Free Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery by Clare O'Donohue Page A

you were bringing me my books,” he said. “I didn’t want to believe it.”
    He gestured for me to sit, and I did, though I think it would have been more comfortable to stand. The seats were small, round metal stools, cold and hard.
    Brick immediately started looking through the bag. I’d brought his entire list, ten books, ranging from the latest Stephen King to a biography on Cleopatra. “Damn,” he laughed. “You got me everything I asked for.”
    “Neighborhood bookstore.”
    “I can’t pay you back, you know.”
    “Give me a good interview.”
    “Shit, I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”
    I laughed. “Nice to see I’m not the only one who can be bought.”
    “What?”
    “Nothing. I’m working on another show, something I don’t really want to work on, because they’re paying me more than my daily rate.”
    “That don’t sound so bad.”
    “It’s rich people talking about how rich they are,” I said, glad tohave a place to vent. “It’s going to be one of those ridiculously expensive restaurants. The way they talk about how exclusive it will be, it’s like they’re figuring out who gets a seat on Noah’s Ark.”
    “You gotta do what you gotta do, Kate,” he said. “It’s got to be tough, life as a widow. You lose the man you love and have to make your own way in the world. I admire that.”
    I don’t generally know what to say to compliments. And since my relationship with Frank hadn’t exactly been a perfect love story, I didn’t wear the title of “widow” too heavily around people who knew me. Sometimes I found myself opening up about my life with virtual strangers—the man at the grocery checkout, the woman who cleaned my teeth—because I could be sad without consequences.
    “I miss him,” I admitted. “We were together a long time, since I was teenager.”
    “Life’s like that, isn’t it? Something you do as a kid stays with you, defines who you are. It’s not easy.”
    “We all have our burdens.”
    “You talk to Tim Campbell?” he asked.
    “I did.”
    “You get what you needed?”
    “The start of it. We still have two more sit-down interviews with you and Tim, and we’ve been approved to get footage of both of you in your cells, and at a couple of other spots in the prison.”
    “He tell you a good story?”
    “Better than yours. He’s more willing to talk about himself.”
    Brick’s eyes narrowed. Not angry, but sizing me up. “Yeah, but all I want from you is books.”
    As he spoke, a shouting match broke out between two of the inmates. One had apparently brushed up against the other’s fiancée. Guards moved between them, and the men were removed. Their visitors—an older couple who was visiting the man who had pushed his chair, and the fiancée and three-year-old daughter of the other man—were escorted out the visitors door.
    “I drove three hours to get here,” the fiancée was saying to the guard. “And I only got to spend ten minutes with him. Can’t you just let things cool down and bring him back for a minute?”
    “Not today,” the guard said. “Next time tell your man to behave himself.”
    “If he could behave himself he wouldn’t be here,” she said.
    The guard just kept moving her toward the door.
    When I looked back at Brick, he was laughing. “Never a dull moment,” he said.

    Andres and Victor waited for me by the van.
    “Everything go okay with that sociopath?” Andres asked as I approached.
    “I was just giving him some books.”
    “You don’t want to get too chummy with these guys. They prey on lonely women.”
    “We’re back at the restaurant tomorrow,” I said, ignoring him. “Eleven a.m. call. And Victor, I expect you to be on time, with everything in working order.”
    Victor frowned, but I could see Andres smiling.
    “I’m sorry about the mic,” Victor said. “It just—”
    I waved him away. “Things happen; equipment breaks down. It’s just that someone hires me, and I hire Andres, and he