It wouldn’t do any good to mourn Winnie if I was dead, too.
So I lay in the solitary cell and just thought.
They’d killed Winnie as they had Linette, right around a shift change for the guards. Winnie’s time of death was called at 2:40 p.m., but clearly she’d been poisoned earlier than that. No doubt the official investigation would place the time of her poisoning just before, or just after, the 2:00 p.m. shift change. Just as they had with Linette, the guards, once again, would have cover.
Two murders in six days. First my best friend inside this place, the person I saw on a daily basis. Then my best friend, period.
Not a coincidence. Not even subtle. Just the opposite. They were sending me a message. They wanted my confession desperately, more intensely with each passing day, as my appeal quickly approached.
But they couldn’t keep killing my friends. Winnie, maybe, as she was the most clearly guilty of all of us and had never really disputed it. Anyone watching our trial remembered her as despondent, defenseless, defeated. The public wouldn’t have trouble believing that Winnie had killed herself, which I assumed would be the official story.
But Serena? Bryah? If the Monte Carlo Mistresses kept dropping left and right just before their appeal, even the most cynical of observers would raise an eyebrow.
The cell door buzzed open and, predictably, in walked the chief asshole of the prison, Boulez. Dressed, as always, to the nines, looking more like a greasy politician than anything else.
“I will not waste our time with pleasantries,” he informed me.
It didn’t matter. He could be pleasant or unpleasant.
“Tell me what drug you used,” he said. “It will be a simple matter of inventorying the contents of our drug cabinet to see what is missing. Easier for us if you just confess.”
I coughed. Blood spattered onto my brown pants.
“I will not ask a second time,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “So I won’t have to keep ignoring you.”
Nothing had changed. I bit my teeth fiercely into my tongue to suppress the rage, to hide it from Boulez. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“Or was it suicide?” Boulez asked. “Each of you had access to the drugs. Either she killed herself or you poisoned her. Which was it, Abbie?”
We went back and forth like that for a few rounds, Boulez taunting me, yours truly ever defiant.
Boulez walked toward me, confidently enough given my restraints. He stood just a few feet away, just outside the reach of my legs should I kick out at him.
“Confess to the double murder,” he said. “And what happened to your friend Winnie will be considered a suicide.”
He was still trying. Looking for the path of least resistance. A simple, signed confession from me and all his problems were solved. I played along with the banter, but there was no way I was going to confess. Not a chance.
“Boulez,” I said. “You won’t win. One day I’m going to walk out of this place.”
His eyes narrowed. Then his smile broadened. “Madame, you are the most famous criminal in the history of France. You’ll never walk out of here.”
It was clear to me now. He’d sent all the messages he could possibly send. He couldn’t kill another one of my friends.
And he couldn’t stop my appeal from starting, less than a month from now.
He was out of alternatives.
They were going to kill me in here.
CHAPTER 85
THE LAST TIME I’d seen Giorgio Ambrezzi was ten days ago, when the prison had a memorial service for his fiancée, Linette. It had been a surreal affair given the circumstances of Linette’s death. A hundred inmates had attended. Giorgio had looked broken beyond repair. Surely he suspected that Linette had suffered more than an accidental slip-and-fall in her cell, but his grief, for the moment, had overtaken his anger, and it hadn’t been the time or the place for me to raise the subject with him.
Now was the time.
After Winnie died, I spent seven days in solitary, Le Mitard. Boulez had threatened a thirty-day stay—in fact, he’d even mentioned forty-five days, which was beyond the legal limit—but I knew he was bluffing. I knew it was a bluff for one very important reason: they couldn’t kill me in solitary confinement. It would be impossible to blame anyone but the guards if I died in Le Mitard. They needed me out.
Now I was out. And I wasn’t safe. It was just a matter of time. Days, not weeks.
I’d met Giorgio twice before the memorial service. He always had a gentle expression, an artist’s carefree perspective. He’d been in good spirits because he was counting down the days until Linette would come back to him, when they would, once and for all, move on with their lives after their addictions and criminal behavior.
Now his eyes were sunken and lifeless. He was unshaven and pale.
“J’ai entendu les nouvelles de votre ami,” he said to me. He’d heard about Winnie. Everyone had. The official story was that Winnie had committed suicide. She had returned to her cell, they said, and self-injected a very high dose of methadone—a drug used to treat addiction. She was found unconscious in her cell. The time of her poisoning was said to have been between 1:00 p.m. and 2:15 p.m.—right around the 2:00 p.m. shift change for the guards.
My favorite guard, Lucy, as it happened, had worked the shift ending at 2:00 p.m.
The official story was that Winnie couldn’t bear another trial, revisiting her shame once more. It was a pretty good story, actually. Winnie had been the only one of us who was not pursuing an appeal, so this whole thing fit into a nice, neat package. There was the typical rumor and intrigue following her death, but all in all, nobody had trouble believing the official line.
“Winnie’s death wasn’t a suicide,” I told Giorgio in French. “And Linette’s wasn’t an accident.”
Giorgio stared back at me, his face and body posture intense. He blinked his eyes to indicate his acknowledgment. He’d figured as much. He’d been in prison. He knew enough to know that the prison guards had their run of the place and could make almost any story stick; and he knew enough to know that they were watching us now, and he had to contain his emotions.
