Sitting in storage, Lilly pulled another page from the case box on the table, while two men standing around her looked at their own pages.

"Ben Phillips," Lilly read. "Nineteen, sophomore at Whitman, found stabbed to death along the side of the road up in Northeast."

Lilly's partner, Scotty Valens, frowned at the report he was reading. "Surprised he didn't find someone to help."

The older man, Lieutenant John Stillman, turned to Scotty. "Well, he might've been in shock. Plus that area was all industrial back then. If it was the middle of the night, everything would've been shut down. He could've wandered around in the dark for hours and not seen anyone before he bled out."

Lilly nodded. "Assigned thought he was probably walking home from a party and got mugged, except Ben's friend Jake says Ben wasn't the partying type."

"Well, whatever happened, looks like Ben fought back," Scotty said, reading the medical examiner's report, before handing it to Lilly. "Bruising on the hands suggests he was hitting someone, hard. Unfortunately, the rain took care of any prints that might've been left on the body."

"This is interesting," Lilly said, reading the report. "M.E. found traces of gold in and around the wound."

"Gold?" asked Stillman, with a hint of skepticism. "Not something most people in that neighborhood would've been carrying."

Scotty shrugged, "Doesn't sound like a mugging, but without the experiment angle, the assigned probably didn't have much to go on."

"Speaking of which, you find anything more about that experiment?" Stillman asked.

"Just the two guys who ran it," Lilly said. "Bob Patterson, the dean, died in '98, and Professor Kevin Hatcher, just retired last year."

Stillman nodded, "Okay, keep digging. Scotty, you and Nick can talk to the professor. I want to know what the hell kind of experiment this was, if it ended with someone getting stabbed."


Professor Hatcher's study was about what Scotty expected; an old-style, wood-finished room with several bookshelves and various plaques and framed awards hanging from the wall.

This is a guy who wants everyone to know how smart he is, Scotty thought to himself with a smirk.

Hatcher himself, a slim, but fit-looking man of about seventy, gave Scotty and Vera a nod as he sat down behind his desk and took a sip from the glass of scotch in his hand.

"I haven't thought about that experiment in a long time." Hatcher said with a sigh. "It took me a lot of years to live it down."

"What kind of experiment was it anyway?" Scotty asked.

"A prison experiment," Hatcher said, looking wistful. "It was my idea. I was just starting out as a professor, and I was so determined to make my mark. I thought this would help us gain new insight."

"Insight into what?" Vera asked.

"Authority, really. The country was divided like it hadn't been since the Civil War. Some people were supporting the government, and the war, without question. Others were denouncing the government and everything it stood for. How do people respond to authority, both when they're faced with it, and when it's given to them? I mean look at you gentlemen. Would you be the same person you are now if you'd become an accountant or a construction worker?"

Scotty and Vera looked at each other.

"I don't like working outside and I never had a head for numbers." Vera said, looking skeptical, "now back to the story."

"Yes, I'm sorry," Hatcher said with an embarrassed chuckle, "The academic in me dies hard. Anyway, I managed to sell the Dean on the idea. He helped me get some financial backing from the Navy, the Department of Corrections, and a few others. We converted an old building that had been built to quarantine influenza patients around the end of the First World War. It was practically a prison already. After that, all we needed were the volunteers."

"That's where Ben came in?" Scotty asked.

Hatcher nodded. "I picked them myself. I could tell that Ben was a stand-out; honest, hard-working, fair-minded. I had something special planned for him…"


("Sympathy for the Devil" – The Rolling Stones)

Standing in the enclosed office area, Dean Patterson frowned as he looked out at the collection of young men gathered in a common area before turning to Hatcher, who was also watching them.

"I checked over some of the profiles." Patterson asked. "Are you sure these are the ones you want?"

Hatcher nodded confidently. "I'm sure. They shouldn't be too polished. Don't worry. I know what I'm doing."

Patterson's gaze shifted as his secretary, an attractive young brunette, walked in carrying a stack of papers.

"Sir, I have the orientation forms you asked for," she said to Patterson, before handing Hatcher the forms.

