Double Cross - James Patterson [27]
I wrote in my notepad:
Expects to be recognized as superior; has a grandiose sense of his own self-importance; narcissistic to an extreme.
Interpersonally exploitive; complex thinker.
Superficial charm. Can turn it on and off at will.
Sibling rivalry (probably killed one brother).
Severely abused, physically and emotionally, by his father. Or so he claims.
Duke University undergraduate and law school. Top of his class. Made it look easy.
IQ: 145–155 range.
No conscience.
Father, William Hyland Craig, former army general, chairman of two Fortune 500 companies, now deceased.
Mother, Miriam, still living in Charlotte.
Former FBI DIC, trained at Quantico, where he also taught new agents.
Highly competitive, especially with me.
I arrived in Florence, Colorado, around noon the day after Kyle’s escape, and very little seemed to have changed about the supermaximum-security prison. I spent the first hour talking with two of the guards who knew Kyle Craig particularly well; then I interviewed Warden Richard Krock. The warden seemed more shocked than any of us that Kyle, or anybody else, could have escaped from Florence. No one ever had before; no one had even come close.
“As you now know,” Krock told me, “the lawyer went back to Craig’s cell, wearing a prosthetic mask, and then hung himself there. What you don’t know is that we videotaped some of his early visits with Craig. Would you like to see them?”
I sure would.
Chapter 36
FOR THE NEXT FEW HOURS, I sat and studied tapes of some of the early meetings between Kyle and Mason Wainwright. The lawyer hadn’t invoked his lawyer-client privilege until the third week he’d spent with his client. Why was that? Because Kyle wanted us to see something? Or maybe because the lawyer did.
What, though? The first visit was virtually the same as the others that were taped.
Wainwright entered the meeting room wearing a very memorable outfit, which no doubt helped with the eventual escape: cowboy hat and boots, buckskin jacket, horn-rimmed eyeglasses that clashed with everything else he had on.
He and Kyle hugged as soon as they met. Kyle said something that wasn’t caught on tape.
Then came a series of eight questions—always the same ones, or very close.
Some kind of code? Or was Kyle playing games? Or simply crazy—he and the lawyer? I couldn’t tell at this point. About anything, really. Except that Kyle Craig was the first prisoner ever to escape from ADX Florence. The Mastermind had done the impossible.
Finally Kyle and the lawyer hugged each other again. Wainwright said something to Kyle that wasn’t picked up on tape. Was this how they exchanged information—whether they were taped or not?
I expected that it was. We would certainly try to find out.
Next, I went to Kyle’s cell, but there wasn’t much to see in there. Prisoners weren’t allowed many personal possessions at ADX. The small room was neat and orderly, as Kyle was himself.
Then I saw the message he’d left.
A greeting card was propped on the table that was bolted down next to his bed.
It was a Hallmark—unsigned—just like the ones at Tess Olsen’s penthouse.
Minutes later, I was back at Warden Krock’s office. I needed some answers to questions that had developed in the past few hours.
“Visitors?” I asked. “We know about the lawyer, though we have no idea what his real relationship to Craig was. Were there other visitors? Anyone who came around more than once?”
Krock didn’t have to consult his files to answer. “In the first year, there was a persistent reporter from the Los Angeles Times named Joseph Wizan, whom Craig refused to see. Repeatedly. Several others contacted Craig through my office but didn’t bother to come out here because he wouldn’t see them either.
“The only one who did visit, and this was just a few months ago, was the author Tess Olsen. You know, the woman who was killed in Washington recently? Kyle surprised us. He agreed to meet with her. She came here three times. She planned to do a book