Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series)

by Douglas Clegg

  Sounding as if he were about to bravely face a firing squad, Jim said, “We’ve just been passing it back and forth. It’s not like I could’ve predicted that Hatcher would maul Donna and then take it.”

  Trey whispered into the phone, “Tell the cops she knows where I am and she’s coming for me.”

  “Don’t get all bent out of shape. Jesus, she’s not going to go catch the ferry to Catalina tonight.”

  “I know Hatcher, Jim. I know her. I’ll contact the local police here. You tell the cops there that Hatcher has a vendetta with me. That she called me here. That she knows where I am.”

  “Don’t get so bent out of shape. Rob Fallon says she’s still here. Maybe she is.”

  “Rob Fallon is a sociopathic head-chopper. Trust me. I know Hatcher. She is going to come for me.”

  Jim Anderson hung the phone up on the other end.

  Trey let his end dangle, as he walked over to Carly.

  “I wish I smoked,” he said. “I feel like doing something self-destructive.”

  “I guess that was bad news.”

  “What time does Jenny get off work?” Trey asked, waving to the babysitter and his kids.

  “Another hour.”

  “All right. Let’s not get Marky and Terry upset. You think we could pay Jenny some overtime tonight? Special circumstances.”

  “We can ask. Why?”

  “This woman—this psychopath Agnes Hatcher—has our cottage address and phone number and the last time I spoke with her at Darden, which is going on ten years, she told me that if she were free, she would get me. Simple as that. Now, one more question, love of my life. Do you mind going with me to the police?”

  30

  The police station was small. There were four offices, and two jail cells in back, primarily put to use over the past two decades as a drunk tank for locals who needed to sleep it off over the weekend. There was an IBM computer to each desk, and the woman who sat at the dispatch radio was not dressed in any kind of uniform. She had close-cropped red hair, and a good figure. Her name tag read: Gloria.

  She was all business however as she logged Trey’s complaint. “Okay. We’ve got four officers out, and two in. She nodded to one of the glass-walled offices. A stout man with a crew-cut sat at the desk, also not in uniform. He wore a sweat-stained white short-sleeved shirt, and smoked a pipe. “That’s Oscar Arboles. You can talk to him. I’ll contact the mainland and see what’s up with this Hatcher woman there.”

  Trey turned to Carly, “If you want to hang out here, I’ll talk to him alone.”

  “No way,” she said. “My abuelita’s father was an Arboles. Maybe we’re related. And I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” She strode ahead of him with more confidence than he felt. He could help but notice that his wife looked great, and always did in situations like this: pulled together, self-assured, a natural leader.

  He tried to catch her confidence for himself as he followed her into the office.

  After introductions, Oscar glanced at the blue computer screen, and then back to them. “So, you’re a psych tech at Darden. My hat’s off to you. And you think this woman might come here.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t say if she’s coming here or not, but she very definitely escaped. A police officer in Riverside actually spoke with her an hour ago. He radioed in a problem with this woman’s car, and then when the license was traced, it was found to belong to another employee at your workplace. Deborah Kuehls.”

  Carly reached over and squeezed Trey’s hand.

  Oscar leaned across the desk, holding his pipe up. “Hope this doesn’t bother either of you.”

  “A little,” Carly said. “I have asthma. I seem to detect smoke at three paces.”

  Slightly disgruntled, Oscar tapped the pipe’s smoking ashes into a wide glass ashtray beside the computer. “I just like the smell of it. So. Tell me how you play into this.”

  Trey took a breath, then began. “I’ve studied this woman for twelve years. I was her first and only friend at Darden. I thought I could rehabilitate her in a way that psychiatrists and drugs could not. I was wrong. We became close, briefly.”

  Oscar looked from man to wife and back. “Intimate?”

