Four Walls

11

FINGERPRINTS WERE FIRST USED as a tool for identification purposes in criminal investigations in the nineteenth century. The first known instance of fingerprints being discussed was in an anatomy text published in Breslau in 1823. It wasn't until the later part of the century that people started applying them to criminalistics-though the idea didn't take at first. Sheldon Hawkes remembered the first time he'd read with surprise that Dr. Henry Faulds-who'd published a paper on prints in 1880 in Nature-offered the notion of using fingerprints to identify criminals to the Metropolitan Police in London. They refused, dismissing the entire notion as fanciful.

Hawkes often wondered if the people who rejected the notion realized their mistake. It was like the person who wanted to close the U.S. Patent Office in the early part of the twentieth century because he thought everything that could be invented had been invented, or the people in the 1940s who saw television as a passing fad, or the people in the 1970s who couldn't imagine what possible use people would ever have for a computer in their homes.

The definitive work on the subject was Finger Prints, a book published in 1892 by Sir Francis Galton, which included all ten of Galton's own fingerprints as an illustration on the title page.

Hawkes had actually found a leather-bound copy of the book in the Strand one day last year and bought it for Mac as a combination Christmas and belated thank-you present for moving him over to fieldwork. It had been two years, and Hawkes had no regrets about leaving the morgue. Besides, he knew the place was safe in Peyton Driscoll's hands.

For one thing, it meant he got to play with fingerprints. Although Hawkes had wanted to be a doctor since he was a kid, he'd always had an interest in forensic science, going back to when he read Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain, one of the first works of fiction to make use of the nascent field of dactyloscopy.

From a forensic perspective, the good thing about fingerprints was that they were everywhere. The same papers that first postulated the uniqueness of fingerprints in the nineteenth century also pointed out the uniqueness of palm-, toe-, and soleprints. All of those extremities secreted oils from the eccrine glands that were often left behind on things touched by that particular body part in the pattern of the dermal papillae (ridges) that made up the prints.

But people touched things with their fingers considerably more often than they did their palms or any part of their feet, so fingers became the focal point.

The bad thing about fingerprints was that while they were everywhere, they were often incomplete. Criminals weren't always considerate enough to leave perfect impressions of their entire finger whenever they touched something at a crime scene.

And sometimes they touched things that had already been touched repeatedly by others. Case in point: the weights in the yard from RHCF.

The actual method for making latent prints visible hadn't changed overmuch since Galton's day: you used powder of some kind. In the old days, you'd cover the surface with the powder, then gently blow it away. What remained behind had adhered to the eccrine gland secretions, which were left in the pattern of the fingerprint.

At least in theory. Sometimes those prints were smudged, particularly when several people in succession had touched the thing and left plenty of sweat on it. That sweat also tended to make regular powders clump, messing up the latent print. For that reason, Hawkes went with contrasting powder, which he applied gently with a magnetic brush. One of the advantages of his years as a surgeon was that it made it easier for him to keep his hand steady while applying the magnetic powder. Danny had been particularly cranky when Hawkes got the hang of it after only a few hours-it had taken Danny months to get it right.

Hawkes had taken the doughnut weight that appeared to have been used to kill Malik Washburne, as well as the barbell and the other doughnut weights on it. The latter were really for comparison purposes, to see if he could figure out who had been using the weights besides the vic.

After taking photos of the powdered weights, Hawkes used acetate stickers to pull up anything that even resembled a fingerprint. The porous nature of the metal in the weights was such that the stickers might not work, so he had the photos as backup. As he pulled each print, he placed the sticker on his flatbed 1000-DPI scanner. The slowness of the scan was offset by the small size of the image being scanned, so it took about an hour for Hawkes to get everything that looked even vaguely like a print onto the lab computer's mainframe.

Unfortunately, some of the prints were very vague indeed. The vast majority of them were too smudged and/or incomplete to get enough of an arch, loop, or whorl to even attempt a match.

The only place where he got anything solid was on the barbell itself-unsurprising, since that had to be gripped tightly in order to be used properly.

