Patricia Cornwell - Cruel and Unusual

“I'm trying to track down someone,” I said, reaching for the phone.

I had no luck with any of the Grimeses I called.

“Maybe she's married,” Lucy suggested.

“I don't think so.”

I called Directory Assistance and got the listing for the new penitentiary in Greensville.

“What makes you think she isn't?”

“Intuition.”

I dialed. “I'm trying to reach Helen Grimes,” I said to the woman who answered.

“Are you referring to an inmate?”

“No. To one of your guards.”

“Hold, please.”

I was transferred.

“Watkins,” a male voice mumbled.

“Helen Grimes, please,” I said.

“Officer Helen Grimes.”

“Oh. She don't work here anymore.”

“Could you please tell me where I could reach her, Mr. Watkins? It's very important.”

“Hold on.”

The phone dunked against wood. In the background, Randy Travis was singing.

Minutes later, the man returned. “We're not allowed to give out information like that, ma'am.”

“That's fine, Mr. Watkins. If you give me your first name, I'll just send all this to you and you can forward it to her.”

A pause. “All what?”

“This order she placed. I was calling to see if she wanted it mailed fourth-class or sent ground.”

“What order?”

He didn't sound happy.

“The set of encyclopedias she ordered. There are six boxes weighing eighteen pounds each.”

“Well, you can't be sending no encyclopedias here.”

“Then what do you suggest I do with them, Mr. Watkins? She's already made the down payment and your business address was the one she gave us.”

“Shhhhooo. Hold on.”

I heard paper rustle; then keys clicked on a keyboard.

“Look,” the man said quickly. “The best I can do is give you a P.O. box. You just send the stuff there. Don't be sending nothing to me.”

He gave me the address and abruptly hung up. The post office where Helen Grimes received her mail was in Goochland County. Next I called a bailiff I was friendly with at the Goochland courthouse. Within the hour he had looked up Helen Grimes's home address in court records, but her telephone number was unlisted. At eleven A.M., I gathered my pocketbook and coat, and found Lucy in my study.

“I've got to go out for a few hours,” I said.

“You lied to whoever you were talking to on the phone.”

She stared into the computer screen. “You don't have any encyclopedias to deliver to anyone.”

“You're absolutely right. I did lie.”

“So sometimes it's okay to lie and sometimes it's not.’

“It's never really okay, Lucy.”

I left her in my chair, modem lights winking and various computer manuals open and scattered over my desk and on the floor. On the screen the cursor pulsed rapidly. I waited until I was well out of sight before slipping my Ruger into my pocketbook. Though I was licensed to carry a concealed weapon, I rarely did. Setting the alarm, I left the house through the garage and drove west until Cary Street put me on River Road. The sky was marbled varying shades of gray. I was expecting Nicholas Grueman to call any day. A bomb ticked silently in the records I had given him, and I did not look forward to what he was going to say.

Helen Grimes lived on a muddy road just west of the North Pole restaurant, and on the border of a farm. Her house looked like a small barn, with few trees on its tiny parcel of land, and window boxes clumped with dead shoots that I guessed once had been geraniums. There was no sign in front to announce who lived inside, but the old Chrysler pulled up dose to the porch announced that at least somebody did.

When Helen Grimes opened her door, I could tell by her blank expression that I was about as foreign to her as my German car. Dressed in jeans and an untucked denim shirt, she planted her hands on her substantial hips and did not budge from the doorway. She seemed unbothered by the cold or who I said I was, and it wasn't until I reminded her of my visit to the penitentiary that recognition flickered in her small, probing eyes.

“Who told you where I live?”

Her cheeks were flushed, and I wondered if she might hit me.

“Your address is in the court records for Goochland County.”

“You shouldn't have looked for it. How would you like it if I dug up your home address?”

“If you needed my help as much as I need yours, I wouldn't mind, Helen,” I said.

She just looked at me. I noticed that her hair was damp, an earlobe smudged with black dye.

“The man you worked for was murdered,” I said. “Someone who worked for me was murdered. And there are others. I'm sure you've been keeping up with some of what is going on. There is reason to suspect that the person who is doing this was an inmate at Spring Street - someone who was released, perhaps around the time that Ronnie Joe Waddell was executed.”

“I don't know anything about anybody being released.”

Her eyes drifted to the empty street behind me.

“Would you know anything about an inmate who disappeared? Someone, perhaps, who wasn't legitimately released? It seems that with the job you had you would have known who entered the penitentiary and who left.”

“Nobody disappeared that I heard of.”

“Why don't you work there anymore?”

I asked.

“Health reasons.”

I heard what sounded like a cupboard door shut from somewhere inside the space she guarded.

I kept trying. “Do you remember when Ronnie Waddell's mother came to the penitentiary to visit him on the afternoon of his execution?”

“I was there when she came in.”

“You would have searched her and anything she had with her. Am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“What I'm trying to determine is if Mrs. Waddell might have brought anything to give her son. I realize that visiting rules prohibit people from bringing in items for the inmates “

"You can get permission. She got it.”

"Mrs. Waddell got permission to give something to her son?”

"Helen, you're letting all the heat out," a voice sounded sweetly from behind her.

Intense blue eyes suddenly fixed on me like gun sights in the space between Helen Grimes's meaty left shoulder and the door frame. I caught a flash of a pale cheek and aquiline nose before the space was empty again. The lock rattled and the door was quietly shut behind the erstwhile prison guard. She leaned up against it, staring at me. I repeated my question.

"She did bring something for-Ronnie, and it wasn't much. I called the warden for permission.”

"You called Frank Donahue?”

She nodded.

"And he granted permission?”

"Like I said; it wasn't much, what she brought for him.

"Helen, what was it?”

"A picture of Jesus about the size of a postcard, and something was wrote on the back. I don't remember exactly. Something like 'I will be with you in paradise; only the spelling was wrong. Paradise was spelled like 'pair of dice; all run together,' Helen Grimes said without a trace of a smile.

"And that was it?”

I asked. "This was what she wanted to give her son before he died?”

"I told you that was it. Now, I need to go in, arid I don't want you coming here again.”

She put her hand on the doorknob as the first few drops of rain slowly slipped from the sky and left wet spots the size of nickels on the cement, stoop.

When Wesley arrived at my house later in the day, he wore a black leather pilot's jacket, a dark blue cap, and a trace of a smile.

"What's happening?” I asked as we retreated to the kitchen, which by now had become such a common meeting place for us that he always took the same chair.

"We didn't break Stevens, but I think we put a pretty big crack in him. Your having the lab request left where be would find it did the trick. He's got good reason to fear the results of DNA testing done on fetal tissue from Susan Story's case.”