God he interpreted as the "most exalted" of all human projects-as the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach had believed. Human will, human love, human hope, human desire-a gigantic image projected upon a screen, a sky-screen of blue opacity.

The Intern supposed that this must be so. She had no religious beliefs of her own.

The Investigator had been a scornful unbeliever-a "militant atheist"-after he'd left the seminary and the Roman Catholic Church; now, decades later, he was still contemptuous of religious institutions, but sympathetic with individuals for whom religious faith was a necessity of life.

The Investigator had abandoned the Midwestern Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr. sometime in the 1960s.

Soon then, there appeared Cornelius Hinton, with advanced degrees from Harvard, Cambridge University, and Columbia University.

Hinton was an energetic and seemingly ambitious academician. His fields were semantics, social psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind-the least penetrable of disciplines. In the 1970s Hinton began to be published widely in academic journals and to be offered professorships at distinguished universities-Columbia, Duke, Yale, Cornell. He moved about as a visiting professor. As a visiting fellow at research institutes. He had no interest in academic rank or in tenure-often, he stayed at a university for only a single semester. He lived in the (rented) homes and apartments of professors on leave. In Ithaca he'd lived much of the time at a campsite in Lebanon State Park a half-hour's drive from the Cornell campus. He wore his hair long. He ceased shaving. He leased cars, when necessary. He preferred bicycles even in cold weather which, in upstate New York, can be very cold, blustery and snowy indeed.

In 1991 he accepted a fellowship at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia. Soon after that, a permanent and high-paying position at the Institute for Advanced Research at Florida State UniversityTemple Park where multi-millionaire Fort Lauderdale donors were hoping to establish a world-class research institution. Yet, strangely, Cornelius Hinton seemed to have ceased publishing at about the time he arrived in Temple Park.

The Investigator's first, controversial bestseller in what would be the SHAME! series had actually been published in 1979: this was SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 197778, a vividly narrated undercover account of the largest state-run home for mentally ill adolescents in Pennsylvania, Arcadia Hall in Philadelphia. This was a psychiatric medical facility in which attendants routinely harassed, beat, and sexually abused their charges while medical staffers and administrators ignored complaints until serious injuries and a death occurred. SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 197778 was presented in diary form by the Investigator who remained anonymous within its pages; according to the book cover, the author was "J. Swift"-the Investigator's homage to his great predecessor Jonathan Swift. From a brief biographical note on the book's dust jacket you learned little of "J. Swift" except that he'd been born in the Midwest "at the end of the Great Depression" and had "traveled widely, and deeply, within U.S. borders"; there was no jacket photo. From the diarist account itself you surmised that "the Investigator" was an impassioned individual who had once intended to become a Jesuit but who'd dropped out of the seminary to become involved in the civil rights movement. Preparing to write SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 197778 the Investigator had trained as a medical attendant at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing; he'd worked twelve-hour days for nine increasingly stressful months at Arcadia Hall, recording and photographing his experiences, until he was fired for "insubordination"-trying to intervene between patients and fellow attendants.

It was a part of the controversy of SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 197778 that the author had been beaten, injured, and hospitalized himself; his assailants had eventually been arrested, tried and found guilty of criminal assault and battery. His life had been threatened numerous times but by the time SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 197778 was published, and climbing bestseller charts following a sensational front-page review in the New York Times Book Review by the distinguished psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, the mysterious "J. Swift" had disappeared from Philadelphia with no plans to return.

In 1979, this had occurred. Not until seven years later would the Intern be born.

Of course, already in high school she'd heard about the SHAME! series, which eventually included nine books, each a blunt, shocking, and meticulously researched diarist account by the individual who called himself "the Investigator"; on book covers, the author remained "J. Swift." Over the years, J. Swift's biographical information scarcely expanded except to include an ever-growing list of awards-National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Anisfield-Wolf Award, Pulitzer Prize. The Investigator/J. Swift seemed to have no private life-no wife, no family, no fixed place of residence. And no photo.

