chapter 30
Peter hustled through the Amherst Building corridor, sticking his head into the dayroom, pausing outside the examination rooms, taking a quick glance into the dining area, dodging clusters of patients, searching either for Francis or Lucy Jones, neither of whom seemed to be anywhere close by. He had the overwhelming sensation that something was happening that was critical, but that he was being prevented from witnessing. He had a sudden recollection of walking through the jungle in Vietnam. At war, the sky above, the moist earth beneath his feet, the superheated air and clammy foliage that caressed his clothes, all seemed the same as they were every day, but that there was no way of knowing, other than some otherworldly sixth sense, that around a corner there might be a sniper in a tree, or a waiting ambush, or perhaps just a nearly invisible wire stretched across the trail, patiently awaiting an errant step to trigger a buried mine. Everything was routine, everything was in place and ordinary, just as it was supposed to be, except for the hidden thing that promised tragedy. That was what he saw in the hospital world surrounding him.
For a moment, he paused by one of the barred windows, where an old man in a dull steel wheelchair had been left unattended. The man had a little white line of spittle meandering down his chin, where it mixed with a gray stubble. His eyes were fixed on the outside land beyond the window, and Peter asked him, “What can you see, old man?” but he got no response. Rivulets of rain distorted the view, and past those haphazard streaks, it seemed there was little but a gray, damp, muffled day. Peter reached down and took a piece of brown paper towel from the man’s lap and wiped his chin. The man didn’t look toward Peter, but nodded, as if grateful. But the old man remained a blank slate. Whatever he might have been thinking about his present, remembering from his past or even planning for his future, was all lost in whatever fog had descended right behind his eyes. Peter thought there was little more of permanence to the man’s remaining days than those raindrops dripping down the windowpane.
Behind him, a woman with long, unkempt, and wild gray-streaked hair flowing electrically from her head lurching from right to left down the corridor a little drunkenly, suddenly stopped, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “Cleo’s gone. She’s gone forever …” before putting her engine back into its never-ceasing gear and moving off.
Peter headed into the dormitory area. Not much of a home, he told himself. One day, he thought to himself. Two days. That was all it would take. A flurry of paperwork, a handshake or a nod of the head. A “good luck,” and that would be it. Peter the Fireman would be shipped out and something different would take over his life.
He was a little unsure what to think. The world of the hospital did that to one rapidly, he thought. It engendered indecisiveness. In the real world, decisions were clear-cut and at least had the potential to be honest. Factors could be measured, assessed, and balanced. Decisions reached. But inside the walls and locked doors, none of that seemed the same.
Lucy had cut her hair and rendered it blond. If that didn’t bring out the predatory urge in the man they hunted, he didn’t know what would. Peter gritted his teeth for a second, grinding them together. He looked up at the ceiling, a little like a motorist waiting for the light to change from red to green. He thought Lucy was taking a chance. Francis, too, he thought, was walking a narrow line. Of the three of them, he understood, he had risked the least. In fact, he was hard-pressed to see how he had risked anything yet. Certainly, he hadn’t put himself into any jeopardy that he could readily see.
Peter turned and left the room. When he exited into the hallway, he spotted Lucy Jones, hovering outside their small office, and he hurried in her direction.
One after another, the release hearings had progressed all morning and into the afternoon. They were a theater of the expected; Francis swiftly understood that if you had arranged all the factors necessary to qualify for a hearing, the likelihood was that you were going to be released. The charade that he was watching was a bureaucratic opera, designed to make certain that unforeseeable risks weren’t taken and careers unnecessarily threatened. No one wanted to release someone who promptly descended into a psychotic rage.
The bored young man from the prosecutor’s office reviewed any legal cases outstanding against the patients in a perfunctory fashion; everything he said was uniformly objected to by the equally young man from the public defender’s office, serving as patient advocate, and who wore the ardent behavior of a do-gooder. More critical to the hearing panel was the assessment from the hospital staff and the recommendation from the young woman from the state Department of Mental Health, still hunting through her folders and notes, and who spoke in a hesitant, half-stuttering fashion, Francis thought, which made a weird sense to him, because she was really being asked whether it was safe to release someone, and she actually had no idea. “Is he a danger to himself, or to others?” It was like a church litany. Sure it was safe, he thought, if they kept up their medications and they didn’t walk directly back into the same circumstances which had driven them mad in the first place. Of course, these were the only circumstances available, so that it was hard to be very optimistic about anyone’s actual chances beyond the hospital walls.
Patients were released. Patients came back. A boomerang of madness.
Francis shifted about in his chair, still bent forward, listening intently to every word spoken, watching the faces of every patient, every physician, every parent, brother, sister, or cousin who rose to speak. Within his heart he felt nothing but turmoil and chaos. His voices threatened to send him spiraling into some dark, deeply pained place. They shouted desperately for him to leave. Insistent, screeching, pleading, begging, demanding—all equally fervent, almost hysterical in their desire. It was, he thought, like being trapped within the pit of some hellish orchestra, where every instrument played louder and more harshly, more utterly out of tune with every passing second.
