He had set his hat down on the chair, and taken his cloak off, too. Beneath it, he wore a fresh white shirt, and the finest black trousers. He was a true gentlemen.
He said, “I saw it in you, girl. You liked what I did. You loved it, pet, didn’t you?”
She nodded, still shivering. She could taste blood in the back of her throat.
“We are alike, you and I. We are of the same mettle. We’ve known each other before, isn’t that true? Not in some wretched heaven or hell, but in eternity. We are soul-mates, child.” His eyes were like diamonds—hard and sparkling all at once. “I brought you a gift.”
He reached into his black bag and withdrew something covered in a monogrammed handkerchief. Blood had soaked through the silk. “It’s something quite beautiful, if you have the talent for seeing beauty. Do you? Do you my raggedly little urchin?”
She leaned forward.
“Do you love what’s on the inside, instead of what’s on the surface? What is beneath the skin is the truth of our beings. Her is her truth,” He said, squatting down beside her, taking her small hand, drawing her to her feet. She was shivering. He wrapped his arm around her, and held the thing in the handkerchief up to her face. “It was the part of her where she lived. It was her secret place. Isn’t it beautiful?”
She looked on as he unfolded the corners of the handkerchief. When she saw what was within it, she looked away for a moment, because it was the part that she hated the most. She glanced about the room, trying to look at everything but what was in his hand.
She saw herself suddenly in the reflection of the mirror on the wall.
Her face scarred and hideous.
“You are beautiful to me,” he said, kissing each one of the incisions on her face.
Someone was screaming out in the street.
She felt lightning burst through her.
Agnes Hatcher awoke in the bed in the last years of the twentieth century.
Her face was covered with blood.
7
Jim Anderson should’ve arrived at work between six and six-thirty, but because his Chevy truck was running poorly, his brakes about to give out, he decided to get there at quarter of and avoid traffic. It was still dark out, and he was sleepy. He’d been subbing for Billy Campbell all week, who, the lucky stiff, was vacationing on Catalina for a week. But Jim wanted his three-to-midnight shift back. He wasn’t a morning person. The mornings were a pain in the butt, all the patients getting wild when they first woke up, the meds having worn off. At night, at least after supper, they tended to watch TV. or read or play board games. Only occasionally, when a television game show, like Jeopardy! , got too exciting, did a riot break out. Even then, they weren’t that hard to subdue—a little force and a few more pills.
When Jim Anderson got past security and had made it half-way down the hall in Building D, he knew something was different. Not in the usual way of some patient getting in bed with another, or some wild person trying to use one of the fluorescent bulbs as a weapon.
It was a stillness that he had not expected.
A quiet.
Sure, he was early.
Sure, he still wasn’t all that familiar with the morning and its routines.
But Donna was not at her desk—and Rita Paulsen hadn’t come in yet to relieve her.
Donna’s desk was piled with papers and Twinkie wrappers. Although he knew that Donna was fairly disorganized, usually, by dawn, she would have cleaned her desk off for the next shift.
He looked into a couple of the rooms, but the inmates were still asleep.
The one he had never liked, never enjoyed being around—her room was just through the double doors.
He never looked there.
That woman scared him.
Agnes Hatcher. How she memorized faces and people, and anyone who had ever done her even the slightest harm. She was forty-two, but looked like she was twenty, small, petite, almost girlish. And yet, she was a tiger. She was the only patient in D that had to be restrained and covered except at mealtime. And even then, they spoon-fed her, with a very long spoon. She was in, as far as he could tell, for stalking and planning the killings of four cops, each of whom, she felt, had been rough with her when she’d been arrested for a double-murder. Jim didn’t know everything about her—he had only seen her picture, and had never seen beneath the sack they put over her face—but he knew she was nothing but a destructive force in a human body.
And he stayed away from her.
Jim turned his back on the steel doors.
He shivered. He wasn’t going to go through them and check on Agnes Hatcher at six in the morning with no one else around.
