by Lisa Jackson
Dr. Zellman was high in the pecking order of the specialists on Side B. He understood the criminal mind in a way that both fascinated and horrified the less imaginative doctors. Well, that was their problem, wasn’t it? he thought with a sniff. Dr. Maurice Zellman did his job. And he did it very, very well.
With a tightening of his lips, he picked up his pace. He was running late, and checking on Turnbull was going to make him later still, but he really had no choice as Justice was his patient and was patently feared by the rest of the staff. This fact half amused Zellman, who’d worked with the strange man ever since he’d been brought to Side B, because Justice was really no more frightening than any other psychotic. He was just a little more directionally motivated, focused on women, specifically these Colony women.
Just as Zellman reached Justice’s room, the door flew open and Bill Merkely, one of the guards, practically leapt into the hall. Merkely didn’t immediately see Zellman, as he was looking back into Justice’s room. “So, long, schizo!” he yelled harshly, his beefy face red. He yanked the door shut and checked the automatic lock as Zellman cleared his throat behind him. Merkely jumped as if prodded with a hot poker, his already red face turning magenta. “Fucker told me I was going to die!” he cried as an excuse.
“You can’t listen to him.”
“I don’t. But he sure as hell predicts a whole lot of shit!”
“What were you doing in his room?”
“Picking up his tray. But I had to leave it in there. Hope the food rots!”
He stomped off toward the guards’ station, which divided Halo Valley Security Hospital’s Side B from Side A, the gentler section, which housed patients who weren’t considered a serious threat to society. Zellman thought of Side A as an Alzheimer’s wing, though he would never say so aloud as they considered themselves to be a helluva lot more than institutional caretakers. He shook his head at the lot of them. Perception. So many people just didn’t get it.
He had a key to Justice’s room himself, and he cautiously unlocked the door. Justice had never attacked him; he’d never attacked anyone since he’d been brought to the hospital, but the man had a history, oh, yes, indeedy he did.
Now the patient stood on the far side of the room, disengaged from whatever little drama had occurred between him and Merkely. Justice was tall, dusty blond, and slim, almost skinny, but hard and tough as rawhide. He didn’t make eye contact as Zellman entered, but he flicked a look toward the meal tray, which had been untouched except for the apple.
“That man is afraid of me,” Justice said, now in his sibilant voice. Always a faint hiss to his words. An affectation, Zellman thought.
“Yes, he is.”
“He always leaves the tray.”
Zellman had a clipboard with a pen attached shoved under one arm. There were cameras in Justice’s one-room cell, tracking his every move. Zellman didn’t need to watch reams of film to remind himself of the content of each of their meetings. He wrote himself copious notes and typed up reports, which he suspected no one ever read. They all wanted to forget Justice Turnbull and his strangeness. When first brought to Halo Valley, he’d referred to the women he sought to harm as “Sister,” in his hissing way. “Sssiissterrrs . . . ,” he would rasp. “Have to kill them all!” he’d warned. But a lot of that dramatic act had disappeared over time.
Not that he wasn’t dangerous. Before his incarceration he’d killed and terrorized a number of women. He had also cut a swath through some peripheral people and had nearly slain his own mentally ill mother. She now lay in a twilight state in a care facility with no memory of the attack and not a lot of connection with the real world.
“Justice,” Maurice Zellman said now in a stern, yet friendly, voice, one he’d cultivated over the years. “You’ve finally got clearance to have those medical tests run at Ocean Park Hospital. The van’s on its way here now. I’m warning you, though. If this stomach problem proves to be just a means to get out of Halo Valley, you’ll be further restricted. No more walks in the yard. No being outside and staring toward the sea.” Zellman heard his faintly mocking voice and clamped down on that. “No privileges.”
Justice turned to look at him through clear blue eyes that were almost translucent. He was extraordinarily good-looking except . . . there was just something unnatural about him that made one hesitate upon meeting him. A reaction to something he emanated that Zellman had never quite put his finger on. Now his mouth was turned down at the corners and he winced slightly, as if he were in pain.
