The Four Stages of Cruelty (17 page)

Ruddik wouldn’t tell me what it was about. He wouldn’t even tell me where we were going. He asked me to meet him at a McDonald’s parking lot off Route 36 at eight-thirty in the morning, the second day of the new year.

I slept badly and woke early. Driving east, I watched the sun rising fast, changing from a dispersed haze to an intense but distant orb. The snow had receded from the road and become a grimy nothingness on the shoulder.

The McDonald’s, just off the exit ramp, was adjacent to a strip mall that included a sport store, a tax attorney’s office, and a Chinese restaurant. I was ten minutes early and feeling coffee-deprived, so I nudged into the drive-thru line. Naturally, as soon as I was locked into the decision, cars in front and cars behind, I noticed Ruddik sitting in a vehicle I didn’t
recognize, a silver Ford sedan, parked next to the Dumpster, staring forward, waiting. The sense of screwup came over me, like I was late for a job interview. I tried to catch his eye, wishing I hadn’t committed to the drive-thru, but he didn’t see me. I tapped the horn, but he still didn’t look over, and I got an annoyed stare in the rearview mirror ahead of me.

When I had finally been handed a large coffee black, I was two minutes late. I rolled through the parking lot, saw an empty spot four over from Ruddik and an old couple in a car going for it, cut them off in a move that was half vindictiveness, half desperation, and suffered their glares as I locked up and walked over to Ruddik’s car.

I sank deep into the seat. There were some food wrappers on the floor at my feet, but it was a clean car with a rental smell. “You got stuck in that lineup,” he said. So he had seen me. “I thought we’d drive together the rest of the way.” I nodded. He was dressed civilian. Jeans and a golf shirt under a fleece sweater. His hair looked good, like he’d just gotten it cut.

“Whose car is this?” I asked as we hit the on-ramp and cruised back on the highway.

“It’s budgeted to the investigation,” Ruddik answered. “We leave it at that parking lot for special occasions.”

A car
budgeted
for special occasions. And who is
we
? I still didn’t know, but Ruddik had an air I didn’t recognize in him, a calm professionalism and confidence, a hint that the uptight righteousness he displayed in uniform was an act. I didn’t ask him anything. I saw a briefcase on the backseat. Saw the gun in the shoulder holster inside his sweater. I wondered
if that was special duty or just typical macho shit. Unlike most of the male corrections officers, I didn’t carry a gun on civilian time. For some reason, we were entitled to carry, even though we had to check our weapons as soon as we stepped foot inside the prison. It always struck me as the height of lunacy—pack a gun while you’re out with your family at Applebee’s just because you can, store it in a gun locker when you get to work so the bad guys don’t wrestle it away from you.

We got off the highway, headed north on a county road, then wound our way west again around White Wolf Lake before turning into a suburb marked by one of those tony stone gates. Large houses, spread duly apart, lots of trees, plenty of judicious speed bumps, the glimpse of a golf course.

Knowing exactly where he was going, Ruddik turned up a hill and into a new lane still lacking public works, a stump where a fire hydrant would go, multicolored wires splaying from a telephone box, the ground torn up, the curbs unfinished, and three houses in various states of construction. Ruddik parked the car across the street from the third house, a two-story McMansion. Two worker vans were parked in the unfinished drive. I glimpsed a few construction men in the open hallway, another one behind a window on the second floor.

“What are we doing here?” I was reaching for a joke, but nothing came.

“How much do you think a house like this runs?” Ruddik asked. The serious look had returned to his face, the grave disapproval of misdeeds.

I gave it my appraising homeowner’s eye, the one on the lookout for defaulted subprime mortgage deals. The neighborhood, the size, the amount of land. I pegged it at three-quarters of a million.

“More,” Ruddik said. “And last week they decided to go with brick on the exterior.” He pointed at a pile of bricks under a tarp on the front yard. “And you know that’s not cheap.”

“Okay, what’s the point?”

“The house is owned by Allison Marie Harris. She’s a single mother of three boys, twice married, twice divorced, just moved from Sacramento, California.”

The name did nothing for me, except I wondered why anyone would move from California to the Upper Midwest.

