A Desperate Silence (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 3) (9 page)

     
"I'm listening." He ran water over the plate and squirted a dab of dish soap from a yellow bottle onto a sponge, scrubbing stoneware.

     
"All right." Sylvia's expression shifted as she concentrated on relating her experience. "Her name is Serena. She's nine or ten, probably ten years old, Hispanic, with a great face, and gawky the way kids are—"

     
"I know kids who aren't."

     
"—but she doesn't speak a word. I think she's capable of speech—" Sylvia refocused on Matt, saw his best poker face, and stopped speaking. "What?"

     
"Nothing."

     
"Something's going on." Sylvia watched Rocko slink out of the room. "You're upset I went back to work to see a traumatized kid?"

     
"No." Matt slapped his baseball hat on his head. He took a long breath. Paused heroically. Kept his voice very soft. "But I'm fuckin' pissed about that beer."

     
Sylvia eyed her lover suspiciously as she moved to the refrigerator and opened the door. She pulled a lager from the six-pack and closed the door. The quick intake of her breath was involuntary. Slowly, she opened the door again. There was a blue velvet ring box on the shelf between ketchup and beer.

     
"Oh." Sylvia's face broke into a smile. "Gee."

     
Matt looked pleased and embarrassed. "You're supposed to open it."

     
She lifted the lid and smiled at the delicate gold ring with its flower of shimmering rubies and tiny pearls.

     
"It belonged to my great-grandma Etty."

     
"It's beautiful." She catapulted herself toward Matt, grabbed him around the waist, and kissed him.

     
When he pulled back for air, his lopsided grin made him look twelve years old. He took the ring from the box and started to slip it onto Sylvia's left ring finger. "Let's see if it fits."

     
She protested, "My fingers are too fat—"

     
"Your fingers are lovely"—the ring hit her knuckle and stuck—"but fat."

     
"Thanks."

     
The gold band wouldn't budge. "
Really
fat." Matt dodged her punch. "Do you have any butter?"

     
"Wait." Sylvia licked her finger and worked the metal band until her knuckle felt raw. Just when she was about to give up, the ring slid into place.

     
"So . . ." Matt removed his baseball hat from his head and crumpled it between nervous hands. "Now it's official."

     
She forced herself to respond before the silence became uncomfortable. "Absolutely," she said lightly, swatting him on the nose with one finger.

     
They kissed. Matt's hands were moving up under her shirt when a high-pitched bleat sounded from the pager on his belt. "Damn." He glanced down. "Rosie."

     
"At the pen?" Sylvia frowned. Rosie Sanchez, penitentiary investigator, would only be working overtime if there had been an incident. There were plenty of incidents at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, an institution that was the center of constant political, judicial, and social controversy.

     
Matt nodded, even as he was reaching for the telephone.

     
Sylvia prepared the dog's dinner while eavesdropping on the monosyllabic phone conversation. "Matt . . . . Yeah . . . . Uh-huh . . . . Uh-huh . . . . Yeah." A glance at his wristwatch. "I'll be there in fifteen." He hung up and caught Sylvia's questioning glance. He said, "An OD at the joint. Some of that stuff coming up from Mexico."

     
She nodded, following him to the door. She knew the Rio Grande corridor was a major conduit for marijuana, cocaine, and the newest "super" heroin traveling from the Colombian-cartel drug labs through Mexico into the northern states. The D.E.A. clampdown on Miami had created a wealth of opportunity for Mexico's border towns.

     
And New Mexico State Police got their share of Mexico's drug crime; there was more than enough to go around.

     
In the doorway, Matt paused and cleared his throat. He had an odd expression on his face. He said, "By the way, that car your girl was driving? Dispatch ran a ten twenty-nine and—"

     
"Whoa, translation."

     
"You better bone up on your ten codes, ma'am. Ten twenty-nine—wants, warrants, stolen; ten twenty-eight—registration."

     
Sylvia set her hands on her hips and took a breath. "The car's from Mexico, right?"

