The strange redemption of James Keene

Staring at a lO-years-toHTOJiil term, the suburban drag dealer knew the feds' offer was too good to resist. But could he endure weeks and months among the criminally insane?

Sometime after midnight in August 1998, U.S. marshals drive Jim Keene to a government runway near O'Hare airport. On his previ­ous flights as a federal prisoner Keene had been chained inside a ratty Con

Air cargo plane. This time he sits in a sleek corporate jet with plush leather seats. The marshals let him fly without cuffs or shackles and even share their food. At dawn they land on a private airstrip outside Springfield, Missouri. When they step off the jet, they get into a van waiting on the tarmac.

As they drive down tree-lined country roads and past lush farm­land, Jim can't help but breathe the fresh air and feel hopeful about his prospects. He has just begun serving a 10-years-to-life sentence on drug charges, yet he has a deal on the table that could free him in no time. The van is going to the Springfield Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, a maximum-security peni­tentiary for psychiatric patients, many of them criminally insane.

With only the war­den and chief psy­chiatrist knowing the true purpose of his transfer, Keene could, if everything goes right, be out in weeks with no strings attached. And if it doesn't go right? He doesn't even want to think about that.

Riding with the marshals makes Jim feel like a normal guy. He thinks about the strange path that led him, the son of a policeman, to a life of crime. / could have been one of

them, he thinks. How did I end up on the other side?

Everybody is silent when they see the penitentiary. Jim's low-security prison in Milan, Michigan is made up of low-level buildings that sprawl across manicured lawns like a college campus. But the MCFP rises from the Missouri plains in big jagged blocks. There are guard towers, barbed wire and, in the early-morning haze, a flood-lit glow over the redbrick exterior, like something out of a James Cagney movie.

"This sure ain't no Milan," Jim says out loud.

The marshals look at Jim, worried that he is about to abort. Jim thinks again about the assistant U.S. attorney, Lawrence Beaumont, who engineered his transfer. Beaumont is the man who put Keene in prison. Until Beaumont offered him the deal, Jim had feared and despised him. As he watches the penitentiary loom before him, Jim asks the marshals, "What if Beaumont backs out? I'll be locked up here forever with raving lunatics."

The marshals tell Jim that Beaumont won't back out. But when their pleading doesn't work, the supervisor grabs Jim's arms. As he puts the cuffs and shackles on, he tells him, "I'm doing this for your own good."

The marshals have planned to arrive between the Spring­field guards' shifts so there won't be too many questions about the newcomer. The van is buzzed inside the prison compound. When the van stops, its door opens and Keene is shoved out as if he were just another scumbag prisoner. As Jim watches the marshals joke with the guards, he wonders if he is being played for a fool. Only as the marshals climb back into the van, when the guards have their heads turned, does one mar­shal look at Jim and sneak him a thumbs-up. When the guards

shout at him to remove his clothes and prepare for a strip search, the thumbs-up is his only consolation.

Keene is issued the prison's military-style uniform—green shirt, camouflage pants and black shoes—and is taken in shackles and cuffs to his cell. Except for the thick metal doors, his floor looks more like a hospital corridor than a prison block. He has arranged his few toiletries when the bell sounds for breakfast. He stumbles out of his cell, still in a daze from not sleeping, and is engulfed in the prison's rush hour. Some people are running. Some are shouting. In their camo outfits they are like a bizarre army surging through the halls. There are always screams, and sometimes Jim hears guys crying. Worse yet are those men who shuffle forward with blank expressions, so jacked up on drugs they look like zombies. He follows the crowd to the cavernous dining hall, where the noises echo even louder. With the sound of thousands of guys blabbing and yelling and all the plates clinking and trays clacking, this is a new kind of hell for Jim Keene.

He looks tor the place to pick up his tray, but his eyes lock on a short and stocky con: Larry Hall. For weeks, as he prepared for this mission, Jim stared at Hall's pictures. Although Hall's face has grown pudgier in prison, Keene is sure it is Hall. Before Keene left for Springfield, his FBI handlers warned him not to approach Hall too soon after arrival so as not to make him suspicious. But at the first sight of his quarry, Jim feels

his body go numb. He starts having crazy thoughts: Maybe I can talk him into helping me out. Or maybe I can just beat the infor­mation out of him. While Keene is thinking, his body is in motion until—bang—he bumps right into him. Hall looks up at Jim in confusion. Keene is sure he has ruined everything.

