Expose

by Saranne Dawson

  “Could there be a history of problems in your husband’s family?”

  “No. They all live here in Baltimore. We’re close, and I’ve asked them.”

  Kate thanked the woman and was about to leave, when she recalled Mary Scofield’s reaction to her phone call pretending to be from New Leaf.

  “Has anyone from New Leaf contacted you since Charles attacked those people?”

  Mary nodded angrily. “Oh, yes. I don’t know how they found out about it, but they started calling me the very next day. They wanted me to sign papers to have Charles transferred to another hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “They said that it would be a better hospital. It was in Pennsylvania somewhere—not far from New Leaf, they said. But I wasn’t about to send him someplace far away where I couldn’t get to see him. Then they came to see me and asked a lot of questions—some of the same questions you asked. And they still kept after me to have him transferred.”

  “Do you remember the name of the hospital in Pennsylvania?”

  “No. They never said its name, and I wasn’t interested.”

  KATE DROVE BACK to Washington, thinking about their conversation. Some of what Mary Scofield had told her sounded much like the descriptions other parents had given of the changes in their New Leaf graduates, and she’d seen for herself the differences in behavior that Tony the counselor had described. But something had obviously gone wrong with Charles Scofield.

  New Leaf’s insistence on transferring Charles to another hospital was interesting, but only if it meant they were worried about the hospital here discovering something. And that apparently hadn’t happened. Besides, Kate couldn’t even begin to imagine what that “something” could be. Still, she thought, she just might try to find that hospital in Pennsylvania. Mary Scofield had said that it wasn’t far from New Leaf, and Kate knew that the region was very rural, so there couldn’t be too many hospitals there.

  She had decided that she wasn’t ready yet to give up on the New Leaf story after all—even though that meant Sam would have more of a free hand to delve into the murder of the young intern.

  Lost in her thoughts, Kate forgot to check the rearview mirror until she was about to exit the parkway in Washington. And when she did, she spotted a dark van about a dozen vehicles behind her. She tried to see if it exited behind her, but the traffic was too heavy.

  “So TELL ME, KATE, is it really better the second time around?”

  Kate gritted her teeth even as she feigned ignorance. The question had been put to her in varying forms at least four times since she and Sam had walked into George’s open house.

  She shouldn’t have come here with him. She’d known that and yet she’d done it anyway. She wondered if Sam was being asked the same question, and what his response was.

  “We’re a hot item. Have you noticed that?” Sam asked teasingly in a low voice, so close to her ear that she could feel his breath. His hand rested lightly on her shoulder, and she moved away quickly, but not before she felt the beginning of a meltdown. As she turned to face him, she saw people smiling knowingly at them.

  “You’re not doing anything to cool it down,” she replied acidly.

  He grinned wickedly. “Would you like to start a fight? That could liven things up even more, and it would be just like old times.”

  Kate glared at him. She didn’t need to be reminded that the last time they’d been here together, they’d gotten into a noisy argument that had resulted in her storming out.

  She moved away from him, making her way through the crowd and trying her best not to think about how that evening had ended with the two of them in bed together, making love as passionately as they’d argued.

  Kate spotted an old acquaintance from the New York Times who’d been transferred back to Manhattan. The woman told her that she’d come down to Washington to interview the New York congressman, Malcolm Sports, about the upcoming drug legalization hearings.

  Uh-oh, Kate thought, hoping that the Post’s chief competitor wasn’t going to run the same series she herself had planned. But as it turned out, the Times was planning an informational series on the issue itself, not the legislative process.

  “Sports hasn’t changed his mind, has he?” Kate inquired. The colorful and outspoken congressman was vehemently opposed to legalization.

  “Let’s just say that he feels toward legalization the same way the Pentagon feels about downsizing the military,” the Times reporter said dryly. “But he’s worried that Newbury might be changing his mind. He says somebody is paying Newbury off.”

  “Really? Does he have any idea who it might be?”

  “Unfortunately, no, and he made me promise not to print his accusation. But I think he really believes it.”

  Kate decided it might be a good idea to talk to Sports. Then she remembered that a college friend of Sam’s was Spotts’s chief aide. She hated to admit it, but Sam could be very useful at times.

  “I wouldn’t put anything past Newbury and his clone, Armistead,” the Times reporter went on. “And I mean anything.”

  Kate’s attention sharpened. “Do you have anything specific in mind?”

  “My former neighbor used to work for Newbury. She’s at the EPA now. She quit because she just couldn’t take it anymore. She told me a lot of stories, but I couldn’t repeat them without her permission.”

  “How long ago did she quit?” Kate asked, trying to contain her excitement. There was nothing like a disgruntled former employee when it came to information sources.

  “Let’s see. It must have been about three years ago.”

  Darn! Kate thought. She would have been long gone by the time Crawford did his internship. Still, she might know something. “Do you think she might talk to me—off the record?”

  “Maybe. I could ask her.”

