The Drop Zone

by Bob Kroll

  “None?” Peterson was skeptical

  “None at all.”

  “She was withdrawn,” Bettis added, “at times moody. Her behaviour was no better and no worse than most other patients.”

  “Staff liked her,” McBride insisted. “She seldom spoke, but she did what staff asked her to.”

  “And when she did speak,” Peterson asked, “what did she talk about?”

  “A lot was disjointed, unrelated to everyday experience,” Bettis said, his voice loaded with authority. “You must appreciate she was undergoing psychiatric care and we hardly scratched the surface before she —”

  “Escaped.” Peterson said, his voice pointed with blame.

  Bettis lifted his hands by way of consent.

  “How did she get out?” Peterson asked.

  Bettis looked to Hamlin for support, and then his eyes shifted to Richard Pratz who so far had not reacted to what was being said. It was Heather McBride who answered.

  “She was not confined, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

  “She was delusional when found on the side of the road,” Hamlin added, “but with proper medication, she behaved quite normally.”

  “Except that she didn’t talk,” Peterson said.

  “She did talk,” Bettis corrected. “But, as I said, a lot of her words were unintelligible.”

  “Otherwise she behaved in much the same way as other patients,” Hamlin repeated. “Without restraint.”

  “So long as she remained within the building,” McBride said.

  “With supervision,” Hamlin said.

  Peterson recognized the cover-my-ass and protect-the-institution patter.

  Danny did too, and he let them know. “With everyone supervising her, like your first-aid manual says, and with all those security cameras, how come no one saw her leave?”

  Peterson saw Bettis sneak a nervous look at Pratz, and in the corner of his eye noticed a frown slip over Pratz’s face.

  “Not all security guards are conscientious about their responsibilities,” Hamlin said.

  “A snoozer,” Danny said.

  Hamlin nodded.

  “What about the video tapes?” Peterson asked.

  “We only record two of the cameras,” Pratz offered, his voice squeaky like a thumb over a scrubbed bathtub, “the main entrance and parking lot. And they’re recycled every two days. A budget cut. A small item, but who would ever think?”

  “So the girl just up and walked away,” Peterson said, “even though you knew she was crazy.”

  “We prefer to use terms that are more respectful of the individual,” Bettis protested.

  “Soften it all with words that mean nothing,” Peterson muttered. Then, louder, “So tell me. What respectful terms should I use for a girl who staggers across six lanes of traffic, tears a bar apart, and slashes her wrist?”

  Heather McBride blinked nervously. Bettis seemed undisturbed.

  “It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, Detective,” Bettis said. “Only we don’t allow it to influence our response to those we have been professionally trained to serve. The mentally ill have the same human rights as you and I. We cannot confine and restrain everyone with a mental disorder just because they walk the streets talking to someone we can’t see or act in a way we consider abnormal. We don’t have the right to lock them away forever.”

  “Even if it’s for their own good?”

  “And who determines that?” Bettis snapped.

  Peterson waved the argument away. “A team of shrinks for a start. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s more respectful to pick the crazies up, dust them off, point them down the road, and tell them to take a hike.”

  “That’s not fair!” McBride protested. “We don’t have the budget for long-term care of the mentally ill. We do all that is possible within the time we have to do it.”

  “And then you show them the door and close it after they leave.” They locked eyes. “So what was she?” He asked. “What clinical term describes her condition?”

  “I think Dr. Bettis should answer that,” McBride said.

  Peterson rotated his chair to face Bettis squarely. “You were her doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  Dr. Bettis heaved a sigh. “There is not a lot to report for the short time she was here.”

  “How short?”

  “Eighteen days. She was depressed and paranoid. Schizophrenic. Feared men in authority, but I had started to soften her defenses.”

  “Just men?” Danny asked.

  “I believe so. She responded reasonably well to nurses and other female staff, and to me, of course. Though she spoke little, very little. Quite introverted. Closed inside her head. During the times she did talk there was little to no relationship to reality.”

  “She spoke English?” Peterson asked.

  “When her mind was settled, yes, and with medication. Why?”

  “We have a recording of her talking in the Broken Promise. It wasn’t English.”

  Danny pulled out the flash drive with the video Billy had edited. “You have a way we can play this?”

  McBride led Danny to a credenza that held A/V equipment. She flicked a switch and a wall panel opened to reveal a monitor. Danny inserted the drive into a USB port.

  “This gets ugly,” Danny said. He opened the video and cued it to the girl screaming wildly, played it, and stopped it at Peterson cradling the dying girl in his arms.

  Everyone in the room was shocked. Peterson couldn’t watch it again. He had turned from the monitor long before the video stopped.

  McBride leaned toward him. “That was you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Peterson held her eyes, steeling himself against what he felt. Then he turned to Bettis. “It wasn’t English, but it was like she was trying to tell us something.”