And then he noticed a door, slightly ajar.
Robby-Boy’s room.
Rob was okay, a mild-mannered sociopath who had a thing for girls’ heads, but was fairly easy to control. Like all good sociopaths, Rob aimed to please, at least to Jim’s face—and that was all he cared about on the job.
Maybe Donna’s there.
Rumor was that Donna had a thing for Rob. It was not unusual for psych techs and orderlies to start having feelings for some of the patients, but it could get out of hand and cross boundaries—and that’s when it got dangerous. Jim shook his head: Darden State is another world. One of the patients, Crackers, had even told Jim that, now that they were friends, it was okay for Jim to screw his colostomy hole, and then Crackers had proceeded to poke at it with his own fingers.
Another world, all right.
Jim decided to go get a cup of coffee before checking on Rob Fallon. It was Campbell’s shift anyway—why should I put myself out this week?
He went down to the vending machines in the staff room. One of the lazier employees, Soderberg, was napping on the couch. Jim poked at him with his finger. Soderberg snarfled away, and opened his eyes half-way as if he were undecided as to whether to fully wake up.
“Where’s Donna?” Jim asked as he stepped up to the coffee machine. He dropped fifty cents in, and pressed the cream and sugar buttons. He looked back at Soderberg. “Get up, will you?”
Soderberg slowly sat up, shaking his head free of sleep. “Huh?”
“Donna. I didn’t see her at her desk. She around?”
Soderberg shrugged. “I saw her a little while ago. What time’s it?”
Jim Anderson glanced at his watch. “Six-ten.” He reached into the machine and withdrew the small cup of coffee.
“I don’t know how you drink that stuff, man,” Soderberg said. “It’ll kill you.”
“What about Donna?”
“I told you, she’s around. She was just in here a while ago. I was snoozing, but I saw her go by in the hall. She’d already changed out of her uniform.”
Jim took a sip of coffee. “You don’t think she’s down there with Fallon again?”
Soderberg half-grinned. “Maybe. He’s been sending her love notes.”
Jim Anderson shook his head. “Jesus. I knew she was wrong for this ward. I knew it.”
“Want me to go see if she’s there?”
“No. I’ll go. I just hope if she is there, she’s giving him meds. I’ve seen him try this before. I was hoping Donna wouldn’t fall for it. What a life, huh?” Jim finished his coffee, tossed the cup in the trash, and headed out of the room.
8
Walking down the corridor, back to Fallon’s room, Jim Anderson checked the other rooms, briefly. There were fourteen inmates on D, all fairly docile, owing to the medications each received. But of them, five were considered sociopaths, and the rest had murdered enough people to fill a house.
Most of them were still sleeping. A few were sitting up in bed, either just staring out in space, or reading, or playing cards. They had that glassy look in their eyes, of Thorazine and Doltrynol.
He nodded to those who were up.
When he got to Fallon’s room, the smell of Lysol was overpowering. That cold chill that Jim felt whenever he went into one of their rooms—he felt it, like ice. He never knew i
f it was him, or them. All he knew was that he felt it.
Sometimes, in the morning, Rob Fallon would be at his table, drawing cartoons on construction paper. Rob was quite a good cartoonist, actually. When he’d been on the outside, Rob had kept jobs drawing funny portraits at amusement parks, and made a decent living at it. Jim had one of his cartoons on his refrigerator at home—it was a caricature of Jim in profile, with a question mark over his head, and the word WHY written at the bottom.
But this morning, the table was bare. Through the bars at the window, the first feeble rays of sunlight speared across the darkness of the room.
Jim flicked on the light to see better.
He heard whimpering, and saw Rob there, hunkered down on the floor in the corner, shivering. He kept his hands clenched shut. He was naked except for a towel around his waist. Jim glanced towards the sink—it was full of dirty brown water. Rob, who liked to be squeaky clean, had been giving himself a bird bath.
“Rob? You okay?”
