by H. P. Bayne
They’d found him, Lachlan later told Dez, where he’d been left, a partially loaded syringe next to the fingers of one hand. The other hand had been inexplicably broken in several places. Some were surmising he’d fallen on it. Given his longtime leg injury, falls for him weren’t unheard of.
Dez had managed to convince Sully to stay at his house, and he’d make Emily come, too, once she was discharged. They didn’t exactly have the space, but it felt better to Dez to have everyone under one roof where he could keep an eye out.
On the second day, Dez received a call from Lachlan, telling him Forbes wanted them to go over to discuss what had happened. Not the police station—Forbes had insisted on that—but at his house.
Dez and Sully left in the SUV to pick up Lachlan. It would take them out of their way, picking up his boss before going to Forbes’s, but it was just as well. Dez wanted to talk to Sully first. With everyone around, he hadn’t had much opportunity. They’d managed to hide Sully’s bullet wound from Mara, concealing the worst of the blood on his shirt and hoodie by doing up his overcoat. Her discovering Sully had been shot—and that her boys had effectively lied to her about it—was unlikely to go down well.
“How are you feeling?” Dez asked a few minutes into the drive.
“The bullet wound? It’s fine. Like, weirdly fine.”
“It doesn’t make sense, man.”
“I know. I’ve been thinking about it, and the only thing I can come up with is that having all that extra energy inside me helped my body to heal more quickly. I mean, I’ve always healed fairly quickly, but not like this. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”
Dez shrugged. The idea of it, of his brother being able to consume and use spirits to heal himself was so out there, it made his head spin. Yet he wasn’t about to complain about something that had, quite likely, kept Sully alive.
“I guess that makes as much sense as anything,” he said. “What about the rest of it? Going back there and everything? You okay with that?”
He gazed over at Sully and was met by a smile. “Yeah, D, I am. I never thought I’d say it, but I really am. Facing it—facing him—it was like an exorcism or something. Just as well, because I need to go back there to try to get those ghosts to cross over. They shouldn’t have to be stuck in a place like that.”
“After, you know… what happened, do you think they’ll appear to you again?”
“I don’t know, but I have to try. Especially given the way I had to use them.”
That touched on the other topic, the one Dez hated having to bring up. Really hated having to bring up.
“Hey, Sull. About that. What was that?”
“You’re not talking about the reverse possession.”
Dez kept his eyes on the road as he shook his head.
“It was the hangman,” Sully said.
“I figured that much out. And I’ve seen what happens when he ends up in control. I mean, it was obviously him at the Gerhardt house that day. But he was, like, fully present this time, having conversations and everything. Even your eyes changed, went all pale—like on someone who’s been dead a while, only shinier. Is that, I don’t know, normal?”
“Not exactly,” Sully said. “I felt like I had to let him take control so I could stay alive in there, so I could escape. Gerhardt had me strapped down to the bed, and he was going to inject me with enough of the drug to kill me. I mean, he actually said he was going to do it. I’ve got the whole thing recorded.”
This was new. “You recorded it?”
“I thought I could get a confession from him. And I did. He admitted he tried to kill his son, and he admitted he was going to kill me.”
“What about Lowell? He say something about him?”
“Yeah. He mentioned him. I’d asked him about the second son prophesy, and he talked about Aiden’s death, and how Lowell had done it.”
Dez’s heart gave a solid thud. “Jesus, Sull! That means we’ve got him!”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m kind of thinking Gerhardt just comes off sounding like a lunatic. It’s enough to raise questions, definitely, but Gerhardt’s not in any condition anymore to provide a statement or testify at trial.”
“I’ve seen cases where recorded statements have been played for juries where the person who initially said it was dead or otherwise incapable of testifying. It happens.”
“Statements given to police, maybe. This, I don’t know….”
Dez didn’t bother arguing the point. Come right down to it, he didn’t know whether it would be usable in court against Lowell. Forbes was the Major Crimes investigator. He’d be able to provide some advice on the matter.
