Fear Nothing (Detective D.D. Warren #7) - Lisa Gardner Page 0,34

cream-colored sweater before she could stop herself, then had to grit her teeth against the exploding pain.

“You want to complain, Melvin?” she muttered. “You want to be all pissed off? Then, come on. I’ll give you something to be good and mad about. Let’s go have some fun.”

Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren hammered her way down the stairs, out the door and into her car. Ready to share her pain with the world.

Chapter 9

SUPERINTENDENT KIM MCKINNON was a beautiful woman. High, sculpted cheekbones, smooth ebony skin, liquid brown eyes. The kind of woman who would be as stunning at seventy as she was at forty. She was also incredibly smart, relentlessly determined and phenomenally tough, all traits necessary to run the oldest female correctional institute still operating in the United States. Especially these days, when the MCI was facing record crowding and had just been written up for housing two hundred and fifty inmates in a space originally built for sixty-four.

The trickle-down theory of pain and punishment, the superintendent had informed me the day I’d asked her about it. Most sheriffs’ jails were jammed up themselves, meaning they no longer had the space necessary to offer the sight and sound separation required by law between male and female offenders. Their solution: ship the women to the MCI, where they became Superintendent McKinnon’s problem.

She got the bad press, the women got wedged into triple-bunked cells and the state still didn’t authorize funds for building additional housing units.

Other than that, the superintendent had a dream job, I’m sure.

Now Superintendent Beyoncé, as the inmates called her, sat on the other side of her massive gunmetal-gray desk, hands clasped before her, and regarded me soberly.

“She’s getting worse,” she stated without preamble. “This morning’s incident . . . Frankly, I’ve been expecting such an episode for days.”

“Meaning you’ve conducted extra searches of Shana’s cell, while asking your officers to be hypervigilant about her access to materials for making shanks?” I responded coolly.

Superintendent McKinnon merely gave me a look. “Come on, Adeline. You’ve walked these halls long enough. You know when it comes to an inmate like your sister, there’s very little we can do. We may be the ones in uniforms, but more often than not, she’s the one in control.”

Which, sadly, was true. My sister was every prison administrator’s nightmare: a highly intelligent, incredibly antisocial maximum-security inmate with nothing left to lose. She was already held in isolation, locked down twenty-three hours a day. With the sole exception of my one-hour monthly attendance, she didn’t care about visitation privileges. Ditto with phone privileges, access to prison programming or even the few luxuries she’d managed to scrape enough funds together to purchase from the prison canteen. Time and time again, Shana acted out like a bad toddler, and time and time again the prison staff responded with loss of privileges and removal of toys.

Shana didn’t care. She was angry, she was depressed and thus far, no amount of medication had made a difference. I would know, as I’m the one who’d prescribed her last three medical protocols.

My sister’s suicide attempt wasn’t a stain just on Superintendent McKinnon’s record but also on my own.

“Has she been taking her pills?” I asked now, the next logical question.

“We’ve been supervising both her ingestion of the medication as well as searching her cell for undigested capsules. We haven’t found anything, but that might just mean she’s one step ahead. You understand, Adeline, I’m going to have to keep Shana in medical for at least a week as it is. You know what that’s like.”

I nodded, getting the message. If prisons were rife with mental illness, then the medical ward was the epicenter of the madness, where the deeply disturbed prowled their locked-down medical cells while howling their particular brand of crazy for all the world to hear.

If my sister hadn’t wanted to kill herself before, a week in medical should do the trick.

“Is it the anniversary of her first murder victim?” I asked now. “Maria said some reporter’s been trying to contact Shana, asking all sorts of questions?”

In response, Superintendent McKinnon yanked open a drawer and pulled out a banded bunch of letters. “Name’s Charles Sgarzi. He first called my office six months ago. My staff informed him he should write to Shana directly with his request. I’m told she read the first few letters but never responded. Apparently, he got more serious after that.”

She handed over the batch of letters. I counted more than a dozen, arranged in

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