The zealous Investigator had gone undercover to visit horrendous factory farms in the Midwest, and dispiritingly understaffed V.A. hospitals in New England; he'd infiltrated slaughterhouses supplying fast-food chains-(in forthright homage to one of his heroes, Upton Sinclair, of The Jungle); he'd infiltrated medical research laboratories experimenting on chimpanzees, dogs, and cats-(managing to take terrifying photographs, released on the Internet to much protest and outrage). Under a name other than "J. Swift" he'd been arrested in San Francisco as an animal rights activist-("terrorist" was the official charge)-and as an "eco-terrorist"-but charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. (The Intern would learn, when going through the Investigator's finances, that he'd been a generous donor to such animal rights organizations as PETA, Animal Rights Liberation Front, and Animal Rights Militia, as he'd been a generous donor to leftist-activist organizations like Code Pink and feminist organizations like Females Without Borders.) The Investigator's most recent best-selling book was SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR, published in 2009, a harrowing expose of several corrupt family court judges in Nassau County, Long Island, who'd accepted more than two million dollars in bribes since 2005, to send as many as three thousand first-time offenders to privately owned correctional facilities. Most of the first-time offenses had been misdemeanors and not felonies, which would have resulted in probation if the judges hadn't shunted the youthful offenders into the prison system; the defendants had had no lawyers, since their parents had been talked into signing away their legal rights by family court officers who were also receiving bribes. In one of the notorious boot-camp facilities, a squalid barracks in the Poconos, young inmates had been harassed, beaten, and sexually abused by corrections officers and fellow inmates, resulting in the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl who'd been arrested for having shoplifted less than twenty-five dollars' worth of merchandise from a Rite Aid store-her first offense! The Investigator had gathered his sordid material by posing as "Hank Carpenter," a representative of the privately-run correctional service PioneerAmerica Corrections, Inc., who'd bluntly offered the Nassau County family court judges "five thousand a head" for each youthful offender they sent to the facility; he'd recorded their astonishing conversations, to be replicated verbatim in SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR.

Before the book was officially published, the Investigator had turned his findings over to the Nassau County prosecutor and the New York State federal attorney general; excerpts published in The New Yorker had stirred a national firestorm of protest and outrage.

Eventually, the corrupt judges pleaded guilty to charges of accepting bribes, lost their positions and were sentenced to prison terms varying from seven to fifteen years.

Seven to fifteen years! With time out for "good behavior," in moderate-security (state-run) prisons, the ex-judges would serve just a fraction of their sentences.

With the bribes from the private-prison facilities they'd bought expensive cars, a yacht, new homes; they'd built swimming pools, taken luxury cruises to the Bahamas, sent their children to expensive private schools. (None of the bribe-money had been returned.) So far, the private-prison facilities hadn't been charged with any wrongdoing.

In totalitarian China, government officials like the corrupt judges might have been executed.

Out of disgust with the Nassau County judiciary, the Investigator was turning his attention to capital punishment in the United States in the past several years following the highly publicized successes of the Innocence Project-specifically, to those states in which the frequency of executions had not slowed despite revelations of wrongly convicted individuals on Death Row, through DNA testing. While states like Illinois, New York, and New Jersey had acted immediately to suspend all executions pending further investigations, such states as Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida had hardly reacted to the disclosures of the Innocence Project at all. "It's as if they don't give a damn, whether a convicted person is 'guilty'-once he's been found 'guilty' by a jury or a judge. Whether a person is innocent isn't a factor in whether the state kills him." The Investigator was incensed, indignant.

It was for this project that the Investigator had hired the Intern.

He'd warned her that it could be "stomach-turning"-"possibly even dangerous." They would try to be admitted into maximum-security Death Row prisons in disguise as lawyers, criminologists, or university professors in sociology, psychology; if prison officials knew who the Investigator was, the muckraking author of the notorious SHAME! series, he would never be granted admittance. The Intern would be less carefully scrutinized, he was sure-"As my assistant, you can go virtually anywhere I can go. No one will look at you."

