“Sorry. Sorry! You want me to go? I’ll go.”

Her cell rings. A number inside the building. She answers and listens to the guard in provisional detention tell her in a shaky voice, “I’m sorry, but Ashley—I can’t—”

“What? Is the lawyer running interference?”

“No,” the guard says. “She’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? Where the hell did she go?”

“No,” he says. “I mean dead. She’s dead. She hung herself.”

She and Chives hurry over to detention and find a cluster of guards whispering in the cellblock. A shoebox-size window is cut into every cell door, and each one is darkened by the head of an inmate. They press their faces up against the glass, trying to see. Their voices are muffled, but they speak loudly, asking what’s happened. Some of them pound their palms against their doors, and the air throbs with their noise.

Nora pushes past the guards and steps through the open door and takes in the sight of the cell. She isn’t sure where to look at first.

The nurse had bandaged Ashley’s head heavily with gauze and medical tape that the young woman had peeled off and twined to fashion a makeshift noose. She slumps beside her bunk with her neck bound against the top corner post.

But Nora gives the body only a glance before taking in the walls and floors and ceiling, all of which are marked with spirals of blood, roughly finger-painted in a filamented design that is now familiar.

She walks the perimeter of the room, studying the red matrix, and then approaches the body for a second look. Ashley’s legs and the floor are damp with what is presumably her vacated bowels, but there is a gray mucus-like quality to the mess. Her face is a swollen scabrous mask—hardly recognizable—and the same kind of gelatinous material oozes from her eyes and her nose and her mouth.

Nora pulls a pen out of her pocket and reaches it to one of Ashley’s eyes. There is a squelching sound when she prods it. The pen pulls away with a thick damp string attached and wobbling from it.

Up to this point Chives has remained in the hall, talking to the guards, but he enters the cell now. “Nora?”

“Contact the chief. I want to fast-track labs on her, and we’ll need his priority sig.”

“I don’t understand. She—you don’t think she hung herself?”

“There’s nothing that makes me think she didn’t.”

“Then what are you looking for?”

“There are answers in her blood.”

8