Chapter 11

There was a white, rectangular marble bench-style bed molded to the floor on the far wall, with a thin white foam mattress on it and a pillow for bedding.
There was a steel toilet with no lid in the left corner, plus a small hexagonal steel sink and a round white molded concrete stool and desk built into the floor with no screws or visible seams.
The tiny space looked minimalist and modern.
There was not so much as a single poster on the off-white walls. One small calendar was taped above the desk, with pictures of women in bikinis sitting on shiny chrome motorcycles.
Smith, Chega, Digby and Dawe meticulously sifted everything, finding a few interesting un-mailed letters addressed to post office boxes around the country, but nothing else.
The letters almost certainly contained coded instructions of some kind, but nothing that struck Smith as particularly important. He made some rough notes on their contents.
The real reason the officers had come to Burnside was to hear what Caleb Chega had to say.
The longtime corrections officer was chief steward for Nova Scotia Government Employees Union local 1187 and the Local Intelligence Officer for Criminal Intelligence Service Nova Scotia, liaising between CISNS and the seemy underworld of provincial corrections.
More than anyone else, and in more ways than one, Chega was the eyes and ears of Burnside Jail.
Smith had become friends with him over the years through many previous investigations of gang activity within the jail system.
Few provincial level guards were as committed as Caleb Chega. Chega was a lifer, while most provincial guards see jail duty as a short-term, feces-filled purgatory through which they have to crawl in order to get accepted into the Federal Corrections Academy in Memramcook, New Brunswick. The federal level of the guard game was where the real wages were found, plus the gang intelligence support, the proper riot gear, the pension, the whole package, including a lifetime membership in perhaps the most powerful gang of all in Canada, the Public Service Commission.