Through the small rectangular window at the center of the door, Olivia spotted Leah at the officers’ station squirming away from Sergeant Hank Wickersham. Even through the metal door, she heard him cackling. His bald head thrown back. His mouth, a gash.
Olivia removed the oversized key from her pocket, the one she’d exchanged for a chit at the control booth, and turned the heavy lock. She stepped inside, immediately shedding her coat. Unlike most of the prison, the MHU had central heating and air conditioning, but it never seemed to work quite right, leaving her sweating or shivering most days.
“Mornin,’ Doctor Rockwell.” Hank’s face lit up when he saw her. He left Leah alone at the desk, her hands resting on her pregnant belly. But she didn’t wait long, widening her eyes at Olivia and escaping to her office before he noticed. “Maybe you’ll like my joke. Not like Doctor Party-Pooper Chapman over here.”
Hank gestured with his thumb to where Leah had been standing. “Hey, where’d she go?”
Leave it to Handsy Hank to tell jokes the day after a vigil. The day after they’d found Bonnie dead. He never could keep his jokes—or his hands—to himself. Rumor had it, he’d been transferred from the Los Angeles Women’s Institution a few months back after they’d caught him in a compromising position with an inmate. Yet somehow, he’d ended up here. The benefits of being a state employee. Never fired, just relocated. Exiled to gloomy Crescent Bay, the prison nobody volunteered for, and to the MHU no less.
“Alright, let’s hear it, Hank.”
He rubbed his hands together and grinned, showing Olivia the chipped front tooth where he’d taken a lick from a delusional inmate armed with a chair and a bad temper. “What do prisoners use to call each other?”
Olivia had heard Hank tell this one before, but she played along, shrugging at him as she chose a clip-on alarm from the box on the desk. She affixed it to the waistband of her slacks like she did every morning, trying not to focus on that cheap red push button. It looked like a child’s toy. A child’s toy that was supposed to keep her alive.
Anticipating his punchline delivery, Hank drummed his hands on the desk. Afterward, he’d punctuate it with his own cymbal crash too. He always did. But, before Hank could speak, someone beat him to it. A voice, deep and smooth as honey. Olivia knew it well.
“Cell phones. Good one, Handsy. Only problem, you told that joke last week. And it wasn’t that funny the first time.”
Hank glowered as if a dark cloud had passed over him.
“Where’d you come from, Devere? Unlock ain’t till nine. You’re supposed to be outside that door, waiting like a good little boy.”
Drake sat on the bench nearest Olivia’s office, running a casual hand through his slick black hair, before he covered his ears with a set of headphones. He fixed his eager eyes on Hank. The way a vulture would sight its next meal. “Door was open.”
Olivia’s stomach clenched, and she squeezed the key in her palm. How could I be so stupid? “It’s my fault, Hank. I must’ve forgotten to lock it behind me.”
Hank shook his head at her and sighed, and Olivia wriggled out from beneath the arm he’d set around her shoulders. “Don’t beat yourself up, Doc. You’ve got a lot on your mind. We all do. I’m sure you were distracted.”
Then he approached Drake. He stood over him, jabbing a finger down into the center of his denim blue prison jumpsuit. Drake didn’t flinch when Hank yanked off his headphones. Just smirked like he enjoyed it. “And you. Next time, I’m writing you up for being out of bounds.”
“Suit yourself, Handsy.”
Hank’s whole head turned splotchy, and he fled back to the desk, retrieving his keys, while Drake preened. Olivia looked on with guilt as Hank waved the other inmate patients through and locked the door with an authoritative click.
“Hey,” Drake said, once all the benches had filled with a warm audience of men in blue like himself. “What d’ya call chow hall duty at a women’s prison?”
Leah’s nine o’clock—Greg Petowski, schizophrenic—guffawed. Even the quiet inmates twittered in anticipation. Drake never disappointed his fans.
“Handsy Hank’s last date.”
Olivia had just turned eight years old the first time she’d sat face to face with a murderer. The man had towered over her like a mythical giant, his hands the size of bear paws. Though she’d grown a full two inches since they’d taken him away, he’d easily lifted her above his head, and she’d squealed with delight. When he’d laughed along with her—a deep chortle that shook his belly—she’d felt both scared and electrified. He’d told her he couldn’t leave with her and her mother that day. He had to stay there, in the middle of the redwood forest, in the old stone building that looked like a castle, until he’d finished his work. More than anything, Olivia had wanted to believe him. Because her mother told her to. Because she still thought grownups told the truth. But above all else, because he was her father.
“Look at me.” Drake wiped at his eyes, cast down on his lap. A lucky break for Olivia, because he didn’t seem to notice her jump at the sound of his voice just then. “Crying like a little girl.”
“Take your time, Drake. It’s okay to be vulnerable in here.” Olivia studied his cheeks for tear tracks. Dry as a bone.
“I’m devastated, Doc. Devastated. Nobody’s ever believed in me the way Ms. McMillan did. She recognized my talent. Everybody else just sees the Vulture. Not Ms. McMillan. She saw me as a writer, a poet, an artist. A man.”
Olivia heard James’ voice, reciting Drake’s haiku. She treats us as men. And the sharp scream—Maryann’s—that left a gaping wound in the silence that followed. When she thought of the scream, she thought of Bonnie, and when she thought of Bonnie she thought of her father. Of that other body she’d been carrying around for the last twenty-seven years, the heaviest kind of baggage. The mental kind. “Would it be fair to say Ms. McMillan was one of the few women you trusted?”
With a faraway look, Drake rubbed his chin. As if after three years of therapizing him, Olivia had stumped him. Had finally asked a question for which he didn’t have a ready answer.
“The only woman,” he said, finally. He paused for a beat, then grinned. “Well, present company excluded, of course.”
Olivia knew better than to return his smile. Drake wielded flattery like a weapon. Best to duck and cover. To return fire.
“Is that why you were rude to Sergeant Wickersham? Making jokes at his expense.”
“You mean, Handsy? That guy is a prick. Always hitting on you and Doctor Chapman and the rest of the lady psych doctors. I even heard him flirting with Ms. McMillan a few times right under her husband’s nose. So, I don’t see what me putting him in his place has to do with anything. You’re overthinking this one, Doc.”
“Well, I’m worried about you. If there are only two women you trust in the whole world, and you’ve just lost one of them, that seems significant. It seems like something that might cause you to lash out.”
“Lash out? Puh-lease. You think that was me lashing out?”
Drake flopped back in his chair, his hair falling in his face like a petulant teenager. Seeing him pout like that, it would have been easy to forget the reason he’d ended up in prison serving a sentence of life without parole. Five reasons, actually.