Blind Spot (4 page)

“I hear the county’s swamped and would like some help,” Curtis said mildly.

“You’re full of it.”

“Call the sheriff and see if I am.”

With that Curtis gave him a light punch on the upper arm and bent his head to the falling rain. Lang watched him walk up the street. He wasn’t going to call Winslow County’s Sheriff Nunce, a man who’d been reelected the fall before though it was rumored he had been reluctant to run again, had been, in fact, expected to retire. Lang had met Nunce a few times over the years when their cases overlapped and had found the sheriff congenial and able to share investigative work, but that didn’t mean Nunce would be looking for Lang to stick his nose in where it didn’t really belong.

“Celek doesn’t want me back,” he said aloud, though Curtis was long out of earshot.

He bent his head to the rain as he headed toward his gray Dodge truck, yanking open the stubborn driver’s door, ducking inside. Slamming the door shut with an effort, he reminded himself he needed to take the truck in and have the door fixed. He just didn’t ever seem to have the energy or initiative. He’d been that way for months, ever since his sister’s death.

Now, running a hand through his wet hair, he stared through the windshield. He’d found parking only a block and a half away from Dooley’s, the breakfast/lunch pub where he’d met Curtis in downtown Portland, not far from the station. Curtis was walking back to work and Lang, though he refused to admit it, felt a faint twinge of regret or envy or a mixture of both. He didn’t want his old job back. He didn’t want a new one, either. He’d been unable to concentrate on it after Melody’s death. He wanted Heyward Marsdon’s neck in a noose, and that’s all he wanted. Not exactly the kind of attitude conducive to good police work.

And Marsdon’s damn family. Wealthy. Arrogant. Above the law. Unable to believe in their son’s culpability though it was understood all around that Heyward III had indeed committed the unthinkable crime. Of course the asshole had feigned remorse. Had actually shed tears. And there had been a lot of psycho mumbo jumbo about schizophrenia and illness and an inability to truly understand his own feelings and actions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The guy was sick, all right. Sick in the head. But someone to be
pitied
? Lang simply did not have it in his heart. Heyward Marsdon had killed his sister and he had to pay for it along with the rest of that supercilious hospital staff. Heyward’s doctor, Claire Norris, being at the top of Lang’s hit list.

Throwing the truck into gear, he rumbled into traffic and was cut off by a guy in a black Ferrari on his cell phone who nearly got his rear end crunched by Lang’s truck. Lang was half amused, half irked when the driver flipped him off. He pulled up on the left side of the asshole and rolled his right window down. The driver looked up and threw him a cold look.

Lang signaled for the man to hang up and the bastard released the bird a second time, pointing at him with that same middle finger, making deep, stabbing motions. For half a second Lang thought about continuing the insanity. He felt an almost overpowering need to drag the guy out of the car and beat the hell out of him. Transference? The need to release pent-up aggression? You bet. With an effort he turned his eyes forward, set his jaw, thought about Dr. Claire Norris, and wondered if he could have just one meeting with her. He’d been advised against it by a passel of lawyers. He was too personally involved. It wouldn’t do any good. She wasn’t completely responsible. Marsdon had killed Melody, not anyone from the hospital. He wasn’t thinking clearly.

The Ferrari jumped ahead, then screeched to a halt at a light where a gaggle of teenage girls were trying to cross the street. They stared at him in collective horror, then broke into the filthiest language and gestures Lang had ever seen from a group their age. Lang pulled up on the driver’s left again and smiled over at him. He could practically see the steam pouring from the guy’s ears. The girls became truly obnoxious. Standing directly in front of his car and not moving, dangerously, until Lang worried for them as the light was about to turn green.

But they sauntered away, arms crossed behind their backs, middle fingers sticking up for the Ferrari asshole’s uninhibited view.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Lang wasn’t much for religion, but a few key phrases sometimes popped into his head from time to time, a gift from his sister, who’d flitted from religion to religion like a butterfly to a flower.

His sister. Beautiful. Fresh. Intelligent. Deeply flawed.

Lang shook his head. Couldn’t think of her. Instead he concentrated on the other woman who haunted his thoughts: Dr. Claire Norris. The reason Heyward Marsdon III had been outside hospital walls looking for whatever his sick, twisted brain considered its next need. Dr. Claire Norris. She’d probably been the conduit for Melody and Heyward to meet. The good doctor, introducing one homicidal sicko to a sweet but slightly twisted woman with delusions and hallucinations of her own, probably putting them together in some kind of therapy class.

Claire Norris. Lang had seen her from afar, a slim, dark-haired, prettier-than-average woman with a strained look on her face. She had witnessed something horrific; he could give her that. His own mind shied away from what must have happened in that room. But Dr. Norris was the one who had okayed Marsdon’s release into society. It was her name on the form. She was the one with the ultimate responsibility for Melody’s death. She was the one who
allowed
Marsdon to cut his sister’s throat.

