An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries) (23 page)

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Authors: P.J. Parrish

BOOK: An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)
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Millie had to think for a minute. “Right after I went in,” she said. “Let’s see, my father committed me in the summer of 1952. She’d been there awhile by then.”
“May I ask why you were committed?”
Millie’s eyes swept back to Louis quickly and he was sure she was going to tell him it was none of his business. “I was a heroin addict,” she said. “My boyfriend got me hooked, and when my father found out, he had me arrested. I stabbed a police officer with a kitchen knife and then stabbed myself.”
Louis looked down at the folder in his hand.
“I was high,” she said, stiffening. “I never would have hurt myself or that cop without that crap in me.”
When Louis said nothing, Millie went on. “They detoxed me and a month or so later I was bunking next to Claudia in that place. She was the saddest person I ever met, I think.”
“Sad, how? Suicidal?”
“Oh no, not like that. I never heard her talk about hurting herself.”
“She slashed her wrists. That’s what put her there.”
“I know. But she told me she didn’t even remember doing that,” Millie said. “Like I didn’t remember much about stabbing the cop or myself, either. Besides, that one thing didn’t make her a lunatic.”
Louis opened the folder and reached for the photograph of Becker, but Millie was talking again.
“She used to cry all night,” she said. “I never heard someone cry so much.”
His next question popped into his head and he almost thought about not asking it. “Did she talk of anyone?” Louis asked.
Millie’s lips turned up in a sad smile. “She was a romantic, that one was. She talked of a boy named Phillip. And how they were going to get married, and how she and him and their children would live in this beautiful house on Lake Michigan.”
Louis lowered his eyes, but they fell on the mug shot of Becker. He closed the folder again. “Did she ever seem to get better?” he asked.
“Better?” Millie asked. “In that place they didn’t want anyone to get better. They only wanted you to comply. And if you didn’t you went to E Building.”
“That’s where she went after you and she tried to escape, right?”
Millie seemed surprised he knew, and she took a second to stab out her cigarette in the ashtray and then gave him a long look. “If you know that, then you know what they did to her in that place. They say she died of the flu, but it wasn’t that. It was that place. It killed you in ways you didn’t even know you could die.”
Louis didn’t want to go back into this, but Millie kept talking and he had the sense that outside of her therapist, she didn’t have anyone to talk to about this. Or at least anyone who wanted to hear it.
“Do you know about the therapy they gave her?” Millie asked.
“I know about the shock and insulin treatments.”
“And about the isolation periods?”
“No,” Louis said. “I haven’t read the whole file yet.”
“She would disappear for months at a time, and when I’d ask, they’d tell me she was on punishment and in isolation and if I wasn’t good, that’s where I’d end up, too.”
He knew what effect long periods of isolation had on convicts in maximum-security prisons. He could not imagine the effect on a young woman already under the influence of drugs and suffering from depression.
His eye caught a shadow lurking just inside the kitchen, and Millie saw him glance toward it.
“Excuse me,” she said. She walked quickly to the kitchen door and in harsh whispers again told her sister to go find something to do. When Millie returned, she carried an amber-colored drink with ice.
“I was isolated once,” she said, setting the glass aside and lighting another cigarette.
Louis opened the folder and slipped out the photograph of Becker, hoping to get Millie back on track. But she kept talking.
“They locked me in that isolation room downstairs and I remember it was cold and wet.” She nodded briskly. “It was February 1964. I remember because those Beatle guys were supposed to be on television that night and I had been good ’cause I wanted to watch them—”
“Miss Reuben,” Louis interrupted.
“But they took me anyway,” she said, her voice changing to something deeper and more distant. “They came and got me in the afternoon and they took me down there and they strapped me down and they just left me there.”
Louis held up a hand, hoping she would see he wanted to talk about something else, but her eyes weren’t on him. She was staring beyond him and she was remembering. He wasn’t sure what to do. He had no idea whether she could make that mental journey back to E Building, and he didn’t want to be here with her alone if she couldn’t.
“That’s the first night I was raped.”
Louis watched her carefully, not quite sure he had heard her right. Millie hadn’t moved and her cigarette ash was growing long between her fingers.
“Who raped you?” Louis said.
Millie was still.
“Miss Reuben?”
Suddenly, her eyes focused on him, and she flicked her ash twice toward the table, missing the ashtray. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was dark and I was full of pills. I felt him and I saw him, but I didn’t see him, do you know what I mean?”
“Do you know anything else about him?”
“I know he was a patient,” Millie said. “He wore the blue tunic the men wore and he had a plastic ID bracelet on his wrist.”
“How would a patient get into a locked room?” Millie shrugged. “Probably let in by some orderly who wanted to watch.”
Louis drew a breath and looked back at the papers he had in the folder. Under Becker’s photograph was a newspaper account of his arrest and incarceration at Hidden Lake. Louis knew the date, but he doubled-checked now. Becker had been sent to Hidden Lake in 1963.
He glanced up at Millie. She was quiet, the cigarette at her lips, her eyes steady on the window. Then he held out the photo of Becker, bracing himself for her reaction—anything from a gasp to hysteria.
“Is there any chance this is the man who raped you?” he asked.
Millie stared at it. “That’s that weirdo Becker. But I don’t know if he was the man who raped me.”
“Did you know Becker?”
“I saw him around,” Millie said. “The men and women were always kept separate inside E Building. We didn’t even eat together, but occasionally, if we were good, every few weeks, they’d let us out and we could walk the grounds. Sometimes, you could visit with the men then.”
“Wasn’t Becker under guard?” Louis asked.
Millie shook her head. “The inmates ran the prison, if you know what I mean. I saw him alone sometimes.”
Louis put the photo away.
“The night of the Beatles,” Millie said, “that wasn’t the only time I was raped.”
Louis looked back at her. She had the expression of someone who was remembering a disturbing but foggy dream rather than a nightmare, and he was suddenly thankful that she had been too drugged to remember the specifics.
“How many times?” Louis asked. “Do you know?”
“A dozen or so, all during that same time.”
Louis stared at the floor. He was trying to imagine how Becker might have gained access to the women when something else edged into his brain. The autopsy photo of Rebecca Gruber’s thighs.
“Miss Reuben,” he said softly, head still down, “may I ask you a very personal question?”
“Sure.”
“Did your rapist burn you?”
When Millie didn’t answer him, he looked up at her. The beautiful speckled eyes misted as she blew a long, thin stream of smoke from her lips.
“They told me later I did that to myself with cigarettes,” she said. “But I knew I didn’t.”
“Where did he burn you?”
Her hand moved slowly to her leg, and she touched her inner thigh with the tip of her finger. “There. On both sides.”
“Three burns?”
“Three with each rape. My legs are full of marks.” Louis rubbed his forehead, listening to the rattle of pans in the kitchen. The sweet smell in the house seemed stronger now, a mixture of air freshener, incense, and that other smell he now was sure was pot.
“I heard about that girl who was murdered down there,” Millie said. “The newspaper said she was a nurse.”
“Yes.”
“Was she burned, too?”
“Yes.”
“And you think Donald Lee Becker did it?”
“Becker died in 1980.”
“Inside that place?”
It was then he realized she had never said Hidden Lake. She had called it only “that place.” He nodded in response to her question.
Millie shook her head. “You seen his body, Mr. Kincaid?”
“No.”
“Then don’t be so sure he’s dead,” she said.
Millie had that same crazy look Delp had when he talked of Becker being alive. By 1980, she had already been out of Hidden Lake for six or seven years. She couldn’t know anything about Becker, how he died or where he was even buried.
He stood up. “Thank you for your time,” he said. “And your honesty.”
“What the hell, it’s therapy, right?” she said with a shrug. She walked him to the foyer and opened the door. As he started out, she touched his arm.
“Why were you asking about Claudia?”
“I’m working for someone who knew her a long time ago,” he said. “I’m working for Phillip.”
Millie looked surprised. “So there really was a Phillip,” she said. “I thought the girl was just crazy with all that talk.”
“She wasn’t crazy,” Louis said.
Millie smiled. “None of us in that place were. Don’t you know that?”
CHAPTER 23
 