Ursitti had provided a list of the forty-five inmates who were in the weight yard at the time of Washburne's death, and since they were all obviously in the penal system, their prints were conveniently on file. Another issue with fingerprints was the sheer volume of prints to compare them to, a number that grew larger every day, particularly in this post-9/11, security-conscious world. While having a larger field of people to compare to increased the chance of a match, it also increased the time it took to do comparison scans.

Luckily, Hawkes had a good starting point. If the prints weren't a match for any of the forty-five in question, then he'd expand the search to the inmates and employees of RHCF. If that didn't match-well, then they had a mystery on their hands, and he'd expand the search further.

While he waited for the search to run its course, he called up the digital photos of the crime scene, selecting the ones he'd taken of Washburne's head wound with the ruler next to it. He got up, double-checked the size of the doughnut weight, then called up the photo of the weight and resized it so its image was proportional to that of the picture of Washburne. Using the mouse, he cut out the weight from one photo and then dragged it over to the wound.

The weight fit perfectly in the wound. (Instinctively, he kept thinking of the weight as the murder weapon, but his years as an ME had taught him never to make assumptions until the cause of death was determined, and Dr. Driscoll hadn't done the autopsy yet.)

He'd saved the images at various stages and now appended all those images to his report, quickly typing in the results.

Shortly after he finished that task, the computer finished its comparison of the fingerprints. Hawkes had recovered seven decent prints from the barbell and one from the doughnut weight. Two of the barbell prints belonged to Malik Washburne.

The one on the doughnut weight and the other five on the barbell belonged to Jorge Melendez. Alt-Tabbing to another window, Hawkes called up Melendez's sheet from the database. He was doing time for possession with intent to sell.

Pulling his Treo out of his pocket and removing his plastic-frame glasses, Hawkes called Mac.

Then he hung up after the first ring, remembering that Mac's own phone was still sitting in the arsenal at RHCF.

Putting his glasses back on, he Alt-Tabbed his desktop computer over to an Internet browser and accessed the phone directory on the NYPD's intranet. It didn't take him long to find RHCF's number, and he called that, asking for Captain Russell.

"Captain Russell can't come to the phone right now," he was told.

"This is Dr. Sheldon Hawkes of the New York Crime Lab. I actually need to speak to Detective Mac Taylor or Detective Don Flack. They're both on-site interviewing witnesses in the incident you guys had today."

"Can I have your badge number, please?"

Hawkes gave it.

"Hold, please."

Adam popped his head into the lab and saw that Hawkes was on the phone. "I'll come back," he whispered.

Hawkes removed the Treo from his ear, put it on speaker, and set it down on the table. "S'okay, I'm on hold. What is it?"

"I ran that dried blood first, like you asked." Adam said. "It wasn't Washburne's, and it wasn't Barker's."

Hawkes nodded in acknowledgment. It made sense to run those two comparisons first, especially given how much of Barker's blood had splattered all over the yard.

"It's AB negative." Adam held out a sheet of paper. "I sent it to DNA, but in the meantime, I checked it against the other forty-three guys in the yard, and only three people had that blood type."

Hawkes took the paper from Adam and saw the three names on the list: HAKIM EL-JABBAR, JORGE MELENDEZ, TYRONE STANLEY.

"Sheldon?" That was Mac's voice on speakerphone.

"Yeah, Mac, it's me. Listen, have you talked to an inmate named Jorge Melendez yet?"

"Not yet-but he's on the list. Why?"

"Melendez's prints, along with Washburne's, are on the barbell Washburne was using, and Melendez's was the only usable print on the weight that cut Washburne's head open."

"All right, thanks. And write this number down." Mac read out a phone number with a 718 area code. "I already gave it to Danny when he called. Call that number directly if you need to reach me or Flack."

Hawkes made a note of it. "Got it. What did Danny tell you?"

"Plenty of clear prints on the toothbrush, and they all belonged to Jack Mulroney."

"So we've got one dunker, at least." Dunkers, or slam-dunks, were the cases that law enforcement lived for: where the perp confessed, the evidence all agreed with the confession, and the case could be put down with a minimum of fuss and effort.

"Yeah," Mac said. "Let me know what else you find."

After Mac hung up, Hawkes picked up the Treo and entered the new number in his contact list. Looking up at Adam, he said, "Let me know when that DNA comes in."

