I followed Dr. Ensor again, this time to a large stainless steel elevator that opened onto barren beige hallways closed off with heavy red doors that required codes for entry. Everything was monitored by closed circuit TV. Apparently Carrie had enjoyed working in the pet program, which entailed daily visits to the eleventh floor, where animals were kept in cages inside a small room with a view of razor wire.
The menagerie was dimly lit and moist with the musky smells of animals and wood chips, and the skittering of claws. There were parakeets, guinea pigs, and a Russian dwarf hamster. On a table was a box of rich soil thick with tender shoots.
“We grow our own birdseed here,” Dr. Ensor explained. “The patients are encouraged to raise and sell it. Of course, we’re not talking mass production here. There’s barely enough for our own birds, and as you can see by what’s in some of the cages and on the floor, the patients tend to be fond of feeding their pets cheese puffs and potato chips.”
“Carrie was up here every day?” I asked.
“So I’ve been told, now that I’ve been looking into everything she did while she was here.” She paused, looking around the cages as small animals with pink noses twitched and scratched.
“Obviously I didn’t know everything at the time. For example, coincidentally, during the six months Carrie supervised the pet program, we had an unusual number of fatalities and inexplicable escapes. A parakeet here, a hamster there. Patients would come in and find their wards in their cages, or a cage door open and a bird nowhere to be found.”
She walked back out into the hallway, her lips firmly pressed.
“It’s too bad you weren’t here on those occasions,” she wryly said. “Perhaps you could have told me what they were dying from. Or who.”
There was another door down the hall, and this one opened onto a small, dimly lit room where there was one relatively modern computer and printer on a plain wooden table. I also noted a phone jack in the wall. A sense of foreshadowing darkened my thoughts even before Dr. Ensor spoke.
“This was perhaps where Carrie spent most of her free time,” she said. “As you no doubt know, she has an extensive background in computers. She was extremely good about encouraging other patients to learn, and the PC was her idea. She suggested we find donors of used equipment, and we now have one computer and printer on each floor.”
I walked over to the terminal and sat down in front of it. Hitting a key, I turned off the screen saver and looked at icons that told me what programs were available.
“When patients worked in here,” I said, “were they supervised?”
“No. They were shown in and the door was shut and locked. An hour later, they were shown back to their ward.” She grew thoughtful. “I’d be the first to admit that I was impressed with how many of the patients have started learning word processing, and in some instances, spread sheets.”
I went into America Online and was prompted for a username and password. The director watched what I was doing.
“They absolutely had no access to the Internet,” she said.
“How do we know that?”
“The computers aren’t hooked up to it.”
“But they do have modems,” I said. “Or at least this one does. It’s simply not connecting because there’s no telephone line plugged into the telephone jack.”
I pointed to the tiny receptacle in the wall, then turned around to face her.
“Any chance a telephone line might have disappeared from somewhere?” I asked. “Perhaps from one of the offices? Susan Blaustein’s office, for example?”
The director glanced away, her face angry and distressed as she began to see what I was getting at.
“God,” she muttered.
“Of course, she may have gotten that from the outside. Perhaps from whoever delivered her snacks from the store?”
“I don’t know.”
“The point is, there’s a lot we don’t know, Dr. Ensor. We don’t know, for example, what the hell Carrie was really doing when she was in here. She could have been in and out of chat rooms, putting feelers out in personals, finding pen pals. I’m sure you’ve kept up with the news enough to know how many crimes are committed on the Internet? Pedophilia, rape, homicide, child pornography.”
“That’s why this was closely supervised,” she said. “Or supposed to have been.”
“Carrie could have planned her escape this way. And you say she started working with the computer how long ago?”
“About a year. After a long run of ideal behavior.”
“Ideal behavior,” I repeated.
I thought of the cases in Baltimore, Venice Beach, and more recently in Warrenton. I wondered if it were possible that Carrie might have met up with her accomplice through e-mail, through a Web site or a chat room. Could it be that she committed computer crimes during her incarceration? Might she have been working behind the scenes, advising and encouraging a psychopath who stole human faces? Then she escaped, and from that point on her crimes were in person.
“Is there anyone who’s been discharged from Kirby in the past year who was an arsonist, especially someone with a history of homicide? Anyone Carrie might have come to know? Perhaps someone in one of her classes?” I asked, just to be sure.
Dr. Ensor turned off the overhead light and we returned to the hall.
“No one comes to mind,” she said. “Not of the sort you’re talking about. I will add that a peace officer was always present.”
“And male and female patients did not mix during recreational times.”
“No. Never. Men and women are completely segregated.”
Although I did not know for a fact that Carrie had a male accomplice, I suspected it, and I recalled what Benton had written in his notes at the end, about a white male between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five. Peace officers, who were simply guards not wearing guns, might have insured that order was maintained in the classrooms, but I doubted seriously they would have had any idea that Carrie was making contact on the Internet. We boarded the elevator again, this time getting off on the third floor.
“The women’s ward,” Dr. Ensor explained. “We have twenty-six female patients at the moment, out of one hundred and seventy patients overall. That’s the visitors’ room.”