When Larry Beaumont first yanked Keene out of the federal pen in Michigan and sent him back to a county jail in central Illinois, Jim had his suspicions about what the prosecutor wanted. In building his drug empire, Keene had worked with a tempting array of targets for the feds, from Mexican drug lords to Chicago-area mobsters. His customers included club owners, doctors, lawyers, politicians and porn stars. Some investigators had focused on Jim's father, a police and fire department officer who was friendly with several shady elected officials in his hometown of Kankakee, 50 miles south of Chicago. Keene hadn't turned government witness on any of them, and he wasn't about to start.

In the jail conference room Beaumont stares down at him as he did in court. With a full gray beard, he reminds Jim of an Old Testament prophet. This time sheriff's deputies and FBI agents sit with Jim. With a dramatic flourish Beaumont slides a fat accordion file across the table.

Nothing has prepared Jim for the first glossy photograph he pulls from the folder. It isn't a picture of a drug dealer. It's a picture of the naked body of a dead young woman sprawled between rows of standing corn. Her face is swollen and bloody. As best he can with the cuffs, Jim turns over photo after photo of the grisly scene. With dread he wonders, Are they trying to pin this on me too?

He looks up expecting to see Beaumont scowl, but the prosecutor's gaze is no lon­ger so hard. Keene contin­ues through the file, flipping through graduation portraits of attractive young women interspersed with terse police reports. Some were found dead and, like the girl in the cornfield, showed signs of strangulation; others are still missing.

The pageant of victims ends with the mug shot of a man. Notations at the bottom of the photo indicate he was booked into an Indiana county jail in 1994, but his cherubic face, framed by slick strands of hair, a trimmed mustache and muttonchop sideburns, looks as if it were snapped a cen­tury earlier. His strange eyes stare off into the distance. His full name is Larry Duane Hall. At 34 he is a year older than Keene. Beaumont says Hall is already serving a life sentence for abducting the girl in the cornfield (homicide carries no federal sentence), but an appeal is pending. And Beau­mont adds, "We think he's responsible for more than 20 other killings."

Hall's grooming tied him to many victims. Their dis­appearance coincided with battlefield reenactments at nearby parks and camp­grounds. A history buff, Hall traveled the country, portray­ing a Union foot soldier. He

even appeared as an extra in two Civil War films. Glory and Gettysburg. His muttonchops were intended to make his face look as authentic as his uniform and rifle.

"We had a full-blown confession." Beaumont says to Keene, "but then he retracted it." Jim looks at the photos of the girls and listens to Beaumont talk about Hall, but he barely absorbs the details. Finally he asks, "What does this have to do with me?"

"We want to place you in the federal penitentiary where Hall is to see if you can get him to talk," Beaumont says. Hall has been a model prisoner, attending to the building's boiler room and carving falcons in the wood shop. Other than the warden, only the chief psychiatrist would know Jim's objective. "You're the perfect guy for this job," Beaumont says. "You have the sort of personality that can deal with everyone."

Jim still doesn't get it. "I don't have experience with serial killers," he says. "Why don't you send an FBI guy?"

"Hall would smell him from a mile away," says Beaumont. "He'll get spooked and go into a shell that no one will open."

Beaumont also wants Hall to confess to another crime: the murder of Tricia Lynn Reitler, an Indiana college stu­dent who disappeared 20 miles from Hall's hometown. Her case drew national attention, but it also created a bitter dispute between the feds and local police about who abducted her. "Tell us where he put that body and you get an early release," Beaumont says. An unconditional release. No parole or onerous fine—absolutely nothing.

But then the old Beaumont scowl returns, and the pros­ecutor adds. "If you don't get us the location of the body, you don't get released. No body, no release."

Jim asks Beaumont for some time to consider the offer. He shuffles in shackles back to his cell with the Larry Hall file under his arm. He is supposed to study the documents to prepare for his mission, but he has little privacy to do so. Three men awaiting trial share his cell. One of them is always looking over Keene's shoulder. Jim can read only at night, by the hall light, while the others sleep.

The file contains newspaper clippings from the Wabash Plain Dealer that chronicle Hall's arrest and trials. Many of his alleged victims look alike: high school and college students in their late teens, with long brown hair and short athletic builds. Although the disappearance or murder of some coincided with Civil War reenactments, other victims were from college towns an hour or two south of Hall's home in Wabash, a faded factory town in north-central Indiana.

