I called last weekend and had my name put on the visitors’ log so that check-in would go smoothly—or at least as smoothly as it possibly can when visiting a maximum security prisoner. I give my name at the entrance, wait patiently as the guard verifies who I am and confiscates both my driver’s license and my key. I’ve opted for a contact visit with Jason and in the wrong hands, both of those things can easily be turned into weapons. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told through the years.
After I check in, the guard gives me a pat down more thorough than any doctor’s examination I’ve ever had, and then tells me to take a seat in the empty waiting room while he calls to have Jason brought into the visiting area.
It’s a long wait, but then, I’m expecting that. Once I gave up my FBI shield, everything about prison visitation grew infinitely slower and more complicated. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Twenty-five minutes later another guard appears and leads me down a narrow corridor into a large visitation room. All fifteen tables are empty, so I choose the one in the corner, closest to the window. I could use the sunlight right about now, even if it is being filtered through unbreakable glass.
A couple minutes later, a guard escorts Jason in. He’s not handcuffed, but his legs are shackled and when he sits, the guard secures the shackles to a metal loop in the floor.
Again, it’s just par for the course—guards don’t take chances with maximum security prisoners—but it’s an uncomfortable feeling to see my brother like that. No matter how much I know that he deserves it.
For long moments, he doesn’t say anything and neither do I. We just look each other over—fifteen years is a long time and it seems like it should make a huge difference. But I guess we’re still young enough that that hasn’t happened, because he looks almost the same as I remember him.
He’s still whip-cord lean, with broad shoulders and long, elegant-looking hands, despite his time spent at this work camp of a prison. And while his dark hair is shorter than it’s ever been and peppered with gray, his eyes are still carefully blank. And his attitude is still the biggest thing in the room.
Despite all that, it’s a little like looking in a mirror. We have the same eyes, the same nose, the same cheekbones and jaw. The same build. The same height. The same hands. It’s disconcerting, even after all this time. Then again, it always has been.
Two peas in a pod my mother used to call us. Even though I was significantly younger than him, she always went on and on about how alike we were, even after it became apparent that there was something very, very wrong with Jason. At least to everybody but her.
There’s a reason I have the issues I do.
I wait for him to say something—anything—but he just looks at me with those strangely expressionless eyes. He’s waiting for the same from me, I’m sure, but I still have nothing to say. Not here and not to him.
Minutes pass, long and silent, and still neither of us says a word. I don’t know how long it’s going to go on, but it feels like we’re locked in a battle now and the first one to speak is going down. I’m determined that it isn’t going to be me—I’ve lost to Jason too many times through the years, in battles far more important than this.
Eventually he’ll get tired of the game, or my visitation will end. Either way, I’m still the winner because I get to walk out the front door and he has to go back to his cramped and isolated cell.
More minutes pass in our strange and silent countdown, marked only by the incessant ticking of the clock on the wall behind us, well out of reach of the prisoners. The guard is watching us from his post in the far corner of the room, and I can tell he’s trying to figure out what the hell this is about.
I would enlighten him if I knew. But even the profiler in me is stumped by our stubbornness in this.
In the end Jason breaks first, just like I knew he would.
“What are you doing here?” he demands.
“Mom said you wanted to see me.”
“And you just came running, out of the goodness of your FBI agent heart.”
“I was never an agent.”
“Oh, right. You were the analyst. Isn’t that the job they give people who can’t cut it as agents?”
“Sometimes.” He’s looking for a rise and I refuse to give him one. Just like when we were kids. But I’m not a kid anymore. “And sometimes it’s just the job they give to people who have psychopathic assholes for brothers.”
“Hmm, maybe.” His voice is unconcerned, but I can tell he didn’t like that. Didn’t like being called a psychopath, but more, didn’t like that I was the one saying it. But he, too, has his poker face on. “Feel better now that you got that off your chest?”
It’s just unlucky for him that I’ve spent the last decade and a half staring down people much more disturbed—and disturbing—than he is. “Not really, no.”
“Yeah, I figured it’d take more than you being a snarky little cunt to clear the air between us.” He shoots me a grin so macabre that my blood runs cold.
Again, I keep that shit to myself, on total and complete lockdown. “Oh, I don’t know. I can see you just fine. Fifteen years and a couple of degrees in psychology clears a lot of smoke out of the way.”