Middle Of Nowhere

CHAPTER 28

The Jefferson County Corrections Facility appeared somehow otherworldly as they approached, the sprawling sand-colored facility surrounded by silver waves of razor wire, all of it pushed out into the scrub of high desert. The ride had been unusually quiet.

Daphne rolled a Starbucks cup between her palms, as if warming them. It was eighty degrees outside the air-conditioned car, the sky a blue found only in the mountains.

Boldt felt a little blue himself. He found it difficult to focus on the investigation, which was, after all, the purpose of the trip. This, despite the fact that before going to sleep he had connected inmate 42 with another four of the burglary victims' phone numbers. He and Daphne were on their way now to have a little chat with number 42.

Boldt turned left onto a long gravel road that led toward the shimmering facility. Dust rose behind the rental in a growing plume that colored the sun. He said, "Listen, Daffy. I've thought about that kiss for a long time. Now that it's behind us, maybe we can make it another five or six years."

"No harm, no foul?" she questioned.

"I don't want you mad at me."

"Is that what you think?" she asked. "You know, for being such a good detective, sometimes you don't have a clue."

"True story," he said.

He mugged a smile for her, squinting eyes giving him away. He pulled the car up to the first of three guard booths, and slipped his ID wallet out of his blue blazer. Daphne did the same, and the conversation ended.

Boldt and Matthews sat across a speckled vinyl tabletop in an employees' cafeteria. Boldt read from the folder in front of him. "Inmate number forty-two, as listed on the phone solicitation sheets. David Ansel Flek-no 'c.' Serving a three-year sentence-get this-for grand larceny. He's been part of the private commerce telemarketing program for the past eight weeks."

"Right about when our robberies started," Daphne said.

They had half the connection: Flek had been the telemarketer who had spoken to each of the burglary victims. Before interrogating Flek, they needed the other half: contact with the outside. They awaited the warden.

When the man arrived, Boldt noticed that some of his military composure had worn off. He understood the implications of all this for his facility. Nothing less than his job was at stake. Yet he was on orders from Etheredge to cooperate-a private facility refusing to cooperate with law enforcement would sound a death knoll for state prison contracts.

"Our pay phones here are owned and operated by an Etheredge subsidiary," he began.

"Never leave a dime unturned," Daphne said.

"The home office is still working with the database of calls placed from those pay phones. The attorneys will eventually have to sort out the first amendment issues. Many, if not most, of the calls made from our pay phones are placed using calling cards owned by relatives or friends on the outside. We can get these numbers from the various carriers, I'm told, but it will take some time. In the meantime, I have this." He handed Boldt a stack of twenty faxed sheets. "They are not sorted by area code," he apologized.

"We'll live," Boldt said.

"But I did have my secretary highlight any directdial calls made to the two-oh-six area code." He added somewhat proudly, "And she put a check by four of the calls that could have been made by inmate number forty-two."

"Determined how?" Daphne inquired, pulling her chair next to Boldt's and looking over his shoulder.

Boldt pointed to the top sheet. "By time."

"Schedule," the warden said. "It's not open access. Pay telephone time is closely controlled."

Boldt said, "So how many others had access to the phones at the same time Flek did?"

"There are five pay phones," the warden explained. "We give each inmate fifteen minutes a day."

"So four other guys," Boldt suggested. It was a nice, narrow field, something he could work with. He recognized the prefix of the highlighted 206 number as a cellular prefix. He would call LaMoia and have the owner of the cell phone identified. He would make sure David Flek made no more calls. If they got lucky, they'd have their burglar. He wasn't holding his breath; it was rarely that easy.

Daphne tested him. "So our chances are one out of five that Flek called Seattle and passed along the names and addresses of possible burglary targets?"

"He doesn't know that," Boldt answered. To the warden he said, "I think it's time we meet Mr. Flek."

"We can arrange that. But first, you mind explaining how all this works? My people are going to ask me, and I'm going to look a hell of a lot smarter if I know what I'm talking about."

