Suddenly I had an idea that sent a spike of adrenaline coursing through my system. I’d been puzzled about why so many boys had died in the fire, and the question had continued to tug at the sleeve of my mind even during the frenzied work of excavating the graves in the Bone Yard.
“I need to go back to the school,” I said. “Can you spare me for an hour or so? And do you still have those old photos that Stevenson showed us? The pictures of the buildings?”
Vickery looked startled. “I guess I can,” he said. “And yes, I do. Want to tell me what you’re thinking?”
I did, and thirty minutes later, I was kneeling at the edge of what had once been the boys’ dormitory, digging into the ground beneath the spot where a fifty-year-old photo showed a pair of wide wooden doors.
A foot down, the tip of my trowel rasped against something hard and metallic, and I began teasing away the dirt to see what I’d hit. A curved piece of rusted steel emerged; as the tip of the trowel flicked lightly along its contours, it revealed a link of heavy chain. I dug beneath the link to expose it fully, and found links on either side of it, and more links connected to those. Then, curling two fingers beneath the exposed links, I lifted. The chain came from the ground like some rusted root I was pulling—a segmented, sinister version of a root—and then it curled back on itself, arching into a loop. At the center of the loop, holding it closed, was a stout, rusted padlock. And on either side of the padlock were stout, wrought-iron handles. Door handles. “Angie?” She aimed the camera at my face, looking at me through the viewfinder. “Now we know why so many boys died in the fire.”
Angie had just finished photographing the padlocked chain and the door handles it held together when Vickery’s red Jeep Liberty stopped in the circular drive. Angie motioned him over and wordlessly pointed to the chain. He gave it a cursory glance, then looked up at her quizzically. Before she could answer his unspoken question, though, his gaze shot back down. “Son of a bitch,” he breathed. “Those poor boys were locked in. That building burned to the ground with the damn doors chained shut.” He flung the cigar away violently. “God damn whoever did this.” His face was crimson and streaming with sweat, and I knew it wasn’t just from the Florida sun. “Hatfield,” he spat. “If he knew that door was chained—and how could he not have known that door was chained?—he’s culpable for the deaths of those nine boys.” He took a deep breath. “So far, Riordan’s been reluctant to charge Hatfield for the homicides we’ve uncovered at the Bone Yard—says we can’t prove that the superintendent knew the boys had been murdered, not unless we get some corroborating testimony.”
“The bad-apple theory?” asked Angie. “The same reasoning that charged enlisted soldiers with torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib but cleared the officers?”
“Yeah, that same reasoning,” he said. “Maybe this chain will convince Riordan that the whole damn tree was rotten—that Hatfield had to have known and condoned all the bad things going on here.” He paused. “I wonder if they’ve ever had a ninety-year-old inmate at Starke.”
“At the risk of raising a sore subject,” I ventured, “any luck yet finding out how Hatfield got made commissioner of corrections after the fire?”
Vickery made a face. “Nothing for sure yet,” he said. “At the moment, my money’s on State Senator Jeremiah Judson—the dearly departed father of our friendly neighborhood sheriff. Back in the sixties and seventies, Senator Judson chaired the Criminal Justice Committee, which had oversight over the prison system. He also raised a lot of campaign funding for the governor’s reelection bid. Sounds like Hatfield’s promotion could’ve been a case of quid pro quo.”
“What was the quo? Why would a state senator pull strings for a guy who did a bad job of running a reform school?”
He shrugged. “Maybe Hatfield had some dirt on him. Or maybe Hatfield was bosom buddies with Deputy Darryl Judson, who was just about to run against his boss for the job of sheriff. Whatever smoky backroom deals were cut, they were cut a long damn time ago, and most of the deal makers are dust by now. I’m sending Stevenson over to Dothan to stir the dust now. Maybe something will come slithering out when he does.”
Chapter 25
The Bone Yard, grave number six.
I was pedestalling the remains: excavating a deep, moatlike trench around the perimeter of the bones, then working my way in from there, creating a small platform on which I would gradually expose the skeleton, in a ghoulish version of the way Michelangelo freed captive figures from the marble that imprisoned them.