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

by Douglas Clegg

  "No. I can't remember sleeping. I feel like I've been up for a week."

  Then, Doc twisted his head around to look over at Trey. "I'm glad you're here."

  "Why's that?"

  "You keep them away."

  "Who?"

  "The shadows," Doc said. "They live underground here. And they come out now because people have been opening the door for them. There must be a lot of them down there."

  Susan shot a glance at Trey that seemed to suggest: just let him talk.

  "I heard one of them when I was eating tonight. If you call that food. I heard this little girl."

  Trey remembered Rob Fallon claiming there was a ghost girl, and filed this away to mention it to Hannifin later on.

  "I heard her. She's trapped down there. Others are trapped there, too. But they're leaking out now. At night they come out and change shapes and get through doorways," Doc said, fairly matter-of-factly. "The world changes at night in the dark. That's why they become night fears. They move through keyholes. They take people over. I'm not safe here." He had never once let his gaze wander from Trey's face. It was as if the only thing in the room he could look at was Trey.

  Afterward, in the hallway, walking swiftly back down the ward, Susan Hannifin said, "He trusts you at this point. That's good. I don't want you to do the police's bidding too much with this. He's at a very delicate point. Even though he's a prisoner here, we can't ever forget his mental state and his health needs, Trey. Let's leave the lights on for him tonight. No point in him staying up all night after light's out. His prescription should start kicking in tonight – when the nurse's do the ten o'clock meds, he'll get some Cambex to help him sleep through the night, but we'll keep the lights on in his room anyway. If the Cambex doesn't work immediately, I want him to feel safe above all else."

  "Sounds good," Trey said. "Let's hope Fallon hasn't infected everybody on Ward D with the ghost story."

  5

  Rob Fallon had already been telling others about the ghost he'd seen beneath Darden State, and the word got around further. Even when Trey took off for the night, Rita Paulsen, who was working double-shifts that week, stopped to tell him, "This is going to be one of those nights – a full moon, ghost stories, and one of the psych techs already has been pretending he heard a ghost, too."

  It was the way of the wards at Darden. Once a rumor started among the patient population, it became like a contagion. Trey figured that by the next morning, every single patient on the first floor, particularly of Ward D, would be complaining that a ghost had come into their rooms through the vents.

  Once he reached the parking lot, sitting in his car, he took a deep breath, let it all out. He knew he'd have to do a good two-to-three mile jog that evening, once the kids were in bed, just to blow of the steam of the day.

  On his way home, he stopped in a bookstore in the State Street Mall in Redlands and picked up a copy of Dr. Susan Hannifin's book.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In his room, wrapped in the warmth of his straitjacket after having it taken off when he needed to use the toilet, Doc Chilmark curled up on a ball, not on top of his cot, but just beneath it. He tried to pretend that it was his cage. He tried to pretend, squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could make them, that he was just back at home with Mary. Feeling her kisses on the back of his neck before she went to her own bedroom.

  But, instead, he remembered things that frightened him.

  He remembered the men who regularly came into the house, the ones who took off all their clothes and lay down on the table.

  All the filthy men who touched her. She was too pure for them. But they touched her anyway.

  All of them needed healing, and after they had left, each one leaving money on the table, Mary had come to him and held him and told him that it was all right. That time was not the enemy. "All men are like that except you," she murmured to him, holding him tight, drawing him from his cage, out onto the floor. His head against her breasts, his arms about her waist. "They all need healing. Women, too. Everybody has the disease in them. But you have the cure for it. You and I both, Doc."

  Doc lay in the room in Program 28 and began crying, because he missed her touch too much. He didn't know why she hadn't come for him yet. She always had come for him in the past, even after she'd left him, as a boy, with Cooper Fenn. Even after Dr. Massey had died. She'd come for him, no matter what was keeping her back.

  He didn't think he could live without her.

  He fought the feelings of sleep, though he was exhausted.

  Something made a noise in his room. He opened his eyes, looking out from under the bed.

  Something was there.

  Even with the lights on.

  The shadows were coming.

  Crawling.

  Night fears on their way.

  Maybe just outside the door.

  Out in the dark of the hallway.

  He glanced over at the grate just the other side of cot.

  What if they were down there, trying to come up?

  For just a second, he was sure he heard the voice of a little girl say something.

  He closed his eyes and tried to blot out any sound he heard.

  Please come soon. Please, Mary. Don't leave me here. You promised you'd never leave.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  1

  The first call came for Trey Campbell at eleven o'clock that night. It was Jane Laymon. He'd tried to reach her earlier, but had to leave message after message for her. He hadn't expected to hear from her again until morning.

  Trey had been reading Dr. Susan Hannifin’s book The Killer Instinct: Inside the Minds of Seven Psychopathic Murderers, lying in bed with the covers half on and half off, while Carly did her yoga over near the French doors that led to the courtyard. He'd just read beyond the introduction when his cell phone light began blinking – he barely noticed it at first, and then wanted to ignore it.

  He took off his glasses, picked up the phone, and popped it open. "Hello?"

  "Trey. Got a minute?"

