“She makes shame working as prostitute,” he shot back. “Cam be better off dead.”
He hung up on me.
Chapter
83
At two p.m. Holy Thursday, inside the psych ward at St. Elizabeths, Patrolman Kenneth Carney was strapped to a bed in a locked room having a murmured conversation with no one. The attending psychiatrist, Arthur Nelson, an old friend of mine, said that after surgeries on his hand and shoulder, Carney had been brought there for observation. Despite the drugs, he quickly went from disoriented to grief-stricken to violent. Nelson had ordered him into restraints.
“I’m recommending lithium once he’s done with the opiates,” Nelson said when I turned from the small bulletproof window set in the door.
“I’d like to talk to him now,” I said.
Nelson raised an eyebrow but said, “Your call, Alex. You’ve dealt with more of the criminally insane than I have.”
I looked over at Sampson, Bree, and Elaine Brown, an assistant district attorney who’d been assigned to the case. All three nodded.
“I’ll have him brought to a treatment room,” Nelson said.
We went out into a waiting area. Assistant DA Brown disappeared to make some phone calls. My head still ached. Of course it didn’t help that Bree, Nana Mama, and I had polished off two bottles of Chianti the night before to dull the pain of our wounds and celebrate the fact that despite the way Cam Nguyen’s father had reacted to his daughter’s rescue, we’d solved an almost impossible case.
At least that was how Captain Quintus had described the investigation on the eleven o’clock news, adding that my wife would be receiving a special commendation for her heroic efforts. Both the Lancasters and the Bransons had appeared on camera as well, holding their babies and praising us and the department for making their families whole again.
As the news stories had noted, however, the exact motives behind Carney’s actions remained murky. Which was why we were all at St. Elizabeths and not taking a hard-earned day off for a job well done.
Sampson’s search of Carney’s apartment had turned up the 9mm pistol the officer had used to murder eight people in cold blood. He also found the ash-colored wig, the clothes, and even the makeup the hairless young man had applied to transform himself into Kelli Adams the kidnapper; as well as the hoodie, brown wig, and fake beard he’d used when roaming the streets as the mass murderer Kevin Olmstead.
But my partner discovered nothing concrete to explain Carney’s insane behavior. Then again, that’s why they’re called crazy.
You have to think a little loony to talk with someone who is criminally insane, at least if you want to gain some real insight into his deep personality. Wishing to God I didn’t have a headache, I tried to get myself to that crazy place, to remember everything I’d heard in the root cellar before he hit me, and then to imagine the subtext of that bizarre conversation.
I could see some of it, but there were big holes I couldn’t explain.
“John,” I said.
“Alex?” Sampson said.
“Call Mahoney and ask him to find out why Carney was turned down for marine recon after passing the physical requirements.”
He nodded. “I have some marine friends at the Pentagon who might be able to help, too.”
“Alex?” Dr. Nelson said, looking out at us from a doorway. “Patient is in room two on the right.”
“You observing?” I asked, going by him.
“We all are. By video feed in my office.”
“Good luck, baby,” Bree said. Despite the wounds and the broken ribs, she’d refused anything more than Advil. It showed in the way she moved and spoke, stiff and slow.
I paused, took a deep breath, understood that this might be a bumpy ride, and went in to face Carney. He was restrained on the bed, looking off into space, when I took a seat opposite him. High behind me a camera rolled.
Studying the young officer a moment there in the bright light, hairless, baby-faced, I could see how with the right makeup and clothes he’d look feminine enough to fool another woman even at close quarters.
“Officer Carney,” I began.
He looked over at me with disdain, said, “Wrong name.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Who am I talking to?”
Carney laughed, said, “Bang. Bang. As if you don’t know.”
Then I got it and said, “Oh, hello, Kevin.”
Carney smiled, nodded, said, “See, I told ’em you’d know who I was.”
Chapter
84
I cleared my throat, said, “Told who? Kenny-Two? Kelli? Your brother and sister?”
“Who else? Officer Goody Two-Shoes?” Carney asked agreeably, then paused and gave me a suspicious look. “Why you asking about Kelli and Junior? Pay attention. You talking to me now, asshole!”
I held up my palms to him, said, “Just trying to understand the—”
Carney’s agitated face became a sea of minor tics and palsies. His eyes quivered, got glassy, and then fluttered up toward their sockets, while his head arched and the muscles in his neck strained, making his veins bulge. For a second, fearing that he was going into an epileptic fit, I almost went to him.
But as suddenly as the attack had come on, in less than five seconds, Carney’s neck relaxed and his head lolled. He blinked lazily at me and then said in that raspy southern feminine voice I’d heard back inside the root cellar: “You’ll have to excuse Kevin. My baby brother’s faculties just aren’t quite right.”
I studied Carney, wondering whether this was an act or a genuine case of multiple personalities. If it was an act, it was a good one, because my experience and research have shown that people with real multiple personality disorder usually “switch” from one to another quite rapidly. The fluttering eyes and the facial tics fit as well. But the arching of his neck, I’d never seen before. In any case, I decided to indulge him.
