Superintendent McKinnon merely gave me a look. “Come on, Adeline. You’ve walked these halls long enough. You know when it comes to an inmate like your sister, there’s very little we can do. We may be the ones in uniforms, but more often than not, she’s the one in control.”

Which, sadly, was true. My sister was every prison administrator’s nightmare: a highly intelligent, incredibly antisocial maximum-security inmate with nothing left to lose. She was already held in isolation, locked down twenty-three hours a day. With the sole exception of my one-hour monthly attendance, she didn’t care about visitation privileges. Ditto with phone privileges, access to prison programming or even the few luxuries she’d managed to scrape enough funds together to purchase from the prison canteen. Time and time again, Shana acted out like a bad toddler, and time and time again the prison staff responded with loss of privileges and removal of toys.

Shana didn’t care. She was angry, she was depressed and thus far, no amount of medication had made a difference. I would know, as I’m the one who’d prescribed her last three medical protocols.

My sister’s suicide attempt wasn’t a stain just on Superintendent McKinnon’s record but also on my own.

“Has she been taking her pills?” I asked now, the next logical question.

“We’ve been supervising both her ingestion of the medication as well as searching her cell for undigested capsules. We haven’t found anything, but that might just mean she’s one step ahead. You understand, Adeline, I’m going to have to keep Shana in medical for at least a week as it is. You know what that’s like.”

I nodded, getting the message. If prisons were rife with mental illness, then the medical ward was the epicenter of the madness, where the deeply disturbed prowled their locked-down medical cells while howling their particular brand of crazy for all the world to hear.

If my sister hadn’t wanted to kill herself before, a week in medical should do the trick.

“Is it the anniversary of her first murder victim?” I asked now. “Maria said some reporter’s been trying to contact Shana, asking all sorts of questions?”

In response, Superintendent McKinnon yanked open a drawer and pulled out a banded bunch of letters. “Name’s Charles Sgarzi. He first called my office six months ago. My staff informed him he should write to Shana directly with his request. I’m told she read the first few letters but never responded. Apparently, he got more serious after that.”

She handed over the batch of letters. I counted more than a dozen, arranged in order of the postmark date. It appeared that as of three months ago, the reporter had started writing at least once a week. The envelopes had all been opened, but given the security protocols, that didn’t mean anything.

“Same guy wrote all of these?”