  Trey sat up, setting the book down. He got out of bed and slipped his briefs on, and made an understood hand signal to Carly who got out of her stretching position, and stood up, watching him. He covered the phone for a second. "It's Jane," he said.

  "I figured," Carly said.

  Trey walked past her to the bedroom door, went out into the hallway, and then took the phone with him out the front door. He sat on the low step. It was a peaceful night, although the vague scent of smoke from distant fires was in the air. "Jane? All right."

  "We found more bodies."

  "In her house?"

  "Beneath it. I should've noticed it the first time I went out back. The whole backyard is concrete, but there's a little color difference near the backdoor. That's where she must've repaired the concrete and then re-set it – after burying her victims. Two of the victims were buried shallow. I'd guess about say eight inches down under just about two inches of concrete."

  Trey swore under his breath.

  "Yeah, we got cadaver dogs out, and when they seemed to locate a spot near the backdoor, we got some jackhammers in went to it. First time I've ever seen this kind of work. Blood Mary was quite the handywoman. Her landlady told me she fixed things all the time. But there's one other thing, Trey. She lived within spitting distance of Darden."

  "You're kidding."

  "Nope. And get this: she had him sleeping in a dog crate. Her son. Handcuffs, ropes, all kinds of restraints."

  "Straitjacket?"

  "Yep. She had lots of stuff right out of a medical catalog. Looked really S&M to me. I'm assuming you figured out the nature of their relationship?"

  "Incest. Abuse. I wish none of this surprised me," he said. "She's in Caldwell?"

  "Yep. If I walk to the end of her block, and go to the back of the houses there, I can practically wave to the guards at Darden. You know how the town grows out into the foothills? Her neighborhood's up there. And I bet she spent a lo
t of time looking at Darden. Why would she do that?"

  "Because she worked as a nurse at Darden. The three patients she killed as a nurse were patients at Darden."

  Jane remained silent for a few seconds. "What?"

  "I saw the state records of her employment. Earlier. I just didn't think it would matter. I didn't think she'd be living up on some hillside watching the place. Jane, I think she's obsessed with Darden State."

  "She was a fucking nurse at Darden?" Jane said as if she hadn't heard it right. "Does that happen much?"

  Trey chuckled. "Okay, it's not funny. I'm just tired. It happens now and then. Sometimes the person who gets hired to work at Darden comes with a full set of serious psych issues themselves. I've certainly seen it happen. Usually, it's the psychologists." He chuckled again, and then apologized for being a little punchy. "In fact, her obsession with Darden might be entirely normal, given everything else. She works there, she murders patients, she's put in Ward D, she gets pregnant by someone there, and she gets out. Makes some sense that if the major events of her adult life – being that dramatic – it becomes her little pond to watch."

  "Who's the candidate for daddy?"

  "You mean to Doc? No idea. Rumors fly. Most likely it was Massey."

  "And he's dead now."

  "That definitely was suicide?"

  "Yep," Jane said. "No question. Here's what we have so far," Jane said. "She befriended a woman named Patty Mullen. Patty was having money troubles, so she needed a roommate, and Bloody Mary stepped right in, but left her son with Cooper Fenn for a bit. Then, Mary killed Patty – possibly. We can't quite track down who Patty Mullen was. We haven't found a body yet, but I suspect we will."

  "Jane, I know that name. Patty Mullen," Trey said. "Christ, I think she used to work at Darden, too. I don't know everybody, particularly in the other wards. But that name is too familiar."

  "Can you check on that for me?"

  "Tomorrow, sure," he said. "But I may be wrong. Maybe it just sounds familiar. God, maybe I'm just getting paranoid about Bloody Mary."

  "It would certainly fit if she worked at Darden. And it would make sense for her to live so close to work," Jane said. "My guess is that Mary, who called herself Jean, murdered Mullen right away. Set up the massage practice to pay bills, and now and then felt she had to kill a client or two. There's more stuff in the house – indications that Doc Chilmark had a hellish life with his mother. I still can't quite figure out the timing on this."

  Trey said the first thing that came to his mind. "Poetic justice."

  "Trey?"

  "It's the thing Brainard said. It's why Mary was in Darden State in the '80s. She cuts off a guy's balls and stuffs them in his mouth because she claimed he tried to force himself on her that way. She and Doc kill Diane Flock and her husband – and their unborn baby – and for some reason we haven't figured out yet. And now Doc is in the house where he was conceived."

  "His father's house," Jane said.

  "Right. Right. I know there's something in this that we're not noticing."

  Then, Jane's voice changed when she spoke next. It seemed to come out as almost a cough. "The baby," she said.

  "What baby?"

  "We never found the unborn baby at the Flock's. Diane Flock was six months along. Definitely dead. They cut Diane Flock open, kill the baby in the process, and take it. For what? She's kept it, Trey. Maybe she hid it someplace."

  "Why in god's name would she do that?"

  "We can safely assume she's operating on a different set of rules than most of us," Jane said. "At this point, I think she's getting creative."