He understood why. Occasionally, he would close his eyes, trying to get some rest. But it didn’t help much. He continued sweating, feeling every muscle in his entire body tensed. That no one had as yet seen the struggle he was trapped within surprised him for he thought anyone who truly looked at him would see in an instant that he was teetering on some razor edge.
Francis breathed in hard, but thought there was no air in the room.
What can’t they see? he asked himself.
The hospital is where the Angel hides. In order to be free to kill, he has to be able to come and go.
He looked across the room at the hearing board. This is the exit door, he reminded himself.
Francis stole a quick look at the gathering of family and friends surrounding the patients. Everyone thinks that the Angel is a lone killer. But I know something they don’t: Someone here, whether they know it or not, is helping him.
And then: Why did he kill Short Blond? Why did he draw attention to himself here, where he was safe?
Neither Lucy nor Peter had asked that question, Francis heard himself say deep inside. As much as anything, it scared him. That he knew to ask this made Francis’s head swirl and he felt as if a wave of nausea might overcome him. His voices resounded within him, warning him, cajoling him, insisting that he not venture into the darkness that beckoned.
They think he killed Short Blond because he had to kill.
He took a short breath of stale air.
Maybe so. Maybe not.
He hated himself in that second more than ever before. You could be a killer, too, Francis heard himself say. For an instant he thought he’d spoken out loud, but no one turned and paid any attention to him, and so he guessed that he hadn’t actually uttered the words.
Big Black had wandered off, bored with the droning routine of each hearing. When he returned to the room, Francis made an immense effort to conceal the anxiety that pummeled him. The huge attendant slumped into the seat next to Francis and whispered, “So, C-Bird, you got the hang of this yet? You see enough?”
“Not quite,” Francis repli
ed softly. What he had not seen yet was what he both feared and expected.
Big Black craned forward to muffle his words. “We’ve got to be getting back to Amherst. Day’s almost finished. People gonna be looking for you pretty soon. There a therapy session scheduled for this evening?”
“No,” Francis half lied for he didn’t really know the answer. “Mister Evans canceled it after all the excitement.”
Big Black shook his head. “Shouldn’t be canceling those.” He spoke to Francis, but more to the world of the hospital. The attendant looked up. “Come on, C-Bird,” he said. “We’ve got to be getting back. There’s only a couple of these hearings left. Ain’t gonna be any different from what you’ve already seen.”
Francis didn’t know what to say, because he didn’t want to tell Big Black the truth, which was that one was going to be quite a bit different. He looked across the room.
There were three patients still waiting. Each was easy to pick out in the remaining crowd of people. They simply weren’t as well groomed. Their hair was either slicked down, or frizzy and uncontrolled. Their clothes weren’t as clean. They wore striped pants and checked shirts, or sandals with mismatched socks. Nothing about them seemed to quite fit, not what they wore, or how they looked out at the proceedings. It was a little as if they were all slightly lopsided. Their hands shook and their faces twitched at the corners of their mouths—those were the different medications and their side effects. All three were men, and Francis would have guessed their ages to be between thirty and forty-five. None was particularly distinctive; they weren’t fat or tall or white-haired or scarred or tattooed or anything that made them stand out. They wore their emotions inwardly. Outwardly, they seemed blank, as if the drugs had worn away not only their madness, but much of their names and pasts, as well.
None had turned aside and looked at him, at least that he could tell. They had remained stoic, almost impassive, staring ahead as each case had been heard throughout the long day. He could not quite see their faces; at best they were profiles.
One man was surrounded by perhaps four visitors. Francis guessed an elderly set of parents and a sister and her husband, who squirmed in his seat, clearly unhappy to be there. Another patient sat between two women, both far older than he, and Francis supposed a mother and an aunt. The third sat beside a stiff older man in a blue suit with a stern, unrelenting look on his face, and a much younger woman, a sister or a niece, Francis thought, who seemed unafraid and listened intently to all that was being said, occasionally taking down some notes on a yellow pad of legal paper.
The overweight judge banged his gavel down. “What have we got left?” he asked briskly. “It’s getting late.”
The woman psychiatrist looked up. “Three cases, Your Honor,” she said with a slight stutter. “They shouldn’t be difficult. Two of the men are here with diagnoses of retardation and the third has emerged from a catatonic state, and shown great progress with the help of antipsychotic medication. None have any current charges pending …”
“Come on, C-Bird,” Big Black whispered, a little more insistently. “We’ve got to get back. Ain’t nothing different gonna happen in here now. These cases are going to be rubber-stamped and out-of-here quick. Time for us to leave.”
Francis stole a glance toward the young woman psychiatrist, who was continuing to speak to the retired judge.“… All these gentlemen have been committed and released on several prior occasions, your honor …”
“Let’s go, C-Bird,” Big Black said in a tone that didn’t leave room for debate. Francis didn’t know how to say that what was about to take place was what he had spent the day waiting for.
He stood up and Francis realized that he wasn’t being given a choice. Big Black gave him a little push in the direction of the door, and Francis stepped that way. He did not turn around, although he had the impression that at least one of the three remaining men had slightly turned in his chair and aimed a glance in his direction, his eyes burning into Francis’s back. He could feel a presence that was both cold and hot all at the same time, and he understood that was what the killer felt, when he held sway with knife and terror over his victim.
