JJ08 - Blood Money (31 page)

“Did Hahn help the docs kill
Jacobs
and Allen?”

I shook my head, still finding it difficult to talk.

“They
didn’t
. . . Why this was the last
one.”

“Hell, I usually
can’t
follow you when you able to talk . . . so this’ll be . .
.”

I said, “What . . .
would
their . . . motive be . . . for trying to kill Lance?”

“Cover-up.”

“
Before
. . . they operated . . . on him? They took organs . . . from inmates . . .
didn’t
kill . . . them. When Allen was killed, the autopsy revealed what they had been
doing.”

“Not that, who tryin’ to kill Phillips?”

“
Allen
was the real target all
along.”

“Got to be Emile Rollins then. Only one left.”

Even with his
help,
I was moving
slowly.
The best I could do was small shutter steps like an inmate in shackles.

“First attempt on Lance was in a confinement cell.

Emile
couldn’t’ve
done that.”

“Got to be staff. Baldwin? Alvarez?
Foster?”

“
Only one person . . . could’ve done
it,”
I said.

I could feel myself waking
up,
the stiffness in
my
muscles breaking up and dissipating, the fogginess in my brain clearing, my vocal chords loosening, but my head throbbed and my vision was blurry.

“Who?”

I took in a breath.

“Lance himself. His cell door . . . was never unlocked. No one
drugged
him or . . . hypnotized him. Danny brought him the rope, but he did it to himself. It was smart. Make himself look like the intended victim from the very beginning. It was convincing
too.
In fact, I think he pushed it a little too far and nearly killed himself. If the nurse
hadn’t
gotten in the cell in time . . . He continued to play the victim and deflect suspicion
by
hiring the inmates to stage the attack on him in the
chapel.”

“So he killed . .
.”

“Danny and Brent. Switched bunks with them, made up that shit about his mattress being more comfortable and Danny feeling safer up there to make it look like their deaths were really attempts on him. This whole thing
was
never about an attempt on Lance or the actual murder of
Danny.
Those were attempts to disguise the real motive for the murder of Brent Allen.”

“Which was?”

“Money.
The motive for all this elaborate deception, and the taking of life, is
money.
It is all about greed.”

Up ahead the dorms rose up out of the darkness, floodlights illuminating their
bulky,
blocky gray masses.

“That why he used the cards?” he asked. “Make sure everybody know it was murder and not suicide so insurance company would pay?”

I shook my thick head
slowly.
“Nothing to do with that. He used the cards so he could make himself look like a victim. It was never about the life insurance. The Suicide Kings was something he used for subterfuge.”

“Thought you said it was about—”

“Money,
yeah. The small fortune left to Brent Allen by his grandfather. The life insurance scheme
was
just a
cover
for the real
motive.
The coverage had already lapsed. What he wanted was to be in
Allen’s
will, not the beneficiary of the
policy.
He’s
about to get out.
Allen’s
grandfather just died. He will inherit. A lot.”

Merrill shook his head.

“I think maybe he talked Danny into attempting or pretending to attempt to hang himself since he had just done it in Confinement, and then he made sure it really worked—or maybe he
didn’t
care. Just wanted it to look like another attempt. But with Brent . . . he
couldn’t
take any
chances.
He traded bunks with him, strangled him, then let him lie on the floor beside his bunk before he hung him.
He’s
the only one who could’ve. He was right under
him.”

“So Baldwin and Alvarez . .
.”

“Didn’t have
anything to do with the
murders,”
I said. “In fact, they were the last thing they wanted. They got caught because one of their victims, Allen, was also
Lance’s.
They
didn’t
kill their victims—that brings autopsies and investigations. They just stole their
organs.”

“You
think he knows you know?”

I nodded. “He
didn’t
stick around Medical—and Hahn to take him back. I think she might be—”

“Think you can
move
your slow ass any faster, or I gotta
carry
you?”

“I’m starting to come out of
it.”

“Then quit doin’ the inmate shuffle and get you ass in
gear.”

W
e were buzzed in to the massive hangar-like structure of D-dorm, then into Quad-3 to find Hahn standing on the top rail of the second-story catwalk, a noose tied around her neck.

Lance stood just behind
her.

Made of several sheets tied together, the noose
was
looped through a metal support beam in the high ceiling. The beam
worked
as a
pulley.
Every time Lance pulled down on the noose, it pulled up on
Hahn’s
neck.

Her hands were tied at her sides with an inmate belt, the tips of her shoes barely touching the top bar of the
railing.

Face
puffy and pale, eyes bulging, little helpless, fearful whimpers escaped from her constricted
airway,
out of her tight mouth, and into the enormous open space of the concrete-and-steel enclosure.

To
our left, the empty metal staircase leading to the upper rows of cell doors and the cement catwalk provided a clear path to Hahn, but it was too tall,
would
take too long to
climb.
She
would
be dead before we could get to
her.

Below the
walkway,
the solid steel cell doors in front of us were closed, dark behind their small strip of glass.

“Don’t
come any
closer,”
Lance yelled.

The quad was so large, its ceiling so high, his
words
were quickly lost in that
airy,
white-noise sound of the huge space.

