Singularity (8 page)

Barry shut the door and sat down beside Sullivan. “We’re very sorry to keep you, but you understand how important this is?” Barry said. Hunt nodded and tried to smile, but it fell flat and his mouth went back to its original half-open state. “You don’t mind if we record this, do you?” Barry asked, placing his phone onto the table near Hunt’s coffee cup.

“No, not at all,” the officer said.

“So, Nathan—can I call you Nathan?” Sullivan asked, looking imploringly at the younger man.

“Sure …
Nate’s
fine, actually.”

“Good. You can call me Sully.
Nate
, tell us about your time here so far. How’d you become a prison officer?”

Nate’s
lips worked soundlessly for a moment. Perhaps he hadn’t expected such a friendly question to begin the interview. Sullivan smiled and wrinkled his brow, trying to get his left eye to open fully.

“My dad, I guess. He got me the job. He’s a prosecutor in
Aitkin
County
. He went to school with Warden Andrews. They play golf together sometimes. I did two years of law-enforcement training up north, and then started here last week.”
Nate
rolled his head on his neck and blinked several times.

“You okay,
Nate
?” Sullivan asked.

“Yeah, just really tired.
I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“We’ll try to keep this short. How do you like it here?”

Nate
chuckled. “So far, it sucks. I have the shittiest shifts available, which I expected, but the other thing is
,
it’s a little cliquey here.”

“‘Cliquey’?” Sullivan said.

“Yeah, you know. Nobody’s been real friendly, except the warden, and I’ve only seen him a few times, since my shifts are at night normally. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a hazing thing, but sometimes, I walk into a room and some of the other guards are at a table talking and they stop and look at me when I come in.”

Hunt shrugged. “And then last night.” The young officer shook his head and closed his eyes. “We saw a few films in school—car accidents and gunshot victims. I watched
Faces of Death
when I was younger.” Hunt’s eyes opened and he stared at the two agents in turn. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Let’s run through last night, okay?” Sullivan said. “How’d it start?”

Hunt breathed out and seemed to deflate an inch lower into the chair. His hands gripped the mug before him, but he made no attempt to drink. “I came on shift at eight in the evening. It’d been raining all day and Mooring
boated
me in. My car’s actually stuck here, so I got a lift from a friend to the edge of the water. I punched in, checked my report sheet for incidents during the last shift, and saw there’d been a fight between inmates.”

“Alvarez and
Fairbend
,” Sullivan said.

“Yeah.
I read the report. It was short. Just said Alvarez became irritated and started screaming something at
Fairbend
. Then he attacked him, and the guards on duty pulled him off and brought him down to solitary.”

“What time was that?” Sullivan asked.

“I think it said about six p.m. in the report. I didn’t think much of it. In fact, to be honest, I was a little disappointed that I’d missed some action. Nights are fucking boring around here, pardon my French.”

“Pardoned,” Sullivan said, smiling a little.

“So the shift went just like the last week had. I made rounds on the floor, checked in with the front desk, played with my phone for a while, until about midnight. That’s when I first started hearing the noises.” Hunt looked around the room and glanced over the agents’ shoulders, as if searching for an eavesdropper. His eyes took on the glint of fear that Sullivan had seen earlier.

Sullivan reached out to touch the young man’s hand. “
Nate
, we’re not going to tell anyone else what you heard. You can be honest. This is for the case, nothing else.”

Nate
swallowed and nodded, but Sullivan still saw doubt in his face.

“You ever heard a shipyard at night?”
Nate
said.

“A shipyard?”
Sullivan asked, tilting his head to one side.

“Yeah, like the docks over on
Superior
when some of the big ore boats come in and spend the night.” Sullivan shook his head and Stevens did the same. “The hulls of the ships groan with the change in weight and pressure when they’re unloaded, and it sounds like whales sometimes, deep underwater, talking to each other.”
Nate
paused, squinting at the memory he was, no doubt, examining. “That’s what it sounded like last night.”

“And you heard this from where?
Your desk?”
Sullivan asked.

“Yeah.
At first I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, it sounded like it was all around me, but then it was farther away and I narrowed it down. It was coming from the solitary level.”

Sullivan nodded and rubbed the scar over his left eye. Perhaps the kid had cracked a little with the lack of sleep and the trauma of seeing what was left of Alvarez. Maybe he should have let him get a few hours of rest before asking him to recall details that might be a bit blurry at the moment.

“I’m not losing it, if that’s what you’re thinking,”
Nate
said, seemingly reading Sullivan’s thoughts.

“I know you’re not,
Nate
. Tell me what happened next.”

“I followed it.
The sound.
The prisoners either didn’t hear it or they were pretending not to. None of them even got up from their bunks. When I got to the top flight of the stairs, I heard something else.
Screaming.”
Nate
stared down at the table, next to his coffee cup, and ran a fingernail along a crack in its surface. “You guys ever heard a man scream? I mean, really scream? Like he’s dying?”

Both agents shared a glance before looking back at the man across the table from them, who now didn’t look like a boy much past his teens. He had regressed before their eyes. “Yes, I have,” Sullivan finally said, and held Hunt’s stare when the younger man tried to see if he was lying.

Satisfied,
Nate
nodded and went back to scraping his thumbnail on the table. “It was horrible. I kept hearing it all day. I can still hear him. I shouldn’t have been surprised when I looked into the cell and saw what I did.”

“We saw the tape of the corridor when you found Alvarez. Where’d you go after that?”

