“Asshole,” Slater murmured under his breath.
The body was a hacked lump of flesh and blood, and although Flood’s comparison was crude, he wasn’t far from wrong. The victim lay on his back, arms splayed out from his sides. His head was bashed in and his face almost unrecognizable. The shirt had been ripped open and the pants pulled down to his knees. Someone had made a ragged cut from sternum to groin, then chopped away at the torso until the intestines straggled wildly from the body into the water.
What maniac did this?
Chapter 11
The prison release process went faster than Cole Hansen could’ve imagined. He didn’t have to finish out his original sentence, and in exchange for the early release, he gave up everything he knew about the Lords – confirmed gang membership and leaders. Which was precious little and probably confirmed what admin already suspected.
He could tell during the interview that the warden had already figured out who'd really sliced up the new inmate in the prison yard. Cole could’ve served out the remainder of his original sentence in Special Needs with the pedophiles and other gang drop outs, but he lucked out. If the Lords hadn’t shanked him inside, someone thinking he was a child molester, could’ve beaten him down bad in SNY.
But it didn’t work out that way.
After a short time in the SHU, he spent only a desperate few hours in SNY. Restless, he waited for someone to attack him, but no one bothered him.
When they released him, he suddenly realized he wasn't in any hurry to be paroled. He had no place to go and no one waiting for him.
The prison gave him two hundred bucks in cash and a backpack that held everything he owned in the world. An officer drove him to the bus stop. Locals didn’t want prison trash hanging around their city. Cole didn’t blame them.
Waiting for the bus to Sacramento, he thought about his situation, knowing the Lords could get to him easy enough on the street through the large gang membership. He wasn’t going to be any safer outside prison.
He wondered how long it'd be until the Professor’s long reach snatched him up like a fish grabbing a worm on a hook.
Frankie fingered the note she’d palmed from Cole Hansen. The ink on the paper was soggy and slightly torn. Luckily, whoever had written it had used pencil, which didn’t run as badly as ink would have.
She couldn’t say why she’d played along with Cole in his clandestine game of note-passing. Maybe because she liked him. He had an earnestness in his expression that rang true to her. He seemed such a harmless guy. She knew she was being terribly naive, as her friends always reminded her.
They told her the same thing about the men she’d dated lately, she thought wryly.
But Cole was harmless and he was truly terrified. There was plenty to be afraid of in Pelican Bay, especially in the SHU. The huge step of debriefing to prison authorities put him in a very precarious position.
If Cole survived the rest of his sentence without gang retaliation for snitching, he’d be just as vulnerable on the street. Frankie knew from his prison profile he had no place to go, no family. No transition house awaited him because he wasn’t in prison on drug-related activities. He’d literally be homeless without any resources.
The man was a throwaway. Not violent enough to be monitored carefully on the outside – when he debriefed, they would expunge the false murder charge – and not resourceful enough to pull himself out of the poverty he faced. He was a lost soul.
Frankie caught a glance of her reflection in the glass window. Talk about lost souls. A pretty, dark-haired woman, who looked younger than her thirty years stared back at her with troubled eyes. The luck of good genes had given her an excellent complexion, good health, and a high IQ.
But the stormy gray eyes told another story. Without the constant search for the truth about her mother, she would live an empty life.
She shook herself mentally and opened Cole Hansen’s medical file, staring at his prison ID photo. Fate hadn’t been generous with Cole. Medium height, on the pudgy side, straight, lackluster hair, and an acne-scarred face all added to the mediocrity of his low intelligence and self-esteem.
However, Frankie had scratched the surface of Cole’s character and found a decent guy underneath. She believed he’d been set up for the prison yard murder, just as he’d claimed. His record was a sad story: unsupportive parents, spotty education, no friends.
He’d been in trouble almost from the start.
She carefully opened the note Cole had sneaked to her during his medical exam. The blocked letters and figures on the note were incomprehensible to her, and yet Cole Hansen had risked his life to get them to her.
Why?