“Well, Kelli,” I said, “when you consider what Kevin did in the massage parlor and the brothel, I’d tend to agree with you.”
Carney shook his head, added pity to Kelli’s voice, and said, “Horrible thing what war can do to a young man, isn’t it? The violence just twists them all up inside, spits them out. Makes you kind of understand when they come home and go off like that, you know, just killing everything that moves?”
The fit took him again, and when he rolled his head forward the second time, he wore a tough, knowing expression.
“Don’t listen to that psychobabble crap,” he said in a voice much closer to his own. “Kevin likes to kill, pure and simple. Always has. Always will. And Kelli’s a bit delusional, always out to save someone if I let her.”
“Big brother Kenny-Two?” I asked.
“In the flesh,” Carney replied, coughed, and then his left eye squinted as if it pained him.
“Your brother and sister look up to you,” I said.
“They better look up to the first one out the chute,” he said, chuckled, and then his left eye squinted in pain again.
“You hurting?”
“Lingering migraines,” he said. “We all get ’em. Curse of the Carneys.”
Thinking back to what I’d heard in the root cellar, and what Sampson had dug up, I hesitated fifteen, maybe twenty seconds before saying, “So tell me about the IED that got you in Afghanistan.”
He squinted again, but this time as if he considered me a fool, and said, “How the Christ should I know? Ask the man in charge. He was there, not me.”
Before I could reply to that, Carney’s face sagged, his eyes drifted and shut. His head rocked forward and then up like the head of a passenger drowsing on a plane.
Eyes open and incredulous, as if he’d been shaken from a deep sleep, he looked at me as if I were part of a lingering dream and then took in the bare room, the restraints, the hospital gown, and the bandages on his shoulder and wrist.
He seemed to startle fully awake then, acting bewildered and then agitated, struggling against the restraints for several seconds be
fore succumbing to the pain of his wounds, turning very frightened and fixing his confused gaze on me.
“Detective Cross?” the young officer said. “Where am I, sir? What have I done to deserve this?”
Chapter
85
Seeing how unhinged Officer Carney was acting, the psychologist in me wanted to believe that he might have no idea of the things he had done. But the detective in me was much more skeptical.
“You saying you don’t know why you’re here, Officer?”
“Where am I, sir?” Carney asked again.
“Psych ward, St. Elizabeths Hospital.”
“Psych?” he said, puzzled again. “No, that’s not…No, I’m…I’m good. I, I checked out. I’m good. I’m good.” He started to cry and then looked at me again. “They said I was good.”
“Who said you were good?”
“Naval doctors. VA doctors. They cleared me years ago, said I was fine. No problems with the baseline. None.”
“You mean a concussion baseline?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Tell me about the IED in Afghanistan.”
“But what have I done, sir?”
“We’ll get to that later, Officer. Where was that bomb?”
On a road southwest of Kandahar, deep in Helmand Province nine months into his tour of duty, Corporal Carney was riding as a top gunner in an armored car leading a line of trucks carrying supplies for several forward bases. The IED had been buried in the shoulder of the dirt road and detonated as he passed.
“Nothing hit me,” Carney remembered. “No shrapnel or powder residue, just the explosive force, the waves of it going through my head. It was like I was there, alert, scoping for Taliban—hoorah—and then I wasn’t. Woke up like thirty hours later on a medevac flight to Ramstein with a piece of my skull riding beside me.”
Doctors told Carney he’d been bleeding from his nose and ears, and that he’d sustained a moderate closed-head brain injury. They’d removed the piece of skull to relieve pressure. After an initial recovery and second surgery to reattach the skull section in Germany, he was shipped on to the Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego, where he underwent extensive therapy.
“Five months and they said I was good to go,” Carney said. “And I was. Went back to my unit, and was crushing PT in like a month.”
“But you tried out for Force Recon and were denied?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They give you a reason?”
“Given my medical history, Detective, they said they did not want to chance it.”
“Make you angry? Sad?”
“Both,” Carney admitted. “But I was only twenty-three. I could see an entire life out there before me. Still do. Please, Detective Cross, what did I do to get me put in here?”
It did me no good to hold back any longer, so I told him.
Carney became nauseated and vomited. “No,” he moaned. “No, I couldn’t. I would never do…” He looked up at me in abject despair. “Oh, my God, sir, what kind of monster have I become?”
Chapter
86
Carney was inconsolable and began to struggle wildly. There was a knock on the door. Two nurses rushed in and started to work to calm him down before he could tear his wounds open or rip out his IV.
I went outside to find Dr. Nelson waiting with Bree and Assistant DA Brown. “I probably pushed him too hard,” I said.
The psychiatrist nodded. “Especially given the surgeries last night.”
“I’ll come back in the morning?”
Nelson thought about that, said, “I’ll let you know this evening.”
“What am I supposed to tell my boss?” Brown asked, checking her watch.
“Tell him he’s going to have to hold his horses a little while longer.”
That did not sit well with the assistant DA, and she scowled.
“You believe him, Alex?” Bree asked.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“No doubt he’s going for an insanity plea here,” the prosecutor said.