The more Jim reads about Hall, the more he wonders if he is up to it. If he can't beat a confession out of him, he has no training to trick it out of him, either. According to Beaumont, Keene would be the first federal prisoner ever to request a transfer from a low-security prison to a maximum-security peni­tentiary. He has already been jumped twice, and though he has a black belt in karate, he knows his survival will depend as much on luck as on skill. (continued on page 64)

REDEMPTION

{continued from page 56) Vet Keene realizes Beaumont's scheme offers him something more than an early release. It could transform his drug sentence into something good. It could redeem his and his father's reputation. And his father feels partly responsible for his son's descent into crime.

Big Jim has been the greatest influence on Keene's life. At six-foot-lour, with the shoulders and biceps of a football lineman, he was once as handsome as a movie star. Keene's mother, Lynn, a raven-haired beauty, completed the picture of a perfectly matched couple. Besides serving as a ranking officer, first in the police department and then in the fire department. Big Jim had a construc­tion business on the side to take advan­tage of his political connections. His wife had her own bar and grill. They raised Keene (known as Jimmy) and his younger brother and sister in a big house. They appeared to have a storybook marriage. Behind closed doors, though, a different plot played out. Jimmy's parents fought constantly about money and his mother's nighthawk ways. When Keene was 11, his parents divorced, and his childhood effectively ended.

Keene enrolled in Kankakee's inner-city high school, where he lettered in track and wrestling and, as the star run­ning back, led the football team to the state championship game. Keene was self-conscious about his family's relatively modest means. He felt that stigma grow-when Big Jim was dragged into a well-publicized drug sting. Although noth­ing came of it, the slain remained on the father and, by extension, the son. "My mom was losing her restaurant, and my dad was going broke on a fireman's salarv," Keene recalls, "and everybody thought I was the godfather's kid."

As people kept approaching Jimmy for dope, he eventually thought about sup­plying them. "If I could get them their party goods, I was the man of the hour," he says. Although not a user himself, he had several pot-smoking friends who introduced him to their local contacts. Keene was well suited to build a sales net­work. He could recruit his wrestler and football-player buddies to be dealers.

When Keene graduated, most Kanka-kee football fans expected him to become a running back at a major university. (He had several offers from big-name schools.) Instead he chose to attend a community college in a Chicago suburb. He explained to Big Jim that he wanted to remain close to Kankakec. In fact he was making too much money to leave his drug operation behind.

"I realized I could put the college education on hold," Keene says, "and become a millionaire very quickly." He dropped out of school in 1984, after his

sophomore year, though he later went back and got his degrees. With too much cash to bank, he spent it on "stupid shit" he didn't need.

He also bailed out Big Jim. When his father was on the verge of eviction, Jimmy arrived at his door with a bag full of $350,000 in cash. Before his father could ask where it came from, Keene told him, "Please don't ask any questions."

It was the first of many infusions into Big Jim's affairs—a sort of reverse trust fund. His father trusted that the source of money wasn't too bad. The son trusted that his father could somehow leverage the cash into a legitimate enterprise. Fueled by his son's funds. Big Jim was rid­ing high again, but every place he sunk Jimmy's money was a dry hole.

If Big Jim had any illusions about the source of his son's wealth, they were dispelled in 1992 when Jimmy and his younger brother, Tim. were busted with 150 pounds of pot. Because the local narcs made mistakes in the search and seizure, the brothers got off with pro­bation. But no matter how he tried, Keene couldn't get out of the business. "I wanted $5 million I could bury in a hole," he says. "Then I'd get a job and start a normal life." But Big Jim's deals ale into all his savings.

The regional narcotics strike force kept an eye on Jimmy Keene. It was only a matter of time before the Drug Enforce­ment Agency infiltrated his organization. When DEA officers raided his house in 1996. they knew about the safe under his bathroom floor. Inside they found bags of coke and weed, along with an elec­tronic scale. In an attic safe they found cash they had given an informant to buy cocaine. Keene decided to take a plea, believing his sentence would be based on the minimal amounts ol drugs found in his safe. But Beaumont also charged Keene with the amounts he was alleged to have sold to informants.

When Keene heard the judge give him a 10-year sentence, the life went out of him. His mother cried hysterically. But as he stumbled out of the courtroom, he couldn't take his eyes off his father. "He was pale white with a vacant stare," says Jim, "like he was lost."

The next lime Keene saw his father was through thick glass in the prison visiting room. His father still looked lost, but as soon as Jim appeared across from him in his jumpsuit, he started to cry. Jim cried loo. "It's my fault," Big Jim kept saying. "If only I hadn't raised you around so much corruption."

