Meaning maybe they weren’t looking for a small, socially submissive male after all. But a female. A woman who wouldn’t appear as suspicious if spotted by the neighbors entering another female’s apartment late at night. A woman who, even if she was found at the crime scene after dark, could more credibly claim to be a close friend of the victim.

Could it be? When D.D. had stood in Christine Ryan’s apartment, maybe it hadn’t been a man who’d caught her off guard. But a lone female, emerging from the shadows . . .

“Melvin. Come on, Melvin! Talk to me.”

But Melvin refused to say a word.

D.D. had had enough. She sat up. Stormed across the room. Wrenched on an oversize cream-colored sweater before she could stop herself, then had to grit her teeth against the exploding pain.

“You want to complain, Melvin?” she muttered. “You want to be all pissed off? Then, come on. I’ll give you something to be good and mad about. Let’s go have some fun.”

Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren hammered her way down the stairs, out the door and into her car. Ready to share her pain with the world.

Chapter 9

SUPERINTENDENT KIM MCKINNON was a beautiful woman. High, sculpted cheekbones, smooth ebony skin, liquid brown eyes. The kind of woman who would be as stunning at seventy as she was at forty. She was also incredibly smart, relentlessly determined and phenomenally tough, all traits necessary to run the oldest female correctional institute still operating in the United States. Especially these days, when the MCI was facing record crowding and had just been written up for housing two hundred and fifty inmates in a space originally built for sixty-four.

The trickle-down theory of pain and punishment, the superintendent had informed me the day I’d asked her about it. Most sheriffs’ jails were jammed up themselves, meaning they no longer had the space necessary to offer the sight and sound separation required by law between male and female offenders. Their solution: ship the women to the MCI, where they became Superintendent McKinnon’s problem.

She got the bad press, the women got wedged into triple-bunked cells and the state still didn’t authorize funds for building additional housing units.

Other than that, the superintendent had a dream job, I’m sure.

Now Superintendent Beyoncé, as the inmates called her, sat on the other side of her massive gunmetal-gray desk, hands clasped before her, and regarded me soberly.

“She’s getting worse,” she stated without preamble. “This morning’s incident . . . Frankly, I’ve been expecting such an episode for days.”

“Meaning you’ve conducted extra searches of Shana’s cell, while asking your officers to be hypervigilant about her access to materials for making shanks?” I responded coolly.