The Darkness of Evil (Karen Vail #7)(25)
“Good luck with that,” Hurdle said. “Anything else?”
“I play well with others and I’m easy to get along with.”
Curtis snorted.
Vail cut her eyes at him. “Fuck you.”
Curtis threw his hands up. “My point exactly.”
She managed to subdue her smile. “On a serious note, I handled the original Roscoe Lee Marcks case seven years ago when he was put away. Actually, the profiler who drew up the assessment that led to Marcks’s apprehension was Thomas Underwood. I came in right after that when Underwood retired. So I’m familiar with Jasmine Marcks, the daughter, as well as the offender. Hopefully I’ll be able to help with establishing his behavioral patterns and tendencies. We need anything from Jasmine, I’ve got a good relationship with her.” She turned to Curtis.
“Erik Curtis. Detective, Fairfax County Police, Criminal Investigations Bureau. Served on CARFTF a bunch of years ago, so I’m familiar with the drill. Plus, I worked the Marcks case. I was the arresting officer so I know this douche bag pretty damn well. Two grown kids, a younger brother who’s a detective in New Orleans, where I grew up. Oh, and I’m divorced. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that. Because you will anyway, no matter what I say.”
“Okay,” Hurdle said. “You’ve all met me and know who I am. Got a teenage daughter I don’t see enough and a wife I don’t see enough. And a bunch of friends like you I end up seeing way too much.”
Tarkoff and Ramos emitted a low groan of disapproval.
Hurdle reached over and gave Ramos a swat with the stack of papers. “We’ve got a bit of a new team here, so I’ll walk us through some of the things we’ll need to get up to speed. Think of me as the quarterback. We’ll huddle, I’ll call the plays, and you’ll go out and run the routes. If I hand the ball off to you, I expect you to run with it. No fumbles.
“Speaking of which, I run a tight ship. No penalties. By that I mean we follow the rules. And the law. When we can. You know some ways to bend shit, fine—as long as it’ll hold up in court. I don’t want any * going free because of some dipshitly stupid thing one of us did while under my command.”
“Is dipshitly a word?”
“It is now, Rambo. Know why?”
“Because you said it is, boss.”
“Right. Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk about this case.” He glanced down at his papers, then set them aside in favor of an iPad. “Marcks was incarcerated at Potter Correctional in West Virginia.” He stopped and turned to Curtis. “That’s a federal prison. Aren’t serials usually prosecuted by state or county?”
“Usually. But Marcks copped to two murders and one of them was done in a national park in Fredericksburg.”
“And thus federal jurisdiction,” Hurdle said. “Okay, well, our model citizen was involved in an inmate-on-inmate fight in the showers this morning at oh-eight-hundred. Looks like he instigated it against a known enforcer, a guy no one screwed with at Potter. Those two facts should give us reason to suspect that this was part of a preconceived escape plan. The fight was designed to put him in a bad way so he’d have to be transported to a nearby hospital.”
“But prison hospitals are usually pretty well equipped,” Morrison said. “How could he be sure they wouldn’t just treat him there?”
“You familiar with Potter Correctional?” Hurdle asked.
“Potter’s older than dirt,” Vail said. “Should’ve been closed decades ago. I’m willing to bet their hospital has never seen the equipment they’d need to treat a serious injury.”
Hurdle consulted the iPad again. “And he supposedly had a head injury and a wickedly fractured arm. That qualifies as a serious injury.”
“So Marcks intentionally got his head beat in just so he could escape?” Walters asked. “A bit extreme.”
“Hard to say how bad he was hurt. I’m told the nurse only did a cursory exam and said it was an emergency, that he needed to be transported to the hospital.”
“Nurse could’ve been in on it,” Vail said. “Not unheard of. That escape from Clinton Correctional in upstate New York wasn’t the first time something like that happened. Woman becomes enamored with a good-looking inmate, he charms her, promises her the world if he can only get out, convinces her he’s innocent and was framed, whatever. She hears what she wants, believes what she wants. Sometimes he’ll reel her in, do the charm thing, and once he’s made her do things that could get her fired or even arrested if they’re egregious enough, he’s got his hooks in her. He can up the ante under the threat of exposure. She feels like she’s got no choice because if he talks she’ll lose her job. So she does increasingly risky things to help him escape.”
“Have they detained her?” Curtis asked.
“She’s dead. Marcks slit her throat.”
“Another man who makes promises and doesn’t keep his word,” Vail said.
Chuckles and muted laughter trickled through the room.
“That’s one of the things we’ll be looking at,” Hurdle said, “to see if she was complicit. Back to the escape. He was taken in the back of a small correctional transport truck. Last communication was at oh-eight-fifty. Driver reported nothing unusual.