I noticed that her voice got softer. “I’ve never been married. Two of my sisters are married, with kids. I love their kids. They call me Auntie Cop.”
“Can I ask a personal question?”
She nodded. “Fire away. I can take the heat.”
“You ever been close to settling down?” I asked. “Auntie Cop?”
“Is the question personal or professional, Doctor?” I already had the sense that she was incredibly guarded. Her humor was probably her best defense.
“The question is just friendly,” I told her.
“I know it is. I can tell, Alex. I’ve had some good friends in the past — men, a couple of boys. Whenever it got too serious, I always got out of harm’s way. Oops. There’s a slip.”
“Just the truth,” I smiled, “slipping out ever so slowly.”
She leaned in close. She kissed my forehead, then she kissed me gently on the lips. The kisses were sweet and totally irresistible.
“I like being with you,” she said. “I like talking to you an awful lot. Are we about ready to leave?”
She and I returned to the hotel together. I walked her to her room. We kissed outside the door and I liked it even more than the first time in Hartford. Slow and easy wins the race.
“You’re still not ready,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You’re right. . . . I’m not ready.”
“But you’re close.” She smiled, then entered her hotel room and shut the door. “Don’t know what you’re missing,” she called from inside.
I smiled all the way back to my hotel room. I think I did know what I was missing.
Chapter 97
“HERE WE GO!” John Sampson said, and clapped his hands together. “Bad boys, bad boys, where you gonna hide?”
At 6:00 A.M. on Tuesday morning, Sampson and I climbed out of my old Porsche in the staff parking lot of the Hazelwood Veterans Hospital on North Capitol Street in D.C. The large, sprawling hospital was situated a ways south of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, just north of the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home.
Home of the Mastermind? I wondered. Could that be? According to Brian Macdougall it could — and he had a lot riding on it.
John and I were dressed in sport shirts, baggy khaki trousers, and high-topped sneakers. We were going to work for a day or two at the hospital. So far, the FBI hadn’t been able to identify the Mastermind among the patients or staff members.
The grounds of Hazelwood were surrounded by high fieldstone walls covered with ivy. The landscaping was sparse: a few deciduous and evergreen shrubs and trees, artificial berms that were evocative of wartime bunkers.
“That’s the main hospital,” I said, and pointed to a nearby building that was painted pale yellow and rose six stories above us. There were a half dozen smaller, bunkerlike buildings on the grounds.
“I’ve been here before,” Sampson said. His eyes narrowed. “Knew a couple of guys from Vietnam who wound up at Hazelwood. They didn’t heap high praise on the institution. Place always makes me think of that documentary Titicut Follies. You remember that scene where a patient is refusing to eat? So they force a hose down his nose?”
I looked at Sampson and shook my head. “You really don’t like Hazelwood.”
“Don’t like the system of dispensing medical care to veterans. Don’t like what happens to men and women who get hurt in foreign wars. The people who work here are mostly all right, though. They probably don’t even use nose hoses anymore.”
“We might need to,” I told him, “if we find our guy.”
“We find the Mastermind, sugar, we’ll definitely use nose hoses.”
Chapter 98
WE CLIMBED STEEP STONE STAIRS, then entered the hospital’s administration building. We were shown the way to the inner office of Colonel Daniel Schofield, the director of the unit.
Colonel Schofield was there to meet us outside a small private room. Two other men and a petite blond woman were already inside. “Let’s go right in,” Schofield said. He appeared anxious and upset. What a surprise.
He made stiff, very formal introductions around the room, starting with Sampson and me, then going on to his staff. None of them looked happy to see us.
“This is Ms. Kathleen McGuigan. She’s the head nurse on Four and Five, where you and Mr. Sampson will be working. This is Dr. Padraic Cioffi. Dr. Cioffi is the psychiatrist in charge of the mental health units. And Dr. Marcuse, one of the five excellent therapists who work at the hospital.”