"Thanks, sweetheart," Patterson said, giving her a smirk. As she turned to exit, Patterson gave her a pat on the rear, causing her to flinch. Not letting him see her reaction, she gritted her teeth and walked out.

Patterson turned to Hatcher with a smirk. "Trust me, the day goes by a lot a quicker when you get to spend it looking at something like that."

Hatcher, looking a bit awkward at the display, gestured towards the doorway, and he and Patterson walked out towards the group.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," Hatcher said, giving the students a smile, keeping a close eye on Ben, who was standing off by the corner. "I'm Professor Hatcher, and this is Dean Patterson. I'm sure you all remember me from our interviews, and I'm sure you have some questions of your own about what we're doing here."

Hatcher began handing out the orientation forms. "I'm sure most, if not all of you, know someone who's questioning the war. I'm sure you know others who say it's a just cause. Why do we respond to authority so differently? What is it that makes one person say 'yes' and another say 'no'? What makes one person follow the rules and another break them?"

"That's what we're going to explore here together. Starting tomorrow, for the next three weeks, this will be a working prison, as far as you're concerned, just like Sing Sing or Alcatraz."

"Most of you will be prisoners." Patterson said. "You'll live like prisoners, eat like prisoners, and have the same restrictions they would. The rest of you will be corrections officers. It'll be your responsibility to keep the peace, and to maintain order."

"But the guards need to be held accountable as well," Hatcher continued. "Someone needs to ensure that they're performing their duties correctly. Someone needs to set the tone for how this place will be run, someone firm but fair."

"Ben Phillips," Hatcher said, walking over to where Ben was standing. "That someone is you."

Ben's eyes widened, "Me? Are you sure?" Ben asked, as Hatcher shook his hand. Some of the other students muttered to themselves, while others, including a taller boy with crew cut hair, just stared disapprovingly.

"Absolutely," Hatcher said. "I know you won't disappoint me."

Ben could only nod nervously…


"It was a controversial choice," Hatcher said, "but I was confident that Ben would rise to the occasion."

"Well, from what we hear, things didn't go according to plan, and you ended up pulling the plug." Scotty said.

"It's not quite as dramatic as it sounds. There were some minor altercations between the prisoners and the guards, not much worse than a few bloody noses, but we decided the responsible thing to do was to end the experiment before things had a chance to get serious"

"Was Ben involved any of these 'minor altercations?'" asked Vera, looking somewhat dubious.

"Not that I saw, but I…" Hatcher trailed off, suddenly looking uncomfortable.

"But?" Scotty asked, pointedly.

The older man sighed. "Look, I know how this sounds, but I wasn't… physically present for most of the experiment."

"Then where the hell were you?" Vera asked.

"Buttering up our benefactors, teaching my class, writing papers," Hatcher shrugged. "Time just seemed to get away from me."

"So you had a bunch of students playing cops and robbers and no one was even watching them?" Scotty asked, his dislike of the professor becoming more evident.

"It wasn't quite that anarchic," Hatcher said, putting up his hands. "I had a team of grad students observing everything from separate rooms. They knew if anything serious happened, I was just a phone call away."

"You remember any of the students that signed up for this?" Scotty asked.

"It was over four decades ago," Hatcher said. "It's possible there's still some paperwork in the archives, but I heard a lot of things got thrown out over the years."

"Right," Vera said, still looking dubious as he and Scotty stood up. "Anyway, stay reachable. We might be back for another lecture."

"Look, I know I should've been there more often," Hatcher said, "I was so busy trying to promote the work we were doing, I barely bothered to actually do it. I've been trying to live it down for forty-three years."

Scotty gave the professor an uninterested look. "Yeah, well, that's forty-three years that Ben didn't have."


Dressed in a park ranger's uniform, the slightly pudgy, mustached older man, whose name tag read ROONEY, turned back to give Lilly and Scotty a friendly smile as they walked down the hill trail towards the cabin.

"Not much of an outdoors type, are you?" the man said, noticing Scotty's bemused look.

"Not really. More of a city guy."

