Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [155]
As Brady was loaded into a county van for transport to ASP, reporters and cameramen surrounded the Norths near the steps outside the courthouse. Jordan and Carole looked ten years older than their fifty years. She stared at the ground as her husband spoke solemnly.
“No death will be slow or painful enough for that animal. I pray he burns in hell, and my biggest regret is that I can’t kill him myself.”
54
Adamsville State Penitentiary
Dirk Blanc was in Thomas’s office celebrating with him the summary judgment throwing out Jorge’s case against him when Frank LeRoy knocked and entered.
“Hear the news, sir?” Dirk said, rising and shaking the warden’s hand.
“Yeah. Thrilled. Good job. Gettin’ tired of these frivolous wastes of time. You guys want a peek at our new celeb?”
Thomas rose. “He’s here?”
“Should be by the time we get down there.”
Like everyone else in the state, Thomas had followed the Murdered Heiress case from the beginning. People were naturally fascinated by a condemned man without an excuse, let alone one who insisted on paying the ultimate price for his crime. Pundits everywhere had proffered every reason imaginable why a young man from the wrong side of town would fall for a socialite and wind up slaughtering the very one he claimed to love.
Others wanted to blame everything and everybody but the perpetrator: poverty, drugs, culture, society, the school system, the courts.
As they left his office, Thomas grabbed his Bible off the desk. He would not be allowed to engage the new man for at least ninety days, and in fourteen years as chaplain he had learned never to take his Bible with him unless visiting a cell at a con’s request. But it seemed the thing to do this time. Maybe it was just for himself, a security blanket. Some things never became routine here, and one was the sobering experience of seeing a death row inmate processed in, even though most of the condemned men in the supermax would outlive Thomas. But not this one. If the press could be believed, he would die in three years.
“Ya gotta hand it to the kid,” Dirk said as they made their way through all the security checkpoints. “Not trying to get out from under it.”
“Yeah, no,” the warden said. “I mean, okay, most of the guys in here, even on the Row, are innocent to hear them tell it. Friends betrayed them, lawyers blew their case, the judge made up his mind before the trial, and on and on and on. But hand it to this guy? You won’t hear that from me. Vicious killer getting what he deserves, I say. And he’s no kid. He’s thirty, ya know.”
“It’s sad, that’s all I can say,” Thomas said as his ID was scanned yet again. “Two young people in the primes of their lives . . .”
“Yeah, no,” the warden said. “Her maybe. He was in the prime of nothing.”
The prison was, if anything, noisier than ever. There wasn’t a man inside who didn’t know who was coming. Everybody was talking, catcalling, hooting, hollering, or banging something. The place depressed Thomas more every time he stepped into it. God had once bestowed on him a deep burden for these men’s souls. Oh, it was still there, but now it came to him in the form of a rolling wave of melancholy and frustration. The evangelist in him wanted to call for order and begin preaching right then and there, calling men to repentance and belief. But he could not. He could talk to one man at a time, and then only at the man’s request. And to Thomas’s knowledge, not one con had come to faith under his influence.
George Andreason, the former governor and now director of the state’s Department of Corrections, waited near the intake cell. Yanno greeted him like the old friend he was. Thomas introduced to him Dirk Blanc.
“Nobody in Ad Seg I see,” Andreason said.
“Had one with a coupla days to go and another on his way,” the warden said, “but they’ll wait. Give the new man his space.”
“Good idea,” the director said. “The press are here. They stay outside the overhead door.”
Yanno nodded, and the four of them turned