"Will do. Oh, yeah, I also ID'd that fiber you found on the vic's shoulder."

Hawkes Smirked. "Let me guess-comes from prison dickies, right?"

"Yes and no. You see, I am smarter than the average bear, and I determined that the thread you found specifically is a thread used to sew the seams on the pants of New York State Department of Corrections convict uniforms-and only the pants. They use a different kind of thread for the shirt seams."

At that Hawkes frowned. "How did a thread from a pair of pants get on our guy's shoulder?"

Smiling beneath his beard, Adam said, "That, my friend, is your problem."

"A problem for later. Right now, I'm gonna go bug Peyton."

"I'm sure she'll love that," Adam said dryly.

Grinning, Hawkes removed his glasses, dropped them in his white lab coat pocket, and headed downstairs to the morgue.

Hawkes had succeeded Peyton Driscoll as the chief medical examiner when she left the job to take a teaching position at Columbia University. In the interview she had conducted with Hawkes before he took over, she'd said, in that clipped British tone of hers, that she needed "a spot of mundanity." When Peyton finally returned, a year after Hawkes moved to the field, Peyton claimed to have decided that teaching was too "routine." Hawkes had asked her what happened to the spot of mundanity, and Peyton had replied, "I got it out with some detergent, and I'm back in the saddle."

As he approached the morgue, Hawkes saw the perfectly coiffed silver hair of Deputy Inspector Gerrard opening the door ahead of him.

With a due sense of anticipation and dread, Hawkes jogged to catch up to him. "Inspector."

Turning around, Gerrard said, "Dr. Hawkes. I'm guessing we're both here for the same reason."

Gerrard had already been the one to bring them this case, and now he was checking on the ME personally. Hawkes saw no way in which that could be construed as a good thing. He squared his shoulders and followed Gerrard into the morgue.

"Dr. Driscoll," Gerrard said in what he probably thought was an amiable tone, "what can you tell me about Malik Washburne?"

Peyton looked up, and her face went sour. "Inspector. At the moment, I can't tell you much, as I haven't started the autopsy yet."

"Well, whatever you do find, trace-wise, put a rush on it, and use my name. This case gets top priority."

"It does?"

Gerrard glared at Hawkes with penetrating eyes. "Yes, Doctor, it does. What possible problem could you have with that?"

Gerrard's defensiveness might be understandable given his recent sparring with Mac, but that didn't mean Hawkes had to like it. "I was just surprised, that's all. I wouldn't think two deaths in custody would get this kind of heat."

"Well, it does, and for two reasons. For one thing, Washburne was a member. He did wrong, but he was doing his time like a good soldier, and he deserved better than what he got."

Hawkes couldn't argue with that.

"Not to mention, RHCF hasn't had a DIC in twenty years, and now they got two in one day. Albany's nervous."

Peyton smiled insincerely. "And it's budget time, so naturally you wish to stay on Albany's good side."

"Staying on Albany's good side gets you geeks all your fancy toys, Doc," Gerrard said. "Speaking of which, what do those toys say about Washburne?"

"Not much so far," Peyton said, "again, by virtue of my not having begun the autopsy yet. However, I can say this much: the vast majority of the blood that we found on his body wasn't his. I sent it for DNA analysis."

"Did you type it?" Hawkes asked.

Peyton nodded. "O-positive."

Hawkes rubbed his chin with his right hand. "That's Barker's type, so it's probably spatter from his wound. I'll double-check the pattern of the O-positive blood on him with his position and Barker's."

Gerrard folded his arms over his coffee-stained tie. "How much of the blood was Washburne's own?"

"Just what I found near the head wound."

"That doesn't make sense," Gerrard said. "Head wounds gush like a sonofabitch."

Hawkes regarded Gerrard. "Right."

"Don't give me that look, Hawkes-I have been a cop for a bunch of years now. I picked up a thing or two."

"Well, I've sent blood to the lab for tox," Peyton said, "and I'll check stomach contents and the rest. As soon as I have something, I'll let both of you know. However, I won't have anything with you two standing here playing mother hen."

Having always hated it when people kibbitzed over his own autopsies, Hawkes put up both hands and backed away from the table. "Sorry. I'll get out of your way."

