Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [79]
“Me,” I asked, “or you?”
He snorted.
“Not usually this much fun around here, is it?” I quipped.
They took my fake lizard belt, scuba watch accurate to fifty feet, amethyst ring and gold loop earrings, the leather purse and contents, minus my credentials, which had been plucked out for Galloway and Rick. They might as well have removed my spleen. I signed for my possessions, then we moved to a computer/scanner to enter my fingerprints into the files of the Department of Justice, Sacramento and county.
“You guys are high-tech. All we get are ink pads.”
The custody assistant was spraying a screen in the control panel with window cleaner.
“She can roll a perfect set,” said Pickett.
The young woman smiled shyly. I was staring at the machine as if it were a huge hypodermic syringe. When I was a kid I once ran out of the doctor’s office before he could give me a tetanus shot.
“Ana.” Pickett shrugged with that big-eyed cop look I knew so well. “We got to do this.”
Afterward, we went back into the booking cell so I could call Devon County.
“Make as many calls as you want,” he said. “It only works collect.”
There was one battle-scarred phone with an unduly short cord, to prevent death by hanging.
They put me in a four-bunk cell. There were no other arrestees, but even if there had been, they would have kept me isolated. That’s what they meant by “special handling.” They did not mean the seatless stainless steel toilet or the mattresses made of fire-resistant polymer, or the ham and cheese sandwich and warm apple juice. Those were standard. Knowing the price of wounded pride, they had also put me on suicide watch.
I could not bear to touch the mattresses so I sat on the edge of a lower bunk. The ceiling was very far away. They put it high up to make you feel helpless and small. I thought of Juliana, holding on to the stuffed leopard.
I knew nothing. How long I would be here. If I would go to prison. If the famous attorney would get the message and be paged and take the case and show up. I didn’t even know the time.
I sat in the badness. There was no other place to go. I sat and rocked and whinnied and pleaded with God to make the terrible feelings go away, but they gripped me in the windpipe with caustic despair. There was nothing else. No voices to distract, just a deep infant panic for which I do not believe we have yet devised a comfort, one that could possibly equal that annihilation. I had no religious words so I stared at my socks.
I stared at my socks against the ugly turquoise floor and imagined, for diversion, the powers of the colposcope, that with my sight I could penetrate the creamy cotton weave, see through to the spaces. Suddenly I ached for Juliana and the closeness of our morning conversations. Why had I not reached out more? Called her, sometimes. Tried to help.
Juliana, of everyone, would know me, right now.
Eighteen.
By ten in the morning the temperature in the Valley had risen to ninety degrees and swimming in Mike Donnato’s unheated pool was like swimming through razor blades—the dead cold chill of the water and the hot sun slashing.
I glided back and forth—four strokes, flip … four strokes, flip—across the tiny oval. This was what my world had shrunk to: fifteen feet of icy chlorination. In the current freak show that was my life, I had been turned into a seal, whooshing and snorting empty circles in a tank.
Believe me, I was grateful. Devon County had gotten the bail reduced, from half a mil to one hundred thousand dollars, after arguing successfully that I was not a flight risk, nor, since this had been a crime of passion, a danger to the community. As a condition of the bail agreement, I would be on home detention under the supervision and responsibility of the FBI. Good friend and former supervisor Mike Donnato had volunteered.
As shocking as the daily dive into the frigid water was the realization of how a legal maneuver had taken me through the mirror, made me prisoner, incomprehensibly, of Mike Donnato’s life, and the choices he had made, from marrying Rochelle