  2

  After the call, Trey had trouble going to sleep, so he kissed Carly goodnight, and took his book out to the living room. Switched on the lamp by the couch, plopped down in it and began flipping pages. But he couldn't focus on Dr. Hannifin’s tales of Ward D, or her past work at Camarillo. He stared out the windows onto the courtyard, and kept thinking of Doc Chilmark. Not as a nineteen-year-old, but as a little boy in a crate. Tied up. Treated, at best, like a dog.

  He tried to imagine what Doc's mother must've been like. A woman who, through her own psychosis, had nurtured her son to the point where he could not distinguish between reality and fantasy. Where he had become his mother's perfect lover. Perfect confidante. It was almost as if she had bred him in order to have a second set of hands to do her dirty work. She'd raised and trained a psychopath – in her image.

  To the point where he did not feel pain at the suffering of others.

  Did not feel remorse at the torture and murder of a woman who was six months pregnant.

  Trey closed his eyes, remembering the thin scars on Doc's face.

  Bloody Mary had burned him. She had abused him. She had…

  Trey opened his eyes. He didn't like to think about it.

  Jane had told him previously that the crime scene in the Flock's house had been set up almost as a makeshift operating room.

  Doc had performed the surgery. He was a healer. He was a doctor, at least in his mind. Doc had been raised to believe he had this power, and for some reason he had decided to use it on the Flocks.

  Mary had been there. She was a trained nurse. She probably even told him exactly how to cut Diane Flock open. How to kill the unborn child. And then, how to tear open Diane's husband when he intruded on the scene.

  How could a woman trained to help the sick do what she did?

  Finally, as these thoughts roiled around Trey's mind, he fell asleep on the couch dreaming of psychopaths and too much bloodshed, only to be awakened several hours later by another call on his cell phone.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  1

  The fire that Mary Chilmark had set earlier in the evening had begun slowly. The underbrush burned gradually, steadily, along the overgrown side yard of the house she'd chosen, and she had gone some distance away from it to watch. After several hours, it had finally picked up speed as the hot wind began shifting again. By that time, she'd gone back to the house by the golf course, where the body of Nick Spitzer lay in the bedroom on the second floor. She needed a few hours' rest before she went down to Darden State to find her son.

  She had left a small bag in the Cadillac, and checked for it before entering the house.

  She opened the bag, and gazed down at what was in it.

  For a moment, she remembered the first time she'd felt her son growing inside her.

  2

  Fire began to rise up sometime after midnight, climbing the house that burned quickly. Inside, a family had to get out fast, for the smoke alarms hadn't worked, and if it hadn't been for the pet German shepherd barking, there was a chance that no one inside would be saved. The owner of the house turned on the sprinkler system and began spraying the roof of the house to try and protect it, but it was far too late, and if he were to describe how the fire moved, he would say that it was like a demon from hell, leaping from his rooftop to the house next door, while all around his backyard became a wall of fire.

  It moved quickly through the community, with palm trees bursting into flame along the roadway. Because new growth had come up after a fire in the wash several years before, the flames found new fuel, and the fire department was called, but firefighters were already up on a mountain on the opposite side of the valley, many miles away, so it took more time than usual for the trucks to come out. Helicopters were the first to get there, but they were few and far between because of the fires in the distant mountains which had been raging for several days.

  From not more than four miles away from where Mary Chilmark had spent the past five years in a rental house, under which she'd buried the Patty Mullen, and a man named Wilcox, and another man named Harrison, the fires raced along the canyon, palm trees like giant torches lighting up the night sky in Caldwell California.

  The dry winds met the flames, causing them to flare up to the sky.

  Trey Campbell, who lived more than twenty miles away in Redlands, received his second
call at 4:30 a.m.

  This time, it was from Jim Anderson.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  1

  Trey left his house at five a.m. after a quick shower and some cold coffee that had been left over from the previous day. He felt a little bleary-eyed, but something about the emergency got his adrenalin pumping.

  On the cell phone as he drove along the streets of Redlands, heading out to the freeway, he asked Jim, "What's the scoop from Willard?"

  Jim Anderson, on the line, said, "Somebody was supposed to call for a line-up of buses. We're anticipating six hours of loading and cleanup."

  "What's the guesstimate for the fire?"

  "Might be as long as 14 hours if it doesn't jump the wash. If it jumps the wash and the drainage ditch out at the boulevard, we're looking at eight. You almost here?"

  "Almost," Trey said.

  "You as sleepy as me?"

  "Sleepier."

  "Marcus Weirdo is here," Jim said, giving the nickname to one of the Clinical Directors who had a more-than-slight problem with cocaine addiction. His real name was Mark Weir, and whenever any major emergency happened – a near-riot, a lockdown, or even misplaced files that the state needed fast, the guy went into coke-head overdrive. Although Weir had spent time in rehab, it obviously had not yet kicked in on his destructive habit, and Trey could just imagine how things were going with trying to keep the patients calm and in some semblance of order while Weir and others were cracking up in the face of an emergency.

  "I don't get it, did the fire jump over the freeway?" Trey asked, as he came around the curve off Oleander and turned onto the aptly named Brown Industrial Road, a short cut over to Caldwell and the hospital.