“Give Lawton a Bible,” he told the attendant indifferently, “if he wants one. But make him understand that he can’t annoy or harass the others.”
“Dr. Gonzalez was afraid having the Bible might get him more agitated.”
Cray ordinarily did not overrule the psychiatrists working under him, but he saw no merit in Gonzalez’s concern. “If he gets agitated, tell him the meek will inherit the earth. That one has done the trick for centuries.” He started to move away, then added, “If he still won’t calm down, sedate him.”
A great many of Hawk Ridge’s patients were sedated throughout their stay. Some had been heavily tranquilized for years. The other psychiatrists, Cray’s subordinates, had been critical of this approach, believing that it impeded the patients’ recovery.
This might be true. But Cray would not have a lot of lunatics raising hell in the public parts of the hospital. They could scream all they liked while in seclusion, but the common areas must be kept safe and civilized.
He wandered among the patients in the day hall. They were men and women, young and old, all different, yet all curiously alike in their white sneakers and white socks and light blue, two-piece cotton garments, which looked very much like pajamas. At some institutions the patients were permitted to wear their street clothes, but Cray sniffed the dangerous scent of anarchy in this policy.
He ran a tight operation. His hospital was clean. The food in the commissary was nutritious and filling and sometimes even tasty. Discipline was enforced on both the patients and the staff. He made few mistakes.
But Kaylie—innocent little Kaylie with her freckled schoolgirl face and shy, hushed voice ...
He’d made a mistake with her. And he was paying for it even now. He had paid for twelve years.
At 11:15 his pager buzzed, displaying his secretary’s number. He called her from a phone in Dr. Bernstein’s office.
“One of the groundskeepers was working near your house,” Margaret said, worry in her voice. “He found your garage window broken. He says it looks like someone tried to get in.”‘
Cray did his best to sound concerned. “I’ll be right over to take a look.”
The morning had been routine so far, but all of that was about to change.
22
"Cornflakes.”
Shepherd stopped at the front steps of the Hawk Ridge Institute, facing a pair of gray-haired patients in matching cotton outfits.
“Excuse me?” he asked the one who had spoken, a chinless man with a face made of wrinkles and liver spots.
“Cornflakes,” the man repeated. “Cornflakes with milk.”
He smiled. His two front teeth were missing. He looked like a mischievous child.
The man’s companion, a woman with glazed eyes, asked Shepherd if he had ever been to Venice.
“No,” Shepherd said. “Never.”
The woman nodded, satisfied. She and her friend returned their attention to an empty ambulance slant-parked in a loading zone. They stood staring at it raptly, and Shepherd headed up the steps.
The front doors opened on a small lobby, musty and inadequately lit. Another patient was inside, this one a middle-aged woman who sat curled on a wooden bench, studying her sneakers as she hummed to herself.
She had a proud, photogenic face, and Shepherd felt a touch of sadness when he thought of the person she might have been, if illness hadn’t stolen her mind.
At the front desk sat a receptionist, paying no attention to the patient. Her concentration was fixed on the flickering amber monitor of an antique computer terminal. For a moment she reminded him of Ginnie. There was no physical resemblance, only the pose she had struck, the air of intent concentration as her careful hands worked the keyboard.
Somewhere deep inside him there was a revival of the old pain. He felt it, hated it, and at the same time, oddly, he was almost bored with it, because the pain had been with him for so long now, and had gotten tiresome.
Maybe this was what people meant when they spoke of healing. He hoped so.
“May I help you?” the receptionist asked without looking up.
“I’d like to see Dr. Cray.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She frowned. The garish amber light glinted on her granny glasses. “Which patient is this regarding?”
“None.” He showed his badge. “I need to talk to Dr. Cray about a police matter.”
The woman barely glanced at the badge. She seemed unimpressed. It occurred to Shepherd that the institute’s staff must be accustomed to police inquiries. Kroft had said the hospital had regular dealings with the local sheriff’s department. Certain obviously unstable suspects—transients, arsonists—were held here for psychiatric evaluation.
