by Chris Mooney
Her phone rang again. The caller was Tim Bryson.
'We've catalogued the security DVDs. Care to guess which ones are missing?'
'The ones from the day Emma Hale disappeared to the day her body was found,' Darby said.
'You got it. I vote we put people on Hale and see if Fletcher shows up.'
'I saw the security tape. If Fletcher is working for Hale, why did he sneak inside?'
'I don't know. Maybe he isn't. Maybe Fletcher is going to try and approach Hale, or maybe he's simply acting alone. All I'm saying is that we should cover all the bases.'
'I agree. You think the commissioner will go for it?'
'That's the next hurdle. What do you have on your end?'
Darby told him about the latent print found on Judith Chen's forehead and the matching print recovered from Hale's jewellery drawer handle.
She hung up and turned her attention back to the laptop. The files saved in Microsoft Word contained homework assignments and several essays for an English composition class.
There was a small folder holding digital photographs of Chen with what appeared to be her family and female friends. There were several photos of her with the dog and a white cat with black fur around its eye and chin.
Darby was examining Chen's internet search history when her phone rang again.
'Good afternoon, Dr McCormick.'
It was the intruder, the man with the strange eyes, Malcolm Fletcher.
27
'I didn't think I'd hear from you again,' Darby said, wondering how Malcolm Fletcher had got her number.
'I want to talk to you about the man who killed Emma Hale.'
'Do you know something?'
'I might.'
'And why do you want to share this information with me?'
'If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.'
'Another quote by Shaw?'
'Very good. I thought your generation had abandoned reading. What do you know about Themistocles?'
'He was an Athenian political leader.'
'Impressive,' Fletcher said. 'Themistocles led his people to victory over the Persians and was later banished by the same people he saved.'
'You've lost me.'
'In the end, it always comes down to a matter of degrees – how far you are willing to go, how far you're willing to push your way through the dark. I shouldn't have to warn you, of all people, that the truth is, more often than not, a terrible burden. You may want to give that some thought.'
'What are you suggesting?'
'I'm extending an invitation to meet the man who killed Emma Hale and Judith Chen.'
'How do you know the same man killed Hale and Chen?'
'Judith Chen was shot in the back of the head, like Emma Hale – at least that's what the papers are reporting. Are the cases connected, Dr McCormick? Or may I call you Darby? After reading so much about you, I feel as though I know you.'
'What should I call you?'
'Think of me as your secret friend.'
'How about you tell me your first name?'
'What would you like to call me?'
'How does the name Mephisto sound?'
A quiet laugh. 'Are you worried I'm going to hurt you?' Fletcher asked.
'The thought had crossed my mind.'
'I didn't hurt you last night.'
'Hard to do when you have a gun pointed at you.'
'I suggest a private meeting at the Sinclair Mental Health Facility in Danvers. I'll contact you in two hours.'
'And if I say no?'
'Then I wish you the best of luck finding the man who killed Judith Chen and the other women. I have no doubt of your abilities. You're certainly much more dedicated, and considerably brighter, than Detective Bryson. He should have discovered the missing necklace months ago.'
Click. Malcolm Fletcher was gone.
Darby called Tim Bryson. She filled him in on her conversation. Bryson listened without interrupting.
'I don't understand why he wants you to go to Sinclair,' Bryson said after she finished. 'The place has been abandoned for, Christ, it must be at least thirty years now.'
'I've never heard of Sinclair.'
'Before your time, I guess. The hospital was built sometime in the late eighteenth century. It was used as an asylum for the criminally insane. In the seventies, a private company took it over for a bit, and then it went back to being a state-run hospital. It's going to be torn down next spring to make way for condos, I think.'
'Fletcher said, "I wish you luck finding the man who killed Judith Chen and the other women." Maybe he knows something about another victim, someone we haven't found.'
'I think he's jerking your chain.'
'He knows about the missing necklace.'
Bryson didn't answer.
'The only evidence we have at the moment is an unidentified latent fingerprint,' Darby said.
'You haven't examined Chen's clothing yet.'
'Which is going to have to wait until Monday. I don't want to spend Sunday sitting around with my thumb stuck up my ass.'
'I don't suppose I can talk you out of this.'
'I want to know why Fletcher called.'
'I'll meet you at the hospital,' Bryson said. 'And I'm going to bring backup, just in case.'
28
Danvers, located north of Boston, was an hour's drive from the city. Darby used the Mustang's GPS navigation system. She took Route One North and made good time until she hit the mall traffic in Saugus. She ducked and weaved her way through the lanes, and when the traffic finally broke free close to Lynn, she tore up the highway.
Access to the hospital was through a single road, long and steep, that twisted its way through the woods. A beat-up Ford truck was parked at the bottom. Painted on the side panel were the words 'Reed Associates'.
The man sitting behind the wheel was a young Italian kid with a smooth, dark face and black hair spiked up with a lot of gel. A diamond earring and two gold hoops were in his left ear. He closed his Maxim magazine when Darby knocked on the window.
'I want to take a look around the hospital,' she said, showing him her laminated ID.
