The Devil went down to Austin

CHAPTER 38

The front of the Travis County Jail is a severe concrete triangle, jutting toward West 11th Street like the prow of a battleship.

Vic Lopez led Maia and me inside the tiny foyer. He deposited his gun in a police locker, then signalled the security guard behind the bulletproof glass. We were buzzed through the double airlock door.

The guard on duty was busy explaining parole forms to a guy in a threadbare suit.

I looked at Lopez. "Do we sign in?"

"Yeah," he said. "Take a tag-doesn't matter what colour."

It's not often I get to be someone's attorney. I took a red tag.

"Bad enough you don't invite me to your parties," Maia murmured. "Now you want to replace me."

Her mood had not been sunny since she received word of our expedition to the marina. Lopez had, amazingly, gotten off with only a mild censure, thanks again to his prominent attention in the press for bringing in three dangerous men. Deputies Engels and Geiger had been taken to the hospital, where they, too, were receiving accolades from the press.

I'd been released after questioning, with no punishment but cold stares. Lopez had vouched that I'd saved his life by stopping the forklift, but I wasn't sure that had won me any points with Lopez's superiors. The marina had been closed until further notice.

Clyde Simms and Garrett had both been taken here-the county's maximum security facility for violent offenders.

Strangely enough, Armand, who'd started the whole thing, was the only one who got out on bail. Perhaps that was part of his plea bargain for copping to assault charges-something Clyde had not been willing to do. Perhaps the police simply failed to provide a Cajun interpreter when they read Armand his rights.

As for Garrett, his bail had been revoked. The fact that he hadn't directly resisted arrest was ignored. Maia's best speeches and tirades didn't help. Wheelchair or not, Garrett had now graduated to hardcore incarceration.

The prison corridors smelled like dayold meat loaf. The walls were brown and beige, in keeping with Travis County's Hershey Bar patrol colours. We walked past the med ward-the psych patients, the newbies waiting for their TB tests to pass. Guards in white lab coats did their rounds, slipping food and drugs through the little slots in the cell doors. All the deputies knew Vic. They highfived him, asked him what was up, gave Maia Lee appreciative glances.

We waited for the elevator with four inmates in bluegreen scrubs who were helping a deputy transport a supply cart.

Lopez looked at one of the inmates, a young Anglo guy with starchwhite hair and a pasty face and a nervous smile. Vic said, "How you doing, Hans?"

The jail deputy grinned, as if pleased by some inside joke.

Hans said, "Fine, sir. I'm fine."

"These boys treating you okay?" Lopez asked.

I looked down at Hans' feet. He was the only one of the inmates without shoes.

"They're treating me fine," he said.

Two of the other guys-both Latinos with hair nets-grinned at each other.

Hans mumbled, "I got hope. My boss knows he ain't going to get his deposits in the bank next Friday without me. I got hope."

"You got to have hope," the other deputy said.

"That's right, brother," Lopez said.

At the top of the elevator, the inmates let us get out first. One held the door for us.

Everybody called Maia "ma'am."

Lopez and I walked up to the guard station. The sentry, a Weebleesque woman, was talking on the phone.

We waited.

The deputy from the elevator led his four charges to their cell block and told them it was time to declare contraband items. The inmates started patting down their clothes.

There were no bars anywhere, just plexiglass walls and big brown metal doors. Inside the block, I could see a metal picnic bench with welded seats, like at a highway rest stop. A little TV was mounted from the ceiling. Along the back wall was a row of tenbyten cells, each with its own brown metal door, each crammed with books and magazines. The whole block was intensely quiet. Much quieter than any jail I'd ever been in.

Three of the inmates showed the deputy their empty hands. One of the Latinos, almost bashfully, offered up a spoon and a comb- two potentially deadly weapons.

The deputy looked satisfied. He took the spoon and the comb and buzzed the cell block door open.

"You bust Hans?" I asked Lopez.

"It isn't Hans, Navarre-it's Hands. Only been in here a couple of days. Killed a guy he owed money to-dumped the body in the woods and thought we'd never be able to track the victim's identity if he cut off the hands and threw them in the Colorado River.

Absolute stupidity. Local fishermen found the left hand. Catfish probably ate the right."

"And he's really getting out of here?" Maia asked.

Lopez laughed. "Not a chance. His boss wouldn't touch him. But that's how easy it is, getting suckered into the logic of losers. Other guys you shared an elevator with are real sweethearts, too- that was a drug dealer, a hit man, and the Barton Creek rapist.

