"Will do," she said. "Where the trailer park?"
"Over in Caldwell, up on Sunset Ridge," Tryon said, and then shook his head. "We've got to catch that woman today, damn it. It's already on the news, and we're getting crank calls about seeing Bloody Mary everywhere. I don't have enough officers as it is to track 'em all down."
Chapter Six
The guy was drunk and it wasn't yet eight in the morning. The bars out on Main Street didn't close sometimes until three, even though legally they had to be shut down sooner. But the one called the Silver Coyote usually had an after-hours poker game going, and he came stumbling out the backdoor around six a.m., the winner for the night with a good three hundred bucks in his pocket and the need to pee, real bad. His name was Nick Spitzer, he was forty-four, and Mary Chilmark had met him once or twice in her work. She was sure he'd remember her.
Sure that he'd help her.
She hadn't slept well that night, not without her son. She knew his car – a 1984 Cadillac that had all but gone to hell in the years Spitzer had been driving it – and it had bumper stickers plastering the back bumper that said "Sometimes I Wake Up Grumpy, Other Times I Let Her Sleep," and "There's Too Much Blood In My Alcohol System," as well as the classic, "I Got A Gun For My Wife, Best Trade I Ever Did."
It was unlocked when she found it, so she crawled inside and slept much of the morning in the backseat. She only awoke when she heard Spitzer's drunken calls to his friends as they left the bar, and then his fumbling with his keys before realizing the doors were unlocked.
When he slid into the front seat, he saw her in the rearview mirror and said, "Well, looks like somebody's lucky day. Hello, baby, long time no see."
PART TWO
Chapter Seven
1
Caldwell, California: small, a dust bowl of a town, a landscape full of ridges and foothills and canyons, and the kinds of houses that looked as if they were meant to fall apart twenty years after they'd been built. The most noticeable landmark – one that had been there for more than a century – was the hospital.
The triple-fence with razor wire; the small sensor detectors at key points along the fences; and the guard booths at every entrance and exit — all of it made the series of buildings look as if they were prison. Yet the grounds looked well tended, no guard towers were in evidence; and cars drove fairly freely in and out of the main driveway. A few palm trees around the buildings; brief streets that connected the long main building to the administration offices; the look of a corporate park built in a style that had all but vanished thirty years before.
Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice was nearly a town unto itself, and recently had known prosperous times as its criminal population blossomed. Those patients who earned, bought or otherwise obtained the insanity defense in their murder trials had worked its vegetable gardens and the great greenhouse where beautiful orchids had been grown. They had put together a Crafts and Decorative Arts workshop that produced hanging baskets and wrought-ironwork for the home that had sold well in shops in southern California; and they had created job skills within the hospital itself, bringing a sense of pride to the patients.
However, a group called Rights Advocacy of the Penal Institutions of San Pascal County had determined that this work was enforced labor, and had lobbied to have it stopped. This particular advocacy group seemed to have a good motive on the surface, but, in fact, digging down through its layers, you’d find that this group was funded by a handful of multimillionaire land developers who wanted state moneys diverted from the hospitals toward their own interests. Still, their lobbying efforts had a chilling effect on the Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice. The work was stopped. The gardens left untended, the crafts workshops, the job skills – all of it stopped because the inmates of Darden States were hospital patients after all, and putting them to work in some capacity was evil.
The results of this fine humanitarian effort on the part of the developers group was that within six months of the pressure on Darden to change their approach to patient care, the medications the patients were on had to be increased, the patients became more lethargic and well-aware of their status as liabilities of the state, and, because the hospital itself could not increase its own funding by sales of the works of its inmates, half the guards had to be let go, despite an increase in violent attacks on hospital staff.
This was the Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice, also called the Darden State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Once, in the 19th century, it was simply one of the many state asylums “for the insane and inebriate,” and had looked like a gothic castle. In that castle, the administrative offices, and beneath it, a true dungeon that held the many so-called “night cages” that houses the insane, the sociopaths, the tubercular, the alcoholic, the addicted, and now and then, the menopausal. If a child were irrationally violent, he might end up in the underground children’s ward. If a family’s daughter did not exhibit traditional feminine traits, she might be institutionalized and given what was called, in the early 20th century, “bath therapy.”
In the 1950s, the castle had been torn down and a new row of boxes had been erected, and by 1982, the current look of Darden State had emerged: looking more like a military base than a hospital, with guard booths along its avenues connecting the wards to the administration's offices to the row of bungalows where some staff chose to live rent-free, within the fenced acreage.
There were other hospitals like Darden State in California, including nearby Patton State, but none carried the level of criminal that Darden did, since it took in the killers that the other state hospitals did not handle well.