“Pourquoi?” he whispered. Why?
I thought he already knew the reason. I pointed at myself. “She’s dead because of me,” I said in French.
Giorgio’s face twisted in agony. Tears fell. I told him I was sorry, over and over again, and I cried as well. He took my hands and squeezed them hard.
“Elle vous aimait,” he said. She loved you.
I loved her, too. I loved them both, Linette and Winnie. This was so unfair. So unbelievably unfair.
I cleared my throat and got hold of my emotions. I wasn’t doing this only for myself. I was doing this for them, too.
“Giorgio,” I whispered. “J’ai besoin de votre aide.”
I need your help.
“Mais il pourrait être dangereux.”
But it could be dangerous.
Giorgio let my words sink in for a moment. He wiped at his eyes and then fixed them directly on me. He answered me in one word. In English.
He said, “Anything.”
CHAPTER 86
TODAY, I WOULD begin to fight back.
I tried to sleep a bit to keep my strength up. My dreams were horrifying. Ghoulish faces and fanged animals and water filling my nose and mouth and lungs as I cried for help.
In the morning, I tried to eat, limiting myself to bread. Carbohydrates for energy. I didn’t taste it. Didn’t enjoy it.
I had a shift at the infirmary at eight. I walked down G wing, past the key-entry door for the staff’s underground parking garage, past the fire-escape door, to the guard booth. I gave my ID number to the guard, Cecile, and listened to the buzz of the door. I worked like a robot inside, dressing wounds and mopping floors and looking through the window outside as a shift of guards left the prison, pulling up to the front gate in their cars, waving to the guard in the tower ten feet abo
ve, sliding their key cards, waiting for the gate to open, and leaving this hellhole for a time. Freedom.
“Abbie,” said Leonore, the nurse, in English. “I need…ceftriaxone.”
For a while now, I’d been one of the assistants the nurses trusted with drug retrieval. Technically, it wasn’t permitted. But practically, these nurses needed all the time they could get with the inmates, and having us retrieve drugs for them saved tons of time.
Still, there were rules. After unlocking the cage door, close it behind you when you’re inside, so nobody else can come in. Remove the drug vials from the shelf and write down what you took on a designated sheet. Don’t take the syringes out of their wrappers, just bring them wrapped, along with the vials, to the nurse or doctor. Deliver the drugs, and the keys, to the medical professional and only that person.
In the end, you were delegated this task because they trusted you. But it wasn’t simply an honor system. One of the four security cameras in the infirmary was located right here in the pharmacy room. Two others were located in the main room of the infirmary. The last one was in the secured room. Lots of eyes watching you.
There was also a nightly inventory of the drugs, and it was your ass if there was anything at all missing, even a bottle of aspirin. And finally, you were frisked upon leaving the infirmary. There was pretty much no way you could sneak drugs or a syringe out of this place. A few, over the years, had tried. All of them had regretted it.
I took the key from the nurse and walked over to the locked cage. Once inside, I found the ceftriaxone that Leonore had requested. Without missing a beat, without any hesitation whatsoever, I also retrieved a second vial of drugs, one that Leonore hadn’t mentioned.
I then got a syringe for Leonore to use, and a second one for me to use with the other vial of drugs.
From the standpoint of the guard outside watching the security monitors—if she was watching at all; if she wasn’t asleep or socializing or playing solitaire—there was nothing to see. That guard didn’t know how many drugs I was there to retrieve. Two vials of drugs instead of one, two syringes instead of one—no reason for her to care.
Had she been so inclined, she might have cared about what happened next. I turned back to exit the pharmacy, which meant I turned my back to the security camera. As I walked, I unwrapped one of the syringes and removed the protective cap as well. Then I stuck the needle into the vial and withdrew the narcotic, filling the syringe. Finally, I recapped the syringe and slipped it into the waistband of my pants. All this was a piece of cake for a mother who had given her son allergy shots for more than a decade.
Maybe, just maybe, someone monitoring the room would wonder what I was doing with my back turned toward the camera, but I doubted it, especially because I never broke stride.
If she had become suspicious, I would find out immediately.
When I stepped out of the pharmacy, I saw nothing amiss. The prison guard seated in the corner was not exactly on high alert; she looked as if she were going to doze off any minute.
Then I heard the buzz of the main door, and the outside guard, Cecile, bursting through it.
CHAPTER 87
I HELD MY BREATH and kept walking toward Leonore as if nothing were wrong, just doing my job. The guard sitting in the corner, an older woman named Nadine, got to her feet as Cecile walked briskly in my direction.
“Here you go,” I said to Leonore, who preferred English. My heart was slamming against my chest.
But Cecile walked past me, shouting at two of the inmates near the far corner, near the secured room. Apparently they were having a minor disagreement and had squared off. Cecile had seen it on the security camera. She seemed ticked off that Nadine, inside this room, hadn’t noticed.
