“What is it?” I asked.
“Whoever tried to kill me slipped somethin’ in my
pocket,”
he said. “I’m sure
it’s
still with
my
property
now.
Officers probably just thought it was
mine.”
“Thought what was?”
“I felt it in
my
pocket but I
can’t
be sure what it
was.”
I
walked
over
to Confinement and searched through
Lance’s
property.
It took a while—not because he had so much. He
didn’t.
But I was thorough, carefully going
over
every inch of everything he owned.
I
wouldn’t
call my search a complete waste of time, because now I
knew,
but it yielded nothing helpful. There was nothing unusual or suspicious in the modest possessions the state of Florida allowed Lance to call
his.
I walked back
over
to Medical
angry
and frustrated—and only partly at Phillips. I should’ve known
better.
I was past the infirmary and nearly back to the SOS cell when I realized Lance had only one uniform. It
didn’t
stand out because nearly all searches of inmate property
involve
only one uniform—the inmate was usually wearing the
other.
But all Lance had on at the moment was a canvas shroud—the only thing permitted in the SOS cell. So where was his other uniform? It was a good question.
Worth
asking.
“Where’s Phillips’s
uniform?” I asked the small woman at the nurses’ station. “The one he was wearing when he came
in.”
She
shrugged
without saying anything, which made her seem even younger.
She was a little less than five feet, so petite she probably did most of her shopping in the
children’s
department, and I was sure her nurse uniform had to be special ordered—that or she sewed it herself.
“You
have
no idea?”
“Wait,”
she said, holding up her tiny hand. “Give me a
minute.”
“Take
two,”
I said.
“It’s
important.”
“We
bagged
it
up,
but I
don’t
think
it’s
been sent anywhere yet.
Let’s
see . . . Check the back counter of the infirmary.”
I did.
As I walked back to the nurses’ station,
my
impatience ballooning, I tried to breathe up some zen. “It
wasn’t
there?” she asked.
“Amazingly,
no.
Any other ideas?”
“
Wonder
if this is it?”
Without standing
up,
without
much
movement at all, she reached
over
and grabbed a clear plastic bag with an inmate uniform in it.
I took the bag and began to empty its contents.
The tag sewn onto the shirt had
Lance’s
full name and DC number on it. I looked through it, returned it, and withdrew his
pants.
A single playing card fell out and fluttered to the
floor.
Returning the inmate blues to the bag, I handed it to the helpful nurse, and bent to retrieve the card.
It was from the Florida cold cases deck, a king of hearts—sponsoring agency seals on the back and information about Miguel Morales on the face.
“W
hat do you know about Miguel Morales?” I asked.
I had just returned to the SOS cell from examining
Lance’s
property and was sitting in the rickety old folding chair again.
He looked genuinely perplexed, his pale forehead making
waves
like a
child’s
depiction of
water.
“Who? Did you find—”
“Morales,”
I said. “Miguel
Morales.”
“
Never heard the name before. Who is he?”
“
You
don’t
know?”
He shook his head. “He who tried to kill me?”
“
A
missing person. Hispanic male. Last seen in Sarasota three years
ago.”
“What’s
that got to do with—”
“I’ll be in
touch,”
I said.
“What was in my pocket?” I stood.
“You
gonna look into this for me? I get out soon. I’ve
worked
real hard to be
ready.
I just want my second chance. I’ve almost made it.
Don’t
let them kill
me.
Not when I’m so close. Please.”
S
uicide is an epidemic in prison.
And though it has been on a sharp decrease since the 1980s, it still accounts for more deaths in prison than murder, accidents, and drug and alcohol overdose combined.
In state and federal facilities, suicide accounts for about 6 percent of all deaths. In county jails
it’s
much
higher.
Because inmates
don’t
have
easy access to drugs or weapons, they often employ methods that are as creative as they are torturous. The three most common types are strangulation, poisoning, and self-inflicted
wounds.
Strangulation is the easiest, poisoning the most difficult, self-inflicted wounds the most brutal. With asphyxiation you drift off to sleep. With poisoning, toxic cleaning chemicals damage your kidneys beyond repair. But with self-inflicted
wounds,
you cut and rip and tear and gash your own skin with makeshift blades and sharp objects and wait to bleed out.
But maybe Lance Phillips
didn’t
try
to kill himself.
Maybe there had been fewer suicides at PCI than
we
thought.
I looked at the cold-case king of hearts again.
One card
didn’t
make for a good hand—no hand at all, in fact—but I was willing to bet on homicide
over
suicide, and I was counting on the property sergeant to reward my
wager.
“Ever see one of these—” I began. “Of course.”
I was holding up the cold-case king of hearts. “In the property of an inmate who supposedly committed suicide?”
“Oh.”
The heavy makeup on Sergeant Carrie
Helms’s
fifty-eight-year-old face emphasized rather than de-emphasized the laugh lines and wrinkles, but she had a youthful bearing, and her bright blue eyes still sparkled mischievously beneath her short gray
hair.
She took the card and examined it.