“One year ago Allison Harris was in a state prison for drug possession. An eighteen-month sentence. Her three boys were temporarily placed in foster homes. She got out quickly, after just five months, then went on social assistance. Didn’t have a penny to her name. And now she’s moving into a million-dollar house in the suburbs.”

I tried to understand where he was going, what connection he was pointing out. “Is she family to one of the inmates?”

“Not quite,” Ruddik said. He looked over and gave me that long, mournful glance, then put the car back into drive. “She’s Roger Wallace’s kid. Your Keeper’s daughter.”

Everything I’d known about Wallace and how he operated shifted in an instant.

Ruddik nodded. “Twenty-five-year veteran, Roger Wallace, still working because he can’t retire, buying his daughter a million-dollar dream home. Go figure, huh?”

The car suddenly moving, pulling away from the curb, my brain slowly chasing after.

“I wanted you to see the house before we talked. You had to know it’s real.”

Ruddik brought his briefcase into the diner, and we sat at a booth. I was tired and grateful for the idea of cheap comfort and food. It already felt like a long day.

“Lawrence Elgin is dead. Did you know that?” he asked me.

I shook my head, another thin slice of shock.

“His condition kept getting worse until they had to take his leg off. I wanted him to talk to me before the operation, spill it all, but he wouldn’t budge without a transfer. I tried to get him treated in a civilian hospital, but the paperwork didn’t come through quickly enough. A blood clot got him on New Year’s Eve, around the time you and I were sitting in the parking lot talking. I call that bad luck and worse timing.”

The waitress came to take our order, and it took me a moment to bring my thoughts to her question and decide what I wanted. While I hesitated, Ruddik asked for eggs and bacon. I got it together and ordered yogurt and a fruit plate.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said after she left. I meant Elgin. I meant the loss of his snitch.

He shrugged. “It always gets harder just before it breaks. At least that’s what I tell myself.”

He started to bring his briefcase up to the surface of the table, then stopped.

“Here’s what you need to know about me,” he said.

I waited with a certain amount of anxiety for the next pronouncement. I realized partway through that I was listening to a confession.

“I’m a drunk. The socially acceptable term is recovering alcoholic. I used to fall asleep at the kitchen table in front of my family with a drink in my hand and my gun still loaded in its holster. That’s how bad it was. Not a drop for eight years now, but a daily urge as strong as you can imagine.”

I nodded. I knew drunks like that.

“I lost my wife and daughter, but if I’m honest with myself, that doesn’t bother me as much as the bad career turn. The job meant everything to me. Have you ever had that kind of frustration in your life?” Maybe not that, I thought, but I understood frustration. “I miss my girl, but I miss the job harder. That’s not a pleasant admission to make, but I try not to fool myself.”

He shifted the cutlery around and brought the sugar bowl in closer.

“This job I have now is a shit job. But I do it because it’s a second or third or fourth chance at the kind of work I do well and because it is nasty and no one else wants it. I’ve never been in a place where illegality is so openly tolerated. We can argue from now until the end of time about what the rules
should be in a self-contained world like Ditmarsh, but I think we can both agree that some actions are wrong no matter where they occur. Anyway, the main thing for you to know is I’m a drunk. And I work very hard to make up for that. You can ask my ex-wife if you can find her.”

He stopped talking. Was he waiting for my answer? I acknowledged that I had been sufficiently forewarned. I didn’t offer any of my own confessions in turn, nor did I think he expected it.

The waitress brought our coffee. Decaf for me. I needed nothing further to up my adrenaline.

“You saw the video. What did you think?” Ruddik asked as he stirred in cream.

Did he want me to express my outrage? I didn’t feel any. No one was hurt, all of it theatrical, boys being boys. I was numb to the cruelties that might have shocked a weak sister. It was only what happened to Crowley that made the video matter.

“How did you find it?” I asked.

“On the kind of site where you find such things. It’s already gone. Someone took it down.”

“Who?”

He shrugged.

“The Ditmarsh Social Club,” I said. “I want to know what that means.” And I did. Intensely.

He nodded. “I agree. We need to figure that out somehow.”

I hesitated. I didn’t know how to have this kind of conversation. “Not just the name. There was a mark, an emblem, below the name. Did you notice it?”

“Three triangles,” Ruddik said. His interest encouraged me, made me braver.