"I'll ride herd on the lab," Gerrard said, following Hawkes toward the exit. "Get those results."

"Thank you, Inspector," Peyton said as she grabbed her scalpel.

As he left with Gerrard, Hawkes said, "Thanks for the help."

"I figure you guys need all the help you can get," Gerrard said with an obnoxious grin. "Besides, Sinclair wants this one, too. He and Washburne rode a blue-and-white together back in the day."

Brigham Sinclair was the chief of detectives and the other person who had raked Mac over the coals during the whole Dobson mess. It probably killed him to know that he had to rely on Mac to solve this case. But Hawkes knew better than to say anything. His usual solution to office politics was to keep his head down and duck the shrapnel.

Gerrard asked, "We have anything like a suspect?"

"We might," Hawkes said. "The weight that caused the head wound had a lot of smudged prints, but one was clear-guy named Jorge Melendez. Flack's questioning him now." Hawkes thought it more politic to only mention Flack, who had served under Gerrard's command, rather than Mac. "He was in the yard at the time, and he was probably the last person to touch the weight that smashed Washburne's head in. But we're a long way from proving that," he added quickly, so as not to get Gerrard's hopes up.

But Gerrard, as he had so snidely pointed out, had been a cop for a while now. He nodded as they got to the elevator bank. "Good. Keep me posted, Hawkes. I don't want this one getting screwed up."

"We're on it."

"That's what worries me," Gerrard muttered.

Hawkes managed to force himself not to say anything. He knew the best revenge would be to put the case down, and soon.

Jorge Melendez really had no idea that the guy was an undercover cop.

He'd thought he'd had good cop radar. Twice, he'd figured some junkie for a UC, and he'd been right both times. Two of his hermanos, Pablo and Jimmy, had gotten popped selling to the same guy that Jorge wouldn't go near.

Jorge was strictly independent. He didn't want to get caught up in that gang shit. He had a source that sold him decent shit for a decent price. It wasn't nothing huge, wasn't nothing he could build an empire with, but it allowed him to make himself a living, and in this world, what more could you ask for, really?

Mostly he sold to college kids. Some years he figured he could just sell during finals week and he'd be able to pay the rent for six months. The best part about selling to students was that he had turnover. Meant the cops couldn't find patterns, at least not without looking too hard. Plus, they were all focused on the gangs. They usually left a smalltime entrepreneur like Jorge alone.

Then he found out the hard way that the cops knew all about him, they just didn't give much of a damn-which suited him fine-until they needed someone to drop a dime on someone called Ray-Ray. Jorge had heard about Ray-Ray-ran heroin out of Alphabet City, but that was all he knew. The cops had figured they'd bust Jorge, get him to flip on Ray-Ray. But he didn't have anything to flip.

Nothing pissed off cops more than messing with their plans. Since they couldn't use Jorge to trade up to Ray-Ray, they went crazy on him. He couldn't afford a good lawyer, so he got stuck with some white chick of a public defender who didn't know her skinny ass from her bony elbows and landed Jorge in RHCF.

His only hope was parole. Then he'd be back on the streets before his hair went gray. He figured the best way to do that was to go all Malcolm X and become a Muslim. When he saw that one of the other cons-dude named Malik Washburne-was offering a Koran class, he figured that was the best way to start.

But just like the UC cop, Jorge misjudged seriously on that one.

Now, after both Washburne and Vance got themselves iced in the weight yard, the whole place had gone into lockdown. That meant everyone was in his dorm, and the TVs were only showing one thing. Jorge hated it. Only thing he ever watched on TV outside was pay-per-view porn, and they didn't let them watch anything that good inside, so Jorge mostly ignored it.

Then one of the COs-Jorge didn't know his name on purpose; bastards didn't deserve names, they were just bullies with nightsticks-took him out to talk to a detective.

Actually, he was talking to two detectives. They both had dark hair. The one in the suit who was sitting had blue eyes and smirked a lot. The other one was standing up, wearing just a suit jacket and button-down shirt without the tie, and he looked like he scowled all the time. They introduced themselves as Detective Flack and Mac Taylor.

