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Estes registered no immediate surprise. “No starting with the small stuff, huh, Lieutenant? So what is it you want to know?”
“I want to know if these murders lead to these men in Chimera. I want to know if they’re as bad as they’re made out to be. And I want to know the names of any reputed members who are now on the outside.”
“The answer to all of that is yes.” Estes nodded flatly. “It’s a sort of a trial by fire. Prisoners who can take the worst we can dish out. The ones who have been in the SHU’s, isolation, for a substantial time. It earns them rank—and certain privileges.”
“Privileges?”
“Freedom. In the way we define it here. From being debriefed. From snitching.”
“I’d like a list of any paroled members of this gang.”
The warden smiled. “Not many get paroled. Some get transferred to other facilities. I suspect there are Chimera offshoots at every max facility in the state. And it’s not like we have a file of who’s in and who’s not. It’s more like who gets to sit next to the Big Motherfucker at mess.”
“But you know, don’t you? You know who’s in.”
“We know.” The warden nodded. He stood up as if our interview had come to an end. “It’ll take some time. Some of this I need to consult on. But I’ll see what I can do.”
“While I’m here, I might as well meet with him.”
“Who, Lieutenant?”
“The Big Motherfucker. The head of Chimera.”
Estes looked at me. “Sorry, Lieutenant, no one gets to do that. No one gets into the Pool.”
I looked Estes in the eyes. “You want me to come back with a state order to get it done? Listen, our chief of police is dead. Every politician in this state wants this guy caught. I’ve got backing all the way. You already know that. Bring the bastard up.”
The warden’s taut face relaxed. “Be my guest, Lieutenant. But he doesn’t leave. You go to him.”
Estes picked up his phone and dialed a number. After a pause, he muttered sharply, “Get Weiscz ready. He has a visitor. It’s a woman.”
Chapter 59
WE WENT THROUGH a long underground walkway, accompanied by Estes and a club-toting head guard named O’Koren.
When we came to a stairway marked SHU-C, the warden led us up, waving at a security screen, then through a heavy compression door that opened into the ultramodern prison ward.
Along the way, he filled me in. “Like most of our inmates, Weiscz came in from another facility, Folsom. He was the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood there, until he strangled a black guard. He’s been iso-ed here for eighteen months now. Until we start sending people to the death house in this state, there’s nothing more we can do to him.”
Jacobi leaned over and whispered, “You sure of what you’re doing here, Lindsay?”
I wasn’t sure. My heart was starting to gallop, and my palms had busted out in a nervous sweat. “That’s why I brought you along.”
“Yeah,” Jacobi muttered.
Pelican Bay’s isolation unit was unlike anything I had ever seen. Everything was painted a dull, sterile white. Burly khaki-uniformed guards, of both sexes but uniformly white, manned glassed-in command posts.
Monitors and security cameras were everywhere. Everywhere. The unit was configured like a pod with ten cells, the compression-sealed doors tightly shut.
Warden Estes stopped in front of a metal door with a large window. “Welcome to ground zero of the human race,” he said.
A muscular, balding senior guard holding a face visor and some sort of Uzi-like taser gun came up. “Weiscz had to be extracted, Warden. I think he’ll need a few moments to loosen up.”
I looked up at Estes. “Extracted?”
Estes sniffed. “You would think after being holed up a couple of months, he’d be happy to get out. Just so you know what’s coming next, Weiscz was uncooperative. We had to send a team in to pretty him up for you.”
He nodded toward the window. “There’s your man….”
