The Memory Thief

by Don Donaldson

“Do you remember when you were apologizing for Jackie’s behavior at lunch and you asked me if I’d experienced a similar kind of pain with my sister? Well, I lied when I told you I hadn’t. Odessa killed my sister practically in front of me eighteen years ago. He was never prosecuted for her murder, and I came to Gibson to see that he pays for what he did. So I’m a fraud in almost every way.”

  She hadn’t cried since she was twelve, but now that she’d revealed her secret, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. She fought to hold them back, but the years of living as a clandestine shadow culminating in the shattering results of Odessa’s brain fingerprint test came crashing down on her.

  Clay drove the truck off the road onto the shoulder, switched off the engine, and turned to look at her. Marti braced herself for his reaction. As the first words of her confession had poured out of her, she’d been convinced he’d be sympathetic, but hearing herself talk, she realized how natural it would be for him to feel she’d played him like a fool. In fact, that was the more likely reaction. Looking at his face, which was locked in an inscrutable expression, she was now sorry she’d spoken.

  Then Clay unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the truck. He went around to Marti’s door, opened it, and unhooked her seat belt.

  Marti was stunned. Was he going to leave her here to find her way home alone? Was he that angry at being misled? He motioned her out of the truck. Okay, if that’s the way he wanted it, she’d go. She didn’t want to be where she wasn’t wanted.

  She slid out of her seat and stepped onto the grassy shoulder. Then suddenly his arms were around her, pulling her close. Instead of resisting as the old Marti might have, she let herself go to him.

  “No one, let alone a kid, should have had to see what you saw,” Clay whispered against her hair. “And to know he was never punished for it makes it even worse.”

  Marti’s last resistance crumbled under Clay’s sympathetic words, and the tears began to flow unrestrained.

  “It’s okay,” Clay murmured. “I understand.”

  And so there they stood, beside the road, cars passing, the occupants gawking at them, neither of them caring.

  Finally, Marti gently pulled back and wiped her tears away with her hand. “This isn’t me. I never cry.”

  “It’s not a sign of weakness. It just means you’re human.”

  A passing car honked at them. When Marti looked that way, she saw the driver give them a thumbs up.

  “Could I be human now in the truck, where the rest of the county can’t witness it?”

  Clay grinned and released her.

  Back in the truck, Clay handed Marti a small pack of tissues from somewhere on his side, and she wiped her eyes.

  “I can’t imagine going through what you did,” Clay said. “How does a twelve-year-old kid deal with something like that?”

  “Therapy,” Marti replied. “Lots of it. That’s what gave me the idea of becoming a psychiatrist so I could get to Odessa.”

  “What did you mean when you said you came to Gibson to see that he pays for what he did?”

  Marti explained about the brain fingerprint test and what she’d hoped to accomplish with it.

  A look of relief appeared on Clay’s face. “I was afraid you might have been thinking of killing him.”

  “Believe me, when he passed the fingerprint test, I thought about it.”

  Clay’s face lit up with an idea. “If he did kill the girl in Blake, and it could be proved, that would get him fried.”

  “But from what Banks said, it doesn’t sound as though that’s going to happen.”

  “Didn’t seem optimistic, did he? What now?”

  “Go back to Gibson and see if I can figure out how he could have done it.”

  “I don’t know what help I could provide, but if you can use me, I’m available.”

  “Right now, it’s a one-person job. But I appreciate the offer.”

  Clay started the truck and pulled onto the highway.

  VERNON ODESSA sat in the Gibson cafeteria, ignoring his food, his mind burning with the images he’d seen in the brain fingerprint test. Except for a single night eight months ago, when he had even been stripped of the pleasure that could have brought him, he’d been denied the one thing that defined him, that made life worth living. He’d succumbed to incarceration and accepted being treated like a zoo animal. But now those sleeping urges, roused by thoughts of what must have happened on the trip to Blake and fueled by the pictures Glaser had shown him, were awake and demanding to be satisfied . . . on his own terms, not on someone else’s whim.

  But how to do that? His hand went to the scar in his neck and he ran his fingers over it. Then he looked at the plastic fork in his hand.

  Useless.

  He picked up the thin, blunt plastic knife next to his plate and considered that.

  Far too flimsy.

  Damn that veg in the women’s ward. If she hadn’t cut herself with that piece of broken mirror, they wouldn’t have replaced all the mirrors in the place with unbreakable glass, and he’d have something he could work with.

  Screw the lousy luck.

  Finished with the slop the cooks called food, Odessa got up, carried his tray to the garbage cans, and dumped all the paper and plastic from his meal. As he moved down and slid his tray into the rolling cart with the stacked shelves, he noticed in the food line a case knife sitting next to a tray of dinner rolls. And with all his ward served, no one from the kitchen staff was nearby.

  He didn’t have to turn around to know at least one of the two orderlies, who had accompanied his ward to the cafeteria, was watching him. So he made no attempt to get the knife, but instead walked back to where most everyone else was still eating and took a seat next to Chickadee.

  “Chick, how would you like to earn some cigarettes,” Odessa said under his breath.