Rob didn’t respond.
Other smells, beneath the Lysol layer: some kind of bleach.
Fallon cleaned himself and his surrounding incessantly. He could’ve gotten the brand-name cleaners from Donna herself.
Jim noticed that the floor had been scrubbed. There was a pasty white layer of soap across its shiny surface.
He glanced over at Rob’s roommate, Petrie, who lay with his face to the wall. Asleep or awake, he was ignoring Jim.
“You been having nightmares again, old buddy?” Jim walked over to him, and crouched down. “Needing to clean up after yourself?”
Rob looked him in the eyes.
This was unusual for a sociopath, to be cowering like this, afraid of a world which only existed as a delusion. Unless something had threatened Rob’s sense of himself as being real. Unless he had, for the first time in his existence, been made to feel small by someone.
But what or who could’ve done that?
Rob whispered, “Now I know why. It wasn’t the eyes, Mr. Anderson, it wasn’t the eyes at all. She showed me.”
He unclenched his hands, something in them.
Something all smeared and red.
Curled hairs at its fringe.
Skeins of flesh, a loose tapestry unraveled in his hands.
“Damn,” Jim said, standing, staggering backwards.
“It wasn’t in her eyes, I thought it was, but it wasn’t. It was in her purse,” Rob said, holding the thing in his hands up, like a supplicant for Jim’s inspection. “Just like my mother’s purse. It’s in it. That’s where her why was. She showed me. She SHOWED me.”
9
Three hours later, after docking the Westcoaster, Trey Campbell was dialing his work number from a payphone on Catalina. Carly was just coming out of the restroom several yards away. She had slipped into navy blue shorts and a turquoise T-shirt, and was stopping every few feet to get her sandals on.
Trey waved to her so she’d see him. She looked up, wrinkling her nose. She would know the call was about work. They hadn’t had a decent vacation in six years, between her finishing her master’s and starting with the county, handling adoptions, and his obsessive work habits (and he hated work, but could not keep from being a workaholic, as lazy as he dreamed of being).
And then, that thing. That incident. Accident. With the gun. It was always there, in the back of his head. He couldn’t sleep some nights thinking about it. When he finally could sleep, he often dreamed about it, as if it was happening all over again.
“This is Campbell. I need to talk to Jim Anderson, Building D,” Trey said into the mouthpiece, and the call was transferred.
Carly didn’t even come over. She went to get her sun block from the boat. He watched her. She looked like she belonged her, a beautiful woman in a beautiful town. The slant of light, flat and broad. The town beneath the sun, layered in the harshness of the day. He saw some children with their father walking past Carly on the dock. The children were all laughing. One held a large sea bass high in the air. Young couples in brightly colored clothes strolled along the promenade. An old man sat on a bench outside the drug store, clutching a cane, watching all the tourists with a look of disgust on his face. Carly got her sun-block, and walked back up to the promenade, ducking into a souvenir shop. The colors of the small seafront town were all pastel blues and yellows and greens. It was like an old painting to him, a town from another time, a resort of perfection and sleepy eyes.
The Catalina Express was docking a little ways up, with yet more tourists ready to disembark. Trey had hoped that not too many people would be on the island yet since it was mid-week. As it turned out, the place was packed. At least they had the boat. Later on, maybe he’d take Mark and Teresa out around one of the coves and let the babysitter have a break for a few hours. That would be nice. Or maybe just lounge around at the rented cottage, read, watch television, relax.
Finally, Jim’s voice came on the line, “Billy. Glad you’re around.”
“I’m not really around. You beeped?”
“Had some trouble this morning. Just thought I’d report in. It’s under control, but shook me up some.” Jim had that deadpan way of speaking as if nothing was very important. But there was an edge to his voice.
“Someone bite his tongue off?” It was the joke at Darden, because between eye-poppings and tongue-bitings, there wasn’t a lot else for the psych techs to joke about.
“A little worse,” Jim said.