She pointed through glass at a spacious open area with comfortable chairs and televisions. No one was in there now.
“Did she ever have visitors?” I asked as we kept walking.
“Not from the outside, not once. Inspiring more sympathy for her, I suppose.” She smiled bitterly. “The women actually stay in there.”
She pointed out another area, this one arranged with single beds.
“She slept over there by the window,” Dr. Ensor said.
I retrieved Carrie’s letter from my pocketbook and read it again, stopping at the fifth paragraph:
LUCY-BOO on TV. Fly through window. Come with we
Under covers. Come til dawn. Laugh and sing.
Same ole song.
LUCY LUCY LUCY and we!
Suddenly I thought about the videotape of Kellie Shephard, and of the actress in Venice Beach who played bit parts on television shows. I thought of photo shoots and production crews, becoming more convinced that there was a connection. But what did Lucy have to do with any of this? Why would Carrie see Lucy on TV? Or was it simply that she somehow knew that Lucy could fly, could fly helicopters?
There was a commotion around a corner, and female peace officers were herding the women patients in from recreation. They were sweating and loud, with tormented faces, and one was being escorted in a preventive aggressive device, or a PAD, which was a politically correct term for a restraint that chained wrists and ankles to a thick leather strap about the waist. She was young and white, with eyes that scattered when they fixed on me, her mouth bowed in a simpering smile. With her bleached hair and pale androgynous body, she could have been Carrie, and for a moment, in my imagination, she was. My flesh crawled as those irises seemed t
o swirl, sucking me in, while patients jostled past us, several making it a point to bump into me.
“You a lawyer?” an obese black woman almost spat as her eyes smoldered on me.
“Yes,” I said, unflinching as I stared back, for I had learned long ago not to be intimidated by people who hate.
“Come on.” The director pulled me along. “I’d forgotten they were due up at this time. I apologize.”
But I was glad it had happened. In a sense, I had looked Carrie in the eye and had not turned away.
“Tell me exactly what happened the night she disappeared, please,” I said.
Dr. Ensor entered a code into another keypad and pushed through another set of bright red doors.
“As best anyone can reconstruct it,” she replied, “Carrie went out with the other patients for this same recreation hour. Her snacks were delivered, and at dinner she was gone.”
We rode the elevator down. She glanced at her watch.
“Immediately, a search began and the police were contacted. Not one sign of her, and that’s what continued to eat at me,” she went on. “How did she get off the island in broad daylight with no one seeing her? We had cops, we had dogs, we had helicopters . . .”
I stopped her there, in the middle of the first floor hall.
“Helicopters?” I said. “More than one?”
“Oh yes.”
“You saw them?”
“Hard not to,” she replied. “They were circling and hovering for hours, the entire hospital was in an uproar.”
“Describe the helicopters,” I said as my heart began to hammer. “Please.”
“Oh gosh,” she answered. “Three police at first, then the media flew in like a swarm of hornets.”
“By chance, was one of the helicopters small and white? Like a dragonfly?”
She looked surprised.
“I do remember seeing one like that,” she said. “I thought it was just some pilot curious about all of the commotion.”
22
LUCY AND I lifted off from Ward’s Island in a hot wind and low barometric pressure that made the Bell JetRanger sluggish. We followed the East River and continued to fly through the Class B airspace of La Guardia, where we landed long enough to refuel and buy cheese crackers and sodas from vending machines, and for me to call the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. This time I was connected to the director of student counseling. I took that as a good sign.
“I understand your need to protect yourself,” I said to her from behind the shut door of a pay phone booth inside Signatures terminal. “But please reconsider. Two more people have been murdered since Claire Rawley was.”
There was a long silence.
Then Dr. Chris Booth said, “Can you come in person?”
“I was planning to,” I told her.
“All right then.”
I called Teun McGovern next to tell her what was going on.
“I think Carrie escaped from Kirby in the same white Schweizer we saw flying over Kenneth Sparkes’s farm when we were working the scene,” I said.
“Does she fly?” McGovern’s confused voice came back.
“No, no. I can’t imagine that.”
“Oh.”
“Whoever she’s with,” I said. “That’s the pilot. Whoever helped her escape and is doing all this. The first two cases were warm-ups. Baltimore and Venice Beach. We might never have known about them, Teun. I believe Carrie waited to drag us in. She waited until Warrenton.”
“Then you’re thinking Sparkes was the intended target,” she thoughtfully stated.
“To get our attention. To make sure we came. Yes,” I said.
“Then Claire Rawley figures in how?”
“That’s what I’m going to Wilmington to find out, Teun. I believe she’s somehow the key to all of this. She’s the connection to him. Whoever he is. And I also believe that Carrie knows I will think this, and that she’s expecting me.”
“You think she’s there.”
“Oh yes. I’m betting on it. She expected Benton to come to Philadelphia, and he did. She expects Lucy and me to come to Wilmington. She knows how we think, how we work, at least as much about us as we know about her.”
“You’re saying that you’re her next hits.”
The thought was cold water in my stomach.
“Intended ones.”
