Malevolent (21 page)

He waved an arm to indicate the entire facility. The motion ended with a casual wave at the guard behind glass whose attention had been drawn by the movement.

Frost chuckled. “The irony is that, while the prosecutor insisted and the press suggested that I was faking my symptoms in order to be found criminally insane, I was fighting my own lawyer to be declared competent. It gets even better.” Frost scooted forward in his love seat. “I actually believed that what I was eagerly telling the court-ordered psychiatrists would prove me sane. What I learned”—his eyes glazed momentarily as he seemed to swim in the memories of a trial seven years behind him—“is that society labels sanity as conformity to group experience and expectations. There are no flying saucers, so you’d better not see one.”

Maybe they were getting somewhere. “So you’re saying that you had experiences in the past that would defy conventional belief,” she said casually.

He shifted his legs to rest one ankle on a knee. In his warm-up sweats, loose cotton T-shirt and expensive running shoes, he looked more like a liberal college professor than a demented killer.

Watching Melinda intently, he said, “It’s so common for people to confuse mental illness with mental retardation—or whatever they’re calling it now. The few visitors I get, my mother and brother, the occasional reporter writing an anniversary story about my crimes, they tend to speak slowly. As if they think comprehension is a problem. You, Detective Dillon, are acting in similar fashion by figuring you can keep asking your questions without arousing my curiosity. Did you expect to find me in a drug-induced stupor, sitting in a straitjacket and nodding off in my applesauce?”

He wasn’t far off. Melinda had been surprised at how clear-eyed he looked. His amiable responses and the generally nonthreatening surroundings kept throwing her.

She said, knowing how weak it sounded even as it left her mouth, “We’re trying to update our files and monitor the progress of your treatment.”

His laughter was a small sound, kept mostly to himself, his chin tucked tightly against his neck. “I would think, if there were any files to update, that would be the job of the prosecutor’s office, not CPD. Besides, I’m sure the case is closed. I confessed, there was plenty of physical evidence, you had witnesses, including my own poor battered wife, and the public was outraged that I managed to escape death row. It’s not like release is imminent. There are no files to update, Detective Dillon. I’m here forever.”

He mocked her with his smile, but gently, as though she shouldn’t take it personally.

She decided to hit him with all she had—which wasn’t much. “There was an accomplice, at least according to you. You blamed the Church of Christian Reconciliation for making you attack your family.”

“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” he said, watery eyes dancing.

“But you thought at the time—”

“The Utica Lane Church of Redemption.”

She forgot what she was going to say. The Reverend Frost sat across from her, looking quite proud of himself. He knew
exactly
what she was talking about.

Melinda said, quite unnecessarily she was sure, “That’s the new name for your old church.”

He nodded. “My mother, who still lives in the area, doesn’t like to talk about my past, but I made her promise she’d alert me when it reopened. I knew it would draw a congregation eventually. I mean, it’s a church, right? It’s not like you’re going to turn it into a convenience store or a bowling alley. I was sure it was priced to sell in this real estate market and another denomination would eventually show interest.” He smiled broadly, a show of how easy it had been for him.

Melinda repositioned herself on the rocking chair cushion, hoping it wouldn’t look like she was squirming.

“We aren’t allowed Internet access here,” the reverend continued, “but I subscribe to a couple neighborhood weeklies and get the news on the radio. I read about a rape nine days ago and heard of a murder last night. The first victim was a church member, wasn’t she? Seems I read she’d just left an evening service. Shame, isn’t it?”

Melinda was rocking in her chair without realizing it. Not a very intimidating way of interrogating a criminally insane killer, so she stopped. “You think the church is responsible?”

There it was. Out in the open. She’d kept her tone deliberately skeptical so he couldn’t tell her true feelings.

He leaned slowly forward until his pale face hung half over the coffee table. Yes, he definitely looked closer to fifty than forty now that all of the boyish humor had fled his eyes. “It sounds like a Warner Brothers cartoon,” he said, “but I really did use a frying pan to fracture my daughter’s skull and commit numerous compound fractures upon my wife. It was all I could find on such short notice…the cast iron frying pan. I’ve never seen so much blood.”

Dr. Valdez had been most hesitant to leave Melinda alone with Melvin Frost. Although she was quickly assured that there had not been a single violent episode since his arrival, Melinda couldn’t help but remember the unarmed guard posted on the other side of that glass wall.

The tension in Frost’s eyes broke and he settled himself back into his love seat. He crossed one leg back over the other and said, “I only told you that to shake you up a little. You sounded so condescending in your skepticism, and yet you hung on every word. You believe me, but you can’t allow yourself to treat me as anything more than a pathetic mental case, lest it upset your lifetime of rational thought. Hardly seems fair, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said when she could trust her voice. “And since you’re so direct with me, I’m going to be the same with you. You sound credible, but I’m having a hard time believing a stable person could so breezily discuss the murder of his own daughter. Or do it, more to the point.”

He rolled his shoulders. “She wasn’t real, so the crime wasn’t real.”

Melinda was chilled, but actually disappointed with the answer. She’d gotten her hopes up for a little more insight from Frost, not the stereotypical psychobabble he was reverting to.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Frost continued. “I don’t mean that in a way that a textbook sociopath might say it. Such a person believes himself to be the center of his own universe, and that everyone else is only here for his pleasure, which, in the more memorable cases, tends to involve torture, sexual deviation and murder.”

The reverend waved at the door glass and Melinda turned in time to see the guard returning with a scowl to his newspaper.

Frost beamed. “Where was I? Oh, my situation is different than that, although Dr. Valdez goes back and forth while trying to decide just how to classify me.”

