Mania

by Craig Larsen

  Nick shook his head, discouraged.

  “Take some time off, Nick. Get some rest. Try to come to terms with your loss. It’s going to take you some time to figure out how you feel.” Stolie nodded toward the double doors directly in front of them, then once again continued in that direction. “This one’s in the bag already. We’ve got our man. This bastard killed your brother. Just leave it with us. We’ll take it to the DA, and like the lieutenant says, we’ve got Ferry nailed. He’ll be behind bars the rest of his life.”

  Nick noticed the smell first. The antiseptic odor of the jail, laden with the heavy, industrial scent of oiled steel and the lingering stench of human excrement and filth. His eyes were focused on the double doors in front of them. The thick iron bars to his left were nothing more than a passing blur in the corner of his eye.

  When Jackson Ferry leapt out at him, the sudden movement left Nick frozen in place.

  Nick’s mind burst with the image of Ferry emerging from the black shadows beneath Pike Place Market. Nick saw the knife in his hand, glinting in the dim light of the street lamp overhead. This image was rapidly replaced with another: Nick wrenching the knife from Sam’s chest, staring at the blood-covered blade before dropping it onto the asphalt.

  Ferry’s trajectory toward Nick was broken by the steel that separated the two men. He crashed loudly against the bars, as if he hadn’t seen them. Sliding his arms through the gaps, he swiped the air just in front of Nick’s face. He grunted as he missed, straining to reach a little farther, his cheek pressed against the steel barrier.

  Stolie was quick to react. Even as Ferry was first colliding with the bars, he grabbed Nick and yanked him back from the holding cell. The nightstick fastened to his black leather belt was in his hand, and he brought it down sharply against Ferry’s outstretched arms. With a shriek of pain, Ferry fell to his knees, holding his bruised forearms with his hands.

  “Guard!” Stolie shouted. The jail guard rushed down the wide corridor.

  Ferry’s eyes met Nick’s. “I can hear what you’re thinking, brother,” he said in an intense whisper.

  “Cuff him!” Stolie commanded the guard. “See that he’s properly restrained.” He turned toward Nick. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” His eyes were still locked with Ferry’s. The man remained on his knees, allowing the guard to draw his hands behind his back. A smile spread across his face.

  “The exit’s straight down the hall, through those doors,” Stolie said.

  “Sure, yeah.” Nick took a deep breath, then turned away from the powerful homeless man at his feet.

  Walking down the steps in front of the station house, Nick wasn’t aware of the man standing in the window two stories above, watching him. William Gutterson let go of the curtain, and it dropped back down in front of the glass. He was a tall man with strong shoulders, now becoming slightly stooped. He had begun to age, and he knew it. His hair was thinning. In the last few years he had put on twenty pounds.

  He took a look across the office at Lieutenant Dombrowski, seated behind his desk. He was aware of the man’s ambition. Dombrowski wasn’t waiting for him to stumble. Any sign of weakness, and the lieutenant would give him a push. “You keep your eye on that kid,” the chief of police said.

  Dombrowski assessed the older man with a critical look. “You’re going in front of the cameras in half an hour, Bill. Telling Seattle we’ve caught the Street Butcher—that it’s safe to go back outside again. This is going to be primetime news. The headline story. You sure that’s a good idea? It doesn’t sound to me like you’re convinced we’ve got our man.”

  “I’ve been around a few years.”

  “Sure you have, Bill. And you’ll be around a few years more, too.”

  The chief of police looked his lieutenant in the eye, measuring his sincerity. “I know what I’ve got to do,” he said. “The city wants reassurance, so that’s what I’m going to give them. This guy Wilder, though—there’s something about him that doesn’t add up. He works for the paper, he seems like an ordinary man—but so did Ted Bundy. Bundy charmed the pants right off his victims, literally. Put a tail on this guy. I’m telling you, watch him. It was good work nabbing Ferry, but the last thing we can afford is to be wrong here. Not on my watch, Dom.”