“Drop the other shoe,” Trey sighed. He knew how bad things could get. He had seen men and women do things to themselves and each other which were, to him, like coming upon a vision of Hell.
Some static on the phone line.
“Jim?” Trey said. “What was that? I didn’t hear you.”
Jim Anderson said, “I said, Robby-boy somehow got hold of a play toy. A real vagina. Only this one didn’t have a woman attached.”
10
Christ. Trey Campbell held his breath for a few seconds.
It was more a prayer than a curse.
He brought the receiver down from his ear, and inhaled the clean salt air. Closed his eyes. Tried to block out the image that was forming in his head.
Then, back to the phone. “Fallon did that?”
“Other bad news. I think it’s Donna Howe.”
Trey remembered catching Rob Fallon flirting with Donna, and warning her about how Rob behaved. Trey felt tears coming to his eyes. Poor Donna. They hadn’t had a murder on premises in thirteen years. “I know it was Donna. Damn it.”
A pause on the line.
Then, Jim said, “we haven’t found the body yet. Fallon isn’t talking about why he did it or where he put the rest of her. Cops have been checking the lockers and the ceiling, but still no corpse. Since Fallon didn’t run, the cops aren’t putting us in lockdown, so at least it’s not the hell we had when Kmetko ran in ‘91. Fallon’s having his usual field day, but even he’s acting weird. Fallon claims Donna isn’t dead. Had to give him some more meds...” Jim kept chattering nervously about Rob and poor Donna, but Trey barely heard him.
He was remembering something, something about genitals.
He interrupted Jim, “Jimmy, it’s not Rob. That’s not his M.O., you know that. Eyes and heads are his thing. Go check on Hatcher.”
Another pause.
“Jim?”
“Billy,” Jim said, “are you nuts? She’s bound and gagged—“
“Look, it’s her M.O. Body parts. Surgery. Rob might’ve killed Donna, but the genitals are consistent with Hatcher. Check on her now. Right this minute. I’ll stay on the line.”
Trey watched as Carly finally came out of the souvenir shop, her hands full of postcards. She walked towards him, her sunglasses slipping down a little. As she got closer, he smelled the coconut oil. She smelled delicious. She managed a smile, and held up a postcard of a mermaid. “I’m going to send this to Mitch, he’ll love it, and Rick and Kathe, I got one for them, too, wait, wait,” she sorted through the
cards.
She brought one out, but must’ve noticed how distracted he was.
“What’s up?”
He sighed, reached over and put his arm around her. “A woman at work. Killed.”
“Oh, my god,” she gasped, and through clenched teeth said, “I hate your work. We did come here to think about you getting out of there with both eyes intact, right?”
He kissed her forehead, tasting coconut oil.
Jim came back on the line. “Billy?”
“She’s not there, is she?”
“Billy—Rita says Hatcher’s in her room. She’s cuffed, still doped up from last night’s meds, face cover still intact...”
“Well, thank god for that. Hope Rob talks.”
“Me, too. If anything else happens, I’ll beep.”
“Okay. Thanks. And Tuesday, buddy,” Trey said.
“Oh, yeah, Tuesday,” Jim said.
Trey hung the phone up. Caught his breath. The fresh air was a relief. He realized that his breathing had been shallow ever since he thought of Agnes Hatcher. Sometimes he held his breath when he went into her room at Darden. Sometimes he held his breath when he heard her name. He inhaled deeply, shaking his head.
“What’s all the stuff about Tuesday?” Carly asked.
“Well, besides being my first day back, he owes me fifty bucks. I told him something would screw up during my first vacation in years.”
“He’s an easy mark. Never bet against a sure thing.”
Although he didn’t completely believe it, Trey said, "Well, they can handle it on their end. They don’t need me.”
“Repeat after me: they don’t need me, they don’t need me, they can handle it,” Carly said, mock-hypnotically. And then, softly, “I’m so sorry about that woman.”
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 3