He studied Melinda’s face for a moment. “But you’re not going to tell me what Dr. Valdez thinks, are you? Oh well. I know I’m not the center of the universe. Neither is God or any other benevolent being. We’re all here for the benefit of the most powerful psychopath imaginable. And what he—or she or it or they—does to us is the equivalent of tearing wings off flies.”

She was genuinely confused now. “But you’re not that superior being, correct?”

“Of course not. I’m the fly. Flies are so inferior to the rest of us that they’re barely real. Probably not even to other flies, except when compelled to mate. And that’s just instinct, not conscious desire.”

Frost leaned toward her again. He glanced once more at the guard in his glass cage and said, “Maybe the analogy’s all wrong. Let me try again. We are more like ants in an ant farm. Think about it. We hate flies, but are sometimes mildly intrigued by the antics of ants. They’re social creatures, of a sort. We watch them build their tunnel homes and social hierarchies. If one ant should eat another, it might be worth watching. We might even introduce another colony of ants into the farm just to watch the war. See, we care for the ant farm and want to keep it alive and thriving, but we couldn’t care less about the lives of individual ants.”

Melinda felt lost, confused. Probably, she told herself, because she was so weary. She was supposed to be asleep right now. She’d driven the forty miles here on her own time, sure that there was no way she could justify expensing it.

Earlier in the day she’d tried to catch the Kimberly Nan Reese murder investigation, but it absolutely wasn’t a sex case. It was, as the medical examiner had pointed out, a simple strangulation. No additional crimes committed before, after or during the attack. Reese wasn’t a member of the church. And obviously neither that case nor the Germaine Marberry assault had anything to do with the incarcerated Melvin Frost.

“So you think that someone—some
thing
—at the Utica Lane church was responsible for what you did to your family. And for the violence of the last several days.”

She was aware that she kept trying to put words in the mental patient’s mouth, kept trying to package his confusing, teasing statements into something concrete and useful. She vowed to stop. To simply wait him out and see what he’d say next.

“Tell me why you keep touching your right breast.”

She froze. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve done it six times since you’ve been here,” Frost said. “Does it hurt? Your tit. Maybe you’re subconsciously indicating physical attraction to me.”

She stood quickly, drawing the immediate attention of the guard who obviously hadn’t been as lost in his newspaper as he’d appeared. The door buzzed electronically as the uniformed man joined them.

“Ah, well,” Frost said, chuckling. “Here’s the list you asked me for through Dr. Valdez.” He pulled a folded sheet of lined notebook paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

As she took it from him and stuffed it into her purse he said, “Just answer me this. Have you visited the church yet?”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Frost.” Deliberately not addressing him as “Reverend”.

“I thought so,” he said, laughing his private laugh. “I wonder what it found out about you.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

She retraced her steps down the long ivory corridor, her guard keeping his silent watch on her. This part of the facility, unlike the bright day room she’d just left, fulfilled Melinda’s expectations of a state-run facility for the criminally insane. Even the guard seemed to respect its dreary power. The two together didn’t make as much noise on the scrubbed tile floor as she’d expect from one person.

They passed steel door after steel door, each shut and presumably locked. Through diamond-patterned wire mesh windows she could see bedded patients. She could imagine rubber mouth guards holding in the screams while jolts of electricity fried faulty brain regions to toast, but she knew she was getting trite and melodramatic.

One door, however, was not shut or locked. It was open and she walked past it before something pulled her back. She watched her guard proceed several steps before realizing he walked alone. He stopped and looked back blankly at her.

Her head throbbing with fatigue, she told herself to continue on, to get back to Dr. Valdez and sign out and get in her car and leave this place and never ever think about it again. Instead, she looked in that open doorway.

“Miss, you’re not supposed to…” His words trailed off as if he couldn’t bring himself to issue a command to anyone with more social status than a mental patient.

“Wait here,” she said, and knew he would.

The shape under the covers sucked liquid nourishment from bags via a relay station of tubes that disappeared under the bed’s white linen. Melinda heard a rhythmic whooshing sound from the machine that was apparently breathing for the formless shape, and another mechanical device with digital readout that beeped to a different beat in monitoring the shape’s vital signs.

Melinda’s stomach hurt as she breathed in the smells she knew so well, the sterile odors of medicine and crisply bleached laundry and medically cleansed death. The smells, they hit her like a wall. She clutched her breast through her thin blouse and felt the grain-size lump growing and hardening.

She was convinced that the figure under the covers was dead, until one withered hand poked through. As if scaling an impossible height, the hand climbed exhaustedly onto the figure’s still torso. Melinda could hear the beat of both the ventilator and the monitor adjusting to the nearly inert patient’s unaccustomed exertion.

The fingers were as thick and coarse as a man’s, but indefinably female. One digit, the index finger, lifted straight into the air. Melinda stared in horrific fascination as the finger bent and twitched, directing her forward.

And now she could hear the wheezing, and Melinda found her own breathing pattern matching that of the raspy woman.

The hand, the finger, and now the wrist were exposed. And the bracelet on the wrist. Melinda’s throat clogged as she stared at the “jade” piece her mother had bought from some street vendor in Mexico City some twenty years ago, back when Melinda’s dad was alive. Mom had continued to occasionally wear it as a joke on herself even after it left a pale-green impression on her skin.

Back when Mom was alive.

Melinda bumped against the door and felt herself blacking out, her legs wobbling.

The guard said, “Ma’am, I really don’t think you oughta…”

He didn’t finish. Just stood statue-still, glaring at her as if her crisis was putting a crimp in his newspaper-reading time. He would have had the crossword solved by now if not for her, his look seemed to say.