“I ran. I ran up to the second level and right out to the front desk. I was radioing Shelly all the way, but she didn’t answer. I don’t know if it was the storm messing with the
walkies
or what. The rain had been coming down harder and most of the rest of the guards were outside stacking sandbags, so when I got to the lobby, I told Shelly what I’d seen. Then I called the local sheriff, told him we needed help. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I was panicking.”

“Did you see anything else unusual down in the solitary hall?
Anyone else?”

Nate
jerked his head back and forth. “No, no one. When I got to the door of the cell, he’d stopped making noise and all that was left was his head on the floor.”

Sullivan shifted uncomfortably in his chair, trying to find a position in which his wet clothes didn’t pull at his skin so much, and then stopped and leaned forward. “
Nate
, where was his head when you looked through the window?”

The guard squirmed in his chair and swallowed. “It was on the fucking floor, in the middle of the room.”

“You mean, in the vent at the corner of the room, right?” Sullivan said, letting his right eyelid drop so that it matched his other one.

“No, not near the vent.
In the middle of the floor.
His fucking eyes were still open, for Christ’s sake. I won’t forget that till the day I die.”
Nate
was becoming unstable. His hands shook as he tried to grip the cold coffee cup. His shoulders hitched as if sobs were merely a few seconds away.

“
Nate
, did you see the crime scene after you initially discovered it?” Sullivan asked, willing the guard’s fragile state to hold for just a few more minutes.

“N-n-no,”
Nate
finally stammered.
“I couldn’t fucking
go back in there. The closest I got was when I brought you down there this morning. Can we be done? Please?” The young man’s voice began to quaver.

Sullivan nodded. “Yes, we can be done. You did great,
Nate
. Go get some rest.” Sullivan said.

Nate
stood, nearly knocking the cup of coffee over in his haste. Barry rose and opened the door for him as he neared it, but Sullivan grasped the guard’s damp sleeve in a gentle grip, turning him back toward the table.

“You’re going to be just fine,
Nate
. You hear me?
Just fine.”

Nate’s
eyes finally
teared
up and a few drops slid down his sallow cheeks. He didn’t make a move to wipe them away. Instead, he swallowed and looked into Sullivan’s face, as if really seeing him for the first time.

“Not everybody freaks out like this, do they? There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there?”

The kid’s naked emotion and battered demeanor nearly broke Sullivan’s heart. He waited only a beat, and then shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with you,
Nate
. Every one of us goes through something like this. You’re just fine.”

Nate
waited for a moment on the threshold, and then seemed to accept Sullivan’s words. He slowly turned and gave a halfhearted smile to Barry, who still held the door. Sullivan listened to the fading footsteps of the guard, until Barry shut the door and sealed them in relative silence. The faint boom of thunder could be heard every so often, but it was muffled and somehow comforting. Perhaps it was knowing that the real world was still out there, carrying on as it always had despite what happened between the walls in which they now sat.

Barry leaned on the table and looked at Sullivan, his eyes like pinpoints. “Did you get what I did out of all that?” he finally asked and sat on the table’s edge, facing his friend.

Sullivan stared off through the glass walls of his mind, already debating the logic and probabilities of what the young guard’s testimony meant. After nearly a full minute of silence, he sat back, squeezing more water out of his shirt onto the floor, and gazed at Barry, his left eye barely visible beneath his sagging brow.

“Yeah.
It means the killer was still in the cell when
Nate
looked through that window.”

==

Sullivan listened to the dull buzzing in the earpiece of his cell phone and was about to hang up when
Hacking’s
gravelly voice finally answered.

“Hacking.”

“Hey, boss. Just thought I’d touch base with you on what we’ve got so far,” Sullivan said, leaning against the lobby entrance. He glanced over his shoulder and watched Barry discussing what they’d decided in the interview room with the guard at the front desk. Barry leaned over the desk and pointed animatedly at something, and the female guard motioned to the warden’s door, across the room.

“Good, I was just about to call you anyway,” Hacking said. He sounded better, Sullivan thought, happier. Although, in over two years of working with the man, he supposed he’d never really seen him happy. Not really. “Lee woke up this morning. I just got off the phone with his wife.”

Relief swam through Sullivan’s midsection, and for a moment he didn’t even feel the harsh pull and uncomfortable dampness of his clothes. “Good. Christ, I was still worried, even after what the doctor said.”

“He’s going to make a full recovery. He’ll be back in a few months, I’m sure. Now, what are we dealing with over there?”

Sullivan laid out the facts, or as much as he knew of them. Yes, Alvarez had been killed in the cell. No, there was nothing apparent yet. Yes, they’d already interviewed the first person on the scene. No, the crime-scene team hadn’t come up yet.

Sullivan listened to the low murmur of voices and the occasional phone ringing on Hacking’s end. The office sounded good right then.
Warm, dry clothes, a cup of coffee, and some simple paperwork.

“So what do you think?” Hacking finally asked.

“I don’t know. I’m waiting on Don to finish up in there, and then maybe we’ll have something.”

“That kid wasn’t lying?”

“That kid was scared out of his mind, boss. He couldn’t have lied if his life depended on it.”

Hacking grunted. “Okay, keep me posted, and hopefully something’ll turn up. The weather looks like it’s not going to cooperate, so you’ll have to make due with limited resources for the time being.”

“Sounds good.
We’ll have someone boat us across tonight if things run their course. Find a motel or something close
by,
maybe meet up with the sheriff in the morning.”

“Okay, be safe.”

“Thanks, sir.” Sullivan hung the phone up and mentally filed Hacking’s beef with him as over. Lee’s recovery had seen to that.