The Secret Friend dm-2

by Chris Mooney

  'So we're talking limited distribution.'

  'I took the liberty of speaking to one of their sales reps this afternoon. Eli – that's the name of the sales rep I talked to, Eli Rothstein – he faxed me a list of doctors and clinics who sell the product in New England. I assumed you'd want to start there.'

  'You assumed correctly.'

  Woodbury handed her a sheet of paper.

  The list of New England doctors was surprisingly small. Shriners Burn Center was a major customer, as were the burn centres in Boston's two major hospitals, Beth Israel and Mass General. A handful of local dermatologists also prescribed the product. There were fewer than a dozen dermatologists in Rhode Island and New Hampshire that used Lycoprime.

  Boston hospitals and doctors' offices wouldn't release any patient files without a court order. Neil Joseph could get the court order, but it would take time. Darby checked her watch. It was coming up on 4 p.m. If Chadzynski asked for the court order, people would jump through hoops.

  Darby stood. 'This is amazing work, Keith. Thank you.'

  'I'm sorry it took so long.' Woodbury's expression turned serious. 'Hannah Givens… Do you think she's still alive?'

  'I hope so.' Darby said a quick prayer as she reached for Woodbury's phone to dial Chadzynski's number.

  74

  For the rest of the day Walter worked on his client websites. His thoughts kept drifting back to Hannah, trapped alone in the dark.

  Hannah had finally spoken to him and then the doorbell rang and he had panicked and now everything had turned to shit. Now Hannah thought he was a monster. He needed to figure out a way to fix this and start over.

  Walter went downstairs into the kitchen and found the phone book. The closest florist was in the next town, Newburyport. He called the number. The man who answered the phone said it was too late for a delivery, but the store was open until five. He thanked the man and hung up.

  Walter didn't like to leave his house. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, there was no need. Clothes, medicine, movies and books, even groceries, were delivered to his doorstep. The only time he left the house was to see Mary.

  Mary knew how lonely he was. She told him to be brave. He had prayed for months for strength. Then one day Mary told him to drive to Harvard Square. She didn't tell him why. It was a surprise, she said.

  Walter sat in his car and from behind the tinted windows watched the college students. It was spring, sunny and warm. He wished he could be outside, mingling with the crowds. If he got out of the car, people would see his face in the unforgiving light. People would stop and stare. Some would laugh.

  The piercing loneliness Walter had felt for as long as he could remember stirred inside him, awakened, and then disappeared, replaced by Mary's love. His Blessed Mother told him he was beautiful and made him look to his left.

  A sexy woman with long blonde hair was crossing the street, heading in his direction. She wore heels, a short skirt and a tight-fitting shirt. Her face was flawless. Men were eyeing her, turning their heads to watch, and she knew it. She was the most beautiful woman Walter had ever seen.

  This is my gift to you, Mary had said. The spirit of the Blessed Mother moving through him, Walter started the car and followed the woman he would come to know as Emma Hale. Mary said Emma was a special woman. In time, Emma would grow to love him. Mary told him what to do.

  He had tried everything to make Emma love him, and when that failed, Mary told him to drive back to Boston and introduced him to Judith Chen.

  Now Walter had Hannah and she refused to speak. He needed to make it right. He grabbed his car keys and headed out.

  The heavyset man working behind the counter and a young woman doing floral arrangements stared when he opened the door, tracked him as he walked to the refrigeration unit and examined the roses. Walter could feel their gazes, as hot as fire, on his neck.

  He decided to go with a colourful bouquet of mixed flowers. A chime as the door opened behind him. Flowers in hand, Walter turned and saw a boy no older than five standing in the aisle.

  'Are you a good monster?' the boy asked.

  The boy's face became a great, bright white blur, like a star staring down on him from space.

  Walter put his hand inside his pocket and gripped the small statue. His Blessed Mother shrouded him with her love.

  'I'm not scared of monsters,' the boy said. 'My daddy reads me a book every night about the monsters that live inside my closet. They're not scary. You just have to be nice to them.'

