The Adored by Tom Connolly Read Free Book Online Page A

of what so many cope with. Does that make sense?”
    “It does,” Parker added. “Mine is similar. How do we not hurt others?” I don’t know the answer, but I’m framing my question around that thought. Tray, you?”
    “My father always likes to talk about peace. Being the warrior he seems to go to opposites. He always quotes Curtis LeMay, the general who ran the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command where they have all the B52 bombers. LeMay was the guy who fire bombed Tokyo in World War II, but when it came time for a motto for his Air Command he chose, ‘Peace is our Profession.’ So something like that, how do we keep peace in the world?”
    “Valerie offered up ours, but I also have a second idea floating around, “How do we remain lifelong friends?”
    And in that long day out on the grass at the end of summer, the seven boys and one girl pondered Mr. Conetta’s challenge and for some, put in place a framework that would guide their lives.

 
    Chapter 12
     
    The first thing you notice about the Auburn maximum security prison is the walls. Huge imposing walls. Walls that run for blocks. And as these walls change directions, there are guardhouses sitting atop them, large guardhouses, more like apartments, surrounded by glass.
    Robert Chambers, the preppy murderer, served his time there. William Kemmler, the first person executed in the electric chair, got the juice there. Joey Gallo, the mobster who made a mess of Umberto’s clam house in Little Italy when they rubbed him out, spent happier days at Auburn. And while the State Asylum for Insane Criminals was part of the Auburn System, Robert Buffum, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Abraham Lincoln himself, committed suicide there by slashing his throat in his cell. Some unfortunate things happened to Mr. Buffum after his meeting with the president: he became an uncontrollable alcoholic, suffered psychological damage resulting from his time as a prisoner of war in the hands of Confederates, and he spent three years in a mental hospital. After that hospital stay, he began to drink again, got into an argument with a man who denigrated President Lincoln and shot and killed the man. He was indicted for murder and sent to the Asylum as an insane criminal.
    Interestingly, not two miles from the prison is the historic home of William Seward, former US Senator and Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, who was brutally stabbed in his Washington home on April 14, 1865, the same night President Lincoln was murdered at the Ford Theater. Seward’s attacker, Lewis Powell, was a co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth. Seward recovered from his injuries and later retired to his home in Auburn where he died on October 10, 1872.
     
    It had started to snow in the morning when he left Stamford on the Greyhound bus to New York. Billy Stevens was to take a bus from New York’s Port Authority to visit his cousin, Curtis “CJ” Strong, who had been imprisoned in Auburn for four of his twenty-five years to life sentence. While CJ’s and Billy’s mothers were sisters and the boys were best friends growing up, Billy had not come to visit CJ in the time he had been at Auburn.
    The bus to the prison was free for family members and brought the visitor right to the front gate of the prison. By 11 a.m. the snow had started to accumulate, and some of the people who had been waiting for the bus to Auburn decided to leave after it was delayed one hour. Stevens thought about turning back; after all, he was not looking forward to seeing his friend and telling him what really happened on the night the Guatemalan drug dealer was murdered. It also meant he would not get back to Stamford until after midnight.
    Stevens would take the bus. He needed to unburden himself.
    The ride was mostly on major highways and took a little over four hours. Stevens and the other passengers visiting the prison went through multiple layers of security including partial body searches.
    As they