Over time and in-depth sessions with him, Zellman had come to realize that some of Justice’s deeply rooted problems were because he’d been rejected and scorned. Rejected and scorned by women. Maybe even his own mother. The women of the Colony particularly bothered him. They might not be his sisters, per se, but he seemed to think they were. Was there any shared genetic makeup between them? Zellman thought it unlikely. Justice’s world was all of his own making.
Still, Justice definitely believed the Siren Song occupants were the Chosen Ones, while he was kept outside the gates. Locked out. Barred. Left with a mother who had been spiraling into mental illness most of her adult life, Zellman guessed. Who knew about his father? Certainly not Justice or anyone Zellman had ever talked to.
Not a great childhood by any stretch of the imagination.
“Can we go now?” Justice stared at him hard.
Zellman nodded. Justice wore loose gray pants and a white shirt, the regulated outfit for the patients on Side B. “I need to get the handcuffs, first. Sorry.”
Justice asked softly, “From the guard?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t try to escape.”
“It’s hospital policy.”
A spasm crossed his face, and he clutched a palm to his stomach. “This pain is killing me.”
Zellman considered the man. Inside the van Justice would be chained around the waist and locked to the side of the vehicle for the ride to Ocean Park. The handcuffs were merely an extra precaution. Sure, it would be against protocol to give him this small freedom as they made their way to the van—against the most basic rule of the hospital. But the stomach pain Justice had been complaining of was definitely worsening, and anyway, Zellman knew when someone was telling the truth and when they were lying. It was just . . . his gift. Justice was telling the truth.
It would take time to get the damned handcuffs, time and effort. And Maurice disliked Bill Merkely almost as much as Justice did. “Come on, then,” he said. “Hurry up.”
Justice’s expression brightened a little, the most anyone could ever scare out of him. He was in gray felt slippers, and he eagerly walked through the door ahead of Zellman. There were precautions overhead in the hall: big, glossy, mirrored half circles that housed hidden cameras. Justice looked up at them as they passed, and Zellman smiled to himself. There would be hell to pay later when the handcuff protocol breach was noticed. Dr. Jean Dayton, a mild-mannered little brown bird with a permanent scowl, would scream her pinched-tight ass off.
They walked along the hall together and, side by side, clambered up the utilitarian metal stairway that led to the ground level. At the top it was a short walk toward a set of gunmetal gray, locked double doors with small windows filled with wire netting—doors that led to the outside. They stood together just inside, looking through the windows, waiting while a white hospital van with the Ocean Park logo pulled under the portico beyond. Daylight was disappearing, the fading sun fingering stripes of dark gold along the grass that fanned out on the far side of the portico, night still an hour or so away.
As Zellman watched, the driver, an orderly from Ocean Park, jumped from the van. The man would be expecting Justice to be handcuffed, and with a faint feather of remorse touching his skin, Zellman turned to Justice and opened his mouth to . . . what? Ask him to be good?
Swift as lightning, Justice snatched Zellman’s clipboard and pen away from him. The clipboard clattered to the floor, and while Zellman goggled in sur
prise, Justice jammed the pen deep into Zellman’s throat and out again. Twice.
Blood spurted in a geyser.
“Wha? Wha? Wha?” Zellman burbled.
The door opened and the driver stepped in. Justice grabbed the man by his head and slammed it into the metal door. Once, twice, three times. More blood. Pints of it.
“Keys,” Justice demanded.
“Van . . . van,” the man mumbled, his eyes rolling around in his head.
And like that, Justice was gone.
Shoved aside and tossed to the floor like a rag doll, Zellman clutched at his throat helplessly, blood squeezing through his fingers. Shocked and outraged that Justice had lied. About the stomach pain. About needing to go to the hospital. About every damned thing!