“You’ll have to sign in, please.”
Shepherd filled out the sign-in sheet fastened to a clipboard. The receptionist put it away without looking at it.
“Dr. Cray’s in his office. Second floor. Room twenty-two. Elevator works only if you’ve got a key, and anyway, it’s busted. Take the stairs.”
She jerked her head at a door with a steel handle and a posted sign that read STAFF ONLY.
Shepherd thanked her, but she was already bent over her keyboard again.
The stairwell smelled of disinfectant. Shepherd disliked that smell. It reminded him of hospitals—well, of course, this was a hospital, wasn’t it?—but he was thinking of the other kind of hospital, the normal kind, like the University Medical Center in Tucson, where, two years ago, he had spent a long series of days and nights, praying, eating too little, crying when he was alone and no one could see.
God, he wanted to be out of this place. He would talk to Cray, size him up, and go.
The door at the top of the stairs opened on a hallway. Shepherd had thought that mental hospitals were always decorated in light green or blue tones to soothe the patients, but the walls here were white, and so were the doors—everything, white.
Some of the doors were open. Walking past, he glimpsed staff members on the phone or typing at actual typewriters, IBM Selectrics or some similar equipment. He hadn’t thought anybody used typewriters anymore. He wondered if Hawk Ridge’s employees used carbon paper too, and mimeograph machines.
In one room, marked ADMISSIONS, the two paramedics who had arrived in the ambulance stood flanking a disheveled teenager in an overcoat. A woman who must be a doctor was interviewing the kid, jotting down notes on a clipboard,
“And what did you do after you got home?” she asked.
“I watched TV, and the guy in the car commercial told me I needed to start a fire in the toolshed. He told me I had to burn the fucker down. I didn’t want to. I’m scared of fire. But the guy was on TV, you know? When they’re on TV, you gotta do what they say....”
Room 22 was at the end of the hall. This door was also open. Shepherd entered an anteroom furnished with a desk, a few file cabinets, and a couch. A plaque on the desk read MARGARET. Cray’s secretary, or assistant, or whatever she should be called.
Her swivel chair was empty. The clock on the wall pointed to 12:15. She must have left for lunch.
But Cray was here. Shepherd saw him through the doorway of his office, seated at his desk, a telephone in one hand and a file folder in the other.
“The chart’s in front of me now,” he was saying. “Moban, seventy-five milligrams. Maintain him on that dosage for two weeks, and then, if necessary, we’ll take another look.”
He hung up, raised his head, and noticed Shepherd in the anteroom. “Yes?” he snapped.
Every cop was good at assessing people. Shepherd processed what he could see of Dr. John Cray—sharp eyes, high forehead, small mouth, hollow cheeks—and decided the man was intelligent, arrogant, controlling, and very tired.
“Dr. Cray.” Shepherd stepped through the doorway into Cray’s office. “I’m Detective Roy Shepherd, Tucson PD.”
He watched Cray’s face for a reaction. Cray merely frowned.
“Tucson? I was expecting someone from the sheriff’s department.”
This response baffled Shepherd. He let a moment pass as he approached the desk. Automatically he noted Cray’s age, approximately mid-forties, and a few other details.
He wore no wedding band. His complexion was sallow; he did not get out in the sun very much. He wore a brown suit of good quality, in need of being pressed. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, revealing a taut, muscular neck.
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Shepherd said finally.
Cray looked impatient. “This is about the vandalism, isn’t it?”
“Vandalism?”
A sigh leaked out of Cray, the sigh of a man who was smarter and better organized than everyone around him, and weary of this burden. Shepherd decided he disliked John Cray.
But the truth was, he disliked all psychiatrists, disliked the profession of psychiatry as such. He had his reasons.
“Apparently,” Cray said, “we’ve got our wires crossed. You see, my sport-utility vehicle was vandalized last night. I called the sheriff’s department about it just half an hour ago. They said they’d send someone to take a report. But of course that’s not at all why you’re here.”
