“Joy,” she said under her breath, and immediately felt disrespectful but realized he probably didn’t hear her. “Officer?”
He turned towards her. “Hm?”
“Brandon Perez. He’s from the Bay Area. Can you find his family and tell them he’s still alive? At least he was when I last saw him.”
The cop hesitated a moment, scribbled in his notepad, and nodded to her. He walked up to the nurse and whispered, “She’s not making much sense.”
“She’s been through a lot. Everything is jumbled in her mind.”
“Yeah, but how long until she’s coherent?” he asked.
“However long it takes.” The nurse put her hand on her hip.
“Right.” The officer looked back over to the bed, and then made his exit.
“Thought you said you were starving, sweetie? You barely touched your tray.”
Raine looked up at her and nodded. Potatoes didn’t sound so great anymore.
THIRTY-SIX
“You’ve never looked more beautiful. You know, they said you could still hear things when they talked to you. In the coma.” Marcus sat on a plastic chair by her bed, holding her hand. Darkness had begun to fall outside the window, and the lights in the room were dimmed. “I’m sorry I didn’t know you were here when they found you.”
“I am just so happy to see you. I’m sorry about that night in your apartment. The rainstorm… “
“Shhh. It’s okay.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
She was comfortable, safe. She didn’t have the energy to think about what Marcus was to her. He was normalcy. And though she was learning to build herself up to where she didn’t put her safety in others, it was still hard to not associate him with this trust.
“Raine, you’ve been in a coma for a week. Nobody even knew who you were for them to tell us you were here.”
She nodded. “I got away, but so many are still trapped. Every moment that goes by is a moment lost for them. I need to make sure Arie and Megan and Perez and the tattooed man are safe. Marcus, somebody needs to do something about that facility. There are so many people in that prison, and who knows what they’re doing to-”
“Hey! Hey, it’s okay.” He stood and paced from the bed to the door and back.
Her hands trembled as she watched his reaction. He doesn’t believe me.
“Uh, they said you might do this. You might have hallucinated when you were out-”
“Hallucinated? I know exactly what happened to me! I was drugged and woke up in this prison. Marcus, the cages were the size of dog kennels—you couldn’t even stand!”
He took her shaking hand in his. He peered into her eyes, the crease between his eyebrows apparent.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she whispered, pursing her lips.
“What way?”
“That thing with your eyebrows. You do that thing when you’re speaking to clients. I’m not crazy, Marcus!”
“I never said you were crazy. And the clients I help aren’t crazy, you know that.”
She regretted saying that. It was insensitive. There was a stigma about mental illness that Raine always sought to break. People with mental illnesses weren’t crazy. They were dealing with the world in their own way, through their own perspective. She was too. Though she felt crazy. She wasn’t sure what had happened to her in the times that she spent unconscious, which felt like quite a bit. She couldn’t even recall the date. Quite frankly, the only thing that seemed clear, was the car wreck… the fight she had at Marcus’s apartment, breaking it off with him, the thunderstorm, and then the car wreck.
“I’m going to have to go get a doctor.” He started towards the door.
“Marcus!” she exclaimed.
He looked over his shoulder. “You’re distressed. They said if any of your vitals spiked—look at that screen.”
“I’m just anxious, please stay here. I finally get to be with someone who’s not a stranger.” Her sentence ended in a whisper.
Marcus stopped and slowly made his way back to the chair on the other side of the bed. “Just take it easy, okay. Don’t scare me like that.”
“Can you tell me what happened to me?” Raine whispered, looking over at him with desperate eyes. “I heard you talking to that officer. There was,” she gulped. “Another body in my car?”
He hesitated, and began the story with a solemn expression. “There was definitely foul play. I was in bed and never got the text that you made it home safely that night like you said you would. I thought maybe you’d just decided not to, you know, give me false hope. I thought you were just telling me we were over for good. But then you didn’t show up for work the next day. Or the day after. I went to your house and no answer. Your neighbor let me in because they said they’d heard Viona whimpering all night. You hadn’t been back for days.”
“Viona!” she whispered with a pained expression.
“Don’t worry, I brought her back home with me. She’s okay. She’s been depressed and mopey, but she’s okay.”
Raine reached forward and squeezed his forearm in thanks. She owed him.
“But it was then that I knew something had happened to you. You’d never leave your dog. I told police the last time I saw you and what happened. I didn’t tell them you broke it off with me.” He stifled a small laugh. “Left that part out of the narrative. But they searched the route. Sure enough, your car was in the woods off the side of the road. Still trying to figure out how nobody saw or reported the fire. Except that that storm was so bad. It must have been enough to put the fire out. We didn’t know how bad it was until we saw the reports on the news. Your car was totaled, Raine. There was a body burned to a crisp. Unidentifiable. Couldn’t even tell if it was a man or woman. Not even dental records would work.”
She absorbed that.
None of this made sense. What was happening? The Warden. He had replaced her body with another when he took her. It didn’t faze her that that was a possible answer to the equation.