"Flack and Mac," Jorge said. "That's cute. You two should go onna road or somethin'."

"Glad you approve," Flack said. "So tell me, Jorge-what were you doing in the weight yard yesterday?"

If the questions were all this stupid, this might actually wind up being fun. There was a CO in the room, too, but Jorge ignored him like he did the COs most of the time. "Liftin' weights."

"Anything else?"

"Not till one of them skinheads shivved Vance."

"What about Malik Washburne?"

"What about him?"

"You see him die?"

"Saw him on the ground. Shit, I was the one told the COs he got iced."

Flack-or was it Mac? Jorge had already lost track-smiled. "And damn neighborly of you that was, too. Did you interact with him at all prior to that?"

"Yeah, I used the bench 'fore he did." Jorge was glad they were just talking about the yard. As long as they didn't talk about the damn Koran class, he was okay.

"Before him, huh?" Flack said. "You figure you could get back into his Koran class if you gave up the bench for him?"

Shit. "I don't know what you mean."

"Yeah, you do. You signed up for Washburne's Koran class. Probably figured if you wore a dashiki and knelt to Allah a few times, the parole board would go easy on you."

Jorge snarled. "That's interferin' with my religious rights, yo!"

Mac talked for the first time. "Which way do you kneel when you pray to Allah?"

Suddenly, Jorge got nervous. He was pretty sure he knew that one. Had something to do with the sun, he thought. "East-the way the sun rises."

"Actually," Mac said with a smile, "it's toward Mecca. Nice try, though."

Flack was holding a folder and was flipping through it. "I got a report here from Officer Sullivan. He said that yesterday, during Malik Washburne's Koran class, he informed you that trying to fake a religious conversion to improve your parole chances was, and I quote, 'an insult to Allah.'"

"And that was when you hit him," Mac said.

It wasn't like he could deny it, so Jorge said, "Yeah, I took a swing at him, but I didn't hit him or nothin'. He hit me, though. Pendejo got me right in the nose!"

"According to the infirmary report," Mac said, "it wasn't broken, but it did bleed a lot. Some of that blood got on Washburne, and we found it on his body."

"Yeah, so we got into it, so what? That don't mean I killed him."

"And yet," Flack said, "you got the trifecta: means, motive, and opportunity. We got your prints on the weight that killed him."

"I told you I used that weight right before he did! And yeah, I figured I'd suck up to his sorry ass so I could get back in the Koran class. There ain't nobody but Allah in my life now."

Flack looked up at Mac. Unless it was the other way around. "You can just feel the religious fervor, can'tcha?"

"Oozing out of his pores," Mac said. Then he leaned forward and stared at him with his scary-ass eyes. "The evidence is piling up against you, Jorge. Malik Washburne had a lot of friends in here. It'd go easier if you confess now."

Jorge was no fool. Cops only said that when they didn't have anything. If they were sure, they'd arrest him. Not that it mattered that much-he wasn't going anywhere for another two years, and then only if he made parole-but he wasn't making their lives easier, either. "Screw you, cop. I didn't kill Washburne. I ain't a killer."

"Yeah, well," Flack said, "neither was Jack Mulroney."

"Yeah, but white folks is crazy. I'm just a businessman bidin' his time in the service of Allah."

Flack and Mac looked at each other, then Mac said, "We're done here. For now, anyhow."

As the CO took Jorge back to his dorm, he wondered what would happen next. He was nothing but a wannabe Muslim, and el-Jabbar had been giving him static on the subject. Getting into it with Washburne didn't help. If word got out that he was prime suspect number one, he was seriously screwed.

Luckily, cops weren't the type to go gossiping. Jorge figured he was safe as long as the cops didn't say anything, and they wouldn't unless and until they actually had something. If that happened, they'd arrest whoever they had, and he'd be safe then.

At least, Jorge hoped that would be how it worked.

After Melendez was taken out, Mac asked who was next on the list.

Ursitti consulted his clipboard. "Karl Fischer. He's-"

"I know what he's in for." Mac shook his head. Fischer had shot three young men in a subway car, killing one, leaving one in a coma, and paralyzing the third for life. All three were African-American. "What the hell's he doing here?"