  The lieutenant let the chief of police finish his rant. “Sure, Chief,” he said to his superior, “you know me. I’ve got your back, just like I always have.” To himself he remarked how tired the old man was going to appear on the ten o’clock news, even in the hour of his small victory.

  chapter 25

  At noon the next day, Nick was standing on the edge of Pioneer Square, staring across the street at the entrance to the Hudson Hotel. The sky had just burst, and all around him people were running for cover from the rain. Nick alone remained still, unfazed by the downpour. A woman wearing a translucent plastic slicker bumped into him, the spikes of her tattered black umbrella nearly skewering him in the eye as she passed, but Nick hardly noticed.

  The rain soaked through his hair, and a few thick strands washed down into his eyes. At last he realized how wet his clothes were. He wasn’t wearing a parka or carrying an umbrella. His gray sweatshirt had turned black, and water was streaming down his chest and legs. Tucking his hair behind his ears, he joined a crowd of pedestrians rushing across the street, making his way toward the Seattle Emergency Shelter, where he had first stumbled upon Jackson Ferry.

  As before, a throng of homeless men were huddled in the hallway leading to the dining room. Because of the rain, the line had degenerated into chaos. The doors to the dining room hadn’t opened yet, and the air in the corridor was steamy and close. The men were milling around impatiently, hungry for their meal. A short man with a red face and bloodshot eyes, dressed in an army jacket and ripped trousers, was waving his hands violently, as though he had to fend the rest of the men off him. Get the hell back, you bastard. Touch me again. Just touch me again, and I’ll shove your fingers down your throat. He was raging, but his eyes seemed focused on no one in particular. When Nick raised his camera to take a picture of him, one of the men hit the camera hard enough to jerk it away from Nick’s eye. You don’t want to be doing that, buddy, the man said to him. It ain’t nice to take no one’s picture without permission. Nick nodded a small apology.

  Nick stepped in between a few men to reach the glass partition that separated the reception area from the public lobby. An overweight woman with thinning hair was sitting at the front desk, a carpal tunnel brace on her wrist. “I’m looking to talk to someone,” Nick said to her. “An administrator.”

  “Are you a resident here?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  She gave him a closer look. “Are you a social worker?”

  “No. I’m a journalist.” Nick glanced down at his camera. “I’d like to talk to whoever’s in charge. Your director. Whoever can tell me something about a couple of your residents.”

  “Are you writing some kind of story?”

  “I’m with the Telegraph,” Nick answered.

  The woman picked up her phone and spoke a few inaudible words into the receiver, then buzzed Nick through a beaten-up door. “Take a seat,” she said, pointing toward a few vinyl chairs. “Carla Lewis—that’s our ED—she’ll see you in a few minutes when she’s got time.”

  Carla Lewis was a short and squat woman with a chubby face and a shrill voice. She regarded Nick skeptically from behind her square glasses. Her office was stuffy with the smell of cigarette smoke, though she had opened a window to air it out. Rain was splattering against the windowsill, and Nick found himself shivering, his skin clammy and uncomfortable beneath his drenched clothes. “So you’re with the Seattle Telegraph?” she asked him.

  Nick showed her his press card. “I’m wondering if you keep files on the people you serve here.”

  “Is the Telegraph doing a piece on the shelter?”

  Nick put his wallet back into his p
ocket. “I do work for the Telegraph,” he said carefully, “but I’m not here in connection with any story. My name is Nick Wilder. You can give my editor a call if you want to. Laura Daly. But she’ll just tell you the same thing. The paper’s not doing any reporting on the shelter right now—at least, not that I’m aware of.”

  “So why are you here, Mr. Wilder?”

  “Do you know a man named Jackson Ferry?”

  The director’s eyes narrowed. “Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

  Nick shrugged.

  “I know who Ferry is.” She pinched a cigarette between her lips and lit it. “But I don’t know that I ever met him.” The putrid smell of her cigarette quickly permeated the room. “He’s been arrested, accused of murdering a man a couple of days ago.”

  “My brother,” Nick said.

