Jailbreak: Prison Investigation

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Garrison takes Adrienne to the prison to get some answers about how the jailbreak was instigated.

Drumming her fingers on the dashboard of Garrison's car nervously as they approached the prison, Adrienne wrinkled her nose. "I sort of hate your car, you know, and I still think we should have let Driver bring us in mine." She huffed out a breath, fidgeting with her seatbelt. "Still, I suppose it's better than a horse. Hey, do I get a shiny badge when we go inside that I can flash at the guards and the prisoners like on Law and Order?"


"Adrienne, they just went through the most catastrophic prison break of the last fifty years in the United States. Flashing a badge and making television police drama jokes?" Kane turned to her, his profile marred by several bruises from his own efforts to recapture the escapees. "Not really the thing you want to be doing right now."


"That's why I'm doing it in the car," she pointed out, still fidgeting. "I've never even seen Law and Order," she grumbled. "Okay so if I can't have a badge to make them respect me are you going to be my bodyguard? Because the whole 'they just went through the most catastrophic prison break of the last fifty years' thing isn't exactly the most reassuring thing to hear when you have to visit." The idea of having to go to a prison filled with dangerous men who had found a way to escape was scary, especially if she couldn't hide behind some symbol of authority.

"SHIELD already knows we're coming, and the Bureau has had your name included on the list. You don't need a badge to talk to them. As for the prisoners, they aren't going to care whether you've got a badge or not. They'll either want to talk to you, tell you to get fucked, or spend the whole time staring at your tits." Kane pulled the car into the lot. He was being deliberately blunt; even locked down, this was still a SuperMax prison, with some of the worst of the worst in three states inside. She'd be safe; the guards and he'd see to that, but there was no way to stop the abuse she'd get from the general population if they needed to go that route.

Garrison reached back and pulled out a blue windbreaker, with yellow lettering. "Put this on. It'll work just as well as a badge." It was an FBI jacket, identical to his own.


"I'll just have to make sure they all stare at my tits, then," she replied with false cheer, making a show of flicking some buttons open on her blouse and pushing her breasts up before putting on the windbreaker. Can we play good cop, bad cop? Okay okay," she added before she drove him to the point where steam poured out his ears, "let's go in." She zipped the windbreaker up, deciding to save the tits theory for a last resort.

"Oh, this is going to be a bad idea." Garrison muttered to himself as he went through the door. He passed over his identification at the first checkpoint, carefully guarded by alert men armed with shotguns. He resisted an urge to smile. Duncan had been correct about what to expect. The guards would be alert and on edge, ready for anything. Exactly how they should have been 48 hours ago when everything went wrong.


Adrienne clenched her teeth, following closely behind Garrison and trying her best to look disinterested. "Have I mentioned how glad I am that I trusted you and didn't have to end up in one of these places?" she mused.

"You would have had to kill a couple more husbands to end up here." Garrison said, following his escorts through several checkpoints, and across a secure corridor into one of the inmate holding silos. "SuperMax' hold lifers, violent offenders, death row cases, organized crime... and in this case, mutants with potentially dangerous powers. Some don't even belong at this level, but there isn't a facility yet finished designed to hold mutants at multiple levels of detention."

The silo was under lock down, and mostly empty. They could see several forensic teams working around the battle damaged concrete and steel cells, tagging blood stains and scorch marks to reconstruct the events and determine just what went so badly wrong in their security.

"Agent Kane? I'm Inspector Carson. Bureau called ahead, mentioned you'd be down."

"Right. This is Ms Frost. She's a civilian specialist working with us. Where are the rest of the inmates?"

"Mostly spread out between the other silos. We've kept the ones who were closest involved in the riot here, and we're running interviews now."


"Do you want me just to, you know, go nuts?" Adrienne asked Garrison, waggling her fingers at him. "See what I can see? Or are there certain places and things I should avoid? Is there a method to what you need me to do, I mean?" This wasn't the first time she'd worked with him in an official capacity, but this was a little different than reading a bomber's clothing to find out his identity, and she wanted to make sure she didn't make a mistake that could lead to her findings being dismissed in court.