Cold-case playing cards are created and distributed by several statewide law enforcement agencies, including the DOC, FDLE, sheriffs’ and police chiefs’ associations, and crime stoppers. Each deck features information about fifty-two unsolved homicides or missing person cases, with the crime stoppers toll-free tip line and the cold-case team web
address.
The decks are doled out to inmates in hopes they’ll come forward with information that’ll help solve the
very,
very cold cases.
Thinking about the cold-case cards triggered something inside me, and I thought I recalled seeing a deck mixed in among the other playing cards on the poker table in the farmhouse at
Potter
Farm this morning.
“Supposedly?” she repeated. “Seen any of these?”
“I’m sure I
have,”
she said. “These decks are all
over
the
place.”
“Not a
deck,”
I said.
“A
single card.”
Her eyebrows shot
up,
smoothing out the skin of her wrinkled forehead. “Hmm,” she said, eyeing me with a conspiratorial expression.
“I’d
have
to check.
What’s
this about?”
“It was with Lance
Phillips’s
property,”
I said. “Not the deck. Just the single card. He says whoever tried to kill him and make it look like suicide slipped it in his
pocket.”
She looked at the card again, reading the information about Miguel Morales who went missing in Sarasota three years
ago.
“I’ll only
have
the property of recent
suicides,”
she said. “Older ones will already be gone.”
“Do you mind checking?”
“It’ll take a while. Probably tomorrow morning at the earliest.
You
think Phillips had something to do with Morales disappearing?”
I
shrugged.
“The killer might. Or maybe the card itself and not the cold-case info means something to the killer. Or maybe
there’s
no
killer.”
“Know anything about the Morales case?”
I shook my head. “Will the next time you see
me.”
She smiled. “Never doubted that,
John Jordan.
Never doubted that.”
I
stopped by the chapel on my
way
up to the
warden’s
office and called Dad.
Chaplain Singer, the staff chaplain forced upon me by the new warden and the one he was working hard to
give
my job
to,
was out this week and I had the chapel to myself.
“Driver for Kent Clark says
he’s
no
hero,”
Dad said. “Oh yeah?”
“Didn’t
try
to stop the robbery of the body in the back of his hearse.
Didn’t
even get much of a description or bother to write down the
plate.”
“What happened?”
“Says he was on a long, empty stretch of Highway 22 between Pottersville and
Panama
City when a nice black car pulls up beside him and a guy in a mask with a gun motions for him to pull
over.”
“What kind of mask? What kind of gun?”
“Halloween. Monster mask of some kind. Shotgun as best I can gather from his description. Says the guy told him he
wouldn’t
hurt him. That he just wanted the girl.
Took
his keys and his phone. Tied his hands to the wheel.
Took
the
body.
Tried
to stuff it in the trunk but it was too stiff. So laid it in the backseat.
Tossed
the
driver’s
keys and phone into the
woods
and took
off.”
“
He seem credible?” I asked.
“I find his incredibility credible. If he were faking stupidity or ineptitude, I think
he’d
bring it down several
notches.”
“What’s
his story?”
“Grandson of Kent or Clark. I forget which. Student at Gulf Coast. Musician. Just your general all around
genius.”
“What’re y’all doing now?” I asked.
“Tryin’
to figure out how to put out a BOLO for a
nice
black
car.”
I laughed.
“I
have
no idea what the hell is goin’
on,”
he said, “but the body being stolen this
way
makes me think
it’s
someone tryin’ to embarrass me before the election.”
“Could
be,”
I said. “Whatever it
is,
we’ll figure it
out.”
“What’re you dealing with there?” he asked. I told him.
When I finished,
we
were quiet a moment.
“Oh,”
I said, remembering something I wanted to ask him. “Is
Jake
with you?”
“
No.
Why?”
“When you see him
would
you ask him if one of the decks they were using in the poker game last night was a cold-case deck? And who brought it?”
“Sure. Why?” I told him.
“I know you got a lot on you, son, but if you could help me with this thing . . .
I’d
be grateful.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Absolutely.
You
got it. I
was
gonna see Mom during my lunch break, but if you need me to do something—”
“No,
see
her.
If something comes
up,
I’ll call you. Otherwise just
check
with me after
work.”
“I
told you to be in my office first thing,” Matson said. “This is the very thing I’m talkin’ about.
It’s
always somethin’ with you. When I
give
an order I expect it to be followed to the letter. No
exceptions.”
We
were in his office with the door closed.
Of course, that
didn’t
prevent anyone outside his office or in the admin building from hearing what he was
saying.
The office, like the man, was stark and severe, minimalist and utilitarian. Everything was institutional and state-issued except for a few framed photographs of inmates working on the
farm
at Angola, Florida and Louisiana DOC citations, some trite religious and motivational posters, and a little LSU memorabilia.
“I
run
my prisons a certain
way,”
he said.
“It’s
why I’m good at what I
do.
It’s
why I’ve been brought here. I’m going to whip PCI into shape and then it will be the model for the rest of the state. It takes a certain type of person to
work
at a Bat Matson institution. Not
everyone’s
cut out for it. In fact, most people
aren’t.
It’s
nothing personal. I just
don’t
feel as though you
are.”