by Bob Kroll
He circled the hospital property a couple of times, noticing a service road that ran between the north side of the hospital and a field of high grass and knotweed. Then he drove through the main gate and parked in one of the empty visitor spaces. A grey SUV pulled in beside him and an elderly couple got out and headed for the building. Peterson followed them in.
Visitors and patients with passes stood outside a small coffee shop, talking. Staff and visitors walked through the lobby in both directions. The elderly couple made for the glassed-in security booth to register their visit in the log book that was propped on the counter in front of the security guard. There were three teenage girls near an elevator, two of them saying their goodbyes to the third. A white coat waited at the elevator beside the one the teens were waiting for. The door opened and the white coat walked in, taking a key from his coat pocket and slipping it into a slot in the panel on the right side of the door.
Peterson waited for his turn to register, reading patient names over the shoulders of the elderly couple and recording the times earlier visitors had signed in and out.
“You ever worry the visit won’t go well?” Peterson asked the couple, loud enough for the heavyset security guard to hear.
The man looked up at Peterson. “Every visit,” he said.
“My first,” Peterson said, “and I’m getting cold feet.”
“Are you a patient’s father?”
Peterson put on a forlorn expression that he made sure the security guard saw. “Uncle,” Peterson said. “My brother won’t visit, and he won’t let his wife. And right now I don’t think I can.”
Peterson started to turn away, then stopped and asked the couple, “You think I could go upstairs with you?”
“Of course,” the elderly man said. “It might make it easier for you.”
Peterson thanked them and edged closer to the booth to sign in. He checked out the monitors for dead spaces in what the cameras saw. The one on the parking lot covered the driveway and the visitors’ parking spaces but fell off before it reached the sides of the building. The front-door camera was aimed straight at the double doors and caught the faces of anyone coming in and the backs of their heads going out. The lobby camera had a narrow field of view that included the coffee shop and security booth, but only one of the elevators, the one used by visitors and patients with passes. Floor cameras viewed the nurses’ stations and hallways, and the one on the administration floor had wall-to-wall coverage.
Peterson signed the name Archie Marcuchie and printed a patient’s name, Lori Campbell, from one of the names someone had visited earlier.
The guard turned from watching the monitors. “It’s not that bad,” he said to Peterson. “Most of them appreciate the visit.”
Peterson forced a smile and followed the elderly couple into the elevator.
“I hope it doesn’t happen again,” the woman said to her husband.
“It won’t,” her husband assured her. Then to Peterson, “There was a lockdown during our last visit. We couldn’t leave the social room for almost an hour.”
The elevator door opened on a female security guard sitting at a small metal desk beside a locked door that required a magnetic key card to open. There was another log book to sign. Then the guard lifted a stick with a magnetic card taped to one end and touched it to the keypad to buzz open the door.
The three entered. Nurses’ station to the left, padded room to the right, and a long hallway straight ahead with a cuckoo’s nest of teens in various stages of dress and undress pacing the floor or hanging out in doorways on either side of the hall, making friendly or goofing off. A few patients remained in their rooms, curled on their beds, facing the wall.
Peterson stood at the nurses’ station watching the show. His attention was drawn to a girl with a tomboy look and a side-mouth irritation. The girl could have been his daughter, with glassy eyes and a face full of bad mood.
The elderly woman watched him watching. Followed his eyes to the tomboy. “You really don’t know what will come of it,” she said by way of encouragement. “But it’s worth the risk.”
Peterson shot her a look that bordered on panic. Then he turned back to the door, caught the security guard’s eye, and nodded that he wanted out.
“Short visit,” the guard said.
“Yeah,” Peterson said and pressed the black button for the staff elevator.
“That one’s for staff,” the guard said. “You need a special key to go down.” She pointed to the elevator nearest her. “This one goes to the lobby.”
“The patients can’t go upstairs?” Peterson asked.
“A pass or a phone call from one of the doctors will get them up, but they have to sign out.”
“And they can’t go to the lobby on their own?”
The guard nodded. “They can if they have a pass.”
By 7:30 p.m., fog had rolled in from the harbour mouth and a light rain had started to fall, blurring the windshield and forcing him to keep the engine running and the wipers going. From a community college parking lot across a busy four-lane, Peterson was watching Stoddard. Most of the administration staff had filed out of the hospital and into their cars hours ago. He raised his binoculars and squinted through the blur at the remaining three office lights on the fifth floor. By the cars still parked in the administration lot, these office lights belonged to Dr. Barbara Coughlin, Dr. Hamlin, and Dr. Bettis.
Peterson waited. Passed the time raising the binoculars and lowering them. His mouth was dry and his nerves strained by weighing duty against the thought of doing two to six for break and enter, being a former cop in medium security where other inmates would make sure he did hard time. He thirsted for some courage, but he held back from reaching for the mickey in the glove box. Anxious to get doing. Thinking it through. Thinking about what he was after and why.
His cell phone sounded. He dropped his head back and rolled his eyes. Then he answered the phone and opened the image he hated to see. Same unmade bed in the same filthy room. A dirty needle on the floor.
His stared at the hospital across the four-lane so as not to look at the image on his phone. Then he did.
