Flesh and Blood (6 page)

Pete nodded, but looking down at the body again, hesitated.

Before becoming the institutional inspector, Pete had been the local high school football coach. His cousin, a Potter County Commissioner, had gotten him the job, and though he had undergone countless hours of training and had been in the positions for a few years, he wasn’t getting any better at it—and wouldn’t. He just wasn’t suited for his assignment.

“Hell, I’ll do it,” Baker said.

Without waiting, he leaned over, reached his long arms down and rolled the body over.

It was a woman all right, the large augmented breasts busting out of her uniform appeared glued on—not moving when the rest of her did. Beneath her badly beaten and bloody face, her white skin was pale, her lifeless eyes green. It was hard to tell for sure in her condition, but she appeared to be in her forties, which was why the braces mounted on her small teeth looked so out of place.

“Anyone recognize her?” Stone asked.

No one did.

With more than three hundred officers and new ones transferring in all the time, it was nearly impossible to know them all.

The only blood on her uniform was a small amount that had come from her face, but how she had been murdered appeared obvious. It was around her neck. Beneath the blood-smeared brown collar of the CO shirt, her pale neck was ringed with bruises apparently made by large, powerful hands as they chocked the life out of her.

“Is it because of the … ah, condition of her face?” he asked.

“She don’t look even close to any of my people,” Patterson said, then, turning to Baker added, “Does she?”

Baker shook his head. “We’ve got a lot of officers and I’m sure I haven’t learned them all yet, but I don’t recall anyone with blond hair like that and braces.”

“Maybe the braces are new,” Pete offered. “Or the hair.”

“Definitely not her natural color,” I said, not to be left out.

“What the hell she doin’ out here?” Baker asked.

Less than ten feet from the perimeter fence, the salon blonde was about as far back as she could get.

“Meeting someone?” Pete said.

“When?” Stone asked. “How?”

The rec yard had been closed since two o’clock yesterday afternoon when a thunder storm rolled in.

“Body’s not wet enough to have gone through the storm,” I said.

“So she came after … .When? What time did it stop raining?” Stone asked.

“It was clear by four when we left for the day,” Pete replied.

“So she was killed after four, but how’d she get out here and why wasn’t she missed and how did her killer get out of here?”

The rec yard of PCI is surrounded by its own fence with two gates and a tower at its entrance. To enter or exit, the officer in Tower III needs to buzz the gates open. The gates are separated by a twenty-five-foot square holding area, and only one gate is opened at a time. The murdered woman had to have been buzzed into the rec yard at some point and her killer had to have been buzzed out.

“She could have been down here a while before she was killed,” I said. “She also could have been killed earlier somewhere else and dumped out here later.”

“We need to talk to the rec yard supervisor and the Tower III officers from yesterday,” Stone said.

Though unusual, it was obvious that he was planning to run the investigation.

“I’m on it,” Pete said. “They should be here in a few minutes.”

“And we need to know who she is,” Stone said. “See if the control room can tell us.”

When following protocol, which wasn’t always as consistent as it should be, the officers in the control room were supposed to visually identify everyone entering and exiting the institution by matching their employee photo ID with the person holding it. They were also in charge of logging and distributing institutional keys to staff.

“At some point we need to call FDLE and get a crime scene unit down here,” Pete said.

“At some point we will,” Stone said. “At the same point we give them two identities—this woman’s and her killer’s.”

“You wait that long, you’re gonna catch hell from them.”

“No, Inspector, you are,” Stone said. “I plan on blaming you. Now, all of you, find out who this woman is and who killed her, and find out fast.”

The three towers of PCI provided one of the best views of the flat North Florida landscape. In addition to the entire prison complex, we could see the seemingly unending pine forest that surrounded it.

Stone and I had climbed up Tower III with the officer who had been on duty last night and were now standing with him and the duty officer inside the tower.

“Who saw the body first?” Stone asked.

I glanced down at the body. It was nearly two hundred yards away, but clearly visible. Colonel Patterson was standing next to it smoking a cigar.

“I did,” Eric Taunton said.

In his early thirties, he was a thick-bodied white man with a thin mustache and freckles. His shift began at seven this morning.

Josh Weeks nodded.

“Josh was gathering his things when I first got in here,” he continued. “I just took a quick look around and—bam, there she was.”

“She?” I asked.

I looked down at the body again. It was difficult to tell from this distance that it was a woman.

“Yeah,” he said, following my gaze. “I’ve got real good eyes. It’s one of the reasons I got this post. It was easier to tell when she was on her stomach. I could see a lot of blond hair.”

I nodded.

“She just jumped out at me,” he said. “At first I didn’t believe what I was seeing, thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but when I looked back and saw she was still there I called Josh over and showed him.”

“Why didn’t you see it?” Stone asked. “There was at least an hour of daylight before Officer Taunton arrived.”

“I just missed it,” Weeks said. “I guess my eyes ain’t as good as his.”

His eyesight wasn’t the only thing that made me question his assignment to this post.

Much larger than Taunton, Weeks was nearly six-and-a-half feet tall and over three hundred pounds. He had dirty blond hair that was too long and needed washing, and breasts that could have benefited from the support of a bra.

“How do you miss a dead body on the rec yard right under you?” Stone asked.

“Warden, I’m sorry, but I just missed it,” he said.