“So then I got onto Troy about it at work. He’d been harassing you, and other women of course, and he’d been acting really weird. I told him we were planning to have that talk with him. We got in a fight, and the next day he was packed up. Said he was leaving the practice. And he was just gone. Of course, that made me suspect him more. And I’m still not quite sure whether or not he had a hand in this.”
She tensed up at the sound of his name. She knew how the Troy story ended. He must have packed up when he was getting closer to solving her case. Why would he do that, though?
“My abductor… He was a patient of Troy’s at one time. Is there any way to access his files?”
Marcus looked down at the floor, and rubbed his hand over his face. He shook his head. “Gone. All of them. What he didn’t take with him, he shredded. I’m still trying to understand the timeline here, Raine. What we don’t get is what happened during the window of time between authorities finding your car, to finding you inside that landfill. What happened?”
“I tried to tell you. I tried to tell the others when I woke up. Nobody will listen! I told that officer about the Warden. It was awful, Marcus. Some kind of copycat Zimbardo wannabe, said he was going to finish the prison experiment that was cut short. He was referring to the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. You remember studying that?”
Marcus nodded. “How many were with you?”
Raine took a moment to catch her breath. She didn’t want her heart rate speeding up again as she explained to the only person that would listen to her. “I didn’t get a full count, but including the guards… maybe around twenty people.”
Marcus reached up and smoothed his chin, slightly parting his lips. “How do that many people go missing and nobody notices?”
“People go missing every day. You believed I died in a car wreck two weeks ago. There was a girl in the prison t
hat had been there two years.”
“Jesus,” he breathed.
“I just feel like we’ve wasted too much time. I want to find the guy and save the people I left behind.”
“How do we find this, this place?” he asked. “Did you have any indication of where it might be?”
She shook her head and heaved a heavy, rattling sigh. She was kept inside the whole time so she had no idea. She tried to remember what she saw as she lay in the suicide net surrounding the building. The net itself! Though he could have already removed it the week she was in a coma. She had so much adrenaline going through her body and mind that she couldn’t recall a single detail.
It was equivalent to when something has happened in hurried situations. Like meeting colleagues at a bar for a network event, and realizing after leaving the house that you’ve forgotten to lock the door, or left your wallet on the table, or forgot to notify everyone of the address. These things that normally wouldn’t slip your mind just do, because of the hurry you’re in.
Raine identifying the location of the building where she’d been held captive was the same thing.
“All I know is that it’s a skyscraper in the city. He’d turned the penthouse into the prison.” She leaned back on the pillow.
“You’re tired.” Marcus reached up and moved some of her hair behind her ear. “You’re going to be all right, Raine.” He spoke quietly. “The nightmare is over.”
In a sense, he was right. She no longer felt like she was bogged down by the anxiety of the unknown. She was more empowered now than she had been since that fall night in her freshman year of college.
He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead, and stood up. “I’m going to let you rest.” He smiled at her and started for the door.
“I know where Troy went,” she croaked.
“Excuse me?” Marcus stopped in his tracks and turned his body slightly to look back at her.
“He came after me. And he found me.”
“I’m confused. They didn’t say anything about Batterman being at the landfill.”
“No. He found the prison, Marcus.”
A silence loomed between them.
“Is he still there?”
“No. He was murdered.”
They had a lot of catching up to do.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Just as soon as Marcus left, the nurse came back. She kicked the door kickstand up and pushed the door back, humming to herself as she went. Her smock was printed with purple lilacs, and she had a stethoscope around her neck.
Raine hardly had any time to herself to think about what had happened since she woke up, constantly surrounded by people. Maybe what she went through was all a hallucination from her medication. Maybe Troy just skipped town. Perhaps she imagined what she wished would happen to Troy for harassing her and treating women so terribly. And maybe the whole prison thing was just what was happening in her head when she got in the car wreck that night in the rain.
As she contemplated that, she knew that what she’d experienced was as real as the broken arm that itched under the cast; the arm that she broke when she jumped from the suicide net to the building below.
“I just… I just don’t understand. I was trapped. It was real.” She looked up at the nurse, who was caught off guard by her raspy voice.
“You’re not trapped inside that coma anymore, Raine, you are free.” She lifted the bottom of the sheets back to reveal Raine’s feet, the right one heavily bandaged.
Trapped inside my own body.
Her experience as a relationship counselor had begun to flood her with theories about herself. Had she dreamed up everything that happened to her when she was inside her coma?
Through her training, she knew it was natural for a victim to feel guilty after an accident, even in their subconscious. Perhaps her subconscious’ way of dealing with this situation was to create an alternate reality that she needed, to pull herself out of the coma. To pull herself out of the prison of her own mind, that was controlling her life.
And as she thought about it further, the parallels presented themselves: hospital gown. In a prison, would they be given hospital gowns to wear? The bruises on her arm. From an IV drip? And it would certainly explain why there were moments of time where she was unconscious. What were the odds of her ending up in Altruism Prison? The name of the prison that never caught on with the inmates, but that the guard Brandon had told her the other guards called it.
