Dirty Fire Read Free

colder. Without a word, we began walking through the rubble.
    It was the last case I would work as a police officer. Two days later, I was handcuffed and placed under arrest.

April 10

Chapter 2
    There is a psychology to the penal system that to me had always seemed either deviously subtle or crushingly blunt. The placement of what is perhaps its most notorious penitentiary, as I neared its grounds, appeared to cover both extremes.
    A few miles outside Joliet, as you approach from the north over the rural roads that wind past sprawling car auction markets and the staked fields of undeveloped subdivisions, you come upon a sight that seems puzzlingly out of place. Dozens of white and gold squad cars are lined up in front of a modest-sized yellow brick building. A sign identifies it as District 5 Headquarters of the Illinois State Police, whose primary responsibility is patrolling the vast miles of expressways and Interstate highways that crisscross the Land of Lincoln. Here, miles from the nearest Interstate exchange, so much law enforcement so prominently displayed seems incongruous, a mistake.
    And then, almost before you know you are upon it, the massive complex that is Stateville Penitentiary rises up from the prairie as if to pounce. Always faceless, always menacing, the mismatched collection of 1930s-style masonry and 1960s-style concrete construction stands as coldly impassive as a street tough in a stare down on his own turf.
    Civilians driving past unconsciously ease off the pedal and shoot a guilty glance at their speedometers; parents instinctively use it to quiet children unruly in the back seat, transferring the sudden tightness in their own stomachs to a new generation. A few irate taxpayers might, a moment earlier, have expressed outrage over the apparent excess of armed police support so readily available; now, on a far more elemental basis, they suddenly worry if there is nearly enough.
    I turned my aging Pontiac onto the long driveway that runs past the guard booths and checkpoints in an unbending line. Before me was the Main Administration building, built of brick the color of dried blood, constructed back when there was no debate over whether incarceration was meant to rehabilitate or to punish.
    People come to Stateville for a litany of reasons and motivations. Most have no choice. Some, a few, come on their own volition out of some sense of duty or charity or personal obligation. But once inside Stateville, the effect it has on each of them is uniformly similar. It is a malevolent shadow, a silent chorus of violence and fear and hopelessness.
    I felt it, considered how close I had come to a sentence here or somewhere much like it. It was not a pleasant thought.
    • • •
    My lawyer had shaken my hand, though his enthusiasm was blunted by a confusion he was unable to completely conceal.
    “Lucky break, that,” he said a little too genially. “One doesn’t often have videotape evidence ruled inadmissible—at least, not because of a missing report in the case file. It made our entrapment claim much more difficult for them to disprove.”
    I had nodded, staring through the rain-spotted courtroom window at a raw day in early March; I was trying hard not to look like a man either surprised by an unusual legal decision or relieved by it.
    Everyone involved had played their assigned roles to perfection. For example, there was the prosecution’s primary witness, a veteran Cook County detective. The assistant state’s attorney led the man through a recitation of his background and expertise. But despite years of undercover experience on his résumé, the detective had been surprisingly inexact in his recollection of the bribery solicitation made to him only months before.
    The transaction had been dutifully recorded by a hidden surveillance camera. Video evidence usually made for a powerful case.
    But at that point my lawyer had moved to suppress the recording, on a technicality that had sounded weak even