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  “Now, just when the witnesses began to file out of the death house, they were treated the same way: grabbed by the guards and several Rangers and taken back in, including Cardinal de la Cruz from New York. And I can tell you this—none of them much liked it.

  “At this point, all we know is what you have already been told. For some extraordinary reason, the chemicals injected into Rona Leigh Glueck did not have the effect—”

  He stopped. The original guy back in the station had the latest news. His voice was quaking.

  “I am interrupting our man at the prison. We have just received word that … apparently the ambulance carrying Rona Leigh Glueck to the hospital…” He began mumbling to someone. He came back. “That ambulance has disappeared.”

  It was harder for me to hear him because of ripping steel and the buzzing in my brain. Essentially, a reporter in the caravan of police cars heading to the hospital said that the lead car, ours, was fired upon as the ambulance sped off. Several police cars crashed into each other, but as yet there was no word of fatalities or injuries.

  Then dead air. Ripping metal. Chain saw making the noise it makes. My head was splitting. Radio again. There was to be a press conference; a spokesman from the Texas Rangers would be speaking in a few minutes.

  Scraggs said, “Wish we had a TV. Love to see how poor Clarence is going to find his way through this one.”

  The crowbar managed an opening in the side of the car, but it wasn’t large enough for Scraggs to fit through. They took their crowbars to my side. They got the door off, but when I tried to move I couldn’t. Not without losing a foot.

  “I’m wedged in.” I pulled a little. I said, “Shit.”

  Scraggs asked me if my leg was broken.

  “No, but it will be if anyone tries to get me out.”

  Scraggs said, “Then no avoiding Jaws of Life. Fuck me.”

  A cop said, “We got one comin’, sir.”

  A very noisy machine. I thought my head might break in half. When Scraggs was freed he came around to my side of the car and talked to me while they put my side of the cruiser to the rack.

  I said, “Scraggs, you don’t need to stay. You’ve got a lot to do.”

  “I ain’t leavin’ till you’re out.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Poppy, are you comfortable talking? Can you answer a few questions that are killin’ me?”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I can talk, Scraggs.”

  “Poppy, what the hell went down here? Somebody substitute water for the chemicals?”

  “No. She couldn’t have faked what she went through. And if she got smaller amounts than what was intended, a shitload of people are in collusion. Impossible. The nurse and the technician were a couple of robots from the system, not conspirators. Brought in from Huntsville. So that leaves antidotes. She was given antidotes over a long period of time so her system could withstand the poisons.”

  “Could that be?”

  “No, but I can’t think of anything else. All I know is she was able to resist the fatal effects of the chemicals. Soon as I get back to DC, to the lab I set up myself, I intend to find out what she got. That’ll be while you’re here figuring out how and who.”

  Scraggs caught my eye just as mine caught his. Neither of us could speak in that moment. I chose to be the one to fill in the silence.

  “The ambulance. It was the governor who said to call an ambulance.”

  More silence. Scraggs filled in this one. “I think the governor was operating on whatever instinct he’d got left.”

  I finished his thought. “They got lucky, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever the plan had been to get the warden or maybe someone over him to call an ambulance proved unnecessary.”

  He said, “Fuck me.” Then he looked up at the frantic cops. “I suppose we ain’t got the ambulance yet, or you’d have informed me.”

  One of them was holding a cell phone to his ear. “’Fraid that’s correct, sir. But we will. We got men with bloodhounds out, we got helicopters, and we got one helluva buncha infrared equipment all over the place.”

  He said to me, “How can anyone have pulled such a thing off?”

  I smiled at him. “What you call your inside job, Scraggs.”

  The cop on the phone said to us, “We’re doin’ a head count right now, I’ll tell you that. Soon as someone from that prison turns up missing, we’ll know who.”

  I said, “He’s already missing. The guard in the ambulance. I heard him volunteer to go. Harley Shank.” I must have moaned.

  “What?”

  “I need a couple of Tylenols.”

  Scraggs said, “You sure your ankle ain’t busted?”

  “No. My head hurts.”

  “I thought the problem was with your leg.”

  “Actually, I can’t feel my leg.”

  “Shit.” Then he said, “Boys, you heard the Agent? You got that name? Harley Shank?”

  “We got it.”

  “Poppy, who put him up to it?”

  “The chaplain. He had the goddamn scripture set and ready to go.”

  “The husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked up again from his squat position. “Rona Leigh’s husband accounted for?”

  “Bein’ questioned sir. Right now. Took him directly to Austin.”

  Scraggs said to me, “Our boys think just like the FBI, how about that?” He asked the phone cop, “What do we know about that boy in the ambulance? Shank.”

  “Chaplain’s cousin, sir. Got him the job.”

  Scraggs and I made eye contact. I knew he’d say fuck me, and he did. Then he said, “Where the fuck can that ambulance have gone?”

  I said, “Maybe it could fly.”

  “It probably could.”

  I said, “Did they get those people on the overpass?”

  His brow knit. “What people?” The cops who leaned into my window were staring at me.

