his cell and stared at it. It looked so different. He had torn nearly everything he couldn’t take with him into small strips and flushed them down the stainless steel toilet. Notes, letters, postcards, photos torn from magazines, all gone. For the first time in years, his desk was neat and clean.
Goldberg stood and paced. The nervous energy was bubbling out of him. He wanted to run, shout, throw something. But he couldn’t. It could all be a joke. A horrible, cruel joke.
This guy calling himself The Commissioner could just be some sort of hacker with a particularly sadistic sense of humor.
The message he’d received late last night had shocked him to his very core. Deborah Nahler dead? The fucking bitch who had put him away for life?
It had to be true. He’d found the news story online. Still, it was beyond his wildest imagination. He’d practically jazzed in his pants. He’d fantasized about killing that vicious cunt, along with Wallace Mack. Those two had worked together to put him here. They’d probably been fucking each other, laughing about their evil plans for poor little Leonard Goldberg. Well, the Nailer had been nailed. Yeah!
And then the message had gone on to give him instructions for getting out of the prison the very next morning! Goldberg thought that might be a joke, and a highly cruel one at that. Somehow, though, he didn’t think the man who had defeated the prison’s security software, initiated contact with him, and given him the tools to get out of prison once and for all, wouldn’t go through all of that for a joke.
The man who called himself the Commissioner just didn’t seem the type.
The door to Goldberg’s cell slammed open and he glanced at the clock. 6 o’clock on the nose. He walked out the door and it took every fiber in his being not to pause and look back at the little shithole that had been his home for the past seven years. Give it the finger, scream with incoherent rage at what it had done to him.
Instead, he walked straight and purposefully toward the laundry area where his job duties for the day typically began. But today he walked past the industrial-sized washers and dryers, down a small hall, to another hall where a guard stood waiting by a door.
Instantly, Goldberg knew the Commissioner had gotten to the guard. Goldberg glanced at the man, saw the dark circles under his eyes, the thinly concealed fury visible in his clenched jaw.
Goldberg watched as the guard swiped a key card through a slot and the heavy steel door swung open. The guard pulled a laundry cart out from behind the door, pushed it down the dim hallway. When they turned a corner, he turned to Goldberg.
“Get in,” he said.
Goldberg vaulted into the laundry cart and was soon covered in sheets and towels.
Now in darkness, he listened as the guard swiped his card again and another door opened. Goldberg felt fresh air, and the smell of exhaust. He heard another door open, this one sounding like a roller door on the back of a truck. He was plunged back into darkness, heard the door roll back down.
And then he was moving.
65.
Mack
Mack watched Reznor. He was still seething inside, but vowed that whatever happened next, he would not lose it again. He would not let Whidby get him riled.
Reznor glanced down at the notepad in her hand. “Mack made a request three months ago to the George Trucking Commission for information on registered drivers in the state,” she said. “Mack made specific requests based on age, race and other personal factors. He received an answer that someone would work on his request and give him a timely response. The response never came.”
Reznor flipped to a second page. “Mack also made a request to the Charleston Municipal Hospital. It, too, requested information on employee based on age, race and other personal factors. He got a prompt response that someone would look into it and get back to him. No one did.”
She looked at Whidby. “I did some digging, and with more official firepower, found out that those requests were never received, despite the proof I had from Mack. I showed them the responses and both organizations admitted that it looked like someone responded, but they couldn’t confirm it.”
Whidby motioned with his hands for Reznor to hurry along.
“It didn’t seem realistic that two different organizations, completely different, in different parts of the country, would be conspiring to keep