Dr. Marcuse nodded benignly in our direction. He seemed a pleasant enough man, but nurse McGuigan and Dr. Cioffi sat there stone-faced.
“I’ve explained the very delicate situation to Ms. McGuigan, Dr. Cioffi, and Dr. Marcuse. To be candid with you, nobody is completely comfortable with this, but we understand that we don’t have a choice. If this suspected killer is hiding out here, our concern is for everyone’s safety. He must be caught, of course. No one disagrees with that.”
“He was here,” I said, “at least for a while. He might be here now.”
“I don’t believe he’s here,” Dr. Cioffi spoke up. “I’m sorry. I just don’t see it. I know all of our patients and believe me, none of them is a mastermind. Not even close. The men and women here are deeply, deeply disturbed.”
“It could also be a staff member,” I told him, then watched his reaction.
“My opinion remains unchanged, Detective.”
I needed their cooperation, so I figured it was a good idea to try to make friends, if I could. “Detective Sampson and I will be in and out of here as quickly as is humanly possible,” I said. “We do have reason to believe that the killer is, or at least was, a patient at the hospital. I don’t know if this makes it better or worse, but I’m a psychologist. I went to Hopkins. I worked as a psych aide at McLean Hospital and also the Institute for Living. I think I’ll fit in on the wards.”
Sampson spoke up. “Oh, yes, I was once a porter at Union Station. I’ll fit in all right, too. Carry that load.”
The executive staff didn’t laugh and didn’t say a word. Nurse McGuigan and Dr. Cioffi glared at Sampson, who’d had the nerve to make light of the seriousness of the situation, heaven forbid.
I figured I had to take a completely different tack if I was going to get anywhere with them. “Are Anectine or Marplan available at the hospital?” I asked the group.
Dr. Cioffi shrugged. “Of course. But why do you want to know about those drugs?”
“Anectine was used to murder people who worked with the killer. He knows a lot about poisons, and he seems to enjoy watching people die. One of the hold-up gangs has never been found, and it’s possible they were killed, too. Detective Sampson and I will need to look at the nursing reports and any case-conference reports for all patients. Then I’ll check the daily charts from our most promising leads. We’ll work the seven-to-three-thirty shift today.”
Colonel Schofield nodded politely. “I expect everyone’s full cooperation with these detectives. There could be a killer inside the hospital. It is possible, however unlikely.”
At seven o’clock, Sampson and I went on duty at Hazelwood. I was a mental health counselor and he was a porter. And the Mastermind? Who was he?
Chapter 99
THAT MORNING, somewhere on the fifth floor of Hazelwood, the Mastermind was incredibly pissed off at his doctor. The useless, worthless quack had taken away his privileges to go off the hospital grounds. The shrink wanted to know why he seemed different lately. What was going on? What was he holding back, holding inside?
He stewed in his pitiful little room on the fifth floor. He got angrier and angrier. Who was he really furious at? Besides the shrink? He thought about it, then he sat down and wrote a letter.
Mr. Patrick Lee
Owner
Dear Sir:
I don’t fucking understand you. I signed our lease with amendments we agreed upon in good faith. I’ve held up my end of the deal and you have not! You conduct yourself as if you are pu
rposely defying our lease.
Let me remind you, Mr. Lee, that while you may be the owner of this apartment, once you take my money, it is my home.
This letter will show, for the record, the illegal actions you have taken against me.
You must cease and desist posting eviction notices on my door I have paid the rent every month and on time!
You must stop calling me, rambling on in your loud Cantonese gibberish, and bothering me.
Stop harassing me!
I ask you one last time.
Stop harassing me!
Immediately.
Or I will harass you!!!
He stopped writing. Then he thought long and hard about the letter he’d just written. He was losing it, wasn’t he? He was going to blow.
He shut down his PC and went out into the hallway of the ward. He put on his usual passive and slightly out-of-it face. The nuts were out in all of their glory. Nuts in ratty bathrobes, nuts in squeaky wheelchairs, nuts in the nude.
