Blood Echoes Read Free Page B

system. From that time forward, there would be no more training schools or foster homes.
    Carl Junior Isaacs had been set loose upon the world.
    He reverted instantly to crime, stealing cars and burglarizing houses, while living a seminomadic existence, bunking with friends or the families of friends, sometimes for no more than a few days, at most a few weeks, then moving on to the next temporary shelter.
    In 1970, he was arrested for breaking and entering and for car theft. Legally an adult, he was now ready for an adult institution, and after yet another arrest for car theft and breaking and entering in Maryland, he was sentenced to the Maryland State Penitentiary, arriving there on March 27, 1973.
    Two days later, a riot broke out, and Carl, small, young, and to some eyes nubile, was raped by fellow inmates from 6:00 P.M. to 2:30 A.M., eight and one-half excruciating hours, while the riot swirled around him, engulfing the prison in a smoking whirlwind of rage and violence.
    When it was over, Carl was removed from the penitentiary and on April 2 given yet another psychological evaluation. For the nervousness, depression, and insomnia it revealed, the doctor prescribed three hundred milligrams of Noludar, one tablet a night for ten days.
    Two days later Carl was transferred to the Maryland Correction Camp, a far less grim institution than the Maryland State Penitentiary. On April 25, he was again transferred, this time to the minimum-security institution at Poplar Hill, outside Baltimore, a place at which he did not intend to remain for very long.

Chapter Four
    T he nineteen-year-old boy who arrived at Poplar Hill Correctional Institute on April 25, 1973, had lived most of his life under some form of official, rather than family, supervision. He was a dark flower grown in the hothouse of institutionalized care. But to the resentment and suspiciousness common in institutionalized personalities, Carl had added a critical element of his own, a dangerously romantic notion of the outlaw archetype.
    During his years of petty crime, Carl had developed a vision of the criminal ideal which, by the time he was nineteen, had entirely captured him. His heroes had become the Wild West bad guys of comic book renown: Jesse James, Cole Younger, Billy the Kid, and other such repositories of outlaw legend. Short, and often ineffectual, fighting the fears of inadequacy that tormented him, Carl had created a similarly exalted outlaw persona for himself, then grafted it onto the drifting cloud of his personality. In a sense, the outlaw persona served as the only identity he had, and he used it like a mask to confront the world, a way either to frighten others or to gain their admiration.
    But in Carl’s case, admiration could be gained only from people who were susceptible to his own bloated vision of himself. His own half-brother, Wayne Carl Coleman, was just such a person.
    Some months before, Wayne had been transferred to Poplar Hill, and once Carl had established contact with him, he began to enlist him in his escape plans, a systematic manipulation that Wayne had few resources to resist.
    Twenty-six years old, the eldest son of Betty Isaacs and Carl Coleman, Wayne had been in and out of institutions for most of his life, usually for such relatively innocuous crimes as car theft and burglary, the same type to which Carl had become addicted.
    Compared to Carl, he was timid, sluggish, and without direction. Consequently, he looked to others for leadership, since he was more or less unable to formulate even the most rudimentary schemes of his own. At five feet five inches, he was only slightly shorter than Carl, but he was considerably less intelligent, and frequently appeared disoriented, his mind prone to wander from one point to another, unable to focus for very long on anything but his most primitive needs. Shy and awkward, he had lived his life in a shadowy crouch, a figure on the periphery, waiting for someone to lead him to the