“Did you even look in that direction once the sun came up?”

He started to nod, but stopped. “Honestly, I can’t remember,” he said. “Thing is, no one’s on the rec yard ’til after the shift change, so I usually concentrate on the compound.”

Stone nodded slightly, but his deep frown and posture communicated how displeased he was.

“What time’d you buzz her through?” Stone asked.

“I didn’t,” Weeks said.

“You sure?”

“Positive,” he said. “Hair like that, I’d remember.”

“She was in there before eleven last night when you started your shift?” Stone said. “That’s a long—”

Weeks shook his head. “I worked a double yesterday,” he said. “I was here from three yesterday afternoon ’til seven this morning. She didn’t come through during that time.”

Stone and I both looked over at Taunton.

He shook his head. “She didn’t come through during my shift yesterday,” he said. “I worked from seven until three and I’m positive I didn’t buzz her in during that time.”

“You realize what you men are saying?” Stone asked. “That she didn’t enter the rec yard yesterday.”

They both nodded.

“That seems far less likely to me than that one of you buzzed her in without realizing it.”

“I’d remember,” Taunton said. “No one gets in without me knowing it.”

“Me, too,” Weeks said, though a little less confidently.

Stone turned to me. “Anything else?”

“Either of you know who she is?” I asked.

They both shook their heads.

“Either she’s new,” Taunton said, “or we’ve never worked the same shift.”

“Yeah,” Weeks said. “Same here.”

“So, you don’t know her and didn’t buzz her in,” Stone said. “Yet there she is on the ground, murdered in a part of the institution you’re responsible for.”

When we stepped out of the tower, Pete and Baker were waiting for us near the gate.

“What’ve you got for me?” Stone asked.

He stepped up to the gate and the rest of us followed. We were buzzed into the holding area by Taunton, then once we closed the first gate and walked to the second one we were buzzed back into the rec yard.

“Nothing helpful,” Baker said. “Everyone’s accounted for.”

Stone cupped the crooked fingers of his bony hand around his ear. “Retransmit.”

“Everyone who entered this institution yesterday is accounted for,” he said. “Logs look good. All the keys’ve been returned. I couldn’t find any discrepancies.”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Stone said.

“But,” I said, “it does fit with what Taunton and Weeks said.”

Stone looked at me, his face a question. “You believe them?”

I shrugged. “Not necessarily,” I said, “but the fact that it lines up with what the control room says gives it more credibility.”

When we reached the body again, the colonel was puffing on his cigar. It was narrow and cheap and had a beige plastic filter tip on the end.

“Put that thing out,” Stone ordered. “You’re standing near a crime scene.”

Stepping a few feet away, Patterson threw the cigar over the fences and in the direction of the small logging road peeking out of the woods beyond.

The perimeter fence is actually two, ten-foot high fences, both of which are topped with looping razor wire, with twenty feet between them and more rows of looping razor wire inside. The design makes it impossible to enter or exit the institution over the fence without getting tangled up in razor wire and having your flesh filleted.

“You trying to start a forest fire?” Stone asked.

“It landed in dirt,” he said.

I looked over in the direction of the road. The cigar had landed on a patch of yellowish-brown grass between two square indentations about ten feet apart and close to the fence. At least if it started a fire, we’d see it.

“Did all the inmates eat breakfast before we closed the yard?” Stone asked.

Patterson nodded.

“How long can we keep it closed before we have to feed them lunch?”

Patterson looked at his watch. “I’d say we could go five or six hours.”

Stone nodded, then turned to Pete. “How long before we need to call FDLE?”

“We should have already,” he said. “Even when we do, it’ll take them nearly two hours to get here.”

As the small group of men continued to talk, I stepped over to the first fence and looked out. I knew the victim had not come through the fences—her body bore none of the scissored signs, but I wondered if her killer had escaped this way. It was highly unlikely. The fence sensors would have alerted the control room if he had attempted to climb the fence, and even if they had been malfunctioning, perhaps from the thunderstorm, he’d most likely be tangled up in the razor wire bleeding to death.

Still, it didn’t hurt to check.

There was no flesh or blood on the gleaming blades of the razor wire. No one had been through the fence. I studied the narrow logging path. There were no tracks near the head of it and only some faint tire tracks, most likely belonging to an ATV further back.

“What the hell’re you doin’?” Patterson asked. “No way he got out through there.”

I nodded. “Just looking,” I said, walking back over to join them.

“So we’ve only got a few hours,” Stone said. “How do we proceed?”

“Has anyone talked to the rec yard supervisor?” I asked.

Stone raised his eyebrows, then looked over at Pete.

“I’m still tryin’ to find ’im,” he said. “He didn’t show up for work today and he’s not answerin’ his phone.”

Stone’s eyebrows arched even higher.

“John, you think your dad would send a deputy by his house to see if he’s home?”

I nodded. “I’ll give him a call him in a minute.”

“So how do we proceed?”

“We need to know who the hell she is,” Patterson said.

“That’s the other thing,” Pete said. “No one seems to know. I described her to the control room officers, the admin lieutenant, the guy at the center gate. No one’s ever seen her.”

It was one thing for none of us to recognize her, but unless this was her first day, it seemed unlikely that no one in the control room or security building would. If it wasn’t so unthinkable we might consider that she came in from outside, but it was as difficult to get in the prison as it was to get out.