Parishioner (37 page)

There was a visitor’s pass left for him at the guard post of the state court building. He’d left his pistol and throwing knife in a locked briefcase in Winter’s car and so passed through the metal detector with confidence.

Cylla was waiting for him in conference room four-FB. She was sitting at the far end of a long table designed for many lawyers and plaintiffs in some corporate case. There was a window at that end of the room and sunlight flowed over the legal predator like heavenly grace on a crocodile’s back.

“I hope you’re right about this, Ecks,” she said as he took the seat next to her.

“Hope is all you can ask for in a building like this,” Ecks replied.

Cylla smiled and shook her head, denying and agreeing with the same gesture.

“When’s he get here?” Ecks asked.

“Three minutes.”

“Exactly?”

“They hop for me around here,” she said. “Money knows every language that’s ever been spoken.”

“So how does this work?”

“He’ll come in under heavy guard and we’ll confer. Then I’ll bring him to be released by an officer of the state’s attorney. That’s the charade.”

“And me?”

“You are my personal security, Mr. Noland.”

She handed him a paper ID in a plastic badge. This he attached to the lapel of his copper-colored
suit.

“Tell me somethin’, Cylla.”

“What’s that, Ecks?”

“How can a stone-cold mass murderer like Lehman get a day pass from prison?”

“The police were too eager,” she said. “They came into his home without a warrant and made ninety percent of their discovery on that bust. It wouldn’t mean a thing except for a thirty-thousand-dollar retainer my firm got to overturn the verdict. He’ll go back in, but right now the law is on his side.

“The thing I don’t get is why you need to talk to him,” Cylla added. “I mean, he’s just a piece’a shit madman. When the partners offered me the case I turned them down flat. I mean, I’ll still work for them, but I won’t try to free a man like that.”

“I don’t know either, Cyll. I just wanna cover all my bases.”

“It won’t be pleasant.”

At that moment Ecks registered the heavy metal chair against the wall on the other side of the lawyer. There were leather manacles on the arms and front legs of the specially designed prisoner’s seat.

Thirty seconds later there came a knock. Cylla went to the door and opened it wide.

Four uniformed guards came in surrounding a manacled, gray-clad, crew-cut inmate: a young white man with smoldering blue eyes and a grimace that could have come only from painful and pain-giving experience.

His muscles were bulging from weight lifting and fear. His gaze rivaled many corpses that Ecks had seen.

Lester Lehman was silent while the guards maneuvered him into the chair and cinched tight the leather manacles. His scrutiny settled on Ecks. The stare, Rule thought, was like the invisible gaze of a predator bird ready to dive down from the heavens.

The head guard had Cylla sign a form attached to a clipboard and then led his friends outside to wait in the hall.

“Where’s Jonas?” Lester asked when the guards were gone. He was still staring death at Ecks.

“Mr. Nayman had a sudden health problem,” Cylla said. “He wanted me to stand in for him, seeing that you were already down from San Quentin.”

“Who’s the nigger?” Lester asked then.

Ecks smiled.

Cylla did not answer the question.

“What is this shit?” Lester said.

“You got three years in San Quentin,” Ecks uttered. “I got forty-six in the street. Let’s not play, son.”

“I’m no blood to you.”

“You’re not blood to anybody you know. When you were eighteen months old your parents left you at a day-care center, where you were kidnapped with two other boys. Your new parents, the Lehmans, bought you from a slaver. Probably thought they couldn’t have children.…”

All the prison-made hardness fell from the young killer’s face. He sat forward, leaning against his restraints.

“You probably felt like you didn’t belong,” Ecks continued. “And then, when your parents had a child of their own, they began to see the flaws in you. Maybe they even stopped loving you. That’s probably why you killed them. I mean, what else could you do?”

“No,” the child in Lester said.

“Oh, yeah,” Ecks said. “And then a man named Martindale had Jocelyn who’s calling himself Ansel Edwards hire Jonas Nayman to find a loophole and get your sentence temporarily overturned. They needed you outside the halls of justice, where you would be a sitting duck. The only thing I need to know, Les, is where you were meant to meet the man who contacted you.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, coon.”

“Come on now, Les,” Ecks said easily. “Name-callin’ is for the playground. We out here in real life now.”

Out of the corner of his eye Ecks could see Cylla watching him.

Lester was shivering ever so slightly. His whole life had been rendered before him like a puppet show.

“I wasn’t adopted,” he said.

“Oh, yes, you were. You talk about me bein’ a nigger, the child of slavery. But you, Les, you yourself were the real slave. You murdered your masters but that shit didn’t get you home.”

Ecks hoped, for Lester’s sake, that those leather restraints were strong and well tied. The
youth was pulling against them with all his might and hate and anger.

