Page 52 of Silent Ridge

“I would really appreciate it, Marley. I’ll owe you one.”

Now he doesn’t hesitate. “I’ll hold you to that, Red.”

Red? I give her a look likeWhat the hell?

She giggles. “Dinner tonight. You pick the place. We’re on our way to the lab. We can talk about it when we get there.”

“‘We’? Who’s coming with you?”

“Megan is. She’s my training officer, you know.”

“So you’re going to be partners, huh?” he says.

“I hope so.” She looks at me. I don’t respond. I want to say that’s not up to me. But it really is. Outside of working with temporary trainees, Sheriff Gray doesn’t make you take on a partner.

“Will you need a DNA run?” he asks.

Shit. I forgot about running the DNA. That will add an hour or two to our time if we wait for it. I nod my head.

“Yes,” Ronnie answers. “But only if it’s not asking too much.”

“I’ll make the time,” he says. I think he would eat a bowl of glass for her.

“Red?” I ask when she hangs up.

“It’s better than what he wanted to call me. He started calling me Yin,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He says I should come work at the crime lab. We would make a good team. Not going to happen.”

I don’t get it for a second, then I do and I regret it. It’s fitting. They’re about as opposite as you can get.

“You can take lead when we get to the lab. You’ve got a good connection there, Red.”

Forty-Seven

It’s a long drive to the lab, made even longer by Ronnie’s never-ending chatter. I make an excuse to let her go in by herself, and when she’s out of sight I call Sheriff Gray.

“Are you at the lab?” he asks.

“Just got here.”

“I got some interesting news about Michael Rader.”

I hear his chair squeak shrilly, a door close, then another creak as he sits down. “Here’s what I was told,” he says. I know he’s leaning back against the wall, because the springs in his chair are screaming,I give up! I’ll pay you to get up!

Like duct tape, WD-40 only goes so far.

“Rader has worked at a couple of maximum security prisons around the state,” Tony says. “He was at Monroe for the last twenty years. He came under suspicion a year ago when there was a rash of prisoners having medical issues. Such as breathing difficulty, muscle weakness, rashes, heart issues. One prisoner who was nineteen years old and in perfect health dropped dead from a heart attack. Ninety percent of these individuals were under the supervision of Michael Rader before developing the conditions. Rader was also handy with his night stick. Of the physical altercations between prisoners and staff, Rader accounted for sixty percent by himself. It was well known that if Rader was required to break up a disagreement or fight among prisoners that he was bringing an ass-kicking with him.”

He sounds about as delightful as his older brother, Alex.

Sheriff Gray goes on: “He was investigated by the prison’s internal affairs office and was being watched closely. Not closely enough, as it turns out, because four prisoners died in a one-week period. The autopsy showed they had ingested some type of poison. That was six months ago. A full investigation of their deaths was launched by the prison. Rader wasn’t a clear suspect in any of these deaths so he was just kept under scrutiny. Then the story got around that Rader had words with each of these prisoners.

“Were these reliable sources—the stories—or prisoners that already had a grudge?” I ask. I can’t believe I’m asking this because I want him to be guilty. Yet, if he was abusive to prisoners, they may have set him up to get even.

“It was other prisoners talking at first and then two guards came forward and admitted that Rader had been involved in breaking up an altercation in the cafeteria. The four prisoners were the main ones fighting and two of them went to the medical office with cuts on their heads. The two guards admitted that they’d lied for Rader and said the prisoners did that while fighting, but the cuts were from Rader’s club. He’d asked the guards to cover for him, but Internal Affairs put the screw to them and they gave him up.”

“So why wasn’t he arrested for aggravated battery?” I ask.

“You’ll like this,” he says. “The video from the cafeteria on the day of the fight somehow disappeared. The guards then changed their stories and said they’d only implicated Rader because they were being threatened by the investigators. Both guards were suspended, but Rader was still untouched.

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