The Drop Zone

by Bob Kroll

  On the third day, after making sure Miles was not following, Peterson was inside waiting for her, playing with a teaspoon, playing a hunch, and watching for her red Ford Focus through the plate-glass window. Once she was inside, he moved behind her in line, his eyes fixed on where a lock of her brown hair flipped over the collar of her suede coat.

  “I heard the staff at Stoddard are crazier than the patients,” Peterson said to the back of Heather McBride’s head. “Any truth to that?”

  McBride snapped her head around. “That’s not funny!”

  “That’s what a security guard said.” He flashed a smile and let it fade. “Has me worried, because a nurse told me your pass system doesn’t work, that patients come and go at will.”

  “Latte or tea?” asked the counter girl, bug-eyed behind big glasses, knowing Heather McBride as a regular.

  McBride turned to answer. “Latte, thanks.” She swung back to Peterson, bristling. “I spoke to your cop pals weeks ago.”

  “I know. But another nut getting loose and committing a crime rings of coincidence, and coincidence never sits well with a cop.”

  The girl brought the latte and McBride used her iPhone to pay the bill. Peterson didn’t order and followed her to a side bar where she doctored the latte with a packet of sugar.

  “Was there something you wanted to say?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “Why don’t we take that corner table, and I’ll tell you?”

  “I’m expecting someone.”

  “He won’t show for half an hour.”

  He guided her to the corner table, the one with no view from the window and out of earshot of most everyone in the coffee shop.

  “Hand in your resignation yet?” he asked.

  “Why should I?”

  “You dusted it off the last time we talked.”

  She looked surprised.

  “I’m paid to find things out.”

  “About me?” She sounded nervous. He liked that.

  “About the people you work for and the easy way patients seem to slip out of Stoddard.”

  “I had nothing —”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  “Then what are you suggesting?”

  “That you might know who opened the door.”

  “This is crazy!” She stood to change tables, but he barked at her to sit down. The colour drained from her cheeks. She sat.

  “Let’s not make a scene,” he said. “We don’t want to talk about this in my office, do we? It gets cramped in there.”

  She shook her head. Her hands gripped her mug.

  “Let me play this by you,” he said. “Restricted patient has a pass to go upstairs for a consult. The doctor uses his bypass key for the elevator to take her to the ground floor and out the front door.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “They are doctors! Why would they help a patient breach security when they could just as easily discharge them?”

  “Because one of the patients I’m thinking of hadn’t said a sensible word the entire time she was at Stoddard. Hardly the right material for a discharge. And the other one could have been discharged, but it played better to the cops and press if he just up and walked out on his own.”

  McBride shook her head, her confidence back, her voice derisive, almost impudent. “You’re talking about the girl that killed herself. She didn’t need help getting out. The nurse you talked to was right. The pass system has problems. Not as bad as patients walking out at will, but there have been incidents.”

  “She used a pass to go upstairs,” Peterson said. “The security guard remembers it. She went up in the restricted elevator and never came back to the teen floor. She would have been difficult to discharge. She wouldn’t tell anyone her name.”

  “Why would a doctor do that?”

  Peterson let her ponder that herself. He changed direction. “Tell me about this last one to take a hike on his own. He was violent, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t work the floors.”

  “And he just walked away?”

  “He had smoking privileges, and there’s no smoking in the building.”

  “Violent schizophrenic has a pass to go outdoors?”

  “I don’t know how violent he was,” she said. “And maybe he didn’t have a pass. Maybe he just …”

  “But you knew he had smoking privileges.”

  She didn’t answer. Clearly troubled by the contradiction.

  Again Peterson shifted direction. “Whose idea was it to clean the video tapes?”

  McBride had to think about it. Then she said, “Mr. Pratz wanted budget cuts.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “We had staff meetings. Lots of suggestions. I don’t know who suggested it. I was new. Not even a month. But Gloria Melanson kept minutes of all staff meetings. She might know.”

  “Does she work the teen floor?”

  “Gloria? Yes. Well, no, not anymore. She retired months ago. She’d worked there forever. A nursing supervisor.”

  “You have her home number?”

  “Home?”

  “I want to keep this out of the hospital for now, out of the press.” The last part came to him out of the blue and he liked the effect it had on her. She was, after all, the hospital’s communications officer. She reached for her shoulder bag hanging off the back of the chair and took out a cell phone. While she called up her contacts list, Peterson kept digging.

  “Stoddard gets lots of young patients.”

  McBride looked up from the cell. “Teens and young adults seem to be the most disturbed. We have a separate floor for teens. Here it is!”

  She gave him Gloria Melanson’s address and phone number.

  “Do all the doctors work with the young patients?” he asked.

  “Mostly Dr. Bettis. It’s his specialty.”

  “What about Hamlin?”

  “Dr. Hamlin is the administrator. He has patients, but not many, and they’re adults.”