Louis parked the car in front of the Ardmore Police Station, and turned off the engine. But he didn’t move from the driver’s seat.
He had called Alice from a pay phone as soon as he left Millie Reuben’s house and asked her to pull Donald Lee Becker’s medical records. Alice had refused, claiming confidentiality. Louis then told her he had found Millie Reuben and that she had the same burns Rebecca Gruber had.
“I still can’t give you those records, Louis,” Alice had said. “I just can’t. Please don’t ask again.”
“Then just pull his death certificate, Alice. Please.”
“You can get that from the public records.”
“No, I can’t. The state sealed it.”
With that, she had reluctantly agreed to get the death certificate, and they arranged to meet at the police station around three. It was ten after, but he didn’t see her car yet.
It was going to be hard, approaching Chief Dalum with all of this. There was now a definite link between Rebecca Gruber and Millie Reuben, and Dalum might even be willing to concede that Sharon Stottlemyer could be connected, despite the fact they would never prove she was burned or raped. From there, it wasn’t a big stretch to see that a former patient was the likely perpetrator. But Louis knew Dalum wouldn’t buy Becker—a dead man—as a viable suspect.
Louis wasn’t sure he did, either. Except for the one fact that in a case where nothing else made sense, Becker did. If Claudia’s body had gone missing, why couldn’t Becker’s?
Louis pushed open the car door and went inside the station. An officer near the front desk gave him a nod. “Chief’s down the way, getting a sandwich,” he said.
Louis hung his jacket on a hall tree and started for the coffeepot in the corner. He poured himself a cup and glanced at the clock. It was 3:20. Alice was probably having a hard time finding Becker’s folder in the crowded records room in E Building. He had made her promise to take a security guy with her. He hoped she had. Maybe he should have gone himself.
“Charlie’s been asking for you,” the officer said.
Louis glanced at the closed door to the cell block. “Mind if I go back?”
The officer shrugged and grabbed a set of keys from a drawer and took him back. Charlie was seated on the lower bunk,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
open on his lap. He looked up when he heard footsteps and broke into a grin when he saw Louis.
“Hello, Mr. Kincaid.”
“Hello, Charlie.”
The officer opened the cell door and let Louis inside, then walked away without locking the door. On the top bunk, Louis saw a McDonald’s bag, and next to that, an unopened package of Hostess cupcakes. He guessed the cops were starting to consider Charlie more of a guest than a possible killer.
“Can we talk, Charlie?”
Charlie closed the book and stood up, setting it on the top bunk, beneath the McDonald’s bag. Then he faced Louis.
“Miss Alice is coming,” Charlie said.
“Yes, I know,” Louis said. “But can I ask you about something else?”
“Yes, sir.”

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