The Laughterhouse: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  The door swings open.

  He’s never met Dr. Stanton, but he’s seen pictures from the trial seventeen years ago, when Stanton got up on his soapbox and said not everybody can be held accountable for their actions. He was wrong. He’s put on weight and his hair has gone completely gray and receded a few inches since then, and for some reason it makes Caleb happy to see that.

  Stanton looks him up and down, sees the blood, and looks shocked. “Where is she?” he asks.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” Caleb asks.

  Stanton is halfway out the door and comes to a stop. He can tell the doctor senses something, his psychiatrist radar starts pinging at the danger only a few feet away, only it’s pinging way too late.

  “Recognize you? No, no I don’t,” he answers, hesitant now. “Do you . . . do you have a daughter?” he asks, his follow-up question proof he knows that something is wrong.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She died.”

  Stanton pauses. He takes a small step backward. He reaches out to put a hand on the door. “What did you say your name is again?”

  “I said it was James,” he says, “but it isn’t.”

  “Listen, James,” Stanton says, missing the point while taking another step back, “I don’t know what kind of game you’re . . .”

  The sentence ends, the following word taking a different shape as Caleb’s fist connects with Stanton’s nose. Then he falls inside, cupping his face with his hands.

  Caleb follows the good doctor inside and shuts the door behind him. He tries to shake the pain out of his hand. He’s used his right when he should have used his left, instinct taking over, and now he has to pay for it. His hand is locked in a fist and it’s going to take a few moments to straighten. He puts his foot into the doctor’s stomach. He uses his good hand to reach into the waistband of his pants and pulls out his knife just as the doctor hits the floor. He looks around, they are in a foyer that leads through to a lounge to the left and what might be a living room ahead. To the right is a staircase. There is nobody around.

  “You see this?”

  “You roke I ose,” Stanton says, looking out from behind his cupped hands.

  “I’m going to break the rest of you if you don’t stop complaining. Where is your wife?”

  “What?”

  “Your wife. Is she in bed?”

  “Oh.”

  “What?”

  “Ooh are you?”

  “Roll over,” Caleb says, annoyed at how complicated this is becoming. “If you don’t I’m going to bury this knife right into your chest. Then I’m going to do the same thing to your kids.”

  “Dote urt I chil-den.”

  Shit. He doesn’t have time for this. The wife could already be on the phone to the police. He brings the knife down as hard as he can, the doctor flinches but can’t escape what happens next—the handle crashes into his head and makes him go quiet for what should be quite some time.

  “Daddy?”

  The voice comes from upstairs. He tucks the knife into the back of his pants and makes his way to the stairs. There’s a girl standing at the top, a little girl with messy brown hair hanging to her shoulders. She’s wearing pink pajamas and there’s a teddy bear tucked under one arm, the finger of her other hand in her mouth as she bites down on it. Her eyes are wide and her face is pale. He makes his way toward her.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  He glances at Stanton in the hall and decides the girl can’t see her father from there.

  “It’s okay,” he says, using his calm voice now, but he can tell she doesn’t think so. He can tell she’s about to scream. “Really, it’s okay,” he says, and sure enough her mouth opens but when she tries to scream, she sobs instead and the scream gets caught. He closes the distance between them. He crouches in front of her so he can look her in the face, one hand on her mouth, one hand on her chest, pushing her against the wall, the bear being crushed in the process. She’s struggling to sob around his hand and he’s careful not to cut her. He feels confused as he looks at her. He needs to feel nothing, otherwise none of this would work, but he’s feeling something.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. I’m an old friend of your dad’s. Where is your mother?”

  The little girl shakes her head.

  “I need you to help me out, because I’m trying to help your parents,” he says. “If I take my hand away from your mouth do you promise not to scream and talk to me like a grown-up?”

  She nods. He takes his hand away from her mouth, ready to replace it in a second if she screams, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything either. Doesn’t shake her head or nod.

  “Your name is Katy, isn’t it?”

  “With a y,” she says.

  “And how old are you, Katy?”

  “I’m nine years old next week.”

  “Wow, so you’re going to be a big girl.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Caleb,” he says. “I know your dad.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s downstairs waiting for us. Where is your mommy? Is she in bed?”

  She nods.

  “Is she asleep?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mommy and daddy don’t love each other anymore, and mommy moved out to live with somebody she does love.”

  “But you said she was in bed.”

  “It’s late,” she says. “Everybody is in bed when it’s late.”

  “Do you live here all the time?” he asks.

  She nods.

  “You don’t live with your mom?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Okay, okay, right. Listen to me. I’m going to go on a trip with your dad,” he says, “and it wouldn’t be very responsible of us to leave you here with your sister, so we’re going to take you both with us. Now how about you show me where she is, huh? Good girls don’t get hurt if they do good things,” he tells her, but of course nothing could be further from the truth. “You don’t want to get hurt, do you?”

  She slowly shakes her head.