“Think about it, Lester. You lost your inheritance when you killed the Lehmans. Why would somebody hire Cylla’s expensive law firm to help your sorry Aryan ass outta jail? Nobody does anything for nuthin’; you know that. So there’s got to be a payday somewhere. Got to.”

“You don’t know.”

“Oh, yeah, son. I do. I really do. I know that the state’s got a whole drawer full of evidence that will put you right back in. Somebody paid thirty thousand dollars for a clear shot—plain and simple.”

The Harlem gangster had hit the high notes of Lester’s young life. He hated his family, remembered in his veins the humiliation of his kidnapping, knew for a fact that he was being set up by the lawyers and whoever hired them. But what choice did he have? He was doing life times four for a crime he couldn’t deny. Even a day of freedom and a chance to run was worth whatever waited for him.

Ecks saw all this in the seemingly vacant blue eyes that had made Lester such a prize when he was a toddler.

“Why?” Lester asked after traveling the entire wrong-way path of his life up until that moment.

“Same as always,” Ecks opined. “What’s true for every soldier, cop, workingman, and thug—worth more dead than alive.”

“And so you come in here and wanna save me?”

“I don’t give a fuck about you, Les. Not one fart in a bean factory. Only reason I’m even tellin’ you what I know is that it’s the right thing to do. Like puttin’ a bullet in a stray dog’s head after a car accident—to end his sufferin’. I know you not gonna help me, man. But I had to be here and you asked why so I told you. After it’s over, Cylla here will give you the names of the three couples who might be your real parents. Maybe at least you’ll know why you did what you did. You couldn’t help yourself, brother. I mean, you just like some windup toy put on the tabletop and let go to run off the side.”

“Fuck you,” Lester said. It was almost a question.

“Naw, man. You the one got fucked in the ass by life. Messed you up so bad that you ain’t never at no time known where you was or why. I’m here to tell you about it. I’m the first
person in your whole damn life told you the truth. Pay attention, young man. This ride will not go around for another pass.”

Lester Lehman sat back in his chair, easing up on the restraints that held him. He looked into his enemy’s eyes and saw the truth there. He wanted to ask a thousand questions that had been in his mind since he could remember. But he knew that the black man sitting in front of him didn’t care. The truth he shared was more like a bomb than a balm; like a hidden knife waiting on the prison yard—it was aimed at his heart.

“We’re going to take you down to the release room now, Mr. Lehman,” Cylla Pride said. “You’ve heard what my colleague had to say. Would you rather I stop this proceeding?”

“No … no. Let’s get on with it.”

The guards were summoned and Lester was released from his chair. His defiant demeanor was now more subdued, though he still glanced daggers at Ecks when he could. The seven of them traveled down a long wide corridor toward an elevator, which they took six floors down.

They got to a control room maintained by three uniformed sentries watching nine monitors and guarding a door that kept you a prisoner or set you free. A small group of business-suited officials had gathered near the metal door.

Ecks turned his head casually, studying the monitors. He just wanted to see who was out in the hall on the other side waiting for Lester. There might not be anyone there. Winter was in his car outside using his own video camera. It was a long shot, but this would be only the first in a series of attempts to find the man assigned to kill the lost children.

At his second pass Ecks saw the man who was responsible for at least two of the murders committed.

“Is the paperwork in order?” a smallish Hispanic man in a tan jacket asked Cylla.

“The papers have all been filed,” the deacon-lawyer replied.

She handed the little man an envelope, which he opened. He took out a folded sheet of paper and read it through—twice.

“This looks to be in order.”

“One moment,” a voice said from the elevator door.

This was a slender man with an exaggerated Adam’s apple. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a thin undertaker’s tie.

“There’s a holdback,” the emaciated man said. “Mr. Lehman attacked a man with a deadly weapon on prison grounds three months ago. The inquiry means that he must be held over in county jail until the courts here make a ruling.”

“What the fuck?” Lester said.

“Put him back,” the lean bureaucrat said. “He must be held over.”

Ecks didn’t talk to Cylla again that day. He made his way back up with the guards holding Lester and then quickly to the front of the courthouse. He was looking around for the killer but came up empty.

“Brother Ecks,” Winter called.

He was parked at the curb, waving from the window.

Ecks strolled over to his friend.

“I got the shots you wanted, man,” Winter said. “How’d you do?”

“All in all I can’t complain.”

“That’s good, right?”

“That girl you met,” Ecks said, “that Cindy Simpson.”

“What about her?”

“I met a girl too. Her name’s Benicia.”

“She fine?”

“You want to have a double date at Fisherman’s Grotto up there on the PCH?”

“When?”

“Tonight.”