“Not a chance we can take, Kay. We’ll be there when you land. The university must have a playing field. We’ll get that arranged very discreetly. Whenever you land to refuel or whatever, page me and we’ll keep up with each other.”
“You can’t let her know you’re there,” I said. “That will ruin it.”
“Trust me. She won’t,” McGovern said.
We flew out of La Guardia with seventy-five gallons of fuel and an unbearably long flight to look forward to. Three hours in a helicopter was always more than enough for me. The weight of the headsets and the noise and vibration gave me a hot spot on the top of my head and seemed to rattle me loose at the joints. To endure this beyond four hours generally resulted in a serious headache. We were lucky with a generous tail wind, and although our airspeed showed one hundred and ten knots, the GPS showed our ground speed was actually one hundred and twenty.
Lucy made me take the controls again, and I was smoother as I learned not to overcontrol and fight. When thermals and winds shook us like an angry mother, I gave myself up to them. Trying to outmaneuver gusts and updrafts only made matters worse, and this was hard for me. I liked to make things better. I learned to watch for birds, and now and then I spotted a plane at the same time Lucy did.
Hours became monotonous and blurred as we snuggled up to the coastline, over the Delaware River and on to the Eastern Shore. We refueled near Salisbury, Maryland, where I used the bathroom and drank a Coke, then continued into North Carolina, where hog farms slaughtered the topography with long aluminum sheds and waste treatment lagoons the color of blood. We entered the airspace of Wilmington at almost two o’clock. My nerves began to scream as I imagined what might await us.
“Let’s go down to six hundred feet,” Lucy said. “And lower the speed.”
“You want me to do it.” I wanted to make sure.
“Your ship.”
It wasn’t pretty, but I managed.
“My guess is, the university’s not going to be on the water, and is probably a bunch of brick buildings.”
“Thank you, Sherlock.”
Everywhere I looked I saw water, condominium complexes, and water treatment and other plants. The ocean was to the east, sparkling and ruffled, oblivious to dark, bruised clouds gathering on the horizon. A storm was on its way and did not seem to be in a hurry but threatened to be bad.
“Lord, I don’t want to get grounded here,” I said over my mike as sure enough, a cluster of Georgian brick buildings came into view.
“I don’t know about this.” Lucy was looking around. “If she’s here. Where, Aunt Kay?”
“Wherever she thinks we are.” I sounded so sure.
Lucy took over.
“I’ve got the controls,” she said. “I don’t know if I hope you’re right or not.”
“You hope it,” I answered her. “In fact, you hope it so much it scares me, Lucy.”
“I’m not the one who brought us here.”
Carrie had tried to ruin Lucy. Carrie had murdered Benton.
“I know who brought us here,” I said. “It was her.”
The university was close below us, and we found the athletic field where McGovern was waiting. Men and women were playing soccer, but there was a clearing near the tennis courts, and this was where Lucy was to land. She circled the area twice, once high, once low, and neither of us spotted any obstructions, except for an odd tree here and there. Several cars were on the sidelines, and as we settled to the grass, I noted that one of them was a dark blue Explorer with a driver inside. Then I realized that the intramural soccer game was coached by Teun McGovern in P.E. gym shorts and
shirt. She had a whistle around her neck, and her teams were co-ed and very fit.
I looked around as if Carrie were observing all this, but skies were empty, and nothing offered even the scent of her. The instant we were on the ground and in flight idle, the Explorer drove across the grass and stopped a safe distance from our blades. It was driven by an unfamiliar woman, and I was stunned to see Marino in the passenger’s seat.
“I don’t believe it,” I said to Lucy.
“How the hell did he get here?” She was amazed, too.
Marino stared at us through the windshield as we waited out our two minutes and shut down. He didn’t smile and wasn’t the least bit friendly when I climbed into the back of the car while Lucy tied down the main rotor blades. McGovern and her soccer players went on with their staged game, paying no attention to us at all. But I noticed the gym bags beneath benches on the sidelines, and I had no doubt what was inside them. It was as if we were expecting an approaching army, an ambush by enemy troops, and I could not help but wonder if Carrie had made a mockery of us once again.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you,” I commented to Marino.
“You think it’s possible USAirways could fly somewhere without dumping your ass out in Charlotte first?” he complained. “Took me as long to get here as it probably did you.”
“I’m Ginny Correll.” Our driver turned around and shook my hand.
She was at least forty, a very attractive blond dressed primly in a pale green suit, and had I not known the truth, I might have assumed she was on the university’s faculty. But there was a scanner and a two-way radio inside the car, and I caught a flicker of the pistol in the shoulder holster beneath her jacket. She waited until Lucy was inside the Explorer, and then began turning around in the grass as the soccer game went on.
“Here’s what’s going on,” Correll began to explain. “We didn’t know whether the suspect or suspects might be waiting for you, following you, whatever, so we prepared for that.”
“I can see that you did,” I said.
“They’ll be heading off the field in about two minutes, and the important point is we got guys all over the place. Some dressed as students, others hanging out in town, checking out the hotels and bars, things like that. Where we’re heading now is the student counseling center, where the assistant director’s going to meet us. She was Claire Rawley’s counselor and has all her records.”