Holding up a hand, Ursitti said, "I know, Detective, I know, but his lawyer made a motion and the judge granted it-as long as his case is on appeal, he gets to stay in medium. And he carries a lotta weight around here."

"Using the system for his own benefit," Mac said with disgust. Of course, Mac himself had done something similar to get Gerrard and Sinclair off his back, but that was only because his back was against the wall.

Besides which, Mac was on the side of right there. When Clay Dobson was first arrested, the officers failed to secure his belt. Dobson tried to hang himself with that belt. Gerrard, then a lieutenant, covered up both the failure to secure and the suicide attempt. Mac hadn't wanted to use that against Gerrard and Sinclair (who was the inspector in charge of the precinct at the time of Dobson's arrest), but he had little choice. While the DA's office had cleared Mac of any wrongdoing in Dobson's death, Sinclair had started an internal investigation to please the media and raise his own profile, no doubt in an attempt to make his bid for the commissioner's chair more realistic.

Mac had thought him to be a fool in any case. Gerrard, at least, used to be a good police. Sinclair, though, was a political animal with delusions of grandeur-and also no sense of history. Most NYPD commissioners were brought in from outside, and the job tended to chew people up and spit them out. Theodore Roosevelt had one of the most distinguished careers of anyone in American history, a successful soldier, a well-regarded New York State governor, a popular vice president and president. The one failure in his entire career was his disastrous tenure as the commissioner of the NYPD.

Sinclair was no Teddy Roosevelt. Thoughts like that kept Mac warm at night.

And sights like Karl Fischer kept him up at night. One of the COs Mac hadn't seen before brought Fischer in. He was shorter than Mac was expecting him to be, with a monk's fringe of hair that was part blond, part silver; a hook nose; and wide, penetrating blue eyes. They were the same color as Flack's.

Most of the inmates who'd come into this room were either defiant or overly solicitous. The former were the harder criminals who didn't give a damn about anything; the latter were the ones who were doing everything they could to be model citizens in order to make parole.

Fischer didn't fit either one of those types. He had a superiority complex about him, a vibe Mac hadn't gotten off any of the other inmates so far. "Detective Flack, Detective Taylor," he said in a bourbon-smooth voice with just a hint of a Southern accent, "what can I do to help y'all today?"

Where others had asked that question as if eager to please, Fischer was acting as if he were doling out indulgences. Neither detective had introduced himself; Fischer must have gotten their names from one of the other inmates, a neat trick with the place in lockdown. Obviously, he wanted to show off how good his information network was.

Mac found he couldn't help himself. "How'd you swing getting remanded here? You were convicted of, among other things, first-degree murder."

"That's arguable, Detective Taylor. You see, the law says I'm entitled to a jury of my peers. That jury was pretty much all my inferiors." He smiled. "Pity that particular nuance doesn't carry much weight with New York judges, but I've got other things to base my appeal on. For one thing, the evidence was truly spotty. Obviously, Detective Taylor, you weren't the one on the case. I can't imagine you allowing an arrest to proceed with the pissant evidence they had on me. If'n you were, I daresay this would've had a much better end for all concerned."

"Somehow I doubt that," Mac said tightly.

"Don't sell yourself short, Detective. I've been hearin' about your trials and tribulations with that Dobson fella. Now there's a hardcore sumbitch, if you'll pardon my French. It's a travesty of justice that a man like him gets to go free while an innocent man such as myself rots away in prison."

Flack got the interview back on track, for which Mac was grateful. "What can you tell us about the two murders that happened this morning?"

"Not a thing, sorry to say, Detective. They both happened in the weight yard when I was not present in that facility."

"So you didn't know that it was Jack Mulroney who killed Vance Barker."

"I was deep in conversation with Mr. William Cox. We were discussing the Gospel according to St. John and the discrepancies between it and the other three Gospels, which I attribute to John actually being present."

Mac raised an eyebrow. "Really? Most religious scholars have come to the conclusion that John was actually the farthest removed from the lifetime of Jesus Christ and that Mark was the most likely to be an eyewitness. That's a very old-fashioned viewpoint you have, Fischer."

