Ransom Read online

  When Peter Morgan went to prison, he hadn't seen his children in two years, and wasn't likely to again. He sat stone-faced through his trial, and sounded intelligent and remorseful when he took the stand. His lawyer tried to get him probation, but the judge was smarter than that. He had seen people like Peter before, though not many, and certainly not one who'd had as many opportunities that he'd blown. He had read Peter well, and saw that there was something disturbing about him. His appearance and his actions didn't seem to fit. The judge didn't buy the pat phrases of remorse that Peter parroted. He seemed smooth, but not sincere. He was likable certainly, but the choices he'd made were appalling. And when the jury found him guilty, the judge sentenced him to seven years in prison, and sent him to Pelican Bay, in Crescent City, a maximum security prison, inhabited by 3,300 of the worst felons in the California prison system, three hundred and seventy miles north of San Francisco, eleven miles from the Oregon border. It seemed like an unduly harsh sentence for Peter and not where he belonged.

  On the day Peter was released, he had been there for all the time he'd served, four years and three months. He had gotten free of drugs, minded his own business, worked in the warden's office, mostly with their computers, and hadn't had a single disciplinary incident or report in all four years. And the warden he worked for totally believed him to be sincerely remorseful. It was obvious to everyone who knew him that Peter had no intention of getting in trouble again. He had learned his lesson. He had also told the parole board that the one goal he had was to see his daughters again, and be the kind of father they could be proud of one day. Peter made it sound as if, and seemed to believe that, the last six or seven years of his life were an unfortunate blip on an otherwise clear screen, and he intended to keep it clear and trouble-free from now on. And everyone believed him.

  He was released at the first legal opportunity. He had to stay in northern California for a year, and they had assigned him to a parole agent in San Francisco. He was planning to live in a halfway house until he found work, and he had told the parole board he wasn't proud. He was going to take whatever kind of work he could get, until he got on his feet, even manual labor if necessary, as long as it was honest. But no one had any serious worries that Peter Morgan wouldn't find a job. He had made some colossal mistakes, but even after four years in Pelican Bay, he still came across as an intelligent, nice guy, and was. With a little bit of luck, his well-wishers, which even included the warden, hoped that he would find the right niche for him, and build a good life. He had everything it took to do that. All he needed now was a chance. And they all hoped he'd get one when he got out. People always liked Peter and wished him well. The warden came out himself to say good-bye and shake his hand. Peter had worked for him exclusively for the entire four years.

  “Stay in touch,” the warden said, looking warmly at him. He had invited Peter to his own home for the past two years, to share Christmas with his wife and kids, and Peter had been terrific. Smart, warm, funny, and really kind to the warden's four teenage boys. He had a nice way with people, both young and old. And had even inspired one of them to apply for a scholarship to Harvard. The boy had just been accepted that spring. The warden felt as though he owed Peter something, and Peter genuinely liked him and his family, and was grateful for the kindness they'd shown him.

  “I'll be in San Francisco for the next year,” Peter said pleasantly. “I just hope they let me go back east for a visit soon, to see my girls.” He hadn't even had a photograph of them for four years, and hadn't laid eyes on them in six. Isabelle and Heather were now respectively eight and nine, although in his mind's eye they were still considerably younger. Janet had long since forbidden him to have contact with them, and her parents endorsed her position. Peter's stepfather, who had paid for his education years before, had long since died. His brother had disappeared years before. Peter Morgan had no one, and nothing. He had four hundred dollars in his wallet, a parole agent in San Francisco, and a bed in a halfway house in the Mission District, which was predominantly Hispanic and a once-beautiful old neighborhood, some of which had gone downhill. The part Peter was living in had worn badly. The money he had wouldn't go far, he hadn't had a decent haircut in four years, and the only things he had left in the world were a handful of contacts in the high-tech and venture capital worlds in Silicon Valley, and the names of the drug dealers he had once done business with, and fully intended to steer clear of. He had virtually no prospects. He was going to call some people when he got to town, but he also knew there was a good chance he could be washing dishes or pumping gas, although he thought that unlikely. He was after all a Harvard MBA, and had gone to Duke before that. If nothing else, he could look up some old school friends, who might not have heard that he'd gone to prison. But he had no illusions that it was going to be easy. He was thirty-nine years old, and however he explained it, the last four years were going to be a blank on his résumé. He had a long uphill climb ahead of him. But he was healthy, strong, drug-free, intelligent, and still incredibly good-looking. Something good was going to happen to him eventually. Of that much, he was certain, and so was the warden.

  “Call us,” the warden said again. It was the first time he had gotten that attached to a convict who worked for him. But the men he dealt with at Pelican Bay were a far cry from Peter Morgan.