'You guys having a convention here or something? You're the second cop who's asked for a tour.'
'Someone else has been here recently?'
'This afternoon,' the security man said. 'Mr Reed gave him a tour.'
'Did this cop leave his name?'
'I have no idea. I didn't talk to him. Chucky did. I came down here to relieve Chucky of his shift. By that time, the dude was already talking to Mr Reed.'
'What did he look like?'
'Let's see… He was tall, at least six feet or so, black hair. He seemed pretty dressed up, nice shoes and stuff. He drove a Jag. Pay must be nice in Boston, huh?'
'He drove a Jaguar?'
'Yeah, a black one, real nice. It's one of the new models.'
'How can you tell?'
'I checked it out when he was up there with Mr Reed. I have a thing for nice cars. I own a Beemer.'
'Is Mr Reed here?'
'Yeah, he's up at the top somewhere.'
'I need to speak with him.'
'Hold on.' The security guard picked up a walkie-talkie. 'Mr Reed's on his way down.'
'What's your name?' Darby asked.
'Kevin Salustro.'
'Did you happen to see the Jag's licence plate?'
'No.'
'After I'm done with Mr Reed, I'm going to come back and ask you a few questions. While you're waiting, I want you to write down everything you remember about this cop including what you saw inside his car.'
'Like I said, I only caught a glimpse of him.'
'Just write down what you remember. You got a pen and paper?'
'No.'
'I'll get it for you,' Darby said. Bryson arrived half an hour later, along with a van containing six cops. It was after six and the evening sky was pitch black.
Nathan Reed, the owner of Reed Associ
ates, the company that provided security for the hospital, was a tall, wiry man with crooked yellow teeth and fingers stained by nicotine. Darby guessed the man was somewhere in his sixties. He wore a check flannel jacket and an orange hunting cap with fur flaps that covered his ears.
'It was the oddest thing, this cop showing up here out of the blue,' Reed told them. They were standing at the bottom of the hill, their backs to the wind. 'He spoke to one of my guys, Chucky, and I just happened to be here, so Chucky got on the horn and called me. We can't have anyone wandering through the hospital without an escort for liability reasons.'
'How did you know he was a cop?' Darby asked.
'He showed me his badge.'
'What was his name?'
'I don't know. He didn't tell me.'
'Did you ask?'
'No, ma'am, I didn't. Cop comes knocking, you do what you're told and don't ask too many questions.'
'Did he have an accent?'
'As a matter of fact he did. British or something,' Reed said. 'He showed me his badge and said he needed to get inside and take a look around the C wing. I told him the place had been cleaned out – there's nothing up there. He said he wanted to take a look so I took him up.'
'Mr Reed, this is going to sound like an odd question, but did you see his eyes?'
'His eyes?'
'Did you notice what colour they were?'
'Haven't the foggiest,' Reed said. 'He was wearing sunglasses. I don't mean to be a Nosy Nelly, but why are you asking me all these questions? Don't you know why he was here? I assume you people work together.'
'This cop you met, we don't know who he is,' Darby said. He sure as hell sounded like Malcolm Fletcher. The description was dead-on. 'Anything you can tell us will be extremely helpful.'
Reed cupped his hand over a lighter and lit a cigarette. 'You ever see that Clint Eastwood movie High Plains Drifter?'
'Several times,' Darby said.
'This guy gave off that same type of menace. You know, do exactly what I ask or there'll be hell to pay. That's why I didn't ask any questions. I took him up there to C wing and let him look around for a bit. Truth be told, I was glad when he left.'
'What time did he leave?'
Reed thought it over for a moment. 'Around four, I'd say.'
'Did he find anything up there?'
'No. Like I said, there's nothing up there. The whole place has been cleaned out. I took him to C wing, he looked around for a bit, then he thanked me and left.'
'He specifically asked you to take him to the C wing,' Darby said.
'Yes ma'am. C wing's the place where they once housed the violent offenders, the real nasty ones like Johnny Barber. You remember him?'
'Can't say that I do.'
Reed took a long drag off his cigarette. 'Johnny Barber – his real name was Johnny Edwards or something – Johnny was a serial rapist back in the early sixties. Worked at a barber shop and cut up women's faces with a straight-edge razor – hence the name. Court found him guilty by reason of insanity so he was shipped off here.' He pointed his thumb to the long road winding its way through the woods. 'Turns out he was also a great artist. They hung some of his paintings on the walls, and I've got to say, they were pretty damn impressive. Then he attacked a doctor – tried to stab him with a paintbrush of all things – so they took his art supplies away and you know what the crazy son of a bitch did? He started using his own turds as crayons. The pictures weren't that bad. Smelled horrible though.' Reed's laugh echoed over the wind.
'I need you to show me where this cop went,' Darby said.
Reed flicked his cigarette into the woods. 'I managed to plough out the main road here before my truck shit the bed, but the top of the campus is a mess,' he said. 'I hope you two are in the mood for some exercise 'cause we got a lot of walking to do.'
29
Bryson already had a flashlight. Darby grabbed the spare she kept in the trunk of her car and then followed Reed, along with Bryson and the six other men, up the steep access road.