But you talk to them for a minute, you can almost buy that they're rational, nice human beings. Scary."

The inmates filed into their cell block. Hands looked reluctant to go. The deputy gave him an encouraging pat on the shoulder, turned him around, then gently pushed him into the block. The door slid closed.

The sentry behind the glass finally ended her call. She said, "Sorry, gentlemen.

Ma'am."

"Hey, Peg." Lopez grinned. "How's your fun factor today?"

"Oh, real high, Vic. Real high."

"We need to see Garrett Navarre."

Deputy Peg barked a laugh. "It just got higher. What room you want?"

Lopez looked at us. "I hate those interview rooms. You want to put your mouth on one of those greasy phones? Look, Peg-how about you bring him upstairs to the rec area.

Can you do that?"

She shrugged. "You know the way."

The outdoor rec area was on the top floor-a cagedin basketball court that looked out over the city. The panorama was obstructed by a tenstory Justice Department building to the left, but we could still see the wooded hills of Clarksville, clusters of apartments at the edge of UT, the green ribbons of undeveloped land that marked Shoal Creek and Barton Creek.

"Nice," I said.

"Oh yeah," Lopez agreed. "This was an apartment, you'd have to pay big bucks for a view like this. You kill somebody, you get it for free."

The door opened behind us. A guard came out with Garrett.

His bluegreen prisoner scrubs were way too big for him, the pant legs tucked under him in neat blue squares. His beard had been trimmed severely, his ponytail cut off.

He had a shiner for a left eye. He hadn't had that this morning.

"If it isn't my brother," he said. "Captain of the Good Ship Forklift."

"Your eye," Maia said. "What happened?"

Garrett touched the bruised skin. "Don't worry about it. Clyde's in the cell block with me-we've got things under control."

The jail guard smiled amiably, moved off to one side, picked up a basketball. He started twirling it on his finger.

"Don't suppose you've come to get me out," Garrett said.

"You decided the odds on that," Lopez told him. "Soon as you eloped with Clyde Simms."

Garrett grunted. "Yeah, Lopez. I should've stayed and taken the rap for another murder-with my kid brother finding all the evidence against me, my counsellor telling me to pleabargain, your deputy friends treating me to some of that countystyle justice. At least with Clyde, I know whose side he's on."

The jail guard yelled, "Heads up, Navarre."

He threw Garrett the ball.

Garrett caught it without much enthusiasm, dribbled it a couple of times in front of his wheelchair.

"Lopez was pulled off your case," I told him, "mostly because he stopped believing you're guilty. He wants to help."

"He wants to help," Garrett repeated. "He'll have to queue up, won't he? Whole fucking world wants to help me."

Maia told him about the tox reports, the ties between the murders of Clara Doebler, Jimmy, and the woman in the lake, the woman we assumed was Ruby.

Garrett's face reminded me of a wall I'd been trying to repair at the family ranch-crumbling stone washed over with plaster so many times I was afraid to scrape away the outer layer, for fear the whole structure would collapse. "It wasn't Ruby down there."

"We should know in a few days," Lopez said.

"It wasn't her. Clyde and I-we've had time to talk. Ruby wouldn't let her guard down like that. She can't be dead."

For a moment, his eyes softened with the same sad, broken hopefulness I'd seen downstairs, in the face of a polite young inmate who severed body parts.

"Garrett," I said, "the murders are connected. There's a poisoner at work. Adrienne Selak, Pena's girlfriend-she was probably drugged the same way as the others."

"If that's true," Garrett said, "why am I still in here?"

"Because," said Maia, "the DA can still make his strongest case, his only case, against you. You might be ruled out of Selak's murder, but the link between her and the other murders is the most speculative. To satisfy the public, give the press a good story, the DA's simply got to get you out of circulation-convict you on one murder, Jimmy Doebler's. The DA had a strong hand to begin with. When you ran, his hand got even stronger."

Garrett gripped the basketball tight enough to squeeze juice out of it. "You come here to tell me I should pleabargain?"

"I don't think that's possible anymore," she answered. "But there might be something you can do, assuming you give us some straight answers. Have you been getting email from the killer?"

He hesitated. "I've been getting-emails."

"From Pena," she said.

