Of Guilt and Innocence: Institute at the Criminally Insane (Virgil McLendon Thrillers Book 3)

by catt dahman

  Virgil was stumped. He asked, “Andy, how did you die?”

  The man’s eyes lit up with excitement, and he replied, “Now, that is a good question. A silver candlestick was my folly. Althea took one from the sideboard, and when I wasn’t paying attention, she bashed me in the head. It was because of the silver, you see; anything less wouldn’t have affected me.”

  “Silver?”

  “That’s the only way to kill a lycanthrope.”

  Virgil looked to Dr. Redding, feeling that he, too, must be crazy because this made no sense. He tried to line up the information logically as he set the words to a piano piece he liked by Bach. Virgil mentally saw his hands working the keyboard with the words settling into the notes.

  Lycanthrope. This was getting stranger by the second, and Virgil had thought his question would help explain matters; how silly that idea had been.

  “It’s a perplexing case,” Dr. Redding said.

  “Ha!” Andy swept an arm about as if he were clearing something away.

  “It was actually an automobile crash. Andy was thrown through the windshield and suffered a terrible injury to his right temporal lobe,” she explained as Andy unconsciously rubbed at a dent on the right side of his skull. “He almost died but woke and since has suffered severe headaches and some confusion. It took hundreds of stitches to sew up his face after he went through the windshield, and he was in critical care for several days. He was hospitalized for several weeks.”

  “I am not confused, you fool. You just want to keep bringing me back from the dead. Well, maybe this time I’ll decompose so much you won’t be able to use me. I’ll best you, yet.”

  “When you awoke, you were at some time a lycanthrope? A werewolf, right?” asked Virgil as he thought. Werewolves were a European belief originally and thought to be caused by either a curse or by a bite or scratch from a werewolf. In old investigations, some thought murders were the work of actual wolves, some thought men believed themselves to be wolves, and other were thought to be actual shape shifters. Rabies was also suggested to explain the occasional wolf-man killings.

  “How was it you became a werewolf?” Virgil asked.

  “I’m not, doctor. That would have been the job for these people: to figure that out because there could be many more like me. I don’t know unless it was something I caught at the hospital; those places can be unsanitary.”

  “Being a wolf would have to be interesting as well as frightening.”

  “Precisely. It isn’t so mysterious but quite natural to shape change, liberating, I mean. It was freeing for me. It was quite pleasant to run about the forest and chase rabbits, to prowl the night, and feast on my prey. It was a wonderful time until Althea used the silver candlestick.”

  “And silver is well-known to cause harm to werewolves,” Virgil agreed.

  “Yes, it does. It caused me terrible pain.”

  “Andy, as a wolf…if you will…did you attack your family? We know there is no Althea now and no children,” Dr. Redding added.

  “Meh,” Andy said.

  Lynn Redding told the story. After the accident fifteen years before, Andy was released from the hospital with healing scars and medication for headaches. He attempted to return to work as an accountant, but the headaches were too severe, causing his vision to fail as he vomited violently. He couldn’t concentrate, and numbers ran into squiggles that made no sense. The doctors said he was in massive pain, but because the injury was to his brain and because nothing they did could correct the injury, they could only prescribe strong pain killers.

  More and more, he fled to his den or the bedroom, pulled the drapes tightly against the sunlight that sent bolts of agony into his head, and huddled and shivered with pain. He was more and more reclusive as he fought the debilitating pain. He felt as if someone were turning a sharp bladed knife into his head, shoving and wiggling the blade until he passed out. Sometimes, he wished to die and contemplated suicide to stop his misery.

  He had a severe brain injury, and the doctors did all they could but to no avail.

  The doctors increased his medication, but the headaches remained. He couldn’t stand even the faintest of light shining in a room, and he screamed with pain if more than one candle were lit.

  One evening as he sat rocking with misery, he felt a strange sensation, and when he looked, he was amazed to see coarse hair growing all over his body, sprouting from his skin right before his eyes; it was fur. His jaw ached as long incisors emerged, crowding out his other teeth.