"MCSWAIN! DEAL WITH THESE."

A stack of envelopes, not-yet-opened.

It was one of the Intern's tasks to cash the Investigator's checks and to pay the Investigator's bills for him, for the Investigator had a fastidious dislike of what he called finances.

Envelopes containing the Investigator's royalty checks-(to "J. Swift" as well as "Cornelius Hinton" and several others)-he could not bring himself to open, or, if he did, he could not bring himself to glance at the figures, as if to see the extent of his income might be an act of immodesty. Even "Cornelius Hinton's" monthly checks from the Institute, he could barely bring himself to examine.

Such tasks, as well as paying bills, the Investigator gave over entirely to the Intern, surprisingly soon after the Intern came to work for him. (Not at the Institute but in the Investigator's stucco town house on the Rio Vista Canal connecting Temple Park with Fort Lauderdale, which the Investigator was leasing from a colleague on leave at the university. As if incidentally, the town house had a two-storey living room mostly glass-walled, with a view, dazzling in the morning, of the Atlantic Ocean and the misty sky above the ocean a mile and a half to the east.) So this is what bestseller means!-the Intern whistled thinly through her teeth.

"He's rich! Money spilling out of bank accounts, he doesn't know what to do with."

And there were translations and foreign sales, reissued paperback editions of old titles, as well as new titles; adaptations of several of the SHAME! titles into TV and film documentaries, in Europe; even, in Sweden, a proposed stage adaptation of SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR to be produced by a major Stockholm theater.

The Investigator dressed well, in a gentlemanly fashion, when he wanted Professor Cornelius Hinton to present a convincing image to the public; but overall, so far as the Intern could determine, the Investigator lived well within his means, owned no property and only grudgingly leased a high-end vehicle, in the late winter of 2012 a steel-colored Acura MDX, of practical use for his trips by car to Death Row prisons.

(The Intern had not been misleading when she'd assured the Investigator that she had a driver's license-somewhere. Since she'd been hired by him, she had managed to acquire, through a Fort Lauderdale acquaintance with a contact in the Broward County Motor Vehicle Department, a laminated driver's license with a photo ID issued to Sabbath McSwain born 8/15/86. For the Investigator would not drive any vehicle, for any purpose, if he could avoid it.) Along with routine bills-gas, electricity, insurance-the Intern paid bills to a number of services each month, one of them a long-term-care hospital in Minneapolis called Mount Saint Joseph. Also, a check for fifteen hundred dollars went out each month to F. J. Mackie, of St. Paul; another, for a slightly lower sum, to Denise Delaney, of Chicago; still others, for varying amounts of money, to a dozen individuals of whom most lived in the Midwest. (Relatives, former spouses, children? Did the Investigator have children? Grandchildren?) One of the accounts, to which the Investigator had paid more than thirty-five thousand dollars between 2005 and 2011, to a party named Hollis Whittaker, resident of White Plains, New York, had been closed in 2011; in red pencil, the Investigator had written F I N I across the name in his handwritten bank account record.

At several colleges and universities including the University of Minnesota, Wake Forest College, Ithaca College, Loyola College of Chicago, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Temple Park, Florida, the Investigator had established scholarship funds for undergraduates with endowments ranging from $500,000 to $900,000. At Cornell University, in addition, there had been established, in 2007, the J. Swift Fellowship in Bioethics and Investigative Reportage, with an endowment of $900,000, for graduate and post-doc students.

Which meant, as the Intern rapidly calculated, that the Investigator had given away several million dollars within the past decade-a fact no one else could know since no one had tabulated and made a note of it and very likely, the Investigator couldn't have named the numerous scholarships he'd endowed.

