I placed one in the VCR. The TV screen blinked from royal blue to a shot of two men having sex on the bed in the very room I was standing in. The camera seemed to be shooting the video footage from where it still sat on the shelf beside the VCR. The room was well lit, and the camera was obviously an expensive one because the picture was crystal clear. It showed a fat white man from the side hunched over a thin black man. The fat white man was Russ Maddox. He was moaning and occasionally blurting out obscenities. The other man, whose face I could not see, was making noises too, but his seemed to be more pain than pleasure.

In another minute or so, Russ had climaxed and collapsed, the black man disappearing beneath his blubber. I hit the fast forward button on the machine, and in a few seconds the black man beneath Russ began moving slightly and Russ finally rolled off him. The black man jumped up. When he did, he came face-to-face with the eye of the camera. I paused it on the familiar face of Ike Johnson.

I stopped the tape as I heard a voice from the hall.

“John, your dad would like to see you downstairs,” the serious young female officer said when she reached the door to the bedroom.

“Would you mind asking him to step up here? I need to show him something.”

A few moments later Dad and Jake stepped into the room.

“Body’s gone,” Dad said. “Crime scene is gone. We’re about to go. Just wanted to touch base with you, see if you thought your case and this one are related.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure they are,” I said, and pressed Play on the VCR.

“Fuck me,” Jake said. “Just threw up in my mouth some.”

“Who’s that with Russ?” Dad asked.

“The inmate who was killed on Tuesday,” I said. “Ike Johnson.”

He nods and frowns. “Looks like maybe Russ was poisoned. Seems completely opposite to how your guy was killed—as opposite as you can get. We really thinking the same doer did both?”

I shrugged. “Not sure about that. Just that they’re connected. Though they may not be as different as they seem.”

“How so?”

“If both were drugged—and if the killer isn’t the trash officer who stabbed Ike—then all the killer did was drug him and put him in the bag, making his part of it as bloodless as this one.”

27

“I think Captain Skipper has been supplying inmate prostitutes to Russ Maddox. And Ike Johnson was one of them,” I said.

I was sitting with Merrill and Anna in her office on the morning of the longest Monday of my life, a day that I began in the company of my friends and ended in the hands of my enemies.

“Run that by me one more time,” Anna said.