“Good.”He paused.“You want me on standby when you’re done?Debrief, or just call and tell me he was full of it?”
“Yeah,” she said.The word surprised her with the relief that came in its wake.“Yeah, that’d be good.Unless…”
Although she'd pictured her partner where she wanted him to be, in the office they shared in Portland, she knew he wasn't there.She knew he'd been taking a few days off to paint the new apartment.And a few times lately, on calls with her partner, Kate had sensed the brooding presence of his new wife, Cheryl, in the background, like a finger tapping on a watch.Hang up.Come here.Be mine, not hers.
“Unless nothing,” Marcus said firmly.“I’m heading back into the office this afternoon.Text me when you’re out.”He cleared his throat, as if trying to get rid of something caught there.“And Kate?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let him in the door.”
She knew what he meant.That old dream.The knock.The voice.The door in the hallway of whatever rented apartment her mind happened to conjure that night — sometimes New York, sometimes Portland, sometimes somewhere in between — shuddering on its hinges while someone on the other side murmured scripture and promises.She never opened it.The dream always ended before she did.That was the point.
She stared through the windshield at the layers of fencing, each one topped with coils of silver wire that caught the sun like something almost beautiful.The outer fence, the inner fence, and the vehicle gate that looked solid enough to stop a tank.Barriers within barriers.Doors on doors.
“The door’s locked,” she said.“Bolted.Sandbags in front.”
“Good girl,” Marcus said lightly.“Go make that prophet earn his lunch.”
She ended the call and slipped the phone back into her pocket.
For a second she just sat, listening to the tick of the car cooling.Somewhere high above, a gull wheeled, its cry thin and annoyed.The world felt very large and very bright and, inconveniently, very alive.Cox was somewhere behind those walls, living too.Breathing the same air, however filtered.Eating, sleeping, plotting.Waiting.
She pictured his cell: small, window slit barely wider than his hand, concrete block bed, stainless steel toilet, the institutional blanket that looked like it had been woven from industrial lint.The man who’d turned the Ten Commandments into murder tableaus, confined to eight by ten feet of grey.
Part of her thought:Good.
Another, more practical part thought:He’s had three months with nothing to do but marinate.Whatever he says in there is going to be concentrated.
She got out of the car.
The heat hit first, a flat blanket that settled on the back of her neck.The wind that had been pleasant with the windows cracked became an oven blast against her legs as she straightened.She locked the sedan and stood for a moment, letting the sun bake the top of her head, grounding herself in the sheer physicality of it.
She shrugged her blazer straight, smoothed a palm down the front of her shirt as if tucking herself back into the shape of an agent rather than a woman who dreamed about locked doors.Her badge and Bureau ID sat in a slim wallet at her hip, the plastic already warmed by her body.She touched it briefly, a reminder of who she was in this equation.
The parking lot was ringed with low, scrubby bushes that looked less like landscaping and more like a concession to the idea that living things ought to exist somewhere on the premises.Beyond them, the first fence gleamed — chain-link topped with razor wire beyond that, another, slightly taller, this one with a discreet sign that read NO TRESPASSING – DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.
No one ever mentioned that part in the brochures either.
The front entrance was a squat, windowless protrusion from the main block, all narrow slits and armored glass.A faded sign above the door read MAINE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS – NORTHBRIDGE SMU, as if they’d been obliged to name the beast before they could cage it.
Up close, the concrete had hairline cracks spider-webbing out from the corners of doors and windows.Nothing structural, nothing dangerous — just the slow, inevitable surrender of man-made surfaces to weather and time.It comforted her a little to see that even this place wasn’t fully immune.
Inside, the temperature dropped ten degrees.Air conditioning hit the back of her throat with the flat, recycled chill of places that never opened a window.The air smelled of disinfectant and old coffee, and under that a faint tang of metal and sweat that no amount of bleach could quite erase.
A heavy-set officer behind bulletproof glass glanced up, took in her suit, her posture, the ID she held between two fingers, and hit a buzzer.The inner door unlocked with a dull clack.She stepped through and felt the small, familiar shiver as the outside world sealed off behind her.
The process took fifteen minutes and three separate locked doors.She surrendered her phone, her watch, her biro, even the clip that held her hair in a knot at the base of her skull.Each item was catalogued, placed in a plastic tray, slid into a locker by a clerk with the exhausted patience of someone who’d done this twelve thousand times.
Without the watch, she felt oddly unmoored.Time belonged to the institution now.They would tell her when forty minutes had passed.They would tell her when she could leave.
She stepped through a metal detector that beeped obligingly at the underwire in her bra, then a full-body scanner that made a soft humming noise as it traced the outlines of her bones.The female officer who patted her down did so with professional thoroughness, hands brisk and impersonal over seams and hems.Kate held her arms out and let herself be searched, reminding herself that for once, the suspicion wasn’t personal.
“Quite an operation,” she said when it was done.
The officer — RIVERA, according to her badge — snorted.“You should’ve seen the memo after your boy took his field trip.They went through this place like a priest at spring cleaning.No more metal cutlery, no library books with staples, no work details outside the perimeter.The man’s lucky they still let him breathe unfiltered air.”
“He’s not my boy,” Kate said, but it came out thinner than she liked.
