Red Rum: A Rosie Casket Mystery R.M. Wild (inspirational books .txt) 📖

“Relax,” I said and put a dime on the counter.

“Number B-2,” Fitzgerald said.

“Thank you.”

Beneath the windows in the back of the library, five computers, all beige and boxy sat atop a round table.

“Did you see the way he looked at me?” I said.

“Yeah, he probably didn’t want to go up in flames,” Mettle said. “He’d overcook the mushrooms in his pockets.”

I sat in the wood chair behind the computer labeled B-2. Its monitor looked as old as if it had been rescued from Steve Jobs’s garage.

“What if these old washing machines aren’t fast enough?”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” I said. I plugged the thumb drive into one of the USB slots. It took the operating system a minute to locate the drive and then I opened the folder.

There were two files inside.

“These look like movie files,” I said. I opened the first one. A small window appeared. I pressed play. The playback stuttered, but the black and white footage and the angle of the camera made it pretty clear what we were looking at.

Security footage.

The movie file was an hour long. “I’m guessing this is an hour’s worth of activity at the visitation room up until the incident with Phyllis,” I said. I clicked on the other file. “This one is the same thing, except it’s the footage for Dimitri.”

Mettle leaned into the monitor. “The video the warden gave us at the station had been edited right up to the point where you entered the room. This must be the uncut version.”

I scrubbed through the video. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this. There’s nothing else going on. It’s a movie of an empty room.”

“Hold on,” Mettle said. “There’s movement behind that door.”

I leaned into the screen. He was right. Through the rectangular, wire-laced window, someone was standing behind the door on the prisoner’s side of the visitation room.

“It might be a guard,” Mettle said.

I scrubbed forward. The door opened and an inmate shuffled past the camera and disappeared into one of the booths.

“Do you recognize that inmate?”

“No,” Mettle said. “This camera is only good for the booth that you sat at. It looks like in the hour leading up to your arrival, there was one other inmate. Go back to the other video.”

I clicked on the other file and scrubbed through it. The footage was essentially the same, just a different angle of the room to capture the booth where Dimitri sat.

“Hold on, right there,” Mettle said. He leaned over my shoulder, his massive chest nudging me aside, and jabbed his finger at the screen. He was one of those people who thought nothing of putting his fingerprints right on the glass.

“What?”

“Oh my God. Do you see that?”

“No.”

“What are you looking at?”

Mettle covered his mouth. “Right there. You can’t miss him. Look who’s behind door number one.”

26

“I don’t get it. Who am I looking at?”

“Do you need thicker glasses, Casket? Look harder,” Mettle said and stabbed the screen with his finger.

“I still don’t get it.”

Mettle grabbed the mouse from me and scrubbed through the footage again. He paused on the moment when the door on the side of the room opened to admit another inmate. This inmate was not Dimitri, but the angle had changed enough to get a decent glimpse of the guard who had escorted the inmate to the visitation room, a guard who couldn’t be seen on the videos posted online.

“I’d recognize that horrible haircut anywhere,” Mettle said.

I leaned into the screen. The guard’s head was buzzed on the front and back. His horizontal mohawk, one that went across his head from ear to ear instead of down the middle, was unmistakable.

“Roman Caesar,” we said in unison.

Out in the cruiser, Mettle took out his phone and scrolled through his contacts.

Roman Caesar was a boy we both knew in high school. His freshman year, Caesar had gone to Mainly Scissors and asked for the “caesar cut” because he had become enthralled with George Clooney on ER and wanted a hair cut that matched his last name. But Giles Fury, the hairdresser, didn’t realize that the “caesar cut” was supposed to be fashioned after Julius Caesar, not a medical operation, and he ended up delivering the strangest hair cut the world had ever seen. Thinking Caesar had asked for a “caesarian section,” Fury gave him a perpendicular mohawk that looked like the raised scar leftover from emergency surgery. Caesar had liked the notoriety from the haircut so much that he had kept his hair like that even to this day.

“Why is Roman Caesar working at the prison? I thought you arrested him for drug possession,” I said. “I thought you said he wanted to be a minister.”

“I did. I put him in handcuffs in the church parking lot after finding a bag of Molly stashed inside one of the hymnals at the church. He must have made a deal or something. I guess the rotten fruit doesn’t fall too far from the bowl.”

“You mean the tree?”

Mettle looked at me. “No, my mom always kept fruit in a bowl on the kitchen counter and it would always rot before we could eat it and she’d get really mad when we ran through the house and knocked it off the table.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure,” Mettle said. “But I know who to call.” He held up his phone and showed me the contact list. All of the names were codewords. Joey Bunker was Meat Locker. I was Red Hot, and so on.

“Who the heck is Billygoat?”

“A guy I know on the force. His name’s Billy Ganz and he drinks goat’s milk for breakfast. The name stuck,” Mettle said. He dialed the number. “Billy, it’s me, Matt. Yeah, yeah. I know. Soon. A few weeks. Listen, I was hoping you could help me out of a pickle jar here. I don’t want to log onto the system. Could you find me the address for Roman Caesar? We busted