Trust Me (Last Stand #1)(5)
Author: Brenda Novak

Skye glanced at the clock. She was still rattled, afraid to step foot out of the house but, at the same time, determined to make sure Burke didn’t hurt anyone else. She couldn’t miss an opportunity to gain public support for those who felt lost or violated. “Of course. I’ll reschedule my class for next Monday or Tuesday and be there as soon as possible.”

Although it seemed to David as if the inverted delta where Skye lived, with its myriad natural and man-made channels, belonged in a world all its own, it was only an hour southwest of Sacramento, where she’d lived when she was attacked. Sherman Island was almost as close to the city of San Quentin, where one of the most famous prisons in the world existed in shocking contrast to the picturesque shores of San Francisco Bay and the affluent area surrounding it.

Burke was locked away in San Quentin, along with more than 5,000 other men, behind stone walls that were over a century and a half old. Notorious for its menacing appearance, as well as its green gas chamber, this prison provided a home for the worst of the worst. And David knew its bloody reputation was well-earned. Even death row was crowded. San Quentin housed around 600 condemned inmates. The rest of its population consisted of lifers and a lower percentage of men who, like Burke, were in for less time and a lesser crime.

As the police-issue sedan bumped against yet another drawbridge, David frowned at the prospect of seeing Burke again. He’d worked tough cases in the past, but he’d somehow managed to crack most of the big ones. Sometimes he got lucky and the right piece of evidence fell into his lap; other times it was sheer determination and hard work, his refusal to leave any stone unturned, that made the difference. Occasionally it was intuition. But nothing had brought him the answers he needed on the three young women who’d been murdered in homes along the American River, and the frustration was beginning to wear on him. Particularly now that Burke was getting out.

Calling ahead to make sure he could arrange a visitation, he turned off River Road onto 4 West. He wasn’t sure why he felt compelled to speak to Burke face-to-face. He hadn’t seen him since court, but he suspected Skye’s attacker would be unlikely to share anything new. In the intervening years, David had tried to communicate with him more than once. Burke had refused to meet with him but accepted a handful of telephone calls. In each conversation, he’d played innocent, as if he could fool David as easily as he did everyone else.

But futile though it seemed, David couldn’t let Burke disappear into society without one last attempt to engage him, to see if he could gain some scrap of information that might finally crack the difficult cases, now long cold, in Sacramento.

For Skye. For the others.

David hit the brakes and barely kept his coffee from tipping over as he ran into the bumper-to-bumper traffic clogging the San Rafael Bridge. The Bay Area was almost always congested. He preferred the slower pace of life in Sacramento. Although his parents and older sister—who’d recently divorced again and moved home—still lived in San Jose, he’d left two years after graduating from San Jose State with a B.S. in Forensic Science. He’d planned on becoming a scientist, but eighteen months of working on fiber analysis as an intern had turned out to be too tedious for him. That was why he’d changed his aspirations and become a police officer instead. He needed a job that allowed him to move around, change his days, talk to people—and he enjoyed the constant challenge.

Just as he reached the other side of the bridge, the fog cleared enough to show the prison, sitting off to one side, seemingly as benign as a college campus.

But the electrified perimeter fence, topped with barbed and razor wire, and the forbidding machinegun towers, gave the reality of the place away as he drew closer. The somber air that pervaded the grounds hung over him far more densely than any fog as he drove into visitor parking, located a space and got out of his car.

There was something singularly hopeless about San Quentin. It had the state’s only gas chamber and nearly twice as many inmates as the prison was originally designed to accommodate. Then there was the presence of so many notorious cold-blooded killers—Kevin Cooper, convicted and sentenced to death for the hatchet-and-knife massacre of the Ryen Family; Richard Allen Davis, who’d kidnapped and murdered Polly Klaas; Charles Ng, who’d tortured and murdered eleven people; Richard Ramirez, “The Night Stalker.” Cary Stayner, Brandon Wilson, Scott Peterson. The list went on and on, setting this place apart from any other on Earth. Sprawling over 435 acres, San Quentin was a contained city of the dammed, complete with its own zip code. According to anyone who’d been there, that was Hell, California 94964.

While he passed through the outer gate, the inner gate and the security checkpoints, David considered how living in such a place might affect a man like Burke. No doubt it’d fill him with indignation and rage. He’d thought he was too good to get caught. And once he’d been hauled in to stand trial, he’d expected to outmaneuver the system so he wouldn’t have to pay for his crimes.

After David had firmly established his identity and the purpose for his visit, a female corrections officer showed him into a small visitor’s booth. “Just a minute,” she said and disappeared, probably to follow up with whoever had been ordered to bring Burke out of his cell.

As David waited on a hard metal chair in the cold, windowless room, he wondered if Burke would refuse to see him—but doubted it. Oliver would be too eager to let David know that he’d slipped beneath the net.

Sure enough, a door opened on the other side of the thick glass that divided the room, and Burke strode in. About five foot nine, with a medium build and sandy-blond hair, he looked thinner but more muscular than when David had seen him in the courtroom. He wasn’t wearing handcuffs or shackles. With only six days until his release, he’d be a fool to break any of the rules and everyone recognized the unlikelihood of that happening.

It wasn’t here that Burke would misbehave—it was out there, after he’d set up the veneer of normalcy that shrouded his sick intentions.

With a polite nod, he sat down and picked up the phone that would enable them to communicate. “Guess you heard the good news, eh?”

He was gloating, just as David had predicted. “I did,” he said, holding a handset to his own ear.

“That’s what playing by the rules will get you.”

“Or snitching on a fellow inmate,” David said mildly.

A dark cloud passed over Burke’s even features. With his ice-blue eyes and delicate, almost feminine features, he seemed younger than his thirty-six years, more like a harmless yuppie than a convict. His nonthreatening appearance definitely worked in his favor; at least it had with the jurors at his trial, who’d deliberated for hours before reaching a verdict. Even with a solid DNA profile proving it was Burke’s blood on Skye’s sheets, his family—the whole community—couldn’t accept that a successful dentist with a loving wife and daughter and hundreds of devoted patients was capable of such a heinous crime.