"They come from different addresses, different Xmailers. They're embedded with some kind of textbased virus-damnedest thing I've ever seen.

Freezes the computer if you try to print it, save it, screen capture it-anything."

"What did they say?"

Garrett shook his head at me. "I'd rather not- Look, it was just sick shit. Most of it was about me. Some about the company. The only one that really bothered me, the one I didn't understand-the bastard talked about some kid who almost got drowned in a tub."

Lopez stared out the chain link fence. "A kid?"

"Like I said. Sick shit."

"Second confession," Maia said. "You wrote the back door in Techsan's security program."

Garrett's eyes darkened. He looked past me, toward the prison doors.

"Dwight Hayes found the glitch," I told him. "It took him a while, but he's sure you wrote it."

"I don't have anything to say about that," Garrett told us. "With or without my lawyer."

"Look," Lopez said. "This could be real bad news for you, Navarre. Or it could be a break. If you wrote this back door in the program, I want to call a friend in the High Tech Unit, get him 'over here to talk with you. You know the program better than any body. Maybe if you two get together, you can trace the leaks. If you can tie the sabotage to Matthew Pena-well, it may not pin him to a murder. But it might be enough to sweat him, maybe even get a search warrant issued for his computer. That would be a very good start."

Garrett kept digging his fingertips into the black lines of the basketball.

Behind him, on the court, the jail guard did air threepointers.

"Get me out of here first," Garrett said.

"Can't do that," Lopez said. "We got to clear you before you go anywhere."

"You'll screw me around," Garrett said. "You can't help it. You're a cop."

"You want to talk alone?" I asked.

Garrett hesitated, then nodded.

"Buckley," Lopez called to the jail deputy. "I'll be inside."

"One on one?" Buckley offered.

Lopez dismissed the offer with a wave, then went through the door.

Garrett said, "You, too, Maia."

She started to protest? the look in his eyes stopped her. She followed Lopez inside.

Garrett held my eyes long enough to count to twenty.

"I wrote the back door," he said. "It was a diagnostic tool. I used it to check the integrity of files."

A gust of wind smacked the side of the Justice Department building and reverberated across the jail roof.

"When the leaks started," I said, "you didn't suspect that was the problem?"

"The back door was buried, Tres. Nobody had the pass code except me, Jimmy, and Ruby. A saboteur would have to get help from one of us, and even then he'd have to be a technical whiz. I couldn't believe my partners would sabotage their own company.

I thought it was much more likely Pena was bribing employees at the beta test sites."

"You should've taken the thing out."

"I tried, little bro. As things got worse, I went in and pulled the original subroutine, but it was too late. The damage was done. The betatesters were pulling the program off their machines, shutting us out of their systems. I couldn't fix all the old copies of the program. I was never even sure the back door had been the problem."

"Then you should've gone to the police."

"I couldn't."

"Because?"

Garrett turned toward the hoop, dribbled twice, shot. The ball whanged high off the backboard and bounced clean away.

"Because I'd used the damn thing myself," he said. "Illegally."

He looked at me, his eyes wet green, like windshield wiper fluid.

I braced myself. "Okay. What did you do?"

"Our betatest customers-one of them was Ticket Time."

"The concert ticket company," I said. And then it hit me in face. "You're not telling me

…"

"I didn't get anything for free, little bro. I paid. I just… put my requests into their computer first. Went to the head of the line. It was a dream, with the summer season about to open up.

"You used the back door for Buffett tickets."

"Don't make it sound so goddamn trivial. I got tickets for the whole summer, almost every show-front row, centre aisle, me and Jimmy and Clyde, a couple of other buddies. Starting next week, we were going on a road trip. It seemed harmless enough. It was just that one time, little bro. Never again."

The jail guard had retrieved the ball. He called, "Hey, Navarre, you going to play on the prisoners' team this year? Guards might just win, you shoot that bad all the time."

The deputy threw from the threepoint line, made a basket.

I thought about shoving the ball down his throat.

"You didn't want to get arrested for scamming Buffett tickets," I said. "And now here you are, for murder."

Garrett looked toward the windows of the justice building.

I wanted to be furious with my brother. I wanted to strangle him. But what he'd done was so ridiculous, so damn… Garrett like, I couldn't muster much more than exasperation.

"If I do what Lopez wants," Garrett said, "if I help the High Tech Unit, chances are pretty good we won't find anything solid enough to bust Pena. On the other hand, I'll be going on record for using my own security program for personal gain. If there were any chance I'd ever work programming again, this would nail the coffin. My career would be over."

