Chapter Twenty-Three
1
HRD – Human Remains Detection – was a special police canine department out of Riverside. Dahl and Laymon wasted no time calling them in, with the help of the Medical Examiner, to the house on Third Street that Mary Chilmark had been renting.
The detectives arrived with two dogs – one a black Labrador retriever, and the other a mutt that looked as if he were part border collie, part lab. Jane had expected the usual German Shepherds. "Cadaver dogs," the HRD guy said, "these guys are trained for this."
"I'm worried they might ruin evidence," Jane said, leaning down to give the mutt a scritch on the head.
"This one's named Scroungy," the officer said, grinning. "Best dog in the world. Training them's a weird experience, since you're burying body parts just for the puppies to go sniff out. But these two are the best. If there are bodies here, we'll find 'em."
"Let's check the backyard first," Jane said. "It's concrete."
"Ah," the officer said. "The classic burial."
2
In the backyard, the dogs sniffed around, and the one called Scroungy stayed close to the back door with his sniffs. The back lights were up bright, and Jane shone her flashlight around until she saw a series of discolorations – a slightly darker more smooth concrete area, when compared to the rest of the yard.
And Scroungy had begun scratching at the area not far from it.
"Let's get the jackhammers!" she shouted to Dahl, who was inside the house with the techs carefully gathering anything that might be evidence.
3
After nearly an hour of two of the guys cracking the surface with the jackhammers, Jane held up her hand in a "stop" gesture. She crouched down along the crumbled concrete, and brushed some of the debris away.
Embedded in it, not far beneath the surface:
A human foot.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1
In his office, Trey opened Mary Chilmark's files. They were made up of several pages of the usual state paperwork, the trial transcripts, the listings of the murders she'd committed. But those told him nothing. It was Brainard's notes he wanted. But the first set of notes he found – scribbled as if by an eleven-year-old on torn spiral notebook sheets – were those of Dr. Phillip Massey.
The man who helped get Mary's early release, and who married her a few months after he release.
The man who had killed himself about five years before Mary and Doc Chilmark murdered the Flocks in their home.
2
The notes:
She is calm. She talks about her childhood. She talks about how she was kept hungry when she was a little girl. She talks about how she got so thin by the age of eleven that her father began force-feeding her by putting his hands on either side of her jaw to open her mouth. How he made her milkshakes made out of beef and tomato juice and made her drink them or she would receive punishment.
Her mind seems clear at this point. Three years here has done her good. I think she was living in a cloud of abuse as a child. Darden, and her therapy here, as well as the medications, have helped her examine these problems. She has begun to acknowledge the murders, but still feels that someone else did them. Someone who was near her all the time. I don't think this is a multiple personality problem. I think she clearly knows that she is responsible for those actions. She told me that she became aware of what she had done when she had tried to set fire to the beds. She felt as if she were a little girl again, and trying to destroy evidence of some bad act she'd committed before her father had come in to punish her for it. When we go for walks on the grounds here, and talk about how she handles pain, she said that she used to burn herself sometimes just to feel something. Or cut herself with scissors when she was a young girl. She expressed regret and horror at her own actions with regards to the murders, but she still feels disconnected from them at this stage.
Yet I cannot help think that Darden State may end up not being the right place for her. A halfway house, perhaps, with medication and ongoing therapy, might be better for her. She definitely has a moral sense of right or wrong, and talks about black-outs she had around the time of the murders.
There is one thing that still concerns me, though, and that is her interest in the occult. Not in some Judeo-Christian definition of it, but she believes that she has seen ghosts, particularly of those who she killed. I suspect this is a manifestation of her conscience, and I hope that through our daily sessions I can bring her to a more clear understanding of her acts and her responsibilities with them.
She doesn't seem prone to depression at this point. Neither is she over-medicated or lethargic. She has been developing a healthy attitude toward the world at large, and has been more than helpful with the other patients.
The patient is generally better adjusted than most of the other patients here, and given the overcrowding that has occurred with the shut down of the A and B Wards while construction is ongoing, and the transitional state of the residence halls as well as D Ward, I recommend a course of therapy as well as an early release program.
3
Trey turned the notebook page over, and saw Dr. Robert Brainard's neat handwriting on two pieces of memo paper:
Dr. Massey,
I can't encourage you on this current course of action. We had an issue with Mary Chilmark with regards to her pregnancy. She will not tell me who the father of her child is, but she's aware that her pregnancy may help her gain early release into the general population. I know you've had worked with her, and I understand your eagerness to see this patient back functioning in the world, but our responsibility to the community-at-large comes first. While she may be capable of living in the world, I recommend the low-security units, perhaps even in the residency housing outside the ward, but still on Darden's grounds.
