Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) Page 5

  “I understand,” Cruz soothed, “but don’t you find it odd that the backpack turns up near Jesus Saves, the very place Dickey always hangs out?”

  Angie set her mouth in a thin, stubborn line. “Sergei didn’t do this.”

  “I’m not saying he did, but somebody stabbed Dickey multiple times and then added insult to injury by smashing him to bits with a metal pipe.” He wasn’t sure that was the way it’d happened, but what the hell.

  Angie chewed on her lower lip, then her thumb. “You saying someone’s trying to frame one of us, huh? This is a set-up?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” Cruz frowned. “Look, I know you’re scared – ”

  “No, you don’t,” Angie spat. “You don’t know what it’s like for these people. They don’t need any more hassle from cops like Officer Rawley, who’s always harassing them, and parole officers who give ‘em trouble.” Here she flashed a gimlet eye at him. “Life’s hard enough without more shit.”

  Cruz ignored the criticism. “Sergei found the backpack, right? His prints will be all over it and probably inside the dumpster. You know I can roust him and make it harder than it needs to be.” Cruz sighed. “Look, Angie, Dickey was one of mine. He wasn’t the brightest guy and he was wasted most of the time, but ... ”

  Cruz felt the same overwhelming emotion he’d felt a lot lately. Like he was swimming upstream all the time. That what he did was useless because neither the system nor the people in it – felons and cops alike – changed. “It’s just a matter of time before the police catch him,” he warned.

  “What if he’s got an alibi?” Angie suggested.

  “God,” he muttered, “let’s hope so.”

  Chapter 15

  By the time Frankie was able to closely examine Cole Hansen’s note again, she discovered he’d already been paroled.

  So fast?

  Administration must have processed him through the system right after he left the hospital wing. The question nagged her – why had he given her the note? Should she pass it on, or remain silent?

  Conflicted about what to do, she retrieved the message from her jacket. She flattened it out on the desk, examining the series of figures on the faded page.

  1BTO+O-HKDD11-15RP10P

  The letters, numbers, and symbols made no sense. Some sort of code, she guessed. Not mathematics or the two zeros – or were they the letter “O”? – would have another letter or digit after them instead of the plus sign, right? Was the next sign a minus, or a hyphen, or ... what? The harder she stared at the message, the less sense it made.

  Even if she were inclined, how could she take such flimsy evidence to the warden? She sat at her desk in the SHU medical wing, the paper curled in her fingers. Harry and Mike were tending two newly-admitted flu patients. The terminal and long-term inmates on the ward were relatively quiet, sleeping or resting from their recently-administered doses of pain meds.

  Rising from her desk, she pulled out a file cabinet drawer and rummaged through the patient files, looking for Hansen, Cole.

  His file wasn’t there.

  That was odd. Maybe she hadn’t returned it to the cabinet after she’d seen him. Or misfiled it. She riffled through several dozen folders before and after the alphabetical position where Cole’s record should be.

  Nothing.

  Walking down the corridor, she stopped at the hospital bed where Harry was adjusting an IV tube. She motioned him aside. Most of the patients in the SHU hospital were critically ill, but they had excellent hearing. And snitches were everywhere.

  “Harry,” she asked, touching his white jacket sleeve. “I can’t locate Cole Hansen’s medical file. Have you seen it?”

  The nurses weren’t supposed to enter her office without permission, but those regulations were loosely kept. The truth was that the medical dispensary lay behind her office, and although the nurses didn’t dispense narcotics, they did have access to the closet that held other medical supplies necessary for them to perform their duties.

  “No, doc,” Harry answered easily, his large homely face showing a gap-toothed smile.

  She shrugged casually. “Oh, well, it’ll show up sooner or later.”

  It wouldn’t do to make a fuss over the missing file. Better for anyone who might’ve taken it to think she believed she’d misplaced it. The patient was discharged and paroled, and the matter no longer concerned her.

  Nonetheless, Frankie didn’t like being duped. She was very certain she had not lost Cole Hansen’s medical records, and she thought she knew how to obtain a copy.

  She didn’t know why she felt so protective of the hapless inmate. Probably because he projected a vulnerability that she identified with. She didn’t believe for a minute that he was smart enough to engineer the murder in the prison exercise yard. And she didn’t think prison admin believed it either.

  More than that, Cole didn’t have the passion for murder. She’d never known a person so apathetic, as if he’d given up on life.

  Although the official medical file didn’t contain the entire inmate history, she convinced Officer Jake Turner in records to make her a copy. Jake had a crush on Frankie – unfortunately, one she didn’t reciprocate – and easily bought her story about needing to look at some family history to complete her medical report – stave off liability, you know.

  She flashed her brightest smile, feeling only a little guilty for the subterfuge.

  After finishing her shift, Frankie made her way through security to her little Toyota Corolla, threw her briefcase into the back, and left the prison grounds. She drove the winding road north to an isolated acreage where she rented a small house close to the ocean, just outside the Crescent City limits and very close to the Oregon state line.

  It was old and cheap, but she loved the view and felt, if not content, at least stable there.

