The Unquiet

“Went back?”

“The men told Andy where he should wait for them each Tuesday. Sometimes they came, sometimes they didn’t, but Andy was always there in case they did. He didn’t want anything to happen to Michelle. There was a clearing about half a mile from the house with a creek nearby, and a trail led down to it from the road, wide enough to take a single vehicle. Andy would sit there, and one of them would come for him. He was told always to sit facing the creek, and never to turn around when he heard someone arriving. He would be blindfolded, walked to the car, and driven away.”

I felt something in my throat, and my eyes stung. I looked away from Price. I had an image in my head of a boy sitting on a log, the sound of water rushing nearby, sunlight spearing through the trees and birds singing, then footsteps approaching, and darkness.

“I hear he’s been taken to the chair a couple of times.”

She glanced at me, perhaps surprised at how much I knew. “More than a couple. It’s a vicious circle. Andy’s medicated, but the medication needs to be monitored and the dosages adjusted. It isn’t monitored, though, so the meds stop working as well as they should, Andy gets distressed, he lashes out, the guards punish him, he ends up more disturbed, and the meds have even less effect on him than before. It’s not Andy’s fault, but try explaining that to a prison guard who’s just had Andy’s urine thrown all over him. And Andy’s not untypical: there’s an escalating cycle occurring at the Supermax. Everyone can see it, but nobody knows what to do about it, or nobody even wants to do something about it, depending upon how depressed I’m feeling. You take a mentally unstable prisoner who commits some infraction of the rules while part of the general population. You confine him in a brightly lit cell without distractions, surrounded by other prisoners who are even more disturbed than he is. Under the strain, he violates more rules. He’s punished by being placed in the chair, which makes him even wilder than before. He commits more serious breaches of the rules, or assaults a guard, and his sentence is increased. The end result, in the case of someone like Andy, is that he’s driven insane, even suicidal. And what does a threat of suicide get you? More time in the chair.

“Winston Churchill once said that you can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners. You know, there was all of this stuff about Abu Ghraib and what we we’re doing to Muslims in Iraq and in Guantánamo and in Afghanistan and wherever else we’ve decided to lock up those whom we perceive to be a threat. People seemed surprised by it, but all they had to do was look around them. We do it to our own people. We try children as adults. We lock up, even execute, the mentally ill. And we tie people naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication isn’t working. If we can do that here, then how the hell can anybody be surprised when we don’t treat our enemies any better?”

Her voice had grown louder as she became more angry. Ernest knocked on the door and poked his head in.

“Everything okay, Aimee?” he asked, looking at me as if I was to blame for the disturbance, which I suppose, in a way, I was.

“It’s fine, Ernest.”

“You want more coffee?”

She shook her head. “I’m wired as it is. Mr. Parker?”

“No, I’m good.”

She waited until the door had closed before continuing.

“Sorry about that,” said Aimee.

“For what?”

“For giving you the rant. I guess you probably don’t agree with me.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because of what I’ve read about you. You’ve killed people. You seem like a harsh judge.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. Part of me was surprised by her words, maybe even a

“I didn’t think that I had a choice,” I replied. “Not then. Maybe now, knowing what I know, I might have acted differently in some cases, but not all.”

“You did what you thought was right.”

“I’ve started to believe that most people do what they think is right. The problems arise when what they do is right for themselves, but not what’s right for others.”

“Selfishness?”

“Perhaps. Self-interest. Self-preservation. A whole lot of concepts with ‘self ’ in them.”

“Did you make mistakes when you did what you did?”

I realized that I was being tested in some way, that Price’s questions were a way of gauging whether or not I should be allowed to see Andy Kellog. I tried to answer them as honestly as I could.

“No, not at the end.”

“So you don’t make mistakes?”

“Not like that.”

“You never shot anyone who didn’t have a gun in his hand, is that what you’re saying?”

“No, because that’s not true either.”

There was a silence then, until Aimee Price put her hands to her forehead and gave a growl of frustration.

“Some of that is none of my business,” she said. “I’m sorry. Again.”

“I’m asking you questions. I don’t see why you can’t ask some back. You frowned when I mentioned Daniel Clay’s name, though. Why?”

“Because I know what people say about him. I’ve heard the stories.”

“And you believe them?”

“Somebody betrayed Andy Kellog to those men. It wasn’t a coincidence.”

“ Merrick doesn’t think so either.”

“Frank Merrick is obsessed. Something inside him broke when his daughter disappeared. I don’t know if it makes him more dangerous or less dangerous than he was.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Not much. You probably know all that you need to about his conviction, the stuff in Virginia: the killing of Barton Riddick, and the bullet match that linked Merrick to the shooting. It doesn’t interest me a great deal, to be honest. My main concern was, and remains, Andy Kellog. When Merrick first began forming some kind of bond with Andy, I thought what most people would: you know, a vulnerable younger man, an older, harder prisoner, but it wasn’t like that. Merrick really seemed to be looking out for Andy as best he could.”

She had begun to doodle on the legal pad on her lap as she spoke. I don’t think she was even fully aware of what she was doing. She didn’t look down at the pad as the pencil moved across it, and she didn’t look at me, preferring instead to gaze out at the cold winter light beyond her window.

She was drawing the heads of birds.

“I heard that Merrick got transferred to the Supermax just so he could stay close to Kellog,” I said.

“I’m curious to know the source of your information, but it’s certainly right on the money. Merrick got transferred, and made it clear that anyone who messed with Andy would answer to him. Even in a place like the Max, there are ways and means. Except the only person from whom Merrick couldn’t protect Andy was Andy himself.

“In the meantime, the AG’s office in Virginia began setting in motion indictment on the Riddick killing. It rattled on and on, and as the date of Merrick ’s release from the Max approached, the papers were served and he was notified of his extradition. Then something peculiar happened: another lawyer intervened on Merrick ’s behalf.”

“Eldritch,” I said.

“That’s right. The intervention was troublesome in a number of ways. It didn’t seem like Eldritch had ever had any previous contact with Merrick, and Andy told me that the lawyer had initiated the contact. This old man just turned up and offered to take on Merrick ’s case, but from what I found out later, Eldritch didn’t seem to specialize in any kind of criminal work. He did corporate stuff, real estate, all strictly white-collar, so he was an unusual candidate for a crusading attorney. Nevertheless, he tied Merrick’s case in with a challenge to bullet matching being assembled by a group of liberal lawyers, and turned up evidence of a shooting involving the same weapon used to kill Riddick, but committed while Merrick was behind bars. The Feds began to backtrack on bullet matching, and Virginia came to the realization there wasn’t enough evidence to get a conviction on the Riddick shooting, and if there’s one thing a prosecutor hates to do, it’s to pursue a case that looks like it’s doomed from the start. Merrick spent a few months in a cell in Virginia, then was released. He’d served his full sentence in Maine, so he was free and clear.”