"I can't tell you what to do," I said. "Not somebody as logical as you."

The wind kicked up again, knocking me a few inches sideways. Over in the far corner of the court, the jail guard kept dribbling a steady, slow beat.

"Last day or so," Garrett said, "I've had a lot of time to think. I've been listening to Clyde and Armand talking about this place they know in the Yucatan-guy can live like a king, never go back to the States. They say they could set me up. Extradition is a joke.

I could screw all this, cut my losses, spend my days drinking cerveza by the beach."

He looked down at his hands. They were trembling slightly.

"And then I realized-I'm feeling the same way I felt that first night Ruby McBride bought me a drink at Point Lone Star, told me she had ideas for a new startup. I feel the same way I felt when Jimmy taught me to jump trains. I start thinking-I've been a sucker my entire goddamn life."

There had been times I'd longed to hear Garrett criticize himself that harshly-to admit he didn't have a realitycheck bone in his body. Now, it brought me no satisfaction.

"You believe in possibilities," I told him. "That's not all bad."

Garrett shook his head. "I keep getting punished for it."

He looked worse than I had ever seen him-the black eye, the chopped hair, the prison scrubs. But at that moment I realized I admired Garrett for the same reasons I resented him-his absolute faith in his friends, his unshakable belief that you could dream something and then go right out and do it. And he kept believing that, no matter how much the world kicked the crap out of him.

The more unsettling realization was that, just for a moment, I saw Garrett the way my dad must've seen him. For all their fights, their harsh words, their years of not speaking to each other-I suddenly understood why Dad, in the end, had left my brother everything. Garrett needed it more than I did. He was living without a net.

Garrett took hold of his armrests, bracing himself as if he were about to get up. "I spent most of my adult life hoping you didn't turn out like me, little bro. That's why I'm impatient when you try to help me. You can't get pulled into my shit. You got to do better. You got to get your own shit together."

I couldn't respond.

"You getting back together with Maia?" he asked.

"I don't know."

Garrett glowered at me, letting me know he would not accept indecision.

"You think I should help Lopez?" he asked me. "You figure he's on the level?"

"Yeah. I think you should."

He called to the guard, who tried to pass him the ball. Garrett caught it, threw it away.

"Tres- Tell Lopez it's a go."

He winked at me with his good eye, then let the guard escort him inside.

I met Lopez by the guard station. He was using their phone, and didn't seem very happy about the conversation he was having. When he saw me coming, he lowered the receiver to the cradle without saying goodbye.

"Well?" he asked.

I filled him in.

Lopez shook his head. "I guess I got to get out my old LPs, take a listen to Son of a Son of a Sailor. I must've missed something."

"That call anything important?"

Lopez glanced at the phone, as if to make sure he'd hung it up properly. "Nothing you need to worry about."

We went down the elevator, now empty. At every locked door on our way out, some unseen guard on an unseen monitor noted our approach and buzzed us through.

When we got out into the foyer, Lopez reclaimed his gun. I gave back my red lawyer's tag.

Maia Lee was waiting for us at the main entrance.

I told her what Garrett had said.

She ran a finger across the glass. "We need to see Pena, try to break the bastard. I'm not sure Garrett can survive in here long enough to help the High Tech Unit."

"Any objections?" I asked Lopez.

Lopez straightened his gun belt. He stared out the window at the convict transport vans.

"Detective?" I asked again.

Lopez reached into his back pocket and pulled out a writing pad, flipped through pages of messy notes.

"Think I might take some flowers to the hospital," he said. "Deputy Engels has a few things to tell me about W.B. Doebler. He just doesn't know it yet."

"You sure that's wise?" I asked. "You know how tight W.B. is with the sheriff. And you're still supposed to be on leave."

Lopez put away his notebook, met my eyes. His expression told me he was past the point of caring about wise choices.

"You two go on ahead," he said. "Don't worry about me."

"You'll keep in touch?"

A small, thin smile. "Navarre. Counsellor."

Then he slipped out the tinted glasses and headed for his car.

Maybe it was just the fact that I'd said too many goodbyes that had turned permanent in the course of the week-to Jimmy, to Ruby, almost to Garrett. But I had to fight back a chill as Victor Lopez pulled away-a strange premonition that I wouldn't be seeing him again.