I resisted the urge to raise my hand to my head, pat down a cowlick I haven’t had in years. My stomach felt weak suddenly and very cold.
“Why’d you bring me here? You could have spoken to a thousand police officers, a thousand Feds, but—”
“If I claimed my blood was being poisoned by the government or that alpha waves from other galaxies were infiltrating my faculties or that I’d been forcibly sodomized by my mother—what would you say to that?”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Because you know nothing, and none of those things are true, and even if they were, it would be largely irrelevant. What if I told you I was God?”
“Which one?”
“The only one.”
“I’d wonder how God got Himself locked up in the joint and why he couldn’t just miracle His ass out.”
He smiled. “Very good. Very glib, of course, but that’s your nature.”
“What’s yours?”
“My nature?”
I nodded.
He looked at Lief. “Are we having the baked chicken again this week?”
“Friday,” Lief said.
Hardiman nodded. “That’s good. I like the baked chicken. Patrick, it was a pleasure meeting you. Drop by again.”
Lief looked at me and shrugged. “Interview’s over.”
I said, “Wait.”
Hardiman laughed. “Interview’s over, Patrick.”
Dolquist stood up. After a minute, I did too.
“Doctor Dolquist,” Hardiman said, “say hello to Queen Judith for me.”
Dolquist turned toward the cell gate.
I turned with him, stared at the bars, and felt them hold
ing me, closing me in, blocking me from ever seeing the outside world again, locking me in here with Hardiman.
Lief walked up to the gate and produced a key, all three of us with our backs to Hardiman now.
And he whispered, “Your father was a yellow jacket.”
I turned around and he was staring at me impassively.
“What was that?”
He nodded and closed his eyes, drummed the fingertips of his cuffed hands on the table. When he spoke, his voice seemed to come from the corners of the room and the ceiling, and the bars them-selves—anywhere but from his mouth:
“I said, ‘Eviscerate them, Patrick. Kill them all.’”
He pursed his lips, and we stood there waiting, but it was useless. A minute passed in complete silence, as he remained that way without so much as a tremor coursing his tight, pallid skin.
As the doors opened and we walked out into the corridor of C Block past the two guards posted as sentries outside the cell, Alec Hardiman sang the words, “Eviscerate them, Patrick. Kill them all,” in a voice so light but rich and strong that we could have been hearing an aria.
“Eviscerate them, Patrick.”
The words flowed like birdsong down the cellblock corridor.
“Kill them all.”
23
Lief led us through a maze of maintenance corridors, the sounds of the prison muffled by the thick walls. The corridors smelled of antiseptic and industrial solvent and the floors had the yellowish shine of the floors in all state institutions.
“He has a fan club, you know.”
“Who?”
“Hardiman,” Lief said. “Criminology students, law students, lonely middle-aged women, a couple of social workers, some church-group types. Pen pals who he’s convinced of his innocence.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Lief smiled and shook his head. “Oh, no. Alec has this favorite thing he does—he invites them to visit, to see his eminence in the flesh or some such. And some of these people, they’re poor. They spend a life’s savings just to get here. And then guess what ol’ Alec does?”
“Laughs at them?”
“He refuses to see them,” Dolquist said. “Always.”
“Yup,” Lief said. He punched numbers into a keypad by the door in front of us and it opened with a soft click. “He sits in his cell and looks out the window as they walk back down the long road to their cars, confused and humiliated and alone, and he jerks off into his hand.”
“That’s Alec,” Dolquist said as we came out into the light by the main gate.
“What was that crack about your father?” Lief said as
we left the prison and headed toward Bolton’s RV sitting halfway down the gravel walkway.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as I know, he didn’t know my father.”
Dolquist said, “Sounds like he wants you to think he did.”
“And that cowlick shit,” Lief said. “Either he did know you, Mr. Kenzie, or he made a hell of a guess.”
Gravel crunched under our feet as we crossed toward the RV and I said, “I’ve never met the guy before.”
“Well,” Lief said, “Alec’s good at fucking with people’s heads. I heard you were coming, I dug this up.” He handed me a piece of paper. “We intercepted this when Alec tried to send it by one of his couriers to a nineteen-year-old boy he’d raped after he knew he was HIV positive.”
I opened the note:
The death in my blood
I gave it to you.
On the other side of the grave
I’ll be waiting for you.
I handed the note back as if it were on fire.
“Wanted the kid to be afraid even after he was dead. That’s Alec,” Lief said. “And maybe you never did meet, but he asked for you specifically. Remember that.”
I nodded.
Dolquist’s voice was hesitant. “Do you need me?”
Lief shook his head. “Write me up a report, have it on my desk in the morning, and I think we’re okay, Ron.”
Dolquist stopped just outside the van and shook my hand. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Kenzie. I hope everything works out.”
“Same here.”
He nodded but wouldn’t meet my eyes and then he nodded curtly at Lief and turned to walk away.
Lief patted him on the back, a slightly awkward gesture, as if he’d never done it before. “Take care, Ron.”
We watched the little muscular man walk down the path
a bit before he stopped and seemed almost to jerk to his left and cut across the lawn toward the parking lot.
“He’s a little weird,” Lief said, “but he’s a good man.”
The great shadow of the prison wall cut across the lawn and darkened the grass and Dolquist seemed wary of it. He walked along its edge, in the strip of sunlit grass, and he did so gingerly, as if he were afraid he’d step too much to his left and sink through the dark grass.