  Andy fell to the carpet on all fours as paws began to form. He watched his fingers shorten and grow thick with fur, sprout curved, yellowish sharp nails, and turn into paws. The pads of his paws itched slightly as they thickened and grew rough. Once he was used to walking on all fours, he wanted to explore, to run wild, and embrace this change.

  His head didn’t ache anymore either. Blessed relief filled him.

  He ran howling, unable to find what he wanted in the outdoors. Instinct made him search for something unknown as he peed on trees and rejoiced in every scent. The moon watched him as he ran freely. Every sight and every scent told a story and mesmerized him. It was so good to be pain free, able to run so fast, and see everything in new ways.

  Maybe he was in the wrong place and needed to go elsewhere to find whatever eluded him. He knew he craved something else. He hadn’t been able to eat food often in the last few months, so he had lost weight. His belly rumbled, and hunger pangs delighted him.

  Returning to his home, he found the house quiet. He didn’t like the scents there, but an urge pulled him. He crept upstairs to the bedroom of his son. His mouth watered, and he didn’t know why. He could hear a heartbeat in the silent room and imagined the taste of blood. His stomach growled.

  Quietly and bloodily, he ripped out the throat of his first born, drinking the blood and chewing the flesh. His headache was gone, he was ravenous, and he rolled in the scarlet liquid, covering his fur with gore. This was glorious. The cub was unneeded and was food. He felt no human emotions: neither guilt nor pity.

  One feeding was wonderful. Another would be ecstasy.

  His second son was equally as delicious, and as a wolf, Andy filled his belly with entrails, ripping at the child’s belly. He was very pleased. It was simply food to him.

  In the third bedroom, he leaped onto his daughter’s bed, still insatiable, but when he snapped at her neck, she screeched and scooted away, leaving him with only a little skin in his great wolf maw. Her pleading and cries were foreign to him, and he didn’t understand the words. They tussled for a few minutes, and she was a worthy adversary, but he pinned her and swallowed gulps of blood as her artery jetted and gushed.

  Hearing the noise, his wife, Althea, ran into the room, saw the blood, and promptly grabbed a silver candlestick and hit Andy right on his old injury. She was hysterical but took control, screaming for her children and terrified for herself. She had no idea what her husband was doing or why.

  “They found Andy unconscious, lying next to his daughter whose throat had been shredded open. Althea had been ripped apart: he yanked his wife’s arms from her body and dislocated both legs, trying to pull them off her body. Her intestines were strung around the room like ribbon festooning a party; her eyes and lips were thrown against a wall. Police said it was the most gruesome scene they had ever witnessed, and one officer resigned on the spot.”

  “See? The slut hit me with a silver candlestick. It killed me, and there you have it,” Andy Wakefield said.

  “But you ate your wife after she hit you?”

  “I think it took a while to kill me. I want to read more about lycanthropy, but the library is scare with material, except for the classic accounts which are of no use at all.”

  “Did you know some people here in the sanatorium died?”

  “Yes. Bad business, that. I didn’t do it though. I’m not a wolf now; I’m dead, see? Were they eaten by a wolf?”

  “ No. Good point. And they weren’t
attacked by anyone dead.”

  Andy smiled, “See? It wasn’t me.”

  Vigil stood, “I agree; it wasn’t. I’ll see you later, Andy, and thank you for sharing your story.”

  “And you’ll help me? Will you see that I am buried?”

  “I’ll do everything I can for you,” Virgil said, already walking backwards from the room. He walked straight out, ignoring the quizzical look of the nurses on duty, and sat down in a chair in the hallway, far from the little room.

  Dr. Becket, walking by on rounds, saw him and motioned to Dr. Redding as he sat down. “You’re a pale as a ghost, Virgil.”

  “That’s horrible. He thought he was a wolf, and now he is convinced he is dead? My God, there are people….”