  “Not like that. We just shared a lot. I felt there was a human being lurking behind the woman who, at that time, was called the Surgeon. But I was wrong. She’s a machine. She fell in love with me, to some extent. And then, when I saw what she did to try to prove her love...” Trey closed his eyes, remembering. The attack on the other inmate. The old man who hit Trey hard in the face. Agnes Hatcher had known about that, and when she had the chance... “She operated on another patient,” he said as matter-of-factly as he could. “Nothing fancy. Just a botched lobotomy. That was when she went back into the heavy restraints and heavy sedation. The orderlies covered her face most of the time, too. They called her the Gorgon, because of the way she looked at them. She looked at everyone as if they were bugs to be studied before they were squashed.”

  “Except for you,” Oscar said.

  Trey nodded. “With me, she felt we had a shared destiny. She couldn’t understand my betrayal of her. She told me that she would find a way to wake me up to who I was inside.”

  “Mr. Campbell,” Oscar said, leaning back in his chair. “That’s not the most dangerous of threats.”

  Trey kept his cool, even though he wanted to explode. “I have worked with sociopaths and psychopaths and murderers and torturers since I got out of college. Agnes Hatcher isn’t the same. She’s a machine. She has no feelings, even for herself. All she has is a constant motion towards. Getting to me is one of her primary goals.”

  Oscar shrugged. “Let’s assume she does come for you. There’s an all points bulletin out for her arrest. Within the next hour, everyone in southern California will see her face on television. We already have an officer who saw her. We know what car she’s driving. She’s going to be caught. It would take her six hours at the earliest to get here. You and your family are probably safer here than anywhere else in this state. We don’t have murders in Avalon. It costs too much to get here if you’re just out to kill someone. This woman is already slipping up. She will be caught soon.”

  “Maybe I should talk with one of your colleagues instead,” Trey said.

  “He or she will say the same thing,” Oscar said. “But don’t get all twisted up about this. If you like, I can have another officer escort you home and stay with you at your cottage. Or, you might consider checking into one of our local guest-houses for the night. That way, if Agnes Hatcher manages to elude the police on the mainland and find a way out here after the last ferry has gone, and finds your rental, at least you won’t be there.”

  “That’s a terrific idea,” Carly said, looking at Trey. “We can stay at the Breakers, there’s a nice pool there for the kids. That way, you can get some rest tonight.”

  “I guess I’m over-reacting a little. That’s a good idea, officer.”

  “Oscar. No Arboles, no officer. Oscar. So,” he turned his attention to Carly, “How did you end up with a gringo like this?”

  Carly half-smiled. “All the good ones were taken.”

  On the street again, Trey said, “I hate that word gringo.”

  “It’s not the best one,” Carly threw her arms around him. “My big baby.”

  Trey shrugged her off. “He was patronizing.”

  “And you are paranoid.” Carly stopped in her tracks. “Maybe this woman is out and maybe she’s dangerous, Trey, but you are on vacation. We can just check into a hotel for the night if you’re that worried. I’m not. I think that crazy woman is probably out on the desert right now or up in Big Bear. Catalina is too hard to get to. Oscar’s right. Maybe she could get over here tomorrow, but the chances are, they’ll have caught her by tonight. Let’s go pack up and get a room at the Breakers. And quit playing the victim.” She stepped around him, and went out to the end of the dock.

  When Trey got there, she was sittin
g Teresa, braiding her hair and then unbraiding it. Mark sat at the edge of the dock, near the pylons, with Jenny, who was pointing out boats in the water.

  When he saw his father, Mark leapt up and went running over to him. “We saw the funniest movie, Daddy. And I saw a shark.”

  Teresa corrected him. “It was a dolphin.”

  “It was big,” Mark said.

  Trey tousled his son’s hair. “I’ll bet it was.”

  “They come out of nowhere,” Mark said enthusiastically, “It’s really cool.”

  Jenny laughed, and swiveled about to face him. “They were a handful.”

  “We appreciate your staying the extra hour.”

  “Time and a half,” she reminded him. She rose up, clumsily. “Mark’s got a little cough. Not much of one. I don’t think it means anything.”

  “‘Hijito,” Carly said, reaching her arms out for her son. He trotted over to her, and she hugged him. “Cough for me.”

  Mark smiled. He coughed twice.

