from Moultrie,” she said. “Where is your buddy, anyway? He don’t usually miss the TNT movie. Likes all those old ones, you know, like High Plains Drifter and Catch-22 and stuff.”
I noticed the sound on the corner television was muted. Henley was singing about all the things he thought he’d figured out that he’d have to learn again. She had the air conditioning turned up high and the lights already low.
“Did you say Moultrie?” I asked. “I thought he was from Charleston?”
“Might have been. But he sure knows about the state pen near Moultrie,” she said, working the glassware under the bar even though there wasn’t a soul drinking but me.
“Said he was a bull there and I should know. My daddy did some time there when I was a kid.”
I wondered why McCane had skipped this part of his résumé, not that we were on reminiscing terms.
“Must have been before I met him,” I said.
She poured another beer from the tap and took my empty. I watched the lights playing in the bar’s back mirrors through my second and left her a five-dollar tip on the way out the door. When I got to the truck I called Billy.
“Did you ever do a full dossier on McCane?” I asked, and it must have been in my voice. Billy was usually steps ahead of me and I had a feeling it got to his pride when he wasn’t.
“No. I just verified that he works for the insurance company. Why? You find out he belongs to the Klan or something?”
Billy is not usually a vindictive person.
“We need to track his work background,” I said. “He told me he had been a cop in Charleston and Savannah, but we need to find out if he ever had any connection with the state pen near Moultrie.”
Billy was quiet on the other end, spinning the information in his head, frustrated by the lack of logic.
“You want to connect the dots on this one for me?” he finally said.
“It might be nothing,” I said. “But let’s check.”
Old cop thinking. Someone lies to you, there’s a reason, even if it’s a lie by omission. Maybe McCane just didn’t include it because being a prison guard isn’t exactly a revered position in law enforcement. Maybe there was more. Maybe I was paranoid. I drove north up the oceanside highway, watching the surf work at the Florida sand. Maybe I was back in the game.
20
When I got to Billy’s apartment, he was still in his back office, working the computers. I opened a beer and watched over his shoulder while he ran his fingers over the keyboard, popping up government websites and directories. He’d run McCane’s dossier and there were some major gaps in it, and that often meant that the person you were trying to track had either spent time in the system, or was in law enforcement, or had somehow had his history expunged. Billy had then called a prosecutor friend in Atlanta who lowered his voice when Billy asked him if Frank McCane’s name and the prison at Moultrie rang any bells. He asked Billy not to use him as a source, but told him the story.
“McCane was a d-dayshift guard at the prison and had b-been there for several years. After a change in the governor’s seat, there was a c-crackdown on the Department of Correction’s internal system, which had been rife with abuse,” Billy said. “McCane had b-been the unofficial head of a shakedown club among the guards.”
“So he was indicted?”
“Not exactly.” Billy said. “When they backed him into a corner with proof, he made a d-deal with the governors office, t-turned over information on the warden and gave up his job. The only s-stipulation was lifelong p-probation. He could no longer w-work for the state, and if he was ever arrested on the outside, they’d re-file the whole l-load of charges from the p-prison on him.”
“So he moved out of the state, gave up public police work and went with the insurance job,” I said, putting the obvious into the air. “Your friend give any details on what McCane specialized in during this stellar career?
“Very little,” Billy said. “He’s a state p-prosecutor. It’s a political year in Georgia. N-No one’s going to b-be in the mood to hang their butt out.”
I drained the beer and went for another. Billy declined to join me and I changed my own mind on my way to the refrigerator. The Moultrie prison was stuck in my