  “Is Pratz in the building a lot?”

  “He’s on the board,” she said, sipping the latte and getting foam on her upper lip, licking it off. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “Not a lot. Once a week.”

  “Does he patrol the halls or just stick to certain wards?” Peterson asked.

  “I don’t understand …”

  “What does he do?”

  She had to think about this. “I see him around. I don’t know what he does. He consults a lot with Dr. Bettis and Dr. Hamlin.”

  “Consult with you?”

  “At times.”

  “About what?”

  “Upcoming events. Staff and government reports.”

  “Is Bettis really off the wall?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I heard,” Peterson said. “The security guard said it.”

  “He’s quirky,” McBride said.

  “How quirky?”

  “I don’t know. Funky might be a better word. His office certainly is, and one of the rooms in his house.”

  Peterson held down his surprise. “You were at his house?”

  She nodded. “A Christmas party for administration.” She smiled. The smile grew wider as she thought of it. “It was weird.”

  “How weird?”

  “I don’t know, psychiatrist weird. One room had these sculptures. Primitives, I guess you’d call them. Figurines of a woman with huge boobs and … my god, it had the two of us laughing.”

  “What did?”

  “The Earth Mother, he called it. A fertility goddess, a replica, I think he said, of something really old.”

  “What was funny about it?” Peterson pressed.

  “It didn’t look like
anything. Not at first. Then we realized, me and Dr. Hamlin’s assistant, that it was a pregnant woman with these enormous boobs, and —” McBride looked away as she said it “— a vagina that wasn’t even close to normal size.”

  “Not something you expected to see there?” Peterson said.

  “I don’t know if I expected it or not. He’s a psychiatrist.”

  Peterson smiled as though he knew exactly what she meant. Then he played a hunch. “Bettis lives in the south end, right, near the hospitals?”

  “A couple of blocks away,” McBride said.

  Peterson pushed himself back from the table. “When are you getting out of there?”

  McBride saw he was genuinely concerned. “As soon as I find something else.”

  Peterson got up to leave.

  “We’re done?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah, we’re done.”

  Chapter

  THIRTY-NINE

  Gloria Melanson was silent for a long time before agreeing that he could stop by. She lived alone in a green split-level across the harbour. Never married. Early sixties. Pudgy face behind thick glasses. A big, matronly woman who waddled when she walked.

  She led Peterson through the house, which was nothing special. A hit-and-miss décor with shelves of knick-knacks from many North American tourist traps. She was having a white-wine cooler on the stone patio and offered him one. He declined, said he was on duty.

  They sat at a teak table with a closed umbrella in the middle. The evening sun, a comfort for mid-fall, played peek-a-boo through a stand of white birch and splayed shadows over two kidney-shaped flower beds abloom with hydrangeas and marigolds.

  Peterson broke the ice with questions about her job and responsibilities at Stoddard. Her responses pulsed with pride; her voice was firm and matter of fact. She was a nurse with nearly forty years under her belt, a by-the-book RN who could comfort and scold in the same sentence. She understood better than many of the younger nurses what it meant to be a professional. Then he asked about the girl who had run away ten months ago, the one who had killed herself in the Broken Promise. Gloria lost the matronly demeanour.

  “She never did settle down,” Gloria said. “I don’t remember what it was, three weeks she was at Stoddard, the whole time her eyes and body never settled. I’m not talking out of turn. It’s all in the nursing reports.”

  Peterson liked the way she said it, practically telling him where he could find what she wasn’t at liberty to say.

  “Bettis was her doctor?”

  “Yes he was,” she said, barbing each word.

  “You didn’t care for him, did you?”

  Gloria folded her ample arms. “Not everyone gets along in a high-stress job. There is always tension, less with some, more with others.”

  “More with Dr. Bettis, I take it?”

  “Oil and water for three and a half years.”

  Peterson held out his hands. “I assumed Bettis was there a lot longer.”

  “It seemed that way to me too.”

  Peterson salted his tone to make it sound as though he was in the know. “And that’s when the difficulties began, with the young girls?”

  “Not long after.”

  He sneaked that one through. Now he waded into deeper, purely speculative waters. “Why do you think Dr. Hamlin didn’t do anything? I’m talking about after you brought it to his attention.”

  She took her time with that one. Too much time, Peterson feared. Then she said, “Philip Hamlin is a kind man and a caring doctor. But he is not a good administrator. Bullies on staff take advantage of him.”

  Again Peterson nodded to suggest he knew exactly what she meant. Then he shifted direction.

  “I talked to another nurse and to Heather McBride,” he said. “Both of them suggested the pass system didn’t work that well, and that it was easy for patients to make the great escape.”

  “Male patients mostly,” Gloria said. “Some females. But that wasn’t the problem. Not from what I saw. The real problem was premature discharges. We had plenty of those in the last three and a half years.”