And he, Dr. Maurice Zellman, a doctor of psychiatry, a member of Mensa, had believed him. Worse than the sting of pain at his throat, the bite of his own damned pen, was the knowledge that he, Dr. Maurice Zellman, had been wrong, after all.
CHAPTER 2
Sssisssterrr . . .
Whore . . . !
With Satan’s evil incubus growing inside you . . . !
The voice rasped against Laura’s brain again. She flinched and nearly stumbled as she thrust up the mental wall against him again on her way to surgery to check on Conrad’s condition. But her worst fears were confirmed: it was Justice.
And he knew she was pregnant??? How?
The frisson that shivered down her spine was an old friend. She’d felt it before many times, but not since Justice Turnbull had been captured, convicted, and locked away. Not like this. Not with this harsh hammering into her thoughts.
Outside the doors to the surgical ward she glanced around, always a bit uncertain that someone else couldn’t hear him as well, though she knew from experience she was the only one. She could block him from digging into her thoughts and feelings, but she could not prevent her own mental receptors from hearing him.
He was a devil. A scourge. A sickness that frightened them all. He was—
“Laura?” Her ex, Byron Adderley, broke into her thoughts, causing her to jerk as if goosed. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded instantly. Frowning, he stripped a pair of surgical gloves from his hands and tossed them into a trash receptacle. His eyebrows rose, as if he were waiting for her to answer.
Like an obedient puppy, she thought sourly.
He’d just come from surgery, she realized. Of course she would run into him. Of course. Murphy’s Law. Pulling herself together, she ignored his question. “How’s Conrad? Do you know?”
“Who? Oh. That security guard?” He shoved a thinning shock of coffee-dark hair from his eyes. “We drilled into his head to relieve the pressure in case of a subdural hematoma. Hope he has a brain left. Someone beat him half to death.” He actually smiled, as if he’d said something clever. “That what you wanted to know?”
“I was just concerned.”
His smile fell away and Byron gazed at her hard. “You like him?”
“I barely know him,” she shot back. “I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
“Yeah, well. ‘Okay’ is maybe not the word for it.” Byron yawned. He stretched his arms over his head in a move she remembered, one she’d once thought was sexy. No longer. “God, I gotta get some sleep,” he admitted. “I was out late last night, and this morning came early.”
Like she cared.
“What about Dr. Zellman?” Being a floor nurse, and not part of the surgical team, Laura was forced to get information secondhand.
“Jesus. He’s lucky to be alive! That fuckin’ psychotic stabbed Zellman, too. Got his voice box but good.” Byron actually sounded a little concerned. “Could be, Zellman never speaks again.”
“Oh, I hope you’re wrong.” She glanced past him toward the double doors that led into surgery. “That’s what they’re saying?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Too early to tell.”
“The psychotic who did this . . . ?”
“No surprise there. You remember the one. Justice Turnbull.” Byron shook his head, his unruly forelock falling forward again. “A whole new kind of crazy.” He stifled another yawn. “Think Turnbull’ll come back to his old stomping grounds and go after those cult freaks again?”
Laura went completely still. Tried not to look as if his remark had hit a nerve. “The sheriff’s department will find him,” she said with an effort.
“Oh, yeah.” He barked out a laugh. “Count on them.”
Ever the cynic.
Laura had heard enough. “I’ve gotta get back to work.” She turned on her heel.
“Hey. Laura.” She didn’t so much as look over her shoulder and set her jaw. How had she ever found him attractive, and why the hell had she married him? Her thoughts strayed to the child growing within her, his child, the baby that Justice seemed to sense, and her insides went numb. “When are you going to stop dyeing your hair?” Byron called after.
She ground her teeth together, angry at him and herself for ever thinking they could build a life together. She’d known he wasn’t her kind of man from the get-go, hadn’t she? She’d suspected he was self-centered and narcissistic. How had she let him convince her to leave Portland for this stretch of coastline and Ocean Park Hospital, when she’d known it might not be safe? God, she’d been a fool to let him talk her into anything so idiotic. She hadn’t wanted to move. She certainly hadn’t wanted to relocate here, of all places. The house they’d rented together in Deception Bay, about six miles down Highway 101, until he’d moved out wasn’t much to write home about, and the apartment he’d subsequently moved into was even less impressive, but that was just icing on the cake of her unhappiness.