  “Some would say he should be in a prison cell, but what would that serve? There is no cure for him, Virgil, but we’re about to use electrotherapy, and that, along with his medications, will ease his symptoms, and he will bathe more, care for himself, eat more, and interact almost normally. For a while. It might be a week or a month, or maybe several months before he becomes this way again.”

  “Cobert’s Syndrome?”

  “Cotard. He thinks he is dead. Walking dead, I suppose you might say, and he is delusional because he thinks he really was a wolf and intersperses Frankenstein into his delusions. Andy was a perfectly healthy, happy man until the car accident. The damage to his brain…we don’t understand all of it, but it caused this delusional behavior, in particular his belief in lycanthropy and that he is dead. Despite your discomfort and repulsion, it is not his own choice to be this way. He believes everything as fact. And he’s not been in pain since the incident.”

  Becket further described the horrific crime scene. Althea and the children were innocent victims and killed in the most ruthless way, but he wasn’t their loving father and husband at that moment; it was a wolf. It was in Andy’s brain, anyway. He still didn’t think of his wife and children as family that he killed; to him, they were food the night he became a wolf.

  When needed, they used electroconvulsive therapy, done with the patient’s being unconscious and having been given a muscle relaxer to restart the brain. Producing a small seizure, it disrupted the negative thoughts and allowed patients to think clearly. After therapy, the patient wouldn’t focus on being dead but would act far more normal.

  “How do you do it?”

  Becket chuckled and asked, “How do I face these stories every day, knowing each is a murderer and a victim and that each case is hopeless? Sheriff, I harbor a little nugget of hope that one day, we might find the key to help one of these people or learn enough to help the next one. That tiny bit of hope keeps me going.”

  Virgil thanked him and joined Lynn Redding, hoping the next interview might be a little easier. He suspected, despite her having said these were the easiest of the patients, that she enjoyed his shock.

  He made a note to himself to tell Donte that he was marking another suspect off his list. No wolf killed those people.

  Chapter Four: In the Library, but not with a Candlestick

  Virgil awoke to a buzzer droning like a captured insect in a bottle and a red light pulsing brightly near the door of his room; it was startling to be awakened that way. After the events of the day and even though he felt at times he would never sleep, he had slept deeply and had swum up from REM, the stage of sleep when people dream. He was irritated from being interrupted from a dream about sailing on a calm, blue-green Caribbean Sea in a luxurious, mahogany-hulled boat with Charlie and Vivian laughing into the wind.

  Adrenaline hit his system as he realized something serious was happening in the asylum, and this was one way that the staff was alerted.

  He had only managed to get his pants on when Donte knocked and rushed in, motioning for him. “Hurry, Sheriff. We’re missing a patient, and the last three times we’ve had to go looking have led to murder scenes. Your pajama shirt will be fine.”

  “Who is missing?” asked Virgil as he glanced at patients who were beginning to line the halls and were asking what was going on; he tried to see who was gone but had no idea. At least Vivian was in the hall and safe. That gave Virgil a second of relief.

  “Leland Hoyt. You and he and a few others had dinner this evening? He was the gentleman with longish hair and a beard.”

  “Yes, I thought his story was interesting and that he seems curable to me, not that I know the business here.” Virgil, Vivian, and several others had eaten dinner together : a pork roast, vegetables, and apple pie. No expense was spared in terms of meals.

  “He might be, but if he is ever deemed sane, then they will imprison him for murder, and that is an evil way to repay a man who fought over in ‘Nam and only followed orders, despite what he was forced to do.”

  Virgil nodded as he followed Donte through the halls.

  Leland Hoyt was an intelligent man, easy to talk with, calm, and interesting. He didn’t share a lot of information in detail but explained that going over his history caused more anxiety. They were working on keeping him stable and were adjusting his medication to match.

  At dinner, he said that he spent two tours in Vietnam as an army Sergeant specializing in tanks. In his last few weeks in Vietnam, he found that he was fine as long as he was in his tank, every time he emerged, he began sweating, had feelings of panic, and was overly sensitive to sounds and light. The symptoms appeared out of nowhere.