In a spare room of the rented town house, on a white Parsons table that stretched the length of the room, were accordion-files of letters: typed and even handwritten letters. Hundreds of these dating back to the late 1960s. (A note from a previous intern, on a Post-it, stated Sorting & filing to 1991. Incomplete.) And there were files of more recent, email letters. Most of these were from editors, some were from readers, a scattering were from friends and acquaintances, former academic associates of the Investigator, students. Salutations were to J. Swift, Cornelius Hinton, "Andy." (Could "Andy" be an affectionate diminutive of "Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr." who'd disappeared decades ago?) The Intern skimmed this miscellany, alert to such phrases as Love, Much love, Love always.

Mixed with letters were cards. Savage-beautiful art postcards, reproductions of paintings by Matisse, Derain, Rousseau . . . The most gorgeously gaudy cards appeared to have been sent by the same individual whose scrawled name might have been Isabel, or Inez.

The last of these cards was dated 2/22/08 and the postmark was Brussels, Belgium.

The Intern had been instructed to "tidy things up"-"identify, with labels"-"dispose of duplicate books, galleys, etc." in the rented stucco town house. Less than a year's lease remained on the town house and the Investigator hadn't given a thought-of course-to where he might move next. (The Investigator was notoriously careless about planning for an immediate, domestic future: his concentration was focused upon the current project.) Previous interns had sorted, filed and labeled much of the Investigator's materials. The Intern discovered, in cardboard boxes neatly labeled by years-(19701980; 19801990, etc.) publications in which the Investigator's work had appeared, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's and TLS; copyedited manuscript pages and galleys for the SHAME! books; print interviews with the Investigator, under the name J. Swift; swatches of reviews, some laudatory and some not. In a folder marked SUMMER 1981/ASPEN were photographs of a festive outdoor wedding in which the Investigator, in his early forties, didn't appear to be the groom but-possibly-the best man. He was wearing a tie-dyed suit of some eccentric material like burlap; on his feet were sandals, and on his head dark bristling snaky braids like dreadlocks; his beard wasn't close-trimmed as it was now but wide, dark, and curly. He didn't look so much like himself-rather more like a ruddy American-simulacrum of the revolutionary Che Guevara.

The wedding photos were haphazard. The camera was scarcely in focus. On a mountainside in the background were wildflowers in vivid bloom, as in a fauve painting. The Intern smiled to think-They are all stoned. They are all so happy! What has become of them now, three decades later?

There was the girl-bride-in white tattered-silk, long silky blond hair, barefoot. And there was the groom-a young guy in his thirties, with a sunburnt face, hair in a ponytail-clean-shaven, and barefoot also.

How handsome the Investigator was, in the summer of 1981! In that long-ago time when he'd been young, still. When he'd been amid a circle of celebrating friends, with whom he was, you could see, emotionally close.

The Intern hadn't yet been born, in 1981. She felt a stab of jealousy seeing in several photographs the Investigator standing with a young woman: not a beautiful young woman but attractive, snub-nosed, with wavy chestnut-colored hair, in a long lacy skirt to her ankles. The two were laughing together, relaxed. There was-you could see it-a sexual ease between them, a physical radiance.

The Intern brought these photographs to a window, to examine them more closely. She thought I have never had a life. What would it be, to have a life?

The Intern felt no bitterness, only curiosity. An almost scientific curiosity.

Thinking too But he has given up this life-of the emotions. He has moved on, he has abandoned these people. Those are the terms on which we can be together.

The new project was tentatively titled SHAME! CRUEL & USUAL PUNISHMENT: Publicly Sanctioned Murders in the U.S.

Though the Investigator was meticulous in his research, the Investigator did not care for a subtle, Jamesian prose style in his writing-his aim was to surprise, to shock, to dismay, to disgust, to convince and to emotionally involve.

The Investigator had been amassing information on death-penalty cases since the highly publicized successes of the Innocence Project in the first decade of the new century, in which more than 260 convicted individuals, many on Death Row, were found innocent through DNA testing. In his computer-files were hundreds of pages of documents including lengthy law journal articles by such specialists in the field as Barry Scheck, Austin Sarat, and Leigh Buchanan Bienen. It was sobering-more than sobering, appalling-to speculate how many individuals, a high percentage of them dark-skinned, had been sentenced to death, though in fact they were not guilty of the crimes for which they'd been sentenced; to speculate how many such individuals were incarcerated in Death Row cell blocks at the present time, who might be freed, if the Innocence Project had access to their cases.