     
"Wrong. The vehicle had plates from a dealer in El Paso, Texas, so E.P.I.C.—" He caught himself before she could protest, and then slowed down. "El Paso Intelligence Center; it's law enforcement and military, they do the U.S.-Mexico border checks. They ran it on their computer and came up with a company in El Paso."

     
"You knew this and you didn't tell me?"

     
"I found it out this morning. I'm telling you right now. The biz, Hat-Trick Incorporated, turns out to be a drop box. The car wasn't reported stolen, and nobody answers the phone at Hat-Trick."

     
"That doesn't sound very promising."

     
"It sounds like a front for contraband, and the most likely contraband is drugs. So what's your kid's connection to sleazy drug deals?"

     
"She could be the daughter of a mule."

     
Matt nodded slowly.

     
Sylvia let out the air from her lungs with a huff. "Sometimes you're a real shit."

     
"Thanks for the compliment."

     
"Thanks for the research."

     
As Sylvia watched Matt's Caprice pull out of the drive, she felt a tinge of envy. For the first time in months, she actually wished she was going to prison.

CHAPTER EIGHT

G
HOSTLY IN FADING
daylight, a handful of protesters stood vigil outside the entrance to the Penitentiary of New Mexico. One protester held up a black-and-white placard as Matt England downshifted for the turn off Highway 14. The sign read
EXECUTION IS MURDER.

     
Matt caught a glimpse of the protester's pale and drawn face. Why did professional crusaders always look as though they were allergic to sunshine? Didn't these people have lives of their own? In Matt's experience, they attached like leeches to the cause of the moment.

     
He glanced in his rearview mirror and saw the figure receding, now the size of a child's puppet. The state's "murder" was going to take place in less than a month. Death by lethal injection for a torture-killer named Cash Wheeler. The first execution in New Mexico since 1960, when David Cooper Nelson was put to death in the gas chamber for the murder of a hitchhiker. The chamber was still in the basement of the pen's old facility. Collecting dust. The new "death house" was a small, sterile concrete-block building constructed in 1990. It sat just outside Housing Unit 3-B at North, the maximum-security facility, where Matt was headed now.

     
He parked next to a hot cherry-red Camaro, climbed out of his Chevy, and walked around to greet Rosie Sanchez. He smiled to himself; Rosie didn't look like a penitentiary investigator—maraschino nails, copper curls almost touching her round butt, five-feet-two and given to wearing spike heels. At the moment, she was balanced on the trunk of her Camaro, filing a polished red fingernail that was brighter than the car.

     
Rosie tucked the file into her suit pocket and cocked her head at the state police criminal agent. "Took you long enough."

     
"Eleven minutes." Matt popped the Chevy's trunk and removed camera and crime-scene kit.

     
"More like twenty-five." She slid gracefully from the Camaro and dusted herself off. "Did I interrupt the lovebirds?"

     
"Yeah, actually—"

     
But Rosie was already leading the way across the parking lot to the maximum unit's main entrance. The multi-building facility dated to the mideighties; all slab concrete, riot glass, high-voltage T-line edging the roof, perimeter fence, and razor ribbon.

     
"On the phone you said OD. What've we got?"

     
"Looks like heroin. Paramedics were here before you. Body's at St. Vincent's because they tried to resuscitate. No luck. His cell's cordoned off." As an investigator, Rosie knew how to process a crime scene, but serious offenses at the pen fell under the jurisdiction of the New Mexico State Police. She continued, "It's straightforward."

     
They were almost to the glass doors, and Matt slowed. He knew that every afternoon, on any yard in the joint, drugs were changing hands as easily as cigarettes and bullshit. "But something's bugging you."

     
Rosie shook her head and grabbed the lock bar on the first of the glass doors. She stood stock-still. "The dead guy wasn't just a max inmate. He was on death row."