  The boy's mother apologized and whisked him away. The man behind the counter smiled thinly as he wrapped the flowers. Walter thought of Hannah while he waited, remembered her skin, so warm and soft, pressed against his scarred body.

  When he arrived home, Walter immediately went downstairs. First he turned on the electricity for Hannah's room. Then he placed the flowers inside the rolling food carrier, pushed them through and looked through the peephole. Hannah lay in her bed. Her back was to the door.

  'I brought you a gift,' Walter said.

  Hannah didn't answer, didn't move.

  'Hannah, can you hear me?'

  She didn't speak.

  'I was hoping we could talk.'

  No answer.

  'Hannah, please… say something.'

  No answer.

  'If you want to eat, you need to talk to me.'

  Walter waited. Minutes passed. She wouldn't speak.

  Walter stormed upstairs and paced around the kitchen, hands shaking. When he'd calmed down, he went to the closet to pray to Mary for guidance.

  His Blessed Mother's voice was faint; he could barely hear her. Mary's voice grew fainter, as though she was dying, and finally she stopped talking.

  He needed to go to Sinclair. He needed to pray in front of Mary – the real, true Mary, the one who had saved him. He needed to get down on his knees, press his head against the chapel floor and with his hands clasped together and tucked against his stomach, pray until his Blessed Mother spoke and told him what to do.

  75

  'I don't believe Sam Dingle killed Hale and Chen,' Darby said in greeting.

  Commissioner Chadzynski sipped coffee from a fancy china cup. She was wearing a sharp Chanel suit. The lights in her office were dimmed. A radio set up on a bookcase played soft jazz music.

  Darby gripped the back of a chair and leaned forward as she spoke. 'Dingle's sister said he left New England after his release from Sinclair. Then he came back once to collect his portion of the sale of his parents' estate, and while he was here he abducted Jennifer Sanders and brought her to that room next to the chapel, where he raped and eventually strangled her to death.

  'Now, twenty-something years later, Fletcher wants us to believe Dingle's come back to his original hunting ground, only instead of strangling and raping women, Dingle is now abducting female college students, keeping them for weeks before shooting them in the back of the head and dumping their bodies with a statue of the Virgin Mary in their pockets. I'm not buying it.'

  'Tell me why,' Chadzynski said.

  'Margaret Anderson and Paula Kelly were strangled and dumped along the road like trash. Jennifer Sanders was strangled, raped and tortured and left to die. Emma Hale was kept alive for six months. Judith Chen was kept alive for several weeks. We also know that at some point the killer went back into Emma Hale's home to retrieve her necklace. In addition to being a considerable risk – he could have been easily caught – it shows a remarkable degree of empathy, even love.'

  'From my understanding, serial killers evolve. Isn't it possible Dingle -'

  'Strangling someone is an intimate, sexual act,' Darby said. 'Hale and Chen weren't strangled. They were shot in the back of the head. The first method is intimate, the second distant. Shooting the victims in the back of the head suggests the killer felt shame at having to kill them. A psychopath doesn't evolve into a killer who develops empathy for his victims. Dingle may very well have murdered Anderson, Kelly, and Sanders, but I don'
t believe he killed Hale and Chen. I believe we're dealing with a distinctly different killer.'

  'I just got off the phone with the Saugus detective in charge of the Anderson and Kelly cases,' Chadzynski said. 'He's retired now, but he remembers management brought in a profiler to help build the cases against Dingle – Malcolm Fletcher. He supposedly visited Dingle at Sinclair.'

  'Bryson believed that Fletcher was trying to throw us off the scent.'

  'Tim also lied to us. I heard a copy of his confession. There may be some truth to it.'

  'Fletcher called me again.' Darby told the commissioner about the phone call. 'I think Dingle is a smoke screen.'

  'Do you think Fletcher will come after you?' Chadzynski asked.

  'He's had plenty of opportunity.'

  'Do you think he'll harm you?'