The Investigator characterized himself as a "skeptic"-"since the age of twenty, a cynic in the tradition of Swift and Voltaire"-yet he was astonished and outraged by the fact that in a distressing number of states, virtually nothing had been done to reduce death-penalty judgments, despite the possibility of DNA exoneration. The Investigator raged to the Intern: "Even the Supreme Court of the United States doesn't seem to care if an innocent person is executed, once he's been found 'guilty'!"

The Investigator particularly detested the "right-wing-leaning" chief justices of the Court. His betes noires were Scalia and Thomas. He'd have dearly loved a SHAME! expose of the (secret, concealed) lives of the Supreme Court justices, but these American citizens were so far removed from accountability to anyone, it was all but impossible for "J. Swift" to imagine exposing them.

"Oh God! If I could live forever. If I never slowed down. If I could go back in time, enter law school, manage to get myself appointed a law clerk for Scalia or Thomas! So much of contemporary evil springs from the Court, as from the White House and the Pentagon, dripping down like a shit-stained ceiling . . ."

The Intern was flattered that the Investigator should speak to her so openly. The Investigator had no fear that his Intern hadn't been hired by his enemies to spy on him.

Often she heard him on the telephone talking to old friends, colleagues and comrades in his activist organizations-she heard his aggrieved voice, his harsh laughter.

She felt a thrill of pride. She was the Investigator's intern.

Though unknown to anyone except the Investigator, at the present time, perhaps sometime, after the new SHAME! project was completed, the name "Sabbath McSwain" might be linked with his name, and their names.

Naively thinking Maybe we will make a difference. What we expose to the world-will change the world.

THE FIRST VISIT to a Death Row facility had been arranged: March 11, 2012, at 10 A.M., at the Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men at Orion, Florida. Orion was a small town in the flatlands of Central Florida north and west of Lake Okeechobee approximately a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Temple Park.

"The tour is arranged, McSwain? Good work!"

The Investigator never failed to express pleased surprise when the Intern accomplished something of a kind he found difficult to undertake: simple telephone requests, reservations and bookings, filling a prescription at the local drugstore, querying a bill that had already been paid. The Investigator was temperamentally vexed at having to execute such ordinary tasks, as a musical prodigy would be vexed having to play "Chopsticks."

The Intern had long been "shy"-that is, not-very-sociable-inclined to extreme taciturnity, even to sullenness-but had quickly assumed, as Dr. Cornelius Hinton's assistant, a confidence, a kind of hearty arrogance, befitting her position. Her ordinary voice was hesitant and scratchy and near-inaudible but her telephone voice was sharp and forthright; the impressively pompous Professor Cornelius Hinton, Institute for Advanced Research at the State University of Florida at Temple Park rolled off her tongue as if she'd been uttering it for years, to intimidate others.

From a contact of the Investigator's in the University of Florida Law School at Gainesville the Intern had managed to secure two places in the Orion tour, which was reserved for individuals in the field of criminal justice, professors and educators and psychologists, politicians, social welfare workers, clergy. In theory, background checks were to be made of all visitors to Florida prison facilities; in practice, the Intern gathered, such checks were cursory and random. Since a professor at the Law School had vouched for Dr. Hinton, neither Hinton nor his young assistant was likely to arouse suspicion in the Orion authorities.

