“Where do you think he’s going?”
“To check on his wife.” Lief spit into the gravel.
“You think what Hardiman said was true.”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. The details were precise, though. If it was your wife, and she’d been unfaithful before, wouldn’t you go check?”
Dolquist was a tiny figure now as he reached the edge of the grass and cut around the shadow of the prison into the parking lot before disappearing from view.
“Poor bastard,” I said.
Lief spit into the gravel again. “Pray Hardiman don’t make someone say that about you someday.”
A sudden stiff breeze curled out of the dark shadows under the wall and I shrugged my shoulders against it as I opened the back door of the RV.
Bolton said, “Nice interviewing technique. You study?”
“I did my best,” I said.
“You did shit,” he said. “You learned absolutely zero about these current killings in there.”
“Oh well.” I looked around the RV. Erdham and Fields sat at the thin black table. Above them, the bank of six monitors played five recordings of our interview with Hardiman, the sixth covering real time as Alec sat in the same position we’d left him in, his eyes closed, head thrown back, lips pursed.
Beside me Lief watched the second bank of monitors on the opposite wall as a series of prisoner photos rolled across, angry faces being replaced by fresh angry faces at a rate of six every two minutes. I looked over and watched Erdham’s fingers whiz over a computer keypad and I realized he was rifling through the prison files of every inmate.
“Where’d you get authorization?” Lief said.
Bolton looked bored. “A federal magistrate at five this morning.” He handed Lief a writ. “See for yourself.”
I looked up at the bank of monitors above his head as a fresh row of convicts materialized. As Lief bent beside me and went over the writ slowly, his index finger running under the words as he read, I watched the six convicts’ faces above me until they were replaced with six more. Two were black, two white, one had so many facial tattoos he could have been green for all I could tell, and one looked like a young Hispanic except his hair was a shock of pure white.
“Freeze that,” I said.
Erdham looked over his shoulder at me. “What?”
“Freeze those faces,” I said. “Can you do that?”
He took his hands off the keyboard. “It’s done.” He looked at Bolton. “None of them are a match so far, sir.”
“What’s a match?” I said.
Bolton said, “We’re running every inmate’s file against all prison documentation, no matter how minor, to see if there’s any sort of relationship with Alec Hardiman. We’re nearing the end of the “A”s now.”
“First two are completely clean,” Erdham said. “Not a single incident of contact with Hardiman.”
Lief was staring up at the monitors now too. “Run the sixth,” he said.
I came up beside him. “Who is that guy?”
“You seen him before?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He seems familiar.”
“You’d remember that hair, though.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I would.”
“Evandro Arujo,” Erdham said. “No match on cellblock, no match on work detail, no match on recreational time, no match on—”
“Lot that computer won’t tell you,” Lief said.
“—sentencing. I’m punching up incident reports now.”
I looked at the face. It was smooth and feminine, the face of a pretty woman. The white hair contrasted starkly
with large almond eyes and amber skin. The thick lips were also feminine, pouty, and his eyelashes were long and dark.
“Major incident, number one—Inmate Arujo claims he was raped in hydrotherapy room, August sixth, eighty-seven. Inmate refuses to identify alleged rapists, requests solitary confinement. Request denied.”
I looked at Lief.
“I wasn’t here then,” he said.
“What was he in for?”
“Grand theft auto. First offense.”
“In here?” I said.
Bolton was standing beside us now and I could smell the Sucrets on his breath. “Grand theft isn’t maximum.”
“Tell that to the judge,” Lief said. “And the cop whose car Evandro totaled, who was a drinking buddy of said judge.”
“Second major incident—suspicion of mayhem. March eighty-eight. No further information.”
“Means he raped someone himself,” Lief said.
“Third major incident—arrest and trial for manslaughter. Convicted June eighty-nine.”
“Welcome to Evandro World,” Lief said.
“Print this,” Bolton said.
The laser jet hummed, and the first thing out was the photo we were all staring up at.
Bolton took it, looked at Lief. “Was there contact between this inmate and Hardiman?”
Lief nodded. “Won’t find documentation of it, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s what you know and can prove and what you just know. Evandro was Hardiman’s bitch. Walked in here a half-decent kid to do nine months on a car theft, walked out nine and a half years later a fucking freak show.”
“How’d he get that hair?” I said.
“Shock,” Lief said. “After the gang-bang in hydro, he was found on the floor bleeding from every orifice with his hair shocked white. After he got out of the infirmary, he went back into population because the previous warden didn’t like spics, and by the time I got here, he’d been bought and sold a thousand times and ended up with Hardiman.”
“When was he released?” Bolton said.
“Six months ago.”
“Run all his photos and print them,” Bolton said.
Erdham’s fingers flew back over the keyboard and suddenly the bank of monitors showed five different photos of Evandro Arujo.
The first was a mug shot from the Brockton PD. His face was swollen and his right cheekbone looked broken and his eyes were tender and terrified.
“Crashed the car,” Lief said. “Hit his head on the steering wheel.”
The next was taken the day he arrived at Walpole. Eyes still huge and terrified, cuts and swelling gone. He had rich black hair and the same feminine features, but they were even softer, still carrying a hint of baby fat.