His first stop was the visitor’s desk, manned by a stout woman sporting a light brown Annie Warbucks fro. He signed in, gave the woman behind the counter his ID, and fished out of his bag the media release that the prison had mailed him weeks before.

“You with the news?” she asked.

Lucas shook his head. He imagined that she didn’t break five feet tall standing up. Her name tag was missing, but it was probably Phyllis or Florence or Agatha—the kind of moniker that appeared on the endangered names list.

Observe the last existing Maude in her natural habitat.

“I’m a writer,” he said, giving the lumpy Annie Warbucks look-alike a smile.

She eyed him in a suspicious sort of way, as though not liking his face. “For the news?”

“No. True crime. I’m an author.”

She looked back down at his license, and for a split second he could see her searching her memory for why his name sounded so familiar. It seemed a natural fit. She worked at a prison. True crime was right up Lumpy Annie’s alley. Maybe she had been one of the millions of readers who had bought Bloodthirsty Times a dozen years ago. She may have watched him stumble through an interview on Good Morning America while having her morning cup of coffee.

Nope.

She slid his ID and credentials back to him and nodded toward the waiting area. “Have a seat, Mr. Graham. Ten minutes till in-processing. Then you go through security. And no cell phones, even for media. You leave it at the checkpoint. No exceptions, so don’t even ask.”

“All righty.” He turned toward the waiting room, took a seat in a scuffed hard plastic chair that reminded him of grade school, and dug through his bag to make sure he had everything in order. He tried to keep himself from getting cold feet by studying the folks waiting to be let in for visitation. An elderly woman sat across the room, clutching her purse with talon-like fingers of sinew and bone. When she noticed Lucas watching her, she narrowed her eyes at him and pulled her purse closer to her chest. And yet she’s brave enough to visit her convict son in supermax, he mused.

My son is not a convict, he imagined her squawk back at him. My boy has been wrongfully accused! Because wasn’t that always the case?

He looked away from her angry face and focused on a young woman rocking a baby in its car seat with her foot. She was reading a tattered old paperback, probably something she’d picked up used for a dime at the local Goodwill. But it was her posture that fascinated him most. So casual, as though she’d been to Lambert Correctional every week for as long as her baby had been alive; maybe six or seven months before it had ever been born.

Ten minutes turned into twenty. Lucas was eventually ushered into a room with small lockers situated behind a waist-high counter. The prison guard peered at him as Lucas removed all items from his pockets—keys, cell phone, loose change—and slid them across the surface to be stored. His messenger bag went in as well, but the guard allowed him to keep his yellow legal pad of notes and a handheld digital voice recorder to conduct his interview. He wasn’t allowed to bring a pen. Lucas had seen enough prison movies to not question why.

The guard patted him down, then wanded him for good measure before motioning for him to step over to the barred door on the opposite wall. A second officer met him on the other side of the bars before a loud buzzer screamed and the door slid open.

The guard who greeted him inside the belly of the prison wore a name badge that read “J E MORALES.” He was a tall, lanky man, maybe in his early thirties, with mocha-colored skin and a faint limp on his left. His smile was wide, almost triumphant.

“Mr. Graham? It’s a real honor,” he said, grabbing Lucas’s hand. “I read your book, the one about Ramirez?” It was always the one about Ramirez. “Man, it was good. You really captured the, uh . . . what’s the word . . .” He waved a hand above his head, trying to summon the right term. “The atmosphere,” he said, snapping his fingers at his own success. “I was born and raised in L.A. just outside of Monterey Park, where he shot that girl and attacked that old couple, you know?”

On top of killing Tsai-Lian “Veronica” Yu and assaulting and murdering one of the Dois, Richard Ramirez had also beaten a sixty-one-year-old woman to death in that same part of town. Lucas didn’t bother to bring up the omission. “That was one of the hardest hit areas,” he agreed.

“I was just a kid,” Morales said. “My parents were shitting bricks. Ramirez was one of the reasons I decided to become a cop.” He paused, as if going back to the memory of growing up in a terrorized Los Angeles, then shook his head. “I worked the beat for a while, but my mom was always waiting for a call, you know? Waiting for el segador . . .” He paused. “You speak Spanish?”

“Not really,” Lucas said.

“That means ‘the reaper,’ ” he said. “She was always crossing herself, praying for me on Sundays, counting off her rosary beads so I wouldn’t get shot in some alley in El Este.”

Lucas had spent enough time in California to be familiar with El Este—East L.A.

“It was mostly just robberies and car theft, lots of domestic disturbances . . . but it was rough, you know? My mom couldn’t handle what I did too good, so I applied as a guard at San Quentin. She wasn’t too happy about that, either, it being so far from home and all, but in her eyes, it was better than me being out on the streets.”

Lucas gave the chatty guard a nod. He appreciated the distraction. A silent walk into the bowels of Lambert Correctional would have only made Lucas sick with anxiety. It was a strange coincidence to run into such an avid fan, but he was thankful. Scared that the guy would suddenly stop talking and Lucas would be left to wrestle with his own self-doubt, he kept the conversation rolling.

“San Quentin,” he said. “You know that’s where—”

“Where they had Ramirez locked up? Yeah, man, I know. Everyone knew. I was working general population, so I was never in the same unit as him, but I knew he was there. I tried to get in to see him, but you know how it is, rules and regulations and all that. It was weird when he died.”

“Weird how?”

“Like, just weird,” Morales said. “You felt good that this guy was gone, right? But you felt bad because you aren’t supposed to feel good about people going to the other side.”

“Did you call your mom when it happened?”

Morales’s face lit up at the inquiry. “Oh, hell yeah, I did,” he said with a laugh. “I called her that same day and told her, Mama, el monstruo está muerto and she started doing Hail Marys right there on the phone. She’s read your book, too. I recommended it.” He paused, smiled apologetically. “She hated it. Sorry, man.”

Lucas bit back a laugh. “Great. Maybe I’ll send her my next one as a mea culpa.”

“A what?”

“An apology.”

“So, you don’t speak Spanish but you speak Latin?” Morales asked.

“No.” Lucas chuckled. “Just that and a few other things. Alibi. Alter ego. Stuff like that.”

“ ‘Alter ego’ is Latin?”

“Yep.”

“Huh.” Morales looked mystified. “Then I guess I speak Latin, too. Man, it’s good to meet you!” He beamed again, smacked Lucas on the back like a lifelong pal. “I lived in L.A. all my life, but I’ve never met a real-life celebrity before.”

Celebrity. Lucas nearly scoffed at that, but instead, he bit his tongue and offered the overly eager guard a smile.

The pair arrived at a second set of bars. There was a small office to the left, thick glass separating them from the guard inside. Morales gave the guy a nod and waited. The buzzer sounded, the bars slid aside, and they continued their walk.

“So, you tried to get to Ramirez; what about Jeffrey Halcomb?” Lucas asked. “Have you met him?”