  Kate drifted through the crowd and found a Washington Times reporter who she knew was on good terms with Newbury and Armistead, beating Sam to him by a hairbreadth. Sam moved off after giving her a grin, and Kate told the reporter that she expected to be working closely with Newbury’s office.

  By the time she pleaded the necessity of a trip to the ladies’ room, she’d gleaned what could be an important bit of knowledge about Armistead. It seemed that he regarded himself as being a computer expert. What that suggested to Kate was that Armistead could have been so confident of his abilities that he might well have used the computer to hide potentially damaging information that was then discovered by Crawford—another expert.

  She found Sam out on the terrace with a very attractive correspondent for National Public Radio, as well as some other people. Sam’s head was close to hers as they talked, and Kate felt an unexpected and very powerful surge of jealousy.

  What’s wrong with me? she asked herself disgustedly. She was telling herself that she didn’t want Sam, but it seemed that she didn’t want anyone else to have him, either.

  Fighting that green-eyed monster, she walked toward them, seemingly unable to stop herself. And when Sam saw her, she was drawn to those blue eyes like the proverbial moth to the flame. A moment later, his arm slipped possessively around her waist, and this time she didn’t move away.

  What does he see in me? she wondered silently. Is it only the challenge? Nothing about their relationship had ever troubled her as much as the failure of her normal self-confidence where Sam was concerned. She’d always blamed him for that, but now, for the first time, she wondered if she was being fair.

  “I’D ALREADY PLANNED to meet Jason for a drink after work on Monday,” Sam said later that afternoon when she suggested that he should talk to Representative Spotts’s aide.

  Still a step ahead of me, she complained silently. She hadn’t told him about Newbury’s former staff member, rationalizing her silence on the basis that she didn’t yet know if the woman would talk to her. They were on their way to dinner with Rob and Geri, following the open house. The weather report came on the radio. Hot and humid the next day—a perf
ect time to escape to the cabin, which was just what Sam had suggested.

  Kate was about to beg off, pleading too much work to take the day off. But then she wondered if she might be able to contact Tony DiSalvo, the counselor at New Leaf. He could save her a lot of work if he knew of a hospital affiliated with the boot camp. And perhaps if she could meet him away from the camp, he might be more willing to talk.

  Dinner was an excursion into nostalgia. Kate watched Sam play with his twin nephews and thought about the times when they’d discussed having children. Sam had wanted them, but she’d been far less eager. Yet now she felt a deep sadness, a longing for what hadn’t come to be.

  When the conversation after dinner turned to spending the next day at the cabin, Kate excused herself to try to reach Tony DiSalvo. She thought it wasn’t likely that she’d find him at home on a Saturday night, but perhaps she could leave a message and get a return call early the next morning.

  To her surprise, Tony was home. Considering the background noise level, she assumed he must be having a party. She explained that she would be in the area the next day and asked if he would see her. She told him that she’d spoken to Charles Scofield’s mother and had some questions. That seemed to pique his interest, and he invited her to his place in the afternoon, explaining that he was adding a deck to his house and they could talk while he worked. She wrote down the rather complicated directions and returned to the living room, saying that she would go to the cabin, but would be using the time to interview someone.

  “The boot-camp story?” Sam asked, and when Kate nodded, Geri made a face.

  “Kate, you never change. That newspaper is your life. You were always working on something whenever we went to the cabin.”

  “That’s not true,” Kate protested, but she wondered if it was. Now that she thought about it, it seemed that she had spent a lot of her time there on the phone, or working on the laptop Sam had given her. Still, she knew that Sam must have understood, since he, too, was in the business.

  But Sam always found time for other things, she reminded herself. Of course, he didn’t need to work so hard; his reputation was already secure.

  On the way home, Sam asked if there were any more developments in the New Leaf story, and she said there weren’t. No way was she going to let Sam stick his nose into this one, too. Besides, she still wasn’t certain that there even was a story in it.

  As soon as they were in the house, Kate excused herself, saying that she was tired and they would have to be up early. But as she turned away from him, Sam reached out to grasp her arm lightly.

  “Thanks for coming along tonight, Kate. I was afraid you’d back out.”

  “Why would you think that?” she asked. “You know I like Rob and Geri.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I kind of pushed you into it.”

  “You know me better than that, Sam. I can’t be pushed into anything.” Except by you, she amended silently. Then I turn into a bowl of Jell-O.

  He chuckled. “Thanks for reminding me. See you in the morning.”

  Kate stared at his back as he started toward the basement stairs. Through her brain crept all the memories of nights when they’d gone upstairs together, arms wrapped around each other, sometimes stumbling in their eagerness to get to bed—and to each other. Then she went upstairs alone and crawled into the bed that had finally begun to feel okay without him—until he’d reappeared.

  TONY DISALVO AND his girlfriend—soon-to-be wife, she learned—lived in a cedar A-frame perched precipitously at the edge of a cliff, up a narrow, winding mountain road dotted with other widely scattered homes. When she arrived, he was, as promised, working on a deck off to one side, the underside of which, he told her, would serve as a carport.

