The Madman's Tale (61 page)

“There’s no time,” Lucy said. She was staring down at the cluttered files spread across her desk in the makeshift office where her makeshift investigation was centered. Peter was pacing to the side, clearly sorting through all sorts of conflicted thoughts. When she spoke, he looked up, slightly cockeyed at her.

“How so?”

“I’m going to get pulled out of here. Probably within the next few days. I spoke with my boss, and he thinks that I’m just spinning my wheels here. He didn’t like the idea of me being here in the first place, but when I insisted, he gave in. That’s about to come to a sudden stop …”

Peter nodded. “I’m not going to be here much longer, either,” he said. “At least I don’t think so.” He didn’t elaborate, but did add, “But Francis will be left behind.”

“Not just Francis,” Lucy said.

“That’s right. Not just Francis.” He hesitated. “Do you think he’s right? About the Angel, I mean. Being someone we wouldn’t look at …”

Lucy took a deep breath. She was clenching her hands tightly, then releasing them, almost in rhythm with her breathing, like someone on the verge of fury, trying to control their emotions. This was an alien concept in the hospital, where so many people gave vent to so many emotions on a near constant basis. Restraint—other than that encouraged by antipsychotic medications—was pretty much impossible. But Lucy seemed to wear some sort of punishment behind her eyes, and when she looked up at Peter, he could see great waves of trouble behind her words.

“I cannot stand it,” she said, very quietly.

He did not respond, for he knew she would explain herself within moments.

Lucy sat down hard on the wooden chair, and then, just as swiftly, stood back up. She leaned forward to grasp the edges of the desk, as if that would steady her from the buffeting winds of her turmoil. When she looked over at Peter, he was unsure whether it was a murderous harshness in her eyes, or something else.

“The idea of leaving a rapist and killer behind in here is almost too much to imagine. Whether or not the Angel and the man who killed the women in my other three cases are one and the same—and I think they are—leaving him in here untouched makes my skin crawl.”

Again, he did not say anything.

“I won’t do it,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

“Suppose you’re forced to walk away?” Peter asked. He might as well have been asking the same question of himself.

She looked hard at him. “How do you do that?” she answered, a question to match a question.

There was a momentary silence in the room, and then, suddenly, Lucy looked down at the stack of patient dossiers on the desktop. In a single, abrupt motion, she swept her arm across the desk, dashing the folders against the wall. “Goddamn it!” she said.

The manila folders made a slapping sound, and papers fluttered to the floor.

Peter kept quiet and Lucy stepped back, took aim with her shoe at a metal wastebasket and sent it skittering across the room with a well-placed kick.

She looked up at Peter. “I won’t do it,” she said. “Tell me, which is more evil? Being a killer or allowing a killer to kill again?”

There was an answer to this question, but Peter wasn’t sure that he wanted to say it out loud.

Lucy took a few deep breaths, before lifting her eyes to where they locked in on Peter’s.

“Do you understand, Peter,” she whispered, “I know in my heart one thing: If I leave here without finding this man, someone else will die. I don’t know how long it will be, but sometime, a month, six months, a year from now, I will be standing over another body, staring down at a right hand that’s missing four fingers and now a thumb, as well. And all I’ll be able to see is the opportunity that I lost, right here. And even if I catch the guy, and see him sitting in a courtroom, and get to stand up and read off the list of charges to a judge and jury, I’ll still know that someone died, because I failed here, right at this moment in time.”

Peter finally slumped down in a chair and lowered his own face into his hands, as if he was washing up, but he was not. When he looked up at Lucy, he didn’t really address what she said, but then, in his own way, he did.

“You know, Lucy,” he said softly, as if someone might be listening, “before I became an arson investigator, I spent some time hauling hoses. I liked it, you know. Fighting a fire is just one of those things that has little ambivalence about it. You put out the fire, or else it destroys something. Simple, right? Sometimes, on a really big, bad blowup, you could feel the heat on your face and hear the sound that a fire makes when it is really out of control. It’s an awful, angry sound. Comes straight from hell. And then there’s this second when everything in your body says to you ‘Don’t go in there!’ but you do, anyway. You go ahead, because the fire is bad, and because the other members of your brigade are already inside, and you simply know that you have to. It’s the hardest easy decision you can ever make.”

Lucy seemed to consider what Peter said, and then asked. “So what about now?”

“I think,” he said slowly, “that we’re going to have to take some chances.”

“Chances?”

“Yes.”

“What about what Francis said,” she continued. “You think in here everything is upside down? If we were on the outside, doing this investigation, and a detective came to us and said we need to look at the
least
likely suspect, not the
most
likely, I would, of course, pretty much have that guy fired from the case. It makes no sense at all, and if nothing else, investigations are supposed to make sense.”

“Nothing in here really makes sense,” Peter said.

“Which is why Francis is probably right. He’s been right about a bunch of things, anyway.”

“So, what do we do? Go over every hospital file again searching for …” He paused, then asked,“… Searching for what?”

“What else can we do?”

Peter hesitated again, thinking hard about what had happened. After a moment, he shrugged a little and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I’m reluctant …”

“Reluctant for what?”

“Well, when we shook up the Williams housing unit, what happened?”

“A man got killed. Except they don’t think so …”

“No, beyond that, what happened? The Angel emerged. He came out to kill the Dancer—maybe. We don’t know for certain. But we do know that he showed up in the dormitory room to threaten Francis with his knife.”

Lucy took a deep breath. “I think I see what you’re driving at.”

“We need to get him to come out. Again.”

She nodded. “A trap.”

