As soon as she disconnected, she got out her iPad, logged onto the hotel's internet, sat down in the club chair by the window balcony, booted up her VPN and Googled Weaver Detention Facility.
A couple of official-looking sites connected to various government agencies. A Wikipedia entry. A prisoner advocacy group promising information and support. Some news articles.
She clicked on the first hit, which seemed to be the main site for the facility.
A photo of an anonymous low-slung gray building with two flagpoles out front, taken at a distance; next to it a portrait of a broad-faced, buzz-cut white man sitting at a desk. Buttons for “Visitation and Contact Instructions” and “Jobs Available at this Facility.” Below that, in polite gray text, a couple of sentences:
Carl Weaver Detention Facility: A medium-security facility with a capacity of 1,027 inmates.
Customer Base: The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, US Marshal's Service.
“Customer Base”?
In the upper left, there was another button that said: “Back to Locations.”
She clicked on it. A banner photo of warehouse and factory-like buildings spread over a flat, anonymous landscape, surrounded by warm lights perched atop skinny poles, like cheap Ikea floor lamps that had somehow grown as tall as redwoods.
Find a Facility,
it said. And below that,
Prostatis: A Nationwide Network Dedicated to Community Safety.
It took a moment to sink in.
The Weaver Detention Facility was owned by Prostasis.
Chapter Twenty-Three
For a minute or
two she just sat there, staring out the window at the San Francisco skyline, her mind empty except for that one thought.
Prostasis owned Weaver Detention Facility.
Operated, rather.
Same thing.
This was bad.
A sudden wave of panic drove her to her feet. This was very bad.
Why? What were the implications?
Deep, calming breaths, she told herself. Get a grip. Think it through.
Randall Gates was a vice president of Prostatis, and he was on Safer America's board.
Gary, or somebody, had pulled strings to get Danny transferred to Weaver Correctional Facility.
Did Gates know about her connection to Danny? About her other life? If he did
. . .
Christ, she thought, did Gary
want
it to come out? That she had a boyfriend who'd been caught smuggling pot? And here she was at the arm of Caitlin O'Connor, the spokeswoman for an organization that preached getting tough on crime.
Why?
Maybe I'm being set up, she thought. Maybe
. . .
maybe something's going to happen to Caitlin, and I'm going to get blamed for it.
That sounded like a scenario Gary would enjoy. Something that would end with both her and Danny in a cell. Or worse.
Was Danny safe?
“Fuck!”
“I'm sorry, I'm
not
going to calm down. You need to get him out of there.”
“Emily, we're doing what we can.”
“Which is
what
, exactly?”
She dropped the phone to her side, dragged her fingers across her forehead.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Get a grip. You have to.
She raised the phone back up to her ear.
“Derek,” she began. “I've done some research into Weaver. It's a substandard, dangerous facility.”
Which was the truth. She'd spent the last half hour Googling on her iPad. Among other things, Weaver had been written up in a few local papers for an inmate-hazing ritual that the guards had not only turned a blind eye toward but encouraged. They called it “Balls on the Wall.” Michelle could barely stand to read about it.
“They understaff the prison so they can make more money,” she said, because money was easier to talk about. “They've found
maggots
in the food.”
“Marisol is going out there first thing tomorrow with the paperwork for Jeff to file a request for a transfer back to Harris County. Assuming this was an administrative error of some kind, that should be all it takes to fix this.”
“And if it wasn't?”
“We file the request for a transfer anyway. If the overcrowding in Harris County really is that severe, they can still move Jeff to a facility closer to Houston.”
“What if they don't? What are we going to do?”
She drew in a deep breath. It was time for, if not honesty, some kind of acknowledgment of what was actually happening here.
“Look, Derek, you know this whole thing is
. . .
that it's screwed up. That there's some kind of
. . .
pressure or vendetta going on.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end.
What
did
Derek actually know?
“Jeff is a pre-trial detainee,” he finally said. “As such, he's entitled to a higher level of constitutional protection than a convicted prisoner. They're not allowed to punish him when he hasn't been found guilty of anything. If they keep up this bullshit, we claim that it's punitive and they're violating the Due Process clauses of the Constitution.”
If Derek knew something, he wasn't saying.
“Do you think that will work?”
“I think we can make a good case.”
Which didn't answer the question at all.
“In the meantime
. . .
” A pause. “It might help if we made that appointment with the DEA.”
Shit.
“Okay,” Michelle said. “Let me
. . .
let me figure a few things out.”
Did it really make
sense for her to meet with the DEA? How much time would that actually buy her, before someone decided there was enough evidence to arrest her as well?
She'd only been Emily for two years. If they were checking her background
. . .
if they asked a lot of questions
. . .
How much of a life story could she fake?
She started to unpack.
After she'd hung her Armani jacket, slacks and blouses in the closet, her light overcoat she'd brought for unpredictable San Francisco nights, folded up her other clothes and placed them in the drawers under the flat-panel TV, she considered what was in the ruck: The logbook. The passports. The money.
She wasn't sure what to do with the logbook and the passports, but she decided the hotel safe was good enough to store the $10,000 bundle, plus the $3,000 from the camera bag, the $25K from Houston and half of the cash in her wallet. People carried cash. That alone wasn't incriminating. Not for Michelle, anyway.
Christ, she thought. All that money in the safe at the Arcata house. Had they gotten a warrant? Could they search the house? She'd put nearly $25,000 in the safe, and there was already cash in it. What would they make of some thirty thousand in cash in a safe that she and Danny both used?
They'd hang her on that alone.
I should've just carried it on, she thought. It would have been less of a risk.