Boldt thought it sounded fair enough. "Flek is supplying names to someone on the outside. Through the phone solicitation, this survey conducted by Consolidated through Newmann, he identifies homes that have a couple computers, a high-end stereo or a couple TVs. A nice bottom line."

Daphne had returned her attention to the original fax of phone numbers called by the phone solicitation team.

Boldt continued, "He calls out on the pay phones- probably to this cell phone number-and supplies the names and addresses of potential high-end targets. At that point it's in our part of the world. We get a burglary call."

Daphne, her nose still in the fax, said, "Lou! Granted, three of the burglary victims are not anywhere on this list from last night. Maybe they were placed a week earlier than the records we've been provided. Maria's not on the list either."

In his excitement over the connection to inmate 42, Boldt had neglected to search out Sanchez's number in the database. It was such a simple oversight, but suddenly the absence of her number from the phone solicitation's master call sheet loomed largely over their efforts.

"She could have been called earlier as well," he suggested.

The closer they came to the interrogation of a possible suspect-even an accessory to the fact like David Ansel Flek-the more Boldt dreaded the possibility of discovering that Maria Sanchez had never been one of the burglary targets. The implication would then be that Maria's assault had been cop on cop, the same way he feared his own assault had been. Now that he approached whatever truth existed, he did so cautiously, well aware that on rare occasions, some truths were better left undisturbed.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "In every case the burglaries come within ten days of the initial phone solicitation. That being the case, she'd be on here."

"Erased?" Boldt inquired of a confused warden. He and Daphne exchanged glances, and he could see her concern as well.

"To my knowledge," the man said, "the system does not allow it. You can't erase any information from the private commerce database. That's one of the stipulations. Just in case something like this ever happened."

To Daphne, Boldt stressed, "We need Flek to implicate whoever was doing these burglaries. If that guy was not at Sanchez's… if he never hit Sanchez's place… if we can confirm it… prove it

… then maybe we have the ammo we need to go knocking on I.I.'s door and get a look at whatever they know."

She nodded, though her concern, like his, was palpable.

To the warden, Boldt said, "We need to speak to Flek right now!"

The prison's interrogation room still smelled of the glue used to fasten down the vinyl flooring. It ranked as the cleanest interrogation room Boldt had ever seen. Better than even the FBI or BATF. A video camera looked down on the occupants. Built into the wall was a twin cassette tape recorder that kept track of every spoken word, every sound. The twin cassette concept, borrowed from the Brits, ensured that no one could later edit the content of the interrogation to fit his needs; one tape went with the officer in charge, the other was filed in a vault accessed only by the warden- a failsafe against corruption.

David Ansel Flek wore the demeaning zebra suit, his number EJC-42 on a patch sewn onto the right breast pocket and on another that ran shoulder to shoulder across his back. "Forty-two," the guards called him, never using names, never personalizing or humanizing the process. A team of privately contracted criminal psychiatrists had advised Etheredge Corporation on how to treat the prisoners in order to maintain discipline and keep peace, so it came as something of a shock to the man in the jumpsuit when Boldt and Matthews addressed him by his Christian name. It also served to mark the two as outsiders-exactly as Matthews had advised Boldt.

"Who are you?" the man inquired. Flek's boyish face and blond surfer-dude hairstyle, his blue eyes and white teeth reminded Boldt of one of the Beach Boys, or Tab Hunter in a Fort Lauderdale movie. His smallish frame had been beefed up in the gym. Boldt knew the ordeal such looks suffered in any prison. They called them babes, wives, soapies-the young men forced to lie on their stomachs for the rulers of the pen. But to his surprise, Boldt did not see the steely-eyed resentment he associated with the abused. The more he studied Flek, the more he believed the man had somehow escaped the role of girlfriend, either a credit to Etheredge's management of the facility, or testimony to the ruthlessness of Flek himself.

"We're your only hope," Daphne said.

Boldt clarified, "Your only hope, unless you like it here."

"Unless you're thinking of turning fifty in here," Daphne said. Dates or age had a way of shaking up any inmate-the passage of time was the only god in such places, the only redeemer. According to his file, the man was twenty-nine years old, and Boldt's comment seemed to hit home.

