The Euthanist (26 page)

I’d expected catcalls from the inmates, but it was quiet. There was only one inmate out there, wardrobed in a red jumpsuit.

He sat within a chain link enclosure the size of a chicken coop, chained to a steel picnic table with his back to us. A guard we hadn’t met let us in with a nod. I didn’t know if this guard knew Royce and Kearns, but Leland didn’t speak to him. Once inside, we approached the prisoner from behind. Cuffs restricted the man’s ankles and wrists. I rubbed my own pink wrists to test how tender the skin was, and they still smarted with pressure.

Walter Gretsch kept his head down. His shaggy clown hair splayed out in all directions, balding around the crown. He’d put on weight since his incarceration. At the trial he was skinny. Now his stomach folded over itself.

Leland stopped to stare at the prisoner, maybe to appreciate the man’s captivity. Walter would have sensed our presence, but he didn’t stir. Out of Walter’s earshot, I asked Leland, “How is he still alive? Pedophiles aren’t supposed to do well in prison, right?”

“He’s a special case. They keep him away from the other inmates.”

“If you want him dead, why don’t you just release him into population? Shouldn’t that take care of things?”

“It’s not as easy as you’d think.”

“It worked for Jeffrey Dahmer.”

“Well, that’s another special case. You can’t just go letting people into population every day. People check. People can lose their jobs.”

“Like Royce?”

“Leonard Royce is a good person, and that’s about as high a compliment as I can give someone. I don’t know Kearns that well, but he seems loyal. I don’t want either of them to get into trouble. They’ve risked their jobs just to arrange this meeting.” Leland looked around the yard at the uniformed men. “I count five guards. Maybe more watching us from a window. Leonard only tells me so much about the staffing and positioning of the guards, so there could be many more watching. You see the cameras too, right?” They weren’t as obvious as in the front, but several cameras perched on the roofs back here too. Leland titled his head back to the guard who let us into the enclosure. “You want to keep your voice down for his sake, but the rest of the guards are too far away to hear anything. This is as much an intimate rendezvous as we could get, but keep in mind people are monitoring us.”

I still wondered what we were going to talk about, but so much adrenaline charged through me—and not the scary kind, the exhilarating kind—that I mainly wanted to see how this would develop. If anyone was going to misbehave, it wouldn’t be me. “Hypothetically, if you were to knife Walter Gretsch right now in this cage, what would happen?” There was the agitator in me acting up again.

I could tell Leland was upset by the question, but he kept smiling, possibly to assure anyone observing us that everything was peachy. “I’d be arrested, lose my job, and go to prison. You’d probably be dragged down with me.”

“Would it give you peace?”

Leland looked at me incredulously. “It would not.”

When we got to the picnic table, Walter Gretsch lifted his head. He didn’t seem surprised to see Leland Moon, but looked at me curiously. Suspiciously. I was too
something
for him—young, white, female. Whatever it was, he withdrew from me. His face had deep frown lines around the jowls, which I remembered from his trial photos. The unhappiness he’d carried with him forever. The creases cut his face the way Hanna-Barbera had outlined five-o’ clock shadows in
The Flintstones
. More than anything, he stank. Maybe he refused to wash as a form of protest. When I’ve smelled body odor like that, it’s been from shut-ins and clients who’ve sworn off hygiene. Not the same kind of smell, but as strong as the FlyNap.

“Walter. How are things?” Leland faked confidence well, but a twitch at the corner of his lips betrayed him. He loathed the man.

Walter rasped like he hadn’t drunk water in days. “It’s good to get out. I don’t see much sunlight. But you know that.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” chided Leland.

“What’s her name?”

Leland answered for me. “Kali.”

Walter wouldn’t address me directly. I made him uncomfortable. “Cally, like California?”

“That’s it.” Leland looked about at the various guards. “Walter, can we sit?” He treated the man more respectfully than I would have predicted.

