Mike stared at the bald kid’s hairline. Full and dark, no sign of recession, probably shaved daily. If the Aryan Brotherhood had a friend on staff, Mike stood close enough to smell his swastikas. “Law enforcement to law enforcement?”

“Yeah, Woods seems like a real badass. Tells every cop he meets to go to hell.”

Mike gave the youth Nazi his money’s worth. “Troy Woods gave me more than I needed to close my case. Hell, he offered to rat on everyone he knew—anything to shorten his sentence. You might as well put him in a stadium, ’cause every cop in the Midwest is gonna show up to listen to him sing.”

The guard looked like Mike had just pantsed Hitler. “You’re shitting me.”

“Don’t let that get around. People hear something like that, you’ll find your badass dead in a shower.”

Chapter 74

CHAPTER

74

“YOU’LL STAY IN your room until nighttime.”

Caitlin watched Embower’s lips through the window, heard his voice through the handcuff slot.

“I have two classes. There’s breakfast in the drop and a sandwich for lunch. Also a stack of books.”

He slid the panel shut and left. If he’d be away most of the day, he wouldn’t be watching the camera feed. He’d have recordings, but Caitlin would work on the presumption he only checked past footage when something went wrong.

She downed some Tylenol and ate breakfast. After her last bite, she casually knocked her open water bottle off the table, swore dramatically, and dropped to her hands and knees.

The bottle landed inches from the drain. She poured the remainder in, listened, but didn’t hear anything, then tried to turn a screw with her fingertip. No luck, but something seemed unusual. Usually, a cover plate like that sat inside a grooved ring, its screws sunk into predrilled holes. From what Caitlin could see, Embower had tapped metal anchor bolts into the limestone, rather than the strip of concrete, then rested the cover on top of the hole, probably to save time while the concrete hardened. Either way, her focus now was how to clog the holes in the cover.

She got up, dropped the empty bottle in the metal drop, and inventoried the shelves. Twenty-three bottles of water, twelve Sprite, twelve Coca-Cola, eight Diet Coke, two boxes of maxi-pads, and three boxes of tampons.

Too big to squeeze through the openings, she took each tampon from its applicator and split the cotton in two. When she had ten disassembled, she went under the table and thumb-fed the material down the drain.

She needed to make a wad. She grabbed a paperback copy of Steven King’s It from the stack of books, tore out twenty pages, rolled each, and fed them down as well. She repeated the process with another box of tampons, another chunk of a different book.