The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  “If the mental health warrant’s been executed, Lockwood should be notifying the police of that, especially since his death was the subject of an investigation.”

  “I can check on that easily enough, although I would expect any warrants would have been nullified with his death.”

  “But since he’s not dead, if they found that out, wouldn’t that nullify the nullification?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Anyway, if it’s not reported, I was hoping you could go over there and ask Gerhardt.”

  “Hold on. You want me to ask the head psychiatrist whether he’s had a mental health warrant executed on a man who died two years ago? God, Dez, they’ll be locking me up next.”

  “Well, I can’t exactly ask him myself, now, can I?”

  “No, you can’t. He almost got you fired, and for good reason.”

  “For good reason? Eva, they were torturing Sully. I couldn’t leave him there and I couldn’t let them get their hooks into him again. You know I couldn’t.”

  That much they could agree on, as he could tell by the small, humourless smile she gave him. “I know that. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “So you’ll ask?”

  “I’ll check whether there’s anything new in the system on Sully. But Dez, that’s as far as I can go. I can’t ask the questions you want me to, not without some sort of evidence. You think Gerhardt’s going to let that slide? He’ll be on the phone to my sergeant in ten seconds flat. You say you need to keep Sully a secret. Asking questions like that is the best way to accomplish the exact opposite.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “First thing is you let me take you to the hospital. You need to be checked for concussion. After that, you have to go to headquarters and report last night’s attack.”

  “I can’t provide a detailed statement to police given who got me out. And I sure as hell don’t have time to spend half the day in an emergency room waiting on doctors and medical tests. I need to find my brother.”

  Eva crossed her arms and sat back on the couch. “How do you plan on finding someone who doesn’t exist?”

  Dez didn’t have an answer. “I’ve been asking myself that all morning.”

  8

  The room was lit by a bare lightbulb, coated in a layer of dust and dangling on a frayed wire from the ceiling.

  That was the first sight to greet Sully as he slivered his eyes open and struggled to reconnect his brain with his physical senses.

  The second, of course, was her.

  The Purple Girl stood at the end of the thin mattress upon which he was lying, her eyes fixed on his with tearless sorrow. If possible, she seemed even bloodier, her white nightgown dyed a deep red along one shoulder and down past her left breast, her arm beneath her capped sleeve shiny with the stuff. While he’d never known her to change in appearance with the lighting of a room, she seemed to him to be half in shadow so that he didn’t know whether it was a result of the blood blackening swaths of her hair or something more.

  Because it seemed to him as he watched her that she was fading, the white of her skin and the nightgown turning to grey in the dark. But the feeling of her, that palpable state of terror that seemed to make up the core of her presence, remained strong around him.

  He didn’t need the added dread. Though her image was unsettling to say the least, he had decided some time ago he would be better off emotionally with seeing rather than feeling her.

  Keeping her in his peripheral vision, he took a moment to scan his surroundings as he pushed himself to sitting. His head throbbed and reeled with the effort and he recalled the injection he’d been given. The memory sent him into a panicked tailspin, had him up off the mattress fast. Too fast. He braced himself against a wall as he fought the wave of dizziness. He couldn’t name the drug, but he could name the feeling, recalled it taking him down countless times as he sought escape or struggled to save himself from another of their experiments. Always he would awaken to the cold, blue room, the tension of the restraints and the knowledge of what was to come. And while he didn’t believe he was truly mentally ill, not like some of the others, there were many times he knew they were trying hard to drive him there.

  There were other drugs, in particular the one they gave him before each visit with Dez or anyone else in his family, the one that left him a zombie. It was like seeing his family through a dense fog, like being bound and gagged as they chattered on around him. He doubted they knew it, but their visits had kept him balanced on a tightrope of sanity when everything else around him was crumbling into that black chasm Gerhardt and his minions had dug out beneath him.

  This wasn’t that blue room, and he wasn’t restrained, which he tried to take as some comfort. But it didn’t explain what he was doing here, in this small, bare, windowless, cement-encased cell.

  Little else was in the room besides the mattress and the bulb, merely a drain in the floor and a bucket in the corner, which, he presumed, was meant for use should the need arise. Other than that, the only other notable feature was a solid-looking wooden door across the room. He moved to it, and found there was no handle, no visible hinge structure. He had only to shove against the wood to verify there was no escape this way; the door was locked tight. It was clear it opened outward, the final confirmation for Sully this was indeed very much a prison.

  He turned, finding the Purple Girl just this side of invisible.

  “Where am I?” he asked, knowing he wouldn’t receive an answer, wouldn’t hear one even if she tried.

  But right now she was all he had, this waif-like, blood-soaked teenager.

  “Please. I need to know. Am I back there?”

  If there had been one gift to having lived a life like his, it was his ability to play it cool, to keep a whirlpool of emotion hidden beneath a carefully constructed, albeit shaky, surface—one he allowed only a trusted few to see beneath. He’d become so skilled he could sometimes hide the full height of his emotion from even himself.

  So the audible fear within his own desperate request unnerved even him.

