"The papers had it that he went out to get a smoke and simply walked away." Juhle was treading lightly. "We were wondering if you had any more details."
Harron uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. "Look. I really don't want to talk about this. An escape is the worst thing that can happen to the warden of a prison, and now you want me to help you make it worse by connecting it to the murder of a federal judge."
"We don't know if it's connected," Juhle said. "If you can eliminate the possibility, we'd be grateful."
A long pause while Harron considered this. "All right," he said at last. "But how is Mowery even theoretically connected to Palmer's murder?"
"We've seen some articles on the possibility that the union might be using parolees on jobs outside."
"What kind of jobs?"
"Muscle. Extortion. Vandalism."
"Mowery was in for violating his parole," Hunt added. "His first time out, he was actually on the union payroll."
Harron's eyes were slits. "And what?"
"And Inspector Juhle here and myself thought it might be worth asking you if you'd heard anything about Mowery getting busted back here for failing to obey orders."
"What orders?"
Juhle shrugged. "Hitting Palmer, for example."
The slab of Harron's face had hardened down to rock. "Bullshit." Abruptly, he stood, walked over to his office door, opened it, and looked out. Then closed it again and came back to Juhle and Hunt and sat again. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. "It couldn't happen. And even if it did, under your theory, Mowery wouldn't have been reported missing."
"Except he broke out," Hunt said. "And really went missing."
Juhle soft-pedaled. "We'd just like to know a few more details about the escape. Maybe there was an unexpected shift change among the guards. The guys who were supposed to protect him didn't get to his new guards in time…"
"All inmates must be in their cells at lockdown, inspector. There are no exceptions. If someone's not there, it gets reported immediately. As was the case here." He gave Juhle the hard eye, shook his head dismissively. "Listen. These people, inmates, they don't get out to do a job."
"We realize that, sir," Hunt said. "But until last weekend, Mowery had been out on parole."
"Okay. And?"
Juhle took it up. "And maybe he got violated because he refused to take a job."
Harron wasn't buying it. "In or out, these people are not contract labor, gentlemen. They're psychopaths. They don't keep agreements and they don't follow the rules. If they get out, they're gone until we find them. They never come back on their own."
Hunt knew that this was the obvious and correct response. It was also self-serving. But everyone in the room knew what was being left unsaid-that every prison had a bustling black market in tobacco, liquor, and dope; that sexual activity not only between inmates but between guards and inmates was not unknown; that "marriages" of convenience or protection or even love could create bonds as strong as anything on the outside, bonds that could make life in jail preferable to a life outside; that guards could beat inmates to death and never be called to account for it; that omerta-the code of silence-was the rule among the guards at every prison in the state.
Whatever crimes might be ongoing and abetted by some few venal guards-money laundering, prostitution, drug deals, murders-the danger and boredom of the daily work and the degree of interdependence among these men guaranteed that no other guard would come forth to testify against any of their own. A bad guard was a bad guard, true, but he was a brother first. And you did not rat out your brother. That was the culture. Hunt, Juhle, and Harron all knew that Arthur Mowery's escape could have been arranged and executed with the collusion of some of the prison's guards.
Juhle said, "Nevertheless, at the moment, we've got no choice but to consider Mr. Mowery a person of interest to this investigation."
"Do what you want," Harron said. "But let me ask you this: In any of these articles you saw, was San Quentin in any way implicated?"
"No, sir. Corcoran, Avenal, Pelican Bay, Folsom, a few others, but not San Quentin."
"I'd like to think nothing like what you're proposing could happen on my watch."
"Yes, sir."
"We've already done our preliminary investigation, of course." He crossed to his desk, picked up a folder. His shoulders settled. He ran his whole hand across the top of his head. "I can't give you all of this, but what kind of details are you looking for?"
"You tell us," Juhle said.
Harron in his chair now held the folder open in front of him. He adjusted his glasses, but before looking down, his eyes came up, and he stared off into space. "Mowery's two previous parole violations are interesting in this context, aren't they?" Then he went back to the folder, flipped some pages, passed a computerized printout across the desk. Juhle and Hunt were up now, by the warden's desk.
"Written up three times for assault," Harron said. "Active AB"-the Aryan Brotherhood-"thought to be an enforcer. Connected to one fatal prison stabbing. No willing witnesses, so no prosecution. Five thousand dollars on his books. Probably bribery or extortion or both."
"So he's got money," Hunt said, "which means a connection on the outside."
Juhle went back to the sheet. "He apparently went straight for…eight years."
"Either that," Hunt said, "or his parole officer had a reason to stop violating him."
Juhle looked at the warden. "You don't have Mowery's lawyer in there, do you?"
Harron thumbed through some pages, found a business card clipped to one of them. "As of seven months ago, Jared E. Wilkins. The third, no less." He handed the card over.
Juhle took it, gave it a glance, held it up for Hunt. " Sacramento," he said.
"Does that mean something?" Harron asked.
"How does a San Francisco thug get hooked up with a Sacramento lawyer?" Hunt said. He took out his cell phone and, on a hunch, punched up the number on the card. "Mr. Wilkins, please," he said. "Sure, Jim Pine… Yeah, I know, I'm fighting a cold." Hunt closed the phone back up and handed it to Juhle. "Mowery's lawyer knows Pine."
Harron's mouth was stuck on open. Finally he got it to move. "If this goes anywhere, inspector," he said, "I'd appreciate a heads-up, just between us."
"If it goes anywhere, warden, the whole world's going to know about it. Who's Mowery's parole officer, who's busted him twice?"
For an answer, Harron found the page he wanted and under his breath said, "Son of a bitch." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Phil Lamott."
"He means something to you," Juhle said.
The warden nodded. "I recognize the name. He started his career here, early nineties. As a guard."
25
They just got back to the car when Juhle's phone went off, and he picked it off his belt on the first beep, checked the number coming in, said, "Talk to me, Shiu. Make me happy."
But the call didn't produce that effect. After listening for less than a minute, shaking his head back and forth the whole time, he said, "I'm just leaving San Quentin with Wyatt Hunt. No, not the prison, Shiu. San Quentin, the burger joint. You don't know it? Out by the Cliff House. Awesome fries. Anyway, we might have something else maybe. But he can drop me back at the Hall. I'll tell you about it then."
"Let me guess," Hunt said when Juhle closed the phone. "The ballistics didn't match."
"I hate that guy," Juhle said.
On the rest of the drive back down to the city, Juhle made a couple more phone calls to verify that neither Andrea nor Arthur Mowery had turned up. No, to both.
After another lengthy phone call, during which Juhle asked a few questions but was mostly silent, he rang off. "That was Jeff Elliot. 'CityTalk'?" This was a popular Chronicle column that often dealt with the law and its practitioners.