  Pelican Bay had been built as a maximum security prison to house the worst criminal elements that had previously been sent to San Quentin. Most of the men were in solitary. The prison itself was highly mechanized and computerized, and state of the art, which allowed them to confine some of the most dangerous men in the country. And the warden had spotted instantly that Peter didn't belong there. Only the vast quantities of drugs he'd been dealing, and the money involved, had wound him up in a maximum security prison. Had the charges been less serious, he could just as easily have been incarcerated in a minimum security facility. He was no flight risk, had no history of violence, and had never been involved in a single incident during his time there. He was a quintessentially civilized person. The few men he chatted with over the years respected him, and he steered a wide berth of potential problems. His close relationship to the warden made him sacrosanct and gave him safe passage. He had no known associations with gangs, groups known for violence, or dissident elements. He minded his own business. And after more than four years, he seemed to be leaving Pelican Bay relatively unscathed. He had kept his head down, and done his time there. He had done a lot of legal and financial reading, spent a surprising amount of time in the library, and worked tirelessly for the warden.

  The warden himself had written a glowing reference for him to the parole board. His was a case of a young man who had taken a wrong turn, and all he needed was a chance now to take the right one. And the warden was certain he would do that. He looked forward to hearing good things from and about Peter in future. At thirty-nine, Peter still had his whole life ahead of him, and a brilliant education behind him. And hopefully the mistakes he'd made would prove to be a valuable lesson of some kind. There was no question in anyone's mind that Peter would stick to the straight and narrow.

  Peter and the warden were still shaking hands, as he was about to leave, when a reporter and photographer from the local newspaper got out of a van, and walked up to the desk where Peter had just collected his wallet. Another prisoner was just signing his release papers, and he and Peter exchanged a look and nodded. Peter knew who he was—everyone did. They had met in the gym and in the halls from time to time, and in the last two years, he had frequently come to the warden's office. He had spent years unsuccessfully seeking a pardon, and was known to be an extremely savvy unofficial jailhouse lawyer. His name was Carlton Waters, he was forty-one years old, and had served twenty-four years for murder. In fact, he had grown up in prison.

  Carlton Waters had been convicted of the murder of a neighbor and his wife, and attempting unsuccessfully to murder both their children. He had been seventeen years old at the time, and his partner in cri
me had been a twenty-six-year-old ex-con who had befriended him. They had broken into their victims' home and stolen two hundred dollars. Waters's partner had been put to death years before, and Waters had always claimed that he did none of the killing. He had just been there, and he had never swerved once from his story. He had always said he was innocent, and had gone to the victims' home with no foreknowledge of what his friend intended. It had happened quickly and badly, and the children had been too young to corroborate his story. They were young enough not to be a danger in identifying them, so they had been badly beaten but ultimately spared. Both men were drunk, and Waters had claimed he blacked out during the murders, and remembered nothing.

  The jury hadn't bought his story, and he'd been tried as an adult, despite his age, found guilty, and lost a subsequent appeal. He had spent the majority of his life in prison, first in San Quentin, and then in Pelican Bay. He had even managed to graduate from college while there, and was halfway through law school. He had written a number of articles, about the correctional and legal systems, and had developed a relationship with the press over the years. With his protestations of innocence throughout his incarceration, Waters had become something of a celebrity prisoner. He was editor of the prison newspaper, and knew just about everyone in the prison. People came to him for advice, and he was greatly respected within the prison population. He didn't have Morgan's aristocratic good looks. He was tough, strong, and burly. He was a bodybuilder and looked it. Despite several incidents in his early days when he was still young and hotheaded, in the past two decades he was a model prisoner. He was a powerful, fearsome-looking man, but his prison record was clean, and his reputation was bronze, if not golden. It was Waters who had notified the paper of his release and he was pleased that they were there.

  Waters and Morgan had never been associates, but they had always been distantly respectful of each other, and had had a few minor conversations about legal issues while Waters waited to see the warden, and Peter chatted with him. Peter had read several of his articles in the prison newspaper, and the local newspaper, and it was hard not to be impressed by the man, whether innocent or guilty. He had a fine mind, and had worked hard to achieve something in spite of the challenge he had had growing up in prison.

  As Peter walked through the gate, feeling almost breathless with relief, he looked back over his shoulder once, and saw Carl Waters shaking the warden's hand as the photographer from the local paper snapped his picture. Peter knew he was going to a halfway house in Modesto. His family still lived there.

  “Thank you, God,” Peter said as he stood still for a moment, closed his eyes, and then squinted up at the sun. This day felt like it had been a lifetime coming. He brushed a hand across his eyes so no one would see the tears springing from them, as he nodded at a guard, and set off on foot toward the bus stop. He knew where it was, and all he wanted now was to get there. It was a ten-minute walk, and as he hailed the bus and stepped aboard, Carlton Waters was posing for one last photograph in front of the prison. He told his interviewer again that he had been innocent. Whether or not he was, he made an interesting story, had become respected in prison over the past twenty-four years, and had milked his claims of innocence for all they were worth. He had been talking for years about his plans to write a book. The two people he had allegedly killed, and the children who had been orphaned as a result, twenty-four years before, were all but forgotten. They were obscured by his articles and artful words in the meantime. Waters was winding up the interview as Peter Morgan walked into the bus terminal and bought a ticket to San Francisco. He was free at last.