  She was barely visible now, but he could feel her pity and her pain. There came what he could only describe as a flash of energy, a charge in the air like that of a coming electrical storm, and suddenly she was there again, solid before him. And, for the first time since he’d begun seeing her all those years ago, he watched as her mouth opened in an effort to form a verbal reply.

  He held his breath, waiting. But his anticipation was replaced with horror as from her mouth poured a torrent of blood. Thick and black, it rushed down her chin, flowed over her chest, painted the front of her nightgown straight to her bare toes.

  He shut his eyes against the image, although he found it seared into his brain like a flash copy.

  When he’d gathered up enough courage to wrench open his eyes, she was gone.

  As terrifying as the sight of her had been, the idea of being alone in this place was far, far worse.

  His eyes searched out the dark corners for any sign of her, anything to suggest she was still here somewhere.

  There was nothing, no sign of her, not even a lingering impression of her fear. But he found he had more than enough of his own to fill the void she’d left.

  Sully lowered himself onto the mattress, back against the cold wall, and waited.

  As far as Dez could tell, he was out of obvious options—short of storming Lockwood and getting himself arrested for assaulting and threatening staff in a search for answers he knew they’d never willingly provide.

  And while he wasn’t above using brute force when necessary, he suspected that wouldn’t help him in this case. He’d visited Sully often enough at Lockwood to remember the size of some of the orderlies and nurses. He knew he could get past a couple of them easily enough, but there was no way he’d manage all of them, particularly with them rushing him several at a time as they no doubt would. And he couldn’t imagine any way to break into a place capable of being secured lik
e Fort Knox. He knew there was a wing for the criminally insane and those deemed otherwise dangerous or a flight risk, and he expected Sully would have ended up there. The thought turned his stomach, but he’d need a lot more than muscle or even cunning to get himself in and Sully out.

  He’d need a bloody miracle.

  Somewhere along the way, Pax had wormed his way into the front passenger seat, and Dez reached over to scratch the dog under the chin as he drove back toward the city centre, its skyscrapers gleaming in the near-distance. The sun was out in full, the afternoon a perfect combination of warm and gently breezy—the kind of day he would once have spent chasing a giggling Kayleigh through the backyard.

  It seemed wholly appropriate now, given his change in circumstances, he should instead visit the cemetery.

  Dez steered his SUV down the gravelled pathways, searching for the place where he’d first encountered Sully last night. If he couldn’t find a way to get to his brother in the present, he’d fall back on the investigative technique of piecing together as many of Sully’s previous movements as he could in the hopes of finding something he could use. After all, Sully might not be back at Lockwood; if someone else had him, Dez would be wasting his time—and, quite possibly, Sully’s life—by allowing himself to be blind to other possibilities.

  The cemetery looked different by day, challenging him to recall his path last night. He parked near the chapel. After climbing out, he held his door open long enough to allow Pax to join him. They paced back and forth through the rows of newer graves until, at last, his eyes settled upon what he knew to be the right one. There was no mistaking it, the mess he and Sully had left in the dark, soil strewn over the grave’s grassy edges and petals scattered here and there from destroyed flowers—the ones they hadn’t completely buried in their rush—with half the site bordered by large paw prints.

  The family of the “Lovingly Remembered” Mr. Edward Overton, aged eighty-two, would not be pleased.

  Dez wasn’t sure what he expected to find here, but all he’d really ended up with was disappointment. For his part, Pax was providing no help, sitting back on his haunches and looking up at Dez as if inquiring about the next move.

  “I don’t know, boy,” Dez said. “I haven’t got a clue. If you want to tell me where you two have been laying your heads, that might be a good start.”

  Pax opened his mouth but, as expected, no answer emerged, his tongue simply lolling out as he panted in the sunshine. Dez trained his sight on the inside of his eyelids as he shook his head. “Asking a dog for answers. I’m an idiot.”

  When he reopened his eyes, he discovered he wasn’t the sole human occupant of the graveyard. In the distance, a few sections away, a woman stood, head bowed, hand gripping what could be a white flower.

  Dez’s mind flashed back two years, to a graveside service at which he’d choked his way through a eulogy he’d spent several painful nights writing while Eva massaged his shoulders and edited his grammar. He’d avoided the spot since, hating cemeteries as a rule, particularly hating this one for holding the graves of both his brothers and his father.

  Now he found himself drawn back to the site of Sully’s grave, the questions rewriting themselves in his brain as he neared, shifting from wondering whether the woman was there for Sully to why. Because, as he reached the edge of the section, there was no doubt she was there for him.

  She turned to Dez as he approached, eyes wide with surprise and shiny with yet-unshed tears. Her honey-coloured hair was streaked with a grey that could be mistaken for highlights in the sun, and her features were youthful and pretty despite the scattering of fine lines that suggested she was close to forty.

  Her smile did little more than turn up the corners of her mouth, coming nowhere near her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You startled me.”

  “Sorry about that.” Dez looked from her to the grave, then back again. “How did you know Sully?”

