wage.
The warden’s office didn’t have a hall window, but Will recognized Amanda’s deceptively calm tone coming from the other side of the closed door. He imagined the man was fuming. Wardens didn’t like being scrutinized. Another reason the man had gone apeshit over all of those confiscated phones. There was nothing more humiliating than hearing one of your inmates talking live to a television station from inside your own facility.
Will asked Faith, “How many calls got out during the riot?”
“One to CNN and one to 11-Alive, but there was an election-scandal-thingy, so no one paid attention.”
They’d reached a long, wide hallway with an even longer line of inmates. Their eighteen murder suspects, Will assumed. The men had been posed like miserable isosceles triangles. The upper halves of their bodies were tilted forward, legs straight, ankles bent, their weight resting on their foreheads against the wall, because the two COs in charge of them were apparently raging assholes.
Lockdown protocol dictated that any inmate outside their cell be restrained in what was called a four-piece suit. Wrists handcuffed, handcuffs attached in front to a belly chain. Ankle irons attached to a twelve-inch length of chain that kept them doing the two-step. Being bound this way, then forced to press your forehead against a cinder-block wall, put a hell of a lot of pressure on your neck and shoulders. The belly chain would add extra stress to the small of your back as your hands were pulled forward by gravity. Apparently, the inmates had been posed this way for a while. Sweat streaked down the walls. Will saw limbs shaking. Chains rattled like nickels in a dryer.
“Jesus Christ,” Faith muttered.
As Will followed her down the line, he saw an array of tattoos rendered in familiar shaky-lined prison ink. All of the inmates appeared to be over thirty, which made sense. Speaking from experience, Will knew that men under thirty did a lot of stupid things. If a guy was still in prison past the third decade of his life, it was because he had either really fucked up, been really fucked over, or was actively making the kind of bad decisions that kept him in the system.
Faith didn’t bother to knock on the closed door to the interrogation room. Special Agents Nick Shelton and Rasheed Littrell were sitting at the table with a stack of folders in front of them.
“… telling you this gal had an ass like a centaur.” Rasheed stopped telling his story when Faith walked in. “Sorry, Mitchell.”
Faith scowled as she shut the door. “I’m not half horse.”
“Shit, is that what that means?” Rasheed laughed good-naturedly. “’Sup, Trent?”
Will lifted his chin by way of greeting.
Faith paged through the files on the table. “These all the jackets?”
An inmate’s jacket was basically a diary of his life—arrest reports, sentencing guidelines, transportation details, medical charts, mental health classification, threat assessment, education level, treatment programs, visitation records, disciplinary history, religious preference, sexual orientation.
She asked, “Anyone look good?”
Rasheed gave them the lowdown on the eighteen suspects in the hallway. Will kept his head turned toward the special agent the way you would if you were paying close attention, but he was actually taking a moment to figure out what to say to Nick Shelton.
Years ago, when Nick was assigned to the GBI’s southeastern field office, he had worked very closely with Sara’s dead husband. Jeffrey Tolliver had been the chief of police for Grant County. He was an ex-college football player and, from all accounts, an ass-kicker. Some of Nick’s summations on their cases read like movie scripts. Jeffrey Tolliver had been the Lone Ranger to Nick’s Tonto, if Tonto had talked like Foghorn Leghorn and dressed like a casual-day Bee Gee in gold chains and way-too-tight skinny jeans. The two cops had taken down pedophile rings and drug traffickers and murderers. Jeffrey could’ve parlayed his wins into a much bigger paycheck in a larger city, but he’d bypassed the fame and glory in order to serve Grant County.
Sara probably would’ve married him a third time if he hadn’t died during the second go-round.
“That’s something to work with,” Faith said. Unlike Will, she had been paying actual attention to Rasheed’s rundown. She asked, “Anything else?”
“Nah.” Nick scratched at his Barry Gibb beard. “Y’all take the room. Rash and me’ve gotta couple’a three witnesses we wanna go back at.”
Faith sat in Rasheed’s abandoned chair and started picking out promising suspects. Will could see that she was going straight to the discipline forms. She was a firm believer in history repeating itself.
Nick asked Will, “What’s Sara up to these days?”
Will silently careened through a series of humiliating answers before settling on, “She’s in the cafeteria. You should go see her.”
“Thanks, fella.” Nick half-grabbed, half-patted Will on the shoulder before leaving.
Will gave far too much attention to the shoulder grab-pat. It was somewhere between a Vulcan death grip and rustling the fur on a dog’s butt.
Faith waited until the door clicked closed. “Was that uncomfortable?”
“Depends on which half of the horse you’re asking.” Will put his hand on the doorknob but didn’t open it. “What’s our play here? I’m not sure these guys are going to feel comfortable being questioned by a woman.”
“You’re probably right.” She slid a jacket out of the pile. “Maduro.”
Will opened the door. The CO was waiting outside. Will kept his voice low. “Get those men off that wall before I make you piss out your lungs.”
The man cut his eyes at Will, but like most bullies, he was a coward. He turned toward his prisoners, bellowing, “Inmates! On the floor!”
There were collective groans of relief. The men had to peel themselves off the cinder block walls. They all had bright red blotches on their foreheads and glassy looks in their eyes. Some struggled to sit. Some of them simply collapsed onto the floor in relief.
Will called, “Maduro, you’re up.”
A short fireplug of a man stopped mid-squat. He turned on one foot, his ankles catching on the short chain. Twelve inches wasn’t much, approximately the length of two one-dollar bills placed end-to-end. Maduro’s walk was stiff and labored. He held up his belly chain to keep it from digging into his hipbones. There were pinpricks of blood where the cinder block had eaten into his forehead. He edged through the door and waited in front of the table.
Georgia’s prisons ran on a para-military platform. Unless they were chained, inmates had to walk with their hands clasped behind their backs. They were expected to stand up straight. Keep their cells spotless and their bunk sheets tight. Most importantly, they were required to address the COs with respect—yes sir, no sir, can I scratch my balls, sir.
Maduro was looking at Will, waiting to be told what to do.
Will crossed his arms over his chest and let Faith take the lead because these guys were murder suspects. They didn’t get to choose who questioned them.
“Sit,”