Nearly a year later, while Keene con­templates Beaumont's offer, he is lold his father has suffered a stroke. He can't believe the news. Despite all Big Jim's financial and romantic setbacks, he always seemed physically indestructible—until Jim's brother pushed him into the visi­tors' room in a wheelchair. "I had to go back to my cell with thai vision of him in my head," Keene recalls. "It got me very

determined." Jim called his lawyer and told him to seal the deal with Beaumont. It might be the only way he'd get out of prison while his father was still alive.

The FBI agents want Jim to take six months to size up Hall before approach­ing him. There is no way Jim will wait that long. But he doesn't expect to bump into Hall in the cafeteria just hours after he arrives.

At first Hall pulls away from him. alarmed, his head moving in slow motion. Keene holds up his hands in apology. "Sorry," he says. "I'm new here. You look cool. Can you tell me how you get your food here?"

Hall points where he should go but then asks, "You think I'm cool?"

"Look at these other guys around you," Keene replies.

Hall laughs and then offers to show him the library later. "I read the paper there every day," he says.

Not only did Jim practically knock him over, but he said exactly the sort of thing that should have made Hall suspicious. Still, Jim starts to think he can accomplish his mission in weeks instead of months.

That morning he meets the chief psy­chiatrist. The shrink places Keene in a cell directly opposite from Hall. While Jim can keep his name, he needs to claim his sen­tence is for a different offense, since drug dealers are usually held in lower-security prisons. Jim pretends to be an interstate weapons runner who has become severely depressed and possibly suicidal.

He is under the chief psychiatrist's direct care. As he perches on his desk, the doctor, a tall man in shirtsleeves, stresses that Jim has to keep his mission confiden­tial. For prisoners, no conduct is worse than informing.

Keene's only other contact with the outside world comes to see him the next Sunday in the penitentiary's large open visiting room. At first, when told he has a visitor, Keene thinks Big Jim has tracked him down. But waiting for him instead is a blonde with cropped hair. She wears a conservative blazer and a dressy skirt. She is attractive if not exactly his type. Jim goes over to her with his hand extended, and she quickly pulls him into an embrace and kisses him, whispering in his ear, "I'm supposed to be your girlfriend."

This is Janice Butkus. FBI agent and niece of former Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus. She uses an assumed name to sign in. If |im discovers anything from Hall, she will work outside to confirm it. She also gives him a phone number to call in case ol emergency. Jim promises he will study Hall only from a distance. He doesn't reveal that he has already talked to Hall and even arranged to meet him a few times in the library. But then again, not much has come of these developments. There is no way they can {continued on page 121)

REDEMPTION

{continued from page 64) chat in the library, and Hall doesn't seem interested in doing so. He just goes to the rack with the newspapers and pulls out the Walxish Plain Dealer. He slowly leafs through the pages. After 15 minutes, he gets up and says, "I'll see you later, Jim.'

For his part Keene won't strike up a conversation either. He doesn't want to seem loo forward. But after a few of these library sessions, Hall invites him to eat breakfast at his table. Jim had noticed Hall always eats in the same corner, always with the same three prisoners. No one sits any­where near them.

The next day Jim joins Larry at his table and introduces himself to the others. One is in his 20s, tall and skinny, with a mul­let haircut and big bug eyes. He sits erect, and his head swivels like an owl's. Suppos­edly for no reason he murdered his family and then his next-door neighbors with a chain saw. Another of Hall's friends is in his 30s and has a froglike face. The third is big and fat with a bad case of acne. Keene never learns their crimes.

For most of the meal, only Jim talks. He cracks jokes. He complains about the food. He asks what they like to eat. While the others stare blankly ahead, he can see Hall tune in to him and even brighten when he speaks. // the other guys talk, it is to ask for the milk with a low, slurred voice. At least I am bringing some life to the party, and I can see it makes Larry happy.

Jim bears some resemblance to Hall's twin. Gary, who is the more outgoing and popular of the two. This may have been why Hall starts to confide in Keene and tell him more about his background. The twins came as a surprise when their parents were in their 40s. Larry's father, Robert, was a sexton, or grave digger, in VVabash. He bragged he was descended from Miami Indians.

After a few weeks of meals together Keene feels Hall will invite him back to his cell, where they can talk privately. Maybe he really can get Hall to open up and be home by winter.