Sometimes, more often than not, he found it impossible to believe that he was here. Of course, that was the point, wasn’t it? No one would guess that he was the Mastermind. No one would ever find him here. He was perfectly safe.
And then he saw Detective Alex Cross.
Chapter 100
SAMPSON AND I both worked the 7:00-to-3:30-P.M. shift that day. When I arrived on Five, I felt I could almost hear an audible stretching of the thin red line between the sane and the mad.
The ward pretty much had the standard institutional look: faded mauve and gray everything, occasional gashes in the walls, nurses carrying trays of little cups, strung-out men in drawstring hospital pants and stained robes. I had seen it all before, except for one thing. The mental health workers carried whistles to sound an alarm if they needed help. That probably meant staff members had been hurt here.
The fourth and fifth floors made up the ward for psychiatric patients. There were thirty-one veterans on Five, the ages ranging from twenty-three to seventy-five. The patients on Five were considered dangerous, either to others or to themselves.
I started my search on Five. Two of the patients on the floor were tall and burly. They somewhat matched the description of the man who’d been followed by detectives Crews and O’Malley. One of them, Cletus Anderson, had a salt-and-pepper beard and had been involved in police work in Denver and Salt Lake City after his discharge from the army.
I found Anderson loitering in the day room on the first morning. It was past ten o’clock, but he was still wearing pajamas and a soiled robe. He was watching ESPN and he didn’t strike me as a mastermind criminal.
The decor in the day room consisted of about a dozen brown vinyl chairs, a lopsided card table, and a TV mounted on one wall. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Anderson was smoking. I sat down in front of the TV nodded hello.
He turned to me and blew an imperfect smoke ring. “You’re new, right? Play pool?” he asked.
“I’ll give it a try.”
“Give it a try,” he said, and smiled as if I’d made a joke. “Got keys to the pool room?”
He stood up without waiting for an answer to his question. Or maybe he’d forgotten that he’d asked it. I knew from the nursing charts that he had a violent temper but that he was on a truckload of Valium now. Good thing. Anderson was six-foot-six and weighed over two hundred seventy pounds.
The pool room was surprisingly cheery, with two large windows that looked out onto a walled exercise yard. The yard was bordered with red maples and elms, and birds twittered away in the trees.
I was in there alone with Cletus Anderson. Could this very large man be the Mastermind? I couldn’t tell yet. Maybe if he brained me with a pool ball or a cue stick.
Anderson and I played a game of eight ball. He wasn’t very good. I let him stay in the game by blowing a couple of chip shots, but he didn’t seem to notice. His blue-gray eyes were nearly glazed over.
“Like to wring those fucking bluejays’ necks,” he muttered angrily after missing a bank shot that wasn’t even close to being his best opportunity on the table.
“What did the bluejays do wrong?” I asked him.
“They’re out there. I’m in here,” he said, and stared at me. “Don’t try to shrink-wrap me, okay? Mr. Big Shit Mental Health Worker. Play your shot.”
I sank a striped ball in the corner, then I missed another long shot I could have made. Anderson took the cue from me and he stood over his next shot for a long time. Too long, I was thinking. He straightened up suddenly. All six-foot-six of him. He glared at me. His body was getting rigid; he was tensing his large arms.
“Did you just say something to me, Mr. Mental Health?” he asked. His hands were large and held the pool cue tightly, wringing its neck. He had a lot of fat on him, but the fat was hard, like on football linemen and some professional wrestlers.
“Nope. Not a peep.”
“That s’posed to be funny? Little play on the peeping bluejays, which you know I fucking hate?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Anderson stepped back from the pool table with the cue stick still clasped tightly in both hands. “I could have sworn I heard you call me a pussy under your breath. Little puss? Wuss? Something derogatory like that?”
I made eye contact with him. “I think our pool game’s over now, Mr. Anderson. Please put the stick down.”
