“Why not?”

“Because there’s what you know and can prove and what you just know. Evandro was Hardiman’s bitch. Walked in here a half-decent kid to do nine months on a car theft, walked out nine and a half years later a fucking freak show.”

“How’d he get that hair?” I said.

“Shock,” Lief said. “After the gang-bang in hydro, he was found on the floor bleeding from every orifice with his hair shocked white. After he got out of the infirmary, he went back into population because the previous warden didn’t like spics, and by the time I got here, he’d been bought and sold a thousand times and ended up with Hardiman.”

“When was he released?” Bolton said.

“Six months ago.”

“Run all his photos and print them,” Bolton said.

Erdham’s fingers flew back over the keyboard and suddenly the bank of monitors showed five different photos of Evandro Arujo.

The first was a mug shot from the Brockton PD. His face was swollen and his right cheekbone looked broken and his eyes were tender and terrified.

“Crashed the car,” Lief said. “Hit his head on the steering wheel.”

The next was taken the day he arrived at Walpole. Eyes still huge and terrified, cuts and swelling gone. He had rich black hair and the same feminine features, but they were even softer, still carrying a hint of baby fat.

The next one was the first I’d seen. His hair was white, and the large eyes were altered somehow, as if someone had scraped off a layer of emotion the way you’d scrape the thinnest film of egg-white from the shell.

“After he murdered Norman Sussex,” Lief said.

In the fourth, he’d lost a lot of weight and his feminine features seemed grotesque, the face of a haggard witch on a young man’s body. The large eyes were bright and loud, somehow, and the full lips sneered.

“The day he was convicted.”

The final photo was taken the day of his release. He’d streaked his hair with what looked like charcoal and gained weight, and he puckered his lips at the photographer.

“How did this guy get out?” Bolton said. “He looks completely deranged.”

I stared up at the second photo, the young Evandro, dark-haired, face clear of bruises, eyes wide and afraid.

“He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter,” Lief said. “Not murder. Not even man two. I know he cleaved open Sussex without provocation, but I couldn’t prove it. And wounds on both Sussex and Arujo at the time were consistent with those of men who’d been in a shank fight.” He pointed at Arujo’s forehead in the most recent photo. There was a thin white line creasing the forehead. “See that? Shank mark. Sussex couldn’t tell us what happened, so Arujo claimed self-defense, said the shank belonged to Sussex, and he draws eight years, because the judge didn’t believe him, but he couldn’t prove otherwise either. We got a serious overcrowding problem in our prisons, in case no one told you, and Inmate Arujo was in every other respect a model prisoner who served his time, earned his parole.”