“You think that’s why he called me here? Deathbed confessions, last-minute change in morals?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. Alec has no morals. Since he’s been diagnosed, he’s been kept out of general population. But I think Alec knew he’d contracted long before we did. In the two months leading up to his diagnosis, he raped at least ten men. At least ten. It’s my firm belief that he did this not to satisfy his sexual urges, but to satisfy his homicidal ones.”

Warden Lief stuck his head back in. “Show time.”

He handed me a pair of tight canvas gloves, and he and Dolquist donned pairs of their own.

“Keep your hands away from his mouth,” Dolquist said softly, his eyes on the floor.

And we left the office, none of us speaking as we took a long walk down an oddly hushed cellblock toward Alec Hardiman.

22

Alec Hardiman was forty-one years old, but looked fifteen years younger. His pale blond hair was plastered wetly across his forehead like a grade-schooler’s. His eyeglasses were small and rectangular—granny glasses—and when he spoke his voice seemed as light as air.

“Hi, Patrick,” he said as I came into the room. “Glad you could make the trip.”

He sat at a small metal table bolted to the floor. His frail hands were cuffed and looped through two holes in the table and his feet were manacled. When he looked up at me, the fluorescent seared the lenses of his glasses white.

I took a seat across from him. “I heard you could help me, Inmate Hardiman.”

“You did?” He slouched loosely in his chair and gave off the impression of a man completely at ease with his surroundings. The lesions that covered his face and neck seemed raw and alive, their surfaces carrying a sheen. His pupils seemed to emanate brightly from recessive caverns in their hollow sockets.

“Yes. I heard you wanted to talk.”

“Absolutely,” he said as Dolquist took the seat beside my own and Lief took up position against the wall, eyes impassive, hand on his nightstick. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time, Patrick.”

“To me? Why?”

“You interest me.” He shrugged.

“You’ve been in prison for most of my life, Inmate Hardiman—”

“Please call me Alec.”

“Alec. I don’t understand your interest.”

He tilted his head so that the glasses, which had been sliding down his nose, righted themselves.

“Water?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

He tilted his head to indicate a plastic pitcher and four plastic glasses on the table to his left.

“Would you like some water?” he said.

“No, thank you.”

“Candy?” He smiled softly.

“What?”

“Do you enjoy your work?”

I glanced at Dolquist. Career seemed to be an obsession behind these walls.

“It pays the bills,” I said.

“But it’s more than that,” Hardiman said. “Isn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“Do you see yourself doing it at fifty-five?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I see myself doing it at thirty-five, Inmate Hardiman.”