  Something behind the woman’s eyes shuttered closed. Were this a suspect interview, Dez would take that as his cue to back off a touch, to revert to relatively suspect-safe and relationship-building subjects like hobbies, skills or the symbolism behind tattoos. But right now, with Sully missing, he didn’t have the luxury of time.

  He decided to offer her some information about himself in the hopes of some quid pro quo.

  “He was my brother.”

  “Sullivan didn’t have a brother.”

  Dez tried to conceal his surprise but knew, even without the benefit of a mirror, he was failing miserably. “How would you know that?”

  The woman broke the connection with Dez long enough to kneel next to the headstone and lay the white rose along the base, avoiding the silk arrangement Dez’s mother had likely placed there during her last visit. The woman rested a hand on the stone, her fingers lightly tracing the letters of Sully’s first name.

  Dez stood in the silence, his mind formulating the answer before she’d even given one, so that when she finally spoke, his shock was somewhat lessened.

  But not by much.

  “I’m his mother.”

  9

  Pax had proven himself hard to predict, but judging from his low growls and rigid stance, he’d decided he didn’t much care for his missing human’s mother.

  For his part, Dez hadn’t yet made up his mind on whether he should side with Pax on that point. The woman had, after all, dumped Sully on someone’s doorstep in the middle of the night, abandoning the infant and leaving him to the mercies of the weather, wandering animals and, potentially, predators of the human persuasion.

  As far as Dez was aware, no one really knew the story of Sully’s birth, the last name Gray simply given to him when the investigation failed to turn up any clue to his real identity. The infant Sully had come in a second- or-thirdhand bassinet with a piece of paper tucked in beneath him, block letters written in black marker: “Please call me Sullivan.”

  It was all Dez had ever learned, information gleaned from the police file he’d managed to sneak a peek at during his years with the KRPD.

  Now, with the potential for answers at his fingertips, he had to hold back from jumping too far and too deep without first testing the waters. Policing had instilled in him a healthy dose of skepticism and, with everything that had transpired within recent hours, he had plenty to be suspicious about.

  With Pax on one side and the woman on the other, Dez led them to a bench near the treed edge of the cemetery. Dez guessed it had to have been near here that Sully had stood two years ago, watching his own funeral. He tried to ignore the anger that bubbled up at the thought. Dez had a keen recollection of breaking down in Eva’s arms after gingerly lowering Sully’s empty urn into the cool, damp soil. The idea that Sully had been nearby, had seen their suffering and had done nothing to stop it, was infuriating. But Dez’s anger was tempered through his awareness of Sully’s continued fear of the possibility of returning to Lockwood. There was only so much fault Dez could find with his brother, particularly given the childhood he’d endured prior to finding a home with the Braddocks.

  That traumatic childhood had been thanks in no small part to Sully’s mother.

  “Lucienne Dule,” the woman said, extending a small, finely boned hand.

  Dez shook, finding her grip firmer than anticipated. “Dez Braddock. Sully came to live with my family when he was seven.”

  “Did your parents adopt him?”

  “In a way, I guess. He was a foster and the placement went well, so it became a permanent one.”

  “They were good to him?”

  “They were good to everybody. And they loved him. Damn sight more than I can say about anyone else he’d been placed with to that point.”

  It was a low blow, he supposed. But she was, after all, the reason Sully had ended up in foster care in the first place, and he wasn’t of a mind to hold back for her sake.

  “What do you mean? Was he mistreated before?”

  “That would be putting
it mildly. I won’t get into details, but it took a few years of counselling to get him more or less sorted out.”

  “But he was okay then?”

  “Well, he had us. So, yeah, I guess he was.”

  Lucienne studied Dez, a small smile on her face as she looked to be piecing something together. “You don’t have much use for me, do you?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “And neither did Sullivan. Therein lies the point.”

  “Look, you’ve got to understand. I love Sully. In every way that matters, he’s my brother. So, yeah, I’m pretty protective when it comes to him.”

  “You speak about him like he’s still here.”

  Damn. Dez thought fast, came up with an answer in short order that seemed to make sense. “He still is to me, I guess. I’ve never been able to make a whole lot of sense of it, but I believe there’s something beyond this life.”

  Lucienne inhaled, a signal she was about to say something else, but Dez jumped in. He had some questions he wanted answered first.

  “He always wondered, you know, where he came from, why he was given up. I’ve had some questions of my own on that count.”

  “And you’d like me to answer them.”

  Dez said nothing more, allowing his silence to form his response.

  Lucienne nodded slightly, a tight smile forming before she looked away, gaze returning to Sully’s grave.

  “I was young when I had him, just sixteen. Please understand, I didn’t want to give him up. I was just a child myself, and my parents wouldn't support me. I was given an option, just one: do what they said was the right thing and give him up, or learn how to be an adult on my own with my son. Obviously, you know what decision I made. It’s one I’ve regretted ever since.”

  “You left Sully on someone’s doorstep.”

  “Not just someone. She was a social worker, a very nice lady named Denise Wilson. I didn’t know her personally, but I knew of her. It was naïve of me, I suppose, but I really hoped she’d just fall in love with Sullivan and keep him.”