After a long moment of silence, he said, “We’re living it the same way, Katy. Getting even. That’s what it is. I doubt it’s what we wanted for a life. I doubt we’d stand in line for the chance to live like this. But this is what we’re doing. Probably because of who I am. Not much of a father. I know I wasn’t much good for your mother. But what about you, what you’re doing to yourself? That’s what matters now. That’s what really matters. Your life. It matters to me. Oh Christ, Katy, it matters to me!”
The image disappeared as the connection broke. He kept talking to the blank screen. “I missed your growing up. I missed it all. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t … It doesn’t mean that. I just … I couldn’t let it go. And I couldn’t bring it home. What I lived on the street didn’t wash out.”
He swallowed hard and turned his head to the hospital. “I still can’t let it go. Twenty-something years on the job and I’m sweating it, and for what? What?”
He shut the phone off and shoved it into his jacket pocket. Waited some more, then, when there were only forty minutes of visiting hours left, one of the three remaining office lights snapped out. He scoped the front door, timing the elevator on the two-minute clock in his head, and saw Bettis exit the building and walk across the lot to his car.
Hamlin and Coughlin’s cars were still in the lot. Peterson watched for a few minutes more. He couldn’t wait. Not with the edge starting to blunt and his deep unwillingness to drink it back. He decided to chance it and swung the car from the community college lot and across the four-lane to the service road behind Stoddard. He parked and reached into the back seat for a small shoulder bag. He checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes to get in and out under the cover of visiting some messed-up teen.
His shoes and
pant bottoms got wet as he negotiated a small hedge, passed through a thin stand of birch, and came up the side of the hospital, out of view of the camera on the parking lot. As he entered, he hid from the front door camera by pretending to wave to someone standing outside the coffee shop. Then he angled to a quarter profile for the lobby camera as he walked to the security booth to sign in. He used the same names for himself and for the patient that he had used earlier.
The guard from earlier in the day must have been pulling the second half of a split shift. Coffee’d out. Eyes working the monitors and not the incoming visitors.
Peterson kept his head low and stepped to the elevators, outside the guard’s view and into the camera’s blind spot. With key in hand, he pressed for the staff elevator. The doors opened immediately and he slipped in without the guard ever looking his way. He inserted the key, pressed five, and pulled out a white lab coat from the shoulder bag. He quickly put it on over his green jacket.
The fifth floor hallway was ablaze in fluorescent light. The offices along the front of the building were dark, except for the two at either end, Hamlin’s and Coughlin’s.
He took his time walking down the hallway, reading the nameplates on the office doors. He had his lock pick in hand like it was a key. But when he tried the door to Bettis’s office, he found it unlocked. He slipped in, closed the door, and clicked on a small LED flashlight. He cross-beamed the room. Ikea wall-to-wall. Desk and two chairs, credenza, file cabinet. Two abstract paintings on the wall facing the desk. Peterson made no effort to figure them out. Diplomas and medical certificates on the wall behind the desk above the credenza. He didn’t bother to read them either. But he did take a close look at a large photo of a two-masted sloop under sail on the open water, and another of the same sloop, Bettis at the wheel, beaming, right hand cocked in a proud salute to camera. A third photo featured the sloop at anchor against a brilliant sunset, its name a stand out on the stern — Jelly Fish.
The desk was more a workstation with a cheap veneer top set on solid legs. An iMac was on top, twenty-seven-inch screen. The desk had a drop-down shelf in the centre for a keyboard and mouse.
Peterson pulled out the shelf and hit the power button at the back of the computer. The single tone of the iMac turning on sounded loud enough to raise the dead. He waited for the computer to load and run its opening sequence. Then a prompt window appeared, asking for a password.
Disappointed, he crossed the room to the three-drawer file cabinet and slowly pulled open the top drawer, looking for what was more his speed — paper files. The drawer was crammed with folders organized by year, but they all dated back to before Bettis’s tenure at Stoddard. He started on the middle drawer, then stopped and went back to the iMac.
He remembered how he and most other cops worked the passwords to access department files, which had to be changed every week by order of internal security. Random combinations of numbers and letters that most cops couldn’t remember. So they wrote the passwords on Post-It notes or masking tape they stuck on the backs of computers or the undersides of keyboards.
Bettis wasn’t even that clever. Surgical tape on the front edge of the keyboard shelf bore an eight-digit number. Peterson entered it and the hard drive was at his command.
He clicked the Document icon in Finder and scrolled down the folder list: office schedules, hospital committees. One named “patients.” He opened it and second from the top of file names was Tiffany Banks. “Goddamn,” he muttered, now knowing for sure someone had pulled her file from administration records.
He read it quickly, paraphrasing the clinical jargon in his head: A twenty-year-old runaway jungled up in a crack house was flamed out and baby talking on the street until she faced a strung-out moment of good sense and walked into Stoddard on her own.
Next came a lot of psychological mumbo jumbo that Peterson reworded as well: a mentally fragile young woman who was desperate for affection and prone to long bouts of depression. She had responded positively to antidepressants and psychiatric counselling, and she was discharged to continue counselling as an outpatient under the care of Dr. Karl Bettis.