"What's it about?" he asked.

"The harder you make us work for it," Boldt informed him, "the fewer years we trim off what's going to be added to your sentence. You want to get out of here by forty? Thirty-five? Then don't play dumb."

His ice blue eyes searched them both. They favored Daphne, and for a little too long.

Boldt cautioned, "There are no second chances, Flek. We leave, and we take twenty years of your life out the door with us."

"I requested my public defender," the man reminded.

"And she's on her way, as I understand it," Boldt said. "You know how busy they are."

"So we wait," Flek said confidently.

Boldt and Matthews exchanged glances. Daphne spoke to the inmate. "I'm not advising you one way or the other, David-"

"Ansel," he corrected a little too quickly.

"You're somewhat new to the system," she said. He winced; he didn't want to be told that. "We've seen your file. First offense, light sentence. They were lenient with you. You're lucky in that regard, as I'm sure you found out once you took up residence here."

"You have a little over a year left to go," Boldt reminded him. "So why add ten to twenty to that?"

"Our point is," Daphne continued, "that going the attorney route is your legal right, and even if we could help you out here, we can't do anything to stop you from exercising that right. And, in fact, you've already invoked that right, which is perfectly acceptable to us, though in my opinion not in your best interest."

In a calm voice, he answered Daphne. "But you are in my best interest? A couple of cops? I don't think so."

"Ten to twenty," Boldt informed the man.

Daphne echoed, "You need to be thinking about turning fifty here at Etheredge."

Boldt reached across the table and forced the man's hands up in plain view.

Flek said, "I was scratching, is all," still not breaking his eye contact with Daphne.

Daphne allowed the facility's forced air system to account for the only sound in the room. It swallowed the three of them. She asked, "Maybe you want to put the idea of an attorney aside for a moment and at least listen to our offer."

"What can it hurt to listen?" Boldt asked.

"So talk," Flek said.

Boldt felt a minor victory. He knew from the man's file that Flek had graduated from junior college, and decided to approach him in a businesslike manner. Boldt informed him, "We'd like to start with the phone solicitations you made and then continue on to the sub sequent pay phone calls made to the cell phone based in Washington."

Daphne added, "The more details you provide… the more they prove out for us… the stronger voice we'll have in your sentence recommendation, which for you translates to fewer years the judge tacks on to your time here."

"No matter what, you hold out on us and you're looking at more time," Boldt explained, "including the possibility of accessory charges to a felony assault. So the smart money says cooperate before the attorney arrives and screws it all up."

"Wasting your time," Flek told him, his words spitting across the table. He motioned toward Daphne, "I enjoy the scenery. But all the small talk I could do without. I don't have a clue what you're talking about." What she knew about his background didn't jibe with the man in that chair, making her psychologist side immediately suspicious. He was hiding behind his inmate persona. Why?

"We have the phone logs," Boldt countered. "The phone solicitations are all tracked on computer. The pay phone calls to the cellular number-we've got those too. Are you dumber than you look, or what?"

"I'm represented by a public defender," he said. "All inquiries should go through her."

"What happens in places like this," Daphne said, meeting eyes with him, "is you get tunnel vision. You get so you can only think like everyone else thinks. And the everyone else I'm talking about are not exactly the cream of the crop, you know? They're losers. You start to think like a loser. Don't be a loser, Ansel," she said, switching names. "We're talking about adding twenty years to your time in here. You'll be forty-nine years old before you're eligible for parole."

The man's nostrils flared and his eyes shone wetly. He repeated, "All inquires should go through my public defender."

"You don't win anything," she pleaded, "by playing tough."

Flek shook his head.

Boldt asked the man, "Why would you willingly add twenty years to your time here? You answer a half dozen questions and maybe we just walk out of here as if none of this ever happened? You can't be that stupid."

"We wait for my attorney."

Boldt stood from his chair. Daphne followed his lead. "Wrong answer," Boldt said.

The events of the next few hours unfolded in a way that he never would have expected.