But no matter how orderly and clean the aboveground area of the hospital seemed, beneath it, the night cages still existed, and though they had not been in use for more than seventy years, it was as if, buried beneath the new, the dark ages of psychiatric treatment still waited patiently for someone to creep down and switch on the light.
Three things that caused some disturbance at the Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice the summer and fall of 2004:
The high voltage system that ran through the wards, generally above the ceilings, was taken down into the underground – the warren of corridors and tunnels that were not longer used, beneath the hospital itself. It became a two million dollar project that had caused patients to have a disruptive season, which was no help to the staff who cared for them. The ceilings had been ripped open; work crews came through, which required more lockdown time than normal; and the sounds of the work below – scraping, hammering, and the general thumps and metal clanks below the patients rooms on the first floor led to the widespread belief that ghosts were beneath the hospital.
This was not helped when news that a graveyard was found in one of these underground tunnels, and the bones – from the patients of the late 1800s to the early 1900s – were relocated to a cemetery eight miles away in Caldwell, California.
Somewhere in all this, a news reporter with a name that seemed as fake as his hair color — Lance Victor — had decided to do a three-part documentary on the scandals, the terrors, and the take-downs of what he called “the world of the criminally insane psychopath at the murder’s hotel – Darden State, in Caldwell, California.”
2
Memo from James Willard, Executive Director, Darden State
TO ALL DARDEN STAFF:
As many of you know, a television station out of Los Angeles has been working on a four-part documentary about the Darden State Hospital, specifically recalling last year’s escape of Michael Scoleri and the murder of one of our psychiatrists, as well as other issues we have had with unfortunate incidents here that have gained some unwanted publicity, in local media as well as national, in the past decade or so. The recent relocation of the graves has obviously focused interest here. We must come to expect that some of our community will be maligned, misrepresented, and shown in a less-than-favorable light, and realistically, none of us will be able to respond per Articl
e 99.8 of the Media Contact handbook.
Given that the cameras continue to come into our workplace, my best suggestion is for each employee to simply do his or her finest job, speak only with a supervisor present, or defer to your Ward supervisor. The state of California has given the television crew an open window into our day-to-day operations, and we need to accommodate this change in routine as we would any other.
I ask you to join me, your new director, in resolving to continue with the excellence and diligence and care that Darden State is known for. One last note that I wish was unnecessary: when referring to Darden on-camera, please do so as the Darden State Forensics Hospital, or the Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice. We have not referred to our hospital as “for the criminally insane” since the early 1980s, and we feel it casts an unfortunate light on our work here.
We have nothing to hide here, and there is no need to cover up anything in the past. There may be disciplinary measures taken should any junior staff members take it upon themselves to speak directly with the reporter or his crew.
3
Lance Victor, the television reporter, held the microphone up to Trey Campbell, just as he entered the security checkpoint in the main entrance at Darden State. "Mr. Campbell, what do you think of the murder of the Flock family by Bloody Mary and her son?"
Chapter Eight
Trey held back his first reaction as he looked first to the reporter and then to the cameraman. He glanced over at one of the nurses, and then to the guard who stood next to him. "I'm being ambushed again?"
In front of him, Lance Victor, who was six foot, blond, broad-shouldered, and as plastic as a pretty boy of thirty could be. Lance had won Emmys for his news coverage, had been named one of the sexiest bachelors in Los Angeles Magazine ten years earlier and still tried to cling to the title, and he had a look in his eyes that always reminded Trey of one of the new patients when they arrived at Darden, before the meds kicked in.
The cameraman behind him had kept the lens on Trey, and someone nearby had a blinding light that seemed to have laser-perfect accuracy for just Trey's face.
Trey squinted into the light. "Look, we can talk about procedure and technique, like we did last week, but you're not going to help anybody – least of all the victims' families – by dredging this one up today. Not this one. Go bother the police."
"The people want to know the truth," the reporter said in an incredible imitation of a sincere tone. "We know he's here. We saw the transport. This is an important aspect of this series we're filming. Why, without an arraignment, are they putting a killer in Darden State?"
"Listen to yourself," Trey said. "You believe your own bullshit?"
A guard nearby chuckled, "Get that clown outta here."
The camera came off the cameraman's shoulders; the light shut off. The cameraman said, "Come on, Lance, let's give it a rest."
The reporter gave a sharp glance to his colleague. "I just wanted a reaction," Lance Victor said, returning his attention to Trey. "It's a story. A good one."
"You want an interview with me, you schedule. No more ambushes. Understood?" Trey said. The reporter had caught him – and at least a half dozen psych techs – off-guard to try and get a so-called "candid" moment too many times over the past few weeks. Often such moments took place right when a patient was going for someone's eyes, or when a violent fight had broken out and three techs had to go in and calm the patients involved, subdue them so they would not hurt themselves, get them in restraints, and still make sure they didn't get their balls ripped out in the process. The cameraman and the reporter were there to expose any little crack in the hospital, and Trey knew too well that most of the big cracks were in the administration, not among the staffs of Wards A through D.