“Maybe because he is insane, Counselor,” my wife said, surprising me.
“You don’t know that,” Brown snapped.
“Neither do you,” Bree said.
I said, “I’m not convinced this is entirely about a head injury.”
“Why?” my wife and the prosecutor said at the same time.
“Because I can’t see a link yet between the injury, the three other personalities, and the heinous things that have been done in this case.”
Before anyone could reply, Sampson appeared, coming down the hallway in a hurry from the elevators. “You don’t answer your phone?”
“Not when I’m interviewing a mass murderer and baby kidnapper.”
“Yeah, well, I think I found some folks you’re going to want to talk to before you go interviewing Officer Carney again.”
He handed me two phone numbers, said, “My contact says they’re busy people. If you can’t reach them at first, keep trying.”
I did keep trying, all that afternoon and into the evening. But as of seven p.m., I had not yet heard back from Chief Petty Officer Sheldon Drury, stationed at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, or Dr. Evelyn Owens of Balboa Hospital in San Diego.
“Dinner!” Nana Mama called.
The air smelled of meat frying and garlic, enough to tear me away from my phone. But Ali rolled over on his stomach on the couch and moaned, “Nana Mama, it’s almost the end. Fifteen minutes? Please?”
“It’s not fifteen minutes until the end of that episode and you know it, young man,” my grandmother shot back. “Now stop it and get to the dinner table. It’s an important night.”
I watched from the hallway as Ali groaned, shut off the television, and trudged to the table as if he carried the weight of the world. Jannie was already at the table, spooning out pork chops my grandmother had pan-seared and then baked in a glass pan with sautéed sweet onions, olive oil, garlic, and a little Dijon mustard. With egg noodles, green beans, and fresh applesauce on the side, there are few dishes in the world that rival it. A cold Dr Pepper only adds to the experience. At least in my book.
In any case, my fifteen-year-old daughter was acting a hundred and eighty degrees different than she had a few nights before, now bubbly and open. Bree sported a new, smaller bandage on her face that showed just how swollen it had become. Her right eye was almost shut. She had to be in pain, but you never would have known it the way she engaged Jannie, getting her to talk about history and English—her favorite classes—and how the coach was expecting great things from her the following afternoon.
For once I just sat down and let them go on, listening to them babble while I dwelled on my sessions with Officer Kenneth Carney and his three alter egos. Was it real? Were there four people in his head? Or was this an elaborate—
“Alex?” Nana Mama said, breaking into my thoughts.
“Right here.”
“The heck you are,” she said, shaking a wooden spoon at me. “I asked you twice how many pork chops you wanted.”
“I was giving it some thought. And I’ll take two.”
Bree, Jannie, and Ali were trying unsuccessfully to hide their smiles.
“Two it is,” she said, and passed me my plate.
We said grace, thanked God for our many blessings, and prayed for Damon to have safe travels in the morning.
“What time’s Damon get in?” Jannie asked, cutting her chop.
Bree replied before I could, saying, “He’s getting the nine o’clock jitney to Albany. Train leaves at ten twenty. He changes in New York City and gets here around quarter to five. He’ll be home in time for supper.”
That thought made me very happy. I knew Damon loved being away at school, but I loved having my firstborn home under my roof.
“Speaking of suppers, Ali, do you know what tonight is?” Nana Mama asked.
“The night I have to wait until I finish Walking Dead?” he grumbled.
F
or a second there I thought my grandmother was going to lay into him as only a former high school vice principal can, but instead she said softly, “No.”
In the silence that followed, I watched my son’s head twist toward Nana Mama, who’d cradled her chin in her interlaced wrinkled fingers and watched him as if she were magically summoning his attention.
Then she smiled and said, “If you really think about it, the event we celebrate tonight was part of the very first zombie story, the best ever.”
Chapter
87
Outside, down the street, in the back of the dark van that now sported a sign advertising a bogus paint company, Marcus Sunday was alone and listening in on the Cross family dinner conversation. Acadia Le Duc was long gone.
Sunday rolled his eyes as Nana enticed her grandson into the story of the Last Supper by selling it as a critical scene in a zombie tale, all the while feeling repulsed by the fact that Dr. Alex’s entire clan was in there munching on fried pork chops.
Sunday hated pork. The whiff of a chop sizzling or a hock boiling set him on edge. So did the odor of bacon. Those thoughts took him back to the months after his father’s death and the skeptical West Virginia state police detective who’d kept nosing around the Mulch farm, acting as if young Thierry Mulch was somehow responsible for his old man’s having a heart attack and falling in among his pigs and having his remains gnawed to broken bones. It had taken DNA tests just to identify the old man.
The detective’s name was Alan Jones, and Detective Jones had tried everything to get young Mulch to admit his involvement in his father’s death, even bringing up the fact that his mother had abandoned the family and his father had recently shot down his idea of going to college to study, of all things, philosophy.
But eighteen-year-old Thierry had been too smart for Detective Jones, razor-focused on the long term. He had never once lost his cool, even when the detective had questioned his decision to sell his father’s farm to a coal mining company that had been after the property for years, and to sell all the pigs.