Page 18 of Jar of Hearts
“I feel strongly that he’s going to try and contact you,” Kaiser says, rubbing his face. He looks exhausted. “I don’t know how, but when he does, I need you to tell me.”
The blue letter flits through her mind again, then flits out.
Geo hands the paper back to him. “He won’t,” she says, so defiantly and authoritatively that she almost believes it herself. “He has no reason to. Now I have to go.” If she doesn’t leave now, he’ll see right through her. She turns away and opens the door.
“Georgina,” Kaiser says. “Take care of yourself in here.”
She pauses, then turns to her old friend one last time. With the badge on his hip, the worn leather jacket, the scruffy face… he looks like a stranger. Maybe he loved her once, when they were kids, but that was a long time ago, when she was worthy of love. Everything’s different now. It hurts to look at him.
He reminds her of the person she used to be.
“I don’t want to see you anymore, Kai,” Geo says softly. “Please don’t come here again.”
PART TWO
ANGER
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
6
The soft ping of his email app wakes Kaiser Brody, and he reaches for his iPhone on the nightstand to check it. It’s only 5:30A.M.and not yet light outside. Beside him, Kim murmurs softly. She doesn’t move. Her blond hair fans out in messy strands over the pillow, and he watches her sleep for a moment, feeling that strange mix of emotions he always does whenever they do this. He’ll have to wake her up at six so she has enough time to get back home before her husband—scheduled for night shifts this week—realizes she’s been gone all night.
Or maybe he won’t wake her. See what happens, what excuses she’ll make, both to her husband for being out all night, and to him, when she tells him later on that they’ll need to lie low for a few days until things at home “settle back down.”
He sighs and clicks on the new email.
It’s from the prison guard at Hazelwood Correctional Institute, the one he pays to send him a monthly report on inmate number 110214, also known as Georgina Maria Shaw. It only costs him a hundred bucks, sent anonymously via PayPal, which isn’t much. But over five years, every month, that shit adds up. Their arrangement is over as of today though, as Georgina is scheduled for release next week.
Five fucking years. In some ways it feels like the time wentby fast, and yet in other ways, it seems like nothing has changed at all.
The PDF report contains a lot of information that doesn’t say much. There’s a detailed log of her incoming and outgoing phone calls, her incoming and outgoing mail, and a list of everybody who’s visited her over the past month. Other than her attorney and Kaiser himself, the only other person who’s ever gone to see Georgina in prison is her father. Her ex-fiancé, that snooty CEO with the soft paunch and thinning hair, never went to see her once.
Her phone records tend to show a bit more depth. She had her usual phone call with a man named Raymond Yoo, who, according to his website, is an “independent financial planner specializing in unique and outside-the-box investment opportunities.” Kaiser can only assume this means the man’s a pro in laundering money. And once a year, on the same day, Georgina makes a long distance phone call to a ninety-year-old woman named Lucilla Gallardo in Toronto. Her maternal grandmother.
There’s also detailed information about medical visits (only one in the past six months, for a rash on her shoulder), her work assignment (in the prison hair salon), volunteer efforts (she tutors fellow inmates working toward their GED), and even what she purchased in commissary (tampons, moisturizer, chocolate). If she filed any complaints or received any disciplinary actions, those would appear in the report as well. In five years, she never has.
Which doesn’t mean they haven’t happened.
Kaiser peruses these reports every month, telling himself he’s keeping an eye out for any contact between Georgina and her ex-boyfriend, Calvin James. But if he’s being honest with himself (and why the fuck would he want to do that?), he knows it’s simply because he wants to know how she’s doing. The last time he saw her, she expressly told him not to visit her. So he hasn’t. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care.
Not that he feels guilty for arresting her. He doesn’t, not really. But he can’t say he ever felt good about it, either.
Accompanying every report is a paragraph personally written bythe corrections officer, giving him tidbits on Georgina’s life over the past month. This is really what he pays the hundred bucks for—the things thataren’tin the report. Who her friends are, who she’s argued with, who she’s fucking, what contraband the CO suspects she’s hiding, her overall morale.
Georgina’s been doing well. Her closest friends are a woman named Cat Bonaducci (a woman who killed someone while driving drunk and was sentenced to fifteen years) and Ella Frank.
TheElla Frank. Wife of James Frank, the drug kingpin, currently incarcerated for life in the Washington State Penitentiary. Georgina formed a friendship with her early in her stay, and the CO has noted several times that she might be involved somehow in Ella Frank’s drug business. Kaiser doesn’t give a shit. Far as he can tell, the Franks haven’t had any contact with Calvin James, a.k.a. the Sweetbay Strangler, and that’s the only thing that matters to him.
What Georgina does to survive in prison is her business.
“Everything okay?” Kim’s face is mushed into the pillow, her voice muffled. The room is dark, illuminated only by the glow of Kaiser’s phone.
“Go back to sleep,” he says to her, and she does.
On the one hand, he likes that Kim’s here, because it’s nice lying bedside someone who understands him, understands his work, and who doesn’t expect or want anything more than what he can give. But on the other hand, he hates that she’s here, because she’s married and he knows it’s wrong.
