3
On the answering machine, Jim’s gruff Texas accent. “Hey Bubba, looking forward to seeing you in the Crack Up Palace today. Listen, we got a live one on Program 28 I want you to meet first thing. Scoleri. Nearly took out Bobby Bronson's left eye this morning. A quarter inch from getting it. Dug right into his skin. Believes he’s Lord of the World. Calls himself Abraxas. Has a whole mythology worked out about how he can hear the secrets. All that jazz. Brainard and Conroy are on him, and Conroy gave you a special pass to check him out. Can’t wait for your assessment. I guess you’re a big shot now. Conroy’s been hunting you down, too. It must have something to do with this profiling case she's working on. Some kidnappings over the weekend. I didn't get the details, you know Conroy and then that dude Eric is in spaceville half the time. Well, bubba, I wanted to be the first to welcome you back to Thrill Kill Row.”
Chapter Seventeen
8:45 a.m.
1
Trey arrived to work a few minutes early.
Nearly soaked, despite his umbrella, he walked from his parking space into the main building. It was a large white-gray building. Were it not for the security fences, a person driving by might think this was some corporate headquarters, or perhaps a spa rather than a hospital for criminals. He nodded to the two men at the desk, both in blue uniforms; crew cuts; one of them seemed to recognize him even though Trey could not remember ever seeing him before.
He flashed his badge, and walked down the main hall.
Ward A had low security clearance. A main central office area, off which three hallways, each with double-doors. Always, flowers on the sign-in desk, as if this were a happy place. The smell of institution. They might as well have bottled it and sold it to be sprayed around every state institution in the world: rubbing alcohol, air freshener, pine cleaner, and something not so breathtaking, something between ammonia and urine in the blend of odors.
The fluorescents still flickered along the ceiling as they had since he'd last been there. The cork boards along the wall carried staff photos and notices about apartments for rent, dogs that needed homes, old cars for sale. An open window office to the right, behind which was an entire open room of administrative staff, as well as some of the legal staff.
At the sign-in desk, three nurses were in line ahead of him, and one, Joe Houston, turned and slapped him a high five. Trey was never sure of high fives. He generally just put his hand up slightly, more used to shaking hands than slapping them.
“I thought you were outta this joint,” Joe said, laughing. “Who drug ya back?”
“I live here,” Trey said. “Didn’t they tell you?”
He took a bit of a deep breath before he turned left to go down to what was called Level Two, which contained the Alphabet Wards A through G. He glanced toward the stairwell that went to the Rap Floor, as they called it. This was a bit easier as an area, because the older patients who had been around for forty or more years were up there. They were less bother than Trey's floor — the older the patients got, the less dangerous they were to each other and to staff. Additionally, the upstairs wards contained the least harmful young patients, as well. The ones who had only committed one murder, or had not even completed a murder but had merely maimed. They were more sedated up there, happier, and with fewer attacks.
It would be like a promotion to move up to the Rap Floor, even if the salary and benefits didn't change.
But Trey was on the Alphabet Wards.
They were his territory.
2
He flashed his I.D. badge to the overweight security guard who nodded him past the second checkpoint.
Hearing the heavy slam of the metal protective doors was enough to bring bad memories back.
Joe Houston smacked his gum as he walked alongside him. “I was on D for two emergencies last month. Man, I do not envy you that place. I had to scrape up one guy off the linoleum.”
Trey sighed. “Yeah, that’s D.”
“Man, I’d transfer out if I were you. Shit, you’d think they’d’ve gotten you off the floor after last summer.”
Trey paused, adjusting his glasses slightly. “They did. They tried anyway.”
“What happened?”
“I guess,” Trey grinned, “Nobody wanted my job.”
3
An orderly he didn’t recognize sat at the station at the entryway to B Ward. The guy looked a little wild, and Trey saw the telltale signs of speed—the bloodshot eyes, the peach skin, the slight jitter.
It was a problem with employees at Darden. Sometimes they turned to drugs to help get them through their shifts. Occasionally, a few of them ended up as inmates a few years down the road. Sometimes you couldn’t tell an inmate from a psych tech or an orderly. If it weren’t for the white jackets versus the khakis of the inmates, it would be hard to tell which was the crazy one.
The worst were not the Speedies, as the psych techs called staff that did meth on the weekends.
The worst were those staffers who were about one bad day away from becoming exactly like the patients they were handling.
“Campbell.”
The orderly checked the badge. Then put an x on a chart. “William C. Campbell the Third. Trey. You’re the guy from the Hatcher thing, right?” the orderly asked.
“Christ,” Trey shook his head. “Yeah I am.”
“That’s cool,” the orderly nodded. “I just read all about it in the Times. You beat the shit out of her?”
“Christ,” Trey said. “No. I was lucky to get away from her. With my heart and lungs intact. That’s all.”
"Hope you don't mind if I feel you up," the guy said, a grin on his face.
"Get your kicks anyway you can here," Trey said, lifting his arm as the guard passed a handheld metal sensor over his body. Then, he reached between Trey's legs, feeling for any hidden weapons.
