Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,49
way his mother had. There were picnic-style metal tables bolted to the floor all around the twenty-by-thirty room. Men sat on one side, their wives or girlfriends or hookers they’d paid to come see them sitting on the other. Kids were running around laughing and screaming and, about every ten feet, there was a guard standing with his back to the wall. Cameras were everywhere, their lenses swinging back and forth in slow disapproval.
Ben Carver sat at one of the back tables, table three. He was dressed in his usual white shirt, white pants and white socks. He had a pair of matching patent-leather slippers that his mother had sent, but Ben seldom wore them outside the cell because he didn’t want them to get dirty.
Everybody had a persona in prison, a different personality they adopted that helped them survive. The thugs got meaner, the Aryans more cruel, the gays gayer and the loonies absolutely fucking nuts. Ben fell into this latter category, and he worked it like a master thespian. Not that John thought it was much of a stretch for the man. By the time the GBI caught up with him, Ben had killed six men in the surrounding Atlanta area. His particular twist was to cut off their right nipples for souvenirs. During his arrest at the main branch of the Atlanta post office where Ben had worked as a mail sorter for eighteen years, one of the cops became a little overzealous and slammed Ben to the ground. A piece of tissue—later identified as the right nipple of his last victim—flew out of Ben’s mouth where he had been sucking on it like a Lifesaver.
This lurid detail combined with Ben’s appropriate last name of Carver had made a big splash in the press. Unlike John, he made the national news, even got his own nickname: the Atlanta Carver. Ben had never been particularly pleased with the moniker, but then he was also angry with Wayne Williams, the man convicted in the Atlanta Child Murders case, for pushing him off the front page a few weeks after his arrest.
“My dear boy,” Ben said, smiling his thin smile as he sized up John. His lips were wet, a black stain at the center where he usually kept a cigarette. His teeth were likewise marked, nicotine drawing a bull’s-eye right at the center. One of the first things Ben had told John was that he had something of an oral fixation. “Better cigarettes than your right tit, my dear boy.” John had never complained about his smoking after that.
“So,” Ben said.
John stood at the table, not sure whether he wanted to sit. He told Ben, “You look good.”
“Of course I do.” He pretended to primp his hair, which was practically nonexistent, winking at someone behind John.
Though Ben was in protective custody, there wasn’t really a room set up to accommodate visitors in that wing, so he had to sit with the general population on the rare occasion someone came to see him. Any prisoner from the Level III mental health unit was at his most vulnerable during visitation. He had to rely on his fellow inmates being too distracted by their whores or too respectful of their wives and girlfriends to pull out a shiv and rip open his belly.
John said, “I had to see you.”
Ben tsked his tongue, and John tried not to think about what the man would have in his mouth right now if the cops hadn’t caught him. “Didn’t I tell you not to ever come back to this hell hole?”
“It’s good to see you,” John said, and he meant it. He hadn’t seen a welcoming face since he’d gotten out.
“Well,” Ben said, smacking his lips. “What have you brought me?”
John took the carton of unfiltered Camels out of the bag.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have!” Ben cradled the carton to his chest. “My sweetness, please do sit. You know I don’t like hovering even if it does give me a wonderful view of your package.”
John sat, feeling embarrassed by Ben’s language. He had forgotten how Ben spoke to him, the way he made you feel dirty even if he was just asking you what time it was. John had to remind himself this was part of Ben’s act, the way he got through the day without cutting his own throat open.
Ben confided, “Oprah is doing her favorite things today.”
Oprah, the only program the entire cell bloc could agree on.