"Adrienne, relax." Kane said gently, aware she was babbling. "And I wouldn't go reading just anything. This is a prison, which means there's a lot of nasty shit neither of us really wants to see stored up in here."

Carson waved them over to a cell, which had been literally shattered by tremendous blows, the door almost torn from the cement walls. "We think it started here. Inmate 12000-34; John Hitchens, appeared to somehow 'change' and destory his cell to escape."

"Mutant?"

"No. General population. Actually one of the least security concerns we had, which is why he was in this silo, since we had to keep female prisoners here, mostly seperated from the main population. Hitchens was fifty-eight, worked in the kitchen and the yard, convicted in the late seventies on drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder. He was up for parole next May."

"Yeah, definitely least likely to cause trouble. Adrienne, be careful, eh? We don't know who might have had that cell before Hitchens."

"You sure know how to show a girl a good time, Kane," Adrienne grumbled as she wiped off a hand and set it on the warped door of the cell, careful to start her reading at the present and work slowly back on the timeline so she wouldn't have to witness anything from a previous inhabitant of the cell.

If she'd been able to scream while reading something, she would have screamed at the sight of the cell's occupant, Hitchens, turning into a grotesque, enormous humanoid blob-thing with no face. Hitchens began rampaging around the cell, destroying it like it was made of Legos and bursting out into the hallway to wreak havoc on the rest of the silo. Instead of screaming she cut herself off from the reading, not too upset to feel a bit of pride in the fact that her hand was still on the cell door.

"What the fuck? I thought you said this guy wasn't a mutant?" she challenged Kane, taking her hand off the door. "Explain to me how a human turns into some sort of golem-troll-Clayface thing!"

"Um, what?" Kane said, and listened carefully to her description. He flipped open his PDA, and began to access the files of the mutants they knew were held there, reviewing their powers. "Infectia." He pulled up the report from Dr. McCoy and read it carefully. "Inspector Carson, did Hitchens have any contact with the female prisoners. The mutants?"

"Of course not. We keep them strictly sequestered; different yard times, different meal times, shower times, laundry schedules. Closest he might have gotten was walking past their cell area bracketed by a couple of guards."

"How did you control their powers?"

"Strongest ones had inhibiters while outside of their cells, and specially reinforced cells to keep them secure at night. We got lucky. Most of them didn't need much to keep under wraps."

"What about Infectia?"

"The plague girl? Inhibitor for meals and showers, masked and gloved the rest of the time, seperately sealed cell."

"Hitchens worked in the kitchens?"

"Chow line, yeah."

"Men and women?"

"Shit." Carson shook his head. "He might. I didn't think to check."

"Come on, Adrienne. Looks like we're going to check out the cafeteria."

Trying to catch up both mentally and physically as Garrison was already on the move, Adrienne frowned as she hurried along. "This Infectia person had the power to make Hitchens into the golem-troll-Clayface thing, and you think she touched Hitchens in the cafeteria line," she mused. "So now we need to figure out how she was able to touch him if her powers were controlled..."

Trailing off, she poked at the food counter so she wouldn't have to witness the sight of the cafeteria in the aftermath of the jailbreak. As before, she worked backwards from the present, skipping quickly over the sight of the prisoners rioting and stopping when she found the female prisoners getting into line. Hitchens wasn't on the other side of the counter, however, so she backed up further to a time when he was, picking him out easily from the reading of the cell, before he'd turned into some sort of abomination of a cartoon character.

Tapping her mental foot in impatience, Adrienne watched the women getting their food, her 'eyes' on Hitchens. After he slipped a small package to a woman, she returned to the present.

"Eew, meatloaf," she commented, wrinkling her nose. "I saw him give something to a woman, a package about this size." She demonstrated with her hands. "So my supersleuthing sense tells me we need to find out who gave him said package and what was in it. Should I check the cell again?"

"I doubt he would have stashed it there. Inspector?"

"The most open section of the prison, security-wise, is the yard. Unless a guard gave it to him, someone smuggling it in would take the lowest risk of discovery. Hitchens was old-time and on good behaviour, so he worked the gardens. They get searched coming in and out, but if it was something small..."