“Of course.” Some strength returned to his voice.

Walter’s hands tested the chain when we sat down. Even though he hadn’t reached toward me, the snap of the chain made me brace myself. Walter saw me flinch and smiled for a tic, then wiped off the smirk in case Leland caught it.

I could tell Gretsch was shorter than me, but he was stocky, and I didn’t know if prison had toughened him up or taken the fight out of him. I kept my hands on the table and prepared for a quick hit if he came at me. I’d go for the bridge of the nose. The chain allowed Walter to place his folded hands on the table. He angled himself toward Leland.

Walter spoke plainly. “How’s Veda?”

Leland didn’t rile easily. Clearly Walter had jousted with him before, and it seemed like Leland had gotten used to questions like this. He even joked back, even though his eyes simmered. “He just got drafted by the 49ers.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. He was fast, like me.”

Leland leaned in my direction. “Kali, you must have questions. Ask away.”

Walter didn’t look at me. He addressed Leland. “She’s a child.”

“Not your kind of child,” I returned. Walter grimaced when I spoke to him but didn’t acknowledge me.

“You’ll want to talk to her,” Leland urged. Again to me: “Kali?”

Geezum, he could have prepped me better. Until twenty minutes ago I didn’t know we would see Walter Gretsch today. I certainly wasn’t prepared to speak with him. Leland looked at me insistently. Christ, what did he want from me? The brat in me thought about reciting the same prayer Leland had whipped out for Beatrix LaCroix. That would confuse both of them. But looking at Walter brought me back to my long-ago conversation with his Helena Mumm. A question formed. “Do you love Helena?”

“That’s a new one,” said Walter Gretsch. I was impressed he responded to me, even if he couldn’t look at me. As he considered my question, he brought his hand toward his mouth until the chain jerked, then hunched and chewed his thumbnail. “I have a fondness for her. As a sister.”

“But you were intimate.”

He snapped, screaming at the table without looking at me. “You think you know me? Don’t fucking judge me, cunt!” The raspy voice rose to a growl, and he couldn’t make it through the sentence without a spasm that pulled his chin to the right. The transformation was instantaneous. His hands reached as far forward as the chain would allow, and the wrists tensed against the cuffs. But he hadn’t lunged for me, just the air in front of his face. At the same moment, my hand darted out to strike him. I would have probably gotten him in the throat, but Leland had anticipated this. He grabbed ahold of my hand and brought it back to the table. Without speaking, his eyes bulged and circled about at the cameras and guards all around us. Any physical contact and they’d come running.

Seeing he wasn’t about to snap the chain, Walter relaxed again, congenial as ever. “We don’t have to talk about that part,” he said.

“I will remind both of you to be civil,” Leland said.

“You want her to learn something, buy her a fucking textbook,” he snarled.

As Walter Gretsch grew more uncomfortable, delight crept back into Leland’s voice. “You got somewhere else to be?”

“You said you’d bring someone to help me,” Walter muttered. “You said we’d trade.” My skin crawled to think Leland had forged a trade with someone like Walter Gretsch.

“I’m trying to make that happen,” Leland told him. “She’s figuring out whether she wants anything to do with you. To be honest, she’s figuring out whether she wants anything to do with either of us. So she’s asking you questions, and it would be in your best interest to answer them.”

So this was an interview. Fine—so be it. The sooner we could end this, the better. If I could agitate Walter Gretsch to the point where he couldn’t contain his fury, those guards would come over and send us home. So I cooked up the most inflammatory question from the ingredients I had. “I want to clarify that you had sex with your sister, but you didn’t love her.” This earned me daggers from Leland.

Walter gave the federal agent a look that said:
she didn’t learn her lesson
. “My dick got lonely, and occasionally you have to fuck something. It’s good for your health.”

“So, you fucked your sister, then.” It came out intentionally vicious.

“Everyone always makes a big deal about that. It doesn’t feel any different than anyone else, Agent Kali.” His eyes darted this way and that.

