But it damn well won’t come to that, he was thinking as he calculated how long it would take to drive to the penitentiary and whether the snow would prevent his going that day.
Warkworth Penitentiary was a brutal grey scar seared into the gently rolling farmland of Northumberland County, about three hours’ drive southwest of Ottawa along country highways slick with salt. Green arrived at noon, having been forced to delay his visit for almost a week, not only to untangle the red tape of the Correctional Service of Canada but also to convince his new boss it was part of his job. Managing Neufeld, he realized, was going to require even more finesse than previous bosses.
Although Green had had several discussions with security and medical staff at the penitentiary since Rosten was transferred there ten years earlier, he hadn’t visited in years and was dismayed but not surprised by the tightened security. Warkworth had been conceived fifty years ago as a model of hope and rehabilitation, but its recent troubles with riots, lockdowns, and overcrowding reflected the harsher reality.
As he approached the first exterior gate, the looming twenty-foot perimeter fence with its barbed-wire cap was a stark reminder that, although this was a medium-security facility, it housed over six hundred violent criminals, 40 percent of them lifers. Despite the dire talk of stress among correctional officers, Green was relieved to find the guards at the gate cheerful and jocular as they waved him through. Outbuildings were scattered across sprawling lawns, and in the distance he glimpsed the grassy playgrounds and picnic areas designed to simulate normal family life.
Inside, it was still a place of steel, concrete, menace, and despair.
It took him nearly fifteen minutes to proceed through security, despite being allowed to bypass the straggling line of civilian visitors waiting to see their family and friends on the inside. Finally he was ushered into a small, windowless interview room.
In the week since Marilyn had told him of the letter, his anger had cooled to a slow simmer. The warden had expressed suitable outrage and had promised to investigate how a letter addressed to a victim’s family could have slipped through their scrutiny. Likely a momentary lapse due to overcrowding and overwork.
While Green waited for James Rosten to be summoned from his cell, he wondered what to expect. He hadn’t seen Rosten since his trial, but he knew he’d been severely injured in an assault by fellow inmates at Kingston Penitentiary ten years earlier. His face had been sliced and his spine damaged.
Green remembered him as a driven young man who’d fought for his freedom with every ounce of his considerable brains and energy. Yet, over the years, his letters had become increasingly bitter and desperate, no longer focused on freedom but on revenge. Twenty years of lost life, not to mention his injuries, had surely aged him. Green steeled himself for a shrivelled, hard shell of a man.
Despite that effort, he was not prepared when the automatic door glided open and James Rosten wheeled himself in. With slow, laborious turns he manoeuvred his wheelchair through the narrow space around the table and came to a final stop so close that his toes nearly touched Green’s.
James Rosten was a study in grey. Grey hair, grey skin, grey lifeless eyes. His skin hung in crepe folds on his shrunken frame. A pale, glistening scar ran from his temple to his jaw, twisting his face into a parody of mirth. His hands were bony, his cheekbones sharp and angular, and his eyes now so deep-set they seemed to retreat inside his skull. Green searched them for a glimmer of the passion and fight he’d once displayed, but only defeat gazed back at him. Green felt the last vestiges of his anger slide away. He extended his hand across the corner of the table toward the man, whose hands were encased in fingerless gloves to provide better grip on the wheels.
Rosten, however, merely stared at his extended hand, resolutely still. “Can’t say it’s a pleasure, Inspector. What do you want?”
“How have you been, James?”
“Just hunky dory. I love it here, as well you know. So richly deserved.”
In the silence, Green could hear the wheeze of Rosten’s breath in his lungs. He relinquished his plans for subtlety. “James … You have to let it go. It’s over. Your appeals are done; there is nothing further to be served by pointing fingers. It’s time to think about what’s next. For everyone, including you.”
“Ah yes. The boundless, limitless possibilities of my future. Reinstatement at the university, reunion with my wife, a warm, fuzzy rapprochement with my kids. I’m a grandfather, by the way. Did you know that? Of course, I only learned that by reading the birth announcements online.”
“Plenty of people have to start over.”
“People who have paid their dues, who deserve what they got.” He pressed his eyes shut. “Oh, fuck it. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. But at least now the family is safe from that monster. Julia is safe. Although I suppose …” He opened his eyes again and gave a twisted smile. “I keep forgetting she’s over forty now. Hardly Lucas Carmichael’s type. But does she have children?”
Green felt a chill. He had no intention of giving this man any new fuel to feed his fantasies. He had no idea whether Julia had ever married or had children, but it was safest to shake his head.
“Good. Gordon?”
“Neither Gordon nor Julia live in the country.”
“How wise of them. But now they’re safe.” He shut his eyes again and drew in a weary breath. “Finally.”
“Yes they are.” Green leaned forward. “Time to let it go. Time to let them go.”
Rosten kept his eyes shut. His frail body twitched. He breathed in. Out. Slowly he nodded. “You’re right, time to let it all go. I’ve done what I could, to no avail, for myself or for them. I won’t bother them anymore, if that’s what you came about.”
Green sensed a true change in the man. A final laying down of the sword he had brandished for so long. Once the battle barricades were gone, Green felt the pull of a question he had never dared broach before.
“James? Why are you so convinced it was Lucas Carmichael?”
Rosten’s face grew rigid and his eyes flew open. Angry and accusatory, the James Rosten of old. “I sent you all those fucking letters! Didn’t you read them?”
How should I answer that? Green thought. He had read them, at least at first, but had tried to dismiss them as self-serving rants. After all, he’d rarely met a con who didn’t protest his innocence and blame even the most unlikely of suspects. Instead, he didn’t answer, but merely waited.
Finally the belligerence in Rosten’s face faded. He edged his chair even further forward, so that his knees touched Green’s. He stared squarely into Green’s eyes. “I have one big advantage over you; I know I didn’t do it. So I looked around to see who could have. I remembered seeing a car like Lucas’s near the cottage that day, and Julia’s behaviour toward him got me thinking. This wasn’t a random, serial killer–style attack by a stranger in the street. This person knew her. He knew she took my course, knew I was giving her private tutoring.” He faltered only briefly over the phrase. “Maybe he’d even seen her in my car. This person had access to her papers, knew I had a cottage near Arnprior, and knew that dumping her body there would point suspicion toward me. So I asked myself, who would know all this? It’s a classic stepfather scenario — man befriends single mother in order to have access to her children.”
It was, of course, a scenario that the OPP detectives had investigated at the time, even after charging Rosten. “But Jackie was not a child. She was twenty years old, not the usual prey for a pedophile.”
“But she had been a child when Carmichael came on the scene. You know yourself that abuse goes on for years in these cases. Maybe it had ended but she was threatening to blow the whistle on him.”
Another theory they had all considered early in the investigation. Considered and rejected. Green thought back over the details. Julia had made some dark hints but balked at specifics, and