  Kicking off her shoes, she fingered the now-dried note from Cole, but left it in the jacket pocket when she hung it up. She poured a cup of tea, flipped on the television for some background noise, opened the copied medical file of Cole Hansen, and began reading.

  After pulling double shifts, however, even the hot tea couldn’t keep her awake.

  Frankie danced that night. Deep in her dreams she danced with her father. She was homecoming queen her senior year. She and her father led a waltz during the Homecoming Dance – a daddy-daughter tradition.

  She felt his broad, steady arms around her, his smoothly shaved cheek lightly touch hers, and the slight hint of the aftershave she’d given him for his birthday the week before. He was so proud of her, and that excitement showed in his stormy gray eyes and mobile mouth, so like her own. People often claimed she was a mirror image of him.

  She was happy because he was so pleased with her.

  Roger Franklin Milano was thirty-nine and that night was the last time Frankie saw her father outside a prison cell.

  Chapter 16

  The kite from Anson Stark startled Frankie.

  It lay on the top of her incoming documents like a snake, a menacingly pale green color with black stripes of words running horizontally across the form. She poked it with a tentative finger. Silly, they were only words on paper, nothing more.

  Still, the uneasiness lingered and she shoved the stack of kites aside, ignoring them while she entered medical details into the patient database on her computer. The unit was secure, as protected as any device these days, at any rate. Even the nurses weren’t supposed to access the electronic medical files.

  But Frankie kept another set of files where she changed the password every two weeks and didn’t write it down anywhere. She strained to remember the current password – so many of them whirled through her head – and finally recalled: Fr5th1*1995.

  She always coded the passwords so that it was nearly impossible even for someone who knew her well to figure them out, but also was something she wouldn’t likely forget. The current one was for Freddy Mesmer, her fifth grade boyfriend, from whom she’d gotten her first kiss in 1
995.

  She kept notes on written patient charts, of course, but they were brief comments about blood pressure, heart rate, meds prescribed – all the mundane data concerning the mostly terminally-ill inmates. These records were kept in her locked filing cabinet, and copies scanned into the prison network database. All administrators had access to these records because they might be necessary in a court of law, for example.

  The more detailed records which she kept for her private study were maintained in a separate database on a flash drive. Each inmate who’d visited her had an individual, well-documented computer file containing her observations – medical and otherwise. These statistics and observations were unbreachable.

  Frankie liked details. She reveled in facts. She delighted in the irrefutable logic of proof. She liked even more that her records were secret. No one but herself knew about the mountains of data she’d gathered over the last ten months.

  The day got busy really fast. Charlie Cox, the garrulous terminally-ill patient, had seized in the afternoon, and despite their efforts to revive him, he’d passed, not with a whimper, but a bang, she thought, recalling the famous poem. She sighed and called the time of death, pulling the sheet over his emaciated form.

  She’d liked Charlie Cox. She realized as she perused the final notes documenting his symptoms and the COD, along with his long medical history in Pelican Bay, that the man he’d been when he first entered prison wasn’t the man who’d just died in front of her.

  Prison changed them all. Some for the worse, but many for the better. Having no sound religious faith herself, she wondered why, but accepted the simple faith these men often clung to in spite of devastating circumstances.

  Sitting at her desk, drained and exhausted from the battle to save Charlie’s life, she gnawed on the end of her pen, and swiveled her chair gently from side to side. She recalled what Charlie had been saying right before he seized.

  “It’s a tricky path you’re on, Doc,” he said between coughs that were more like carving out something large and malignant from the lungs. “Very tricky.”

  He closed his eyes and rested a moment, and she’d thought he was finished when he opened his eyes and reached for her hand, clutching it with surprising strength. “Be careful. This is a dangerous place for innocents like you.”

  “What?” She thought his mind had wandered into the past.

  His faded eyes widened and he glanced over her shoulder. She involuntarily followed his gaze, but no one was there.

  “You don’t know what you know, Frankie.” He had never called her anything but “doc” or “girl,” and she was mildly surprised that he knew her first name. “You oughter get outta here.” He inhaled sharply, struggling for breath.

  “Charlie, relax, you need to calm down. This much talking isn’t good for you.”

  “Never mind me!” he exclaimed with more ferocity than she’d thought he had left in him. “It’s you that needs to worry.” He sighed and closed his eyes briefly.

  “I know you won’t leave,” he murmured at last, the words labored and halting, “but watch your back. There’s those would not like you meddling in prison affairs.” He gestured feebly with one hand. “Look around you, girl. They’re all murderers, rapists, thieves, liars – the lot of them.” He glowered darkly. “And I don’t mean just the inmates.”

  Then he’d closed his eyes right before his poor ragged heart had seized, his body convulsing, and neither CPR, the paddles, or epinephrine injection had been sufficient to revive him.

  And what the hell was she supposed to do with those last words from a dying inmate who’d been on his own personal death row for decades? He couldn’t possibly have known about the message Cole Hansen had slipped her in the examination room, he couldn’t understand what had really happened in the prison yard the day of the murder Cole had confessed to, and he absolutely couldn’t have figured out her personal stake in the whole affair.