  “It was gibberish, and she probably was trying to tell you something.” Bettis had turned to look out the window. “Under stress, agitation, or when her imagination was running wild, she often spoke in tongues. Hers was a divided mind. What she said may sound like a language, but I assure you it is gibberish.”

  “Gibberish?” Peterson repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Not a language?”

  “No.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “This is not our first schizophrenic patient. You would be surprised how many we get. I video each patient when they first arrive. Study their behaviour. Listen to them. With some, their speech is unintelligible. I could get any one of a dozen videos from my office and show it to you.”

  This was not the answer Peterson had expected, or wanted. Words that are not words. A chattering of disconnected sounds. Syllables without meaning. Doodling out loud.

  “So she runs away from here ten months ago and disappears,” Danny said, “and then she —”

  “We followed protocol,” McBride said. “We contacted the police. How much they did, we have no idea.”

  “Apparently girls run away from home all the time,” Bettis added. “At least that’s the impression I got.”

  “They run away for a reason,” Peterson said. “And they stay away for a reason. So what made this girl run?”

  He looked from face to face. No one had an answer. Then Peterson asked, “Any idea why she suddenly flipped out and killed herself?”

  Peterson’s question hung in the air. The boardroom fell silent. McBride closed her eyes. Pratz and Bettis stared at their hands. Hamlin alone held Peterson’s eyes.

  “Something must have driven her into a deeper depression,” he said, “deeper into her paranoia. My best guess is that it was something shocking. Not a physical shock, though it could be, but a shock to her mind.”

  Chapter

  EIGHTEEN

  Danny s
lid behind his desk opposite Peterson. He had bad mood written across his face. They both had been riding the side streets and back alleys, coaxing and strong-arming the wasted and unwanted to talk about the time they spent in St. Jude’s church, warming up or sleeping one off during mass. Those who knew the dead priest had had nothing but good to say about him, and those that didn’t couldn’t have cared less that he was dead. Many had been more than willing to say just the opposite for a forty-ouncer of cheap wine. Some even had offered to point a finger if it meant lining their pockets with whatever the detectives had to offer.

  Peterson’s effort had been half-hearted, his attention span short. Two words from a street drunk or junkie and he would stop listening. His thoughts always sliding back to the Broken Promise.

  “Two detectives and a half-dozen uniform cops nosing both sides of the Strip, and we turn up nothing,” Danny said. “Zilch.”

  Peterson passed him a forensic report. “This will raise your spirit. The fingerprints of the women in the photos don’t match those in the sacristy.”

  Danny rolled his eyes. “What about the one whose photo was still in the camera, the one crying when the priest snapped the shutter?”

  “Her name’s Wendy Levigne,” Peterson said. “She has MS, lives up the Valley, and gets around in a motorized wheelchair.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “Slurred speech. I caught every third word. Talk about the short end of the stick. She’s been married eleven years and her husband packed his bag less than a year after she was diagnosed.”

  The landline rang and Danny answered. He covered the mouthpiece. “For you,” he said. “A woman with a bedroom voice.”

  Peggy Demming guided Peterson behind the reception desk and down the central hallway at the Birthright Centre, her spike heels clicking on the hardwood floor. Peterson tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help it. Peggy Demming was an eye-catcher in a black knitted skirt.

  “I could have called a priest,” Peggy said over her shoulder, her voice husky from a day of tiresome meetings with municipal bureaucrats and financial donors, “but I didn’t think a priest would understand.”

  She showed him into Anna’s office, shrugging at the clutter and removing a stack of books from a folding chair for him to sit. “I suggested she take time off, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said work would help her forget. You don’t know how many times I’ve caught her just sitting in here, staring at nothing. I thought she should talk to someone. I know she went to see you at the police station, and she said it helped. I thought you would know what to say. You were there.”

  Peterson remained standing. “I’m not sure what I can do. What she went through, it’s not just shock. It stays with you. Talking to a shrink or priest might do her a lot more good.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve been through it before.”

  The receptionist poked her head through the door and told Peggy she had a call from a mother-to-be. Peggy started from Anna’s office and stopped.

  “Anna’s always been weird. Not weird, but different. It’s worse now. Everything’s happening all at once. Funding cuts. A chance we might have to close our doors. Now this. I just thought maybe you could help.”

  Peterson stood beside Anna’s desk, taking in the photos of babies and a few mothers plastered on all four walls. He turned quickly to the sunny window, seeking glory in the bright leaves on the nearby maple. Finding none, he turned back to the framed photos on the walls.

  “No one said it was going to be easy,” he overheard Peggy say in her office across the hall, “but it is the right thing to do.” There was a long pause then Peggy insisted. “You’re not abandoning it! You’re giving it life. You’re giving it hope.”

