The next morning, while washing up, the farmer-looking convict walked over to Bruce, who was brushing his teeth, and handed him a toothbrush. Bruce casually passed his own toothbrush to him, then saw that a tiny line of letters and numbers had been carved into the base of the bristles on the toothbrush he received.
It was an easily guessed Caesar cipher. Once decoded, it read "gate." But the information Bruce wanted obviously would not be on the gate itself. He quickly realized it referred to the southernmost corner of the exercise yard, where one could see a corner of the gate.
Sure enough, during that day's exercise period, Bruce found the prisoner list he wanted in a crack in a stone block there. There were only names and no details, but that was enough.
Using the serial killers' crowd as cover, Bruce quickly memorized every name on it and began comparing them with the information in his mind. As long as a name had appeared in any newspaper or crime-related material, Bruce could immediately retrieve all relevant information.
The crimes committed by the inmates in this maximum-security prison were all serious, and most had made the news. Before long, Bruce had filled in the identities of every prisoner in his mind, including where they came from, their backgrounds, what crimes they had committed, when they had been arrested, and when they had been tried.
Those were all details news reports might mention, but Bruce also compiled an additional intelligence file in his head: the weapons the criminals specialized in using, any unusual abilities, relatives who might still be alive, their methods of committing crimes, personality weaknesses exposed during trial, and so on.
But not everyone had available information. There were several people on the list Bruce had never heard