Prodigy

by Charles Atkins

  “So why was he there? How did he get in?”

  Anton turned off at the Croton exit. As the sports car climbed the gently sloped hill toward the red brick administration building he said, “I guess all of that is academic at this point. No one doubts that Jimmy was stalking her. Maybe he followed Carter, had some kind of rescue fantasy about stepping in after the boyfriend’s killed. You know, like the knight in shining armor. Maybe he even intended to kill Carter. Which, if he’d actually hired him, would have been a good way to cover his tracks … plus, he’d come out looking like the hero.”

  Barrett looked across at her boss as he parked. She was torn—it felt good being able to discuss Jimmy’s case, and to have a halfway decent conversation with Anton; on the other hand, she had the strong feeling that he was hiding things. She also knew that to call him on it would backfire. She thought about a saying that Sifu Li had taught her years ago, “A lie is like a mole. When you try to dig it out, it will only burrow three times deeper.”

  “You ready?” he asked, popping the release for the tiny trunk that just barely held their briefcases.

  “Sure.”

  ___

  A Croton escort waited for Barrett and Anton, as they checked all sharp objects, beepers, and cellular phones at the guard desk.

  Barrett wryly observed how careful the guards were, imagining that there had been hell to pay for the lapse that had resulted in the Charlie Rohr mess.

  The first electronic steel door slid back while a guard walked them through a metal detector. Satisfied that they weren’t carrying contraband or weapons, the second, and final, door opened.

  “They’re waiting for you,” the escort informed them. “I was told you were going to be here half an hour ago.”

  “Traffic,” Anton replied dully.

  Barrett made an “mmm” noise and nodded her agreement.

  They followed silently as their guide brought them to the locked elevators and then down two flights to the underground conference room.

  How politically correct, Barrett thought, as she looked at the people seated around the scarred oak table. Even the furniture was arranged so that there was no definite head—just like the round table. All the players had assembled for George Fitzsimmons’ case conference, including the man himself, who sat between his attorney and his silver-haired mother.

  They’d duded him up in a tan leisure suit, a lawyer’s ploy designed to make the six-foot-five redhead appear less threatening. Tan leisure suits were about as low as you could go on the apparel food chain. If you wanted someone to seem powerful you put them in black—like the judge—if you wanted them to appear weak and ineffectual—wouldn’t hurt a fly—stick them in a tan leisure suit.

  She looked at all the doctors, social workers, consumer advocates, and administrators, most of whom she knew from other such conferences.

  She took a seat and sipped from a styrofoam cup of coffee that had been handed to her. A plate of dry chocolate-filled cookies landed in front of her, she selected from the meager offerings and passed them to Anton, as though they were so many communion wafers being dispensed to the faithful. In front of her was a thick stack of documents that contained information on the patient, as well as a blank treatment plan onto which they were encouraged to “brainstorm.”

  She found it hard not to be cynical as she counted thirty-two people in the room and quickly calculated the meeting’s cost to the taxpayers. Thirty-two professionals at an average of seventy dollars an hour; it would be at least two hours, plus travel time—around ten grand. And there’d be more meetings and ...

  Her thoughts drifted while Felicia Morgan, Croton’s medical director, called the meeting to order.

  Anton nudged her and slid across a piece of paper.

  She looked down at his hastily scrawled note, “Five bucks says Felicia is going to recommend a group home, everyone will agree, and then they won’t be able to find one willing to take him.”

  Barrett grinned, grabbed the paper and wrote back, “Duh.”

  Dr. Felicia Morgan—an intense rail-thin woman in her forties, with black-rimmed glasses and dark hair that appeared to have been slicked back with brilliantine—turned to the patient/prisoner. “Mr. Fitzsimmons, what do you think you’ll need to make it this time? We don’t want to see you have to come back.”

  Barrett bit the inside of her mouth, while the medical transcriptionist hurriedly typed every word.