They arrived at his house forty minutes later, and Forbes waved them in.
“I called in sick,” he said. “I figured we needed to discuss this privately.”
The police sergeant waited until they were all seated around his living room before launching into it. “Thanks to Lachlan, they found Gerhardt in his office in the old wing. We’ve been questioning staff left, right and centre, and barely anyone claims to have been aware the old wing was still in use. They’d been told it was unsafe due to asbestos, so were ordered to stay out of there. For my part, I believe them.”
“Gerhardt only had a handful of people present during the experiments,” Sully said. “Hackman’s dead. Lowell was there a few times. And the other one we now believe to be Reynold Dunsmore. I don’t doubt some of the other orderlies were in on something and maybe a nurse or two; it’s pretty hard to cart patients around in the dead of night without at least a couple of night staff noticing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if most people around there had no clue.”
“All of that’s definitely being checked into,” Forbes said.
“How is Gerhardt?” Lachlan asked. “Any updates?”
“He’s still in hospital,” Forbes said. “Medical staff is trying to figure out what to do, but given the experimental nature of the drug, they’re at a loss. Unsurprisingly, they’ve brought LOBRA in to offer advice. Lowell is distancing himself from it, of course, saying he doesn’t know anything about this drug. While the vials are labelled with some identifying information—enough for Gerhardt to know what he was using—it doesn’t have the necessary identifiers as to where the drug came from. You can bet your ass Lowell’s working as we speak to obliterate any evidence of the stuff in his labs. Not much we can do about that, I’m afraid. We don’t have nearly enough for a search warrant. Good news, I guess, is this should mean the drug experiments are over.
“As for Gerhardt, he appears to be in a semi-vegetative state, but his brain is showing unusual signs of activity. Neurologists aren’t sure what to do with him, other than send him back to Lockwood. I mean, he sits up fine, he can be spoon-fed and everything, but he can’t communicate. It’s like he’s stuck inside his head. The worst part is the expression on his face. Twenty-four-seven, he looks like he’s seeing his own death coming for him.”
For anyone else, it seemed a cruel outcome. For Gerhardt, Dez decided, it was justice.
“What about Lockwood?” Sully asked. “What’s going to happen to it?”
“They’ve got someone filling in as psychiatrist over there, a young woman who’d apparently tried for a spot there in the past. The board loved her but Gerhardt put his foot down against her. With the only opposition gone, I’m thinking she’s a shoo-in for the chief job now. By all accounts, she’s got a great reputation. Won a humanitarian award for the work she did in some Third World countries and all that.”
“Cass Jacobson,” Lachlan supplied. “I heard about her.” He met Sully’s eye. “She’s good. Really good. She’ll do a fine job around there, and she’s a sweetheart to boot. Gerhardt’s polar opposite. I understand she’s in the process of re-evaluating every patient there to ensure she agrees with the diagnoses.”
Sully smiled, and Dez mirrored the expression. In many cases, Lockwood served a purpose, and a useful one. It was helpful and even necessary
to many of its patients. But to others, those like Sully, it had been a living nightmare. It sounded like that was about to end.
“What about the files?” Lachlan asked. “They still there?”
“Yep, all accounted for,” Forbes said. “We seized them all as evidence, and we’re trying to make sense of them now. Most of them don’t identify the patients other than by numbers, and they’re only a record of the secret treatments, not the legitimate patient records. The proper records are upstairs, in the main office. Based on what we know about Sullivan’s experience, I think I’ve managed to pick out his file. But there are others—a lot of others—we haven’t been able to put a name to.
“I’ll tell you this, the info contained in those files is pretty damning. It confirms what you’ve told us. Gerhardt made notes of what patients reported having seen, he noted the quantity of the drug used in each case and whether sedative was required to calm the patients afterward. But we found something else, something even better. He video-recorded some of the sessions. It’s pretty damn obvious how terrified the patients were, how unwilling to undergo these supposed treatments. It makes him look a damn sight more unstable than his patients.”