Why did you marry him?
At a corner, she hazarded a quick glance over her shoulder, but Byron had already turned away. He couldn’t really care less about the horrific events that had taken place at Halo Valley. If he wasn’t the center of the universe, then the universe itself didn’t matter.
Because I wanted to believe someone loved me.
And she’d been stupid enough to buy into his good looks, his easy charm, his success . . . what a fool she’d been and now . . . Automatically her hand strayed to her abdomen and the life beginning to pulse within her. She couldn’t keep this baby. Byron’s baby. She couldn’t. Yet, it was a child . . . her child. . . .
Nurse Baransky, middle-aged, brusque, was coming down the hall toward her. “Are you checking on Mrs. Shields?” she asked.
“I’m on my way to her room now.” Laura tried not to appear like she was hurrying, but inside she was running, running, running. From Byron, from her marriage, from the strangeness of her childhood, from Justice . . . from the truth . . .
“Were you at the ER?” Baransky asked.
“Just coming from outside surgery. No word yet on Conrad or Dr. Zellman.”
Baransky nodded. “It was that madman who escaped, wasn’t it? The one they captured in the shootout at the motel a few years back? Can’t think of his name. Justin something?”
“Justice,” Laura reminded carefully, the taste of his name on her tongue bitter, the sound of it striking a chord of terror that shuddered through her. Sssiissssttterrr. His hiss echoed through her brain. Dear God.
“They were bringing him here for testing because he was complaining of stomach pain off and on, apparently.”
“He was faking,” Laura said automatically.
“They told you that?”
Laura nearly bit her tongue trying to take the words back and was instantly sorry that she’d blurted out something she didn’t really want to discuss. “I’m just going on an assumption,” she backtracked as a patient, a thick-in-the-middle woman with a wan expression, walked tentatively down the hall. Her plump fingers were clenched tight around the pole of a rolling IV stand.
“You need help?” Baransky said, and the woman offered the ghost of a smile as she shook her head, determined to walk on her own. “You said that Justice Turnbull was
faking his illness?” Baransky asked, turning her attention back to Laura.
She didn’t know how to answer that she knew Justice was faking. She sure as hell wouldn’t be able to explain that Justice had started banging against her brain, something that had begun when she was young, though its strength had waxed and waned over the years, and had practically been nonexistent since he’d been incarcerated, had come back with a vengeance. That she still could manage to hold him out, but there was always a tiny iota of time before she could effectively throw up her mental wall, an infinitesimal moment where he left traces of his own thoughts, scraps that were available to her. So, yes, she knew he’d faked the stomach pain because, in effect, he’d told her as much. More like an overall realization than the needle-sharp words he sent to her.
And she also knew he’d been planning this escape a long time.
And she knew that he was hunting her now. . . .
How does he know about the baby?
“Laura?” Baransky suddenly demanded, eyeing her closely. She had a big voice and little or no tolerance for anything she deemed to be nonsense.
Laura could tell her face had lost color. “I’m just overly tired. Didn’t get good sleep last night.”
“Maybe you should sit down. I can check on Mrs. Shields.”
“No, no. I’m okay.”
Laura forced out a smile as she walked past her. She was feeling nauseous, but it was less about the pregnancy and more about the realization that Justice Turnbull had escaped. When the events of his rampage had taken place a few years earlier, she’d kept the wall against his thoughts up solidly high. Before then, he’d never been seen as a serious threat to her and the others he’d targeted by either herself or her family. But then suddenly he was after them all! Threatening the very foundation of her family, her ancestors, anyone even remotely related to her, all those who lived at the huge lodge shielded from the world by massive iron gates. Her sisters.