"Well, I'm an old-fashioned kinda guy. I'm surprised to hear an officer of the law espousing knowledge of scripture, particularly from a scholarly perspective." He smiled, an expression that was wholly without warmth. "But then, you were a Marine, weren'tcha, Detective? I guess it's true that there are no atheists in foxholes, huh?"

Cursing himself for allowing Fischer to direct the interview, Mac saved Flack the trouble of getting them back on track. "What did you see?"

"I'm afraid that I was sufficiently engrossed in my spiritual discourse with William to see much of anything. I only noticed something was going on when the, ah, gentlemen in the weight yard started screaming obscenities. I noticed that there was a considerable amount of blood on the fence, but beyond that, I'm afraid I didn't notice any particulars."

Ursitti stepped in for the first time. "So Mulroney didn't come to you? Asking permission?"

"I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about, Lieutenant. Nobody in this prison needs my permission to do anything. I'm just an inmate hereabouts."

"Cut the crap, Fischer," Ursitti said, "everybody knows you run the white people here."

"That's an unsubstantiated allegation, Lieutenant. And I'd say it's slanderous besides. Within the confines of the regulations of this facility, Jack Mulroney is free to do whatever he wishes with or without my consent."

"So the fact that he talked to you in the mess right after he stole his razor blade is just a coincidence."

Fischer looked studiously thoughtful. Mac felt nauseated all of a sudden.

"I do recall," Fischer finally said, "that Jack and I had a conversation over breakfast. I believe it was about the unfairness of Mr. Vance Barker's takeout slide during yesterday's baseball game."

Flack asked, "Did Mulroney mention retribution?"

"In fact, he did, but I cautioned him against it. Such retribution, as you call it, very rarely has any kind of good end. It would seem he didn't follow my advice-assuming he was the one who stabbed Mr. Barker. As I said, I didn't see it."

This was getting them nowhere. Besides, Mulroney had confessed, and they had physical evidence to back it up. While trying to nail Fischer on conspiracy to commit murder would have given Mac great joy, he doubted someone who'd finagled remanding to medium security while appealing a murder charge would have any trouble sliding out of additional charges here. So Mac moved on to the other case. "What about Malik Washburne?"

"What about him?"

"Did you see who killed him?"

"Again, Detective, he was in the weight yard. I wasn't. And I don't much pay attention to the comings and goings of heathens. They'll all get theirs when the Kingdom of Heaven arrives, worry not."

"I wasn't worried," Mac said.

Flack asked, "Were you aware of any disagreements Washburne may have had with any of the other inmates?"

"Far as I could tell, folks seemed to like him well enough. So did I, truth be told. He was a decent sort of fella-for a heathen, leastaways. Whoever killed him will surely burn in the fires of hell for his sin." Again, the smile. "Not that most of those imprisoned here were likely to avoid that destination in the first place."

"Except you, of course," Mac said, "being innocent and all."

"Perfection is God's prerogative, Detective Taylor. We mortals can only aspire to it, and that means that sometimes mistakes will be made, such as my incarceration. It is a mistake that I will rectify, worry not."

"Still not worried." Mac looked at Flack. "We're done here."

"Definitely."

Fischer stood up. "I'm sorry I couldn't have been more help, gentlemen. I hope you find both of the murderers in our midst."

After Fischer left, Flack started looking at the floor on either side of the table.

"What're you looking for, Don?"

Flack looked up at Mac. "I figure after all the manure that was being shoveled, we oughta be seeing a rose pop out of the floor any second now."

Mac chuckled. Ursitti didn't. The lieutenant said, "Fischer's no laughing matter, Detective. I really hope his appeal finishes, one way or the other, soon, 'cause the sooner he's out of here, the smoother everything'll go around here." He sighed. "It's no coincidence that our first DIC in two decades is while that asshole's here. El-Jabbar's bad enough, but at least he keeps things together, y'know? Fischer's just bad news. Usually the white guys here keep their heads down, but he's got 'em all riled up. And I'll tell you something else, no way Mulroney even thinks about doing what he did without runnin' it by Fischer first."

"Unfortunately," Mac said with a sigh, "the only evidence we have points to Mulroney acting alone."

"Yeah." Ursitti shook his head and looked at his clipboard to see who the next interview was.