Just as Keene thinks things are going well, he's thrown a curveball. One day three white weight-lifter types with slicked-back hair surround him as he walks down a corridor. He has seen them hovering over a stooped, frail old man at a table in another corner of the cafeteria. "The old man wants to talk to you," one of them says.

The old man is Vincent "the Chin" Gigante, who was the leader of the Geno-vese crime family in New York City. For most of the 1990s he frustrated federal efforts to prosecute him by wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in a robe and slippers. In fact he was a sophisticated boss, overseeing an extensive bookmak-ing and juice loan operation and using his control of trade unions to shake down construction sites. His dementia act did not save him from conviction, but it did get him placed among truly demented prisoners at Springfield.

Jim gets along line with Mafia prisoners.

His grandmother is Italian, and his grand­father used to be a driver for Al Capone— the sort of pedigree the mobsters loved to hear about.

Gigante's men hustle Jim to where the 70-year-old is waiting. Gigante can tell Keene has some Italian roots, but he doesn't like the other things he sees. "Let me ask you a question," he says, poking a finger at Jim's chest. "What are you hanging around those baby killers for? You want someone to put a knife in vour back?"

Over the next few months Gigante enforces his own strict routine on Jim. No more hanging out with baby killers. Jim is expected to have breakfast with Gigante. Out of the corner of my eye, Keene thinks, / can see Hall look at me like he wonders why I won t eat with him anymore. But I know enough about Mafia guys not to disrespect them. My freedom is staring at me from across the room, and I have to look the other way.

After breakfast Keene follows the old man into the prison yard and plays bocce on the grass court. Since Jim's allergies exempt him from a day job in the prison factory. Gigante expects him to be his morning companion.

Keene is desperate to find time alone with Hall. Surreptitiously, Keene starts to stalk the serial killer to see if there is a place outside the cafeteria to bump into him. Hall doesn't keep a schedule like other prisoners. Because of his experience as a janitor, he leaves his cell early to work in the boiler room. At night he spends hours in the wood shop. )im won't be allowed through the door until he spends a full year at Springfield without incident—another nine months. When he passes the shop, he always sees Hall busy at what looks to be the same project: a carved wooden falcon the size of his hand.

His best shot to find time with Hall is after dinner, when prisoners gravitate to the TV rooms. Jim has learned that Hall's favorite program is America's Most Wanted. Hall and his friends camp out every Saturday in the tiniest, least desir­able TV room a few hours before the show's scheduled time. To break the ice, Jim decides to join them.

Keene's chance to steal the spotlight comes one night when a muscular black gangbanger appears a few minutes into the show and changes the channel. Keene hears Hall mumble under his breath, "That ain't cool," but he and the others remain motionless. Seeing he could be the savior, Jim jumps up and turns the channel back. The black inmate changes the channel again. When Jim jumps up again, the black man points at him and says, "White boy, you better not touch it. or you'll have a problem." Keene turns the show on again. The intruder pulls back to swing, but Jim nails him with four quick punches. As he falls back into the chairs, Jim jumps him, stomping his head and chest.

Keene spends that night in solitary, a windowless cement room with nothing

but a metal bed and toilet. He paces until morning, wondering if he has sabotaged his whole mission. But right after he gets his breakfast tray, he is taken to a hearing before six administrators, including the chief psychiatrist, who nods at him with a smile. The only witnesses to the assault are the serial killers. Each of them backs up Jim's story that the black inmate, who has a history of assaults, barged into the room to change the channel and swung first at Jim when he switched it back.

Jim is now Hall's hero. Although they cannot eat together, they sit in the TV room, chatting after shows or talking a few minutes before lights-out. Coincidentally, one of the first America's Most Wanted shows they watch features serial killers, with the mother of one victim pleading to find out where her daughter is buried. Keene sees an opening. When they talk later, he says to Hall, "Why doesn't that guy tell the par­ents where lie buried the daughter? If I was the guy who killed those girls, I'd give them the location."

"You would?" Hall asks.

"Sure," Keene says. "It's not like the guy's ever getting out. The least he can do is give the parents closure and get some redemption for his crime."

Hall seems to ponder the thought for a few moments, then asks if someone like that could ever get redemption. "Oh yeah," Jim tells him, remembering the sermons he heard as a child. "The worst sinner can still find redemption."

Even a cursory look at Hall's early life reveals a number of traits found in other men who commit multiple rape-murders: complications at birth, childhood poverty, an alcoholic father (his drinking forced him into early retirement from the cem­etery), an overprotective mother, early contact with the police for arson and van­dalism, no normal experience with sexual intercourse and few friends.