     
Matt whistled softly. At New Mexico's penitentiary, death row was not a physical location but an administrative designation. The state's four death row inmates were housed in a segregation pod in Unit 3-B. All three dozen prisoners in that pod were kept under twenty-three-hour lockdown. For one hour of every day, each of the inmates exercised in a completely enclosed cage that measured approximately twelve by twenty feet. Alone. And each inmate came into contact with only a small, select group of correctional officers.

     
It was an accepted fact of prison life that drugs came in with staff. There weren't enough girlfriends, wives, mothers, or buddies to account for the volume of flow. Rumors ran fast, and Matt thought he could name at least three longtime employees who were trafficking. But proving it was another matter. Snitches didn't last long in the joint.

     
As if she read his mind, Rosie said, "I know every C.O. on that duty roster."

     
"One of them's dirty."

     
Rosie looked grim. "And I've got a dead man in Ad Seg."

     
Matt flashed on the protesters outside the pen. He asked, "So it's Cash Wheeler?"

     
"No. Wheeler's alive. The overdose was Darryl Bowan, Wheeler's next-door neighbor." She pushed open the first door, and Matt followed her into the entryway.

     
The C.O. on duty at the admitting desk stood, recognized Rosie through the glass, and buzzed the locked security door. Rosie pushed down on the bars, and she and Matt entered North's small lobby and then the stairwell that accessed the gym, yards, and housing units.

     
While they were wending their way past Medical Services and then outside through Medical's asphalt-and-wire sally port, neither of them spoke. But as they stood waiting for a massive gate to roll open allowing entry into 3-B's perimeter yard, Rosie said, "It hasn't reached the press yet, but Cash Wheeler's started a hunger strike."

     
"Protesting his innocence?" Matt asked dryly.

     
"He got a raw deal, if you think about it." Rosie waved her fingers in the air. "The prosecuting attorney made his career on Wheeler's conviction. And now the governor won't commute to
life
because he's afraid it would brand him as liberal."

     
"He's right." Matt gave a curt nod. "People still remember a certain unnamed governor as the one who set the baby-killers free." After a moment, he asked, "If Wheeler's on a hunger strike, won't he be moved to the hospital?"

     
"Absolutely—if his lawyer ever eases up." Rosie nodded. "Anyway, the upcoming execution, the hunger strike—it's making the guys in the pod crazy."

     
"Crazy enough to overdose?"

     
"Bowan and Wheeler were buddies." She sighed.

     
"Tell me what you found." The gate clanged open with a shudder.

     
"He shot up in the thigh. He used a couple of condoms as a tourniquet to raise a vein." Rosie walked quickly, heels clicking out a two-four rhythm. Her legs were half the length of Matt's, but he always had to work to keep pace with her. One of these days he planned to sit down, do the math, and figure out how she moved so damn fast.

     
Rosie's mouth was moving quickly, too. ". . . a shakedown two days ago, but no drugs. Now Bowan's dead and there's a vial of whatever killed him in the sink."

     
Matt asked, "You remember that heavy-duty heroin coming up from Mexico last year?"

     
"
¿Chiva?
" Rosie spat out the local slang for heroin. "How could I forget? First it made the junkies psychotic, then it whacked them. We had six overdoses in one week."

     
"Didn't they call it Death Ride?"

     
"And Mexican Dog and Lone Ranger." Rosie nodded, looking unhappy.

     
Beyond the prison perimeter to the northeast, the land rose steeply for forty miles to Santa Fe Baldy in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. To the northwest, the Jemez range jabbed against blue sky, while the Ortiz Mountains stood due south. Man-made boundaries seemed small and mean in comparison.

     
At the metal entry door to Housing Unit 3-B, Rosie spoke into the intercom. Moments later a C.O. buzzed them through. Matt took in the familiar beige severity of the hall that connected the overhead control booth with each of the three separate pods in the unit. They passed the strip-search cell, and then Rosie stopped outside the door to the middle pod. Again, they were buzzed through. Officers in the control booth had visual access to all three pods.