Free The Wrong Man by David Ellis

inthe board game, but for all I knew he was in a faraway place, envisioning himself as Sir Lancelot to Shauna’s Guinevere.
    You’d think that his mere presence at Boyd was an acknowledgment of Tom’s mental illness, but it wasn’t. The state wasn’t stupid. Boyd housed all kinds of people who presented problems to jailhouses, ranging from patients with communicable diseases, such as HIV, to notorious individuals deserving of segregation, such as gang leaders or police officers, to those with your basic “behavioral” problems.
    Tom Stoller fell into the last category. He wasn’t mentally ill. He was a “behavioral” problem. Yeah. Sure. Once they convicted him, he’d go to a penitentiary and receive somewhat decent psychological services. But for now, especially with an insanity defense looming, the state wouldn’t treat him as anything but a problem inmate who could be kept compliant if they drugged him up.
    Tom double-jumped two of Shauna’s checkers. “Ooh, I was hoping you wouldn’t do that,” she groaned.
    Tom looked up at her and stared, expressionless, in the inappropriate way of a child. Even when Shauna smiled and broke eye contact, as would any adult, he held his stare on her.
    Shauna dutifully jumped one of Tom’s checkers. “Take
that
,” she said.
    “I had girlfriends,” Tom said. I almost jumped out of my chair. It was the first time Tom had ever volunteered anything personal.
    “I’ll
bet
you did.” Shauna winked at him. Bless her heart, she likewise recognized the significance of the moment but played the whole thing casually.
    Tom stared back down at the checkerboard, and Shauna snuck a peek in my direction. Before too much time had passed, and the moment was entirely lost, she said, “Was there one in particular? Usually there’s one special one.”
    “Jenny. Jenny, but she didn’t want to…” Tom dropped his head and started mumbling.
    Shauna waited for a moment. “She didn’t want—”
    “I can’t think of the name of the movie.” Tom shook his head harshly, like he was removing cobwebs. “In Somalia. She didn’t like it.”
    “The mov—”
    “It made her sad. She didn’t like… suffering.”
    I knew what he meant. It was a graphically violent film about the American Special Forces operation in Mogadishu that went south and got a bunch of our elite soldiers killed.
    “Black Hawk Down,”
I said, from across the room.
    Tom whipped his head around at me. With one violent thrust, he jumped up and backhanded the checkerboard clear across the room. Instinctively, Shauna pushed her chair backward, and I got to my feet. I raised my hand toward the security camera to indicate we didn’t want or need intervention by the Corrections guards.
    Tom stood, frozen, his gaze lost somewhere in a memory. He slowly turned and walked over to the corner, where he took a seat and sat silently, stoic except for the familiar tremors. Shauna and I looked at each other, speechless.
    “She didn’t want me to fight,” he finally whispered.

13.
    The Starboard Room in the city’s Maritime Club was at full capacity over lunch, thirty tables with eight guests at each, as the U.S. Secretary of Labor droned on about reform of collective-bargaining laws and diverse workplaces in the “New America.”
    New America is right, thought Randall Manning, president, CEO, and sole shareholder of Global Harvest International, a privately held company located eighty miles south of the city. Normally he wouldn’t give the time of day to a speech on the topic of diversity, of all things, but he needed to be in town on other business and welcomed the excuse. And he couldn’t deny enjoying the prestige of the invitation, a seat among the elite. He could allow himself that much; he hadn’t experienced a great deal of enjoyment in his life of late.
    As the labor secretary continued through his speech, Manning leaned over to the man sitting next to him, his lawyer, Bruce McCabe. “Where,” he said in a