  “Oh, he’s dying.” Carly raised her eyebrows to Teresa. “Your brother’s dying from too much fun.”

  Mark laughed, and Teresa smiled.

  Trey grinned, too. It was okay. Nobody was coming after him. Agnes Hatcher will be caught within a few hours. Or she’ll hide out on the desert. This island is the safest place for us right now.

  This was confirmed after he’d walked Jenny home to her parents. Trey jogged back to the cottage, and Carly greeted him with, “Agnes Hatcher is dead.”

  31

  Carly had recorded one of the news broadcasts for him, as she sometimes did when he worked double shifts at home. It was habit. Oddly enough, the mayhem of the world often relaxed him.

  A KCBS reporter was standing in front of an arroyo. “The body of serial killer Agnes Hatcher was found three hours after her escape from Darden State Hospital.”

  A photograph of Agnes Hatcher flashed on the screen.

  It was an early one, from her first entry into Darden.

  It was how Trey remembered her.

  Then, the video switched back to the reporter. “Hatcher was found at the base of this arroyo.” The video switched again to a lighted canyon, with a burning car. “She was dead on the scene. Local police told this reporter that the vehicle she was found in has not yet been traced to an owner, although it appears to be a Buick Skylark. Hatcher was notorious cop-killer of Pasadena, who, in 1981, known as The Surgeon by southern Californians...”

  The reporter kept talking, and Carly said, “See? All that worry for nothing.”

  “She’s not dead,” Trey said. “Jesus. She’s fooled them.”

  “She fooled the cops?” Carly said, somewhat bemused. “Trey, come on.”

  “She can’t be dead. She’s…”

  “What,” Carly said. “Smarter than that?”

  “Well, damn straight.”

  “It almost sounds like you want her to be alive.”

  “Believe me, I don’t. This just seems too easy.”

  “Or maybe it seems too real,” Carly said. “Honey, you are too tied up with that place and with those patients. Watch it again. Hit rewind. Come on, just do it. Watch the news report.”

  Trey replayed the news report three or four times before he could convince himself that Agnes Hatcher was indeed dead. “It looks like she really is dead.”

  “And you want to believe that she can’t die,” Carly whispered, slight tension in her voice.

  “No, not that. She just seems human now. Now that she’s dead. She didn’t seem that way before. Christ. I feel terrible. And still I feel like getting plastered so I can get over terrible and get to relieved,” Trey said. “My god, I can’t believe I said that.” “I can. She sliced and diced, what, twelve, thirteen people in her career? You were like this when Jeffrey Dahmer died, too. Don’t start feeling bad for people like that,” Carly said. “I’ll make the drinks.”

  “No, it’s just that Agnes was different. She was a killer, sure. But she never really had a chance. Probably she was already something of a sociopath when she was tortured as a child. That’s all it takes, though: some kind of torture. It’s as if as kids they had this dark spot in their brains. Someone, usually an adult, takes the time to just step on the kid over and over until that darkness blossoms into a flower. Until it becomes the only thing they know. The only thing she knew. It’s a mystery of life why it happens exactly like that. But it’s no mystery as to where it came from.”

  “There are a lot of abused kids in the world who don’t grow up to operate on unwilling victims,” Carly said. “You had your own abuse at times when you were a kid. You haven’t murdered anyone that I know of. You aren’t awful to people. I don’t think it’s an excuse. There are a lot of kids who get stepped on, and they go on to run companies or become social workers or write novels. They don’t all murder for fun.”

  “That’s part of the mystery—why does one do that, and the other become a Gorgon? Where’s the place where it happens? Maybe only reincarnation can account for that kind of personality, coming out of nowhere. Maybe it’s not nature or nurture. But we know she was tortured for many years of her life. I think half of what she did was to try and make other people feel the way she felt on the inside. She just did it the wrong way.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Carly snorted. “Well, I’m jubilant that she’s no longer of this earth, sweet psycho queen that she was. So, are we going to have wine or margaritas?”

  “Maybe later,” Trey said. “I have to watch this video again. To drive it into my skull that the Gorgon’s destroyed.”

