Graham improved his posture and settled his shoulders. “Sure,” he said.
And it was done. The three of them headed toward the front together. As they reached the door, Graham shot a look back to Deputy Price, but he’d already moved on to other matters.
The lock turned and Jolaine’s cell door opened. She stood from her concrete cot.
A guard — an officer (they didn’t like being called guards) — said, “Are you Jolaine Cage?”
“Yes.” Who the hell else would she be? They’d put her here, for God’s sake.
“It’s time to go.”
She instinctively took a step backward, away from the door. “Go where?”
“There’s a team here to transfer you to Chicago.”
“Why?” Jolaine asked.
The guard half smirked, and assumed a weird, asymmetrical stance with one hand notched over the nightstick that resided where a firearm would be if he were a real cop. “I know I look like I run the place,” he said, “but you’d be surprised the shit they don’t tell me.”
Jolaine sensed that she was supposed to laugh at that, but she was disinclined.
“Yeah, okay,” the officer said. “I need you to turn around so I can cuff your hands.”
Jolaine didn’t move.
The officer rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, don’t do this to me. It’s almost the end of my shift. Don’t make me call the crisis team.”
He said that as if she had any idea what a crisis team was. “I don’t understand,” she said. While mostly a statement of truth, it was also a delaying tactic, buying time for one of those options she’d been waiting for to materialize.
The officer said, “What’s to understand? You turn around and I cuff you.”
“But I don’t want to go anywhere,” Jolaine said. “What’s in Chicago? That’s a long way from here.”
“Great food and a pretty city,” the guard said. “Though I don’t think you’re scheduled for a lot of sightseeing.” That joke fell flatter than the first one. “Look, I don’t know, okay? I have orders to deliver you out front. For me, that’s the beginning and the end. And please believe me when I tell you that I have every intention of following my orders.”
Jolaine remained in place.
“Your call,” the officer said, “is whether it all happens easily or if you end up bloody in the process.”
“But I haven’t been charged with anything,” Jolaine protested.
The guard shrugged with his whole body. Handcuffs dangled from one of his outstretched hands. “That’s yet another thing that lies outside my give-a-shit zone,” he said. “I’ve told you what my orders are. Now, you have to decide whether or not you’re going to follow them.”
“Don’t you see that this is wrong?”
The guard said nothing. He just stood there, the handcuffs dangling from one fingertip.
Jolaine tried to think of an alternative, but no option seemed available. She could refuse to leave, but then the crisis team would storm in — she imagined burly guards in riot gear with nightsticks and pepper spray. The result would be blood and bruises and she’d still end up in the car where she didn’t want to be.
Or, she could fight this guy. Same result.
She had no option but to comply. She turned her back and surrendered.
Venice Alexander entered the final bit of code into her keyboard and bingo! Her screen jumped to life with a checkerboard of color images from the local jail in Lambertville, Michigan. That one had been a difficult hack — far more difficult than the security feed from the police station down the street where Graham Mitchell was being held. Once in, she now had to cope with an embarrassment of riches. In the case of the police station, she was faced with a matrix of sixty camera images. For the jail, it was at least twice that many. Choosing which images to concentrate on was a dizzying challenge.
After only a minute or two of watching both banks of images among four screens, Venice opted to ignore the police feed and concentrate on the jail instead. As the mother of a young teen herself, her heart belonged to Graham, but the boy had one big thing working against him. The most recent picture she had of the kid was nearly three years old. Kid years and dog years shared the common element of vast physical changes in very short periods of time. Even if she found the image of someone who likely was Graham, there’d be no way for her to be sure.
With a few clicks of her mouse, Venice reduced the police station to blackness and then split the jail feed among the four screens. As was often the case with jails, every cell had its own camera with its own video feed, but the voyeuristic element of it made her exceedingly uncomfortable, especially when it came to the cells of young men, who, she’d decided, were incapable of keeping their hands off their private parts for more than a few minutes at a time.
It was that thought, in fact, that awarded her first big break in the challenge to locate Jolaine Cage within the jail. While she hadn’t had a chance to figure out the logic in the order of the camera feeds — assuming that there even was such a thing — she knew that wherever she found a male prisoner, she no longer had to worry about finding Jolaine.
In the end, it turned out that fewer women committed crimes in Michigan than men, and by a large margin. By the time she narrowed the images down to the ladies’ cells, it was a simple matter to locate Jolaine. She looked exactly like her photo.
If she wanted to, Venice could have manipulated the camera from her desktop, but she opted not to because of the risk. Somewhere in that jail, a guard (or ten) was watching exactly the same images she was, and if something started to pan or zoom without affirmative input from them, the result would likely be unhappy. Like Peeping Toms (Tomasinas?) everywhere, she needed to be grateful for the view she had, even if it wasn’t as good as it could be.
As she watched, Jolaine was in the middle of a conversation with someone who was just outside the edge of her camera’s view, and it was not a happy exchange. From the way Jolaine moved, Venice imagined that she was trying to put space between herself and whoever was speaking with her.
Since the cells only held one prisoner apiece, that meant that the other party had to be outside the cell, which by definition meant that the other party had to be in a hallway.
Splitting the images yet again onto different screens, she was able to increase the size of the thumbnails, and increase their clarity. Venice scanned the dozens of squares looking for the image of someone in the mirror image of Jolaine, facing the edge of a frame while engaging in a heated discussion. She did this while glancing back to Jolaine’s frame every couple of seconds just to keep track.
“There,” she said. The sound of her own voice startled her, and she pointed at the screen, as if to display her discovery to someone else. A man in a uniform stood in the middle of a long hallway, dangling what appeared to be handcuffs from his fingers. Details were difficult because it was a fairly long angle. Venice imagined that the camera had been placed at the end of the hallway to capture all of the doorways in a single frame.
She dragged that frame over to the screen that displayed the interior of Jolaine’s cell and she watched. It wouldn’t be beyond the technical capacity of the security system to capture sound as well, but Venice had not had the time to untangle that part of the knot. She’d have to settle for just the video.
Venice keyed her microphone. It was a gooseneck that rose from the table and allowed her to multitask while minding Jonathan’s business and keeping him out of trouble. “Scorpion, Mother Hen,” she said.
Jonathan’s voice told her to go ahead.
“I’ve tapped into the video feed from the jail where they’re keeping PC Two. I have eyes on her right now.”