"Oh, I'm opposite," he responded. "After I got divorced and the kids grew up, I couldn't get out of the city fast enough. Too cramped, you know?"

"Not as cramped as being locked in a makeshift prison," said Lilly.

He, stopped, turned, and gave her a wistful look. "Yeah, I found that out on my first day. Longest two weeks of my life." His face brightened, clearly trying to move on from that awkward subject. "So how'd you guys find me, anyway? I though the school threw out most of their old records."

Scotty nodded. "Yeah, they did, but one of the ladies from archives remembered getting' into with you when you tried to save some of the files."

The older man chuckled at the memory. "Yeah, I remember that old battle axe. Surprised she's still alive."

"So, Albert, why were you trying to save a bunch of old files anyway?" Lilly asked.

Albert shrugged. "Didn't seem right, just pretending like it never happened."

"So you and Ben have any sorta beef?" Scotty asked.

Albert paused for a moment, then shrugged. "Nothing comes to mind. I was too busy keeping my head down to make any sort of trouble."

"Any other prisoners ever get into it with him?" Lilly asked.

"Maybe, but I'm afraid I don't have any names to give you."

"Well, maybe we'll get something from the files you got," said Scotty.

Albert shook his head. "Don't count on it. Prisoners all got assigned numbers. Using your real name in there was a big no-no. Professor Hatcher said something about breaking down the individual, getting us into the mindset of a prisoner. I was Number Three. I used to think that was my lucky number. Boy, was I wrong."

Stopping at the door to the cabin, Albert pulled out a set of keys. "I don't know if there's anything useful in there, but you're welcome to 'em. I just hope the mice didn't get at them."

Lilly and Scotty just looked at each other.


Sitting at his desk, Detective Vera frowned at the sandwich in his hands, until he attracted the attention of the nearby Detective Kat Miller.

"Something wrong with the sandwich?" Kat asked.

"Nah, just thinking of something that professor said. Something about not being the same person if I had some job without authority."

"What does that have to do with a sandwich?"

Vera shrugged. "I always have the guy make something that's not on the menu. Just wondering if I was an accountant or something."

"I don't know, but I wouldn't want you doing my taxes if you were." Kat rolled her eyes and took a sip of the coffee.

"Hey, where'd you get that?" Vera asked, gesturing to her paper cup.

"That place at the corner."

"Something wrong with the coffee here?"

"The guy there puts some cinnamon in it."

Vera eyed her suspiciously. "He do that for everyone, or you did you ask him to?"

Kat took a sip and said nothing.

The conversation was interrupted by Jeffries walking past them to Stillman's office and knocking on the door.

"Got something here." Jeffries said,

"Albert Rooney's files have some names?" Stillman asked, getting up from behind his desk.

"Not exactly," Jeffries said. "Most of the other guards aren't mentioned by name in here, and all the prisoners are referenced by numbers. There is one thing though. An incident a couple of days into the experiment. One of the prisoners got into it with a couple of guards after one of them used 'a racially derogatory term'." Jeffries winced slightly at the detached, official tone of the report.

Stillman nodded. "Any chance Ben was one of those guards?"

"No, according to the punch cards, he wasn't on shift then, but it got me thinking. Whitman wasn't exactly a diverse campus back in '68. No Asian or Hispanic students and only four black students."

"Any chance one of those four could've been a volunteer?"

"Well, two of them were too old to make the cut, a third was in a wheelchair…"

"Leaving just one," Stillman finished.

"You ever hear of Carter Jenkins?"

"That big-time civil rights lawyer?"

Jeffries nodded solemnly, "That's him."


The law firm was a fairly modest one, one that suggested its clients consisted mainly of people who couldn't afford to pay much.

Carter Jenkins, the man escorting Lilly and Jeffries through the office, was a slightly bulky man in his sixties, appearing a bit more reserved than the fiery young man visible in pictures of various protests in a few of the framed newspaper clippings on the wall. He nodded with a hint of resignation when the two detectives brought up Ben's name.