On the morning of March 11, 2012, the Intern came early to the Investigator's office at the Institute. The plan was that the Intern would drive them in the Investigator's leased Acura SUV to the prison facility north and west of Lake Okeechobee. On the drive-on U.S. 27, along the North New River Canal-the Investigator studied Death Row documents he'd downloaded from the Internet, made cell phone calls and rehearsed with the Intern what their strategy should be during the guided tour-"I will be recording when I can. What seems valuable. Just the tour-guide talking, if he's a corrections officer, is the sort of thing I want. Death Row anecdotes. 'Off the record' kind of things-he'd never say in an interview. And in the execution chamber, if the tour takes us there-we'll both want to take pictures, if we can. The closer to the execution site, the better. But don't worry: I won't expect you to do anything risky, this first time. Though you're my 'assistant' we won't acknowledge any connection during the tour. The tour has been organized through the warden's office, it's doubtful that the guide would even know that 'Sabbath McSwain' is 'Cornelius Hinton's' assistant. I'll signal you if I want you to do something in particular but don't try to anticipate anything-just behave naturally. Fit in with the others. You look like a student-you won't attract attention. I will take as many photos as I can, that seem to me pertinent to our project. But we should both be sparing."

The Intern smiled uneasily. Sparing!

The Intern had no wish to call attention to herself. The Intern had a strong wish to remain invisible for as long as possible.

At the Orion exit, all signs led to the prison facility.

At the Orion exit, already you could see the flatland-acreage of the prison grounds bordered by a fifteen-foot electrified wire-mesh fence topped with coils of razor wire. You could see, at regular intervals along this fence, guard-tower stations. And beyond, only just visible, the ugly fortress-like buildings of the prison. The Investigator said thoughtfully: "I've been 'jailed' a few times but not yet 'imprisoned.' There's a profound psychological difference, it's said. And only just imagine-a sentence of life behind bars. A sentence of death."

The Intern detected an air of excitement and apprehension in her employer's voice. The Intern did not wish to think He is anxious, too-but will never show it.

On the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Temple Park, the Intern had thought If something goes wrong now-an accident-we would be spared. The worse danger would be averted.

But the Intern was a careful driver. The Intern was a precise driver. The Intern was something of an obsessively careful and precise and law-abiding driver in the very face of a (secret) wish to sabotage the morning's project, to spare the Investigator and herself the risk of entering the maximum-security prison and confronting what lay within.

By 9:45 A.M., the prison facility was bathed in the dull-winter-glower of central Florida in late winter: no visible sun, a sky of coarse clouds, yet a shadow-less light everywhere. The Intern could recall-vaguely, as one might recall a childhood movie never seen in its entirety, or consciously-a very different sort of late-winter, in another, more northerly climate.

Especially in the mountains, snow would lie everywhere in mid-March-in heaps, in layers, in rivulets, some of it gritty and discolored and some of it fresh, freshly-fallen and dazzling-white.

Here in Florida, snow never fell. No startling surprise out of the sky-snow.

By 9:45 A.M., the prison facility was well into its day. Very likely, the prison-day began, for corrections officers and other employees who came into the facility, at dawn.

The employees' parking lot was nearly full. The visitors' lot, which had to be at least an eighth of a mile beyond, was already about one-third full.

Before they were allowed into the prison, the Investigator and the Intern had to lock away personal items in their car trunk or glove compartment: wallets, credit cards, cash, all electronic equipment including cell phones, laptop computers, iPads. They were forbidden to bring inside contraband-cigarettes, for instance, or any sort of medication. Any sort of instrument or weapon, anything that might be fashioned into a weapon, a toothbrush for instance, house or car keys, gold-chain necklaces, any sort of conspicuous jewelry. They were allowed to wear wristwatches and they were allowed to bring inside with them a single pen and a single small notebook-no recording devices or cameras, of course. They were forbidden to wear any shade of blue for blue was the prisoners' primary color, nor could they wear denim of any color, including black, for denim was the prisoners' primary fabric. They were forbidden to wear orange-orange jumpsuits were the uniforms of a certain cadre of prisoners who were not-yet-sorted into the general population. And they were forbidden to wear brown, or beige-brown, for these were the colors of the COs' uniforms.

