The Alabama night was thick as gravy, the kind that clung to your skin and made you feel like you were breathing through a wet sock. Roy Peltier walked the perimeter of Briarwood's main building, keeping to the shadows, his flashlight off because he knew that light attracted the wrong kind of attention. The fence was thirty feet high, topped with razor wire, but he wasn't climbing it. He was walking through the front door, same as he'd done a hundred times. The difference was that tonight, he had a key.
The key had come from Delores's desk, which he'd borrowed during his coffee run. She'd left it in her top drawer, next to a half-eaten candy bar and a photograph of her grandchildren. Peltier had slipped it into his pocket without a second thought. He wasn't proud of it, but he was past pride. Pride was a luxury for men who had the luxury of time.
The side door opened with a click that sounded like a gunshot in the silence. He stepped inside, closed it behind him, and stood still for a full minute, letting his eyes adjust. The corridor was dim, lit only by emergency strips that buzzed with a faint, sickly green. He could hear the distant hum of the prison's ventilation system, the occasional drip of a leaky pipe, and underneath it all, the heavy silence of a sleeping institution.
He walked eastward. He didn't have a choice. The anonymous call had given him the direction, and his gut had given him the rest. The warden's private suite was at the end of the east wing, past the administrative offices, past the conference room, past a door that was marked "Authorized Personnel Only." Peltier had never been inside. He'd heard stories—a private bathroom with a shower, a small kitchen, a bedroom with a real mattress. The kind of perks that came with being the nephew of a state senator.
He reached the door and tried the handle. It was locked. He used Delores's key, which didn't work. He tried another key from his pocket, one he'd copied from the maintenance shed. That didn't work either. He was about to give up when he noticed the keypad mounted beside the door—a digital lock, the kind that required a code.
He stared at it. He had no idea what the code could be. He tried 1234. Nothing. He tried 0000. Nothing. He tried the warden's birthday, which he'd seen on a personnel file: 0715. The lock beeped twice and turned green.
Peltier smiled in the dark. People were predictable, even the ones who thought they were untouchable.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The suite was small but comfortable—a leather couch, a mahogany desk, a bookshelf filled with law volumes that looked unread. There was a coffee maker on the counter, still warm, and an ashtray with a single cigarette butt. Peltier recognized the brand: Camels, unfiltered. The same brand Hollis Vance smoked.
He walked to the closet, his heart pounding. The anonymous call had said the jacket was in there. He opened the door, and there it was—a denim jacket, faded, with a torn left sleeve, hanging next to a uniform shirt and a pair of brown leather shoes with shiny toes.
Peltier stared at it. He didn't touch it. He didn't need to. The jacket was the proof he'd been looking for—the link between Vance and the third man, the link between the laundry room and the east wing. But there was something else in the closet, too. A box, pushed to the back, filled with papers. He pulled it out and started flipping through them.
They were work orders. Dozens of them. All signed by the same name: Robert Calhoun, the missing contractor from Apex Services. But the dates were wrong—some of them were from months before Calhoun was supposed to have started working at the prison. And the signatures were all slightly different, as if they'd been written by different people.
Peltier felt the pieces start to click into place. Calhoun wasn't a real contractor. He was a ghost, an identity that someone had invented to create a paper trail. And the paper trail led directly to the warden's office.
He was still reading when he heard footsteps in the corridor. Soft, deliberate, coming closer. He shoved the box back into the closet, closed the door, and pressed himself against the wall behind the desk. The footsteps stopped at the door. There was a beep as someone entered the code, and the door swung open.
Hollis Vance walked in, his face pale in the dim light. He didn't turn on the lamp. He stood in the center of the room, his hands trembling slightly, and said, "I know you're in here, Peltier. Come out."
Peltier stayed still. He didn't breathe.
"I found your car in the parking lot," Vance continued. "You think I don't know how to look? You think I'm stupid?" His voice cracked, just a little. "I'm not stupid. I know what you're trying to do. But you're wrong."
Peltier stepped out from behind the desk. "Am I?"
Vance flinched, then recovered. "The jacket isn't mine. It's my uncle's. He keeps it here for when he visits."
"Visits? Your uncle lives here. He's the warden."
"He has another place. A cabin. He keeps old clothes there. The jacket was a mistake."
Peltier walked toward him, slow and steady. "You turned off the camera, Hollis. Your uncle's admin account. We both know it. You went into that laundry room with Crowe, and something happened. And then you came out, and you told Talia to keep his mouth shut, and you called your uncle, and together you made up a story that would make it all go away."
Vance's face was a mask of pain. "You don't understand. Crowe was involved in something. He was blackmailing my uncle. He had letters, photographs—evidence of things that happened a long time ago. My uncle told me to get them back. That's all I was supposed to do."
"And the jacket? The third man?"
Vance looked at the floor. "There was no third man. I wore the jacket to disguise myself. I walked east to make it look like someone else. I didn't want anyone to connect me to what happened."
Peltier felt his stomach drop. "What happened? You killed him?"
