CELL 8 (19 page)

He stands there and says that I’m dead.

He declares me dead, says that John Meyer Frey died
. . .

. . .
that I died at zero nine thirteen at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Marcusville.

But I’m lying here.

Grens had hoped for a reaction, anything, something that showed that the little shit had understood that this was serious.

Nothing.

He just sat there, didn’t even blink.

“I’m not dead. You can see that, you can all see that I’m alive.”

Grens stood up abruptly. The lightweight chair tipped back and fell over when he tried to lean on it for support.

“Yesterday evening and through the night we’ve been in touch with Interpol in Washington and the FBI in both Washington and Cincinnati.

Their documents show—and I want you to listen fucking closely here—that you are identical to one John Meyer Frey.”

The thin, pale man on the chair in front of them trembled, not much, but enough for them to notice.

That name . . . he hadn’t heard it . . . no one had said it for over six years.

“So,
Frey
, according to the same documents, you died in a cell in Marcusville, convicted of capital murder—the first-degree murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. You fucked her first, then put several bullets through her body. She was found dying on the floor of her parents’ home.”

John was no longer trembling, he was shaking now, as if his body was in spasm. He whispered.

“I loved her.”

“You were stupid enough to leave the house when your sperm was deep inside her.”

“We’d had sex. Because we loved each other. I would never . . .”

“According to the FBI, you died in your cell only months before you were due to be executed. I have to say, Frey, I’m quite impressed.”

John got up from his chair, sat down on the dirty floor and leaned back against the wall, his face in his hands.

“Your father, he’s called Ruben Frey, isn’t he?”

He curled up even more. It was cold on the floor, a draft from somewhere; John was colder than he’d ever been before, but that wasn’t why.

“It’s only a few hours since the FBI in Cincinnati had their first interview with him. He states clearly that he has no idea what you are doing here. He claims that you’re dead. That you are buried in the cemetery in Otway, about twenty miles west of Marcusville, the same cemetery where your mother is buried. He says he knows that it’s true because he arranged and paid for the funeral. He says he knows that it’s true because he was there himself, because he saw your coffin being lowered into the ground, because he said farewell to you in the company of around twenty other people.”

His voice.

I haven’t heard his voice for over six years.

“But your father can claim whatever he likes. The identification of you is one hundred percent.”

I know that he was involved.

Not how, he never said, but his face was there in the backseat of the car, I can picture it whenever I want.

“
Do you have anything you would like to say at this point?”

He was always so careful, about justice, with the authorities.

Now he’s being questioned by the FBI again.

For me!

For my sake.

Hermansson had been sitting next to Grens, listening. She had eventually managed to repress the discomfort that was suffocating her, she was present again, she was a policewoman, she was the one who had first questioned the man she had arrested in his home on suspicion of aggravated assault, it was she who had offered him a cigarette, and something to drink, and fed him the promise that she would almost certainly be able to arrange for him to meet his family, she was the one who had been closest to winning the suspect’s trust.

She put a hand on Ewert’s shoulder, asked him to swallow his next question, indicated that she wanted to ask it.

Ewert Grens nodded.

“John.”

She went over to him, sat down close to him, leaned back against the cold wall as well.

“Things are the way they are. We know what we’ve just been told.

There’s not much we can do about it right now. But you
have to cooperate
with us. For your own sake.”

She took out a pack of cigarettes from her inside pocket, shook it until one came out.

“Cigarette?”

He looked at it.

“Yes.”

She gave it to him, lit it for him, waited while he smoked, the minutes it took until it was finished.

“I want to talk to my wife first. She doesn’t know anything. She has the right to hear it, from me.”

Hermansson gave him another cigarette, then turned to the others and looked at Ågestam.

“Well?”

“No go.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a blackout. That’s what I mean. That includes wives.”

She didn’t take her eyes off him.

“I would ask you to reconsider. How can she affect the investigation?

And we need to know what this is about.”

“No.”

“Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

Hermansson pointed to the door. Ågestam shrugged.

“Sure.”

They left the room, Lars Ågestam first, Hermansson behind him; she avoided looking at the others as she shut the door.

She knew that she was right. But she also knew that the likelihood of her being proven right would increase if she didn’t embarrass the public prosecutor in front of the others.

She looked at him, her voice was steady.

“We simply do it at the same time. He tells us. But she’s there when he does it. She listens at the same time. All he’s asking is that she hears it from him. What do you think?”

The public prosecutor said nothing.

“Ågestam, I think you also realize that it’s in the best interests of the investigation. The only purpose of this investigation is to clarify the facts.”

Lars Ågestam ran a hand through his hair, pushing his fringe farther to the side it was already lying on.

He realized that what she was saying was logical. It wasn’t according to the book, and it was far from in line with the order of full restrictions, but it might undeniably be the step forward that the investigation so badly needed.

He sighed, turned around, and opened the door again.

“We’ll interrupt this informal interview for a while. And bring in the wife. If that’s what it takes to make a dead man talk.”

KEVIN HUTTON SHOULD PERHAPS HAVE GONE TO BED. IT WAS THREE IN
the morning, local time, and he felt his eyes straining as he drove along the wide, dark, and almost deserted highway between Cincinnati and Columbus.

But it wasn’t possible to stop.

He had to know where all this weirdness led, what it was that had happened, if the friend from his teenage years whom he’d grieved for, whose funeral he’d attended, was alive, if he had in some way managed to get out of one of the country’s top security prisons, if he had in some fucking way succeeded in escaping from the prison’s Death Row a couple of months before he was due to be executed.