“No.”
“Still, I have a feeling your visit could be related to my little problem.” Cray leaned back in his chair, studying Shepherd over the neat stacks of paper on the desk. “It’s about her, isn’t it?”
“Her?”
“Kaylie McMillan. Isn’t she why you’ve come to see me?”
“I guess I’m a little slow today, Doctor. Who exactly is Kaylie McMillan?”
“The person who trashed my Lexus—or so I believe.” Cray smiled, a surprisingly warm smile that illumined his face and made him look younger, “I’d better start at the beginning, hadn’t I?”
“That might be good.”
“Please have a seat. Care for some coffee? It’s quite good. One-hundred-percent fresh-ground Kona. There’s a coffee house in Tucson that sells it.”
So he went into Tucson now and then. Hardly a startling admission, but Shepherd took note of it as he pulled a metal chair close to the desk and sat. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“Then perhaps, before I tell you about Kaylie, you might enlighten me as to why you’re here. Since, quite obviously, my guesswork on the subject was all wrong.”
Shepherd kept his answer vague. “Someone’s made some rather serious allegations, Doctor. Allegations concerning yourself. Now, I’m just looking into this on a purely preliminary basis—”
“Kaylie,” Cray said.
He was nodding, his expression curiously content, like a man who’d found the answer to a riddle and was pleased with his own cleverness.
Shepherd shrugged. “Excuse me?”
“These allegations were made anonymously, isn’t that so?”
“Well, yes.”
“Kaylie did it. What precisely did she accuse me of? Kidnapping parochial-school girls and selling them into slavery? Using my basement as a torture chamber? A series of ax murders, perhaps?”
“You’re taking this kind of lightly.”
“I’m not taking it lightly at all. She vandalized my Lexus. She’s evidently spreading false accusations of a nature sufficiently serious to require your presence in my office. And she’s stalking me.”
“Stalking you?”
“Yes. What did she accuse me of?”
Shepherd hadn’t wanted to reveal the charge too soon, but he saw no way around it. “She said ... Well, she said you were the White Mountains Killer. You know the case—”
“Yes, of course. Her claim is original, at least. But hardly unexpected. That crime has received a good deal of publicity, and psychotics are highly suggestible.”
“Kaylie’s a psychotic?”
“Oh, yes. She was a patient here, you see. One of the more difficult ones.”
The woman’s voice on the 911 tape spoke in Shepherd’s memory: I’m not crazy.
“When was this?” he asked.
“Twelve years ago, when she was nineteen. The sheriff’s department placed her in our care after her arrest.”
“On what charge?”
“Homicide.” Cray took another sip of his Kona coffee. “She and her husband, Justin, had been married less than three months when dear, sweet Kaylie shot him in the heart.”
23
Murders were rare in Graham County. A year could pass, even two or three, without a single homicide. For that reason Shepherd was sure Cray would remember the details of the case.
“Tell me how it happened,” he said.
Cray swiveled in his chair, sunlight catching the flecks of amber in his grayish eyes. “All that’s known with certainty,” he answered, “is that Kaylie killed Justin with his own revolver, then panicked and fled in their car. A deputy found the vehicle on a back road the next day. She’d lost control and driven into a ravine. Search patrols were organized. A helicopter spotted her two miles from the crash site, wandering in the brush. When the police reached her, she was on her knees, sobbing.”
Slowly Shepherd nodded. Twelve years ago he had been a patrol officer riding shotgun with Gary Brannigan. He and Gary’d had their hands full with drug shootings and gang fights, and neither of them had paid much attention to crimes outside Tucson city limits. But dimly Shepherd recalled the case of a teenage wife in Graham County who’d murdered her husband and had been found in the desolate foothills, soiled and dehydrated and distraught.
“They never found out why she did it,” he said, more to himself than to Cray.
“Unfortunately, no. When the sobbing subsided, Kaylie entered a catatonic state. Essentially, she had suffered what the layman calls a nervous breakdown. So the deputies brought her to us. She was admitted to our forensic ward—Ward C, which is no longer in use. She was kept in seclusion, and was utterly uncommunicative.”
