exasperation in her eyes died instantly. “Oh good! You’re still here! A lovely service, don’t you think?” She linked her arm through his and led him out of earshot. “I know people feel awkward, but everyone’s been so kind.”
“Marilyn, is there something —?”
“He wrote to Julia.”
Green stopped so abruptly that she stumbled. “Who?” Although he knew.
“That man. That horrid James Rosten!” Her eyes filled and her chin quivered. “He had the nerve to contact Julia. Not me, mind you, but poor Julia!”
“What did he say?”
“Some nonsense about how he knew the truth and he hoped she had some peace now.”
Green’s jaw tightened. Bastard! Rosten knew Julia was the vulnerable link in the family, and he’d gone straight for it. He glanced at Julia, who was pretending to talk to Gordon but was, in fact, watching their exchange obliquely. Wariness hooded her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “How did she take it?”
“Oh, she didn’t see it. Thank God! The letter came to the house and I intercepted it.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.” She hugged her thin arms to her chest. “He didn’t waste any time, did he?”
“Have there been any other letters?”
“Not yet, but I’ll keep a sharp eye out certainly. Not that he’s likely to write me or Gordon; we’re hardly his type.”
“May I see the letter?”
She shook her head. “I burned it. I shouldn’t have, I realize now, but I was so furious. Mike, he reached out from prison and came right into our home! I didn’t know he even remembered where we live! We’re unlisted now. For pity’s sake, we’ve spent twenty years trying to escape the past and the press!”
He felt an angry knot in his chest. It had been bad enough when the man directed his obsession at Green, but if he was now turning his sights on the victim’s family and on the surviving sister, he had gone way over the line. The letter should never have made it past prison security.
“I’ll alert the prison, Marilyn. We’ll stop him, I promise. It won’t happen again.”
Her pallid face tilted up, her eyes locked on his. “And if it does?”
“Then keep the letter and call me immediately. I’ll lay charges.”
But it damn well won’t come to that, he was thinking as he calculated how long it would take to drive to the penitentiary and whether the snow would prevent his going that day.
Warkworth Penitentiary was a brutal grey scar seared into the gently rolling farmland of Northumberland County, about three hours’ drive southwest of Ottawa along country highways slick with salt. Green arrived at noon, having been forced to delay his visit for almost a week, not only to untangle the red tape of the Correctional Service of Canada but also to convince his new boss it was part of his job. Managing Neufeld, he realized, was going to require even more finesse than previous bosses.
Although Green had had several discussions with security and medical staff at the penitentiary since Rosten was transferred there ten years earlier, he hadn’t visited in years and was dismayed but not surprised by the tightened security. Warkworth had been conceived fifty years ago as a model of hope and rehabilitation, but its recent troubles with riots, lockdowns, and overcrowding reflected the harsher reality.
As he approached the first exterior gate, the looming twenty-foot perimeter fence with its barbed-wire cap was a stark reminder that, although this was a medium-security facility, it housed over six hundred violent criminals, 40 percent of them lifers. Despite the dire talk of stress among correctional officers, Green was relieved to find the guards at the gate cheerful and jocular as they waved him through. Outbuildings were scattered across sprawling lawns, and in the distance he glimpsed the grassy playgrounds and picnic areas designed to simulate normal family life.
Inside, it was still a place of steel, concrete, menace, and despair.
It took him nearly fifteen minutes to proceed through security, despite being allowed to bypass the straggling line of civilian visitors waiting to see their family and friends on the inside. Finally he was ushered into a small, windowless interview room.
In the week since Marilyn had told him of the letter, his anger had cooled to a slow simmer. The warden had expressed suitable outrage and had promised to investigate how a letter addressed to a victim’s family could have slipped through their scrutiny. Likely a momentary lapse due to overcrowding and overwork.
While Green waited for James Rosten to be summoned from his cell, he wondered what to expect. He hadn’t seen Rosten since his trial, but he knew he’d been severely injured in an assault by fellow inmates at Kingston Penitentiary ten years earlier. His face had been sliced and his spine damaged.
Green remembered him as a driven young man who’d fought for his freedom with every ounce of his considerable brains and energy. Yet, over the years, his letters had become increasingly bitter and desperate, no longer focused on freedom but on revenge. Twenty years of lost life, not to mention his injuries, had surely aged him. Green steeled himself for a shrivelled, hard shell of a man.
Despite that effort, he was not prepared when the automatic door glided open and James Rosten wheeled himself in. With slow, laborious turns he manoeuvred his wheelchair through the narrow space around the table and came to a final stop so close that his toes nearly touched Green’s.
James Rosten was a study in grey. Grey hair, grey skin, grey lifeless eyes. His skin hung in crepe folds on his shrunken frame. A pale, glistening scar ran from his temple to his jaw, twisting his face into a parody of mirth. His hands were bony, his cheekbones sharp and angular, and his eyes now so deep-set they seemed to retreat inside his skull. Green searched them for a glimmer of the passion and fight he’d once displayed, but only defeat gazed back at him. Green felt the last vestiges of his anger slide away. He extended his hand across the corner of the table toward the man, whose hands were encased in fingerless gloves to provide better grip on the wheels.
Rosten, however, merely stared at his extended hand, resolutely still. “Can’t say it’s a pleasure, Inspector. What do you want?”
“How have you been, James?”
“Just hunky dory. I love it here, as well you know. So richly deserved.”
In the silence, Green could hear the wheeze of Rosten’s breath in his lungs. He relinquished his plans for subtlety. “James … You have to let it go. It’s over. Your appeals are done; there is nothing further to be served by pointing fingers. It’s time to think about what’s next. For everyone, including you.”
“Ah yes. The boundless, limitless possibilities of my future. Reinstatement at the university, reunion with my wife, a warm, fuzzy rapprochement with my kids. I’m a grandfather, by the way. Did you know that? Of course, I only learned that by reading the birth announcements online.”
“Plenty of people have to start over.”
“People who have paid their dues, who deserve what they got.” He pressed his eyes shut. “Oh,