But other aspects defy the definitions of FBI profilers. Hall had the slovenly ap­pearance of the impulsive "disorganized" killer, yet when investigators seized his 1984 Dodge van they found the detailed notes of an "organized" offender, re­minding himself to "plan and plan" and "check over again." He kept meticulous lists to prepare his van for abductions and to buy materials for cleaning up. He cautioned himself, "No evidence. No fo­rensic residues." Indeed, no biological evidence was ever found.

When he was tracked down by a Ver-million County, Illinois detective for the murder of Jessica Roach, the girl in the cornfield, he provided a statement detail­ing how she was abducted, raped and strangled. "I am not in control," he told an FBI polygraph examiner. "This was one of those times when I was not in control." But a few weeks later he told a newspaper reporter the statement had been fabricated by his interrogators.

During the session with the FBI exam­iner Hall also confessed to the murder of Tricia Rcitler, who disappeared from her college in Marion, Indiana six months

before Roach's murder. Incredibly, Hall had previously confessed to that murder when police found him with an "abduc­tion kit"—rope, knife, ether-based starter fluid—four miles from where Reitler was last seen. Since the Marion police already had their prime suspect in custody, they dismissed Hall as a morbid wannabe and didn't even arrest him. Their wannabe theory became a key argument for Hall's lawyer in the Roach trial. Marion police were even ready to testify in his defense. A month after Beaumont convicted Hall in the Roach case, he organized a search for Reitler's body, using marks found on maps

ill Hall's van for directions. His expedition enlisted anthropologists, cadaver-sniffing dogs and FBI aircraft with heat sensors— all to no avail.

But in those first three months they are together in Springfield. Hall won't even tell Jim the nature of his alleged crimes, let alone the locations ol his victims' bodies. Like Keene. he pretends to be in Spring­field on weapons charges. At least he now feels comfortable inviting Jim into his cell. There, too. Hall's .seniority and conduct have earned him special benefits. On one wall he has hung a cardboard cross to show he regularly attends the chaplain's

services. There is a photo of his father and mother and another ol his brother.

By December Jim has been in Springfield live months, but it seems longer, and his window of opportunity is closing. As the chief psychiatrist warned him. there's no telling what will touch off a crazed pris­oner. A case in point is a tall biker from Iowa who killed several people while high on melhamphetamine. lie has a lanky, muscular body and spiderweb tat­toos around both elbows. Enraged sim­ply because Jim has mentioned his name to another inmate, he corners Keene in his cell and, with spit flying from his lips, screams. "Why's my name coming out of your mouth?"

Without room to swing, Jim lets his wrestler's instincts kick in. He dives for the biker's spindly legs, picks him up and flips him down hard on his back, where he pounds him with both fists until the guards drag him away. Keene spends another night pacing the hole. But the biker refuses to speak up in his own defense, and Jim lucks out again.

Jim has to take some risks to get Hall to open up. One night when they are alone in Hall's cell, he asks. "Haven't we been hanging around each other long enough to tell the truth?-"

"What do you mean?" Hall replies.

"Come on. Larry." Keene tells him. "I know all about your case."

Hall's eyes grow wide, and he looks away. "What do you mean?" he asks.

"It was in all the Indiana newspapers," Keene answers. "My mom's got a subscrip­tion to a newspaper from your area. When I told her your name the other day, she said. "Your buddy is the one accused of kill­ing those girls. "

Hall averts his eyes. "I don't know what vou're talking about." he says.

After Keene leaves Hall's cell, he-spends a restless night wondering if he has moved too quickly. The next morning during breakfast he sees Hall looking at him from across the room. Was he up all night thinking too?

Keene can't wait to find out. When they pass each other on the way out, he slaps Hall on the shoulder and says, "See you later in the library." as though nothing has happened. Hall looks back at him with relief and says, "Yeah, sure." Jim realizes what Hall most fears: that Keene will stop talking to him.

That night, when they are alone in Hall's cell. Jim asks again about the girls, and Hall seems to go into a trance. In a robotic voice he says, "Sometimes I have dreams about bad women, and in those dreams I hurt them."

At first Keene doesn't know what to say. / can't tell him I hurt women too. he thinks. Hut I Kin sn\ I was hurt by u>om?n. like he was. Jim mentions one longtime girlfriend who got pregnant while he was behind bars. "I've had bad dreams about her," he says. "Fuck these evil chicks." Then Keene asks, "What about that Jessica Roach?"

