In The Falling Light (35 page)

But this wasn’t perfume, and it wasn’t a
love letter.

Across the top of each photocopied page in
tall, Old English script stood the words, DEATH WARRANT.

9) Intelligent People Don’t Necessarily
Do Intelligent Things.
And here was a perfect example of that.
Biochemistry was a field filled with bright young talent, highly
educated and creative. And those minds dreamed up – then cooked up
– Poveglia V, naming it after an island in the Venetian lagoon
which had been used over the centuries as a place to dispose of
plague victims. How clever. Poveglia V was
highly
contagious, spread by both physical contact and airborne
transmission, with flu-like symptoms followed by sudden paralysis
appearing at seventy-two hours, and death occurring twenty-four
hours later. It was a hardy little bastard, too, and didn’t break
down when it hit the air or sunlight as many other organisms did.
PV was capable of living outdoors in a virulent state for up to two
weeks and had a 97.6% mortality rate. There was no vaccination for
it, and no way to halt its brief but fatal journey once it entered
the body.

God knew what they ever thought it could be
used for. Unless you wanted to end mankind, of course. For that it
was the perfect agent of change.

10) Insane People Should Not Be Allowed
To Work With Contagious Bioweapons.
He stuffed his last
envelope, then opened his mouth and gave his tongue a spritz.
Yummy. He decided his last rule needed no elaboration. It was self
evident.

Walter filled a nylon duffel bag with his
envelopes, hung it over his shoulder, grabbed his coat and shut off
the lights in the lab as he had promised. It was only Thursday,
with two more mail service days before the holiday. The people in
charge wouldn’t find the murdered corporal for hours, and wouldn’t
find Walter for days. By then he would have visited four mailboxes
and three different post offices, and PV would be well on its way
to spreading its holiday cheer.

At the main doors, bright desert sunlight
streamed into the facility lobby. The Army sergeant at the watch
desk looked him over, then gestured for Walter’s bag to be placed
on a nearby table. He unzipped it, and began pawing through the
envelopes.

“What’s all this?”

“My holiday newsletter. I’m late getting it
out.” He gave what he hoped would look like a sheepish grin. “I
used some of Uncle Sam’s time to get them ready to mail.” The
sergeant raised an eyebrow, still sifting through the envelopes,
and covering himself, the table, the lobby of the lab building with
Poveglia V particles. Within an hour, the forty-nine people still
working in the building would be infected, and they would bring it
home to their families, their neighborhood grocery stores and gas
stations, restaurants and holiday parties. About half would be
flying to other parts of the country for the long weekend, and not
one of them would notice a thing until Christmas.

“Don’t worry, Sergeant,” Walter said. “All
the envelopes and paper are mine. I didn’t take any government
property for personal use.”

The sergeant zipped up the bag and pushed it
back to Walter. “Merry Christmas.”

Walter walked out, and looked back through
the glass doors. He threw the sergeant a wave and a smile. “Fuck
you very much.”

It was a small place, neat and tidy, simple
and empty. Except for Carla, who sat alone in her kitchen with only
the light over the stove to chase away the night. On the table in
front of her sat a birthday cake with eighteen lit candles. Beside
it in a 5x7 silver frame was a photo of a seven-year-old girl with
dark hair, a school picture. In it, the girl was smiling without
her front teeth.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” Carla said to
the picture. “Eighteen. A real milestone.” Carla raised a glass of
vodka to the cake and took a long swallow, her last remaining vice.
She’d kicked smoking, wrestled through a tough patch with sleeping
pills and come out the other side, and was eating right and keeping
fit. July twenty-third was the only day she drank, and always
alone.

“We’d be getting you ready for college,
baby.” She smiled and tipped the glass again. “You’d be excited and
nervous, I’d be happy for you but so sad inside, not wanting you to
go. I’d try to keep up the smile but you’d know how I was feeling,
wouldn’t you?” It was now nearly impossible to see her daughter’s
face when she closed her eyes. She needed photos to remind her.