A hundred miles, about an hour to go. He had stopped at an all-night food place and bought a hotdog in an artificial, slightly yellow bun and some of those energy drinks based on caffeine and chemicals. He wasn’t actually that tired, but the snow and the dark and encounters with headlights on the wrong setting had irritated his eyes and minced his mind, and he had felt dizzy for a while. Some air, some food, some sugar; he was feeling better already.

Ruben Frey was still in Cincinnati. They had questioned him for a good hour in the FBI’s office; then they had sat long into the night, looking out over the darkened city, while they re-questioned him, a father who consistently claimed that his son was dead, that that was all he knew, that he was still grieving six years later.

He hadn’t been able to give a satisfactory explanation as to why he had remortgaged his house for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars with a branch of the Ohio Savings Bank in Columbus five months before John’s death, and when they continued to press him without getting an answer, he had after a while started to cry and begged them to stop scratching at the wounds that had slowly started to heal.

Frey was now asleep at the state’s expense in a bed on the outskirts of town—unnecessarily expensive given what an average hotel it was.

Benjamin Clark was in the room next door, not that it felt like there was any risk that Ruben would open the door and run, but Kevin Hutton wanted to do this right—after all, he’d never come across a case like this in more than ten years’ service with the FBI.

He’d never heard anyone talk about someone escaping from Death Row in any prison anywhere, ever.

Nor had he ever had anything to do with a dead person who was alive.

And he had never previously been involved in investigating a person who had been so close.

They had been there for each other for as long as he could remember. They had been neighbors in Marcusville; had played together with their red fire engines in the sandpit in the local playground; been in the same class, shoulder to shoulder to and from school every day; had played soccer together on Marcusville’s various youth teams when they were deemed too weak for football; they had longed for girlfriends together, sat and jerked off together in the cellar room every time they found old man Richards’s porn magazines in the trash—they had figured out when he chucked them, once every two weeks when a new one was issued.

They had lost contact a bit toward the end; John had met Elizabeth and screwed for real and had done two stints in a juvenile correction institution, for aggravated assault both times.

They had felt it even then, by the time they turned seventeen, that they were headed in different directions.

Kevin had become a special agent with the FBI.

John had been sentenced to death for murder.

But he had never really understood
what
actually happened. Sure, John was volatile, pigheaded at times, he seemed to seek out conflict and enjoy it, but he wasn’t the sort of person who would first sleep with his girlfriend and then shoot her before calmly walking away.

He had visited him in prison several times in the first few years, decided to do it as a friend, a private individual, nothing to do with his rights as a federal agent, but all the procedures he had to go through as a result every time he wanted to go there—the hysterical security checks and feeling that you could never say anything without someone sitting there listening and taking note—made him lose the will, so he went less and less frequently and not at all in the last year.

Then suddenly John was dead.

Kevin had thought about visiting, of course he had, before he was due to be executed. He had followed Ruben’s and the lawyers’ appeals in the papers and realized that the governor was not going to postpone it any longer. John was not going to be granted clemency, he was going to be killed by lethal injection, confirmation that Ohio would once again be included in the statistics for completed executions.

Then he died in his cell.

Kevin gripped the wheel even harder, finished what was left of the energy drinks.

It had been hell.

He had undoubtedly undervalued their friendship, fooled himself into thinking that these were new times, that they didn’t mean so much to each other anymore, that the fact that he didn’t go to see him anymore was proof that what they’d once shared had faded, gone.

He still felt it.

He’d stood there in the cemetery and listened to the priest and the few people who had said something and he’d understood that a part of him had ceased to be, that part of him was being buried there as he watched.

Twenty-five miles left. He accelerated.

He didn’t want to be late.

He was sitting in the front of his car and suddenly heard his own laughter—he was driving at seventy miles an hour in the middle of the night and laughing with nobody and without feeling happy.

“I should be ecstatic,” he said out loud.

If it’s true that you’re alive.

But it doesn’t work like that. Do you understand?

An animal darted along the side of the road in the headlights. He jumped, waited until what was a rather large rabbit had disappeared, and then accelerated again.

Jesus, John, you were convicted of murder!

You took a life.

So you owe one.

He had called Lyndon Robbins earlier that evening, as soon as they’d left for Marcusville to pick up Ruben Frey. Robbins had worked as the head doctor at Marcusville at the time of John’s death but was now in Columbus, head doctor at Ohio State University Hospital somewhere on Tenth Avenue.

They were going to meet at the hospital at four o’clock. Robbins had asked if it could wait until the morning, or even better late morning, but Kevin Hutton had cut short any discussion, had just explained that he expected Robbins to be at the entrance at 0400 hours precisely.

Lyndon Robbins was a big man, considerably taller than Kevin’s average height, and he was also solid. Kevin estimated that the doctor who was waiting outside the hospital entrance must weigh at least two hundred and twenty pounds.

They shook hands, his eyes were tired, hair uncombed, but he looked friendly, patient somehow. They went into the large hospital, Robbins pointed down a never-ending corridor and they walked along it for a while, then through a door, two flights of stairs and another door.

Robbins’s office was cramped, an oversized desk and piles of boxes, and as he closed the door behind them, Kevin looked around without success for somewhere to sit. It was a room that couldn’t hold much more than Robbins, as if his large frame took up any remaining space and he wore the walls. He pointed to a stool in amongst all the mess in the corner under the only window. Kevin leaned forward, got hold of it, and sat down.

Lyndon Robbins was breathing heavily, the walk and the stairs had made him sweat, despite the January cold.

“Kevin Hutton, special agent in charge, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“How can I help you?”