  “Scraggs, the people who dropped the blocks.”

  I was the only one who’d seen three people drop the concrete blocks. Scraggs had been concentrating on his driving. He and the rest of the cops had assumed they’d been tossed from the ersatz ambulance. But then again, someone else had thought we’d been fired on.

  I assured them that the blocks had been dropped from above. That sent a couple more cops to their cell phones.

  Scraggs said, “We got ourselves a full-fledged conspiracy, don’t we?”

  “I’d say.”

  The front end of the car was lifted off my foot. I gritted my teeth and wiggled it. Squashed but nothing broken.

  Not long after, a doctor at the Waco Hospital said, “Couple weeks on crutches, ma’am, is all. Wrenched real bad. Just stay off it.”

  I told him to dig out his Ace bandages and wrap my ankle up extra tight. I’d limp.

  * * *

  That night, after he’d spent a few moments with his scotch in the library, the governor ordered everyone arrested who had witnessed the failed execution, including the police. Cooler heads prevailed, cooler heads who wondered aloud to him who then would do the arresting. He said, “Me.” To lighten things up, the cooler heads wondered aloud if the cardinal would make bail. The governor told the cooler heads they were fired, but that was nothing unusual so the cooler heads persevered, suggesting to the governor that he would have to arrest himself. The governor announced he was going to bed and he’d deal with it in the morning.

  However, the Texas Rangers did detain everyone who was in the death house, including the warden, including the cardinal. Even the corrections officers were detained, along with all the workers and the roused off-duty guards. Replaced by various people within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, of which there are over a hundred thousand employees, the detained horde was conveyed to Fort Hood, where there was plenty of room. The cardinal was made to understand that it was necessary, and he
counseled everyone else that they would just have to cooperate. They all did, too, except Gary Scott. He’d quickly recovered from the crack to his head. He needed a beer and he needed his lawyer. He wasn’t given access to either.

  9

  When I got back to DC, my director was all abeam. “Poppy,” he said, “your instincts run deep.”

  Then he went off on an ecstatic riff as if he were practicing for a news conference. “Because of you we end up with a legitimate presence in an investigation of even greater magnitude than the last Texas prison break. Don’t have to barge through any doors insisting that the escapee must have crossed state lines.”

  I started to say that I was glad to be of help, so to speak. He wasn’t hearing.

  “Poppy, we’re the ones who defined the direction this case should take because we had an agent right there. We had an agent who predicted that testing the syringe and IV line would certainly show the traces of the three chemicals used to execute a condemned prisoner.”

  “Actually, it was—”

  “Even before that was confirmed we saved the Texas authorities a lot of time by eliminating tampering. Gave them a sharper focus. We’ve got a huge state police force who have had to come crawling to us for once.”

  I hated to burst his bubble. Drawing attention to the success of his agency was one of his jobs, the all-important political one. But he tended to get carried away when his personal security was enmeshed. “Sir, the only person we’ve eliminated was the UPS man who delivered the chemicals.”

  He said, “Please tell me the drugs were not delivered by UPS.”

  “Sorry.”

  He stopped his lion’s walk back and forth in front of the giant window overlooking his kingdom. He stood behind his chair and leaned down on the back of it. “But the key is, they have the ambulance, and our guys found it before theirs did. So don’t go making this out to be even more complicated than it is. You know as well as I do that people don’t drop off the face of the earth. We’ll find her.”

  “I think if we can—”

  “She’s on an island yet to be charted. Can’t be a very big one because the borders were sealed so fast. We’ve got that chaplain, we’ve got good IDs on the guys in the ambulance, we’re learning everything there is to know about Harley Shank. Also, three people lugged concrete blocks onto an overpass above a very busy highway. Someone will come up with something on them sooner or later.”

  I got directly into his face. “Sir, someone’s received her and we have no idea who.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got our work cut out for us. Nothing new there. But we’re all around her.”

  * * *

  Three days later, our work still remained cut out. No trace of Rona Leigh or the conspirators. But it was important that we’d found the ambulance. The fake ambulance.

  Our dredgers located it at the bottom of the Leon River, three miles from where the river emptied into Belton Lake. At the lake itself, the Rangers found the remains of a campsite, an elaborate campsite several witnesses had noticed during the week leading up to the execution. Couple of guys with what they said was a boat under a blue tarp. Supposed to be working on the boat, but they decided to fish from the banks instead—feeling too lazy to try to get the boat in working order despite offers of help. They were generous with their beer supply and fellow fishermen enjoyed their company before heading along to their own favorite fishing spots.

  The two men fished and fished, waited and waited, while their fake ambulance sat primed under the tarp and ready to go.

  Most of the ambulances in Texas are old Cadillacs. This old Cadillac had been purchased on the Internet via a money order. In the investigation business, one of the most dreaded terms is money order.

  The search of the campsite area was not unlike an archaeological dig. Under layers of dirt and leaves the Texas Rangers found hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, drills, sanding devices, protractors, paintbrushes. They found more sophisticated items: a welding unit, a soldering machine, a drill press, and a compressor. And, obviously, a generator. Building an ambulance out of an old Cadillac is strikingly not a simple thing.