Yes, I agree that her progress has been both remarkable and her remorse convincing and authentic. We have all gotten to know Mary Chilmark well here, and she has many supporters among the staff.
I understand your professional commitment to her, and if you are willing to provide additional support and supervisory care, for the duration of her pregnancy, while she undergoes continued therapy and daily visits to Darden, I can sign off on this to some extent, but with caution. However, I do not think it advisable for you to take such a risk with a patient, no matter how that patient has recovered from past trauma and delusional behavior.
I want you to remember a patient named Shattuck in 1979, and how an early release impacted his life and the lives of the community to which he was released. Sometimes, a patient manages to fool us all. While I certainly feel that the years we've known Mary Chilmark mitigates against a reprisal of this kind of behavior, I can't help but feel that she should be in residency at least for another year of observation.
Sincerely,
R.B.
4
When Trey had finished going through the letters and notes in the file, he flipped through the pictures inside them.
There was one of Mary Chilmark, then in her twenties, sitting on a chair in a lounge. It was an old scene, and her legs were crossed, her head thrown back slightly as if she owned the place. She had a cigarette in her right hand.
She was beautiful. She looked like the most glamorous young woman who had ever walked through Darden's doors. Reminded Trey of another patient who also had a great deal of beauty.
Beauty could be a weapon, particularly of the criminally insane. It could be used to seduce and then destroy what it had power over.
Strikingly, she looked like a feminine version of Doc Chilmark. The same waif-like face with large dark eyes. The dark hair. The slender arms.
But what Trey noticed most about this photograph was that it was not just another file photo taken of a patient. Whoever took this must have loved her. Whoever took this had caught her relaxing, and in her face – in those eyes – he saw the gleam of power.
She knew she owned whoever took the picture.
She knew
she would be free of Darden State.
Where was the lounge? Things had changed so much a few years after Mary Chilmark had been a patient there that Trey had no idea. He couldn't identify the wall behind her, or the cigarette machines – which they no longer had at Darden and had never had in Trey's memory.
Had Massey taken the photo? Had he brought her into an employee lounge for the cigarette and snapped the picture? If so, why keep it in the files?
With Massey dead, there would be no answers to the questions.
Idly, Trey turned the photo over. Written on it: Mary Chilmark, Darden State.
Didn't seem particularly odd, but he was unsure why such a casual picture had been taken of her. It made her look like she was an employee on a cigarette break. There were a few other photos in there of her, more official shots, but none quite like this one.
The file on Chilmark was fairly thick and had the usual lists of her therapies, her meds, and the letters from victims' families that always went to the Board whenever the decision of early release was upon them.
Somewhere in there he saw a small scrap of paper that nearly fell out from between the rest of them.
He looked at it. Could barely read it.
Brought it right up to his face. Like a chicken scratch across some printed words.
It had been torn from something else. Some kind of paperwork. He rifled through the nearby papers, checking them, but none had been torn.
Trey closed the file, trying to forget that curious smile on Mary Chilmark's face in the photo of her in the lounge.
A smile that might've meant nothing at all.
Or might've meant everything.
He went through the papers, the transcripts from her trial that were briefly excerpted, and paused when he saw a page with a word crossed out in black magic marker. He flipped through the transcript: the name of the hospital —where Mary Chilmark had murdered three patients – was blacked out.
5
Less than fifteen minutes later, he stood outside Dr. Brainard's office. Diego, Brainard's assistant, had tried to dissuade him from standing vigil, but Trey kept Mary Chilmark's bulky file under his arm, and just waited outside the door.
After a minute, the door opened.
Brainard stood there. "I'm leaving in twenty minutes."
"Where did she commit those murders?" Trey asked.
He was sure he already had an answer.
Chapter Twenty-Five
1
In Brainard's office. Lights dimmed; blinds drawn; an end-of-the-day neatness to it. Empty wastebasket. The top of his desk was in perfect order, and his computer had been shut down. The smell of a cinnamon-and-vanilla cachet in the air.
"You write in a note to Massey, in Mary's file, about having known her for years. Not the two years she was here in Ward D. But years. She was twenty-five years old when she committed the murders. You said she came to Darden fresh from nursing school. She was in Darden for just under two years, which was remarkable in and of itself," Trey said, following Dr. Brainard in. "I saw a picture of her. A photo someone left in there. It looked like a nurse on a break, and not a patient."
Brainard went to the file cabinet, withdrew a key from his suit jacket pocket and unlocked the cabinet. He opened it wide, thumbed through some files, and pulled a thick one out that had a rubber band around it.
When he turned around to face Trey again, Brainard wore an expression on his face that Trey could only think of as "bemused."
"It's sealed information," Dr. Brainard said. "But I'll let you see it. The state of California would crucify me professionally, Trey. If this got out, particularly with that news guy all over us, well, it would not be a pretty moment of Darden's past."