I let out my breath. I handed Nurse Leonore the ceftriaxone and the capped syringe. She didn’t check or even look at my other hand—where I had palmed the other vial. Nor did she ask me to lift up my shirt so she could see whether I had slipped a syringe inside the waistband. Why would she? She was too busy with this inmate’s urinary tract infection, and I’d long ago earned her trust. Besides, she knew as well as anyone that there were twenty ways you’d get caught if you tried to sneak drugs out of the infirmary.
The difference here was, I had no intention of sneaking this syringe out of the infirmary.
Leonore unwrapped the syringe cover, uncapped it, filled the syringe, and injected the drug into the patient’s thigh. Then she recapped the syringe and handed everything back to me.
I returned to the pharmacy, where I put the two vials of drugs back where I got them and disposed of the used syringe in the sharps container mounted on the wall.
I occupied my time collecting some used towels on the floor, mopping up a mess, all the while hiding a syringe full of narcotics in my waistband.
So far, so good.
A half hour later, Nurse Leonore requested another drug. I repeated the same procedure to the letter. It worked the first time, why not a second?
So now I had two syringes full of drugs for my own use tucked in my pants.
I went into the secured area, where the five individual beds were placed for special cases—people with contagious infections or those who posed security risks. It was behind a locked door, but for the time being nobody was in those beds, so the door was left ajar. My job was to put fresh linens on the beds.
My eyes casually glanced up at the security camera in the corner. The small red light in the bottom corner was glowing, meaning the camera was on. I started with the bed in the far corner, the one farthest from the camera. When I tucked in the sheets under the mattress, I made a point of bending at the knees and shoving my hands far under the mattress. It was probably unnecessary, but that wasn’t the point. My purpose was to make it appear that this was my standard way of making a bed, so when the guard watching the security camera saw me do it with the first bed, then the second, then the third and fourth, she wouldn’t be surprised—or suspicious—when I did it with the fifth bed, the one closest to the security camera.
Even if the guard were closely monitoring my actions, which I doubted, it would have been highly unlikely that she would have noticed that I was tucking two syringes full of narcotics into a small space under the bed where two reinforcement bars overlapped.
Almost half a year working in the prison hospital taught you a few things.
It might just save my life, too.
I would find out soon enough.
CHAPTER 88
MY LAWYER, JULES LAURENT, sat back in his chair and squinted at me in concentration.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
I had exceeded the number of visitations I was customarily allotted, having received a visit from Giorgio yesterday, but the prison made special exceptions for one’s attorney, especially when a court proceeding was scheduled in the near future. I had summoned Jules down here on short notice. Bless his heart, he had dropped everything and taken the train down here this afternoon.
“You can do that, right?” I asked. “They’re, like, subpoenas?”
“They are—yes. They are called commissions rogatoires. But—are you sure?”
“I’m absolutely sure.”
“This…will be difficult,” he said, sighing. “The prosecutor will object. I cannot say with…certainty that the juge d’instruction will grant this request.”
I nodded. “But we’ll never know unless we try, right? I mean, if the investigating judge says no way, then he says no way. We’re no worse for trying.”
“No worse for trying?” Jules shook his head. “Abbie, this could get you killed in here.”
“A chance I’m willing to take.”
Jules thought for a moment. Really, what did we have to lose? He ultimately came to the same conclusion.
“Okay.” He slapped his hands down on the desk. “I’ll file the necessary papers.”
CHAPTER 89
THE PRISON YARD. Our one hour outside. It was thick and steamy today, the sky ove
rcast. I stood against the chain-link fence so nobody could come up behind me. I watched the other inmates kicking a soccer ball or socializing.
The prison yard. This was where it would happen. I was almost sure of it. Two reasons. One, they could use a prisoner to do their dirty work and keep their grimy fingerprints off the whole thing. They owned plenty of these inmates. There were plenty of inducements they could offer a prisoner to kill me.
And two, the cameras. There were surveillance cameras out here, just as there were everywhere inside, but with one difference: out here, the cameras weren’t stationary. They moved at the direction of the monitoring guard inside. So it would be a simple matter of making sure that the camera was turned in another direction when one of the inmates came after me.
I stood, braced, for the entire hour. Not letting any inmate within ten feet of me. Watching the cameras, heightening my awareness whenever the cameras appeared to move off me. I stayed on the perimeter but in the dead middle of the fence, so it would be harder for the cameras to avoid me than if I stood in a corner.
I made it through the hour. The next challenge was the line going back inside. Single file. Easy enough for my killer to slip in line behind me, and then slip something sharp into my back or over my throat.
I found two of my cell mates, Josette and Penelope, and wiggled myself between them. They didn’t seem too thrilled but they didn’t protest.
Lucy, as always, was watching me in the hallway as I returned from outside. I knew from Linette, who had worked in administration, that Lucy was working double shifts for the next month—the afternoon and evening shifts. Same with Sabine. That would give them maximum freedom to plan whatever they had in store for me.
I avoided Lucy’s eye contact as I shuffled back in. I’d had a near miss with her and Sabine when they tried to rape me. But since that night, when Mona perished in the helicopter escape attempt and then Linette was bludgeoned to death, Lucy and Sabine had stayed away from me. They were going to pick their moment, and before that time, it was probably best, from their perspective, to keep their distance.