“Elizabeth, I have to ask you something,” I said, pushing my sandwich aside for a moment.

“Sure, what’s up?”

“I just feel like … well, ever since this morning, you’ve seemed a little distant.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, accepting responsibility without offering an explanation. In other words, trying to get out of one.

“Oh, don’t apologize,” I added quickly. “I was just worried. Did something happen?”

She sucked in a long, deep breath—another physiological superfluity—and said, “It’s just, that guy who was able to materialize out of thin air, your guy, he was … he was so beautiful.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, nodding my head in agreement.

“And amazing.”

“Still with you.”

“And sexy.”

I leaned in. “I like where this is headed.”

“But…”

“Uh-oh.”

“I just thought it odd.”

“Odd?”

“Yes.” She leaned in as well. “Charlotte, he was wearing … a prison uniform.”

Chapter Seven

Genius has its limitations.

Insanity … not so much.

—BUMPER STICKER

A prison uniform? What did that mean? Had he gone to prison? Then died there?

The muscles around my heart clenched at the thought. He’d had such a hard life; that much had been painfully clear from the moment I first saw him. Then for him to end up in prison. I couldn’t imagine the horrors he’d had to endure.

While I wanted nothing more than to rush off to the prison, I had no idea which prison he’d been in. He could have been in Sing Sing, for all I knew. I needed to cool my jets and focus on the case. Uncle Bob went to work on the warrant and court transcripts, and the lawyers went to check on their families, so I drove to the Metropolitan Detention Center to talk to Mark Weir, the man Carlos Rivera said was innocent.

The female corrections officer at the sign-in desk studied my APD laminate. “Charlotte Davidson?” she asked, her brows furrowing as if I’d done something wrong.

“That’s me,” I said with an inane giggle.

She didn’t smile back. Not even a little. I totally needed to read that book on how to win friends and influence people. But that would involve an innate desire to win friends and influence people. My desires were a tad more visceral at the moment.

The officer directed me to a waiting area while she called back for Mr. Weir. As I sat pondering my visceral desires, specifically the ones earmarked for Reyes, I heard someone sit down beside me.

“Hey, Grim, what are you doing in my neck of the correctional system?”

I looked over and smiled before fetching my partially charged cell phone. Flipping it open, I made sure it was on silent before I spoke. “Dang, Billy,” I said into the phone, “you’re looking good. Are you losing weight?”

Billy was a Native American inmate who’d committed suicide in the detention center about seven years prior. I tried to convince him to cross, but he insisted on staying behind to help dissuade others from following his asinine example. His words. I often wondered how he might manage such a thing.

A bashful grin spread over his face at my compliment. Despite the fact that the departed couldn’t lose weight, he did look a little slimmer. Maybe there was something I didn’t know. Either way, he was a good-looking man.

He elbowed me playfully. “You and your phones.”

“I gotta do this or they’ll lock me up for talking to myself, Mr. Invisible.”

A deep chuckle rose from his chest. “You here to get in my pants?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Figures,” he said, disappointed. “I always attract the crazy ones.”

Sucking in a sharp breath, I was smack-dab in the middle of an Oscar-worthy performance—feigning offense with such emotion, such realism—when my name was called.

“Oops, that’s me, big guy. When you coming to see me?”

“See you?” he asked as I jumped up to follow the officer toward the visitors’ room. “How can I not see you? You’re as bright as the damned searchlights outside.”

When I turned back, he was gone. I really liked that man.

I sat down at booth seven as a gangly man in his forties sat across from me. He had sandy blond hair and kind blue eyes and looked like a cross between a beach bum and a college professor. A plate glass window separated us, one with thin wire latticed throughout to make it even more inescapable. Sure, I wondered how they got that wire in there, the rows so evenly spaced, but now was not the time for such musings. I had a job to do, dammit. I would not be sidetracked by latticework.

Mr. Weir studied me from the other side—not the other side, but the other side of the glass—his expression curious. I picked up the speaker phone and wondered how many people had used that same phone and how sanitary those people had been.

“Hello, Mr. Weir. My name is Charlotte Davidson.” His face remained blank. Clearly my name did not impress him.

Another inmate strolled in to sit at the next booth, and he cast a wary glance over his shoulder, already eyeing others as if they were the enemy, already on constant guard, ready to defend himself at a moment’s notice. This man didn’t deserve to be in jail. He hadn’t killed anyone. I could sense his clear conscience as easily as I could sense the guilty one of the guy next to him.