“What if he’s not convicted?”

“That’s your problem. If you screw up the prosecution, you can’t blame me.”

At this point, Erardi takes out his notepad, uncaps a cheap pen, and writes something down. I have their attention. They are still working much too hard to appear nonchalant, but these guys are under pressure. Their little task force is scrambling because they have no credible leads, according to the newspapers. Hanski continues, “What if you give us the wrong name? Let’s say we go chasing after the wrong suspect; meanwhile, you’re a free man.”

“I’ll never be a free man.”

“You’ll be out of prison.”

“And looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.”

“We’ve never lost an informant in witness protection. Over eight thousand and counting.”

“That’s what you advertise. Frankly, I’m not too concerned with your track record or what didn’t happen to the others. I’m worried about my own skin.”

There is a pause as Erardi stops writing and decides to speak. “This guy sounds like he’s in a gang of some sort, maybe a drug dealer. What else can you tell us?”

“Nothing, and I’ve told you nothing. You can make all the wild guesses you want.”

Hanski smiles at nothing that is humorous. “I doubt if our boss will be too impressed with your scheme to get out of prison. As of today, we’ve had at least two other inmates contact us and claim to have valuable information. Of course, they want out of prison too. This is not unusual.”

I have no way of knowing if this is true, but it sounds believable. The knot in my stomach has not gone away. I shrug, offer a smile, tell myself to stay cool. “You guys can play it any way you want. Obviously, you’re in charge. You can keep beating your heads against a wall. You can waste time with these other inmates. It’s up to you. But when you want to know the name of the person who killed Judge Fawcett, I can give it to you.”

“Someone you met in prison?” Erardi asks.

“Or maybe out of prison. You’ll never know until we have a deal.”

There is a long pause as they stare at me and I stare right back. Finally, Erardi closes his notepad and sticks his pen back in his pocket. Hanski says, “Okay. We’ll go tell our boss.”

“You know where to find me.”

Several times a week, I meet my White Gang at the track, and we walk in wide circles around a field used for soccer and flag football. Carl, the optometrist, will be out in a few months. Kermit, the land speculator, has two more years. Wesley, the state senator, should get out about the same time I do. Mark is the only one with his case still on appeal. He’s been here for eighteen months and says his lawyer is optimistic, though he freely admits he falsified some mortgage documents.

We don’t talk much about our crimes, and this is usually true in prison. Who you were or what you did on the outside is not important, and it’s also too painful to dwell on.

Wesley’s wife has just filed for divorce and he’s taking it hard. Since I’ve been through it, as has Kermit, we offer advice and try to cheer him up. I would love to entertain them with the details of my visit from the FBI, but this must be kept quiet. If my plan works, they will show up one day for a walk and I’ll be gone, suddenly transferred to another camp for reasons they will never know.

CHAPTER 7

The FBI’s temporary headquarters for its Fawcett task force was a warehouse in an industrial park near the Roanoke Regional Airport. When last occupied, the space had been leased by a company that imported shrimp from Central America and froze it for years. Almost immediately it was tagged “the Freezer.” It offered plenty of space, seclusion, and privacy away from the press. Carpenters hurriedly built walls and sectioned off rooms, offices, hallways, and meeting places. Technicians from Washington worked around the clock to install the latest high-tech gear and gadgets for communication, data, and security. Trucks filled with rented furniture and equipment ran nonstop until the CC—command center—was stuffed with more desks and tables than would ever be used. A fleet of rented SUVs filled the parking lot. A catering service was hired to haul in three meals a day for the team, which soon numbered close to seventy—about forty agents plus support staff. There was no budget and no concern for costs. The victim was, after all, a federal judge.

A lease was signed for six months, but after three weeks of little progress there was a general mood among the Feds that they might be there longer. Aside from a short list of randomly picked suspects, all of whom were known to be violent and had appeared before Fawcett in the past eighteen years, there were no real leads. A man named Stacks had written the judge a threatening letter in 2002 from prison. Stacks was found working in a liquor store in Panama City Beach, Florida, and had an alibi for the weekend the judge and Ms. Clary were murdered. Stacks had not set foot in Virginia in at least five years. A narco-trafficker named Ruiz had cursed His Honor in Spanish when given a twenty-year sentence in 1999. Ruiz was still in a medium-security prison, but after a few days digging through his past, the FBI decided his former cadre of coke runners were all either dead or in prison too.

One team methodically sifted through every case Fawcett handled during his eighteen years on the bench. He had been a workhorse, handling 300 cases each year, both civil and criminal, while the average for a federal judge is 225. Judge Fawcett had sentenced approximately thirty-one hundred men and women to prison. Laboring under the admittedly shaky assumption that his killer was one of these, a team burned hundreds of hours adding names to its list of possible suspects and then discarding them. Another team studied the cases, both civil and criminal, pending before the judge when he was murdered. Another team spent all of its time on the Armanna Mines litigation, with particular attention paid to a couple of flaky environmental extremists who didn’t like Fawcett.

From the moment it got itself organized, the Freezer was a swarming hive of tension, with urgent meetings, frayed nerves, dead ends by the hour, careers on the line, and someone always barking from Washington. The press called nonstop. The bloggers were feeding the frenzy with creative and blatantly false rumors.

Then an inmate named Malcolm Bannister entered the picture.

The task force was run by Victor Westlake, a thirty-year career agent who had a nice office with a nice view in the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. However, for almost three weeks now he had been holed up in a freshly painted room with no windows in the center of the CC. It was by no means his first road trip. Westlake had made his name years earlier as a master organizer who could rush to the scene of the crime, line up the troops, handle a thousand details, plan the attack, and solve the crime. He had once spent a year in a motel near Buffalo stalking a genius who got his kicks sending parcel bombs to federal meat inspectors. Turned out to be the wrong genius, but Westlake did not make the mistake of arresting his prey. Two years later he nailed his bomber.

Westlake was in his office, standing as always behind his desk, when Agents Hanski and Erardi entered. Since their boss was standing, they stood too. He believed that it was unhealthy, even deadly, to sit for hours behind a desk.

“Okay, I’m listening,” he barked, snapping his fingers.

Hanski quickly said, “Guy’s name is Malcolm Bannister, black male, aged forty-three, in for ten for RICO violations, federal court in D.C., former lawyer from Winchester, Virginia. Says he can deliver the name of the killer, along with his motive, but of course he wants out of prison.”