Page 21 of Girl, Entangled

‘Then you’re out of luck. Sorry. Could be anyone.’

‘What do you remember about Hayes?’

Pell shrugged. ‘He had what the guys underneath us would call luxury items. He had a radio, books, sewing equipment. Used to stitch these little patterns together. He even had a football.’

‘What? Seriously?’

‘Give a man a football and he’ll be happy for hours.’

Ella backtracked. ‘Not that. Hayes used to sew? As in, knit?’

‘Yeah. He used to take sewing classes, actually. Probably because nobody else wanted to, so there was no risk of him getting pool balled. Know what I mean?’

Ella caught the shifty eyes of a prisoner peering through the hatch in his door. She did her best to ignore him, despite his jeers. She and Pell picked up the pace and went down a narrow corridor, out of the main area. They came to a dead end, with two doors on either side.

‘End of the line,’ she said.

‘Not quite. This right here was Hayes’s cell. It’s away from everyone else’s.’ Pell unlocked the door. The inside was a nondescript prison cell with a steel bed sans mattress on one side and a sink and toilet on the other. ‘We cleaned this place out and haven’t stuck anyone in here since. No one has earned the privilege. You can’t tell, but this is four feet bigger than every other cell in Jessup.’

She took a quick look inside, then stepped back. As she did, her eye caught the door of the cell directly across the gallery.

Someone had carved into it. The letters were deep and crude, gouged into the steel paint with something that had taken time and a hard edge, and they spelled DEAD MAN WALKING.

‘Dead man walking. What’s that about?’ Ella asked.

Pell looked over it and scrubbed the carving with his finger, as though skin alone might rub out letters gouged into the steel. ‘Oh, that was the other guy we had in here. Greaves. The guys here used to call him the Greave Digger. Staff and prisoners alike.’

‘Greaves?’

‘Yeah. He’s gone now. Lethal injection, actually. Nasty stuff.’

Ella looked at him. ‘Huh? Maryland doesn’t have a death row. The state hasn’t had the penalty for years.’

‘Not state, no. Greaves was federal. Killed a woman, carved her up and buried her body parts in graves all over some field, hence the nickname. Started in Maryland and ended up in D.C. It crossed our state line, so you know what happens then.’

‘It becomes the FBI’s problem.’

‘Correct. He was being held here on a housing contract while the lawyers argued over where he went next. Must be three years back now. He sat with us the best part of a year while it all dragged through the courts, long enough to settle in, join the workshops, the lot. He ended up going to Terre Haute. A week later he got the needle. But that’s another story. Regarding Hayes, that’s all I’ve got. We haven’t released any inmates recently, so there’s nobody on the outside that knows about his snitching past.’

‘What about inmates who have contact with the outside world?’

‘Plenty of them, too. We keep copies of all incoming and outgoing correspondence, so you can check that if you want. Same goes for visitations. We record all conversations, but that’s not to say we listen to them.’

Seven hundred inmates. Ella did the math and didn’t like the five-figure number that emerged.

Ella stood in the dead-end corridor and tried to find the next move, and the next move wasn’t there. The killer was outside. The motive was inside. Somewhere between the two was a door she hadn’t found yet, and standing here looking at an empty cell wasn’t going to find it for her.

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve got what I’m going to get up here. Can you show me to the gift shop?’

‘Sure. Follow me.’

Ella took one more look at the cleaned-out cell, four feet bigger than every other box in Jessup, earned and now empty, and then she turned and went to find Ripley.

CHAPTER TEN

The gift shop sat at the end of the public corridor between the visitor center and the staff exit, and Ella found it by following a hand-painted arrow on a piece of card that pointed left at the vending machines. It was still open. That was the first surprise. A sign in the window said WELCOME and below that INMATE CRAFTS – ALL PROCEEDS SUPPORT VICTIM SERVICES.

Ella went in.