Peter agreed. “A trap. But what would we use for bait?”

Lucy smiled. But it wasn’t the sort of smile that implied something funny. It was more the devil-may-care look of someone who understands that to accomplish much, much needs to be risked.

Early in the afternoon Big Black collected a small squad of Amherst Building residents for a sortie out to the garden area. It had been some time since Francis had seen the results of the seeds they had planted in the hospital gardening area, before Short Blond’s death and Lanky’s arrest.

It was a fine afternoon. Warm, with shafts of light energetically bouncing off the white trim paint on the side of the hospital buildings. A light breeze that sent the occasional bulbous white cloud skidding across the expanse of blue sky. Francis lifted his face toward the sunlight, letting the heat enter him, and hearing a murmuring of satisfaction within his head that might have been his voices speaking, but just as easily could have been a small sense of hope creeping into his imagination. For a few minutes he believed he could forget everything that was taking place around him, and luxuriate in the sunshine. It was the sort of afternoon that made all the darknesses of being mad seem a little distant.

There were ten patients on this particular outdoor trip. Cleo started out in the front of their lineup, having taken the lead as soon as they stepped out of the doors of Amherst, still muttering, but surging forward, with a purposefulness that seemed in opposition to the laziness that was part of the day.
Napoleon at first tried to keep pace with her, but failed, and then complained to Big Black that Cleo was making them march too fast, which made all of them come to a stop on the pathway and created a bit of an argument.

“I should be first!” Cleo shouted out angrily. She lifted herself up haughtily, looking down at the others with a regal attitude that stemmed from some wayward thoughts within her. “It’s my position. My right and my duty!” she added.

“Then don’t go so fast,” Napoleon countered, wheezing slightly, his portly frame shaking.

“We will move at my speed,” she replied.

Big Black looked exasperated. “Cleo, please …,” he started, and she pivoted to him.

“All applications are inappropriate,” she said.

Big Black shrugged and turned to Francis. “You lead the way,” he said.

For a moment, Cleo stepped into Francis’s path, but he looked at her with such a hangdog look of resignation that after a second, she snorted with imperial disdain and moved to the side. As he stepped past her, he could see that her eyes were aflame, as if her thoughts within her head were being singed by some out of control fire. He hoped that Big Black saw the same, but he wasn’t sure, as the attendant was trying to keep the group in some semblance of organization. One man was already crying, and another woman was wandering off the pathway.

Francis stepped out and said, “Let’s go,” hoping that the others would follow. After a moment, the group seemed to accept Francis in the head position, probably because it defused a potential shouting match that no one particularly wanted. Cleo dropped into place behind him, and after urging him to speed up a few times, was distracted by catcalls and disjointed cries that echoed between the buildings.

They stopped at the edge of the garden, and whatever tension seemed to be building in Cleo’s head, seemed to quiet for just one moment. “Flowers!” she said in astonishment. “We’ve grown flowers!”

Tangled clumps of reds and whites, yellows, blues, and greens all twisted together haphazardly through the muddy quadrant of the hospital grounds edge. Peonies, baby’s breath, violets, and tulips had sprung from the murky soil. The garden was as chaotic as any of their minds, with sheets and slices of vibrant color heading in every direction, planted without order or organization, but flowering wildly nevertheless. Francis stared, a little astonished, reminded in that instant how drab their lives truly were. But even this depressing thought was shunted aside, in exuberant delight over the growth in front of him.

Within a few seconds, Big Black had distributed some modest gardening
tools. They were children’s implements, made out of plastic, and they didn’t do particularly well at what the task at hand was, but still, Francis thought, they were better then nothing. He plunked himself down next to Cleo, who seemed barely aware of his presence, and started working at organizing the flowers into rows, trying to bring some order to the explosion of color surrounding them.

Francis was unaware how long they worked. Even Cleo, still muttering obscenities to herself, seemed to put some of her stress on hold, although she occasionally sobbed as she dug and scraped in the moist loam of the garden, and more than once Francis saw her reach out and touch the fragile blooms of one flower with tears in her eyes. Almost all the patients at one point paused and let the rich, damp dirt dribble through their fingers. There was a smell of renewal, and vitality, and Francis thought the fragrance filled him with more optimism than any of the antipsychotic drugs they were forever ingesting.

When he rose, after Big Black finally announced that the sortie was over, he stared down at the garden, and had to admit that it looked better. Almost all the weeds that threatened the flower beds had been plucked out; some definition had been imposed upon the rows. It was, Francis thought, a little like seeing a painting that was still only half-completed. There was form and possibility.

He tried to dust some of the dirt from his hands and clothes, but only halfheartedly. He found he didn’t mind the sensation of being filthy, at least not on that afternoon.

Big Black arranged the group into a single line, and returned the plastic gardening tools to a green wooden box, counting them at least three times as he did so. Then, as he was about to give the signal to start back down the pathway to Amherst, he stopped, and Francis saw the huge attendant’s gaze focus on a small group that was gathering about fifty yards away, on the very edge of the hospital property, behind a wire fence.

“That’s the cemetery,” Napoleon whispered. Then he, like all the others, quieted.

Francis could see Doctor Gulptilil and Mister Evans and two other senior staff. There was also a priest, wearing a collar and several workmen in gray hospital maintenance uniforms gripping shovels, or leaning on the shafts, awaiting a command. As the group gathered together, Francis heard a chugging, diesel noise, and he saw a small backhoe being driven over to where the group was standing. Behind the backhoe there was a single black Cadillac station wagon, which with a shock, Francis recognized as a hearse.