  “Doin’ what?” Chick had an irritating speech impediment that sent everything he said through his nose, and you could barely tell one word from another.

  “Go over to that rolling tray cart and push it over.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll be fun.”

  “I’ll get in trouble.”

  “That’s why I’m willing to give you three cigarettes to do it.”

  Chickadee looked at the cart then back at Odessa. “Five . . . I want five cigarettes.”

  “Done.”

  “I want them now.”

  “Three now, two after we get back to the ward.”

  “Okay.”

  Odessa passed Chickadee three cigarettes under the table, and Chick put them in his shirt pocket, using a napkin to hide the movement.

  “The wheels are probably locked. If not, and it starts to roll, you’ll have to put your foot behind one of them so it’ll tip. Can you do that?”

  “Why couldn’t I?”

  “You haven’t noticed your pins are messed up?”

  “Don’t you worry about me. I’m no cripple.”

  “After you do that, go into the kitchen and yell at the cooks about how bad the food is. I mean scream at them, and keep it up until you’re forced to stop.”

  “You didn’t say anything about yelling.”

  “I’ll give you an extra cig for that.”

  Chick got up and reached for his tray.

  “Not now. Wait until I move to a new table.”

  Odessa got up, went to the front of the room, to the row of heavy oak tables closest to the serving line, and slid into the attached picnic-bench-type seat, where he pulled a paperback from his pocket and pretended to read. But he was actually watching the two orderlies over the top of the pages.

  Bobby Ware was leaning against the wall to Odessa’s left about halfway between the front and back of the room. Eddie Greer was on the opposite
side of the room closer to the back. Both were looking right at him.

  From the corner of Odessa’s right eye, he saw Chick get up and head for the front. Don’t screw up, you fruit, he thought. Keeping his eyes on the pages in front of him, he waited for the crash.

  A few seconds later, there was a sound that had to be the cart rocking once, then it went over with a shattering of plates even louder than Odessa had imagined it would be. Eddie Greer bolted for the front of the room, but Ware stayed where he was.

  Odessa silently urged his puppet into phase two. Don’t forget the kitchen, moron.

  Then he heard a string of incomprehensible bellowing.

  This sent Ware into action, and he, too, headed for the serving line.

  Odessa waited until Ware had passed behind him, then he stood up and followed. While the two orderlies were dealing with Chickadee’s diversion, Odessa plucked the case knife off the counter and slid it up his sleeve.

  BACK IN his room a few minutes later, Odessa turned on his radio and began sharpening the blade on the case knife by sliding it over and over along the rough surface of his radiator.

  Chapter 19

  THOUGH MARTI was eager to get back to the hospital and take another look at Odessa’s records, she agreed when Clay suggested they stop and have dinner at a little café on the outskirts of Linville. She didn’t have much of an appetite, but figured eating now would get that out of the way and clear the rest of the evening for thinking. The delay meant she didn’t reach the hospital’s front entrance until a little after six o’clock.

  The good part of her late return was she arrived after the shift change, so when she went up to the ward to get Odessa’s files, she didn’t have to deal with Ada Metz. Instead, she met for the first time Nurse Olivia Barr, a sweet-tempered woman with a sparkle in her eye and a pin on her uniform that was a tiny picture frame containing a photograph of her pet Westie.

  Happily, Marti didn’t see Odessa anywhere in the dayroom.

  The major impediment to her belief that Odessa had committed the Blake murder was the same one that had stumped Sheriff Banks. The night rules for Odessa at the hospital called for an orderly to physically make sure he was on the ward every three hours. The orderly was supposed to actually look at his face, not respond to a lump under the blanket that looked like a person. The orderly was then required to sign a check sheet indicating Odessa was there.

  It didn’t seem likely Odessa could escape from the ward, make his way thirty miles to Blake, find a victim that fit his criteria, get cleaned up, and come back, all without transportation, in just three hours. And if he did escape, why come back to the hospital at all?

  The murder in Blake had been discovered on the morning of September 12, so when Marti reached her office, she riffled through Odessa’s logbook, looking for the check sheet entries for the night of September 11. When she found them, she got a surprise, because in the blanks where the orderly was supposed to sign off by writing his initials, someone had written patient in seclusion.

  Seclusion . . .

  September 11 must have been the night Odessa attacked Ronald Clary.

  Marti cross-checked the nurse’s notes for the date, and saw she was correct.

  She found these circumstances more than interesting. The one night when Odessa’s presence in custody was crucial to establishing an alibi for a murder, his usual routine had been altered. She picked up the records and headed back to the ward, where she found Olivia Barr returning to the nursing station from the dayroom.

  “Olivia, were you working on this ward last September, when Vernon Odessa was put in seclusion?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask, dear?”

  “I was just looking at the logbook for him and noticed that instead of checking on him every three hours that night, the orderly on duty just indicated he was in seclusion. Did no one actually verify he was there the whole night?”

  “That’s the same question the sheriff from Blake asked me when he came to investigate the murder they had. No, we didn’t bother, because seclusion is more secure even than the ward. There’s just no way anyone could escape from there.”