  Peterson scowled, feeling daunted by all the babies that surrounded him. He found refuge in the framed reproduction of Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila. He negotiated a file cabinet, a few stacks of books, and Anna’s desk to get a closer look and to read the printed file card taped to the wooden frame.

  “Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it — even a considerable share.”

  — St. Teresa of Avila

  He was reading this when Anna entered the office. He turned to see her braced against the doorjamb, her arms wrapped around herself for strength or comfort or to hold in an anger that wanted to get out.

  “I came by to see how you’re doing,” Peterson said.

  “And what do you see?” Anna straightened up.

  “It takes time,” Peterson said. “Talking helps.”

  “Who would understand?”

  “A psychologist. A priest. Me.”

  Anna stepped into her office and sank into the folding chair Peggy had cleared for Peterson. “And what about you? Who do you tell?”

  “I get counselling.”

  “Do you talk about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it help?”

  Peterson ducked behind a smile.

  “Talking about it makes it real,” Anna said, “as though it really happened.”

  “It did happen.”

  “I know, but I wish it hadn’t. I wish it was all in my head.”

  “No, you don’t want that. Fantasy you can’t put behind you. Reality you can. Even the nightmares get less. It was real, Anna. What that girl did, what happened to us was real.”

  Anna’s hands tightened into fists. “I didn’t have to go there, but I was stubborn. I couldn’t let her change her mind, not like that, not without talking about it.”

  “Her?”

  “Sally Toomey, a waitress in that bar. She’s pregnant. She was with us and changed her mind about having the baby, before it was too late. And I was there to … that’s what makes it all so wrong. And then I failed that girl. I couldn’t help. I couldn’t stop all the blood.”

  He could have taken her into his arms just then, seal a bonding of sorts. Instead, he looked at the photos that covered the walls. Played for time to dissipate what he felt, and what Anna felt.

  “A lot of babies,” he said, without turning.

  “A hundred and forty-seven throughout the building and some mothers, mostly the ones that kept their babies.”

  “No fathers?”

  “Not many stay long enough to get their picture taken.”

  Peterson pointed to a photo of a man smoking and drinking coffee. Now he turned. Feelings in check. “This one stayed.”

  Anna smiled. “My father,” she said.

  “And I take it the woman is your mother?” Peterson said, and, off Anna’s nod, continued. “And the beautiful novitiate in white is you?”

  Anna looked away, embarrassed, off-put by the compliment. “I left the convent years ago,” she explained.

  Peterson knew she had been a nun. Danny had briefed him on her background check.

  At age sixteen, she’d heeded a sudden calling from God to become a nun. Her Mother Superior had described her as “retiring.” Her spiritual advisor, Sister Xavier, said she was, “deeply penitent and excessively devout.” Left the convent when her parents separated. Attended St. Mary’s University, BA in psychology. Entered a master’s program. Dropped out after a
year and enrolled in the Carmelite Order of Nuns. No talking, no visitors. Prayer and fasting. Left after four years to care for her sick mother. Worked in homeless shelters and food banks. After her mother entered a nursing home, Anna joined the Right to Life crusade. Founding member of the Birthright Centre.

  Peterson moved back to the Bernini reproduction of St. Teresa. “This one baffled me until I read the caption. She looks like she’s …” He looked to Anna for help.

  “In ecstasy,” Anna offered. “St. Teresa of Avila. She had visions of God and an absolute sense of His divine love.”

  “Is that what made her a saint?”

  “The love of God, yes!”

  “You can tell by the look,” Peterson said, without taking his eyes off Anna. “The ecstasy. Do you want to be a saint?”

  Anna’s brow wrinkled as though she was puzzling over all sides of Peterson’s question. Peterson watched her effort and wondered what was there to consider: you either wanted to be a saint or you didn’t. Yet he waited, quietly, the way he waited for a suspect or witness to get around to saying what was on their mind.

  “When I was a little girl,” Anna said to her hands folded on her lap, “I went to church every day. I lit a candle and stared into the flame and prayed and prayed to St. Teresa until my eyes crossed. Then I would quickly look at the statue and it would appear to move. I believed the statue had come to life and had answered my prayers.”

  Anna lifted her head, her eyes glassy with tears. He extended his hand and Anna took it. He curled his fingers over hers.

  “I don’t know what’s happening.” She caught her voice before it broke. She squeezed Peterson’s hand for support. “I keep seeing the girl. The blood. Her eyes reaching into me. She’s saying something I don’t understand. Her last words. I’m listening. I’m close to her lips and I’m listening, but I don’t understand.”

  “It was gibberish,” he confided.

  “No!” Anna snatched back her hand.

  “She was a patient at Stoddard Mental Health Centre,” Peterson explained. “Paranoid schizophrenic.”

  “She said something she wanted us to know.”