Page 116 of Return of the Spider

Bree said, “I thought you wouldn’t be showing up until long after midnight.”

“We had to leave the investigation. Turns out John and I are compromised.”

“What?” my grandmother said, setting her puzzle aside.

“Compromised how?” my wife said.

“Hold that thought,” I said. I went and got a beer, then sat down and told them.

When I finished, there were four empty beer cans on the coffee table, all of them mine, and shock and silence in the room.

“I don’t know what to do to change things,” I said. “To make it right.”

“You can always make some good out of the worst situations,” Nana Mama said.

“Diggs spent nearly twenty years in prison unjustly, and now he’s dead,” I said sharply. “There’s no fixing that.”

“I’m aware,” she replied calmly. “But get outside your head and all this nonsense about the destruction of your reputation. It’s tarnished a little, but that happens to the armor of any great knight. Go play some of your Gershwin. You’ll figure out what to do.”

Bree gazed at me with a degree of sadness. “That’s probably not a bad idea, babe,” she said. “A better one than having another beer, anyway.”

I shrugged and walked, wobbling a little, through the house and out to the porch, where I sat at the piano and once again tried to playAn American in Paris.

It was so bad, I almost gave up and went to the fridge for a fifth beer. But I knew in my heart that Bree was right, booze was not a good answer, so I kept playing.

Slowly, as sections of the piece came together, thoughts of Soneji, of Diggs, and of Maria slipped away until I was thinking of nothing but the music.

I don’t know how long I sat there playing.

But when I came back to reality, I knew exactly what I had to do to start to remove the tarnish on my armor and fight the pull of the downward spiral that threatened to swallow me for the second time in my life.

CHAPTER

98

Three days after leavingthe Pine Barrens, John Sampson and I took a long drive to the southwestern tip of Virginia and the Red Onion State Prison.

One of the commonwealth’s two supermax facilities, the Red Onion squatted in a large clearing in a forested unincorporated area near the town of Pound.

In aerial photos I’d seen, the prison was laid out in four repeating geometric patterns, like the design of an American Indian blanket. Seen from the parking area, the facility looked like what it was: a place for dangerous criminals to be caged for the safety of inmates in other correctional facilities.

“They’ve got the poor bastard with the worst of the worst these days,” Sampson said when we climbed out of his new Ford F-150 into ungodly heat. He loved that truck.

Before I could reply, I heard a man say, “Dr. Cross? Detective Sampson?”

We turned and saw a sharp-suited man hurrying toward us with an awkward gait; he carried a briefcase and kept pushing a pair of heavy black-framed eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose. He was in his late forties and wore a nice suit, but that move with the glasses and his wild tousle of now-graying hair gave him away.

“Ryan Davis,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m glad you could come, Counselor.”

“It’s the least I could do,” he said. “Except for a little gray at the temples, you guys look the same. I mean, it’s kind of amazing. Like it all could have happened yesterday.”

“Some ways, it feels like it did,” I said. “Shall we?”

We went to the gate, showed our credentials, and turned over our weapons while Davis’s briefcase was searched. Then we were led through six different security doors and gates before being met by Warden Daniel Celt, a tall whippet of a man in his fifties.

“Does he know we’re coming?” Sampson asked.

“He has no idea,” the warden replied.