  Chapter 17

  Cole Hansen spent his first night of freedom in a flea-bitten hotel off Washington Street, in downtown Rosedale. The kind of place that rented rooms by the hour, the dump was all he could afford. For a while, he amused himself watching the hookers come in and out, doing their business, briefly and efficiently.

  After the long bus ride from Crescent City, he still had about sixty dollars left from the money he’d paroled with. When it ran out, he didn’t know what he’d do, but he’d be damned if he would spend his first night of freedom huddled against a building in a dark alley.

  He’d gotten fast food and spent thirty bucks on this sorry excuse for a rented room. He lay on top of a worn bedspread, not wanting to think about what crap was crusted into the thin fabric. No matter, he’d had worse before, both inside and outside of prison or jail.

  As long as he was free, he could survive anything.

  Staying alive, avoiding blowback from prison debriefing, was the important goal.

  He had expected to serve out the last six months of his original sentence in special needs, but admin had fast-tracked him through the system, gotten him out of harm’s. He figured that move had saved his life.

  The Professor was too smart not to figure out what Cole had done. Anson Stark would be wanting major retaliation and had plenty of contacts on the outside to carry out his orders.

  Now he just had to stay alive long enough to finish parole or disappear.

  People thought Cole was dumb, and he admitted he wasn’t very smart. He had trouble in school all his life and dropped out at the age of fifteen. He didn’t read well – the letters and figures on the page looked all twisted around and backwards, but teachers, and even his own parents, seemed to think he was just lazy, not trying hard enough.

  He knew there was something wrong with him, in his head, but he wasn’t as stupid as people thought. If he was, he’d be dead already. Right now he knew enough to realize he was in deep shit with little chance of getting out of it no matter who reached out to him.

  There were precious few giving a hand to a no-good ex-con like him.

  No one around here, not even his parole officer, could help him. Some things just didn’t get fixed, no matter how good peoples’ intentions were.

  He thought of Doc Jones and her pretty, but sad face. She’d tried to help him. She was one smart cookie, the way she’d scooped up that note he’d dropped in her hand during his medical exam. She’d be a helluva card player, he figured, smiling at the image.

  He sighed deeply and then shivered as if someone had walked over his grave. He sure hoped he hadn’t put the doc in harm’s way. He didn’t want that on his conscience, along with all his other mistakes.

  Opening the packet of materials he’d been given on release, he started reading. It was a laborious task, his reading skills being only slightly better than his writing. However, using the map provided, he realized he was right around the corner from a homeless shelter. Jesus Saves. Sounded hinky to him. He didn’t trust much in Jesus freaks. They were always wanting to convert you to something in exchange for a bite of food or a place to bunk for the night.

  Still, maybe he’d give it a once-over in the morning after he reported to his parole officer.

  He dosed a bit, wakening up around midnight. Taking his backpack with him, he walked down the stairs and next door to a twenty-four-hour, old-fashioned drive-in where he got a black coffee and sat quietly in the corner, planning and thinking.

  At last the manager, a pimply-faced teenager who’d been eyeing him for some time, walked over to his booth. “Uh, sorry, sir, but you can’t stay here, uh, any longer. That is, uh, unless you order something.”

  Cole was pretty sure the kid was scared to death, but he didn’t want to start off his release with some kind of unnecessary altercation, so he simply nodded and rose, taking his coffee with him. He wandered around the area, silent and mostly empty except for the occasional street person settling down for the night in an alley or behind a secluded dumpster.

  Even though it violated his p
arole, Cole knew he had to have something to defend himself with. You couldn’t live on the street without protection. A gun was out – too hard to get, too easy to get caught with, and too pricey.

  Some kind of blade, maybe a hunting knife. Anything over three or four inches violated parole, too, but was easier to hide or ditch.

  A steak or paring knife would provide some protection, although not much. He decided tomorrow he’d go to the Walmart store across town and see if he could shoplift a suitable weapon.

  Returning to his room, he settled down for the night, having found a hefty, good-sized rock in the alley behind the hotel. The rock would have to do until he boosted a blade.

  Chapter 18

  Anson Stark wasn’t anything like Frankie had expected. How could the whole damned prison be terrified of the ordinary-looking man they called the Professor? Stark was only a few inches taller than Frankie, who was five feet seven, and he had a slight, but wiry frame.

  He didn’t look much of a threat, probably weighed about thirty pounds more than her. But she’d learned a lot about killers in the last year, and the look in Stark’s eyes and the expression on his face chilled her to the bone. He wasn’t someone you’d turn your back on.

  He was heavily shackled. By law, inmates had to receive requested medical attention, but security was taking no chances with Stark. Wrists cuffed behind his back, with a chain extending to his feet and linking them together, he was forced to hunch over when he walked. The whole affair gave him an awkward, stilted gait.

  When he saw Frankie, however, he pulled himself erect – at the cost of some pain, she imagined. The strain on his posture would be tremendous. Pride or control, she wondered?

  Both guards remained inside the examination room, although protocol demanded that the inmate receive a degree of confidentiality. Frankie doubted Stark would harm her in front of the hefty correctional officers.