Free Blood of the Lamb by Michael Lister

some notes on the case.
    Making a list of the suspects, I considered each of them carefully.
    Paul Register, Dexter Freeman, Cedric Porter, Bobby Earl and/ or Bunny Caldwell, Abdul Muhammin, Roger Coel, Theo Malcolm, Tim Whitfield, and DeAndré Stone.
    The Caldwells were the most likely of the lot.
    Even if they didn’t actually kill their daughter, they could be behind it. Why didn’t DeAndré come back in with them? Why have security if you’re not going to guard your daughter when she’s surrounded by several hundred convicted felons?
    And then it hit me like the hardest punch in boxing—the one you don’t see coming.
    What if Bobby Earl gave DeAndré the night off precisely because he didn’t want his daughter to be guarded? Could he be that wicked? Was this crime that calculated and premeditated?
    I’d have to figure out a way to ask Bobby Earl, but for now I could start with the suspects at my door.
    I found Abdul Muhammin at his post in the chapel library, preparing to open it to the inmate population. Like most inmate orderlies in the prison, he had a proprietary interest in what he believed to be his library, but that was okay, because it motivated him to do a good job. Only on occasion did I have to remind him that the people using the library were more important than the library itself.
    “Bet we’ll be busy today. Everybody wantin’ to see the scene of the crime,” he said, shaking his head to himself. “Sick bastards. I still can’t believe it happened.”
    “Me neither,” I said.
    “It’s all they’re talkin’ about on the pound.”
    “I bet.”
    I sat on the edge of a folding table across from the small desk where he continued to stamp cards and insert them into books.
    “How did it happen?” he asked.
    Muhammin was a thick, light-skinned black man in his late twenties. He had bulk, but no muscle, and he was fleshy, almost puffy, without being fat.
    “I’m still not sure,” I said. “You have any ideas?”
    “Has to be Bobby’s bitch, doesn’t it?” he asked, and I could tell he wasn’t even conscious of how demeaning he was being to Bunny. In fact, I was sure to him he wasn’t being. In his world the sky is blue, water is wet, and women are mamas, bitches, or whores. “Who else could’ve done it?”
    Like most libraries, this quiet room smelled of dust, glue, and ink, but unlike most libraries, there was a monotonous uniformity to the materials it held. Try as I did to compensate with the small budget I was given each year, the majority of books and tapes that lined the shelves were donated by puritanical people with a particular point of view—for the evangelistic compulsion to convert and proselytize was felt most strongly by those most conservative. Ironically, those with the least to say usually say the most and the most outwardly religious were often the most theologically unsophisticated.
    “What about Bobby Earl?” I asked.
    His face wrinkled into a slack-jawed mask of incredulity, as if what I had suggested defied a natural law that everyone knew to be as certain as gravity.
    “Bobby’s no child killer,” he said. “His conversion was real—I saw it—but even before he was born-again or whatever y’all call it, he was no killer. People either are or they ain’t, and he ain’t.”
    “Did you get to talk to him?” I asked.
    He shook his head and frowned. “After what happened, I didn’t even try.”
    An unopened box from Bobby Earl Caldwell Ministries sat next to a rack of pamphlets and tracts, and I wondered again about the complex motivations of a man like him—why he did what he did the way he did it, but soon found myself contemplating the more pertinent subject of what a man like him was capable of doing.
    “I was surprised to see you without your koofi,” I said, attempting to make it sound like curiosity and not accusation.
    “Just showin’ a little respect,” he said. “Keepin’ everything on the down low.”
    I nodded as if I not only