Anita stopped having birthdays just after
she turned seven, but that hadn’t stopped Carla from celebrating
them. She sat and looked at the vacant chair across from her,
wishing she could see her, even just a glimpse, a smile, a
reassurance for mommy that she was happy in Heaven.

“I’d be so proud of you, off to become a
doctor, a professor, maybe a business executive…maybe a…” Carla
started crying then, softly at first and then building into great
wracking sobs, squeezing her eyes tightly against the tears which
fell onto the tablecloth, clenching her fists until her nails dug
moons in her palms. She gasped for an endless breath, then let out
a long, rising and falling moan, rocking back and forth, red eyes
staring at the ceiling as if searching for an answer to the
unanswerable. There was only the empty kitchen.

She snatched the vodka glass off the table
and hurled it at the refrigerator with a snarl, exploding it, her
clenched teeth bared. “Why?” she screamed. “Why? Why her, you
fuck?” At first Carla wasn’t sure which sadist she meant, but
decided she was screaming at God. He chose not to respond, so she
began drinking from the bottle, staring at the picture as her
sobbing turned to a dull ache in her chest, getting quietly drunk.
Just before she passed out, she thought she heard the mobile of
ceramic hummingbirds over the kitchen sink tinkle softly, could
swear she felt the soft touch of a little hand on her back. And
then there was the sweet oblivion of nothingness.

In the morning, Carla took a shower and
scrubbed the bitterness from her mouth, did her usual five mile
run, showered again and got ready for work. On the drive in, she
stopped for coffee and spent the rest of her ride thinking about
Kelvin Finch.

Deacon Valley Correctional Facility sat in
the northeast corner of the state, surrounded by miles of flat,
open prairie. Both the prison marksmen and the inmates behind the
wire referred to that open space as the killing fields, for there
was no place to hide from and no way to outrun a bullet fired from
a tower. Deacon Valley, or simply DV, was made up of the
administrative wing, engineering and motor pool areas, and the main
building itself, broken into ten structures home to dining and
kitchen facilities, recreation rooms, a small medical center, and
housing for the inmates themselves. They were numbered DV-1, DV-2,
DV-3 and so on.

No one thought it was a coincidence that the
Protective Custody unit segregating the violent sex offenders from
the rest of the population was numbered DV-8. Administration and
official documents called it PC. The inmates and COs at Deacon
Valley called it the Monster House.

Twenty-eight men were housed in two tiers of
fourteen, single occupant cells against one wall, the upper level
reached by a catwalk with a stairway at both ends. The common area,
filled with metal tables and benches cemented to the floor, sat in
front of the cells, and a shower area was off to the left. It
looked like every other corrections housing unit built since the
90’s, each cell door secured by a steel, motorized rolling door
with a reinforced glass window and a food slot with a locking
hatch. The only way in or out of the block was through the Bubble,
an octagonal control point of armored glass and steel with a
separate airlock-style passageway for people to move in and out.
The Bubble was staffed 24/7 by a pair of corrections officers who
controlled the locks and movement of each cell door, as well as the
access passage. Officers only went onto the block when it was time
to serve meals, and they never left the Bubble unmanned.

In many prisons, this area would have been
called the SHU, for special housing unit. Deacon Valley did indeed
have a SHU, but it was elsewhere, and much larger. Those cells had
back doors which opened into small, individual, heavily fenced
exercise yards where the inmate occupants were allowed to go for
one hour a day. They were locked down the other twenty-three.
Inmates in the SHU were the most violent, and posed the greatest
threat to staff.

Also in many prisons, sex offenders found
themselves housed in general population, where they had a hard time
of it, enduring physical and sexual assault, enslavement to other
inmates, and living a life of paranoia and fear, never knowing from
which direction the next attack would come. They were the absolute
lowest life form on the prison food chain.