  She was talking about Bettis. He knew it. And she looked at him until she was sure he did.

  “You want to tell me about them?”

  “Maybe there’s too much to tell. Closed doors. Private consultations.”

  “Elevator pass upstairs? After dark?”

  Gloria didn’t answer. Her eyes wandered over the garden, and her hands worried in her lap. Peterson let the silence tie a knot between them. Then it hit him. The hesitation, the suspicion, the bitterness he sensed in this woman. He lowered his voice to a whisper, picking his words to gently slip the knot.

  “The call that tipped us to the girl in the Broken Promise being from Stoddard was anonymous. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Gloria nodded and took her first sip of the wine cooler.

  “Why?”

  “I knew certain ones would try to keep it quiet,” she said. The barb had crept back into her voice.

  Peterson thought he knew why. “You didn’t retire on your own, did you?”

  Gloria stared at the stand of birch. “I should have known better than to ask so many questions, to challenge his methods. But my duty is to the patients.”

  “We’re back to his private consultations, aren’t we?”

  Gloria shifted in her chair as though her thoughts and feelings were making her feel physically uncomfortable. “Betty Martin brought it to my attention. She was ready to go to senior staff. So I investigated her complaint on my own.”

  “And they forced retirement?”

  “Not they!”

  “Bettis?”

  “He questioned my nursing skills. Took his concerns to the director of nursing.”

  Peterson leaned forward to suggest his question and her answer would be a confidence between them. “Are you saying Dr. Bettis was inappropriate with the female patients?”

  She removed her glasses, placed them on the table, considered the question carefully. And just as carefully she phrased her answer. “If you are suggesting that his behaviour made Betty Martin and me uncomfortable, the answer is yes.”

  “You could have gone to senior management,” he said.

  “I raised questions with them.”

  “That’s not the same as an official complaint.”

  “Not in the medical field.” She paused to think through what else she wanted to say and how to say it. She lifted her glasses, fingered them, and set them back down. “Mental illness is a matter of control. Counselling and medication help. A change in environment, a change in circumstances can reduce the struggle. We try our best to stabilize anxiety, reduce stress. But at the end of the day, these young girls are still at risk, still vulnerable. To discharge them before they’re ready, before they’re prepared to go back to the street is just so wrong!”

  She held his eyes, allowing hers to reveal much more than what she had said. But he couldn’t leave it at that. He had to settle it. “Is that what Bettis did?”

  She sipped her wine cooler, a clear indication she was going to let that stand for her answer.

  “You took notes at staff meetings,” Peterson said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember who suggested erasing the security video tapes?”

  Gloria clicked her tongue derisively. “It was hardly a big item in the operating budget, but Pratz insisted, and Bettis agreed.”

  Peterson pulled out the photos of the girls printed from the flash drive. He reached them to Gloria. “Ever seen these girls before?”

  Gloria looked at the photos, inhaled sharply, and seemed to sink into the chair.

  “His patients?” Peterson asked.

  Her face was filled with sadness. “They all didn’t kill themselves, did they?”

  “Jus
t the girl in the Broken Promise,” he said. “Her name was Molly. The photos are from video recordings. They’re not pleasant.”

  She returned the photos. “They were his patients,” she said. “I remember three of them very well. Hospital records will have all their names, but I can give you three right now — Tiffany Banks, Ella Hargrove, and Mickey MacKinnon. Mickey’s for Michelle, she called herself Mickey Mac. And staff used Tiffy for Tiffany Banks, but she always called herself T-Fi.”

  The unexpected seldom surprised him. But this time it did. His head snapped up at what she had said, and his hand shook as he flipped open his pad and wrote down the names.

  “Tell me about Tiffany Banks,” he said.

  “She was a sweet child. I call her a child because she acted like a child, had the mind of a child. The others called her a baby doll, though she was twenty or twenty-one and belonged in the adult wing. But Bettis kept her with the teens because of her behaviour.”

  “One of his patients?”

  “One of his first, along with Mickey Mac.”

  “Early discharge?”

  “Again one of the first.”

  “And you disagreed?”

  “We don’t have much say in that regard.” Gloria said. “Even at staff meetings, we have to hold our professional opinions in check.”

  “What about her background?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Lived on the street, I suppose.” Gloria paused to reflect, then she added, “I almost think she came in on her own. Most don’t.”

  Peterson shifted gears, keeping his voice quiet. “Did you know the patient who recently escaped from Stoddard?”

  “Stephen Emery.”

  “You knew him?”

  “He was hospitalized many times when I was there. This was just the latest.”

  “You know what he did?”

  “I know what the newspapers said he did.” Her voice trembled with an overtone of anger. “He was terribly disturbed, confused, but he was not violent! He was agitated, but he never needed restraints. Stephen was not the animal you and the press have made him out to be.”