My body can be like a teenage girl living on the margins where everything is either the best or worst that ever happened. The ordinary ups and downs of daily existence may pass me by, water off a duck’s back, or unleash the demons. There’s little predictability to what will flip my switch except that, when it happens, it happens without warning or opportunity to steel myself. Mine is an erratic vulnerability that drives me crazy, leaving me weak when I have to be strong and causing me to lose control when I have to be in control.
I might have shaken just as much had I known Kate was going to be at breakfast. Wound tight with anticipation, I still may have spun out like a top when I saw her. But her unexpected appearance was a gut punch that never gave me a chance. We had too much unfinished business, neither knowing what came after hello.
Traces of silver had found their way into her dark hair along with creases above her brow and a softening of her cheeks, concessions to her mid-forties that gave her a settled beauty. Standing two feet away, her head cocked at a slight angle, she carried herself with the same certainty that had first drawn me to her, observing and absorbing everyone and everything, intense blue eyes instinctively probing for secrets hidden in our facial expressions, body language, and the way we didn’t say what we really meant. Then and now, that was also one of our problems, the way she made me feel exposed, laying bare things I didn’t want to admit or share, no matter how open and obvious they were to her.
“Never better, Kate. Good to see you.”
She took half a step closer, palms out to catch me. I gripped the table with one hand, held her off with the other, not wanting to fall into her arms. Lucy quietly angled my chair away from the table, giving me a safe place to land.
I corkscrewed into my chair, ignoring my spasms as if everyone’s chin was supposed to be pinned to their shoulder, and pointed her toward the empty seat next to Ethan Bonner. He was sitting upright, eyes pinched with detached clinical concentration, like a scientist watching lab rats, making me wonder if he knew about my disorder and whether he had orchestrated this moment and why he would want to make me shake.
I glanced at Lucy, her red-faced glare at Bonner pinning it on him. I wasn’t so certain. Some things are just going to happen no matter what you do. And, I had to admit that I wasn’t shaking only because I was taken off guard. Uncomfortable or not, I was glad to see Kate.
“So, down to business,” Bonner said, signaling our server. “The omelets are terrific, and the coffee is passable. What’s everyone going to have?”
Bonner’s effort at forced normalcy worked for me. I didn’t have answers to the questions rattling around in my head and wasn’t certain I’d trust the ones he would give me.
“Veggie,” I told the server. “And toss in some bacon.”
I looked at Lucy, her face finding its normal hue even as her eyes widened at me. I nodded, telling her that she was on deck and to let it go. Everyone ordered, and everyone breathed. I led us in idle chit-chat about Kate’s son and my dogs, her neuromarketing firm, and my gig with Simon and Lucy until our food came, keeping it up while we ate, using the time to restore my equilibrium and get used to being with her again.
I thought back to the Janice Graham case, trying to remember whether she’d been in the courtroom at the defense table, deciding she hadn’t, guessing that she’d nonetheless been the unseen source of Bonner’s magic, wondering what debt she owed him that she was paying off at breakfast and whether she could pick Jimmy Martin’s lock and find out what happened to his kids.
Bonner looked at me and brought the conversation back to his client. “Kate’s going from here to the Farm to talk to Jimmy. I’d appreciate it if you’d go with her.”
“I assume you mean both of us,” Lucy said.
“No,” he said, taking a sip of coffee and smiling an apology to Lucy. “I mean Jack.”
“Bullshit!” she said, coming halfway out of her chair. “This is my case!”
Bonner was smooth, treating the question of whether we had agreed to work together as settled. Lucy’s reaction to his suggestion was as predictable as mine was to Kate’s presence, their argument irrelevant unless we were all partners.
“Three people are too many,” he said. “Jimmy will think you’re ganging up on him, and he’ll clam up even more.”
Lucy had interrogated enough witnesses to know that Bonner was right. She glanced at Kate. They had been close before Kate moved to San Diego. They’d kept in touch, Lucy telling me that Kate was doing fine and had stopped asking about me. Kate nodded at her, and Lucy sat back in her chair, arms folded over her chest, narrowing her eyes at me, not surrendering and demanding I do something.
“We can’t agree to anything until we talk to our client,” I said. “Peggy gives us the okay, we can decide who does what.”
“Kate is only here for a couple of days. You take too long and your client will be the big loser.”
“What’s your schedule?” I asked Kate.
She sighed. “It’s up in the air. There are some things happening at home. I may have to go back sooner than I’d like. Maybe tomorrow.”
I studied her, looking for a downturn in her mouth, a break in eye contact, or a lift in her lip that would tell me what she was thinking and feeling. She called these involuntary twitches micro facial expressions because they lasted a fraction of a second, too short-lived to be recognized and translated by someone not trained in her dark art. I didn’t see any of that. Instead I saw a wistful look in her eyes and a hopeful smile, maybe because that’s what I wanted to see.