  At first, they thought the problem was migraine headaches and dehydration. They gave him painkillers and dropped several boluses of IV fluids into his body.

  Within days, the nervousness became panic attacks: his heart rate and blood pressure soared as epinephrine rushed over him in a fight or flight reaction. As he became more unstable and sometimes shouting in terror or cowering in frozen fear, he was sent to be evaluated by the Army’s psychiatry department in the United States and was discharged honorably under medical terms when the doctors found him beyond what they could fix.

  After becoming a civilian again and going back home, he suffered a similar attack and drove head long into a crowd of people, killing three, paralyzing one, and wounding several; unfortunately, the victims were a group of school children under the age of ten, and the public opinion was one of outrage. He didn’t mention how the children flew into the air and over his car with blood making pools on the pavement and how all he could do was shake and cringe as panic locked him in place behind the wheel.

  They called him a child-killer and a baby-killer both for the car accident and for his tours in Vietnam as sentiment polarized against the servicemen who served in the war. Had his doctors, attorneys, and the army not supported him in his claim of his affliction of agoraphobia and panic attacks, he would have been sent to prison for life or executed. Had his family not been wealthy, he would have been punished severely for his crime. It was an accident, but children were involved, and there was no compassion for someone who took the lives of the young.

  Hoyt’s eyes were sad, but he didn’t make excuses, saying only that he didn’t understand what had happened to him and that he was better. He couldn’t recall most of his activities in Vietnam, and when he had an anxiety attack, it was far worse than dying; it was like drowning, smothering, burning alive, and having every second of the attack last a lifetime. “The doctors say it will continue until I face what we saw and did over there and can remember all of it or talk about it, but I think I’d prefer to be sick or kill myself,” he had said calmly over dinner.

  Now, Virgil asked Donte, “Is he dangerous?”

  Donte shrugged as he looked in closets for Leland Hoyt. “He could be if he feels out of balance, exposed, or out of control. Anyone can be dangerous when he panics like a wild animal, you know. Normally, no he isn’t dangerous to anyone but himself. He’s done well with the medications, and as you could see, he acts fairly normal, if there is such a thing as normal.”

  “The gathering room is undisturbed,” Nurse Annabeth Curtis said, making sure they knew she had che
cked the logical place to search, if there were another murder happening. She tucked strands of hair back and huffed, relieved that there wasn’t a body where she searched; she wanted to find Mr. Hoyt, put him in his room, and then get some sleep. It wasn’t her shift, and this was tiring her.

  There was a loud noise of voices buzzing and then raising with interest and a few shouts. Something was wrong.

  “Donte, we…he’s here,” Dr. Becket called out. His face showed fear and concern, despite his training to stay neutral. He couldn’t hide his reaction at what he found. He kept shaking his head.

  Most of the staff gathered at the doorway to the library as others called out that Mr. Hoyt had been located.

  “Is he okay?” Donte asked in a whisper.

  “Donte says he’s okay,” came whispers from up and down the hall as patients repeated what they thought they heard.

  “No. He’s not.”

  “He knows, but Hoyt was shot,” whispers continued.

  “No one was shot,” Annabeth Curtis announced, “go back to bed. If anyone had been shot, we’d have heard it. Stop eavesdropping.”

  “Anyone could have been shot,” someone said.

  The nurse ground her teeth

  Becket shook his head and replied, “Let’s allow Dr. McLendon to look over the scene while wait here.”

  “They’ve called Dr. Oversteen.”

  “Go to sleep. There is not an Oversteen.”

  “Someone shot Dr. Oversteen.”

  “Go into your rooms!” Becket shouted, his face going red. “Dr. McLendon, I have checked his vitals, and he is deceased. Very recently. You may see my footprints since there was blood on the floor.” He held up both shoes to show Virgil his shoe tread.

  Virgil noted the shoes and thanked Becket. “Donte, would you accompany me so that as I speak, you can commit certain points to memory? Or if you have paper and a pencil, you can take notes for me? I find they help me organize my thoughts.”