"I want in on Program 28," Lance said.
"No way in hell."
"If you care so much about these people, Trey, you'll get me in there."
"I can't risk your life and mine just for your show," Trey said. "If you had seen what some of these guys in 28 did, you wouldn't want to do it. You're going to have to make a special arrangement with the governor if you want to get in there."
"I have people working on it," Lance said. "I believe in Program 28, Trey. I've read up on it. I know they're the most violent, sadistic patients here. I know their crimes. I can list their names for you. If you can help me get inside there, I'll have my story, and I'll make you and your co-workers look like gold. I promise."
Trey calmed down a little. "Look, for some reason, Lance, you just get my hackles up. I apologize for the reaction. I know that what you want to do is a good thing. The more the public knows about Darden, the better off everyone is. But my understanding is there's already a stack of patient refusal and authorization papers in administration that have to be processed simply because you haven't done your follow-through. We're here for the patients, for the state, and so that people like you on the outside don't have to worry about these patients on the inside. We're dealing with daily stressful situations here that are not meant for anyone's entertainment."
"Why can't I bring the camera to Program 28?"
"You know why. It's for the most far-gone sadistic of the sociopathic psychopaths," Trey said. "That's not the psych term you want or the state wants me to say. But there you have it. And above all that, they're human beings who deserve their privacy, even here. They deserve to get treatment within their hospitalization period."
"You mean 'incarceration'," Lance said. "I think those people are animals. Monsters. I know what they've done to innocent victims on the outside. I've read the files. Do you think it's right that they get to hide inside here? That they get millions from the state thrown at them to keep them safe and alive?"
Trey hated the reporter for putting it that way, but something within him understood it. Sometimes, no matter how he cared for the patients, there were a handful of them that he wasn't sure deserved to live. And he hated having those thoughts. He felt to be good at his work, he had to put that kind of mindset aside and focus on the good that could be created at Darden. He had to believe that if the psychiatric community kept studying and seeking to understand how the human mind went to the extremes that it did, that something good and powerful for the betterment of life would emerge.
But many days – and nights – Trey felt exactly like the reporter and his words.
Some people didn't deserve to live.
And he knew that very thinking was not far distant from the minds of those extreme killers themselves.
"You have got to understand that your wanting a story does not supersede privacy issues and psychiatric considerations. Only the highest clearance would get you in there, and as far as I can tell, that's the one place you're not allowed."
"Campbell, look, man to man," Lance said. "I just…I want to show the world what you do here. How you and the psych techs and psychologists are…well, heroes of sorts. The truth of all this."
Trey wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. What bullshit. "Show them whatever truth you decide on. But don't expect me to spoon-feed it to you. If you want to get clearances and permission, you know where the Willard's office is, and you know where Sacramento is if you need more than that. Now, I've got work to do."
Lance Victor sighed, and for just a split second Trey felt a twinge of sympathy for the guy. Just doing his job. Trey had even watched Lance's reportage on the big earthquake a few years' back, and had felt the guy was pretty good. He just hadn't known how in-your-face he got until the camera came into Darden.
"I just want something exciting to happen here," Lance said.
"I know, it's pretty boring," Trey said "It's not like the Snake Pit you wanted."
"Hey, you got a take-down last week," a guard at the desk said. "How much more excitement you want? You wanna riot, stick around. Maybe it'll be your lucky day."
"Yeah," Lance Victor said, grinning with perfectly-capped, brilliantly-white teeth. "I want a riot."
Chapter Nine
1
Trey nodded to the guards at the entrance to Ward A – I.D. badge out, he passed through. The halls of A were decorated with drawings and paintings done by the patients. These were the least dangerous of Darden – some of them had attempted suicide and perhaps hurt someone else on the way out, but often it had been unintentional. Still, the state put them here rather than in a regular psych hospital, and there was good reason for some of them. A few psychopaths had open-door policies here, as well, for they weren't dangerous at any but their original victims; some were in their seventies and eighties, and had been at Darden State for more than thirty years. Ward A was low-security, and the patients mingled with the staff, had small birthday celebration. During visiting days, family and friends might come through and spend time with them, and all in all, it fairly closely resembled a hospital ward at nearly any other hospital, but in this one, the residents tended to be fairly long-term.
He passed through the checkpoint at Ward C, and nodded to Rita Paulsen who was standing with two psych techs. When she saw him, she stepped over and mentioned about the TV reporter gunning for him. "I already got gunned," he chuckled, and then he stopped by the refreshment lounge and popped a dollar in a machine to get a can of apple juice.
When he reached Ward D, Pete Atkins, a Correctional Officer whose post usually was at the entryway to Program 28, stood there, waiting for him.
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 43