“Three triangles inside a circle,” I said. “I’m sure it comes from a fallout shelter sign.” I took a pen from my pocket and drew the marks on a napkin, then turned it around. “You see? That sign is in the bubble, above the stairs where the hatch goes down into the armaments room and the old dissociation unit. That’s how I found Crowley.”

He looked impressed. “How did you make the connection?”

I wasn’t ready for my own confession and felt my words curving away from the full truth. “I saw the sign first in a drawing, something Crowley had done for his art class. Then I noticed the same mark a number of places around the prison, mixed in with all the other graffiti. When I was working the bubble on Christmas Eve and saw the old fallout shelter sign turned upside down, it just clicked. I checked out the City because it seemed possible that the mark meant something. I didn’t know Crowley would be down there.”

He looked as if he had something to add, but he cut it off. “Good work. That’s how an instinct can pay off. Now, is there anything else you want to ask me before we go further?”

I didn’t know what going further meant, but I did want to ask a few more things.

“What’s your official status? You’re what? FBI?”

He nodded, and took a long second before answering. “In a way. When I think we’re ready for that level of disclosure, I’ll explain all the interdepartmental connections.”

Fine. The reluctance peeved me. But I had another question,
and I didn’t want to erode my standing before asking it. I was surprised by how much it pained me to voice the words.

“You say Wallace is dirty. How do you know for sure?”

I suppose part of me still didn’t want it to be true.

“The house is a bribe,” Ruddik answered. “I can’t prove it, because we haven’t secured a warrant to trace the finances, but my belief—based on scrutiny of Wallace’s unpromising long-term savings situation—is that the house was funded by a single transfer, a giant payoff for something that recently happened or is about to happen. But Wallace is only part of a larger picture.”

Ruddik unsnapped his briefcase and carefully spread four sheets of paper on the table, arranging them so that a dense schematic of lines and bubbles became connected. It looked like a technical drawing of a nerve cluster or the layout of tunnels on a lunar station.

“Consider this a work in progress. I’ve been building a network map of Ditmarsh Penitentiary by mining a variety of data points. It’s a hodgepodge, but an interesting one. Basically, think of it as a visual display of who spends time with who. I’ve included inmates, COs, and civilian staff in key positions like the mail room, the purchasing department, the infirmary, and other high-contact or heavy information flow areas. I’ve tried to analyze where shifts and meetings and work periods overlap, who knows who outside the institution and in social settings. Which staff goes on vacations or training courses together. I combine all that with financial information. I look for prisoners who have shown bumps in their inmate account balances. I look for the COs recording
the most overtime pay. I follow promotions and watch who gets special-duty opportunities.”

Our food arrived, and Ruddik slid the papers to the side, careful not to sully his map. I thought about URF and my struggle to join. Special duty.

“It’s new stuff,” Ruddik said. “Some people call it mosaic theory or network analysis. In the last few years it’s become standard in CIA and Homeland Security work, tracking phone calls, account transfers, flights, hotels, bar bills, mining all that data to draw conclusions about otherwise residual contact between apparent strangers. The goal is to sift through the trash and surface the connections.”

“I never knew that sort of thing was possible,” I said.

“Take a Homeland Security example,” he said, eating as he talked. “You’ve got three foreign students who have no apparent relationship with one another. But they pop up in your data because each one has attended a different flight school. Fine. We’re all suspicious of Arabs at flight schools. So you start tracking phone calls, bank deposits, vacations, business trips. You look into what each one does in his free time. Since they’re Muslim, you’re particularly interested in mosques, community groups, and special groceries and bookstores. Maybe you can’t see any conspiracy or connection. Just an innocent fascination with learning to fly an airplane. Then you realize that all three went to the same fitness club at least once within the last year. Now the gym becomes your next jump-off point. Does the gym itself arouse any suspicion, or is there anyone attached to the gym who could be a person of interest? Sure enough, you connect the gym to another person you’ve had your eye on for
some time, a courier type. Two more connections, and you’re linked to a banker in Switzerland who funnels cash for Al Qaeda. Bingo. There’s no proof, and there’s no crime, but you know there is a connection between those three students and a terrorist financier. Nothing random about it.”

Ruddik drove his toast into his egg and took a hasty bite leaning over the table.

“It sounds like that Kevin Bacon game,” I said. That’s all I could think of: the idea that any person could be linked to Kevin Bacon through a minimum of six other people.