  “What?”

  “The man he killed was my brother. Sam Wilder.”

  The director let a stream of smoke out through her nose.

  “I was wondering what you can tell me about him. About Ferry.”

  “Like I said, Mr. Wilder, I didn’t know Ferry myself. He had a room here for the past few months, upstairs. So I saw him coming and going a few times. I know his face. He’s a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. The last I heard, the police were moving him from the jail to Western State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. But that’s all I know about him.”

  “What does that mean—that he’s schizophrenic?”

  “Literally, schizophrenia means the splitting or shattering of the mind. It can assume as many different forms as there are people. As far as I’m aware, in Ferry’s case, he experiences positive symptoms of the illness—delusions, hallucinations, but no thought disorder. I don’t have any experience with him, though. I don’t know more than that.”

  “Tell me what those terms mean,” Nick said. “Delusions, hallucinations. He sees things?”

  “Yes.” The director took a drag on her cigarette. “He sees things, hears things. In layman’s terms, he’s lost touch with reality. He isn’t able to distinguish between his own thoughts and reality.”

  Nick felt himself shiver. “Was he being treated?”

  Nick noticed the director’s hesitation. “I wish I could offer you more help, Mr. Wilder,” she said, “but I really don’t know. He was another one of our residents, nothing more. There are a lot of people here just like him, Mr. Wilder.”

  “Capable of violence?”

  “Everyone is capable of violence under the right circumstances. You know that, Mr. Wilder. In most cases, though, the person most at risk of harm is the schizophrenic himself.”

  “And in Ferry’s case?”

  The director examined Nick from behind her glasses. “From what I remember, he’s a pretty big man. He was loud—that was my impression. Angry. Threatening. But is he violent? I’m not a doctor, Mr. Wilder, just a social worker. And I’m only five-two, though.” She tried to smile. “So everyone’s big to me.”

  “What about Henry Dean?” Nick pressed. “Does the name Henry Dean mean anything to you?”

  “Should it?” The director considered the name. “No,” she said at last. “Henry Dean, no.”

  “What about James Warren?”

  The director pursed her lips and shook her head.

  “Do you keep records of the people you serve here?” Nick asked a second time.

  “That depends on what you mean by serve, I suppose. We offer a number of different services. We provide over a thousand meals a day in our dining room, and we don’t keep track of the people who eat with us. We also offer counseling services and programs like vocational training and drug-dependency clinics. It would be up to the groups and individuals running those programs whether they keep track of the individuals in attendance. The people who use our facilities are transient, and often they don’t carry government IDs or passports or Social Security cards. Usually they don’t even have birth records. Keeping accurate track of our population can be a challenge—not to say a waste of time.”

  “What about the people who live here? Doesn’t the shelter keep records of the people occupying its rooms?”

  “We do our best,” the director acknowledged.

  “Can you access your files for me, then?”

  “To what end, Mr. Wilder?”

  “A few weeks ago, in New York City, an indigent man by the name of Henry Dean became psychotic, entered a boutique, and without motive murdered two people with a broken bottle.”

  The director fastened Nick with a curious stare, waiting for him to continue.

  “A few months ago, in Milwaukee, a homeless man, Jimmy Warren, became psychotic, broke into a private home, and without motive killed two people in their sleep.”

  “You think the murders are related somehow? And related to your brother’s murder as well?”

  “I don’t know.” Nick realized how tentative he sounded. “I do have reason to believe, though, that both Dean and Warren lived in Seattle. Like Ferry.”

  “I see.” The director took a pen and wrote the two names down on a sheet of paper. “Why don’t you leave it with me? And give me your phone number. I’ll look into it. If I can find anything out about either man, I’ll give you a call.”