My dissertation was on altruism in the human psyche. Did I just take that and turn it into this big, huge delusion?
The bottom line was that she was safe now. And all that was left was to recover. Reliving stress wasn’t the best way to do that. She was going to have to let her story go.
She was going to have to go with the truth.
“Thank you for being here,” she told the nurse again.
The woman moved her legs back and forth, bent them at each joint, then rolled her ankle in gentle circles. “We’ve done these exercises a ton of times, only you weren’t awake to witness it. Keepin’ your muscles nice and un-atrophied. And you’re welcome, sweetie.”
Raine allowed her to work through each exercise. “Has anyone talked to my family?” she asked.
“Your mom, dad, and sister are on their way now.”
Raine nodded. “Thanks.”
When the nurse was finished, she pulled the sheet back up. “Comfortable, honey?” she asked.
Raine nodded again, looking over at the IV bag. What was in there? It must have been strong because her eyelids were growing heavier by the minute, and her head was spinning.
Maybe the jail never happened. Maybe I made it all up… or… Her thoughts slowed down and became more jumbled. A single ray of light from the cracked door bled in from the hallway.
She fell in and out of dreamless sleep, checking the window for external cues as to what time it was every time she woke. Finally when she woke, conscious but not feeling like opening her eyes, she heard voices outside in the hallway. She perked her ears.
“None of her story checks out. We’ve torn apart every skyscraper in the city! And the one piece of solid information she told the boyfriend, was that the same person that abducted her, murdered Troy Batterman. And that the murderer was one of his mental patients. Only we can’t check that out either because Batterman left town few days back and took all of his files with him! If he was going to rescue Walsh, don’t you think he’d just have gone and not taken his whole practice with him? Point A to point B just don’t add up.”
She listened to the detective, wanting to shout out at him that she’d told the truth, only she wasn’t quite sure anymore what the truth was.
“So you’re telling me the team has already eliminated every skyscraper in the city as evidence that something of the likes of what Walsh explained actually happened?”
“Checked the buildings out from floor to scaffolding.”
“There’s one detail that just doesn’t sit well with me though.”
“What’s that?”
“The dead body in the car at the crash.”
There was a silence in the hallway, a silence that set prickling goose bumps down her limbs. It just reminded her, as if she needed reminding, of the evil this man was capable of. And he needed to be stopped. But if they couldn’t even find the skyscraper he held them in, how were they going to be able to catch the man?
THIRTY-EIGHT
Her eyes shot open. As the light of the moon glowed into her room, she saw him standing near her bed and he’d been more radiant than the last time she saw him. Especially since he was cleaned up. There was a moment of pure panic, as she blinked her eyes multiple times to see if he would disappear, but there he stood in the doorway of her hospital room, as if she’d dreamed him up.
“Arie!” she gasped. Her body tensed up as he took up her hand
. “You’re not—you’re not real,” she choked, trying to bring herself to reality. What’s in that IV drip?
“Huh? What are you talking about? Of course I’m—Raine what are they telling you?”
She looked him over, realizing he was wearing scrubs. He must have been a nurse or doctor of some sorts. He probably assisted with her recovery. She’d made him a character in her little coma story, like the nurse telling Marcus she could hear them while she was out. She was so exhausted at this point she just let him speak.
Arie grabbed the chair and pulled it up to the bed. “Raine, please. I’m sorry if this is overwhelming. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but I know the truth. I was with you. When you jumped, I just—couldn’t handle it. In that moment, I felt the weight of my entire life. When you left that room and you didn’t come back. I knew you’d jumped off the roof. And I knew the answer. I couldn’t let you go. I didn’t know if you died or made it.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He had just given details from her experience that she hadn’t told Marcus. Or the detectives. Or the nurses. She hadn’t told anyone. He was in that prison with her. And he was touching her hand. Physically touching her hand. She felt the cool dry skin of his palm on hers. “How did you—” she lost the words.
“After you left, things changed. Megan told me the Warden was packing up. Tearing down parts of the prison. That detail told me that you had lived. He was afraid of outsiders or authorities finding the place after your escape, so he packed up. In the confusion, two of the guards turned on him. They mutinied. They opened all the cages and people were running.”
“Brandon,” she whispered. She didn’t have to ask which guards mutinied. She knew.
“In all the commotion, I was able to find a staircase that took me down. Far down. I ran until my knees buckled underneath me. And I found the sun.”
“Why didn’t you try to go to the police?” she asked.
“I did. They wouldn’t believe me. They thought I was crazy! I didn’t know where to find you, I said I’d been with you in the jail, only I didn’t know your last name. They said you’d been killed in a car wreck. I thought I was going insane, I thought I’d dreamed you up—that I needed the idea of you in order to escape.”
The Altruism Effect: Book One (Mastermind Murderers Series 1) Page 17