Step On A Crack

Chapter 108

THERE ARE ACTUALLY ten prisons on Rikers Island in the Bronx, housing as many as seventeen thousand inmates. Rikers is almost a small town, with its schools, clinics, athletic fields, chapels and mosques, grocers, barbershops, a bus depot, even a car wash.

As I arrived there early the next morning, I was hopeful again. I’d had an idea during the night, and now I had the opportunity to execute it.

At a little past eight, I walked by the Amnesty Box, where prison visitors are allowed to deposit drugs or weapons without fear. I had neither, so I proceeded inside and was escorted to a small meeting room inside Rikers’ Central Punitive Segregation Unit, also known as “the Bing.”

About a quarter of the inmates at Rikers are poor people who can’t afford to post bails of five hundred dollars or less, but I was more interested in the hard cases. For the next four hours, I sat in the room and met dozens of inmates.

I played them a tape of excerpts with Jack’s voice from the negotiations. Maybe somebody would recognize “Jack” from a previous stay at Rikers or one of the other prison facilities around New York.

But not Angelo, a burglar with an exaggerated shoulder curl, like a boxer always ready to fight.

Not Hector, a gang player with two tear tattoos at the corner of his right eye, signifying he’d killed two people so far in his twenty-one years.

Not J.T. either-a white thug from Westchester with a serious drug habit who was a walking Merck Manual on pills and meds.

Or Jesse from 131st Street in Harlem, placid face with one lazy eye, soul patch under his lip, inside Rikers for alleged felonious assault.

In fact, not any of the seventy-nine inmates who came to see me in the cramped meeting room space had anything for me. How depressing was that?

Until my eightieth visitor, Tremaine, a skinny “older” guy, maybe forty, though he looked fifty, at least that. He said he thought maybe he’d heard that voice before-Jack’s voice. “Don’t know for sure, but maybe.”

On the way back from Rikers, I called One Police Plaza and told Lonnie to run the prints from the dead hijacker through the city, state, and national law enforcement employee records.

It was an hour later when the fax rang back at my office. The cover sheet told me it was Lonnie with the results.

It seemed like a month before the second sheet hummed out of the machine.

I lifted it up slowly, careful not to smudge the ink.

It wasn’t the smiling ID picture of the dead hijacker that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from so much as the captioned information underneath it.

Surprise mixed with a sick, guilty feeling that washed through my stomach like battery acid.

Unbelievable, I thought.

I took out my cell and speed-dialed Commander Will Matthews’s office. “This is Bennett,” I said when I had him on the line. “I think we got ’em.”