  “Supervision,” George Fitzsimmons mumbled.

  “Say more,” Dr. Morgan urged.

  “I know that if I’m off by myself I get into stuff. I need to stay on my medications, and I want to … but if I’m not supervised … I might forget or something.”

  “Do you know what kind of supervised setting you’d want?” Dr. Morgan asked.

  Barrett felt like joining in.

  “A group home,” he replied on cue. “I think a group home would be best.”

  For the next hour and a half the assembled congratulated George on his “courage and creativity.” They then set about identifying potential group homes, all of which had sent representatives to the meeting. They had all reviewed George’s records and one by one they politely declined to have him come live with them.

  As Anton had predicted, the meeting went nowhere. Dr. Morgan closed the session by gushing, “This is all part of the process. I think we made real progress today. George, don’t be discouraged.”

  “I’m not,” he mumbled, while staring down at his size-fourteen loafers.

  His previously silent mother roared to life. She glared at Dr. Morgan.

  “I’m calling the commissioner and the governor!”

  “This is unacceptable!” George’s legal aide added. “He needs to go to a least-restrictive setting!”

  “You can’t keep him here forever,” his mother said, “it’s not fair.”

  Barrett tuned out the brewing fight. She knew that Dr. Morgan would try to appease everyone while doing absolutely nothing. The truth was, George would remain at Croton for years. Unlike Jimmy, he wouldn’t be able to buy his way out.

  The meeting broke up and Barrett and Anton edged for the door. It was best to get away before getting tagged for some kind of pointless task or subcommittee. The first time she’d attended one of these Anton had advised, “Say little and keep your head low.”

  Those were words to live by. The first time she’d spoken up at the release hearing of another patient, she was immediately sucked into a several-months project looking at the availability of supervised apartments in the greater Manhattan area. Only after they’d finished the task did she discover that the same study had been done four times before, and nothing had been done to improve the housing situation.

  “Anton,” she whispered as they made their getaway, “are you in a hurry?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to grab a look at Jimmy Martin’s old chart.”

  He looked at his watch. “It’s going to be on microfiche.”

  “I know, but I’m curious about a few things. And besides, we’re not going to make it back in time to do anything anyway.”

  Reluctantly, he agreed. They got into his Jag and drove across the grounds to Gunther Hall. They showed their badges to the security guard, emptied their pockets into plastic baskets, and ran their briefcases through the metal detector.

  In the climate-controlled basement library, Barrett pulled up Jimmy’s file on a microfilm viewer. At the top of the screen it indicated that over ten thousand pages of information had been scanned on James Cyrus Martin IV. She scrolled through the index to the section labeled, “disciplinary.”

  “Ouch,” Anton remarked, reading over her shoulder.

  “What was he up to?” Barrett commented as the screen filled with over a dozen separate incidents, for which he’d received disciplinary tickets.

  She clicked on the first selection. Three months after Jimmy’s incarceration, he’d been caught having sex with another patient—Jackson Osborn.


  She thought back through her last session with Jimmy, but the archived report led her to believe that the sex was consensual. It involved the two men being discovered by a night-duty nurse in the bathroom.

  She punched in Jackson Osborn’s name. An equally large file appeared for the man who’d successfully pled not guilty by reason of insanity for numerous pedophilic offenses. But unlike Jimmy’s file, his final entry read “deceased.”

  She clicked on it.

  “He hung himself,” Anton remarked, looking at the screen.

  “Seems so,” she answered dully, as she back-clicked to the report of the disciplinary hearing. “Just a month after this.”

  “Interesting,” Anton said, “what else is there?”

  She looked at the second entry in Jimmy’s disciplinary file. This time the infraction centered around one of the guards, caught giving Jimmy a CD player. In the investigation that followed the guard was transferred when it was discovered that he’d received money from Jimmy’s sister—a clear violation of hospital rules.