  A few minutes after Nick left her office, Carla Lewis picked up her phone. Holding the receiver against her ear with her shoulder, she punched in a number and lit another cigarette at the same time. “It’s me,” she said when a man answered. “Yeah, I’m okay.” She brushed some ash from the front of her dark blue polyester shirt. “Listen, I thought I’d ask you a question. I just had an interesting visit from a man asking around about a few of our population. Hmmm?” She puckered her lips sideways and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Nick Wilder. He’s from the Telegraph. But that’s not what brought him here. He also happens to be the brother of the man Jackson Ferry stabbed to death last week down on the waterfront. Yeah. Nick Wilder. Sam Wilder’s brother.” She inhaled, turning a half inch of her cigarette into ash, then again breathed a billowing cloud of smoke into the stuffy room. “What’s that? Yeah.” She looked down at the sheet of paper on her desk. “Henry Dean and James Warren. I thought I’d give you a call, see if you could place them. I don’t think either one of them was a resident here, so I couldn’t be of much use. I’ll double-check, but in the meantime I thought maybe you might know them. Maybe you saw them at the clinic?” The director took another drag on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in an overflowing ashtray. “Sure,” she said. “Whenever you get the chance.” Then she hung up the phone.

  On the other end of the line, a tall, athletic man replaced the phone into its cradle. He stood up from his expansive, teak desk and walked to the huge plate-glass window at the corner of his office. Lifting a sheer privacy curtain, he gazed down thirty stories beneath him at the façade of the Four Seasons Hotel. Cars took on the aspect of toys from this height, and he let his eyes follow a Tonka-sized city bus down the street. At last, straightening his elegant jacket, he returned to his desk.

  “Who am I seeing next?” he asked, pressing an intercom button on the high-tech phone.

  “You’re free for another half hour, Dr. Barnes,” a pleasant feminine voice replied.

  “Thanks, Millicent,” he said. Then he crossed his office to a cashmere upholstered daybed beside a pair of gleaming teak bookshelves and, sitting down, rested his head pensively in his hands, his elbows on his knees.

  chapter 26

  When Nick opened his eyes, he had the feeling that he hadn’t slept. He had been dreaming, though—a dream so intense that he thought it was real. The sheets were wet with sweat, and his shoulder ached horribly. He lay still, searching the room with his eyes, then shifted onto his back. He didn’t want to wake Sara. He waited, listening to her even breathing until he was satisfied that he hadn’t disturbed her, then got out of bed.

  Since the evening of the gala, Nick had been dogged with the sense that he had seen the man with whom Hamlin had been speaking somewher
e before. As the official from the EPA responsible for awarding the Elliott Bay contract to Hamlin’s company, Ralph Van Gundy had been in the news. This association alone hadn’t felt right, though. Nick couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he knew the man.

  In his dream, he had been standing in front of the massage parlor on Fourth Avenue, looking up at the red neon sign in the second-floor window. A light rain had been falling, and the sky was low and threatening. Nick was by himself on the street. The clerk inside the dingy store on the ground floor of the building had become a Doberman, and he snarled ominously at Nick from behind the plate-glass window, teeth bared. The flimsy, ragged door swung open. Yellow light spilled like water into the dark street. And then Hamlin stepped outside, dressed incongruously in the tuxedo he had worn at the gala, followed by the stout man he had led into the concert hall. The head of the Washington EPA. Ralph Van Gundy.

  Nick crossed the small apartment to his desk. His laptop was buried under a pile of papers, bills he had been ignoring for the last few weeks. He pulled the computer out, then powered it up. He had long since deleted the photographs from his camera. The resolution was too high for him to store too many pictures on a single memory stick. He kept backups on his computer, though, and he opened the folder that contained the massage parlor pictures.

  “What is it, darling?”

  Nick hadn’t heard Sara approach, and her voice made his heart jump. She put a hand on his shoulder, then leaned down against him, snuggling him from behind.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “I just can’t sleep,” Nick said. “That’s all.”

  “What are you doing?” She peered at the screen of the laptop. “Who’s that?”

  Nick shrugged. “No one.”

  “Tell me,” she said, giving his neck a soft kiss.

  “A man named Ralph Van Gundy.” Nick couldn’t think of any reason why Sara shouldn’t know. “An associate of your father’s.”