“If you’ve got all these letters from him, they’ve got to be more useful than anything I know. Because all I know is that LaReigne volunteered on Monday nights. And now she’s been kidnapped. That’s. All. I. Know.”

“Six months’ worth of romantic, intimate letters from Tague Barnwell, that LaReigne stored in a flowery little box under her bed. Or are they yours?” Mansur said.

“They could be anybody’s. She has a post office box, and probably half the people in that ministry use her post office box to exchange letters with their inmate pen pals. You don’t give them your real address. She even lets the volunteers in the Muslim and Christian ministries use her post office box. For all you know those are letters she was storing for that Molly woman. She volunteers with one of the evangelical ministries. That’s what LaReigne said.”

“Oh, we know who Molly’s pen pal was, but at least one of these letters was definitely written to your sister.” Mansur reached over and slid one of the pages in front of me.

Dear La Reigne,

 The first thing I want to say to you is that I don’t want you to take my letter the wrong way. I’m sure you get so many letters from the guys here, telling you how beautiful you are. You are beautiful, but that’s not why I’m writing you. I felt like, when we talked at the ritual, that there was a spiritual connection between us, and I’ll understand if you didn’t feel the same way, but I still wanted to reach out to you. Because the truth is, I’m alone in here. I’m supposed to have these friends, and people who support me, but I can feel myself changing, and they’re not people who like change.

 The second thing I want to say to you is that I’m not the man you think I am. It’s brave and generous of you to come here every month to work with us and give us a chance to worship, and I don’t blame you at all if you think I’m exactly like the guy you’ve probably read about in the newspaper. I did those terrible things. I hurt people. That’s true, but I’m not that guy anymore. I’ve grown so much in the last four years, and I want to keep growing. What I need is a friend who is outside this circle of hate and destruction that I find myself trapped in, because I don’t want to be part of that anymore, but here in prison, there’s no way out.

 I don’t want to say anything negative about Conrad, because honestly, he has been a good friend to me. I was just a kid when he took me under his wing, and maybe that more than anything is why I went along with what he planned. I’m not saying that to deny my responsibility for what I did. I should have refused to be part of it, but I looked up to him like a father and it was hard for me to say no. In here, he’s one of my only friends. Him and Craig Van Eck and Craig’s crowd, and I think you know enough about them to know they aren’t the best people for me to be around. They’re trying to drag me back down. To keep me trapped in the same old thinking that brought me here. I don’t want to keep being that person, but I can’t get away from them either.

 As much as I want to change, I need protection. There’s no safety for someone like me alone in here. Especially with all these gangbangers in here. They would be happy to get at me. To hurt me or kill me. I know I’ve done terrible things, and you may even think that I am a racist (I truly am not!) but they hate white people. It would give them bragging rights to bring me down. So whether I want to be part of Craig’s group or not, whether I feel like part of that circle, I have to have friends in here to watch my back.

 Thank you for reading all this, and if you feel like you can, a letter from you would mean so much to me. Just to know that someone out there has heard me and believes that I can be a better man.

 Merry meet,

 Tague

   “So he wrote her a bullshit letter,” I said. “Inmates are bullshit artists.”

“Maybe you’d be more interested in the love letters your sister sent to Barnwell?”

“Not really.”

Mansur didn’t care. He pushed another stack of photocopied letters across the table to me, but I ignored them.

“You don’t seem surprised at the suggestion that your sister sent love letters to Barnwell.”

“These aren’t even love letters,” I said, after I’d looked at the first few. LaReigne was a romantic sap, and those letters weren’t even all that gushy.

Next to the stack of letters, Mansur laid out a couple of Polaroids. Your standard sad prison visitation photos. Grainy, under fluorescent lights, everybody looking a little green and smiling awkwardly, posing against cinder block walls, or, somehow more depressing: a fake outdoor backdrop as cheap and cheesy as a Sears portrait studio. The kind of family photos that made up a lot of my childhood.

The pictures had been taken on the same night, probably only a few seconds apart. LaReigne was wearing a blush pink sweater. Modest, because you have to follow dress code for prison visitation, but nice. She looked pretty, standing next to Tague Barnwell in his prison scrubs.

You couldn’t tell from his mug shot in the news, but Tague was good-looking. Tall. Broad in the shoulders. Light brown hair and a mustache. Super white teeth flashing at the camera. Maybe even better looking than Loudon, if you go for guys with prison-gang tattoos on their forearms. I couldn’t make out the details, but from the shape of it, I knew what it was. A green-and-white number fourteen pool ball with the legs of a swastika peeking out around the edges. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, it might take you a while to notice it, but it was exactly like the one my father got while he was in prison. Dad had always worn long sleeves on visitation day, but when I claimed his body, I’d seen the tattoo.

“This one came out of your sister’s box of letters.” Mansur tapped one of the pictures. “The other one came out of Barnwell’s cell. He had it pinned up over his bunk, like the last thing he looked at before he fell asleep every night.”

“Everybody needs something to get them through.”

“Suddenly, it seems like you know a lot more than you thought you did.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Here’s what I know. LaReigne can fall in love at the drop of a hat. Every guy is her one true love, and she has terrible taste in men. Also, some women really like lifers, because you always know where they are. When your man is in prison, he’s not out cheating on you or spending your money or coming home drunk and smacking you around. He’s locked up nice and safe somewhere, and he has time to write you love letters.”

Mansur actually chuckled. Like I was funny. Like he was having fun.

“That sounds like the voice of experience,” he said.

“Not mine. I don’t do romance, and I definitely don’t do romance with guys in prison. My mother, she was a hundred percent faithful to my father, even though he was never coming home. He used to send her three letters a week and he called every Thursday. Maybe to LaReigne that looked better than how her marriage turned out.”