It was a precaution that Trey appreciated. Not for the cheap thrill. Because they'd had problems with staff smuggling things in.
Staff that got too close to the patients.
Guards could be the worst, particularly if they were working Darden because they'd failed the psych exams for regular duty. If they'd worked the prisons out on the desert, as some had, they thought this was a cake position, but they always ended up complaining that they'd prefer the general maximum security prison population to Darden State.
At least with sane prisoners, you had logic and reason and motive.
He waited for the guard on the other side to unlock the steel door.
4
On B Ward, he passed the group rooms, and the recreation center. One elderly man, tall and thin, propelled himself forward in his wheelchair.
As Trey passed by him, the old man said, “Goddamn motherfuckers. I’m gonna skin me the lot of you.”
A nurse, holding a clipboard to her chest, flashed a smile at Trey. Lauren Childes—she’d been at Darden since before Trey’s time. “Good to see you back, Trey,” she said.
Her eye-patch was new. Her left eye was covered.
One of the patients had gotten her, probably.
Trey didn’t want to ask.
He didn’t want to know.
5
Two COs at the double-doors. Corrections Officers had been brought in to beef up security even further.
The two cops frisked him as he stepped across the grate at the entrance to C. Their ID tags said Curzon and Bellows. Curzon, the younger of the two, held up a metal detector and waved it over his body.
“Glad to see Darden’s met twentieth century technology,” Trey said.
The officers said nothing.
Trey knew their silence was from nervousness. He held up his ID badge. They scanned its bar code. Double-checks and triple-checks were the rule.
No cop liked being in C or D Ward.
“When they have you guys come in?” Trey asked.
“Nine weeks back. Extra protection,” Bellows said. "Ever since Program 28 went into effect."
“What do y
ou do when something happens?”
Curzon shot the other a look, and half-smiled. “We bolt for the doors and get the hell out of here. Let the crazies kill the crazies, that’s my take.”
Bellows shook his head. “You’re on D, right?”
“Right,” Trey said. "New assignment: Program 28."
“Oh man,” he laughed. “Oh man. We lost a guy there last month.”
"Dead?" Trey asked.
"No. Early retirement. Some lucky SOB banged his knees up something good. Somehow got a pair of pliers from some asshole working on the pipes, and just busted his kneecaps. Went out on disability. They've transferred half of the SVPs from up in Napa down here, and they're..."
"Different," the Curzon finished. They chuckled. “Two nights back some guy on D tried to pull some chick’s head off. It was bad. Real bad.”
Bellows chuckled. “She grew two inches.”
“Damn,” Curzon laughed. "Why can't we send 'em to Patton State? Or send their asses back to Atascadero. We don't need the pile up here."
"Let me keep my cojones, that's all I'm sayin'," Bellows said.
6
The first corridor had bars on its entry door, but after that, the hallways all looked like a cross between hospital floors and elementary school corridors, with fire doors at the end of each of them. The artwork and creative writing samples of many of the patients were taped up to long cork boards just above eye level along the walls. He passed the group rooms, and the lounges. All the guards seemed to recognize him, even those he’d never seen before. He assumed this was because of the notoriety he’d received since the previous summer. Artwork adorned the walls. Outside each porthole door, the clipboard hung with the various doctors and nurses’ names for the patients who occupied the rooms, as well as their daily schedules from morning showers to recreational therapy to who got cigarettes and who didn’t.
For Trey it was like walking down a long and lonely tunnel to the place that almost cost he and his family their life.
D Ward.
And an offshoot of D, the newly christened Program 28.
It looked, at first, like any other hall of the entire complex.
But it wasn’t.
7
When he arrived at Ward D, he marveled at the beefed up security. Cameras moved lazily back and forth along the ceiling. Reinforced doors of steel were everywhere it seemed—more than had been there when he’d last been at work.
“Somebody must be running for office somewhere,” he told Mary Fulcher, who was doing soap and toilet paper counts near the guard station.
“Huh?” she asked. “Oh, Trey. Hey, old man. I didn’t recognize you with those glasses.” She threw her arms around him for a quick hug. When she pulled back, he noticed that she had aged ten years over the past few months. Her forehead was creased with worry lines — far too young to have them — and she had that over-stressed look to her eyes.
“Good to be back, Mary. I meant all the security improvements. The cameras. The guards and stuff.”
“Oh yeah. It was Hatcher that did that. Olsen got a call from the governor himself and it was all donated by some security firm in Riverside. ‘To make sure no one ever escapes from D Ward again’. Good P.R. for the neighborhood, huh?”
“Yep. Good P.R.,” Trey replied.
“Think it’ll work?”
He smiled.
"Me, neither," she said.
8
On Ward D, the night shift nurse and psych techs were off on their duties, so he made a pot of coffee in the lounge and drank half a cup. The lounge was a mess—crushed Dixie cups on one of the round tables, the microwave was filthy, and someone had spilled coffee creamer around the sink.
Same old same old.
