“How could I have forgotten how much fun this is? The only thing better than the body search is the paperwork,” the man announced to the air. “That sounded sincere, right?”

“Archer, none of us want to be here. Least of all your father. I get that cracking jokes is your way of defusing the tension, but why would you want to defuse the tension? We’re supposed to be tense and horrified to find ourselves here. We’re supposed to feel that way so we fight hard to get him out,” Angela snapped, veering off from her pacing long enough to glare. Then she grabbed the bridge of her nose and squeezed. “Argh, sorry. I’m a little jittery.” She flapped a hand at him. “Sorry.”

“Wow, you have changed,” Archer Drake observed. In closer proximity, Jason Chambers could see the family resemblance: both tall and lean, long noses and mouths meant for smiling, though Angela’s hair—shoulder-length strawberry blond layers—was much lighter than the man’s. “You’re still an uptight, controlling jackass, but now you feel bad when you behave like an uptight, controlling jackass. And that wasn’t a joke to defuse tension!” he added as she took a few steps closer. “It was an objective observation. That’s a legitimate thing, right?”

“Of course it’s legitimate. But your cousin’s right, this isn’t a happy errand, so why pretend?”

“Thank you, Leah,” Angela said, pointed and triumphant at the same time.

“Miss Drake.”

Angela spun and smiled when she saw Jason had joined them, which was a rarity in his profession. If he thought about how often people scowled at the sight of a cop, he’d get depressed. Well. More depressed. Not for the first time, he wondered why he’d been drawn to a profession where every single day on the job, people were not glad to see him. “Angela, like I told you last time, and the time before that, please call me Angela.”

Please call me Jason.

Please call me Jason.

Please call me Jason.

He opened his mouth.

Please call me Jason.

“Sorry. I forgot.” Not even close.

Fortunately, the dazzling intense woman he’d been horrified to realize he had a crush on

(a crush! like he was sixteen! what next, the acne makes a triumphant return?)

was too busy with the introductions to notice his stilted delivery. “This is my cousin Archer and his fiancée—”

“Leah Nazir,” he interrupted. He’d recognized her at once. “Hello. Detective Jason Chambers. I’d know you anywhere.”

She shook his hand. She had long, wavy dark hair; wide-set eyes; and a pale, pretty face. Her hand was tiny. “Have we worked a case before?” It was a good guess—most local cops knew Nazir consulted with police departments all over the country—but wrong.

“No, I was a big fan of That’s My Mom.”

Nazir’s smile dropped off as if his hand had turned into a dead rattlesnake. She extricated herself from the handshake and managed a small, “Oh.”

Mistake.

“Oh,” Angela added.

Mistake. Why?

“Sorry,” he said. Because for some reason he now had to apologize for the fact that Leah Nazir was once a household name.

“It’s weird that I keep forgetting you were a child star, right, hon?” Archer asked.

“Why do you keep asking questions you don’t actually want the answer to? And it’s not weird, it’s lovely.” She managed to arrange her lips into a gruesome approximation of a smile. “I’d prefer everyone kept forgetting.”

“Sorry,” Jason said again. And then he could put his finger on what he’d overlooked . . . not just Leah turning her back on acting, but the eventual fallout from that decision: Her costar/mother had been murdered just a few months ago. It had made headlines in various entertainment sections of various papers. People and Us Weekly had each done a small article on the case. “Death of an Icon’s Mother,” “Agent Murders Former Client,” “That’s My Mom Costar Slain.” It hadn’t been his case, but when it came to gossip, cops put hair salons to shame. The murder had been exceptionally foul and violent; two rookies had gotten sick at the scene. It had been discussed. Frequently.

“All right.” The brisk voice pulled Jason back to the present. “Your IDOC paperwork is all set, here are your IDs back.” A corrections officer had looked everything over and fed copies into the great bureaucratic machine that was ICC (pronounced “ick” to nearly everyone’s annoyance). This was a small relief, because filling out paperwork didn’t necessarily guarantee entrance to Intake Processing.

And if you were allowed in, you weren’t done yet. Such things took time: a minimum of two forms of ID for every visitor. Searches. Paperwork. No cell phones, no pagers, no smoking. No boxes, no purses, no bags, no books. No sunglasses, no keys, no drinks, no food. No money, no backpacks, no magazines, no wallets. Lock them all away, but the State of Illinois is not responsible for anything stolen if someone breaks the flimsy lock and absconds with your purse, bag, book, keys, drink, food, backpack, wallet.

Diapers, tampons, medication? Determined on a case-by-case basis. (Hint: Take your meds in the parking lot.) Contraband? Illegal per the Illinois Code of Criminal Conduct. (Hint: Leave contraband in the parking lot unless you want to live in a cage.)

Clothing? Everyone must wear underwear. All females must wear a bra. No tank tops, no shorts, no dresses. No hats, no gloves, no scarves.

All this to sit in a bare, sad room and stare at a loved one who, for whatever reason, now lived in a cage.

“Drake family.” This from the intake processing officer, whom no one saw unless the paperwork was squared away.

“That’s us,” Archer said, and Jason saw Angela bite her lip.

“Come on,” Jason said, and led them to the Visitation Room.