Broken Prey

boredom was grinding, and Lucas began to empathize with Chase’s wish to die. Lucas looked for seams in the tape, where it might have shut down; but it was seamless. Nobody, as far as they could tell, had said anything about the Peterson killing.
    “Could it be a code word, telling them that the killing was done?” Sloan asked. Jansen glanced sideways at him, an idiot glance, and Sloan said, defensively, “All right, it’s not a code word.”
    “There’s gotta be something,” Lucas said. He’d written down a list of names of the people who’d gone through the security area; there were thirty of them.
    “Every single person you’ve seen in there—half the staff, I didn’t know that many people went in and out, to tell you the truth—but every single person knows he’s on tape,” Jansen said.
    “You can’t see them very well, unless they’re right up against the viewing panel,” Lucas said. “Is there another angle?”
    “Yeah, we have one of the scanning cameras at the end of the hall.”
    “Let’s see that.”
    They spent ten minutes fast-forwarding through three days of the staff coming and going. “I keep thinking, the food ,” Sloan said. “It’s the only thing that consistently goes into the cells.”
    They thought about that for a moment, and then Jansen said, “Suppose one of the guys delivering the food wrote down what happened, like a little strip of paper, and put it in the mashed potatoes . . .”
    “Let’s look at the guys bring in the food.”
    Seven different staff members delivered food over the three days. The food went into the cell on a kind of metallic lazy Susan device. “Wouldn’t even have to put it in the food—you could just drop it on the tray when you put the food in the slot,” Sloan said. “The cameras aren’t so good that you could pick that up.”
    They watched the three men eating, saw nothing out of the ordinary, except that Biggie had bad manners, eating with his hands as much as with his spoon.
    “Okay,” Lucas said, when they were done. He was discouraged. “Maybe this isn’t it. Goddamnit, I thought I was on to something.”
    “Want me to go down and drop Peterson’s name on Biggie? Or on all three of them?” Jansen asked. “I could mention ‘a Peterson thing’ in passing, see if we get any reaction.”
    “It’s an idea,” Lucas said, considering him. “You’re not going to get anything from Chase, though. He was hypermanic this morning.”
    “He’s gone over the top and is on the way back down,” Jansen said. “If I go now, I might catch him before he crashes. You could watch from here, in real time.”
    Lucas nodded. “Let’s do it.”
     
    CHASE GAVE IT AWAY. Jansen rolled the observation window back and said, “How’re you doing? Sleepy?”
    “Man, I’m dying,” Chase whimpered. “I’m going out. I’m like a light, I’m going out.” He put his hands on both sides of his head and squeezed: “Why am I like this, Mr. Jansen?”
    “We don’t know, man.” There was a note of sympathy in Jansen’s voice, and it resonated.
    Chase said, still holding his face, “If I could just, if I could just . . . If I could get out of here just for a couple of hours . . .” He sounded desperate, like a man who needed water.
    “That’s gonna be tough, since the Peterson thing. The director is adamant about keeping the three of you under wraps. That might not seem fair . . .”
    Lucas liked the way he did it: in passing, as part of another idea, the raisin in the rice pudding. Chase’s hands came down; his face was brighter, and his thin lips turned up in a joker’s smile. “You know about that? How he got her . . .”
    “I’ve heard the usual stories,” Jansen said, noncommittally. He looked over his shoulder, as though he shouldn’t be talking about it.
    “So cool. He fucked her all night. He had her tied up, he had this rope around her neck like a fuckin’ bridle, he fucked her all night. Six, seven, eight times. The bitch could hardly walk in the morning. He took her up there, rolled her out of the car, naked as the day. Then he says, ‘You got a hundred yards and then I’m coming.’ ”
    “She ran, but there was no place to go, so she ran into the woods.” Chase was leaning on the viewing glass now, face only inches from Jansen’s.
    “She was screaming: but there was nobody out there. He caught her by this big tree, and she tried to run around it, keep the tree between them. Then he