Fighting Chance(7)

Mark had thought it sounded like a pile of shit then, and he definitely thought it sounded like that now. His job was not to provide a “more cost-effective” administration of Pennsylvania’s prisons. His job was to keep bodies in the beds.

“Think of them like hotels,” Carter Bandwood had said. “The principle is essentially the same. Every empty bed represents a net loss of revenue. Optimal return on investment requires operating at full capacity.”

Mark had never been able to pin down Carter Bandwood’s exact position in the company. He could have been a lowish-level flunky just lucky enough to get a New York office. He could have been one of the owners of the whole shebang. It was hard to get accurate information about who ran Administrative Solutions, or who owned it.

Mark did have one piece of accurate information this morning, though. He knew that Carter Bandwood was panicking.

“She didn’t tell you why she’d suddenly changed her mind about our arrangement?” he asked. “She didn’t give you a clue?”

“She didn’t even tell me she’d changed her mind about the arrangement,” Mark said. “She called this morning, from her car, for God’s sake, because she won’t call from a stable location—oh, no, that would make the calls all too clear—”

“If she didn’t tell you that she wanted to change the arrangement, what did she tell you? What the hell is going on?”

“She told me she had to consider the possibility that, in the event of a criminal investigation, she’d be likely to come out more cleanly if she were the one who walked the information in the door.”

“She meant if she was the one who went to the police and told them about the arrangement.”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.”

“Christ on a crutch. She doesn’t even care that she’d go to jail herself? She doesn’t even care?”

“Carter, honestly, I couldn’t tell you. We were doing that thing again where I could only pick up one word out of three.”

“She would go to jail herself,” Carter said. “If she thinks she wouldn’t, she’s insane. It’s a juvenile court she’s dealing with. The press will go insane.”

“Probably.”

“She didn’t tell you when she was going to do this? Today? Next week? At a press conference? What?”

“She didn’t even tell me that she was going to do this. It’s like I told you. The reception was all crapped up. She refuses to talk anywhere but in her car.”

“Well,” Carter said, “you’re going to have to call her. Or go to see her. You’re going to have to go do something. If she’s going to do this, it’s going to be bad no matter what, but I can tell you it’s going to be a lot worse if we’re not ready for it.”

“Ready for it or not, Carter, I don’t think it’s going to make any difference. We paid a juvenile court judge a lot of money to make sure she sent kids to juvie for as long as possible to make sure the places were, uh, operating at full capacity.”

There was a long, drawn-out silence at the other end of the phone. When Carter Bandwood’s voice came back, it was flat and metallic. It didn’t sound panicked at all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “And if you’re taping this, I’ll find a way to make you dead.”

After that, there was nothing. Mark shut off his phone and then disassembled the recorder device he’d bought at the advice of a private detective he knew. The private detective was the only person Mark had ever known who was more cynical than he was himself.

Somewhere upstairs, somebody flushed a toilet. Mark put the device into his inside jacket pocket and called up. “Bethany? Or is that Kaitlyn? Everybody’s late today.”

Bethany came down the stairs with a towel around her head. “Kaitlyn’s not running late,” she said. “She’s not home.”

“She left early?”

“No,” Bethany said.

Mark looked at his wife. She’d been a pretty girl at school, and she wasn’t bad now. But that wasn’t the point. Her sister was the point.

“We’re going to have to do something about this,” he said.

“We’ve got a judge and a lawyer,” Bethany said. “We are doing something about this. She just needs a little time to grow up.”

“She may not have any more time,” Mark said, tapping his chest.

But then it just seemed wrong, somehow, to bother Bethany with all this, especially when he wasn’t sure how it was going to work out. The only thing he had decided was that he wasn’t going to jail alone, and that didn’t begin to cover the situation.