  'No.'

  'Did he threaten you in any way?'

  'No,' Darby said.

  'I'll keep the traps on your phones, but at some point, we'll have to pull your surveillance.'

  'I think you should put them on Jonathan Hale.'

  'Every expert I talked to says Malcolm Fletcher works alone.'

  'Your FBI contact said Fletcher murdered the killers he hunted,' Darby said. 'I wouldn't be surprised if Fletcher already found Dingle.'

  Chadzynski stared at the blinking lights on her phone for a long moment.

  'If you want to find Fletcher,' Darby said, 'you need to put people on Jonathan Hale.'

  There was a knock on the door. Chadzynski's secretary came in and placed the court order on the edge of the desk.

  The commissioner waited until the door was shut before she spoke. 'The Herald reporter has decided to run the story about the remains being found at Sinclair.'

  'Did you remind him it might cause Hannah's abductor to panic and kill her?'

  'I did. The story will be on the front page of tomorrow's paper.'

  Darby picked up the copies of the court order. 'If there isn't anything else, I'd like to get to work on this.'

  'Where are you going to start?'

  'The Shriners Burn Center,' Darby said. 'Coop and Woodbury are going to hit the dermatologists' offices before they close for the day.'

  'I'll see if I can locate Jonathan Hale,' Chadzynski said, reaching for her phone. Malcolm Fletcher had traded his hotel room for a safe house in Wellesley, a suburb twenty minutes outside of Boston. Ali Karim had made all the arrangements.

  The place was fully furnished. Fletcher sat at a small antique desk reading a computer printout of Walter Smith's patient file from Shriners. He had managed to hack his way past the hospital's firewall and into the patient database. Once Walter's file was printed, Fletcher deleted it from the hospital's computer system.

  Walter's last corrective surgery took place in 1987, when he was eighteen. The address listed in the file was an apartment building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Fletcher had checked the address earlier in the day. Walter had moved out in 1992. The forwarding address was a studio apartment in the Back Bay. The landlord had faxed Karim a copy of the rental agreement. Walter didn't leave a forwarding address, but his social security number was listed on the application.

  The quickest way to find Walter's current address would be through tax records. That meant hacking into the IRS's computer network.

  At the moment, a UNIX program was running, quietly searching for a back door past the IRS firewall. To slip in and out without leaving a digital footprint or, worse, triggering an alarm, required a tremendous amount of patience and skill. One wrong move and federal agents would be standing on his doorstep.

  Malcolm Fletcher picked up the Virgin Mary statue he had removed from inside the cardboard box at the Sinclair chapel and moved it between his fingers as he reached for the phone.

  'Have you changed your mind about meeting Walter, Mr Hale?'

  'No.'

  'Make sure your phone is charged,' Fletcher said, watching the computer screen. 'I'll have Walter's address tonight, tomorrow at the latest.'

  76

  The hospital director for the Shriners Burn Center, Dr Tobias, sat behind his cluttered desk and watched Darby over his bifocals. He hadn't read the court order. He had handed it off to the hospital's legal counsel, who took his sweet goddamn time reviewing it. Jesus Christ, hurry up. Finally, the lawyer gave Tobias the go-ahead.

  Tobias, round and bowlegged, escorted her through gleaming white hallways. Behind the closed doors Darby heard the steady beep of machinery and murmured conversations. Some doors had small windows built into them. Most of the patients lying in the beds wore pressure-garments over their faces and arms. It was impossible to tell if they were male or female. Many of the burn patients were children.

  Some patients wandered through the hallways. Darby looked away from their mangled faces and limbs.

  The hospital pharmacy had a computer system which allowed searches based on a patient's name or the name of a particular medication. Darby searched for 'Samuel Dingle.' No one named Dingle was listed in the pharmacy database.

  The list of male patients using Lycoprime totalled 146.

