Page 42 of Go First
“Tamen lex, lex manet,” Kate said, mostly to herself, recalling the interview with Edward Stone.
“Sorry?”
“The law’s the law,” she said.“As in: it’s one of the few things we can rely on.”
The Governor nodded.“For that reason, I believe we can and should still take pride in our justice system,” he went on.“Cox hasn’t been tried yet.When he does, if he’s found guilty, he can appeal the verdict.And he can carry on appealing for decades beyond that.Some people consider that a form of cruelty.Some people call it an indulgence, a courtesy accorded to killers that was not extended to their victims.I can see the merits of those arguments.But the right to a trial, and the right to appeal… those things are the hallmarks of a civilized society.The gangs in here might mete out their notions of justice with a bedspring or a shard of glass.Butwedon’t.Even a prisoner has rights.”
“Speaking of which, what about the bug in Cox’s cell?Has that yielded anything?”
The Governor looked sheepish. “He, er, located it on Saturday afternoon.Recited the Last Rites over it and flushed it down the toilet.”
“Right.Great.”
They stopped outside a solitary cell.A guard stood by the door, and opened a flap to reveal Santos inside, sat on the narrow cot, his face buried in his hands.The Governor gave Kate a brief nod in farewell, and the Guard let her into the cell.
Santos looked up when Kate entered.Eyes red-rimmed, cheeks streaked with tears.
“I am not an assassin,” he whispered.“I don’t know what came over me.One moment we were talking… and then it was like I was outside myself.Detached.And I knew—knew—that Cox had to die.I had this overwhelming sense of his malevolence, his pure evil.That it needed to be stopped.”
Kate kept her voice level.“Detached enough to hide a plastic knife in the prison?That’s not some wild impulse, Father.That’s serious planning.”
Santos looked startled.“I don’t remember anything.”
Kate was instantly sceptical of the whole amnesia act.But she gave Santos the courtesy of an answer.“If it was on your person or in your possession, then the guards would have found it.”
Even as she said that, though, Kate knew there were other possibilities.Drugs got into the prisons, and telephones, even explosives and kits for building guns… and only a percentage of them were smuggled.Much as it would pain a man like the Governor to admit it, in every correctional facility from Alaska to Wyoming, prison staff themselves were a major conduit of contraband.
“I—perhaps.I’ve had… other episodes.These past weeks.Blackouts, fragments I cannot recall.Maybe I prepared it then.Maybe I don’t remember.”He pressed trembling fingers to his temples.“Five years ago I was kidnapped—by a parishioner gone mad.I went to some therapy sessions, but I stopped...they weren’t helping but… I think I never really processed the trauma.”
Kate watched the man in front of her.His grief and shock seemed real.So did the shame.But the convenient gaps in memory, the ready-made past trauma?Hokum, or something darker?
“What’s going to happen to me?”His voice was almost childlike.
“You’ll be transferred to County Jail,” Kate said.“Charged with Assault with a Deadly Weapon, in the first instance.Murder in the first if Cox dies.”
She let the words hang.Santos let out a breath slowly, trembling, tears welling in his eyes.“You’d better get down on your knees and pray, Father.”
For a long moment he simply stared at her, lips moving soundlessly.Then he bowed his head and did exactly that.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sister Beverly Locke pressed the key into the back-door lock and felt the bolt resist her, stiff from the salt-soaked air that rolled off Portland Harbor.The damp always made the old brass temperamental.She twisted harder until the key finally gave with a reluctant metallic sigh.
Six steps up and she was inside the rear hallway of the Healing Hands Ankh-em-Maat Spiritual Center, the warm perfume of incense hitting her like a thick shawl.Sandalwood and something sharper—myrrh, maybe.Monday morning, and already the air carried the acrid sweetness of last night’s service, or whatever Sister Dorothy had been mixing in her tiny apothecary.Beverly pulled the door closed and leaned her shoulder against it, the first small exhale of the day slipping from her lungs.
Her mind had not stopped since she’d climbed out of bed.
That man with the too-white teeth and the crocodile grin—what was his name?Ethan?Evan?—was scheduled to arrive at ten this morning, and promising to demonstrate a “blessedly discreet” way of moving the Center’s funds through a daisy chain of accounts in Belize, the Isle of Man and half a dozen other jurisdictions she’d never heard of.No more taxes, he’d said, and winked like a salesman at a county fair.Anyone would think there something dishonest about what they were doing here.
Then, in the afternoon, a meet with the landlord: Mr Koukkoullis, who had left another curt voicemail containing terms like ‘market conditions’, ‘adjusting upwards’, and ‘long overdue’.Mr Koukkoullis was another strange one.A dapper dresser, and a dead ringer for Piers Brosnan, yet utterly, utterly lacking in charm.Whenever he visited the premises—something the Sister tried to prevent as much as humanly possible—he moved around the place with an expression poised halfway between disgust and mirth, touching the products, fingering the furnishings and the wall-hangings, occasionally sucking his teeth.The Sister always lit a half-dozen cleansing candles after his visits, saying that Koukkoullis brought bad energies with him.Beverly did not, fundamentally, disagree.
What else?Dammit, how could she forget?Slap-bang in the middle of the day: the Holy Envoys’ Growth Encounter Lunch.Beverly could feel the numbers in her bones, all the work it would require: nine hundred dollars apiece for the presentation and the sit-down lunch Sister Dorothy insisted on—nine hundred, times twenty-two attendees, all there for a lesson in “moving Ankh-em-Maat products at a higher spiritual vibration.”Beverly had banked the checks herself.
She almost blanched as she thought of the fine detail entailed.Fetching the trestle tables from the basement.And the big, plastic-backed tablecloth.That nice young man, Kano, from the caterers had been given the list in plenty of time: who ate meat, who ate fish, who had been told in a dream to eat only grains and pulses.But there’d be something wrong, because those danged women made finding something wrong into a championship sport.She remembered, dimly, a joke about a waiter approaching a table full of lunching ladies with the question: “Ladies, isanythingokay?”
There was such a lot to do, and every item Beverly remembered seemed to rattle like a bead in a jar as she set her handbag on the hall table and started down the corridor.She should have written a list.She used to be able to keep everything in her head, but she’d lost the knack.And guess what, she couldn’t remember when.She chuckled at that, for a moment.Her daughter would appreciate it.Provided, of course, Beverly remembered to tell her.
“Morning, Sister Dorothy,” she called, pitching her voice to carry.“It’s just me.”