“Have you gotten anything out of her so far?” said Rhytag.
“I’ve built up some goodwill,” said Carla. “I let her beat me at gin rummy three days running. If you saw us together you’d swear I was her Doberman, on a leash, growling at the gangbangers. But she’s reluctant to talk about her case. Her lawyer has filled her head with anxieties about trusting people in jail.”
“She told you this?” said Thorpe.
“Right out of her lawyer’s handbook,” said Carla. “He told her not to discuss it with anyone, and she listens to him. To hear her tell it, the man walks on water.”
“This would be Mr. Madriani?” says Howard.
“I don’t know his last name. There are two of them. She calls them Paul and Harry.”
“When you say he walks on water, does it look like the normal lawyer-client relationship or do you think there might be something going on on the side?” said Howard.
“You mean a threesome with her lawyers? Now that would be kinky,” said Carla.
“I’m talking about Madriani. That would be the Paul half of the partnership. Do you think she and the lawyer might have been having an affair?”
“There hasn’t been any heavy breathing that I’ve heard.”
“Keep your ear to the ground,” said Rhytag.
“One thing is certain, she’s scared. I don’t think she’s ever been in jail before. She’s a little naive. If I were doing an evil deed, she’s not someone I’d pick to do covert work.”
“That may not be how it went down,” said Thorpe. “She may have been enticed up here by the victim without knowing the reason.”
“You mean Pike.”
“Correct,” said Thorpe. “When she realized what was happening with the photographs, she knew enough about Nitikin to know she was in trouble. So she had to get the photographs back.”
“And to do that she ended up having to kill Pike, is that it?”
“It’s possible,” said Thorpe.
“The prosecutor seems to think she had some help,” said Howard.
“We know she drugged Pike,” said Thorpe. “One of our agents got a glance at a toxicology report. So she’s not as innocent as she looks. Keep one eye open when you sleep.”
“I’ll try to get her to talk about the case, but-”
“Forget the case,” said Thorpe. “Get her to talk about her life down in Costa Rica, her family. About her parents, particularly her mother. Share some intimate details with her about your own family. Nothing real. Make it up. Get her reminiscing about life on the outside.”
“We know now that it was her mother who took the photographs,” said Howard. “We need to know where the pictures were taken and where her maternal grandfather is.”
“Yakov Nitikin. I read the file,” said Carla. “If she’s involved in the way you think she is, she’s not going to tell me anything about Nitikin.”
“She may give you a clue. It depends on who she thinks you are,” said Thorpe. “If she gets in trouble again and she has nobody to lean on but you, and she trusts you, she may.”
“Just an idea,” said Rhytag. “I take it that after the fight in the shower there are hard feelings on the part of some of the other women.”
“That’s an understatement.” Carla laughed. “It’s why I needed the weapon. I wasn’t excited about the idea of fending off eight or ten of them if they got me cornered somewhere out of sight of the guards. But if I have to pull the Walther, I’m going to be out of there. It’ll blow my cover. It’s one thing to have a zip gun. It’s another to have a three-eighty with a full magazine.”
“Given your attire I’m curious as to where it is right now,” said Thorpe.
“You don’t want to know,” said Carla.
“The sheriff wasn’t keen on a loaded handgun in his jail. I was advised that it’s against state law,” said Thorpe. “He told me that if you got caught with it, my ass was grass, because neither he nor any of his people knew anything about it, including the guard who slipped it into the towels for you. So if I lose my pension, you owe me.”
“Semper fi,’” said Carla. “I knew you’d been in the marines too long to let one of your troops go tits up in a county jail.”
Howard looked at her, wide eyed.
“Excuse my language,” said Carla. “I’ve been undercover too long.”
Thorpe laughed.
“So here’s the deal.” Rhytag was ignoring them. “Solaz is bottled up in jail on a murder charge with gangbangers who, after the brawl in the shower, would stick a shiv in her in a heartbeat. So if you aren’t around to protect her, she’s got problems, right?”
“I hope you’ve thought about that,” said Carla.
“We have,” said Rhytag. “She’s not in any danger. We’re keeping a close eye on her. Father Protector, the guard who slipped you the gun, has her on a special assignment in the jail dispensary while you’re here. We’re not going to let anything happen to her.
“But in the meantime,” said Rhytag, “there’s no reason we can’t put all that fear to work for us. Here’s how we do it. Tell Solaz that your lawyer pulled some strings with somebody he knows at the jail. They’re thinking about transferring you someplace else. Tell her it’s the honor farm. If you’re right about her, and she hasn’t been inside before, she’s not going to know the difference. Tell her it’s a place where they let inmates go when they think they can trust them, and it’s much better than the jail. Tell her you already talked to your lawyer and there’s a chance he might be able to have Solaz transferred with you. The problem is, to do this your lawyer needs a lot of personal and family background information to make sure she qualifies, so that when your lawyer goes to pull all the levers, it’s not going to blow up in his face. He needs to know all the places she’s lived, where her family is from, all the places they’ve lived, go back at least three generations. Take notes. You need to know whether any of her family members going back that far have ever been in any trouble with the law in any of the countries where they lived.”
“This honor farm has high standards,” said Thorpe.
“Platinum Diners Club only,” said Rhytag. “You need to have any information her family has ever given her in this regard. Tell her that in most other countries, the government in the United States is able to check records, so she has to be sure to tell you everything she knows. If your lawyer finds something in the records that she hasn’t told you about, he’s going to think she’s hiding something and she’s going to be off the invitation list at the honor farm. In which case, when you leave she’s going to be left behind all alone to entertain the angry women you pissed off in the shower.”
“What if she wants to discuss it with her lawyer?” said Carla.
“Tell her she can’t. Because if she does, her lawyer is going to want to talk to the people at the jail. If he does it’s going to result in both you and your lawyer getting in a lot of trouble. You put her in the pit of divided loyalties,” said Rhytag. “You came to her rescue; she’s not going to want to get you in trouble. Besides, all she has to do is give you the family background and you’ll take care of the rest. Otherwise you won’t be able to play cards with each other much longer. If she doesn’t deliver up the family tree immediately, let her look around at all the angry faces for a day or two and then tell her time is running out, you need the information or she may wake up one morning soon and you’ll be gone.”
“You’re cold,” said Carla.
“That’s how you survive in an ugly world,” he told her. “Think of it this way. The minute she mentions Grandpa Nitikin’s name as a survivor, you take her by the hand, call the guard, go out to the front of the jail. We’ll have agents from the bureau pick both of you up in a nanosecond and we’ll put her in a private suite in the federal tower downtown so we can talk to her.”