  The man who had Hannah Givens would be young, white and probably in his late twenties to early thirties. Physically, he would have to look and appear young. A college student would be reluctant to climb inside the car of an older man, but they might be more inclined to do so if they believed the person appeared to be a college student too, possibly one who said he was attending the same college. Darby believed the killer was local. He wouldn't want to live too far from Sinclair. She would pay close attention to those who had criminal records.

  For that she would have to rely on Neil Joseph, who was sitting at his desk waiting for her to call. Neil could easily find a criminal record provided it wasn't a juvenile offence. Those records were sealed and couldn't be accessed without a court order. Darby hoped that wouldn't be the case.

  'Can you sort the Lycoprime list by the patient's age?' she asked Tobias. 'I'd like to review the younger patients first.'

  'I can't print out a single, definitive list starting with age – you'd have to examine each file to find that information. We could, however, print out the list of all male patients using Lycoprime.'

  'What about patients using Lycoprime in conjunction with Derma?'

  'The problem is you won't get an accurate sampling. We stopped selling Derma, oh, I'd probably say at least four years ago. It's no longer a prescription item.'

  'If a patient is using Derma, would it be listed in their file?'

  'In the older files, yes,' Tobias said. 'We recommend Derma to all of our patients. It's an excellent product. We give out trial samples to our patients to see what colour best matches their skin tone, and then they can order the particular shade over the company website.'

  Meaning there's no way to track recent Derma orders from the pharmacy records, Darby thought.

  'I know you're anxious to get to this,' Tobias said, 'so in the interest of saving time, I'd recommend Craig – that would be the gentleman to your left, Craig Henderson, our pharmacist – I can have Craig send the Lycoprime patient files to my office printer. They'll start alphabetically by the patient's last name. You can use my office computer to access the actual patient files. You can't access the patient database through the pharmacy's computer. The patient files are on a separate system.'

  Tobias' laser printer was dreadfully slow. Each pharmacy file contained the patient's name, date of birth, address and health insurance information. The patient's entire prescription history was listed.

  It took an hour to print Lycoprime patients A through H. The ages ranged from five to fifty.

  Dr Tobias helped her sort the patients into two piles – one for ages up to fifteen, the other pile for ages sixteen and older.

  Most of the patient records were of young male children or teenagers who had been burned in a house fire caused by a parent falling asleep with a lit cigarette. Some had been accidentally scalded by boiling water left on
a stove. One boy, a ten-year-old, had decided for some ungodly reason to light firecrackers near a plastic gas jug in his parents' garage. The fire was so severe he couldn't breathe without the aid of a ventilator. He later died.

  And then there were the other files, the ones dealing with parents who had dumped their screaming infant or meddlesome toddler into a tub of scalding water; parents who, in a moment of anger or drunken rage, shoved their son into a fireplace or wood stove. Jesus, here was a file on a father who, wanting to teach his eleven-year-old a lesson about the dangers of fire, lit a match and held it to up to his son's hand. The flame caught on the boy's polyester pyjamas. They melted against his skin, covering him with permanent burn scars.

  One patient seemed promising: a twenty-nine-year-old white male named Frank Hayden. In 1996, at age seventeen, Hayden was jumping a faulty car battery when it exploded. The battery acid burned his face. His patient file listed the dozens of reconstruction surgeries Hayden had endured over the past decade.

  Hayden also had a criminal record. In 2003 he had been arrested for attempted rape. He served two years in Walpole. After his release, he went back to live with his mother in Dorchester.

  Coop called as Darby was examining another patient file. Coop was at a Cambridge dermatologist's office who was the third largest supplier of Lycoprime.

  'Nothing on Sam Dingle, but I found six male patients who use Lycoprime,' he said. 'The oldest is twenty-eight. Ten years ago, this guy's father was in massive debt and took out insurance policies on his family. The asshole lit the house on fire, tried to make it look like they were victims of arson. The whole house went up in flames, and when the fire department arrived, they managed to save this kid. His parents and four other siblings burned to death.' Sighing, he added, 'I think I need to find another profession.'

  'What about a criminal record?'