Caitlin shrugged. “Maybe we could use it somehow. Depending on where we go with this whole thing.”
“You and Troy.”
“And Shane, potentially. We’ll see.”
“Okay,” Michelle said.
“I guess I need to decide pretty quick about what to do in California. It’ll be bad enough when I tell the board I want to pull our resources out of Protect Our Communities. If I tell them I want to go in and campaign on the other side…” Caitlin chuckled, in a way that suggested she was faintly embarrassed. “Well, that’s gonna be some fun times.”
Michelle took a quick glance around the restaurant. A few Japanese businessmen, local hipster types with handcrafted leather messenger bags, well-heeled tourists, techies in hundred-dollar hoodies. No one who seemed to be watching them, though someone certainly could be.
She thought about her purse. Both of her iPhones were in it, and they were both switched on, Michelle’s phone for work, and because she knew she could only be out of touch with Gary for so long before he’d retaliate, Emily’s phone in case someone called about Danny. She didn’t know if Gary could put spyware that switched on the mikes on her phones if he’d never physically gotten his hands on them. But she couldn’t trust that they weren’t being heard. There were plenty of other ways Gary could listen.
“Caitlin… are you sure you want to take this that far right now? Some of the donors… well, they’re powerful people. And… I know the type. They can be pretty ruthless.”
“Now, what are they gonna do?” Caitlin said with a snort. “Try and smear me? You know what, they can call me unstable, they can go ahead and try, but I’m not going to be doing this alone. I have people on my side too.” She paused to refill Michelle’s sake cup. “Besides, I don’t give a shit what they think. They’re free to take their money someplace else if they don’t like it.”
There had to be some way she could warn her, some story she could tell that Caitlin would believe.
Michelle drew in a deep breath. The air came with just the slightest hint of fish. It occurred to her that if Danny did get out, maybe he could back her up on this. The story would still sound crazy, but if there were two of them saying it…
And there was his logbook. Should she show it to Caitlin?
I have to time this right, she thought. I need to wait until Danny’s out before I risk it. There were negotiations going on, she knew, and blowing up Gary’s operation would only complicate them.
But what if Danny didn’t get out? When was Gary going to pull the trigger on whatever he had planned for Troy Stone?
Where could she and Caitlin talk and not be overheard?
“Where did you go?”
“Sorry,” Michelle said. “It’s just… I was thinking of some things that happened a couple of years ago, when my husband died.”
Caitlin leaned in closer. “Do you want to talk about it, hon? I get the feeling you had kind of a rough time.”
Michelle manufactured a chuckle. “It’s a long, complicated story. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Just not right now.”
It wasn’t until the next morning, when they sat in their Business Class seats, plane waiting on the tarmac at SFO, and the flight attendant requested that all portable electronic devices be switched off for takeoff, that Michelle realized when and where might be the best opportunity for them to talk with some privacy.
No cell phone reception. No bugs. No van parked on a street outside with a high-powered mike aimed in their direction. Other passengers were a concern. But if she were careful…
She’d wait a day for Danny. But on the flight back to Houston on Sunday, she’d tell Caitlin the truth. Or some version of it.
In the meantime, she’d keep a close eye on Caitlin.
“You know,” she said, “about filming you at the convention… I do a lot of still photography. I don’t have that much experience with video, but in a pinch, if we can’t find someone else on such short notice…”
“Oh, that sounds good,” Caitlin said, between sips of her mimosa. “I mean, this is just an idea I had, it may or may not come to anything. No need to make a big production out of it.”
Just the excuse Michelle needed to keep Caitlin in her sights.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Well, here we are.” Caitlin grinned at the camera. “Prepare yourself.”
Michelle followed her onto the convention hall floor.
“Caitlin, can you hold up a minute? I want to get a few long-shots of all this.”
The convention floor was huge, lit by fluorescent lights and ambient glow from displays in the booths that formed a maze across it. There was no natural light here, it was sealed off from the outside world like an indoor shopping mall or sports arena, its own disconnected environment, the constant chatter of the crowd forming an oceanic, discordant roar.
Michelle got her shot and half-jogged to catch up to Caitlin, who stood next to a booth for a company advertising itself as “The Next Generation in Correctional Healthcare.”
“Ready?” Caitlin asked.
Michelle nodded. They’d stopped at a Best Buy a couple of miles from the convention center on their way from the airport and bought a Rode mike, some memory cards and an extra battery pack for her dSLR. A camcorder would have been better, but the camera would do, and at least Michelle already knew how to use it.
“So, the prison industry in the United States is big,” Caitlin said. “State and federal governments spend around seventy-five billion dollars a year on corrections. We’ve got a total inmate population of two point three million people, which in terms of both the number of prisoners and as a percentage of the population, is the biggest in the world. We’re five percent of the world’s population, and we have twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. That’s right-we’re number one.”
She paused. “You got all that?”
Michelle nodded.
“Let’s walk a little, okay?”
“Sure.”
Michelle followed alongside Caitlin as they moved down the row of booths. There were booths for food service. For secure payment systems. For vests that promised “ultimate stabbing protection.” For tactical weapons, security cameras, prison architects, prison plumbing fixtures, drug-testing kits. Phone systems, correctional software, correctional pharmacies, prison ministries, sheriff’s associations, insurance companies.
Caitlin halted again. “So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this. Wondering, is it really true that we just commit more crimes in America? And if so, why is that? Is this”-she made an open-palmed wave at the convention floor around her-“helping us fix that?”
They walked a little farther. Caitlin stopped in front of a booth for substance-abuse software. “Well, one thing I learned is that about half of the folks behind bars in state prisons are there for non-violent crimes. Ninety percent of federal prisoners are there for non-violent crimes. You know how many of those are there for drug offenses? About one quarter of the people held in US prisons and jails. You can add another seventeen percent who say they committed their crimes to get money for drugs. Around sixty-five percent of prisoners have some kind of drug problem. Only eleven percent of them get treatment for it.”
She really was good at this, Michelle thought. The way she pulled up all those facts and figures without sounding rehearsed or rushed, how she faced the camera with an easy charm.
“Here’s something else,” Caitlin continued. “I was talking to a representative from a correctional officer’s union the other night, and you know what he told me? More than half of all male inmates have at least one significant mental health problem. With women? Seventy-five percent.”
She held the camera’s gaze and said: “There are more seriously mentally ill people in the Los Angeles County Jail than in any psychiatric hospital in the United States. Three times more people with serious mental illness incarcerated than in hospitals.” She shook her head. “Now, that’s a lot of numbers and percentages I’m throwing out here. But to me, they all started adding up to the same thing.”