He yanked on the sheet wrapped around his
arms
and it snatched Hahn
up,
her shoes slipping off her feet and falling down to the bare concrete floor
below,
taking a moment to reach the floor because of the distance, bouncing as they smacked the cement, the loud sound of their crash ricocheting off the hard surfaces.

Hahn gasped, the pitch of her whimpers becoming more shrill, more childlike, more panicked.

Most of the men had been in their cells, many of them sleeping, but a small group was beginning to gather on the ground floor. They looked up in silence, obviously shocked at what they were seeing.

“Get them outta
here,”
Merrill said.

A CO had just rushed in from the officers’ station, but was too busy looking up wide-eyed at Hahn to respond.
“Now.”

He began to slowly herd the resistant inmates.

Merrill turned and took a few steps toward them and they began to
move
much faster.

Within a few moments
we
were alone with Lance and Hahn in the quad.

If he
didn’t
release some of the tension in the sheets soon, there
would
just be three of
us.

“Ease off on the pressure
some,”
I yelled up at him. “Lower her down just a little. Please.”

“Why should I?”

“What do you want?
Why’re
you doing this?”

“My whole life . . . nothin’ ever works out for me.

Everybody’s
always
. . .
everything’s
been against
me.
I’m . .
.”

“You’re
a very rich man
now,”
I said. “The
world
is a different place for someone with the kind of money
you
have.”

He cocked his head and seemed to think about it.

Looking down at me, he said, “But they’ll never
give
me the money
now.”

“It’s
yours.
Nothing anyone can
do.
Oh, they may
try
to get it back, but you can hire the best
lawyers.”

“Hell,” Merrill said, “you can OJ all this shit
away.

Beat the charges.
Live
the good life on the golf course every
day.
All it takes is
money.”

“If you let Hahn
go,”
I said.
“You
can’t
kill her in front of
us,
with us standing here watching, and expect . .
.”

He fed a little slack to the noose.

Hahn’s
feet touched the rail again and some of the color began to come back into her face.

“The response team will be here any minute. Place’ll be full of officers with
guns.
Let her
go
now.
Let us take you in.
We
can protect you.
You
know I will.”

The PCI riot squad was a group of trigger-happy adrenaline junkies with far more testosterone than judgement. Its members were correctional officers who were good shots and gung-ho, all of whom had the required ego and requisite sophomoric swagger.
We
had to resolve this before they stormed the quad.

“I let
go,
she
hangs,”
Lance said. “She’ll fall and snap her neck. They shoot me, she
dies.”

“Don’t
let that happen. Go ahead and let her
down.”

“
It took you a
while,”
he said. “I almost fooled you,
didn’t
I?”

“You
did.”

“I’m smarter than people think.”

“
You
are.”

As we spoke, Merrill slowly eased under the overhang of the second-story
walkway
and
over
toward the stairs.

“If you could’ve just made them look like suicides and not used the cards . .
.”

“But I had to look like a victim. I knew
I’d
be suspected as soon as people found out about
Brent’s
will.”

“Hiring the inmates to attack us in the chapel was a nice
touch.”

“You
like that? I thought so
too.
I told ’em the most they could be charged with was assault and
I’d
make them rich for it. I knew
they’d
talk
eventually,
but
I’d
be long gone by then. Some warm tropical place without extradition, sipping champagne and earning interest.

Fuckin’ doctors fucked it up for
me.”

“It was a great plan. Ingenious. I mean
really,
really smart. I think you could get a book deal out of
it.”

He seemed to think about that, but only for a moment.

His head exploded a split second before the deafeningly loud report rang around the enormous concrete-and-steel
box.

The riot squad ran in. Boots on concrete.

Barking
orders.
Radios
blaring.

As Lance fell, he released his hold on the noose.

The sudden release of tension made Hahn lose her balance.

She tried to get it back, but
couldn’t
and fell off the
rail.

She
didn’t
fall
far.

The slack snapped out of the sheets, the noose tightening around her neck.

From the moment the shot was fired, Merrill was running up the stairs.

I tried to get beneath Hahn to catch
her,
but she
didn’t
fall far enough. Not even close. She was some
two
stories
above
me. Dangling.
Dying.

When Merrill reached the place where Hahn had been a moment before and where Lance now lay dead, he
couldn’t
reach the rope. Hahn was hanging from the high ceiling, the noose caught in the
beams,
too far
away
from the balcony for him to reach.

“What the fuck do I do?” he yelled. “I
can’t
reach
her.”

I
didn’t have
an
answer.

The riot squad was yelling “CLEAR” and other congratulatory exclamations, seemingly oblivious to Hahn. They probably thought it was another inmate.

I spun around looking for something we could use to reach out from the balcony and pull the sheet rope in so we could grab
her,
but there was
nothing.
Anything that could’ve
worked
could’ve also been used as a weapon and
wouldn’t
be in an inmate dorm.

Hahn was hanging
above
me and there was nothing I could do about it.

She had kicked a bit at first, but now the only movement was coming from the slight
sway
of the sheets, the only sound the small, sad creak that accompanied it.