She raged at Anthony. It was obvious that she cared for him, that she was hurt by what she had just seen. The look on her face was undiluted disgust.

Anthony at first bowed his head and looked like a wounded little boy, but as she continued to berate him, something changed.

He glanced over at Johnson for his response to the whole scene, and that set him off.

He pulled back and punched Sandy hard in the stomach.

She bent over and stepped back. Within seconds, Johnson was behind her forcing her down on the bed.

It was difficult to watch but I didn’t look away—even as my pounding heart filled with pain and nausea spread through me.

They ripped her clothes off and began to beat and rape her.

The violence and brutality was even more surreal because it was silent.

Even more disconcerting and discordant were the expressions on the two men’s faces. As they beat and brutalized her, they smiled and laughed wickedly.

The entire attack took less than ten minutes, but in those sadistic six hundred seconds, both Thomas and Johnson had raped, beaten, and sodomized Sandy Strickland.

Molly Thomas and Sandy Strickland. Skipper had made his own little rape tape. I could tell that the second rape had actually occurred before the first one—Jacobson wasn’t in the infirmary like on the night of the murder, and Sandy Strickland wore the old gray nurse’s uniform that had since been abandoned by the department for something a little brighter.

Skipper must have recorded a lot of footage during the first rape that he deemed unworthy or that somehow showed him and so recorded over it.

As I continued to watch, a couple of things caught my eye.

At some point near the end, a door opened into the hallway where the camera was positioned.

I rewound the tape and played the same footage again. This time when the door opened and the light poured into the hallway, I pushed the pause button.

There he was.

When the light came into the dark hallway, it made the glass the camera was shooting through reflect the image like a mirror, revealing that the cameraman was Matthew Skipper.

Just over his right shoulder, standing just behind Skipper in the doorway to the caustic storage room, was the inmate orderly Allen Jones.

40

The veil of darkness covering the compound seemed much more than only the absence of light.

I was alone in the pervasive darkness. I was in it and it was in me. Or so it seemed.

I had entered the institution just a few minutes before.

“Everybody’s working late tonight,” the control room officer said.

“Who else?”

“That tall, pretty classification officer. Medical called her in on an emergency transfer.”

My heart started racing.

I spun around and quickly scanned the parking lot.

There in the employee parking lot was Anna’s car.

“Who’s the OIC?” I asked.

“Captain Skipper.”