“Anyone else there?” Sully asked.
“You’re wondering about Lowell,” Forbes said. “Sorry, no. There was a video of you, but Lowell wasn’t in it.”
“He wasn’t there every time,” Sully said. His tone sounded the way Dez felt. After everything they’d been through to get to this point, it would have been too easy, finding Lowell in one of those torture videos.
“Is there anything connecting Lowell to this stuff?” Dez asked.
“Not by name. Gerhardt covered up others’ involvement, I suspect. But given the nature of the drug involved, I can’t imagine any lab besides LOBRA being able to come up with it. Our own lab has been looking at it, and they’ve never seen anything like it.”
Dez thought of something. “Sully, the drug Lowell was giving you a couple of years ago, the one you were taking around the time you started seeing Harry. Maybe it’s similar.”
Forbes raised an eyebrow. “You have any left?”
“Not personally,” Sully said. “But you guys seized some back then, remember? I think your lab tested it. I think Lowell told you it must have been some kind of street drug.”
“Shit, I forgot about that,” Forbes said. “I’ll check with the lab, see if we have the samples on hand. If we can compare the two, it could be we’ll be closer to pinning something on Lowell.”
Dez met Sully’s eye. There was one other thing, although he wasn’t sure Sully was prepared to hand it over.
Ultimately, Sully pulled his cellphone from his pocket. “There is one thing, Forbes. I recorded part of my conversation with Gerhardt.”
“What? Why the hell didn’t you say that earlier?”
“Sorry. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It’s got my voice on it, and I’m not supposed to exist, remember?”
“Let me hear it.”
Dez hadn’t heard it yet either, and his blood ran cold as the recording played through. He listened as Gerhardt admitted to what he’d tried to do to his own son in the name of this stupid prophesy, what he planned on doing to Sully. But the turning point came as the psychiatrist dug further into Harry’s vision, and what it had ultimately meant for Aiden Braddock. Dez fumed as he listened to the cold, clinical way the doctor spoke of the two small boys, both targeted by an organization fuelled by greed, power and wealth.
The recording ended abruptly after that. Dez was livid, damn near shaking with it, but he calmed slightly as his brother’s hand settled on his shoulder and squeezed. Dez exchanged a quick look with Sully. He knew there had to have been more to that recording; it cut out just after Gerhardt announced his intention to kill Sully. Dez suspected his brother had done some editing, had gotten rid of the parts that might incriminate him or Emily or would raise questions given the later appearance of the Cockney-accented hangman.
“What happened after that?” Forbes asked.
“I guess my phone died, but Emily suddenly appeared. She had her gun and she threatened Gerhardt into letting me go. There was a struggle. I grabbed his hand at one point and he fell. I think he broke it, but I couldn’t tell if that happened when I grabbed him or when he hit the floor. Anyway, we knew he had a gun—he’d already shot Emily—so we got out of there.”
It was the story they’d rehearsed, a way to explain away evidence that might be uncovered. No one had known whether it would be enough to convince investigators—Lachlan’s tight-lipped expression suggested he, at least, smelled a lie—but if Forbes thought the same, he wasn’t making a point of it.
“I’m going to need your phone,” he said.
“For what?”
“I need to take it to our tech guys so they can extract the audio clip you’ve just played.”
Dez was about to protest—the tech guys would be able to remove far more than that if they wanted to—but Sully beat him to it. “Sorry, man. I’m not turning it in. Like I said, I’m not supposed to exist. There’s stuff on here that could burn me. I’ll email you a copy of the recording.”
“Copies aren’t good enough. Not for evidence. There’s no way to ensure tampering didn’t occur.”
Sully took another long look at his phone. “Can you guarantee me this is enough to nail Lowell?”
Forbes waited until Sully looked back up at him. “Nope. But it’s enough to start asking some questions.”