With the sound of her name, Hall's head turns away. "Why would they just pick you out of the blue and say you did this to that girl lor no reason? "Jim asks. "What was the deal?' Were you dating her?"

After a long silence Hall says. "It wasn't like they said. It wasn't like Beaumont said. Me and her were talking. She was friendly. She was being nice. She was one of the first who was nice to me. "

It lakes several nights before Keene hears Hall's version. He doesn't want Jim to think he pulled the girls into the van, but he doesn't deny forcing himself on them when they refused his advances. With Roach, he claims, the trouble started when he tried to kiss her in his van. Hall says she started to go crazy. She was hit­ting and punching him. and he began

choking her to make her stop. "The next thing I knew," says Hall. "1 was lying next to her and I had her strapped down. My clothes were off, and her clothes were off. I think I blacked out and we had sex together."

When Roach began to cry for her mother, he forced her from the van with her hands bound and marched her through the woods. Hall shows Jim with his fingers how he inter­locked two belts and used them to bind her neck to a tree. From the other side he twisted the ends with a stick as you would a tourniquet, so he wouldn't have to see her face when she died.

Keene has waited months to hear this, but in the dim light of Halls cell he feels no exhilaration. By telling Larry he understands how he could be hurt by women, he almost

feels guilty of murder himself. What if Jessica Roach really had smiled at Hall? She was innocent and, as a result, so vul­nerable to real evil. While everything Hall tells Jim brings him closer to freedom, it is also too much to bear.

Eventually Hall has more to say about Tricia Rcitler. She was also pretty, he says, with beautiful hair. She too seemed to like him but then started hitting him after he tried to kiss her. He tells Keene he blacked out and when he woke up he was looking down from above. At these times he was not in control. Someone else was doing the bad things. Below, he could see himself choking Rcitler.

"I realized I had done it again," he tells Jim. In a panic he drove the 20 miles from

Marion to Wabash and parked the van in his parents' driveway, leaving Reitler bound inside. He went to his room and paced back and forth until he could clear his mind. Later that night, he says, he drove into a wilderness area, where he killed and buried her.

Jim still needs a more precise location for Tricia Reitler's body. Somehow he has to find a way to ask without making Hall suspicious. One night, when Hall doesn't appear back in his cell, Keene looks for him in the TV room and the wood shop. From the doorway he sees Hall standing by his workbench. No guard is around, so Jim enters unchallenged. As he moves closer to Hall, over his shoulder he sees

not just one falcon but several, all nearly identical. Hall places one after another on different spots marked in circles on a road map. As soon as Hall hears Jim behind him, he dives forward to cover up the map. "Jim, what are you doing here?" he asks. "You know you're not supposed to be here." As he folds up the map. Hall says he has just linished a project to send to his brother in Wabash.

Keene grabs one of the falcons and turns it over in his hand. Although unpainted, it is intricately finished. Hall reaches over to pet the top of its head, his fingers trembling. "These are totems, Jim," he says. "They watch over the dead." His eyes are wide, and he looks ready to cry. Jim hands the falcon back.

"I better leave," he says, "before that guard comes back.'

Keene practically runs through the halls to the phone room. If Hall carved the fal­cons to watch over the dead, then the spots on the map are where he buried his vic­tims. First he calls Agent Butkus and gets her answering machine. He warns her to intercept the map before it leaves the prison. Next he calls Big Jim. "I want to give you some peace of mind, he says. "I really think I've figured this out and I'll be leaving any day now."

When Jim returns to his cell, he sees Hall is still away. Hall gets back minutes before lockdow n. Now Keene can't contain himself. He walks across the hall and pokes his head inside Larry's cell. "Looks like I'm (mine home." he saw

Hall pulls back as if he has been slapped. "What are you say­ing?" Hall asks. "I thought your sen­tence was 40 years."

That is enough to mess with Hall, but Keene has more. Just thinking about his release—from Springfield, from the whole prison system—makes him giddy. "Larry," he says, "after what you told me, I realize you belong here the rest of your life. I don"t see how you can live with yourself."

Hall backs up deeper into his cell, his eyes wider than ever. As Jim walks across the hall, he hears him whine, "Beaumont sent you. Beaumont! Beaumont!"