  Next case was again a sexual infraction. This time with a guard—Otto Beardsley. The guard alleged that Jimmy had made advances to him and that in a moment of weakness he’d acquiesced. Mr. Beardsley was terminated. Barrett scribbled the guard’s name and employee identification number onto a piece of paper.

  As she went down the list, the cases broke down along two lines, bribes and sex. The sex part, at least, somewhat jibed with Jimmy’s story. In some of the reports he stated that he was an unwilling, or at least unenthusiastic, participant; in others he said nothing. The bribes were something else. Most were small, but there were obvious attempts to cover them up.

  “Jesus,” she muttered as she read through the fourth sex offense. Similar to the others, it involved Jimmy and two other patients being found by a security guard in a supply closet. The report verified some of the brutality that Jimmy hinted at; in this instance it seemed clear that Jimmy had been raped.

  Barrett scribbled down the names of the perpetrators—Carl Greer and Lars Nordstrand—and passed them to Anton. “Could you pull these two up?” she asked, while she read through the incident report.

  Anton switched on the adjacent microfilm viewer. He stared at the screen and said nothing.

  “What did you find?” Barrett asked.

  “This isn’t good,” he remarked, his face illuminated by the glowing monitor.

  “What?” Barrett asked, half listening while she read through the guard’s account.

  “Lars Nordstrand killed himself in solitary.”

  “How the hell do you do that?”

  “Not easy, even back then.” Anton scrolled down, “Somehow he managed to get hold of a sheet and he looped it around a nail head in the wall.”

  “What about the other one?” she asked, sensing with a sickening certainty what the answer would be.

  “Greer … let’s see … oh shit!”

  “Dead?”

  “Dead.”

  “How?” she asked, tightening her gut.

  “Looks like he was shot.”

  “In here?”

  “No, transitioning back to the community. Let’s see, the handwriting is hard to read … on a scheduled leave back to his mother’s house in the Bronx, and both he and his mother were shot on the street. She survived; he didn’t.”

  “How long after the incident?”

  “About four years.”

  “So Jimmy would have still been at Croton?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “And Nordstrand?”

  Anton flipped to the other record. “Six months after.” He paged down to the death certificate on Lars Nordstrand. “This is interesting, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “The coroner lists asphyxiation as a result of hanging as the cause of death on Nordstrand, but he also gives a secondary cause … hypoglycemia.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m just reading what’s here. It says Nordstrand’s blood sugar was 20 at the autopsy.”

  Barrett felt the walls of the underground library press in on her. She pictured Jimmy winking as he asked her if she had a sister, she thought about Morris Kravitz and his insulin. She saw Ralph lying in the drawer at the morgue, bits of gravel embedded in his cheek. Pushing back from the table, she looked over Anton’s shoulder. “Go to his medical file.” She was finding it hard to breathe.

  The two psychiatrists stared at the screen as Lars Nordstrand’s yearly physicals and volumes of laboratory test results passed before their eyes.

  “He wasn’t diabetic,” Barrett said. “And if someone’s blood sugar is that low, there’s no way he could be with it enough to hang himself, especially in such a creative way.”

  “Maybe it was a lab error?” Anton suggested.

  “Maybe,” Barrett replied, a part of her wanting to divulge her suspicions about Kravitz’s death. But she held her tongue. How was it that Anton didn’t know all of this? If he’d been involved in Jimmy’s release, why should any of this be a surprise?

  She went back to her terminal and paged through the last half-dozen incidents—all minor infractions that involved gifts to various employees. “Well, for the last five years he was here it seems Jimmy kept his nose clean.”

  “He would have had to in order to get released.”

  She stared down at her notes and then glanced at Anton.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Nothing good,” she said, mentally tallying the shocking deaths that surrounded her patient. “I think I’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here?”

  “Sure … Bad things happen to people in here, Barrett,” he said.

  “They do,” she replied, convinced now that Anton was deliberately concealing stuff. But why?