  “Okay, Katy with a y, why don’t you take me to your sister?”

  “Which one?”

  “What you mean which one?”

  “Which sister?”

  “Melanie, of course,” he says, but her question worries him. “Katy, how many sisters do you have?”

  “If you were friends with my dad, wouldn’t you know?”

  “I’ve been away for a long time, Katy, but how about you tell me?”

  “Two.”

  Two. Jesus, just how much did he get wrong? No wife, three daughters, what else?

  “Katy, are there any other adults in the house?”

  “No.”

  “No brothers?”

  She shakes her head. “You seem mean,” she says.

  “I’m not mean,” he tells her.

  “Are you going to hurt anybody?”

  “No,” he says. “Tell you what, you can make sure nobody gets hurt by making sure everything I say gets done. You can be my special helper.”

  “I don’t want to be a special helper,” she says.

  “Your older sister is Melanie,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “And the other sister? Is she younger or older?”

  “She’s only one,” she says.

  So he’s dealing with an eleven-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a one-year-old. He thinks about how it’s going to change the plan, and realizes it doesn’t. It might tweak how things are done, it’ll give him some more leverage with the doctor, but the end result is going to be the same.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Octavia. What about Dad? Are you going to be mean to him?”

  “Your dad did a bad thing,” he tells her.

  “My dad helps people.”

  “Some
times he helps the wrong people.”

  “What did he do?”

  “It’s a grown-up thing, Katy. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m grown up,” she says. “Remember? I’m talking to you like a grown-up would.”

  Despite the situation, despite the man bound on the floor and all the blood and the years in jail, he can’t help but smile. It feels good, for the first time he feels something, and it’s dangerous.

  “Maybe Dad can help you,” she says. “Are you one of his patients? Are you a crazy man?”

  His smile disappears. “No,” he tells her. “I’m a friendly man.”

  Her eyes narrow as she stares at him. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, the thing is, Katy, it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not, because you’re going to do what I say. If you don’t, you’re going to get in trouble, and the last thing I want is to see you or your sisters getting hurt because you wouldn’t do what I say,” he says, reaching into his pocket for the duct tape. “Now, how about you show me where they are,” he tells her, “before you make me mad,” he adds, and she shows him, not saying another word on the way.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  From out of nowhere the rain comes back. I have to increase the speed of the window wiper that works. It makes a strange grinding sound, making me worry it’s going to fly off the window and get lost in somebody’s front lawn, but then, just as quickly, the rain disappears again, just a thirty-second assault on the city. I have to drive carefully even though I have the urge to speed, scared that if I take my car over thirty miles per hour the engine will turn into a jigsaw puzzle. There are patrol cars and lots of vans with sleepy looking reporters beside them at the nursing home, and even though I managed to leave before Schroder he’s beaten me out here.

  Schroder is standing in the foyer next to Nurse Hamilton who, for the moment, looks nothing like Nurse Hamilton, but more like a woman wearing a Nurse Hamilton suit that’s been stuffed under a couch for the last twenty years. She starts to come over, then thinks better of it. Schroder leads me up the stairs to the second floor and in the opposite direction of Bridget, but I can’t follow him, not straightaway, not until I check on my wife. I head to her room and there is enough light from the hallway to see her sleeping peacefully.

  “She’s okay,” Schroder tells me. “What happened here has nothing to do with her.”

  I’m not sure what to tell him. I try to grab hold of my thoughts to calm them down—I want to move Bridget to another home. I want to hunt down the man who violated this place.

  “Come on, Theo, we’ve got work to do,” he says, holding up a thin file in front of me. “Look, I know you’re pissed off, but you need to focus on what’s relevant here, and what’s relevant is that Bridget hasn’t been hurt but somebody else has been, and we need to make it as right as we can for that person because that’s what we do.”

  I take a few seconds to listen to what he’s saying. I try to absorb it. I realize he’s right.

  “Theo, are we on the same page here?”

  “We are,” I tell him.

  “Good.” He turns around and I follow him into a part of the nursing home I haven’t been in before, but it looks the same as the rest of it—rubber plants potted along the corridors, landscape paintings, views from the windows out over the gardens. We pass rooms along the way, other patients in similar states to my wife, some in better shape as they turn and look toward us as we walk, others in worse shape, hoses and tubes connecting them to a form of artificial life.

  “Victoria Brown,” Schroder says. “She’s forty-nine years old, married, no children. She’s been here for seven years after being assaulted in a shopping mall bathroom. She had her head smacked into a sink and never woke up,” he says. “Never got the person who did it,” he adds.

  “There’s a lot of blood,” I say, stopping outside the room and looking in.

  “He stabbed her like he stabbed the first two.”

  “So whatever pissed our guy off happened at least seven years ago,” I say.

  “Has to be. I don’t see her making anybody angry since being here. And he must have been angry,” he says. “She put up no fight and he just kept stabbing her all the same.”

  “What did she do? Before the attack?”