“Catatonic?”
Cray shook his head. “Initially she exhibited unpredictable outbursts of violence. She had to be kept under restraint, for both her own safety and the safety of the other patients.”
“Under restraint? You mean, in a straitjacket?”
“Only at the beginning. The first few days.”
“How long was she here?”
“Four months.”
“Who treated her?”
“I did. They delegate the more challenging ones to me.” Shepherd caught the lift of pride in the statement. “After a few weeks she recovered the ability to communicate. We had many long talks, Kaylie and I.”
“Do you remember anything distinctive about her voice?”
Cray hesitated, seemingly bewildered by the question. “Her voice?” Then his eyes narrowed. “Oh, I see. It was a telephone call, wasn’t it? That’s how she contacted you. Well, her voice is rather girlish, actually. She sounds like a sweet little thing. Shy and sensitive and vulnerable. Her true personality profile, however, is rather more complicated than that.”
The description matched the voice Shepherd had heard on the 911 tape. “Okay. Sorry for interrupting. You were talking about the progress Kaylie made in your therapy sessions.”
“She seemed to be getting better. But she professed complete amnesia when it came to the killing of her husband.”
“Professed? You think she was lying?”
“She’s certainly capable of carrying off an elaborate deception. As subsequent events were to prove.”
“What events?”
Before answering, Cray paused for another long swallow of coffee. Shepherd waited, casting his gaze around the office.
Papers and folders were everywhere, all stacked tidily, with no impression of disorder. There were a couple of framed paintings on the walls, but otherwise the office was bare of decoration—no knickknacks or mementos, no family photos on the desk.
Did Cray have friends, a lover? Shepherd doubted it. The man seemed too distant to inspire affection.
He could inspire hatred, though. Esp
ecially in a patient consigned to his care, wrapped in a straitjacket, imprisoned in a cell ...
“The events,” Cray said at last, “of the night of June twenty-third, 1987. The night when Kaylie escaped.”
Old bitterness laced the words. Shepherd heard it in Cray’s tone, saw it in the angry twist of his mouth.
“If she’d been watched more closely, she never would have gotten away. But she’d fooled us into dropping our guard. We had no idea that she spent every night loosening the bolts on the grille over the air duct in her room.”
The air duct. Yes, Shepherd remembered that detail.
It had stuck in his memory because it was so much like something in a movie. He had rarely heard of anyone actually escaping that way.
“She took off the grille,” Cray said, “and crawled into the duct. Kaylie is a small woman, and there was room for her, though it must have been a tight fit. She belly-crawled to the midpoint of the building, a distance of eighty feet, and ascended a short vertical shaft to a rooftop vent. She kicked out the wire-mesh panel at that end of the duct system, then emerged onto the roof. She was able to climb down and run to the perimeter fence, which she scaled easily. Later we found her footprints in the dirt.”
“And then,” Shepherd said, more facts of the case returning to him from some long-forgotten mental file, “she proceeded on foot to a farm or a ranch, something like that—and stole a car.”
“A pickup truck.”
“Hot-wired it.”
“Yes. I have no idea where she learned that particular skill. But you see, that’s the thing you need to understand about Kaylie McMillan. Despite her illness, she’s smart and determined and ... unexpectedly resourceful.”
Shepherd noted the hesitation. Cray, it seemed, was still upset about having been bested by one of his own patients, even after twelve years.
The man liked to be in control. He would not forgive anyone who challenged him successfully.
“She drove to the house where she’d lived with Justin,” Cray said. “It had been four months since the killing, but the place was still unoccupied and largely undisturbed. She changed out of her hospital-issue garments into her regular clothes, packed a couple of suitcases, and left. By the time we discovered she was missing from her room, she must have been miles out of town. The pickup was found on the following evening at a rest stop along Interstate Eight. Where she went from there is anyone’s guess.”
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