Visitors were forbidden to wear shorts, sleeveless shirts or pullovers, open-toed shoes like sandals. Female visitors in particular were not to wear "provocative" clothing no matter the heat. (Some administrative offices were air-conditioned at Orion but, overall, the facility sweltered and baked in the heat of the sun through April to October and beyond: if you believed you could not bear temperatures in the mid- or high 90s, or higher, it was not recommended that you visit Orion during these months.) On this chilly day, the Intern wore dark corduroy trousers and the Investigator surprised her by wearing a quite striking suit, dove-gray, pinstripe, of a light flannel wool, with a white shirt and a silk necktie, which she'd never seen before.

He'd even trimmed his white beard. He'd trimmed his fingernails.

Of course, visitors were forbidden to speak with-"signal to"-any inmate. They were not to drift away from the tour-group under any circumstances. They were not to attempt to pass notes to any inmate-or corrections officer. If the tour-guide introduced them to a trustee-an inmate-worker-they could speak to this man, but not otherwise; and they could not ask him any personal questions, whatsoever.

"It will be like taking a tour through a 'factory farm,' or a slaughterhouse, which I've already done and which can be pretty ghastly. Essentially, our aim is to soak up as much information as we can, and take pictures when we can, and get back out alive." The Investigator laughed, as if he'd said something witty.

The Investigator instructed the Intern to please walk ahead of him, to catch up with a half-dozen other visitors who were making their way up a flight of crude stone steps to the roadway above. The Investigator remained at the SUV for a few minutes longer, before following after her. And when he joined the group of fourteen visitors assembled outside the prison gate it was 9:58 A.M., he did not so much as glance at her.

THOUGH SCHEDULED TO BEGIN promptly at 10 A.M., the tour did not begin until 10:38 A.M. when the tour-guide-the Lieutenant-arrived, from inside the prison facility. He was a tall fit-looking man of indeterminate age, not old, yet certainly not young, in the dull-brown uniform of the Orion correctional officers; his shoulders were muscular, yet slightly slumped, as his chest seemed just slightly concave, as if he'd been ill recently and had not yet regained his lost weight and strength. His jaws looked as if they hadn't been shaved recently-at least, not clean-shaven. His eyes crinkled at the corners with an unpredictable sort of merriment. He checked the IDs of the tour-visitors and passed them back without comment except to say, apropos the "sociology of crime" class and their (female) professor from the Florida State UniversityEustis-"Might be, I could learn something from you." His tone was somewhere between sneering and flattery.

Just inside the prison gate was a metal-detector checkpoint through which the Lieutenant drove his visitors like a herd-dog driving sheep. Again they showed their laminated ID cards, this time to a frowning guard who stared at them suspiciously as if he'd never seen a tour-group before. The guard stamped their wrists with invisible ink warning them that, if they washed the ink off, the entire facility would go into lockdown-"Nobody in, and nobody out."

Other guards were moving through the checkpoint with them. It was protocol, the Lieutenant said, for visitors to allow COs to go ahead of civilians.

The Intern moved without hesitation. Her heart was beating calmly. In such times of wonderment it is good to recall I am not really meant to be alive-this is all posthumous. I will endure.

"Step along, folks. This way. Don't stray from my side."

Now they were inside the facility, or rather in an interior courtyard of the facility. Underfoot was a scrubby open area of cobblestones edged with weeds and, to the right, a weatherworn stucco building upon which a rainbow mural had been painted, very likely by inmates. The Intern glanced back at the others in the tour-group-the students of whom all but two were female, the (female) professor, several middle-aged men, all white-and, in his distinguished pinstripe suit, the Investigator who'd already begun taking notes in his little pocket notebook.

The Investigator's Sony watch, with the large state-of-the-art face in which dates, tides, sunsets and sunrises were registered, was visible on his wrist, and set to take instantaneous mini-pictures, the Intern knew.

Her own Sony watch, a gift from the Investigator, wasn't so conspicuous on the Intern's wrist, nor did she feel comfortable about using it. The Investigator had rehearsed picture-taking with her-numerous times-but the Investigator had told her not to take pictures inside the facility if she was anxious about doing so: to take pictures here was in violation of Florida law, and she could be arrested.

