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didn’t I!” Kirk finally shouted into the phone. He felt a rush of blood. “Goddamn it, of course it ain’t me! Didn’t I tell you? Ain’t I been telling you?” Kirk felt a flood sweep through his head. “Didn’t I tell you? Over and over? But no one believed me? Didn’t I . . .” Kirk stopped speaking because he realized that his hand shook so hard he could barely hold the phone. He felt lost suddenly and began to cry. He tried to control himself. Down the tier an inmate hadstopped his mopping and was watching. Kirk had learned never to show weakness in front of other inmates in the prison. He tried to hold the phone still and steady to his ear and speak again. “Didn’t I tell you?” And then he couldn’t anymore. He just broke up, let the phone drop, and began to weep both with shame and without shame, covering his face to hide himself at first and then just letting himself be seen. Down the row of cages, three or four more inmates were peering out their cell doors watching him. Kirk no longer cared. The phone dangled on its aluminum cord. He stood then and whispered, “It’s over, it’s over . . .” Then he repeated it louder to no one in particular: “It’s finally over, ain’t it?” Then he raised up on tiptoes, threw his hands high in the air mimicking a touchdown, and started screaming it: “Sweet Jesus, it’s over! It’s goddamn over, Bob!” He leaned down and yelled it into the dangling phone. “It’s over, Bob! This is fucking great! It’s finally over, man!” He raised up on tiptoe again, his arms stretched high. Tears streamed down his face. He started hopping in place, then started running down the tier, his arms still up, turning one way and then another, jumping, crying and screaming. “It’s over! It’s over!” He kept hollering it. “The DNA says it ain’t me! It ain’t me! The DNA says it ain’t me. It’s over . . .”
    Bob Morin could hear all this through the phone. As he listened, he shivered with emotion. What would happen next to Kirk, how long would it take to actually free him, would the real killer ever be caught? He bowed his head thinking about how such an injustice could occur.
    Sergeant Cooley Hall was not surprised. He just leaned back against the tier wall shaking his head and whistling over this strange inmate, his friend, this Mister Bloodmon, in whom he’d come to believe.

PART II
A CRIME IN FONTANA VILLAGE
    May the bad not kill the good
    Nor the good kill the bad
    I am a poet, without any bias,
    I say without doubt or hesitation
    There are no good assassins.
    â€”P ABLO N ERUDA

FIVE
    T HE M ARYLAND P ENITENTIARY , the oldest continually operating prison in the Western world, sits like a medieval castle high on a promontory at the intersection of Madison and Forrest Streets in the city of Baltimore. Its grimy walls have incarcerated generations of convicts including “Negro Bob” Butler, who was reputedly the first to enter the institution upon its completion in 1811, as well as the celebrated “Tunnel Joe” Holmes, who chiseled through slate, concrete, and seventy feet of earth and clay to escape. For two centuries it has housed the state’s most violent and incorrigible criminals. Its walls enclose men who live by brute force, who seethe with anger, who are pitiless. Kirk Bloodsworth spent nearly a decade in the Maryland Penitentiary, much of it on death row.
    This mausoleum was built at an elevated altitude, supposedly to benefit from the breezes off the water. Beneficent city officials believed that the disorders that seemed to habitually infect prisoners—smallpox and dysentery—might be alleviated by fresh air. Initially, there were few buildings nearby. No one had ever heard of a skyscraper. As its population of convicted criminals grew, as timepassed, this prison witnessed the dramatic