Her feet felt a rough patch in the otherwise smooth floor. She looked under the table. Like the playroom, the bedroom’s limestone floor now had a strip of gray concrete that led toward the outside wall. Unlike the playroom, Caitlin’s line ended in a circular metal drain under the table. Two Phillips-head screws kept the four-inch steel disc and its waffle-pattern holes in place.

She remembered the camera and decided to wait to investigate the drain. From the vantage point of the camper toilet post-dinner, she stared at the brand new drain and worked out a plan.

There were only two ways out of the room—handcuffed with a bag over her head or drugged and unconscious. She needed to be both conscious and have her hands free—and Embower hated a mess.

Caitlin had a new drain and enough tampons and maxis to destroy an entire dorm’s plumbing.

Chapter 73

CHAPTER

73

MIKE STARED AT the big man in the orange jumpsuit on the other side of the glass. Troy Woods had forty pounds on him, two inches of height, and shoulder muscles swollen from hours on weight benches.

The inmate reached for the phone, showing the faded ink swirled around his right wrist. The institutional blue complemented the recent red wound over his cauliflower ear.

Mike spoke into the handset. “You in the Aryan Brotherhood, Woods?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Who do you guys even beef with? I figured everyone in Indiana was white.”

Woods snorted. “Then you don’t know shit. We got Mexicans like everywhere else, except in here they don’t even mow the grass. You a cop?”

“I understand you had a visitor yesterday. Caitlin Bergman?”

Woods smiled. “Yeah, you’re a cop. Fuck you, cop.”

Mike watched Woods puff up, typical jailhouse bravado. “Fuck me, but you’re not getting up? You that bored?”

Woods rolled his shoulders back. “Seven out of fifteen, I got spare time. Guess whose fault that is?”

“The Mexicans’?”

“Caitlin Fucking Bergman’s.”

“Thought you had some sort of car accident,” Mike said. “Something about a family of four and a fourth DUI.”

“Links in a chain, Cop.”

Mike stared him down. He’d met a hundred guys like Woods in prison, tough guys who believed they wouldn’t have been there if someone else hadn’t failed, never owning up to their own stupid mistakes. Having been one himself, he knew the best way to get them to talk was to treat them like the victims of circumstance they claimed to be. “You’re right. I used to be a cop, but then I ended up on your side of the glass, thanks to Bergman.”

“Bullshit.”

“Four years in Corcoran, all because that bitch reporter had to prove she was smarter than me. Sound familiar?”

He watched Woods process the mix of truths and lies. Woods’s hard-case act dropped a level. “Corcoran? That’s where Manson was, right?”