“She loved you.”

“How do you know that?” he asked pointedly. “You ask her?”

There was no sense in lying, especially since I didn’t fully understand the point in talking to Walter in the first place. “I did. You can tell by the way she talks about you. She wanted to have a family with you.”

He resigned. “That she did.”

“That’s why she helped you steal the kids.”

Leland conjectured, siding with me. “Love does crazy things.”

Walter raised his eyebrows at Leland, imploring him to shut me up. He fought to remain calm. “What’s her point?”

I asked, “Did you want a family with her?”

He tried to seem self-assured, but his chin spasm betrayed him every few words. “Hell no. What would I want with a family?” He leaned toward Leland and the shackles rattled. I could smell that he hadn’t brushed his teeth that week. “You know how it is when you got some crazy bitch that won’t let something go? It’s everything I could do not to take a hammer to her.”

To fake composure, I sounded as mechanical as possible. “But you didn’t.”

“I did what I could to talk her out of it. Told her we couldn’t have kids, because they’d be all fucked up and deformed. But she kept at me.” He pointed at the agent to make his point. “Helena hatched that rotten egg herself.”

“Are you saying the kidnappings were her idea?”

The way he regarded Leland made me feel like I’d said something egregiously ignorant, like not knowing who the President was. “Taking those kids was her idea. That’s a fact. That’s what I’ve always said.”

“So, you had no part in the plan?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t take part,” he said. “Only that it wasn’t my plan to begin with.”

In the articles, I never read that he’d ever owned up to the crime. “Is that an admission?”

“I said as much as I’m going to say on that.”

Leland said, “Sounds familiar.”

Walter’s temple throbbed. I liked that I was getting to him, although basking in his pain made me feel like a sadist. He asked Leland, “When are we going to get to my trade?” They were speaking in shorthand. Leland had promised him something before this meeting.

“Keep answering my questions and we’ll get to it soon.” I spoke out of my ass. I didn’t want to get to the terms of our trade. I wanted to get us thrown out of the prison. “Why are you in such a hurry anyway? You got big plans for tonight?”

He took my question seriously. “I go back to the room and listen through my little window slit for the birds. They got herons and scrub jays up here. I hope one day one might fly in and I’d be able to eat it, but they’re too big to fit.” Maybe he was crazy after all.

Now Leland spoke, introducing a new topic. “That’s because instead of windows, you have loopholes in your cell. You know where the word loophole comes from? It’s the arrow slits they carved into castle walls so that bowmen could shoot arrows from their little nooks. They built loopholes into the cellblocks here because of the whole San Sebastián lore. In your cell, that thin sliver of light is coming from a loophole.”

Walter mused, “Loophole…” He thought about the word. “A loophole is what gets you out of something. I need a loophole.”

“Sounds like you could sure use one,” Leland said, guiding the conversation.

Walter finally looked at me. “I need a loophole to get me out of this place.” Facing me, breathing toward me, I inhaled the full potency of his stink. “You are my loophole—you know that, right?” He pointed at Leland. “He told you that right? You’re going to be my loophole.”

“A loophole to get you out of prison,” I said for Leland’s benefit. This was one hell of a trade he’d made with Walter.

“Walter…” Likely hearing the contempt in my voice, Walter went back to ignoring me. “Walter…” My instinct was to reach toward his arm to get his attention. If I touched him, the guards could end this. Leland should have stopped me—he had been so quick about deflecting my slap. But Leland didn’t get in the way of my slow reach toward Walter Gretsch. I expected that if I drew close to him he might attack me, and I would be willing to prompt an attack if it meant calling the guards. But Walter squirmed away from my arm. The prospect of my touch clearly revolted him. “Look at me, Walter. Look at me.”

Leland sat back and folded his arms. Now that I was engaged with the convict, he wasn’t going to get in the way. Walter eventually swiveled his head toward me.