Deacon Valley was a little different. The
garden variety sex offenders and rapists were still housed in
GenPop, and their existences were no different from others like
themselves around the country. But the State of Oklahoma decided
that the most violent sexual predators would be housed together in
the PC. This wasn’t any acknowledgement that they were special, and
most posed no risk to staff. The state, however, knew these men
were the most reviled, and the most at risk of being murdered by
other inmates. Such instances meant weighty investigations and
second-guessing by review boards, politicians and the media, all of
which interfered with the smooth day-to-day of the facility. And so
they were kept in the Monster House to keep them alive, the worst
of the rotten eggs in one basket.

In DV-8, the ground level cell on the far
left was where the King lived.

Because of what he had done, he couldn’t
have survived on any other block, and while the inmates in PC might
have been hated, the King was despised above all others. Yet here
within the Monster House, he was a celebrity. Several years ago,
TRU TV had done a ten minute piece on his exploits and included it
in an
American Predators
episode. When HBO announced its
intention to put together a full hour documentary on him, titled
“King of the Monster House,” Kelvin Finch was elevated to the
status of rock star.

King Finch VIII, eight for the number of his
victims. Or at least that was how many he’d confessed to.
Investigators across five states suspected there were many more,
but Kelvin wasn’t talking. Everyone believed he was holding back
information which he intended to parlay for future attention once
his fame started to dim. He certainly had time in which to play his
games. Initially facing lethal injection, Finch’s lawyer negotiated
life without the possibility of parole in exchange for his client
leading them to the remains of his seven previous victims, and
providing full disclosure of the details of each case. The
opportunity to close out so many disappearances and bring a measure
of peace to so many family members was impossible to pass up, and
so Kelvin Finch bought himself a lifetime, after ending so many
others.

Right now the King was out of his cell and
sitting at one of the tables playing chess with another inmate,
using a soft felt game board and plastic pieces. Across from him
was a heavyset black man named Linus James, doing
twenty-five-to-life for abducting a fourteen-year-old runaway and
sodomizing her for four days in a hotel room before smothering her
with a pillow. Pretending to play chess – a game Linus neither
understood nor cared about – the inmate gave a casual look around,
and then carefully passed a dog-eared wallet photo under the table
to the King. It was a picture of a girl at a birthday party.

“Like we agreed,” Linus said softly.

The King glanced down at the picture before
tucking it away. He smiled, revealing a missing front tooth, his
lips still yellowish purple from the bruise. Several weeks ago, a
rookie CO named Granger had been assigned to the Monster House, and
made the mistake of talking with another officer about his
six-year-old daughter Katie, with Kelvin Finch close enough to hear
it. For weeks Finch took every opportunity to whisper vile comments
about what he wanted to do to Katie when only Granger could hear.
The rookie acted like a professional, writing Finch up repeatedly
and ensuring his privileges were revoked as long as was permitted.
Finch kept at it, each softly spoken remark more twisted than the
last, and it began to wear at the young man. Finally, one afternoon
when the inmates were lined up at the rolling food service carts,
Finch whispered to Granger the specifics of how he would murder
Katie and what he would then do with the body. Granger snapped,
turned on him and punched Finch in the face, knocking him down,
knocking him out, and knocking out a tooth.

Granger lost his job.

Finch filed criminal charges, and the prison
scheduled him for a dental implant.

Finch’s lawyer hastily drew up the
lawsuit.

Everyone knew Granger had been provoked, but
the assault was witnessed by thirty people, and there was no way
around that. Although threats were made by the administration to
shut down HBO’s access and interviews, Finch’s lawyer suggested
that it would most certainly be construed by a civil jury – as well
as the media – as retaliation and abuse of power, not to mention a
possible violation of First Amendment rights. Reluctantly, the
administration withdrew its threat, and the special was still a go,
much to the King’s delight.

Linus nodded to Finch. “Talk to me.” The
deal was a picture of Linus James’s young niece in exchange for
Finch’s detailed telling of his fourth abduction and murder, a
grade school girl in Kansas City named Lilly Barnes.