  “Here’s the thing. She was a criminal lawyer.”

  A small chill rushes down my spine as a connection is made. “So that gives us two lawyers and one teacher and one accountant. He leave a message?”

  “It’s on her forehead. Same as the others. You were complicit.”

  “In what?”

  “In whatever made victim one not care enough and was or wasn’t worth it for victim two.”

  I look up and down the corridor. “And nobody heard or saw anything?”

  “No, and it’s not like the victim was making a sound.”

  “You talk to the husband?”

  “He’s dead. He killed himself a couple of years ago. Hung himself.”

  Does every story in this city have a bad ending? Does everybody have a sad tale?

  There are forensic experts inside and outside the room. There are plastic markers next to blood drops on the floor and bloody shoe tread prints that are dark near the body but lighten with every step until they disappear near the stairs. The dead woman’s arms are still by her side and there is no expression of horror on her face. Her eyes are closed, her face perfectly relaxed. It’s the first time either Schroder or myself have ever seen a murdered coma victim. Maybe it’s the first time anybody has. We’ve seen them get pregnant and contract diseases, but not this.

  “You okay?” Schroder asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I tell him.

  “You look like you could do with some air.”

  The handwriting across the dead woman’s forehead is a match for the others.

  “Two lawyers and one teacher and one accountant,” Schroder repeats.

  “Doesn’t seem like the setup to a joke anymore,” I tell him.

  “No. But it never did.” He pushes his hands into his back and stretches it out, his spine popping softly. I once saw a guy do that and throw out his back. “The staff say you were here earlier,” he says. “You didn’t see anything?”

  “I did see somebody walking with a bloody knife but didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

  “Hey, look, I’m just asking.”

  “I’d have told you. Who found her?”

  “One of the nurses was doing a routine check. She saw the bloody footprints and just figured one of the patients had had an accident. Followed them into here and started screaming. Woke up the other patients and brought the rest of the staff running. It’s pretty obvious these aren’t random victims,” he says. “Random doesn’t bring you into two retirement homes and one nursing home. Our killer is working from a list. Question is, how many people are on it?”

  It’s a good question. The room has a similar view over the grounds as my wife’s does, and the two women enjoyed it about the same. The layout is the same too, the bed in the center with walking room all the way around it for the nurses. There’s a vase full of flowers so fake they wouldn’t even have fooled the coma patients. There is not much emotion in this room, not until a madman came in here and filled it with rage.

  “Victim three doesn’t fit the list,” I say. “The killer went to a lot of effort to sneak in here and stab this woman lots of times and leave a message, he could have made the same effort for Brad Hayward. He could have waited for him in town by his car, or pulled up to him at a set of lights, or waited till the wife was asleep. He could even have tried to sneak into his workplace.”

  Tracey Walter steps into the room behind us. The medical examiner looks tired. She’s spent a long day examining the dead, and now she has to spend a long night cutting them open.

  “Let’s get this done,” she says in the way of a greeting. She puts her case on the floor and pulls out a thermometer with a skewer on it. I look away as she stabs it i
nto the woman somewhere around the liver, then look back to see her checking the temperature. She takes another look around the room as if figuring out how hot it is in here. She takes down some notes, seems to do some sums, then comes over.

  “Preliminary guess is death was ninety minutes ago,” she says, looking at her watch, “which puts death around two-thirty.”

  “I was here around eleven thirty, maybe quarter to twelve,” I say, thinking that things could easily have been different if I’d come here later, or if the killer had come here earlier. I could have been pulling in as he was leaving, or pulling out as he was arriving. I could have seen him, maybe I’d have gotten a sense of what was going on, maybe what was left of Victoria Brown could still be alive.

  “Body is fine to move,” Tracey says, and heads back down the corridor toward the stairs.

  “We’ve been running background checks on the victims,” Schroder says.

  “And?”

  “And speeding tickets are as bad as these people ever got.”

  Forensics takes over the scene. It’s time to go and see John Morgan, Brad Hayward’s boss. It’s already four o’clock. Schroder hands me a slip of paper with Morgan’s address. His handwriting was bad when I met him back at the academy, but it’s gotten worse over the years. The letters blend into a mess and he has to point out what he’s told me.

  “If it helps,” he says, walking with me past the bloody footprints that peter out the closer they get to the stairs, “I’m feeling the same thing you are.”

  “Which is?”

  “Helpless,” he says.

  “Not hopeless?”

  He shrugs. “Take your pick,” he says,

  I go to say goodbye to my wife before leaving. I enter her room and Bridget is standing by the window and the curtains are open. I flinch at the sight of her there, so much in fact that I have to take a step back to balance myself. “Bridget?” I say, and I wait for her to turn around and smile at me, only she doesn’t. I quickly cross the room, I take her hand and look into her face but she doesn’t see me, doesn’t react to my touch, she’s just staring out at the police cars in the parking lot, the red and blue lights reflecting off her skin.