an airport waiting room.”
Spencer nodded. “I’ll see him in there?”
“No. The execution chambers are just behind the back wall of the visiting room.”
Spencer held up his hand to the electronic sensor. Owlflashed green in the light, and then vanished. Owls,thought Spencer. Once, when he was nine, Spencer and his older brother Cal had talked an old mountain man named Rattler into taking them owling, because they were still too young to hunt. Rattler walked the Arrowood boys across every ridge over the holler, teaching them to look for the sweep of wings above the tall grass in a field and to listen for the sound of the waking owl, ready to track his prey by the slightest rustle, the shade of movement. He taught them how to make owl calls, and they became so good at it that they could not tell if an owl was calling to them out of the forest or one of their own. Look out,Rattler had told them. When the owl calls your name, it means death.
Later on we became owls,Spencer thought. Cal went to Vietnam and died in a jungle of screeching birds, and Spencer grew up to be a lawman, hunting prey of his own by the slightest sound or by one false move. A lot of people had heard him call their name.
He stared at the tile floor, the institutional cinder-block walls, and at the display case of carved ship models made by inmate craftsmen. “I thought Mr. Harkryder would be on death row.”
“He was housed in Unit Two. It’s directly behind this building. But in the days before his execution, a prisoner is moved to a holding cell in the back of Building Eight. We’ve never done an execution before at Riverbend, but the procedures have all been outlined so that we would be ready.”
They walked through the door and into the empty visitation hall, past a series of functional sofas and chairs of plastic and steel arranged in conversational groupings so that twenty or thirty sets of visitors could have a few feet of privacy with the inmate they came to see. They stopped at another metal door on the back wall. The guide unlocked it. “There’s another way in,” he said, “but I thought we’d go this way, since Mr. Harkryder is already in his cell. This is where you’ll be tonight.”
The witness room. Rows of metal conference-room chairs facing a plate-glass window covered by blinds. Straight in front of them was another door. The pleasant-looking man pushed it open. “You might as well see it now, Sheriff.” He stepped over the threshold and stood aside so that Spencer could look into the bright, empty room.
Almost empty.
A plain wooden chair sat in the center of the room.
The guide motioned him to the door on the left wall. “This leads to the hallway,” he said. “You know: the last mile. The other way is the control room, where the machinery is located, and there’s also a room there for the equipment of the prison telephone system. Would you like to see it?”
The guide had given this tour many times before, and an execution had never happened yet, so perhaps the air of unreality about this place still lingered for him. Spencer declined the invitation to see the other rooms. There was too little time.
They emerged in a tiled corridor that reminded Spencer of the Sunday school building of a modern church. The open door on the left revealed a small kitchen. You could have had a wedding reception or a Scout meeting in the bright empty room beyond—except for the wooden chair in the center.
A few paces past the kitchen doorway, Spencer saw the only three barred cells in Riverbend. The ordinary prisoners’ rooms had blue metal doors that they could lock with their own keys. Building Four, where the troublemakers were kept, had solid cell doors with pie flaps for food to be taken to the prisoner, and bars enclosing the various areas of that building as a security precaution, but no cells like these. These were jail cells, much more familiar to a county sheriff than to a modern prison guard.
Inside the last barred cell, a man in jeans and a blue cotton work shirt sat on the metal bunk, writing on a yellow legal pad. An armed guard sat on a folding chair in the hall, watching the cell with an air of uneasy boredom.
Spencer stepped up to the bars. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said.
Fate