“What do these pictures show, Vic? Besides the idea of a certain amount of sadism in the prison, I mean.”
I’d had a lot of time to think during my recuperation, and I spelled it out slowly, putting the events in order as much for myself as for Morrell. “A prison is a great place to run a factory. Labor is cheap and it’s captive: you never have the danger that a union will form or that anyone will protest work conditions. Even if you’re paying the workers more than you would in Southeast Asia, you still save money because you don’t have any capital costs. The state provides the physical plant. The state buys the machinery. Shipping to the world’s biggest market is cheaper than from Thailand or Burma, especially if you’re close to the main shipping routes out of Chicago. So Coolis started producing shirts and jackets for Global Entertainment.”
He frowned. “It sounds disgusting but not a reason to try to kill you for finding it out.”
“Illinois law. You can only make things in prison for sale in the prison system. Baladine and Teddy Trant at Global are good friends. When Baladine started running Carnifice Security and got the bid to build and run Coolis, the two of them probably saw what great potential there was in the captive workforce. The two men are very tight with the Speaker of the Illinois House. Poilevy ran a special legislative session exclusively on crime a couple of years ago. I think he probably promised Baladine that for enough money sprinkled around the right way he could overturn the law, but labor balked. Usually they do pretty much what the Speaker says, but they wouldn’t budge on this one, because they’d face a rebellion from the rank and file if they undercut real jobs in the state.”
Morrell fiddled with the photographs. “I still don’t get it. Did Baladine have his nanny arrested simply to send another body to the prison factory?”
“No. That was one of those things. Nicola was arrested for stealing. She was tried, and sentenced, and ended up in the clothes shop because she was small with quick little fingers and because she didn’t speak much English and the prison tries to keep discussion of the operation to a minimum. They intimidate the women who work in the clothes shop and try to keep them separate from the rest of the prison population. I discovered early on that women were scared to work in the clothes shop, even though they could make better money for piecework than they could at some of the other gigs.
“Then Nicola learned her little girl had died of asthma, the same little girl whose hospital bills put her in so much debt that she stole the necklace to begin with. She wanted to see the dead child herself and bury her, and they laughed at her. She lost her head and pounded her little fists on this guy’s chest—” I flicked my middle finger against Hartigan’s face. “He shot her with a stun gun. He kicked her. Her intestine perforated. They shut her in segregation, then they got scared and sent her to the hospital. I’m guessing the hospital said she needed expensive surgery to fix her up and even then she might well die. They thought if they dumped her body near her apartment, they could pretend she’d run away and been killed at home.”
My voice became drier and drier, more and more impersonal as I tried to keep from feeling anything about the narrative. Morrell put a hand in mine, giving me a chance to draw away if I wanted to: it’s one of the things they train you in at the Berman Institute. Let people have plenty of room to get away if they’re nervous about being touched. I squeezed his fingers gratefully, but I needed to get up, to be in motion. We went back to the garden and talked while I restlessly moved around the late–flowering bushes.
“When they got Nicola to Chicago they saw that the stun gun had singed her shirtfront. In case the medical examiner noticed the burn holes during an autopsy, they stripped off her clothes and put on a Mad Virgin T–shirt—I’m pretty sure one that Lucian Frenada had made on spec for Global.”
I explained to Morrell what I had learned about Frenada and Trant the night I’d been at Father Lou’s, right before my arrest, that Frenada had made some shirts for Global and had argued both with Lacey and Trant over what became of them.