While Miss Ruby talked, I wondered if perhaps Nicola had never made it to Coolis Hospital. Maybe Captain Ruzich had her taken to Chicago directly from the prison. No, that didn’t work—the floor head at the hospital’s prison wing clearly had known about Nicola. Unless she’d been primed to say Nicola had been on the ward when she wasn’t?

“I need to find someone who will tell me what went on in the shop the day Nicola left here. Or I need to get a job working over there.”

Miss Ruby grunted. “You can’t get girls to talk about what goes on in the clothes shop. Of course everyone around here is more or less scared, the guards can take away your commissary privileges or your phone calls or put you in seg. But the girls in the clothes shop, they don’t talk to anyone. And of course, for the most part they don’t speak English anyway.”

“So if I wanted to get into the clothes shop, I’d have to be a foreigner.”

“First, you have to lose at your trial. The jail girls, they get kitchen duty and other ugly stuff, but they don’t ever get the jobs that pay anything decent.”

“I really need to see the inside of that shop,” I said, looking across the room. CO Polsen was in the doorway, eyeing me in a way I didn’t like, but I willed him out of my mind. “How much would it cost, and who could arrange it for me?”

“What’s your real business here, Cream?” Miss Ruby asked softly.

I continued to look ahead, speaking as she did, out of the side of my mouth. “I want to see Robert Baladine destroyed. If I can learn what happened to Nicola, I may find a way to make him … well, sorry he ever crossed my path.”

“If revenge is what you want to eat for dinner, you’re going to get yourself a bad case of indigestion. It never pays, believe me, Cream. I tried that meal for a lot of years, before Jesus showed me a better way.”

She paused, as if waiting for me to say amen, sister, or ask for her conversion story, but even for her help I couldn’t pretend to a faith I don’t own.