"No." Vance's eyes snapped up. "No, I didn't kill him. When I went in, he was already dead. The shiv was already in his neck. I saw it, and I panicked. I touched the tape, and I ran. I didn't kill anyone."
Peltier stared at him, searching for the lie. He'd interrogated a lot of men in his time, and most of them had tells—the eyes shifting left, the hands twitching, the voice going up at the end of a sentence. Vance had none of those. He was telling the truth, or he was a much better liar than Peltier had given him credit for.
"If you didn't kill him," Peltier said, "then who did?"
Vance shook his head. "I don't know. But I think my uncle does. And I think he's been covering it up since the moment it happened."
Peltier felt the pieces shift again, rearrange themselves into a different shape. The warden, not the nephew. The warden, with his access to the camera, his control over the investigation, his ability to bury evidence. The warden, who had a private suite and a ghost contractor and a nephew who was terrified of him.
"Why are you telling me this?" Peltier asked. "You could have let me find the jacket and leave. You didn't have to confess."
Vance's face crumpled. "Because I'm tired. I'm tired of carrying this. I'm tired of being afraid of my own family. I want it over."
Peltier took a deep breath. "Then come with me. We'll go to the DA together. We'll lay it all out."
Vance nodded. He took a step forward, then stopped. "There's one more thing. The shiv—the one that killed Crowe. It wasn't a prison-made weapon. It was a kitchen knife, sharpened down to a point. The kind you'd find in the warden's private kitchen."
Peltier felt the air leave his lungs. "You're saying your uncle killed him?"
"I'm saying I don't know. But the knife came from his suite. I recognized the handle—it was a set he got for his birthday last year. And that night, after I came out of the laundry, he called me and told me to get rid of the jacket. He didn't ask me what happened. He didn't ask me if I was okay. He just said, 'Fix it.'"
Peltier put a hand on Vance's shoulder. "Okay. Let's go."
They walked out of the suite together, down the east corridor, past the laundry room, past the storage closet where Angel Cruz had hidden and seen nothing that made sense. The prison was quiet, but Peltier could feel the weight of all the eyes that weren't watching—the sleeping inmates, the lazy guards, the system that had turned a blind eye for so long it had forgotten how to see.
They reached the exit, and Peltier pushed the door open. The parking lot was dark, empty except for his car and Vance's truck. He was about to say something when he heard the sound—a car engine, approaching fast. Headlights cut through the night, and a black sedan skidded to a stop ten feet from them.
The door opened, and Mallory Vance stepped out. She was wearing the same tailored suit, but her face was harder now, stripped of the professional courtesy she'd worn earlier. She looked at Hollis, then at Peltier, and said, "Get in the car."
Hollis stepped forward. "Mallory, listen. I told him everything. It's over."
Her eyes flickered with something that might have been pity. "No, Hollis. It's not over. It's just beginning."
She turned to Peltier. "You're going to come with me, Investigator. And you're going to forget everything you heard tonight. Do you understand?"
Peltier didn't move. "I understand that you're covering for your uncle. Just like Hollis was. The question is: whose knife was it?"
Mallory's face went pale. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"The knife," Peltier repeated. "The one from the warden's kitchen. The one that killed Crowe. Did he use it himself, or did he give it to someone else?"
She opened her mouth to answer, but no words came out. And in that silence, Peltier knew the truth—or part of it. The warden had killed Crowe, or ordered it. The knife was the proof. And Hollis Vance had been the pawn, the one who'd found the body and made the call, the one who'd been manipulated into silence by a family that put its own survival above everything else.
But there was another piece of the puzzle, one that Peltier hadn't found yet. The letters. The photographs. The blackmail material that Crowe had been holding. Those were still missing, and they were the real reason the warden had wanted Crowe dead.
Peltier pulled out his notebook and wrote, "Find the letters." Then he looked up at Mallory Vance and said, "I'll get in your car. But I'm not forgetting anything. And when this is over, you're going to have to explain to a jury why your uncle killed a man over a stack of paper."
Mallory's composure cracked. Just a hair, just a second, but Peltier saw it. And that small fracture gave him all the hope he needed.
He got into the sedan, and they drove off into the Alabama night. But Peltier was already planning his next move. He had the jacket, he had the knife, he had Hollis Vance's confession. All he needed was the blackmail material. And he had a feeling—that same gut feeling that had never let him down—that it was hidden in the one place no one would think to look.
The warden's private bathroom. Behind the shower tiles. Because warden Horace Bledsoe was predictable, and predictable men always hid their secrets in the place they could see from the toilet.
Peltier smiled in the dark. The game wasn't over. It had just gotten interesting.
And somewhere in the east wing, in a solitary cell that smelled of fear and regret, Angel Cruz was staring at the ceiling, dreaming of empanadas and wondering if the man in the denim jacket would ever come back.
He wouldn't. But the jacket would. And when it did, it would carry a story that Cruz had been too afraid to tell, a story that would finally make sense of the three conflicting memories that had haunted him for weeks.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight, all that mattered was the drive, the dark, and the truth that was waiting to be found.
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