  The ambulance was driven into the Leon River and sunk to its silty bottom eight minutes after I’d watched its taillights go out. The clock on Scraggs’s dashboard had stopped exactly eight minutes before the one on the ambulance dashboard had done the same. The tracks through the swampy ground from where it left the road had been easy to find and follow. The ambulance never stopped until its front wheels were in the water, whereupon the occupants got out and transferred to another vehicle. Then the ambulance was pushed the rest of the way into the river.

  The tire tracks leading back out of the swamp were left by standard-issue police van tires. Witnesses said they’d seen a police van in the area earlier. Yet another fake vehicle. Which left us with one really big clue: The conspirators were incredibly industrious and not short on funds.

  The police that night had checked every car, truck, RV, motorcycle, bicycle, scooter, in-line pair of skates, baby carriage—anything on wheels. But they didn’t check each other. Rona Leigh’s private police van had clear sailing through the roadblocks while the entire highway patrol force, the Rangers, and a million good-time Charlies with rifles went hunting for an ambulance. All over the state that night, people being rushed to hospitals suffered setbacks.

  The director asked me a question over and over just for something to ask: “How far a drive from Gatesville to the Mexican border?”

  “Seven hours to Laredo, I know that for a fact. That would be direct, too. But even though it’s a damn long border, all the crossing points were closed down way before seven hours post escape. More like seven minutes. Besides, sir, you can take a bath in the Rio Grande and no one bothers you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. Rona Leigh is not in Mexico. If she’s alive, she’s got to be in some major medical center with a couple of brilliant doctors who were in on the escape. And we know that can’t be. Sir, she was in bad, bad shape. So I don’t know what to think. Whether she’s dead or alive, the very clever people who sprung her have found as ingenious a place to hide her as their manner of saving her. We have to devote ourselves to figuring out the motivation for getting her out. Figure out the motivation, find your perp. Follow the money and all that. Last year, it took me two entire weeks to find out who was stealing the cardinal’s money because his motivation was so unanticipated.”

  “Poppy, can there be any truth to the theory that she was spirited away? That she played no part in the escape?”

  “No. She acted the part set forth for her. Rona Leigh would have done anything to stay alive, just like every other convict on death row. Even if it meant allowing herself to come within an inch of death. She’d risk possible death to avoid certain death.”

  He began pacing again. “With each day that passes, more and more people are using the word miracle to explain her escape.”

  “I know.” The People photographer and Frank, the reporter, had chronicled the miracle. “Sir, I heard Dan Rather, straight-face, discuss the role of angels in her disappearance. He didn’t say escape, he said disappearance.”

  My director sighed. “Switch to Brokaw. Rather lost his marbles years ago. Poppy…”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How the fuck was this possible?”

  “If I had her blood, I’d know.”

  Suddenly, he needed a little denial for comfort. “The blood was lost.”

  “No, sir, the blood was poured down the drain. But we have to stop worrying about how. We’ve got to concentrate on why. Then we’ll get to who. After that, how.”

  “I know where our concentration lies. I thought we’d have a route when the ransom note arrived. I can’t believe we don’t have one.”

  “None of us can.”

  Offers to pay any ransom had come in from all over the world. Came from people who thought they’d be saving the life of an angel, not an ax murderer.

 
I stood up. I put my weight on my ankle. It felt like my dentist was drilling the bone. I needed the practice, though. I smiled. “Permission to return to Texas and find Rona Leigh Glueck. Ten days, max.”

  Another sigh. “The second the goddamned press conference ends, go.”

  He hated press conferences. I loved them. Sometimes an astute reporter’s question is one no one’s asked yet. Another profession where you can do something intelligent even though you flunked chemistry.

  But no such luck. Once our representative gave the findings on the syringe and the tubing—that Rona Leigh had received enough poison to kill an elephant—there wasn’t a question from them that we hadn’t asked ourselves. The reporters’ incredulity matched our own. As in, “Her blood samples are missing?”

  I spent a few hours with Joe before I went back to Texas. We had dinner at my favorite restaurant. His apartment. He re-created a Texas barbecue with Stubbs barbecue sauce. Spike the cat finally became my friend because he discovered how much he loved brisket.

  Post-sex talk is about equal to press conference questions when it comes to unforeseen illumination. Right after Joe stretched and settled into his pillow, he said, “Poppy, what didn’t jibe?”

  “None of it jibed.”

  “Think of the physical details. Rona Leigh walks into the death chamber. From there, take each step she took. Watch and listen.”

  I brought up images of each step she took, manacled steps, then each step the others took once she was through taking steps.

  “Holy shit.” I’d already thought of something not jibing as it had been happening.

  Joe said, “Oh, boy. What?”

  “The nurse swabbed Rona Leigh’s arm with alcohol.”

  I sat up and leaned on Joe so I could see his clock. Four-ten A.M. Two o’clock Scraggs’s time.

  I scrambled out of bed, located my purse, and found his card with his home phone.