Page 36 of Proof

“I never went to camp when I was a kid, but I think it’s safe to say it was just like that. Extended overnight camp for murderers, rapists, and all sorts of men who preferred their victims young.Reallyyoung.”

His brittle response left me with goose bumps.

Bad goose bumps.

Thiswas the Cass who’d killed three people and left me for dead.

“So you were a bit homesick at the beginning but then made friends that would later become buddies forlife?” I asked, letting my voice hang on the last word.

“I think this is where I’m supposed to object and say you’re leading the witness,” he responded.

I nodded. “I should be more specific, I guess. Sorry, I’ll get the hang of this,” I quipped. “So, tell me, Mr. Ashby, what did your days consist of at your new sleepaway camp?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin when Cass suddenly shifted in his seat. He settled his arms on the table and leaned in, pinning me with hard, unforgiving eyes.

“When I arrived or when I left?” he asked.

“Both.” The tap dancing was starting to annoy me but only because I really wanted to know. The idea of the Cass I’d known when I was a kid spending his life in a prison cell that had probably been half the size of my bedroom made me sick to my stomach. The Cass I’d known these past few weeks… well, fuck, I didn’t know how I felt about that.

“When I arrived, I got to have more time outside. To make friends, I guess you could say. I made lots of them. I mean, Ididkill a federal agent, a snitch, and some little kid who’d basically been just taking up space. And the cop who survived… well, they wanted to give me the title of camp king for that one. But you know what they say about people lifting you up so they can knock you back down just so they can watch the fall.” Cass shrugged. “It was a short honeymoon. Let’s put it that way.”

The man across from me paused for dramatic flair. Despite his sarcasm, I knew his words rang true. Cop killers always had a huge following in prison.

“When I didn’t want to play with the other kids’ toys or pick which baseball team I wanted to be captain of, my new buddies decided if I wasn’t going to play then Iwasn’tgoing to play.”

“What does that mean?”

“Didn’t your precious news clips tell you about any of that, JJ?” Cass asked. The muscles in his face hadn’t relaxed for even a second. “Well, after I decided I liked keeping to myself, the other boys figured I needed to be taken down a few notches. The camp counselors didn’t like how many boys I kept sending to the nurse’s office after they tried to poke me with small but very sharp objects, so they decided I shouldhave some quiet time by myself. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to have some privacy, but getting a full sixty minutes every day to breathe fresh air or feel the sun on my face got really old really fast. My accommodations were quiet, food and water were served through a slot in my door at regular intervals, and there were no pesky clocks, so I never had to worry what time it was. No phone calls to deal with, no annoying visitors to disrupt my peace and quiet, and nothing more than a few books, a pad of paper, and some dull pieces of charcoal sticks to entertain me kept my schedule pretty wide open.”

“You were in solitary,” I murmured. In my early days as a cop, I’d been hungry for knowledge of every aspect of my job, so I’d read whatever articles and studies I could get my hands on. A study on what solitary confinement did to the average person in just a matter of days had been so disturbing that, to this day, I couldn’t get the mental images out of my brain. All sense of time and place were taken away. Little to no human contact, no natural light other than the single hour in the heavily guarded yard that reminded the confined person of what they were missing out on the rest of the twenty-three hours of the day. Many of the already unbalanced prisoners went completely insane when kept in solitary for too long.

The punishment had been designed to torture prisoners in the cruelest way possible so that when they returned to the general population, they’d behave themselves just to avoid the hell of solitary again.

“You know the best part about solitary,” Cass said with an ugly grin. “The rooms are designed so that there’s no pointy object in sight. No sharp edges on the bed frame, no place to put a noose, not enough material tomakea noose?—”

“Enough,” I snapped. I felt sick to my stomach at the thought of Cass in a place like that. That he’d even contemplated taking his own life made me want to throw up.

I wasn’t supposed to feel sick, though. I was supposed to feel relief that justice had been done.

“Thereallybest part is the knowledge that at any moment you could run out of air or that they’d forget about you, and you’d starve to death. And, of course, knowing no one would hear your screams was always a comfort. If they didn’t hear your demands and pleas to be let out of that dark, empty, lifeless hole then they weren’t close enough to disturb your peace and?—”

“I said enough!”

“Don’t waste your breath with the next obvious question,Counselor,because I can’t answer it. I have no fucking clue how long I was in there for. No clock, remember? I can tell you the room was home until a guard showed up one day and told me I was being transferred back to LA to spend some time behind bars there. Solitary was called protective custody out here. Still, there was no place like home,” Cass drawled.

Even if he’d wanted me to believe he’d managed to come out the other side of solitary with his mind completely intact, his body couldn’t play along. He was sweating and his skin had paled considerably. His fingers were twitching but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Not to mention the door. Whether he knew it or not, he kept looking at it.

I remembered the moment in his motel room when he’d gone to the door and opened it for no apparent reason before closing it again.

God, the room had been so dark and closed off. Cass had done that for me, formycomfort. He’d left himself with no fresh air to breathe and only a sliver of light to confirm whether it was light or dark outside, despite the presence of a clock in the room. He’d only opened that door to make sure it hadn’t somehow gotten locked from the outside.

The lack of doors in the upstairs bedroom made sense now. Tears stung the backs of my eyes as I began to truly understand the extent of the damage that had been done to him by the same system I’d worked for. How many men and women had I put behind bars who’d ended up like Cass? Locked away, alone and forgotten. Serving their time behind bars was one thing, but being put in a room with nothing and no one… no ability to know if it was day or night, no idea of how many days had passed and how many were yet to come. I believed in guilty people serving their sentence, but not like that. Not in a way that slowly drove them insane.

The kitchen became deathly silent as we sat there. A cool breeze blew through the open door, but I didn’t dare protest about it being open. My discomfort was a pebble in a pond compared to the relief that door offered Cass.

“Next question, Counselor,” Cass demanded. I could tell he was trying to escape the memories of solitary confinement. I wanted to escape the same thing.

I took a couple of subtle deep breaths so I could focus.

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