“We recovered one of the vials completely intact,” the supervisor of D Wing said; he seemed to have aged five years since he’d gotten up that morning.
“We’re talking about vials. Not a sharpened toothbrush or a shiv or a shank.” The deputy warden looked around the room. “Glass vials,” he repeated.
The event was still only one hour old, and the jail was in lockdown.
“What’s the situation, Harry?” Will Thomas asked.
Dr. Harry Norringer looked at his notes. “We have a number of inmates with various injuries. Nothing that warrants a hospital transfer. Small lacerations mostly, and a couple of contact burns where the solution touched them.”
“They were flinging the vials with some kind of elastic-type, homemade catapults, and they had to get it through their own bars first. Some of them didn’t manage it, and it bounced right back,” one of the guards, Miller, said.
“What was in it?”
“Some kind of bleach. The smell is still all over the yard.”
“Cameron,” the doctor continued, “has a burn on his shoulder the size of a dime; the skin is raw, but it didn’t go much deeper than that. His jacket caught most of it. I bandaged the wound and put him on a course of antibiotics. His blood pressure is better than mine, and his heart rate was practically at coma level.”
“How many inmates were involved?” the deputy warden asked Miller.
“We think at least nine, maybe more. We’ll be looking at the CCTV to confirm. And then there’s Manny Oretremos—the kid who had a vial and didn’t throw it. By now he’s on the ‘bad-news list,’ so he’ll have to stay in protective custody.”
“The inmates never go into the same runs, right?” Thomas asked.
“No, they rotate in a nonrepeating pattern,” Miller replied. “Just so that what happened today cannot happen.”
“But it did happen. And what it means is that they waited, for weeks, possibly, so that he would be in the middle.” Will Thomas ran his hands through his hair. “We’ve been lucky today.”
No one said anything; it was a conclusion they had all already reached in the privacy of their own minds.
An ill wind, Will Thomas thought. An ill wind blows through my jail.
Chapter 14
Madison held her cell in her hand for a long minute after Doyle rang off. KCJC had called Cameron’s legal representatives to report the ambush of their client; Doyle had called her as he was driving to the hospital to tell Quinn in person.
It was not unexpected, Madison reasoned. In fact, it was the very thing KCJC had tried to avoid by having Cameron in protective custody from the start. Yet there was something repulsive about a targeted attack where the prey had no chance to defend himself. Even against a con with a shiv, Madison’s money was on Cameron, and that was the problem. There was something unsettling about the amount of preparation and patience that had gone into the attack; likely it was the one piece of their life that got those inmates up in the morning, wondering if that was going to be the day and how much damage they could do before the guards stopped them.
Madison left her desk and went outside for a few minutes. People didn’t smoke anymore—Madison had never smoked in the first place—but she missed the pretext to stretch her legs and feel fresh air on her face. It sounded silly to say, “I need to breathe different air for a little while,” and yet occasionally that was precisely the case. A few minutes were enough.
The day had been about canvassing Warren Lee’s neighborhood and the area where the body had been left by the killers—forensics seemed to indicate that at least three unknown males had been present in the victim’s kitchen. They had boot prints by the back door, though as yet nothing to match them to and no witnesses to the abduction or the dropping off.
Madison had been supporting Spencer in his investigation, but the whiteboard with the list of Homicide detectives in black marker and the names of the victims in red indicated that she would be the primary on the next one. Soon Spencer and Dunne would have to look after their dead, because Madison would have her own.
She automatically reached for her cell to call her partner and then decided not to: it was up to Brown to decide when he was ready to go to the shooting range with her, and the worst thing she could do was put him under pressure at a time when he was already feeling its heavy load.
“We got something,” Dunne said from his desk, where he had just replaced his receiver. “A resident on 35th Street came home at 3:10 a.m., and he could swear the vic was not there yet.”
“That leaves a three-and-a-half-hour window when they could have left him there,” Spencer said.