Peterson pulled out the flash drive Danny had given him and inserted it into a USB port. Then he copied Tiffany Banks’s file to the flash drive.
He scrolled down to the file for Michelle MacKinnon. A crackhead squeegee kid living on the street until a good cop wrangled her into social services, which signed her into Stoddard for thirty days of observation. He copied Mickey Mac’s file to the flash drive.
Then he pulled the scroll bar to the bottom and found a patient’s file without a name. It read pretty much the way Bettis had described Molly’s condition when Peterson and Danny had interviewed the executive staff in the boardroom. He copied it as well.
He scrolled back through the files, looking for a title that stood out. A word that rubbed him the wrong way. A highlight. Bold lettering. Something unusual. A personal reference. Something private. He found nothing.
He ejected the flash drive then settled the flashlight beam on the credenza. He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until visiting hours were over.
The credenza housed a single drawer and open shelves holding a scanner, printer, medical journals, and a few medical texts. He played the light over the titles, then opened the drawer. Inside were two rows of DVDs, each with a patient’s name. They were in alphabetical order. He pulled the one for Tiffany Banks and set it aside, more proof she had been a patient of Karl Bettis. He found the one for Mickey Mac and pulled that too. He did not find one with no name.
Half a dozen flash drives were scattered in the space behind the DVDs. Not labelled. He selected one and slotted it in the iMac. Double clicked the video titled “Med. Conv. ’12” and hit play. Ten seconds and he knew what it was, the keynote speaker at a medical convention moaning about the urgent need for government commitment to programs for mental health.
Peterson tried another flash drive. Different year, more of the same. He was digging for a third when he noticed an external hard drive on its edge at the back of the drawer. He set it on the desk beside the iMac and connected them with the USB cable from the scanner in the credenza.
He clicked the hard drive icon and entered the same eight digit number written on the surgical tape. It was incorrect. He squeezed a curse through his teeth. Stared at the hard drive as though daring it to show him what was hidden inside.
An office door opened and closed. Peterson cupped the flashlight and listened hard as someone walked to the elevator and waited. Then the elevator door opened and closed. From the sound of their voices, a teenaged girl and a woman greeted each other, then walked down the hallway and stopped outside Bettis’s door.
“Do you want a Coke or something before we start?” the woman asked.
“I’m good,” the teenager said.
The consulting room was directly across from Bettis’s office, and now the door to it opened and they went inside.
Peterson listened. He checked his watch. Five minutes to closing. He shut down the iMac and tucked the two DVDs and the external hard drive into the shoulder bag. He cross-beamed the office for anything left out of place then listened at the door. Just voices coming from the consulting room. He exited Bettis’s office and nonchalantly walked to the staff elevator. Once inside, he removed the white coat and stuffed it into the shoulder bag. He used the elevator key to override stops at the other floors, reached the lobby, and joined a young woman and two teens at the security booth to sign out. He used them to block the lobby camera as he made for the main door.
The rain had stopped and the parking lot was glazed with light. He stood for a moment in the portico, heaved a big breath, and retraced his steps along the side of the building and through the hedge to the service road where he’d parked.
The first thing he noticed was the broken window on the driver’s side. Then the dark sedan parked across the service road, bloc
king his way out. Then Andy Miles stepping from the shadows and around the dark sedan. Walking forward. Dark jacket and a Blue Jays ball cap.
“What’s in the bag, Peterson?” Miles demanded.
“Dirty laundry,” Peterson said, changing shoulders with the bag so his right hand hung close to the pocket with the Colt Automatic.
“Drop the bag and I’ll save you the cleaning bill.” Miles narrowed the gap between them.
“It seems you clean up a lot of things,” Peterson said.
“Maybe I don’t like a mess.”
“Your friends do.”
Miles sneered. “Then it’s a good thing it’s me here and not them.”
“Otherwise what? Choking a gun barrel like Teabag and the girl? Or stretched between two trees like Terry Sylvester?”
“Either way turns out bad for you,” Miles said. He reached behind his back and his hand came out with a 9mm Sig Sauer. “So put the bag down and back off,” Miles ordered.
Peterson didn’t move.
“You said yourself, you’re a certified screwball,” Miles said. “I caught you sneaking from Stoddard and you went berserk.” He stepped closer. They were five feet apart.
Peterson pointed his chin at the pistol. “One shot fired from department issue brings down a whole lot of investigation.”
Miles snickered. “Like you said, I’m good at cleaning things up. Now drop the bag.”
Peterson held the bag out between them, reaching deep inside for the nerve to keep his arm steady and not show the fear that was churning his guts. “You want it?”
Miles hesitated. “Just drop it, and we both go home.”
“I hate going home,” Peterson said. He dropped the bag and kicked it at Miles’s feet.
Miles quickly stepped back, slipped on the wet road, and, as he did, Peterson lunged and grabbed the Sig in his left hand. He quickly reset his feet to throw a punch and landed a crunching right cross to the side of Miles’s head. Miles buckled but held the gun tight. Out of shape but strong as an ox, turning Peterson’s hand and the gun to point at Peterson.