"I haven't even thought about that experiment in years," Carter said with a hint of a sigh. "Naturally, they assigned the role of prisoner to the one black volunteer." Carter rolled his eyes slightly at the memory.

"You know he was found murdered not far from where they held the experiment?" Jeffries asked.

"Yes."

"Same experiment you participated in." Lilly said. "You didn't bother to mention that to anyone back then?"

"No, I didn't," Carter said, evenly. "I learned early on not to trust the police. It's not personal, but I certainly wasn't going to risk going to them voluntarily."

"We know you got into it early on with a few of the guards during the experiment." Jeffries said.

Carter shook his head. "Not with Ben," he said, sounding a bit defensive. "If you were civil with him, he was civil with you. Actually, I always thought if it was anyone in there who hurt Ben, it wasn't a prisoner."

Lilly looked at Carter intently. "Are you saying one of the guards killed Ben?"

"I'm saying Ben wasn't a very popular leader. He was one of the younger volunteers and a few of the older boys didn't take kindly to taking orders from a sophomore. More than that, a lot of them thought he was too easy on us. It was like they could smell weakness on him. Some of them rode him pretty hard, especially one of them…"


("Jumpin' Jack Flash" – The Rolling Stones)

Carter, wearing the dull gray prison uniform he and the others had been assigned, looked over at Ben, adjusting the slightly oversized guard's uniform he was wearing, and waving the prisoners back to their cells.

"Let's go, Number Four," Ben said, calmly to Carter, as he continued waving them forward. "Come on, guys. It's past curfew."

Ben turned to see a taller boy with crew cut hair, also in a guard's uniform, but adorned with a shiny badge, walking towards him, a scowl on his face.

"I need to talk to you," the guard said to Ben.

"Okay," Ben said, calmly, waving the prisoners towards their cells.

Ben and the guard walk around a corner. Once they were out of sight, however, Carter slipped out of the line, headed towards the corner they'd gone past, put his back to the wall, and listened.

"They're supposed to be in their cells by now. Curfew is nine, sharp." the guard said.

"It's just a couple of minutes," Ben said.

"That's not the point!" the guard hissed. "There's something I wanted to ask you about. Is it true you caught one of them with contraband?"

"It was just a few candy bars. Relax, I took them away."

"Well which one of them was it?"

"I said I took care of it, Darren," Ben said, gritting his teeth with growing irritation.

"How? By giving him a stern talking to?" The sarcastic tone in Darren's voice was impossible to miss. "Did you even make him tell you who got them in for him? I'll bet Number Twelve got them in for him. Every day, it's something new with that guy. Are you going to do anything about him?"

"Look, I don't have to explain anything to you! Hatcher made me head guard."

"And I'm starting to think he made a big mistake." Darren glared at Ben, "You bleeding heart types are all alike. You're too afraid to lay down the law. You know, people like you are the reason this country's going to hell in a handbasket."

Ben's eyes narrowed. "Well, I'm sorry I don't meet your approval. If you can find another prison experiment that's run better, feel free to switch. Until then, go back to your post and stand watch!"

Darren stared at Ben for moment, and then started walking off, before turning back to Ben.

"Maybe I'm not the only one who should be watching out."

After Darren was out of sight, Ben sighed and leaned against a wall. Carter, trying to hide the surprised look on his face, stepped away from the corner, and hurried to catch up to the other prisoners…


"It was like that guy could smell blood in the water," Carter said, shaking his head.

"Different managing styles?" Jeffries asked.

"Darren was a Nixon Youth, law and order type. Thought leniency was a cardinal sin. Really took to the role. Even had this shiny gold-plated badge made up."

Lilly leaned in at the mention of this. "Did you say gold?"

Carter nodded.

"You have any idea what happened to him?" Jeffries asked.

"Sure," Carter said, with a hint of a smile. "I've even argued in his courtroom a few times over the years."

"His courtroom?" Lilly asked.

"Mmm-hmm," Carter answered. "I assume you've heard of the Honorable Judge Darren Gale."

"'No Bail Gale?'" Jeffries asked with a sigh.

"That's the one." Carter said.

The two detectives looked at each other uneasily.