  As they got up to leave, her beeper chirped.

  “I’ll be right back,” she walked across to a phone and dialed the number on the display.

  “Barrett?” Hobbs’ voice felt like a balm on her jangled nerves.

  “What’s up?”

  “I thought you’d want to know, the results came back on Kravitz’s insulin.”

  “And?”

  “It’s insulin all right, but the concentration is ten times higher than it should be. Kravitz was murdered. We’ve pulled Sheila Kravitz in for questioning … Where are you right now?”

  “Croton,” she said, “I’ve been going through Martin’s records.”

  “Find anything?”

  “I can’t talk here,” she glanced over at Anton who was waiting with briefcase in hand by the elevator. “I don’t think Sheila killed her husband.”

  “That makes two of us, but the only fingerprints on the bottle belong to her and her husband.”

  “Are you going to be around later?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll call you. Too many things aren’t adding up.”

  “And I bet our boy is in the middle of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “He wants something from you, Barrett. And it’s not duets.”

  “Don’t be jealous,” she tried to tease, but her anxiety was too high to carry it off.

  “I don’t want to see you get hurt,” his tone deadpan.

  “I can handle myself.”

  “I know. But sometimes the best strategy is to pull back until you know what you’re facing.”

  “I can’t run, Ed. Even if I wanted to, and right now there’s a part of me that’s scared shitless … It’s not an option.”

  “You say that, Barrett. But you’ve got to be smarter than that. What am I missing?”

  Barrett knew exactly why she couldn’t run. She could hear her father’s drunken rage, her mother screaming for Barrett to go to her room, the bruises on her face. The long drive. The paralyzing fear when he’d tracked them down. Sophie’s words to her mother, “There’s a time to run, and a time to stay and fight.” If Jimmy killed Ralph—and God knows who else—leaving town wouldn’t help. Erotomaniacs weren’t so easily d
issuaded. Once she started to run, she’d never be able to stop.

  There was a pause. “Maybe someday you’ll tell me,” Hobbs said softly.

  “Maybe.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Later that night, holed up in her cave-like Manhattan office, Barrett tried to work. The phone rang. “Hello?” Who’d be calling this late? It was after eight, and aside from the guard in the lobby and the cleaning crew, she was the only one left. She’d stayed, ostensibly to edit a chapter in her book. But the truth was, she didn’t want to go home.

  “Dr. Conyors,” a woman’s muffled and frightened voice spoke.

  “Yes.”

  “If you want to get Jimmy Martin, find Gordon Mayfield.”

  “Who is this?” A sliver of fear shot up her spine.

  “Gordon Mayfield,” she repeated and then hung up.

  Still holding the phone, Barrett muttered, “What the hell?” She focused on the woman’s voice; it could have been anyone, even a man pretending to be a woman—even Jimmy for that matter. But why call so late? Either this person was expecting to get put into her voice mail, or knew she was here; not a comforting thought. She glanced around and considered calling the security desk to make certain that no one else had entered the building. She opened the door and peered down the dark hallway. As she did, the motion detectors turned on the lights; she was alone. She went back into her office, locked the door and jiggled the handle.

  Standing in the middle of the room, she strained to hear the noises of the building, the gurgle of hot water through the radiators, a soft and distant buzzing from a dying florescent bulb. “Gordon Mayfield … why do I know that name?” She opened her bottom drawer and pulled out the growing stack that she’d collected on Jimmy. She’d given Marla the task of cajoling the Croton librarian into printing out several hundred pages of Jimmy’s records and faxing them over. It had taken the better part of the day, but finally Barrett could spend the time she needed to hunt through Jimmy’s history and find the pieces that had been overlooked. The thing that made him tick.

  She ran through her notes from the visit to Croton, wondering if Mayfield’s name was there; it wasn’t. Still, it was familiar, on the tip of her tongue. “Mayfield,” she repeated aloud as she flipped through records.