A slick layer of ice covered the pavement. She walked carefully, watching each step. The hill, bordered with pine trees, their branches weighed down with heavy, wet snow, seemed to stretch for miles with no end in sight.
'The campus is in the process of being torn down,' Reed said, his breath pluming in the cold air. 'I told your cop friend the same thing. There's nothing in there, nothing at all. The whole place has been cleared out.'
'When did the hospital close?' Darby asked.
'An electrical fire in the morgue gutted the Mason wing back in eighty-two. The lackeys on Beacon Hill decided it was too expensive to fix – the hospital is over two hundred years old – and with the statewide budget cuts in mental health, the hospital closed the following year.'
'There's a morgue in this building?'
'At one point in time, this place was a research hospital. When a patient died, the doctors would study their brains – this was back at the turn of the century when such things were allowed. Anyway, after the fire happened, the place shut down permanently – lack of funding and all that. I can't say I disagree with the decision. It would have cost a pretty penny to fix this place up.'
Darby nodded, not really listening, her focus turned inward on Malcolm Fletcher. What was his interest in an abandoned hospital? If he was, in fact, looking for something, why didn't he sneak in? Maybe he couldn't find another way in and decided to ask Reed for help.
When they reached the top of the hill, Darby was out of breath, her legs shaking with fatigue. Reed lit another cigarette.
The Sinclair Mental Health Facility, a massive Gothic structure of ancient brick and barred windows, was set around a wide courtyard holding the remains of a water fountain and several trees which were probably even older than the hospital. Some of the stained-glass windows were still intact.
'That there's the Kirkland building,' Reed said. 'Place is over two hundred years old.'
Darby had never seen anything so massive in both size and length. Going in there one could get lost. Forever.
'How big is this place?'
'About four hundred thousand square feet,' Reed said. 'There are eighteen floors not including the basement, which is a maze in and of itself. Kirkland is divided into two wings – Gable and Mason. You can't go inside Mason. The floors are pretty much rotted away, and the fire did a lot of damage, so we had the place sealed off back in eighty-nine. In another few months, everything you see here will be gone to make room for condos. Truth be told, I'm a little sad. This building's a historic landmark, the last of its kind. See those two buildings to your far left? Those used to be the tuberculosis buildings. They had one for male patients, one for female. There's a lot of history here.'
Darby waded through knee-high snow covering the courtyard. The place had the look and feel of a New England college campus from the early fifties – quaint and secluded, a sprawling mass of brick buildings tucked inside a heavily wooded area sitting on top of a hill overlooking Boston, eighteen miles to the south.
'Kirkland's become sort of a local tourist attraction ever since that movie Creepers came out,' Reed said. 'You see it?'
Darby shook her head. She was not a fan of horror movies any more. They hit too close to home.
'The Morrell book was much better,' Reed said. 'The story's about a group of urban explorers known as creepers who break into old historic buildings. The movie producers used the hospital as a location. We've had to increase security over the past five years. We have guards posted around the property twenty-four hours a day. Majority of people we arrest are teenagers and college students looking for a spot to drink and get high and screw, if you can believe it.'
Reed took out his keys and walked up the stairs to the main doors. The glass behind the steel security grate was cracked.
'You brought him through the front door?' Darby asked.
'Yes ma'am.'
'Is this the only way you can access the hospital?'
'The front door
is the safest way to enter the hospital,' Reed said. 'There are some other entrances through the basement ducts and some old tunnels that lead out into different parts of the property, but half of 'em have collapsed or are about to. You try and go in that way, you're risking your life. That's why we got all this security around here. Place is a liability. Back in ninety-one, some asshole broke into the property, fell and cracked his head open. He sued and won a nice little settlement for himself. If you saw the legal bills, your head would spin.'
Beyond the front door was a hallway that opened up into a large, rectangular-shaped room stripped clean of its furniture. There was nothing in here but bare floors and walls covered with flecks of chipped white paint.
'This used to be the reception area,' Reed said. 'Grab a hardhat from that box over there. You two don't scare easily, do you?'
'If he gets scared, I'll hold his hand,' Darby said, glancing to Bryson. Tim didn't hear the comment. He was moving the beam of his flashlight around the room.
'This one time, I took a group of ghost hunters through here for some TV show,' Reed said. 'They were carrying these weird gadgets that looked like props from that movie Ghostbusters. One of them thought they saw a ghost and the stupid son of a bitch ran away screaming and fell through a hole and fractured his foot. Stay behind me and watch your step.'
30
The adjoining room was as long and wide as a football field, with a vaulted ceiling and mouldy, water-stained wallpaper printed with tiny red and blue roses. The back wall had custom-made picture windows, many of which were broken or missing. The linoleum floor was covered in snow and patches of melting ice.
'This used to be the main dining room,' Reed said. 'Back in the forties, they had professional chefs that cooked all this fancy food. Brought in lobsters during the summer, had these big cookouts for the patients on the front lawn – there used to be a small golf course here, too, believe it or not. I wouldn't have minded staying here during those days. Place sounds like a resort. How much you know about Sinclair?'