For a second, he thought he heard a voice shouting after him: We are the same, you and I! but then he realized that there was no real noise in the hearing room, except the routine voices of the participants in the daylong exercise. What he heard was hallucination.
But it was real, and not real, all at once.
Run Francis, run! his own voices clamored.
But he did not. He simply walked forward slowly, imagining that the man they had hunted was directly behind him, but that no one, not Lucy, Peter, or the Moses brothers, Mister Evil, or Doctor Gulp-a-pill would believe him if he blurted this out. There were three remaining patients in that room. Two were what they were. One was not. And Francis thought behind that one false mask of madness he could hear the Angel laughing at him.
He understood another thing: The Angel seemed to like risks, but Francis might have slipped past the acceptable category. He would not leave Francis alive much longer.
Big Black held the door to the administration building open and the two of them stepped out into a haphazard drizzle. Francis turned his face skyward, and felt the mist flow over him, almost as if he could get the sky to clean away all his fears and doubts. The day was rapidly closing down, the gray skies fading to a washed-out black that heralded night. In the distance, Francis could make out the sound of some heavy machinery laboring hard and fast, and he turned in that direction. Big Black, as well, had pivoted about and was staring across the hospital grounds. Over by the garden, in the makeshift cemetery in the most distant corner of Western State, a bright yellow backhoe was dumping a final load or two of moist dirt onto the ground.
“Hold on, C-Bird,” Big Black said abruptly. “We need to take a minute here.” The huge attendant lowered his head down, and then Francis heard him whisper, “Our Father, who art in heaven …” and the rest of the brief prayer.
Francis listened quietly. When Big Black lifted his head, the attendant said, “I’m thinking that’ll be just about the only words spoken over poor Cleo.” He sighed. “Maybe she’ll have more peace now. Lord knows, she had little enough while she was alive. That’s a sad thing, C-Bird. A real sad thing. Don’t make me have to speak a prayer over you. You hang in there. Things will get better, sure enough. You trust me.”
Francis nodded. He did not truly believe this although he wanted to. And, when he looked up once again into the darkening skies, hearing the distant noise of Cleo’s grave being filled in, he thought right at that moment that he was listening to the overture of a symphony, notes and measures and rhythms that promised that there were surely still deaths to come.
It was, Lucy considered in reflection, the simplest, least adorned plan they could come up with, and probably the only one that held out any hope for success. She would simply take the late night nursing shift that had proven to be fatal for Short Blond. After taking up her position in the nursing station alone, she would wait for the Angel to show up.
Lucy was the tethered goat. The Angel was the man-eating tiger. It was the oldest of ruses. She would leave the hospital intercom open to the second-floor station, one flight above her, where the Moses brothers would wait for her signal. In the hospital, cries for help were pretty familiar and often ignored, so it was decided that if they heard Lucy say Apollo, they would race to her side. Lucy had chosen the word with a twinge of irony. They might as well have been astronauts heading for a distant moon. The Moses brothers did not think it would take more than a few seconds for them to descend the stairwell, which would have the added advantage of blocking one of the routes of escape. All Lucy had to do was keep the Angel occupied for a few moments—and not die doing it. The front entrance to Amherst was double-locked, as was the side entry. They all imagined that they could corner the killer before he was either able to slice Lucy or to fumble his way through keys and out into the hospital ground
s. But even if he did flee, by then Security would be alerted, and the Angel’s options would be rapidly narrowing. And, more important, they would see his face.
Peter had been particularly insistent on this point and one other detail. It was critical, he’d argued, that the Angel’s identity be learned, regardless of what happened. It would be the only way to back build the cases against him.
He had also demanded that the door to the first-floor men’s dormitory be left unlocked, so that he, too, could monitor the situation even if it meant a sleepless night. He argued that he would be a little closer to Lucy, and that the Angel was least likely to expect an attack from a door customarily locked. The Moses brothers had said that was true—but that they could not leave the door unlocked themselves. “Against the rules,” Little Black had said. “Big doc would have our jobs if he caught wind of that …”
“Well—,” Peter started, only to be shut down by Little Black holding up his hand.
“Of course, Lucy will have her own set of keys for all the doors around here. What she does with them while she’s at the nursing station ain’t our business …,” Little Black said. “But it ain’t gonna be my brother and I leave that door open. We find this guy, all is good. But I’m not looking for any more trouble than we’ve already got coming.”
Lucy looked down at her bed. It was quiet in the nurse-trainees’ dormitory, and she had the sensation that she was alone in the building, although she knew that couldn’t be true. Somewhere there were people talking, perhaps even laughing over a joke, or sharing some story. Not her. She had laid out a white nurse’s outfit on the surface of the cot. It was to be her costume for the night. Inwardly, she felt a little mocking laughter. First Communion dress. Prom dress. Wedding dress. Funeral dress. A woman laid out her clothes with care for special occasions.
The Madman's Tale Page 50