“Then, I’ll tell you what,” I said to Bonner. “Kate joins our team for now. She and I go see Jimmy. Whatever we get stays with us until we have a chance to talk with Peggy. If she signs on, we’ll share and share alike. If she says no, Kate can stick with us or go home.”
Bonner put me back under the microscope. We both knew that Kate didn’t need me or anyone else with her when she talked with Jimmy Martin. He wanted something else, something he needed us for, and it wasn’t chasing down leads.
“One condition,” he said. “After you’re done at the farm, Kate interviews Peggy Martin and tells you and me what she thinks. If we don’t have a deal, Kate keeps working for me and you guys are on your own.”
There it was. Bonner didn’t think Kate or anyone else could get anything out of Jimmy Martin, so he didn’t care who talked to him. Peggy Martin was a different story. She wore her emotions on both sleeves. Kate would have no trouble reading her. If Peggy wasn’t being straight with us, I needed to know. I knew one other thing with equal certainty. Never underestimate Kate Scranton. Bonner had done that, his deal now worth more to me than it was to him.
“You know,” Kate said, “this isn’t the third grade. We aren’t on the playground, and Lucy and I aren’t waiting with bated breath to see which team we get to be on. It sounds like Peggy hired Lucy, not you, Jack. And I’m here because Ethan called in a favor, but the favor didn’t include being used as a bargaining chip.”
She said it with a steel smile, the knife going in deep enough to make her point without injuring any nerves. Bonner looked at me and shrugged, conceding the moment.
“Kate,” I said, “are you okay with Bonner’s deal?”
“Only if Lucy is okay with it.”
“Lucy,” I said, “let me go with Kate. This could be our best crack at Jimmy Martin.”
“What am I supposed to do? Stay here and order another cup of coffee?”
“You’ve got the closest relationship with Peggy, and you know that Kate can help us find Evan and Cara. Talk to her and convince her that this is the right thing to do. Besides, we both know Bonner is right. Jimmy will feel like we’re ganging up on him if all three of us show up for the interview.”
She thought for a minute, turning her glare back to Bonner. “Okay, but it’s not Kate I’m worried about.”
Bonner took her shot with a smile. “I wouldn’t be worried about Kate either if I were you.”
“Why do they call it the Farm?” Kate asked.
We were eastbound on Blue Parkway in her rented Chevy Malibu approaching LC’s Bar-B-Q.
“Turn here,” I told her, pointing to a street called Sni-A-Bar that fed onto Blue Parkway, one side of the triangle framing LC’s. “Before it was the municipal jail it was a farm, a two thousand–acre hog farm. The city bought it, sold the hogs, and built the jail. It opened in 1972. There are two hundred acres inside the fence. Now the city is talking about shutting it down to save money and moving the inmates to the county jail.”
“Ethan told me that Jimmy should be in the county jail but they didn’t have room for him.”
“That’s today. Long term, the city says it’ll be cheaper to pay the county to house their inmates than to keep the jail open. The county wants the money and is talking about building a new jail.”
“Which is less lousy, the Farm or the county jail?”
“Security isn’t as tight on the Farm. There are two dormitories, one for women and one for men. Unless they put you in an isolation cell for protection or discipline, you do your time on an open floor, like an old hospital ward with rows of beds, only the beds are made of steel and the mattresses are thin enough you can use them to floss your teeth.”
“No stars from Zagat?”
“Not when the majority of inmates have some kind of mental illness and even more of them have drug and alcohol problems. Plus, most of them are homeless, which means they’re happy to have a roof over their heads and that they aren’t likely to be violent. The food sucks, but the body odor quotient makes you forget how bad the food smells.”
“Can’t wait. What was Jimmy like when you and Lucy saw him?”
“Like a guy who spent all day practicing his poker face. Lucy asked the questions, but she didn’t get any answers.”
“What did he say? What was he like?”
“He didn’t say much. Just listened but acted like he didn’t hear a word she said. Only time he showed any reaction was when Lucy asked him why he’d make his wife suffer, not telling her what happened to their kids.”
“What did he say?”
“Said, ‘Ask the bitch.’ Kind of smiled when he said it.”
“Charming. Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Ask the bitch?”
I laughed. “Peggy doesn’t strike me like that, though you never know what someone’s really like until you’re married to them. She says he’s doing it out of spite. Says he’s a mean prick. Says he accused her of cheating on him and smacked her around. She got a restraining order against him a month before he was arrested. He couldn’t see the kids except with a court-appointed social worker.”
“What do you know about the kids?”
“Evan is six, and Cara is eight. They look like their mother.”