“You’re talking about six degrees of separation. That’s an old Zimbardo experiment and very fundamental to network theory, but his scope of interest was just about random connections. We’re interested in the
intensity
of connections to show directional flow and draw conclusions about behavior patterns. The example I gave you about the three foreign students is a real one. That was three of the nineteen terrorists from September 11. When intelligence did a retro assessment of the trails the hijackers left behind before that day, we were able to discover connections between all nineteen hijackers. Rather than the mosques, like everyone expected, the gym was in fact the best nexus point for determining who knew who.” He grimaced. “That gym was the key, and we never knew it. They were workout pigs. They liked lifting in front of mirrors, and they got to know each other that way. Incidentally, a tendency for narcissistic behavior got upped in terrorist profiles subsequently. When assessing the motivations of extreme ideologues, we’d seriously overlooked personal aggrandizement as a coping mechanism.”

I stared at the map on the table. Some of the bubbles were densely connected with lines that led to other bubbles.

“So how does it work with Ditmarsh?”

“Basically I’m focused on the shadow hierarchy,” he said.

“Shadow?”

“As opposed to the real or formal hierarchy. You know how it works. The warden is a political figurehead. The deputy wardens are more like functional executives, chief operating officer, chief finance officer, and so on, while the keepers, or lieutenants, are the line managers with supervisory control over the rank-and-file COs, who have the most contact with the customers—or inmates.”

Customers? His corporate language threw me. I thought of the institution purely in the terms of a military organization.

“The shadow hierarchy explains what really happens inside—as opposed to the way we pretend things are supposed to happen. Why do some keepers have more clout than others? Why do some worthless COs have such easy shifts and other highly trained COs are always running into trouble? Why are there blocks that run smooth and others that don’t? How come when you pull one or two inmates out of a tier that’s running fine, you get a sudden surge in chaos and random violence? You know as well as I do there are inmates with more control over the daily routine than any CO. If you want to get something done, you’ve got to work through them; otherwise the whole system grinds to a halt and the other COs start ignoring you in the staff room because you’ve poked a stick into the wheel.”

“I’m not blind,” I said, a touch bitter. “I work there, too.”

“So you look for connections,” he said. “And sometimes you observe some interesting patterns.” He put his thick finger on one of the nodes. “I’m looking for my gym, and I’ve got a couple candidates.”

“Like where?” I asked.

“B-three is a node for sure. But that’s Billy Fenton’s ground, so no big surprise.”

I nodded. Although I had no evidence to back up my suspicions, I’d sensed power emanating from his surroundings, like waves of heat.

“The infirmary spiked slightly in the last six months, though I can’t tell whether that’s a distortion in the data or something meaningful.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Another really dense node is the art therapy group.”

In spite of everything, I wouldn’t have guessed. “What’s going on there?”

“Maybe it’s Crowley,” he said. “Crowley was in the infirmary. Crowley was on B-three. Crowley was in the art therapy group. Crowley ended up dead. If we can find out why, we’ll learn more about what he was involved in and who else was part of it.”

The plates had been cleared away, the coffee refilled.

“I want you to help,” he said.

“What do you mean by help?” I asked, nervous as hell.

“I think you have a knack for this stuff. And I want to see what you can come up with when you get your feet wet. Nothing crazy. Just a toe dip. You’re able to talk to some people I can’t, ask different questions. Let’s start with the
Ditmarsh Social Club, for example. You want to know more. I want to know more. I want you to ask around about it. There must be some old-timer you can trust. I want you to get a sense of how they react when you bring it up, maybe learn something valuable.”

I didn’t answer right away. I kept my face straight despite the misgivings. I suppose there’s a point when you join the other side, whether you commit to it or not. Just by listening to Ruddik’s overtures, by not walking out on him, I’d cut myself loose from any trust any CO might have owed me. I wasn’t sure I wanted that trust anymore. I was sick of the lies.

Ruddik kept working on me.

“I’ve shown you a lot of stuff here this morning, Kali. I’ve made myself very vulnerable to you. This is not a game. I’m asking for a little help. Another set of boots on the ground. No one has to know but you and me.”

In a snap I made my decision, my fateful affiliation. “I can do that.” I nodded. “I’ve got some ideas who to try.”