Stupid, she thought. You're so stupid.
But she couldn't spend too much time beating herself up about that right now. She needed to figure out what to do.
Was there any way to get out ahead of this game that Gary was playing?
She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the closet safe and started pulling out the things she'd packed from the ruck.
Her camera bag. The money in it. The practical jacket and the $10,000 bundle. The money from Houston. The passports.
She opened one of the passports, the one belonging to “Meredith Evelyn Jackson.”
Her hair was dark in the photo. Shoulder length.
Well, there was nothing she could do about the length. But I should dye my hair again, she thought. Back to what it was before.
She was going to have to use this passport. She knew it now. There was no going back to Emily. And she couldn't count on Michelle being safe for much longer.
Danny's logbook. She ran her fingers on its pebbled surface.
What to do with the logbook?
What to do about Danny, locked up in a prison run by Prostatis?
No way that filling out an administrative request for a transfer was going to get him out of there. And how long would building a case based on constitutional law actually take?
I've got to get him out, she thought. I have to at least try.
She pulled
Taking Flight
out of the bag. The Further Adventures of Lex Telluride, she thought.
Have you heard back from Sam?
When she'd told him she'd heard nothing from Sam, that was when Danny had told her about the book.
Maybe Sam wasn't holding up his end of the bargain. Whatever the bargain was.
She considered her choices. There weren't very many.
If she wanted to get Danny out, she'd have to make a bargain with someone, and that someone was either Sam or Gary.
She took her last remaining burner phone out of her suitcase and headed downstairs. She'd make the call outside.
“What can I do
for you?”
Where to start?
“We have a situation,” she said to Sam.
After she'd finished, there
was silence on the other end of the line. Typical, Michelle now realized. He did this kind of thing and answered questions with questions, making her force the conversationâa way of keeping her off-balance.
Why did Danny have so much faith in him?
“Did you get all that?” she finally said.
“I did.”
“And
. . .
do you have any recommendations?”
Silence.
“You know, this is a burner phone with limited minutes,” she said.
A chuckle. “Let the process run its course,” he said.
Now it was her turn for silence. “Are you shitting me?” she finally said. “I'm actually curious.”
“Of course not. It's always best to see if the easiest path opens up. You waste much less energy and the calling in of favors that way.”
“You know, Sam,” she said, “it's funny, because Danny really trusted you. He was counting on you to help. And so far, all you've done is make vague promises and tell me to let it all play out.”
“You think I haven't helped him already?” he said sharply. “That I haven't helped you? Do you think all of the arrangements I make happen by magic?”
“No. I think they happen because you or somebody else owed him some favors. And now you're adding up who owes who.”
Funny. It wasn't until she'd said it that she knew she'd spoken the truth.
She thought she heard his intake of breath. But that might have been wishful thinking. This man was cold. It wasn't about loyalty for him, not primarily, anyway. It was all about the balance, about the calculation, how the numbers added up.
“Our best option is to wait and see if this administrative appeal gets him out of the facility. If it doesn't, then we can escalate the pressure.”
“Okay. Then I'll call you tomorrow or the day after. We should know where we stand by then.”
After they disconnected, she stared at the burner phone in her hand. She wondered if the low heel on her boot was hard enough to crush it.
What an asshole.
She hadn't told Sam everything. She wasn't going to lay down all her cards at once. She hadn't told him about Danny's logbook or the passports, and she was pretty sure that Sam didn't know about them. Danny wasn't naïve. He was always hedging his bets.
But it was clear that Sam didn't care all that much about Danny being in prison, in a place where it was reasonable to assume people were willing to do him harm. Sam didn't care at all that she was being squeezed by Gary and the DEA, or that she was likely being set up in some kind of scheme to help keep Safer America the convenient little money machine that it was, one pumping out ads to support the interests feeding it all the cash that kept it running.
She was willing to wait a few days. After that, Sam was going to get something in his mailbox that he might not much like.
After that, she decided
to take a walk. She needed to buy another burner or two, for one thing. It was close to 5:30, still plenty of sun left, and the day was pleasant, cloudy and in the mid-sixties.
She wandered around Union Square in search of a Walgreens. Those were everywhere, so she figured it wouldn't take long. She was always struck by what a beautiful city San Francisco was, but she especially noticed it now, after spending so much time in Houston. All these older, elegant buildings, framed against a pink and purple sunset. Now filled mostly with luxury chain stores. Tiffany. Gucci. Marc Jacobs. Kate Spade. Burberry, Brooks Brothers and Bloomingdale's.
So much money here.
By the time she got back to the hotel, it was nearly 7:00.
I should eat something, she thought. Maybe just in the hotel restaurant. It was on Safer America's dime, after all, and sushi sounded as good as anything. After that, she had no idea. Go to the gym, maybe. Watch a stupid movie. Work on her story for the DEA, that is, if she decided to make that appointment. She really wasn't sure if it made sense, if it would actually do any good.
And if they were planning to arrest her, if she met with them and they knew where she was, even if she was traveling as Michelle
. . .
Panic fluttered in her chest. I've got to get Danny out
of jail, she thought, and then we have to get the fuck out of
here.
The restaurant was called
Kendo and was decorated in black with red and gold accents, with swords hung on the walls here and there and a sculpture tangle of branches sitting in the center of the space lit by gauzy blue and red spotlights.
There was a place at the sushi bar. Michelle eased her way in.
“Something to drink?” The waitress, dressed in what looked like a fashion version of a black martial arts outfit, was young, cute. Everyone here would be young and cute, Michelle was willing to bet.