Keene sleeps well that night. The next morning, he wakes to the sound of keys rattling. As he turns to the light, guard after guard piles into his cell. A short, squat woman in a pantsuit hovers

over his bed. She points a finger at him and shouts, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

Jim still has a blanket wrapped around him. "What do you mean?" he asks. "1111 James Keene."

"I want to know who you really are," she says. "Why did you hassle my patient with all these questions about his cases?"

Her patient? Keene realizes she is Hall's shrink. When he peers through the pha­lanx of guards, he sees Larry standing behind them. She continues to bark ques­tions: "Did the prosecutor send you? Did you see the file? Did you see my report?"

Two guards grab Jim by each arm and drag him out of bed. "You're going down into the hole until you decide to tell us

the truth." she says. They put him in cull's and shackles and push him outside in his bare feet with no more than his boxer shorts and T-shirt. Still groggy from sleep, ]im stumbles forward like a man in a dream.

He is back in the hole again, but he tells himself it is just a misunderstanding. As soon as the FBI gets his message, it will set him free. But the day wears on. and no one comes except the guard with his tray and a change of clothes. No one comes the next day, either. Jim whistles for a guard and waits until he is close enough to see his eyes in the eye slot. "Officer, now listen to me." he whispers. "I'm not just a regu­lar criminal. I'm here working undercover with the FBI, and if you can just get me to the chief psychiatrist-----"

"Shut up," the guard says. "You're as crazy as the rest of them." The guard never looks through the eye slot again. Jim is scared. He knows he looks as crazy

as he sounds. This is exactly what Big |im had feared when Keene told him about Beaumont's plan—that somehow his son would end up lost in the system. )im pates for hours, cursing himself (or blurting out what he said to Mall.

He did not keep up his regular meet­ings with the chief psychiatrist. Now his life depends on getting word to him. Vet he can't have the guards think he is a nutcase, either. Over the next few days he tries to build a rapport with a night guard, acting as normal as possible. He thanks him for his food and chats about the weather for the few moments he is by the door. Finally, without telling him why, he asks if he can see the thief psy­chiatrist. The next day, when the guard starts his shift, he tells Jim the psychia­trist is on vacation for another week.

It is all Keene can do to keep from screaming. The next seven days seem to take an eternity to crawl by, but finally the

slot at the bottom of the door slides open, and he hears the psychiatrist whispering. "Jim. what's going on? The guards tell me you claim to be with the FBI. You're not supposed to say you'n- with the FBI."

"And you're not supposed to go on vacation," Keene says. "(let hold of that FBI lady." he says, raising his voice, "or ill tell everyone in this prison \ou work with the FBI"

Within hours the guards rap on the door and tell Keene to put his hands out for cuffs and then attach the shackles. As he hops after them, he sees Butkus at the end of the corridor, surrounded by men in suits. "Take those off of him." she orders. As the guards remove his cuffs and shackles, she says, "|im. I'm sorry." For some reason his message never got through to her.

The suits surround Keene and Butkus. Together they march through the main corridor of Springfield as the inmates head in the other direction for lunch. Those who know Keene stand with their mouths open as his procession passes by. Keene and company head right out of the building and toward another corpo­rate jet on the runway.

Once again on the plane, his handlers treat him like a brother. "Thev had this whole turkey meal wailing for me—prob­ably the best food 1 had in months—and I ate it like a wild animal." says Jim. "Janice sat next to me and kept apologizing, but I was raving at her—scratching at my beard, food Hying from my mouth. 'That was really bullshit.' 1 told her. I can't believe you left me there that long. ' But even as he rages, |im is on his way to freedom.

To this day, no one will tell Keene what happened to the falcons and the map. Although he did not locate Reitler's body, as Beaumont required, he had gotten Hall's confession to her killing. Keene passed a battery of polygraph tests to prove it. Beaumont honored his agreement, and in February 15M19 the judge granted Keene. after a year and a half behind bars, a full and uncondi­tional release.

Ironically, il'Beaumont's gambil did not succeed in providing closure to one fam­ily—the Reitlers—it did for the Keenes. After his release Jim got the chance to spend another five years with his father before Big |im died of a heart attack.

After the encounter with Keene. some­thing snapped in Hall. He was trans­ferred to another prison medical facility and is no longer competent to stand trial. Meanwhile, back home in Wabash. with both parents dead. Hall's twin. Gary, has taken to lelling acquaintances his brother is a serial killer. He admits he watched his father retrieve a map from Larry's van that had little circles, each with a nil inside them—what he took to mean "dead body." He counted 22 circles before his father burned it.