He had no intention of being caught, or arrested. He prided himself on never once having been discovered when he'd gone undercover on a project, since the late 1970s.

The Lieutenant was telling them about the history of the Orion Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men, founded in 1907, on just twenty acres of land. In subsequent decades the prison was enlarged and in 1939 the current Death Row unit was built, holding thirty-five prisoners. In 1982, other maximum-security facilities were built in central Florida, to accommodate a "growing increase" in the prison population-"Due mainly to drugs and drug-trafficking in the Miami area." In the state of Florida there were three other Death Row institutions-Florida State Prison, or Starke Prison; Union Correctional Institution in Raiford; and Lowell Correctional Institution Annex, where women on Death Row were housed.

From her research the Intern knew most of this. The Lieutenant's voice was brisk and hearty and grating to her ears. The Intern saw how the Lieutenant's pebble-colored eyes moved over the individuals of the tour-group, compulsively. He had no need to listen to himself speak-he'd said these words many times, and knew to pause when he expected smiles, or nervous laughter. For it seemed that the Lieutenant was always counting the members of the tour-group-he couldn't help himself.

The Intern sometimes found herself counting-people, figures, objects. Who knows why?

A way of fixing the infinite. Stopping time before it flows-away.

It was an M. C. Escher predilection, maybe. A compulsion.

Badly she wanted to draw-something. Her fingers twitched, as the Investigator's fingers twitched, with the need to collect, to record. In this forbidden place, in particular. Where they moved like wraiths, undercover.

The Intern, as "Sabbath McSwain," had had an art exhibit, with two other young women artists, at the Females Without Borders center at the Temple Park. After a long absence of creating art-of feeling the wish to create art, still less the energy and hope of such effort-the Intern had worked for several exhilarated weeks on intricately rendered pen-and-ink drawings, not of Escher-like visionary subjects but of individuals she'd observed close-up, and intimately: some of them had been customers in the failing bookstore, faces that had appealed to her, a kindred loneliness in them as in herself, and that peculiar yearning.

The instinct for abstraction had waned in her. The instinct for a witty acquisition of being, through quantification and repetition. Now, she seemed to care mostly for individual faces: quirky, homely, unself-conscious, unique. Millions of individuals, very few of any particular distinction yet all of them unique. Here was the mystery!

The Investigator hadn't wanted an assistant who was creative. The Intern would hide from him this impulse, never would she confide in him that she'd had an exhibit at the Females Without Borders center. (Which possibly the Investigator had seen, though he wouldn't have remembered her name attached to twenty-five pen-and-ink portraits of extreme simplicity.) The Intern smiled: overhearing one of the young women in the tour-group murmur to a companion that the Investigator-"that man, there-with the white hair"-was "some kind of retired chief justice"-a remark which, the Intern thought, would amuse her employer when she told him.

"Any questions, folks? If not, follow me!"

The Lieutenant had finished the opening passages of his tour-speech. Now he was leading his fifteen visitors across the courtyard and into the stucco chapel.

"This is our 'non-denominational' house of worship, folks. We are very proud of our chapel."

The interior was spartan, with pinewood pews, a low ceiling, sputtering candles against a wall and a plain T-cross, not a crucifix, elevated at the front of the room. There was a pulpit banked with artificial calla lilies and behind the pulpit stood a light-skinned black man in blue prison uniform, about thirty-five years old, nervously waiting to address the group. He had a boyish face, eager eyes. The Lieutenant introduced him as "Juan-Carlos"-a "lifer"-that is, the inmate had been given an indeterminate prison sentence-"thirty years to life"-from which he might, at some point in the future, be paroled.

Juan-Carlos spoke rapidly, staring out into the pews with shining eyes. His voice had a gospel-lilt. Telling of how he'd made a "bad choice" as a boy, joining a gang, in Miami, drug-dealing-gang-"thown my own life away like garbage"-and ever after, "tryin to retrieve it through the help of Christ Our Lord."