But the louder, more incessant voice of obsession drowned it out. Because somehow, inexplicably, Lucas only had a couple of days left to see the man who had compelled him to move to Pier Pointe; otherwise, Jeff would no longer be willing to talk, if he was ever willing at all.
Halcomb had shut him out. Betrayed him. Threatened Lucas’s project by refusing to see him. He had backed out on a deal that Lucas upheld without so much as a bat of an eye. The knowledge that he had somehow run out of time made him feel sick. But it was more than losing time—it was an assurance that, despite all his efforts, his career might now be over. His marriage sure as hell seemed to be. He was going to lose his kid, the girl that meant everything to him, and yet he still managed to see her for no more than what seemed like a few minutes a day. When was the last time I saw her, anyway? He had been too busy scrambling for a solution. This was Jeff Halcomb’s fault. He had put Lucas out.
His fingertips tingled. His entire body buzzed with nauseous anxiety. Mad butterflies smashed into his organs, desperate to beat their way through muscle and skin.
His attention wavered to one of Echo’s loaned photographs. In it, Jeffrey Halcomb was alone. He sat cross-legged on what appeared to be a bed of pine needles. There were trees at Jeff’s back. He was cupping something in his hands, too out of focus to make out; possibly a baby bird or squirrel. But it made no difference; his smile was too disarming to focus on the contents of his palms. Jeffrey Halcomb had, in his heyday, been what any woman would have considered beautiful. Dark waves of hair stopped just beyond his shoulders. His face was long and angular, strikingly attractive—a face that drew in runaways, eyes that promised a better future filled with acceptance and understanding. But goddamn, it was that smile that won them over. Something about it radiated peace and love and all the stuff an angry kid leaving their home life behind would want. Jeffrey Halcomb looked positively radiant, a hippie transplant stuck in the early eighties.
Audra Snow, Laura Morgan, even dead-eyed girls like Chloe Sears—they all wanted to be whatever it was Jeff had tucked away in his hands. They wanted to be that baby bird, that tiny woodland creature. They wanted Jeff Halcomb to be their everything, and in the end, that’s exactly what he had become.
Lucas pushed the photograph beneath his stack of papers, not wanting to look at it anymore. Why did I speak to Mark that way? He had to call him back to apologize. He grabbed his phone, but rather than calling Mark back, he found himself speed-dialing Lambert Correctional Facility long after visiting hours were over. When Lumpy Annie answered the line, Lucas nearly sighed with relief at the sound of her voice. At least she was familiar. Maybe, finally, he’d stumble into a bit of luck—by some miracle, on his last attempt, Lumpy Annie would say, Wow, gee, Mr. Graham, I sure am glad you called, because inmate number 881978 suddenly changed his mind about that visitation thing. You should come on down first thing in the morning and do that interview you’ve been harassing us about.
But from the tone of her recognition, he doubted that was the case.
“Oh, hi, Mr. Graham,” she said, no longer needing an introduction.
“Hi,” he said, embarrassed by the fact that this prison receptionist had become somewhat of a long-distance acquaintance. “Sorry, I just had to check one more time. You understand . . .”
Lumpy Annie remained quiet for a long moment, then exhaled a breath into the receiver. “Mr. Graham, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”
“He’s still not taking visitors,” Lucas said. “I guess that isn’t much of a surprise.”
“Not quite,” she said. “It’s a bit more serious than that.”
“How so?”
“Mr. Graham, the inmate . . .” She paused, backtracked. “Jeffrey Halcomb, he’s no longer with us.”
“He was transferred?” That didn’t make any sense. Halcomb had been at Lambert since his conviction. If there had been any plans of transferring him from one facility to another, Lucas would have known about it.
“I guess you can say that,” she said. “He’s dead, Mr. Graham.”
Lucas lost his breath.
“He killed himself in his cell earlier today. His body is with the medical examiner. So I guess you can stop calling here.”
A strange feeling roiled around in his guts, one that suggested far more empathy than he cared to feel for a brainwasher, a conspirator, a murderer. Halcomb was dead? How could that be? A man like him didn’t just simply end himself like . . . like Hillstone. Like Schwartz. Like January Moore. Like the lost and lonely of Pier Pointe, 1983.
“I don’t—” Understand. The final word was lost among the dimness of his study, cut off as his gaze shifted to the cross on his desk, the artifact he’d been fiddling with during his research, tapping against his blotter to an unheard tune. Schwartz. Lucas leaned back in his seat, repelled by the cross’s very presence, suddenly sure that Jeff had gone the same way his inmate neighbor had. Someone had left that cross for Lucas with Lumpy Annie. Someone had also smuggled one in just like it and passed it on to Schwartz. How did a man kill himself in a maximum-security cell? Someone had provided Jeff with a weapon . . . someone from the outside.
“. . . the cross,” he murmured into the phone.
“Mr. Graham?”
“He stabbed himself, didn’t he?” The words trickled out of him in a slow, wheezing leak, so quiet that, had the connection been bad, Lumpy Annie wouldn’t have had a chance to catch his question. But she had. He could tell she had by the momentary pause, as if she was considering whether telling him to check with the coroner for that information, or to finally throw a bone to the desperate bastard who kept calling the prison.
“No,” she finally said. “He poisoned himself. Arsenic, they think.”
A shudder shook him from the inside out.
I don’t even know where she’d have gotten such a pill, Maury said of January’s death.
Someone had given it to her.
Just like someone had done the same for Jeff.