“You think you can make me put down this cue stick? Probably do, if you think I’m a puss.”
I held my mental health–worker whistle to my mouth. “I’m new here and I need the work. I don’t want any trouble.”
“Well then, you came to the wrong goddamn hellhole, man,” he said. “You’re the fucking priss. Whistle-blower.”
Anderson tossed the pool cue onto the table and he stalked toward the door. He bumped my shoulder on the way.
“Watch your mouth, nigger,” he said, spitting as he spoke the words.
I didn’t give Anderson any more ground. I grabbed him, spun him around, surprised the hell out of him. I let him feel the strength in my arms and shoulders. I stared him down. I wanted to see what happened if he was provoked.
“You watch your mouth,” I said in the softest whisper. “You be very, very careful around me.”
I released my grip on Cletus Anderson and he spun away. I watched the large man leave the pool room — and I kind of hoped he was the Mastermind.
Chapter 101
THE WORST POSSIBILITY I COULD IMAGINE so far was that the Mastermind might disappear and never be heard from again. Hunting for the Mastermind had become more like Waiting for the Mastermind, or maybe even Praying for the Mastermind to do something that would lead us to him.
Shifts at the veterans hospital began with a thirty-minute nursing-report-cum-coffee-klatch. During the meeting each patient was talked about briefly, and privilege changes noted. The report buzzwords were affect, compliance, interaction, and, of course, PTSD. At least half the men on the wards suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The shift report ended, and my day began. The psychiatric aide’s main duty is to interact with patients. I was doing that, and it reminded me of why I’d gone into psychology in the first place.
Actually, a lot of my past life was rushing back, especially my feelings for and understanding of the terrible power of trauma. So many of these men suffered from it. For them, the world no longer seemed safe or manageable. People around them didn’t seem trustworthy or dependable. Self-doubt and guilt were always present. Faith and spirituality were nonexistent. Why had the Mastermind chosen this place to hide?
During the eight-hour shift I had a number of specific duties: sharps check at seven (I had to count all the silverware in the kitchen; if anything was missing, which was rare, rooms would be searched); one-on-one specials at eight with a patient named Copeland, who was considered extremely suicidal; fifteen-minute checks starting at nine, checking the whereabouts of all the patients every fifteen minut
es and putting a mark by their names on a blackboard in the hallway outside the nurses’ station); and baskets (somebody had to empty the garbage).
Each time I went to the blackboard I gave the most likely suspects a slightly bolder chalk mark. At the end of my hour on checks, I found that I had seven candidates on my hot list.
A patient named James Gallagher was on the list simply because he roughly fit the physical description of the Mastermind. He was tall enough, thick chested, and seemed reasonably alert and bright. That alone made him a suspect.
Frederic Szabo had full town privileges, but he was a timid soul and I doubted that he was a killer. Since Vietnam he’d been drifting around the country and had never held a job for more than a few weeks. Occasionally, he spit at hospital staff, but that was the worst offense he seemed capable of.
Stephen Bowen had full town privileges and had once been a promising infantry captain in Vietnam. He suffered from PTSD and had been in and out of veterans hospitals since 1971. He took pride in saying that he’d never held a “real job” since he left the military.
David Hale had been a policeman in Maryland for two years, before he began having paranoid thoughts that every Asian person he saw on the streets had been put there to kill him.
Michael Fescoe had worked for two banks in Washington, but he seemed too spaced-out to balance his own checkbook. Maybe he was faking PTSD, but his therapist at the hospital didn’t think so.
Cletus Anderson fit the Mastermind’s general physical description. I didn’t like him. And he was violent. But Anderson hadn’t done a thing to make me suspect he could actually be the Mastermind. Quite the contrary.
Just before shift change, Betsey Cavalierre reached me on the ward. I took the call in the small staff room at the rear of the nurses’ station. “Betsey? What’s up?”
“Alex, something very strange has happened,” she said, and sounded rattled. I asked her what, and her answer gave me a nasty shock.