Free The Body and the Blood by Michael Lister

outside the box’ thing.”
    I shrugged. “Maybe.”
    The flickering candles backlit the elderly woman as she prayed, making her movements clipped and jerky, highlighting her deformities, and she looked like a minor character in an old, under-cranked horror film.
    “Did you go around to the cells prior to the service?”
    He nodded. “Always do. Walk by each one so that everyone can see me. Let the regulars know I’m there. They’re usually open.”
    He was right. Though the quad door always remained locked—or was supposed to—the cell doors for PM usually stayed open. In theory PM inmates weren’t a threat to each other or the staff as much as they were threatened by the rest of the population. The only reason one of G-dorm’s quads was used for PM inmates was because of how easy it was to isolate them from the rest of the population.
    “They were closed and locked last night because of the threat I received,” I said.
    “Didn’t do any good, did it?”
    “You see anything strange when you walked by Menge’s cell?”
    He shook his head. Didn’t see anything. It was dark.”
    “Darker than the other cells?”
    He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess it was. I really didn’t think about it at the time.”
    “But you looked in?”
    He nodded. “It was empty.”
    “Did you look at the floor?”
    He shook his head. “I never walk right next to the doors. So I can only see from about the waist up. Plus the windowpane is so narrow.”
    I looked back at the elderly woman in the front. Even at this distance and in candlelight I could see that the fingers fondling the rosary were disfigured and arthritic.
    “Anybody else outside the cells?”
    “The man with you. Officer, the white one, and—”
    “Potter?”
    “Yeah. He was all over the place. Seemed hyper or upset about something. And a woman.”
    “A woman ?”
    The elderly woman looked back at us for the first time.
    “Yeah,” he whispered.
    “Sorry,” I said. “This is the first I’ve heard of a woman being down there. Was she an officer? In uniform? What?”
    “No. She had on pants and a blouse.”
    “Was she staff? Wearing a DC name badge?”
    “Not that I saw, but I only saw her from a distance.”
    “What’d she look like?”
    His face contorted into a questioning frown. “Not sure exactly. I try not to look at attractive women too closely.”
    “So she was attractive?”
    “Yeah. Kind of exotic. Cuban maybe. Do they grow this far north?”
    “And this was all prior to Inspector Daniels and myself coming in?”
    “Just before.”
    “What about the flyer? How long you been using it?”
    “Couple of weeks.”
    “Who printed it?” I asked.
    “I did. On my computer. Why?”
    “One announcing the murder looked identical to it.”
    “How could an inmate do that?”
    “Not sure,” I said with a shrug. “Maybe one of the inmates in the PRIDE printing program did it for him. Even so, don’t know how he’d get it into PM. Don’t know how any of it was done at the moment.”
    “Then you’re wasting a lot of valuable time.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “How can you hope to figure out who did it if you don’t even know how it was done?”

Chapter Ten
     
    “I still can’t figure out how it was done,” Pete Fortner, the institutional inspector was saying. “I mean, it seems impossible. He’s alone inside a locked cell.”
    Tom Daniels and I were sitting across from Pete in his office inside the security building of the institution. Tom had just given Pete the butt-chewing of his correctional life for not taking the flyer about the murder in PM seriously, and to make up for his negligence Pete was now trying to be helpful.
    “It’s just impossible,” Pete added.
    Daniels nodded. “That’s what I’ll put in my report, Pete. Inspector Fortner says it’s impossible.”
    A short, pudgy man with unruly hair and a bushy mustache, Pete Fortner wore glasses, which he blinked behind a lot, out-of-date and too-tight slacks, and black