Trey took the files that Brainard had stacked on his desk. He opened the first one.
It was an employee file of the Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice.
There was an old identification card with its clip still on it.
The photograph was of Mary Chilmark.
"In the 1980s, we were still transitioning," Brainard said, and went to sit on the edge of his desk. His voice was low and almost soft, as if he didn't like telling secrets. "Most of the wards were still the mentally ill. Ward C dealt with the mentally retarded, and only D had been used for the criminally insane verdicts. But state funding got cut, and eventually, we had to release a lot of patients, and it was about '84 when the funding came in to develop Darden as more for criminal justice than mental illness. She came to us as a nursing intern. In fact, I think she was in her last term – going to school during the day and working the night shift here. She was here two years before the incidents."
"The murders of three patients," Trey said, glancing up from Mary Chilmark's employee records.
"Yes."
"The state wanted her employment records sealed?"
"Sure. What are you, a boy scout? Scandals happen in hospitals. Particularly ones like this. Not often. Maybe every thirty years. Somebody bungles. Hospitals don't just run on purity and light. Something happens," Brainard said. "It was a sensitive point, you've got to understand that. Funding was coming in. It was simply to keep trouble from happening. When a hospital like Darden transitions, nobody wants trouble. You think this information would help the police in their investigation?"
Trey thought for a moment. "I don't know. Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't."
"It wouldn't. She was a good nurse. Very young. Even gifted. I suppose that's why we were all protective of her. The patients loved her. But the PST she sustained, and her father's abuse all those years, and then, if she was at all to be believed, when the male patient raped her…"
"He raped her? Do we know this for a fact?"
"No. There's no way to know it. It was simply her word at the time, after she murdered him. But he had been a sexual deviant, per the state code at the time."
Trey closed the folder. "Is there anything else that needs to be known about Chilmark?"
"She saved another nurse's life. We all were witness to it. A patient was coming after the other girl, and Mary put herself in harm's way, getting stabbed twice in the shoulder. But the other girl – another young nurse – would've been killed."
"The way Mary Chilmark kills," Trey said, "she probably killed the patient who attacked."
Dr. Brainard said nothing in reply. He stood up again, and went to his office door. "If we're finished here," he said, opening the door.
The light from the hallway seemed too bright as Trey rose and set the file back on Brainard's desk.
As Trey went out into the hall, Dr. Hannifin's assistant, Lara, called out to him "Hannifin wants to grab you, if she can."
"Why not?" Trey asked, and leaned against the reception counter. "Day I'm having, I'm never getting home."
2
"You wanted to see me?" Trey asked after tapping lightly on the door. When he tapped, the door slid open slightly. As soon as Hannifin saw him, she swiveled around her chair and got up and came toward him as if she were in a rush. "He's been acting out some more. I want you to come with me."
She brushed past him out the door, and he stared at her a second before he began following her as she went out into the corridor.
3
In the elevator down to the first floor of Ward D, he said, "I'm probably breaking a confidence, but his mother was a nurse here."
Hannifin glanced up at him – she'd been staring at her feet waiting for the elevator to move between floors. "Mary Chilmark was here?"
"Darden was transitioning between being a hospital with both the mentally ill and the criminally insane, to being what it is now. She murdered patients here."
She shook her head slightly. "Nothing surprises me anymore. Well, that doesn't really help us with the son right now. Look. He wants you there when I talk to him. For some reason, he's attached to you." She said. "I can't tell if this is good or bad – his feeling too comfortable with you."
"Probably bad," Trey said. "Maybe I shouldn't
go."
"No, it's good for the most part. There's something about you that makes him relax." She looked straight ahead as she said this, at the closed elevator doors.
"Maybe it's the straitjacket," Trey said.
She ignored his comment. "Do you know where this rumor about ghosts came from?"
"Ghosts?"
"He started to get violent and screamed about the shadows of the dead crawling on him," she said. "Right after he ate. Nobody knows what brought it on."
"He started screaming? Wow. He was calm when I saw him earlier. Maybe it was Fallon."
"Why him?"
"When we found him in the underground, he said he saw ghosts. Maybe he's been talking this up on the ward. That's the only thing I can guess."
"Ugh," she said. "That underground. I don't know why they don't just seal it up."
The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out, went through the security check, and on down to Program 28.
4
"He let them out," Doc Chilmark said. In the comfort of his straitjacket, he leaned back on his cot and looked up at the ceiling rather than at Trey, Hannifin or Atkins, who stood near the door to Chilmark's room.
"Doc, there really are no ghosts down there," Susan Hannifin said. "Let's talk about the anxiety you're experiencing. Are you managing to rest at all?"
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 51