  Chapter 2

  Ted Lee liked working swing shift. He had done it for so long by now that it suited him. It was an old comfortable habit. He worked the four to midnight in General Works, Inspector Detective Lee in the San Francisco police force. He handled robberies and assaults, the usual smorgasbord of criminal activity. Rapes went to the Sex detail. Murders to Homicide. He had worked Homicide for a couple of years in the beginning and hated it. It was too grim for him, the men who made a career of it always seemed strange to him.

  They sat around for hours looking at photographs of deceased victims. Their whole view of life got skewed by having to harden themselves to what they saw. What Ted did was more routine, but to him it seemed much more interesting. Every day was different. He liked the problem-solving aspect of matching criminals to victims. He had been in the police force for twenty-nine years, since he was eighteen. And a detective for nearly twenty, and he was good at what he did. He had worked Credit Card Fraud for a while too, but that seemed too boring. General Works was just his cup of tea, just as the swing shift was. He had been born and raised in San Francisco, right in the heart of Chinatown. His parents had come from Beijing before he was born, and both his grandmothers had come with them. His family was steeped in ancient traditions. His father had worked in a restaurant all his life, his mother was a seamstress. Both his brothers had joined the police force, just as he had, fresh from high school. One was a beat cop in the Tenderloin and didn't want to be more than that, the other was on horses. He outranked both, and they loved to tease him about it. Being a detective was a big deal to him.

  Ted's wife was second-generation Chinese American. Her family was originally from Hong Kong, and owned the restaurant where his father had worked before he retired, which was how Ted had met her. They fell in love at fourteen, and he had never even dated another woman. He wasn't sure what that meant. He wasn't passionately in love with her, hadn't been in years, but he was comfortable with her. They were best friends now, more than lovers. And she was a good woman. Shirley Lee was a nurse in the intensive care unit at San Francisco General Hospital, and saw more victims of violent crimes than he did. They each saw more of their coworkers than they did of each other. They were used to it. He played golf on his day off, or took his mother to buy groceries, or whatever else she needed. Shirley liked to play cards or go shopping with her girlfriends, or get her hair done. They rarely had the same day off, and no longer worried about it. Now that the kids were grown, they had few obligations to each other. They hadn't planned it that way, but they had separate lives, and had been married since they were nineteen. Twenty-eight years.

  Their oldest son had graduated from college the year before, and had moved to New York. The other two boys were still in college, in the University of California system, one in San Diego, and the other at UCLA. None of their three boys wanted to go into the police force, and Ted didn't blame them. It had been the right choice for him, but he wanted something more for them, although the department had been good to him. When he retired, he would have a full pension. He couldn't imagine retiring, although he would have thirty years in the coming year, and lots of his friends had retired long before that. He had no idea what he'd do when he retired. At forty-seven, he didn't want a second career. He still liked his first one. He loved what he did, and the people he did it with. Ted had seen men come and go over the years, some retire, some quit, some killed, some injured. He'd had the same partner for the last ten years, and before that for a few years, they had paired him off with a woman. She had lasted four years, and then moved to Chicago with her husband and joined the force there. He got Christmas cards from her every year, and in spite of his initial reservations, he had liked working with her.

  The partner he'd had before that, Rick Holmquist, had left the force and joined the FBI. They still had lunch once a week, and Rick teased him about his cases. Rick always made it clear to Ted that what he did at the FBI was more important, or at least he thought so. Ted wasn't so sure. From what he could see, the SFPD solved more cases and put more criminals behind bars. A lot of what the FBI did was gathering information, and surveillance, and then other agencies stepped in and took it out of their hands. The Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms guys interfered with Rick a lot of the time, the CIA, the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney, and U.S. Marshals. Most of the time, no one interfered with Ted's cases at the SFPD, un
less the suspect crossed state lines, or committed a federal offense, and then of course, the FBI stepped in.

  Once in a while, he and Rick still got to work on a case together, and Ted always liked that. They had remained close friends in the fourteen years since Rick had left the SFPD, and they still had a lot of respect for each other. Rick Holmquist had gotten divorced five years before, but Ted's marriage to Shirley had never been in question. Whatever they had become, or their relationship had evolved into over the years, it worked for them. Rick was currently in love with a young FBI agent, and talking about getting remarried. Ted loved to tease him about it. Rick loved to pretend he was tough, but Ted knew what a sweet guy he was.

  What Ted loved best about working swing shift, and always had, was the island of peace he found when he got home. The house was quiet, Shirley was asleep. She worked days, and left for work before he got up in the morning. In the old days, when the boys were young, it had worked for them. She dropped them off at school on her way to work, while Ted was still asleep. And he picked them up, and coached them in sports on his days off, whenever he could, or at least attended their games. When he was working, Shirley got home right after he left for work, so the boys were always covered. And when he got home everyone was asleep. It meant he didn't see a lot of the kids, or her, while they were growing up, but it brought in the bacon, and they had almost never needed to pay for a sitter, and never had to worry about day care. Between them, they had covered all their bases. It had taken a toll on them, in the time they hadn't spent together. There had been a time, ten and fifteen years before, when she had bitterly resented the fact that she never saw him. They had argued a lot about it, and eventually made their peace with his hours. They had both tried working days for a while, but they seemed to argue more, and he'd worked nights for a while, and then went back to swing shifts. It suited him.