“The stupid ones who used the opportunity of the prison break to make a run for it came out and found themselves out there in the middle of twenty miles of wheat and alfalfa fields. Most of them were city boys. They were wearing orange prison jumpsuits, and sandals and white socks instead of shoes. None of them had any civilian clothes when they ran out of the prison. None of them had a dime, and probably none of them had a clear idea of where they were or which way to run. By daylight we had nine hundred sixty-two in custody. The problem for us wasn’t capture. It was transport and incarceration. We used any trucks we could commandeer, and then had to lock them in areas that could be closed off and chained shut with padlocks because the electronic locks were sabotaged.”

“How did Nick die?”

“He was working in the out-processing area near the main gate. The twelve came through on their way out, saw him and Dave Culbert, the man working with him, and shot them.”

“Good,” said Bill. “I read that most of them were caught and strangled. Strangling would have been worse.”

“They had full-auto M4s, so Nick and Dave went fast.”

“What happened in the town?” Bill asked.

“Well,” Leah said, “first the twelve ringleaders came into town. They were wearing the street clothes from the lockers of twelve guards they had killed. They had guns from the armory of the prison. They were driving the cars the guards had parked in the lot. They had the addresses of the guards too. And they had the cell phones the guards left in their lockers. In other words, they had directions to a dozen addresses where the man of the house wasn’t ever coming home.”

“What happened?”

“Pretty much everybody’s worst fear. There were a dozen brand-new widows raped in their homes. Four of them were killed afterward. A couple of the inmates went to the warden’s house and made a big production out of making him see what they did to his wife and daughters before they killed him.”

“Why do all that stuff?” said Bill. “They had a limited time to get as far away as they could.”

Leah shrugged. “I wondered at the time, and I still do. At first, I thought they were just a bunch of psychopaths who had found each other in prison, and that’s the kind of thing psychopaths do. Now I think they had two things in mind. One was practical. They wanted to pillage those houses to get everything they could—more clothes, food, money, and any valuables. In order to do that, they had to at least silence the families in the houses—tie them up and gag them, cut the phone wires, and take the cell phones. After that, they had the opportunity to do what they wanted. But there was something else.”

“What?”