  32

  Agnes Hatcher sat between the old man and his young grandson in the backseat of the station wagon. The younger man, only in his mid-thirties, who was the boy’s father, drove. The wife, in the front seat, hadn’t liked the idea of picking up a hitchhiker at all. But Agnes had given them gas money, and so she had proven honorable enough for the grandfather who sat beside her. It was the only car to pick her up in forty minutes. “All the way to Los Angeles?” The driver asked.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “My boyfriend Pete’s meeting me. We’re going to see Miss Saigon. I really appreciate the ride. If my stupid clunker of a Nissan hadn’t broken down, I wouldn’t’ve had to bother you. I hate the idea of hitchhiking. Haven’t done it since I was nineteen.”

  “No bother,” said the husband in the front seat. “The holy spirit told us it was okay to give you a ride. We’re going to a revival downtown.”

  “Really?” She said.

  The wife eyed her in the car mirror. “Have you met Jesus yet?”

  “Oh, I think so,” Agnes said. “Many times.” She turned to the blond boy beside her. “What’s your name?”

  He looked up at her with weary eyes. “Timmy.”

  “You’re a very well behaved young man,” she said.

  The grandfather tried to touch her knee, but she pulled away from him.

  “Jesus is our savior,” the husband said. “Let me tell you a little about him.”

  Agnes Hatcher closed her eyes and wished that they would go away. It would be a few hours until she got downtown, and then another hour to San Pedro. When she would arrive there, she’d finally dye her hair and change her look. She was exhausted. An hour or two of rest wouldn’t hurt. Perhaps she could sleep while these animals in the station wagon droned on about their religion. She had a fantasy about slicing each one of their throats, but there were too many of them together. After all, she needed the ride. She had followed her inner voice, the one that led her hands to slice the nice Southern woman back by the dumpsters at Wal-Mart, the one that told her to use the nice Southern woman’s body as her own decoy. The voice that guided her without words, just the vibrations of the universe. It had all been promised her from the past life, he had told her: “With these lives, with this blood, we consecrate our own eternity together.”

  The voice had led her to the arroyo, led her to stuff the oily rag into the Buick Skylark (the oily rags in
the oven, surrounding her beloved memory threatened). Led her to burn the woman’s body, the seats of the car, the slow smoldering fire that caught.

  Then, using the natural leverage of the slight rise in the arroyo, she pushed the Buick, ever so gently, and it rolled, burning down further into the wasteland.

  The voice within her let it be known that this would make the others leave her alone.

  Let her follow the trail of instinct to her most beloved goal.

  But the voice had died down when she’d had to accept the ride. She had stood at the bus stop for fifteen minutes when the car had pulled up to her. It was Fate, she could tell. And with these Jesus sellers all around her, driving her to Los Angeles, she wished the voice and instinct would guide her hands to stop up their mouths permanently.

  But it was silent in her head.

  She had no choice but to play sweet and kind and compassionate.

  Next time, she intended to take the bus.

  33

  At the cottage, Mark was determined to overcome his fear.

  He slipped out of his flip-flops and treaded out to the patio. His mother was inside, teaching Teresa some guitar chords—Teresa played the piano a little, but was new to guitar. His mother had been taught classical guitar when she’d been a girl, but she was teaching Teresa some basic stuff like “Puff, The Magic Dragon.” Mark considered that “girl’s time” between the two of them. So now, he figured it was “boy’s time” between he and his father. He stood a few feet back from the edge of the pool, and then turned around.

  “Daddy?”

  “Marky? What’s up?” Trey was sitting in one of the lounge chairs nearby, watching the night.

  The last gasp of day, almost an aura of pale lavender light, played about the edges of the undulate hills that rose behind the cottage. The scents of honeysuckle and jasmine wafted on a light breeze. Night was like a cloud, pushed from the east, towards the hills. It was so close to being dark, that it felt like it was past Mark’s bedtime. Only his parents were letting him stay up later than usual because it was a vacation. His father seemed lost in thought. Mark felt his father worried too much about things.