"Let's take a look at the gardens. Did he have any specific equipment?"

"It's shared equipment, but there's only ten men on the detail at any time."

"Think you can go through ten pairs of work gloves?"

"In my sleep," Adrienne replied with a snort, trying to use false bravado to mask her nervousness as they began to move again. She moved closer to Kane as they passed the cells, ignoring the calls, jeers, and comments the three of them were getting from the prisoners. Waving a hand in front of her face like she was getting warm, she unzipped her jacket to see if the tits theory would work on them.

The volume of the comments increased and it was Carson's unimpressed look that quickly dispelled any mirth. "Miss, we had a riot two days ago. The guards don't need anyone making things more difficult." He rebuked quietly as they passed through another security checkpoint.

Adrienne zipped her jacket back up and resisted the urge to preen over the fact that Carson's statement seemed to imply he thought she could induce another prison riot with her tits, since she knew that hadn't been his point.

The route through the currently thinly populated silo led to another security area, and through that, access to the maintainance area. It was securely guarded, as it represented one of the few accessways past the walls. Carson waved at a neat workspace, that had carefully lined up boots, gardening gloves, and basic landscaping equipment stacked on and around it.

"There's the equipment. Everything is counted going out and coming back in, and the prisoners are searched. It doesn't mean that Hitchens couldn't have slipped something past the guards. He's been on this detail for a couple of years now, and has never been a security risk."

"So it was likely that the day to day security on him was likely a bit prefunctionary. Got it." Kane finished. Guarding was actually a lot more difficult than people thought, since being active and alert every minute of every shift with tasks you'd done dozens of times that day alone was nearly impossible.


"You may as well get comfy," Adrienne said to the men as she surveyed the equipment she would have to read. "Since we don't know which gloves Hitchens was wearing on the day he got the package, or when he got the package, or even if he got a package while wearing the gloves, this might take a while." Of course she didn't really mean that, had only said it to lower their expectations, because readings, while they felt like time was passing for her, were actually instantaneous in the real world no matter how much of the timeline she read.

The first pair of gloves showed nothing extraordinary within the past six months, and the second pair was much the same aside from a rather lude episode where the wearer either decided it had been too long since his last conjugal visit and hadn't wanted to wait til he returned to his bunk for happy time or just felt the need to leave a nice stain on the gloves for someone else to find. The third pair had been worn during an attack on one of the guards which Adrienne skipped over quickly.

Thankfully, reading the fourth pair of gloves yielded some pay dirt. She watched Hitchens pick something up out of the grass on the far side of the prison wall, and pocket it.

"I saw him take something," she reported to Kane and Carson, throwing the gloves aside gratefully. "From over there. He pocketed it, and it wasn't an interesting new rock to add to his rock collection. It looked like one of those things nerds use when they can't breathe, one of those L-shaped things. Why would he pocket that?"

"An inhaler?" Kane and Carson exchanged a look. "Kick. Someone planted an inhaler full of Kick on the grounds, for Hitchens to smuggle into Infectia. Inspector, would--"

Carson was already shaking his head. "If she was on Kick, she would have been able to bypass our precautions and infect people."

"And that's your breakout. She must have known that those drones would go nuts when they transformed and transit, and without any prior warning, none of the guards had a hope of containing them. The more chaos they and the escapees caused, the better her chances of getting away in the mess. Either she was working with the people who planted the drug, or they knew what she'd do with it if she had the chance."

"So now you just have to find out who knows Infectia that well," Adrienne mused, enjoying being a sleuth. "Isn't there surveillance on the area outside the prison where the inhaler was dropped? Wouldn't the tapes show someone dropping it?"



"They'll start looking. Officially, your powers are inadmissable in court, so I'll tell Duncan and he'll get some agents together with Corrections and start looking for corroborating evidence." He fished out his cell phone. "Inspector Carson, I'll get some help down to you as soon as possible. Adrienne," Kane smiled crookedly as he dialed. "Nice work."


"Would be nicer if my powers were admissible in court," she grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest. "Can I have my brownies now?"

"Don't tempt me to call them Adri Snacks from now on."