She clicked on the first hit, which seemed to be the main site for the facility.
A photo of an anonymous low-slung gray building with two flagpoles out front, taken at a distance; next to it a portrait of a broad-faced, buzz-cut white man sitting at a desk. Buttons for “Visitation and Contact Instructions” and “Jobs Available at this Facility.” Below that, in polite gray text, a couple of sentences:
Carl Weaver Detention Facility: A medium-security facility with a capacity of 1,027 inmates.
Customer Base: The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, US Marshal’s Service.
“Customer Base”?
In the upper left, there was another button that said: “Back to Locations.”
She clicked on it. A banner photo of warehouse and factory-like buildings spread over a flat, anonymous landscape, surrounded by warm lights perched atop skinny poles, like cheap Ikea floor lamps that had somehow grown as tall as redwoods.
Find a Facility, it said. And below that, Prostatis: A Nationwide Network Dedicated to Community Safety.
It took a moment to sink in.
The Weaver Detention Facility was owned by Prostasis.
Chapter Twenty-Three
For a minute or two she just sat there, staring out the window at the San Francisco skyline, her mind empty except for that one thought.
Prostasis owned Weaver Detention Facility.
Operated, rather.
Same thing.
This was bad.
A sudden wave of panic drove her to her feet. This was very bad.
Why? What were the implications?
Deep, calming breaths, she told herself. Get a grip. Think it through.
Randall Gates was a vice president of Prostatis, and he was on Safer America’s board.
Gary, or somebody, had pulled strings to get Danny transferred to Weaver Correctional Facility.
Did Gates know about her connection to Danny? About her other life? If he did…
Christ, she thought, did Gary want it to come out? That she had a boyfriend who’d been caught smuggling pot? And here she was at the arm of Caitlin O’Connor, the spokeswoman for an organization that preached getting tough on crime.
Why?
Maybe I’m being set up, she thought. Maybe… maybe something’s going to happen to Caitlin, and I’m going to get blamed for it.
That sounded like a scenario Gary would enjoy. Something that would end with both her and Danny in a cell. Or worse.
Was Danny safe?
“Fuck!”
“I’m sorry, I’m not going to calm down. You need to get him out of there.”
“Emily, we’re doing what we can.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
She dropped the phone to her side, dragged her fingers across her forehead.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Get a grip. You have to.
She raised the phone back up to her ear.
“Derek,” she began. “I’ve done some research into Weaver. It’s a substandard, dangerous facility.”
Which was the truth. She’d spent the last half hour Googling on her iPad. Among other things, Weaver had been written up in a few local papers for an inmate-hazing ritual that the guards had not only turned a blind eye toward but encouraged. They called it “Balls on the Wall.” Michelle could barely stand to read about it.
“They understaff the prison so they can make more money,” she said, because money was easier to talk about. “They’ve found maggots in the food.”
“Marisol is going out there first thing tomorrow with the paperwork for Jeff to file a request for a transfer back to Harris County. Assuming this was an administrative error of some kind, that should be all it takes to fix this.”
“And if it wasn’t?”
“We file the request for a transfer anyway. If the overcrowding in Harris County really is that severe, they can still move Jeff to a facility closer to Houston.”
“What if they don’t? What are we going to do?”
She drew in a deep breath. It was time for, if not honesty, some kind of acknowledgment of what was actually happening here.
“Look, Derek, you know this whole thing is… that it’s screwed up. That there’s some kind of… pressure or vendetta going on.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end.
What did Derek actually know?
“Jeff is a pre-trial detainee,” he finally said. “As such, he’s entitled to a higher level of constitutional protection than a convicted prisoner. They’re not allowed to punish him when he hasn’t been found guilty of anything. If they keep up this bullshit, we claim that it’s punitive and they’re violating the Due Process clauses of the Constitution.”
If Derek knew something, he wasn’t saying.
“Do you think that will work?”
“I think we can make a good case.”
Which didn’t answer the question at all.
“In the meantime…” A pause. “It might help if we made that appointment with the DEA.”
Shit.
“Okay,” Michelle said. “Let me… let me figure a few things out.”
Did it really make sense for her to meet with the DEA? How much time would that actually buy her, before someone decided there was enough evidence to arrest her as well?
She’d only been Emily for two years. If they were checking her background… if they asked a lot of questions…
How much of a life story could she fake?
She started to unpack.
After she’d hung her Armani jacket, slacks and blouses in the closet, her light overcoat she’d brought for unpredictable San Francisco nights, folded up her other clothes and placed them in the drawers under the flat-panel TV, she considered what was in the ruck: The logbook. The passports. The money.
She wasn’t sure what to do with the logbook and the passports, but she decided the hotel safe was good enough to store the $10,000 bundle, plus the $3,000 from the camera bag, the $25K from Houston and half of the cash in her wallet. People carried cash. That alone wasn’t incriminating. Not for Michelle, anyway.
Christ, she thought. All that money in the safe at the Arcata house. Had they gotten a warrant? Could they search the house? She’d put nearly $25,000 in the safe, and there was already cash in it. What would they make of some thirty thousand in cash in a safe that she and Danny both used?
They’d hang her on that alone.
I should’ve just carried it on, she thought. It would have been less of a risk.
Stupid, she thought. You’re so stupid.
But she couldn’t spend too much time beating herself up about that right now. She needed to figure out what to do.
Was there any way to get out ahead of this game that Gary was playing?
She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the closet safe and started pulling out the things she’d packed from the ruck.
Her camera bag. The money in it. The practical jacket and the $10,000 bundle. The money from Houston. The passports.
She opened one of the passports, the one belonging to “Meredith Evelyn Jackson.”
Her hair was dark in the photo. Shoulder length.
Well, there was nothing she could do about the length. But I should dye my hair again, she thought. Back to what it was before.
She was going to have to use this passport. She knew it now. There was no going back to Emily. And she couldn’t count on Michelle being safe for much longer.
Danny’s logbook. She ran her fingers on its pebbled surface.
What to do with the logbook?
What to do about Danny, locked up in a prison run by Prostatis?
No way that filling out an administrative request for a transfer was going to get him out of there. And how long would building a case based on constitutional law actually take?
I’ve got to get him out, she thought. I have to at least try.
She pulled Taking Flight out of the bag. The Further Adventures of Lex Telluride, she thought.