Sully held onto the phone for another moment, then dropped it back into his pocket. “I’m sorry. That’s not good enough. Once Lowell clues in I’m alive—and he will once this recording starts getting out there—none of us are safe. I could deal with it if it was just me, but it’s not. It’s my family too. I need to find more, something we can concretely pin on him. Something that will take him out of play for good.”
Forbes leaned forward. “Are you sure that exists?”
Sully seemed to be doing his best to form a smile. “It has to. I don’t want to think about the alternative.”
Forbes’s phone ringing a few minutes later signalled a pause in the conversation. He took the call out of the room and Lachlan excused himself to use the bathroom, leaving Dez and Sully alone in the living room.
Dez studied a row of family photos on the upper shelf of a bookcase while Sully knelt beside him to scan the titles. Charles Raynor’s face grinned from one of the photos, his arm draped around his son’s shoulders.
“Bad Luck Chuck in happier days,” Dez grumbled, his tone reflecting his disdain for the man.
While Charles was well-enough liked by the community, he’d run up against his share of problems as Kimotan Rapids’ longtime mayor—leading to the nickname coined by one of the unsuccessful mayoral candidates in the last civic election. The massive flood four years ago was a veritable disaster for obvious reasons. Another was a corruption scandal that had nearly unseated him. Flynn Braddock had been given the unhappy task of liaising with the feds on the corruption allegations, an extra-uncomfortable task since the mayor doubled as head of the police commission. Nothing had come of it except Flynn’s belief Charles harboured hopes of seeing him out of a job one day.
It turned out Lowell solved the problem for Chuck.
Sully hadn’t acknowledged the comment and, when Dez looked down on the top of his brother’s head to see why, he noticed Sully’s gaze fixed upon something in the bookshelf.
“What is it?” Dez asked.
Sully’s hand shook slightly as he drew a book from the shelf, a battered copy of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go!. He stood, taking the book with him as he flipped the cover open.
An intake of breath caught in Sully’s throat, and he exhaled a half-whispered, “Oh, my God.”
Startled by his brother’s inexplicable reaction to a children’s book, Dez peered over his shoulder. Inside the front cover was inscribed, “To my boy. Wherever you go, carry me with you. Love forever and ever, you
r mom.”
“Sully, what?”
“This book. She showed me this book.”
“Who?”
“Eloise.”
Sully next scanned the photos on the shelf. His face paled as he settled on one, taken when Forbes was just a little boy, both his parents next to him.
“Oh, God. Dez….”
“What? You’re freaking me out, man.”
Sully replaced the book on the shelf and caught Dez’s sleeve, tugging him out of the living room, through the kitchen and into the backyard. Only then did Sully reveal what disturbed him, his tone hushed to keep the conversation private.
“You remember what I told you when we were at Lachlan’s, and he had the photo of Eloise and David? I recognized something about David. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And then, when Gerhardt gave me his wedding band? Dez, the book, the photo. Forbes is David.”
Dez stared at Sully, trying to comprehend what he’d just said. “But Sully, that…. How is—”
Sully cut into Dez’s failing attempt at speech. “It all makes sense. When the four of us went into Lockwood the other day, I had a panic attack and Forbes talked me through it. He said something to me about his mother having been a patient there before her suicide. He wasn’t talking about his birth mother. He was talking about his adoptive one—the one I saw flipping out and killing Eloise.”
“Hang on. I thought Chuck and his wife, whatever her name was, were his birth parents.”
“Her name was Val,” Sully said. “And, no, they weren’t. A couple of years ago, when Forbes was questioning me about Betty’s murder, he asked me something about whether I’d ever wanted to find my birth parents. I told him I figured he was asking because he was adopted himself. He didn’t deny it, just shut the conversation down. Now I get it.”
Dez whistled low before speaking. “Jesus. How much do you think he remembers?”
“He hasn’t said anything about Gerhardt, about having any recollection of him as his father.”