“That’s it? That’s all you know?”
“They’re little kids, they’re missing, and good things don’t happen to little kids when they go missing. That’s all I need to know.”
“Well, it’s not all I need to know.”
She followed Sni-A-Bar, turning onto Ozark Road, continuing until we came to the entrance to the Farm. A two-story chain-link fence topped with razor wire and curved inward like a baseball backstop surrounded the complex of one-story buildings.
“Ethan told me he arranged for us to meet Jimmy in the Women’s Recreation Area, wherever that is,” Kate said.
We announced our presence to an intercom and a camera at the gate and waited for an unseen hand to push a button, gears groaning as the gate slid open. A guard met us inside the administrative building and searched Kate’s shoulder bag. A woman wearing a gray pantsuit, her blond hair, sparkling eyes, and perky smile contrasting with the dreary surroundings, introduced herself as Superintendent Annette Fibuch, confessed her love of corrections, told us that the guards were corrections officers, not guards, and escorted us to the Women’s Dormitory, telling us that’s where we’d find the Women’s Recreation Area.
Lucy and I had met with Jimmy Martin in the visitor’s area, talking to him through a phone, separated by a bulletproof glass barrier, a setting that nurtured evasion and invited denial. The Women’s Recreation Area could have passed for a community college rec room; it was the one space I’d seen at the Farm where inmates could feel at ease and Kate might learn something from Jimmy.
It was a long, rectangular room, its cinder block walls painted yellow with red trim on three sides, the pattern reversed on the exterior wall, the upper third of which was a bank of windows. Sunlight poured into a carpeted room furnished with a Ping-Pong table, a game table, a chalkboard, and a quartet of soft, black club chairs clustered together in a tight square.
“An officer will bring Jimmy here in a few minutes,” Superintendent Fibuch said. “He’ll wait outside the room if you need him. Jimmy isn’t thrilled with the company he’s keeping, but I don’t think he’ll cause any trouble. Feel free to stop by my office on your way out if you need anything else.”
“She seems more like a concierge than a jail superintendent,” I said, after she left.
“Ethan says she takes good care of him because he worked with her on getting the inmates decent mental health care. He says a lot of them used to live in state mental health facilities but those days are over, thanks to budget cutbacks. Now, this is their ticket to the help they need.”
“That Ethan is something else. One step removed from sainthood.”
“Do you have a good reason to dislike him, or are you just oozing resentment because he hired me instead of you?”
“I don’t like surprises and setups.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he should have told Lucy you were involved in this case.”
“Why? Because you and I used to be together?”
I felt the heat rise in my neck. “Yeah. That’s right.”
“So you naturally assumed that he knew about us.”
“I assumed you told him if he didn’t know already.”
“Why would I tell him, and why would you think he would know if I didn’t tell him? You and I didn’t make the society page, and I didn’t put my relationship status on Facebook. Honestly, Jack, no one cares what happened between us.”
“I care.”
The words tripped out as unexpected and involuntary as the stutter that accompanied them, a guilt-laden tremor rippling through my torso for punctuation. Joy was dying, and I was playing wounded Romeo.
Kate caught her breath, her face coloring as her mouth hardened.
“So you do.”
The door opened, the officer, a towering black man, led Jimmy Martin into the room, cupping Jimmy’s elbow in his massive hand. He had a good six inches and fifty pounds on Jimmy, his gray uniform and dark skin a sharp contrast to Jimmy’s orange jumpsuit and pasty complexion.
Jimmy was nondescript, the way so many people are, his features even and bland. Comb his brown hair back, dress him in a blue suit and he could have been a bank vice president though he looked just as at home wearing the latest in jailhouse fashion. His clothes outlined him, but he filled in the empty spaces when he opened his mouth.
“You be nice to these people, Jimmy,” the officer said.
Jimmy shook off the officer’s touch, his flat expression in place. “I don’t need you to tell me shit, nigger.”
The officer cuffed him on the back of the head. “Mind your manners, Jimmy. You don’t want these people getting the wrong idea about you. And, don’t forget, you and me got a long walk back to the men’s dorm. Lot of places along the way a man can slip and fall, especially the sorry shape this place is in.” The officer looked at us, smiling. “Don’t worry about me and Jimmy. We got an understanding. I’ll be right outside if you folks need anything.”
Kate waited for the officer to leave before walking toward Jimmy, her hand extended, Jimmy’s red, puffy eyes darting from her to me and back to her, his arms at his side, clenching his fists. She waited, her hand outstretched, Jimmy studying it like it was a hot poker before giving in and slowly raising his. Kate took hold, not letting go.
“Jimmy, I’m Kate Scranton. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me. Let’s sit down and figure out how I can help you.”