He’d said as much a number of times, to anyone who would listen. He’d been told his thinking was convoluted. He was just looking for someone to blame. He needed antidepressants and therapy. He needed help.

Drugs?
That kind of help? From the psychiatric community? Like he was going to listen to anything those headshrinkers from Halo Valley had to say. Quacks, every one. Self-serving quacks.

He was driving out Sunset Highway through a misting rain, leaving the Portland skyline in his rearview mirror, passing through the tunnel and headed west into the sunset. Except today the horizon was all gray and dreary. No sun in sight. Two weeks ago it had been blazing hot. Early September. Not much change from August. Then
bam.
They’d been hit with an early storm and now this rain.

Well, the rain suited his mood.

He exited the freeway on the outskirts of Laurelton, still within the western edge of the Portland city limits. He’d bought the property as soon as he’d scratched up enough money for a down payment, and after their parents died in a fiery crash on I-5, he had Melody move in with him. She’d been seventeen and he’d been twenty-three. Now he was thirty-seven and she would have been thirty-one this past May if not for Heyward Marsdon.

She’d been in and out of rehab more times than he liked to recall. She was crazy without medication. She hated taking medication. She took the wrong kind of medication. She crashed. She went to rehab. Got clean. Got crazy again.

But…she was such a sweet, funny person when everything was in line. Slightly ironic, slightly off-kilter, slightly acerbic. He loved her. And now she was gone.

He’d quit the force shortly after Melody’s death, though Drano had told him the job was open whenever he felt like stepping back in. Lang supposed he should have felt grateful, but all his energies were directed somewhere else and he didn’t honestly give a damn.

Now when he walked into his house, he had the peculiar notion that Melody was there. Something in the air. A leftover scent. But it was an illusion. He’d identified her body in the morgue. There was no question it was her. No question she was dead. No question where the responsibility lay. It was just sometimes—rarely—Lang wanted her back so badly that he almost made himself believe it could happen.

Nutty behavior. Grief taking over the sane part of his mind from time to time.

Walking onto the small back deck outside the kitchen, he was impervious to the shivering drizzle that seemed to have gripped the area in a firm hand. The deck was about three feet off the ground and he’d been building steps to it from the backyard, more for something to do than any serious interest in home improvement. Now he tested the wooden rail and wondered if he should change them out to wrought iron. He could do the work himself.

Trying to come up with something to fill your time?

Back inside, he poured cold coffee from the pot into a mug and heated it in the microwave. He thought about Claire Norris some more. He’d seen her on television, mostly; in person he’d had to keep his distance and he didn’t want to be too near her anyway. Self-preservation. He didn’t want to do anything rash.

So, he’d watched her on television with an intensity that was undoubtedly obsessive. He’d DVR’d her only interview with the press and kept it still. She was about five-eight with sexy legs and small feet encased in sensible black pumps. She wore a lab coat over a skirt or dress, mostly. Her hair was chin length, and she had a tendency to tuck it behind her ears when she was speaking, an unconscious focusing act. She was good-looking, her teeth white, her waist slim, her chin slightly pointy. She appeared…honest, he could admit. But then, that was Halo Valley’s prime disguise.

Now Lang threw himself in a chair in front of the television. Clicking around, he found nothing but game shows, talk shows, and daytime dramas. He stared out the sliding glass door to the rain-soaked cedar boards of his deck. Then, like an addict, he accessed his DVR interview of Claire Norris. Dr. Claire Norris.

She only said a few words, and Lang knew them by heart.

Pauline Kirby:
Would you have done things differently, knowing what you do now?

Claire:
Heyward Marsdon the Third is under continuing psychiatric care.

Pauline:
But shouldn’t he have been locked up? Shouldn’t you have known?

Claire seemed to struggle a bit when a man with a goatee jumped forward and practically shoved her aside.

Dr. Freeson:
I’m Dr. James Freeson with Halo Valley Security Hospital. We always strive to give each of our patients individual care. Dr. Norris has been Mr. Marsdon’s primary psychiatric physician for several years and is highly competent.

Blah, blah, blah.

Lang rewound and watched it again. Funny, how Freeson initially sounded like he was defending Claire Norris, but after hearing his tone a thousand times and seeing his face, Lang suspected the man was trying to distance himself from the woman who’d brought this destruction to the hospital.

He watched it again and then froze the picture on Claire Norris’s face.

“You’re obsessed,” he said a few minutes later, never taking his eyes from the screen. “It’s dangerous.”

I got a job for you. Something I want you to look into.

Curtis was worried about him. Maybe he was right. Maybe Lang was starting down that nutty lane his sister had traversed most of her adult life.

With a feeling of inevitability, he picked up the phone and asked for the Winslow County Sheriff’s Department.