There would be three shift nurses making early rounds of meds on two different corridors. Six psych techs, most of them doing shower duty. Rise and shine wasn’t for another ten minutes. Miraculously, another fifteen psych techs would arrive by 7:30 a.m. Then, three or four would be late for their shifts. Other staff would come in, and the night staff would leave. The patients would wake up at different times, depending on how heavily they had been medicated, but most of them had been up since six. Others would just be waking up. The showers would go in shifts, as would the cafeteria groups.
Trey finished his coffee, which tasted bitter but strong enough to energize him. He tossed the cup into the trash can by the lounge door, but missed it. He wondered if this was an omen for the rest of his day.
Because he’d been shift supervisor, he had one of three small offices at the opposite end of the corridor. He passed several patients’ rooms, glancing at the charts as he went, noticing that Dr. Conroy now had six new patients, and Brainard had two. As usual, Brainard overdosed his with too much Doltrynol, but it was the man’s methods: drug em and bury em. And before they die from lack of life, pretend that you actually care about their welfare.
Jim Anderson had been promoted to Shift Charge, and as Trey passed his office, he saw the desk covered in paperwork, and the small lamp on. Tinny music from the small boom box on Anderson’s desk—was it from The Mikado? Trey wasn’t sure. Anderson was a big Gilbert & Sullivan fan, which seemed so incongruous with Anderson’s demeanor and way of talking. But somewhere along the line, he’d gotten hooked on light opera, and played it whenever he could. Trey smiled as he heard the words, “I’ve got a little list of people we could do without who never would be missed,” from the tape that was playing.
They hadn’t spoken since last summer.
It was as if what had happened had been too much to talk about.
Anderson was still on the ward somewhere. He’d be there till noon. He was the one guy Trey was looking forward to seeing.
Then, two doors down, Trey’s office.
The door was still locked. Had anyone been in it during those four months? When he unlocked the door and went in, he saw the tracks of others. The papers out of place, the computer terminal turned slightly to the right, the file folders stacks on the cabinet.
Then, he went about his morning duties.
9
Trey signed for the alarm pens, to make sure they were accounted for. Next, he went down to the station and checked the razors, to make sure the correct number was there. After that he checked the sharps: scissors, razor knife, a special knife to cut restraints in case of fire, pliers, screwdrivers, a hammer, finger and toe nail clippers. The others probably checked them, too, but as supervisor it was his ultimate responsibility.
And since what had happened the previous summer, Trey Campbell did not want to leave anything to chance.
After he checked out the sharps, he walked up and down the corridor of D Ward. Several fire extinguishers lined the walls, and he checked each one of these. Then, he moved on to check the defibrillators and oxygen bottles. As he passed it, he glanced at a crash cart—used for hospital emergencies, it was full of bandages, neck, back, and other braces, flashlights, special hospital material for people in sudden and acute respiratory or cardiac failure. The nurse on duty was in one of the patient rooms—he saw her through the porthole. She was in there with two psychiatric technicians, tending to one of six patients in the room. It was Rita Paulsen. She smiled when she caught a glimpse of him through the round window. He nodded to her, but was unable to smile. He both looked forward to his daily routine, and wished he had not come back.
Trey flipped through the roll charts to see if there were any other female staff on D that morning. When female staff were on, he had to check with them every fifteen minutes. It wasn’t that they were incompetent. It was that the patients often had their more gruesome attacks on the females. It was a dangerous job.
He checked the Site Incident Report, at the nurse’s station, but nothing out of the ordinary had occurred in the night. Walking the green halls, with the thick smell of rubbing alcohol and Clorox, and then that all pervasive odor of mildew—it was as if he had not had time off at all. It was as if his life had begun and would
one day end within these walls.
Within D Ward.
Any one of these patients was potentially dangerous in ways the community that surrounded Darden State could not possibly imagine.
Trey knew better than anyone that all it took was one.
He wondered if anyone was making the back hall rounds and the long hall rounds. Every 15 minutes someone was supposed to check the Ward and the patients’ dorms. In a dangerous unit like D, no one wanted to miss those.
He did his own check of the Ward, looking from room to room. Most of the patients were sleeping. Some had already risen and were with the orderlies down at the showers. All would be awake in a few minutes. Then the laundry detail and shower supervisors would miraculously appear from this silent ward, and the day would truly get under way as the med cart squeaked on its wheels down the bustling corridor.
10
After he’d gotten his phone messages and checked the computerized state forms, he went down to Conroy’s on-site office, down through the corridors, on the opposite end of the building from the violent criminal's ward.
She wasn’t there.
Her office, like all the psychiatrist’s offices, was large and spacious—unlike the hole-in-the-wall he had, as supervisor on D. She had a window to the inner courtyard, and a side room for her secretary. It smelled of lilacs and cigarettes inside the office. Elise always broke the rules and smoked in her office. So far, no one had complained too bitterly about it.
He went in and looked over her messy desk. Half a dozen manila files, stacked one atop the other. A half-drunk cup of coffee—she was an early riser sometimes. A workaholic most times.
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 25