  “I don’t understand. Don’t you closely monitor patients in seclusion? I thought that was standard procedure across the country.”

  “Usually, yes . . . when we use the seclusion room on the ward, but Odessa was in the old facility, where there’s no wiring for cameras.”

  “Where is the old facility?”

  “Basement of this wing at the bottom of the stairwell, just inside the first floor security door . . . a relic from the past. Dr. Quinn specifically ordered him put there because it’s so nasty. Odessa has the potential to be such a behavioral problem, Dr. Quinn wanted to impress upon him that we simply will not tolerate violent behavior. As I understand it, the use of an unmonitored facility is perfectly acceptable if it’s part of a specialized individual behavioral program.”

  “If no one was watching him, how can you say he couldn’t have escaped?”

  “It’s physically impossible. Were you thinking Odessa might have been responsible for that murder?”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “The sheriff had the same thought until he saw the way seclusion in the basement is laid out. Then he just went away. So you know if it satisfied him, it’s very secure. Are you planning to go down there?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No, it’s just dirty.”

  IN HIS room, Odessa stopped stroking the stolen case knife on the radiator and examined the blade. It wasn’t ready yet, but it was coming along nicely. When it was finished, there’d be no more flashlights shining in his eyes every three hours at night while he was trying to sleep, no one telling him what he could do and what he couldn’t. All that would be over.

  THE MESH metal door at the head of the basement stairs clanged shut, and Marti started down the steps on the other side. Accompanied by the most awful creaking noises that made her worry about the safety of the staircase, she descended into ever-increasing darkness. By the time she reached the foot of the stairs, she could see almost nothing in the gloom ahead.

  She stepped tentatively forward and paused to let her eyes adapt to the poor light. As they did, she saw across a rough concrete floor an old steel door with huge strap hinges that looked as though it had been made in a medieval metal foundry. Instead of a doorknob, there was a metal ring welded to it above a large keyhole.

  She pulled on the ring.

  Locked.

  A quick inspection of the old brick walls surrounding the door revealed a filigreed iron rectangle with a large key hanging from a big nail with a square head.

  She took the key down and put it in the lock. From the ancient appearance of the door, she figured the lock mechanism would be hard to move, but it rolled over with oiled ease, making hardly a sound. When she pulled on the door’s metal ring, the door moved ever so slightly. Bracing herself, she put her back into it, and the door swung open, again smoothly and without a whimper from the hinges.

  The space beyond was a cave as dark as the inside of a coffin, and she could see not one inch of its contents. She fumbled to the right of the entrance for a light switch and eventually found one: an old-style push button on a raised round base. It turned on the power to a string of what seemed to be forty-watt bare light bulbs wired to a low, curved ceiling made of the same old brick that lined the walls. With the lights on, feeble as they were, she could now see that water laden with calcium had dripped through the mortar in many places, studding the ceiling with small, white stalactites, which gave the space the appearance of a great mouth filled with teeth.

  Along the right wall were five metal doors which looked to be of the same construction as the one behind her but smaller. Each one had a rectangular slit covered with metal mesh in it near the floor, presumably for passing a food tra
y. Remembering Trina’s warning about getting her key back before going through the metal doors upstairs, she turned and reclaimed the big key that had let her in. It was then she realized there was no keyhole on the inside. Once the big door was shut, there would be no way to open it from the inside. That must have been what the night nurse meant when she said it was physically impossible to escape from here.

  Worried that the door might shut behind her, Marti put the key in her back pocket and looked around for a loose brick or something else she could use to make sure the door couldn’t fully close. But there was nothing available. She turned to the door and pushed hard on it, swinging it to its full open position. Then she stood and watched it carefully to see if it would stay put.

  After ten seconds of close scrutiny with no movement of the door, Marti decided to trust it.

  She then went into the cellblock, where on a scarred old wooden trestle table she saw another key similar to the one in her pocket, but slightly smaller: apparently the key to the individual cell doors. She picked up this key and approached one of the cells, suddenly aware that she was merely assuming none of them was occupied.

  “Is anyone here?” she said softly.

  No answer.

  “I’m Dr. Segerson,” she said, a little louder. “If you’re behind any of these doors, please say so.”

  Once again she heard no response. But, considering whom she might be dealing with, that didn’t mean much.

  Located at eye level on the door in front of her was a small metal disk free to pivot on the rivet holding it in place: the cover for an observation port. She shifted the disk upward and looked through the quarter-size hole under it. But there was no light in the cell, so she could see nothing.

  Noticing another old-style black button switch to the right of the door, she pressed it and looked again through the observation port. But the cell was still dark, so if the switch was meant to operate a light within the cell, it wasn’t working.

  Then, realizing if the cell were empty the door might be unlocked, she put the key from the table in her other back pocket, grasped the hand ring just above the keyhole, and pulled. With a rusty squeal that made her wince, the door inched open, then stalled. She let go of the ring, put both hands on the now-exposed edge of the door, and pushed it open another foot, causing the hinges to make a horrible din.