  While he sawed and hammered, she told him about her conversation with Mary Scofield. Tony said he remembered Charles well, and he knew, of course, about Charles’s attack on the teachers and students.

  “We were all really shocked,” he said. “There are some kids we’ve had whose histories of violence would lead you to expect that, even if they seemed to have been turned around. But Charles was never violent to begin with—at least as far as I know. He was the kind of kid who could just as easily have turned out okay if he hadn’t been surrounded by bad influences in the neighborhood.

  “His mom was a good, supportive parent, and even though his father was dead, he had an older brother who was a good influence and some uncles who were close to him, too. They all came to see him during family weekends and participated in the sessions we had for families.”

  “So you didn’t see anything while he was there that would have suggested he was having emotional problems?”

  “Nothing—and I was the one working the closest with him.”

  “After the incident, someone from New Leaf contacted Mrs. Scofield and wanted to have Charles transferred to another hospital. She said it was a hospital in Pennsylvania, not far from New Leaf.”

  Tony paused in his sawing and looked surprised. “I didn’t know about that. I called her, just to tell her how sorry I was and to ask about Charles.” He frowned. “She was pretty unpleasant over the phone, but I thought it was just because she was so upset at the time. Now that I think of it, though, she did say something about not wanting us to bother her again.”

  “So you didn’t know that anyone else from New Leaf had called her?” Kate asked.

  He shook his head. “It was probably Ted. He’s real big on public relations.”

  Kate thought she detected a subtle hint of dislike in his reply, but decided to let it go for now. Instead, she asked if Tony knew what hospital Mary Scofield could have been referring to.

  ’There’s some place they’ve sent kids to from time to time. I don’t think I ever knew the name of it, though, since that doesn’t happen often. We screen out kids with serious mental problems because we’re just not equipped to handle that sort of thing. The only time I’ve heard it mentioned, people have just called it ‘the clinic.’“

  “But why would they have tried to persuade her to send Charles there, when he was already hospitalized?”

  “I don’t know. Probably they just think it’s a better facility.”

  Tony began to hammer a plank into place and Kate retreated into her thoughts. She didn’t know how to proceed at this point. Tony seemed very cooperative, but that could change in a hurry if he thought she was criticizing New Leaf.

  Then, when he had finished nailing the board into place, he startled her by asking a question of his own.

  “Do you think something screwy’s going on at New Leaf?”

  Kate chose her words carefully. “I have no real reason to think that at this point. All I’m trying to do is to figure out what makes it work so much better than the others do. Why do you ask?”

  He came over and took a long drink from his beer, then sank down on the ground beside her.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just projecting. I told you before that I’ve been trying to figure out the same thing. And after the episode with Charles, I began feeling uneasy.

  “I’m no psychologist, but I’ve got a master’s degree in counseling and a lot of experience besides, and I know that we miss things all the time. Psychologists and counselors have been known to pronounce someone perfectly sane and rational and then he or she goes out and kills someone. I’ve made some mistakes myself, but there’s still no way I can see Charles as being violent.”

  “His mother told me that right before the attack, she found him crying in his room,” Kate added. “He told her he was scared, but he didn’t know why.”

  “ ‘Scared’ can cover a pretty broad range of emotions—especially for a kid. Since he couldn’t pinpoint it, it sounds more like a free-floating anxiety, maybe the beginnings of paranoia. On the other hand, maybe he did know what was scaring him, but didn’t want to tell her.”

  They talked for a while about mental illness, specifically about paranoid schizophrenia. Tony said that Charles was at an ag
e where the illness can often begin, but the lack of a family history argued against it. Still, as he pointed out again, nothing was certain when it came to dealing with the intricacies of the human mind.

  Finally, Kate decided to take the plunge. “Tony, is it possible that anything could be going on at New Leaf that you wouldn’t know about?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” he replied warily.

  “What if there were, say, some sort of experimental treatments—or even drugs—being used? Would you know about that?”

  “Sure. It would be on the kids’ charts, and we all have them. There are a few kids on small doses of psychoactive drugs, but they’re not experimental. And as for other types of therapies, I’d know about them.

  “Besides, even if what you say is true—which it isn’t—it wouldn’t explain Charles’s behavior. He’d been gone for a couple of months, and he was never on any drugs here to begin with. But,” Tony went on, “there are some illegal drugs that can result in the kind of paranoia his mother described.”

  “His mother said he didn’t use drugs, and the reporter for the Baltimore Sun who covered the story found out that they did a drug screen and nothing turned up.”

  Tony nodded. “We do regular drug testing on the kids because there’s always the chance that someone will manage to sneak something in. Charles’s tests were fine, and I know he hated drugs anyway.”

  Kate sighed. “Well, I think I’m going to have to give up on this story—or at least the New Leaf part of it. I’ll prob ably still do a follow-up on the success rate of the boot camps. I picked up some information on them at Brookings Institution.”

  “There’s another research institute you might want to contact,” Tony said. “I can’t remember the name of it, but I heard Ted mention it recently. He seemed to think highly of its people, and he said they’re going to be studying our program at New Leaf as part of some major research project.”