Maybe it was time to talk to Sheriff Nunce and see if there was something he could do.

Summer tried to return with a burst of heat that steamed the tarmac and pushed through the gray clouds. It lasted about two days, the time it took Laurelton General to feel confident Jane Doe was fit to be discharged. Claire was eyeing the weather and snatching up her jacket on the way out of her house when she got the call from Leesha.

“I’m on my way to work,” Claire told her without waiting for Leesha to speak. “Don’t worry. I’ll meet the transport car. She won’t be alone.”

“No hurry. Your Dr. Freeson’s meeting her,” Leesha said.

“She’s his patient.”

Leesha humphed. “You look out for her, Claire. Don’t let this become some political bullshit.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

Claire’s bungalow sat on a knoll in a small neighborhood of homes that had been built on a sloping hillside above the town of Deception Bay. Through her pane windows she had a peekaboo view of the Pacific Ocean, and now she glanced out angrily, blind to the sunbursts arrowing through the silvery cloud cover, shimmering on the ruffling waves.

Damn Freeson and the whole Marsdon family. They all wanted to keep her under their thumbs. They wanted her capitulation. They wanted her to write a favorable report on Heyward III and get him moved to the less restricted side of Halo Valley. Their money was grease to the axle that ran the hospital, and therefore they had a certain amount of control on who was a patient and who wasn’t. The Marsdons wanted Heyward’s case reviewed and Claire’s testimony would go a long way to the good, and Freeson and Avanti were more than willing to help.

Locking the side door, she headed to her Passat, seeing huge drops of rain plop onto its shiny black hood. The staghorn sumac, whose green leaves had turned to orange and fiery red, began to shiver from an onslaught of water. Claire tucked herself into her car and backed down her drive. From along a side gravel lane, which connected her bungalow to the other homes that meandered down the hill, she caught sight of Dinah standing on her deck in a long caftan, her face turned up to the heavens. Dinah lifted her arms and smiled at the skies, her long blondish hair waving around her head like a golden aureole.

Claire thought about her as she drove the twenty-plus miles inland to the hospital. Dinah had grown up in the area and she had a list of clients, much like Claire, whom she treated with homeopathic remedies and exercise in the form of yoga and her own kind of tai chi. She was also a sometime foster parent to a young boy named Toby, whenever Toby’s mother fell back into her pattern of choosing abusive partners, and she was far more grounded than Claire had originally thought. Claire used her as a sounding board, and Dinah was both a good listener and advisor. And, as she wasn’t totally against alcohol, she would occasionally share a glass of wine with Claire and some good conversation.

But if Freeson or Avanti—who’d both now been all over Claire about her trip to Laurelton General to see the patient without asking—knew she was friends with an herbalist and even listened to her advice, they would probably try to have Claire’s license yanked. The irony of that made Claire perversely happy. Maybe some of her interest in Dinah was merely a way to thumb her nose at the Halo Valley politicos. Whatever the case, it worked for her. Her own “homeopathic” medicine.

By the time she drove up the winding two-lane drive to the hospital, she’d gone from annoyed and angry to taut and determined. She wasn’t going to let Freeson have his way with Jane Doe. She wasn’t going to let the Marsdons work their influence on her. She wasn’t.

She parked in the lot and strode into the concrete-and-redwood side building that housed the medical offices of the hospital doctors, taking the elevator to the second floor. After hours she used a keycard and code, like the hospital, but before seven
P.M
. the medical offices were accessible and open and anyone could just walk in.

Inside the office building the hallway was carpeted in commercial grade brown-speckled carpet with halogen can lights offering pools of illumination along its length. Light oak doors with sturdy brushed chrome levers marched down both sides. Claire’s new office was now around a turn and toward the skyway that led to the hospital. She’d been located at the far end previously, but by mutual decision between her and hospital administration, she’d moved.

Healthier for everybody.

Today she hung her jacket and purse in the closet, shrugged into her lab coat, then locked the closet with a small key that she pinned into her coat pocket. She didn’t have an immediate appointment, so she headed for the hospital proper.

Halo Valley Security Hospital was an experimental model, designed more like assisted living quarters. The second floor of the office building led through a skyway and door to the hospital itself, and when Claire inserted her keycard and punched in the code, she could enter the second floor of the hospital itself. Side A. The less restrictive side. A separate, older, brick building stood behind the newer Side A and had been nicknamed Side B—the place where the more disturbed patients, ones who were a danger to themselves and/or others, were housed.

As Claire pushed open the access door to the hospital, she could hear wailing as loud as a siren.

Gibby,
she thought.
In Side A’s morning room.
She picked up her pace but didn’t run. There was no running in the hospital. Running panicked the patients. Besides, Gibby had a tendency to scream when nothing was wrong, and Claire knew Darlene, one of the day nurses, was more than capable.

She walked across the gallery above the morning room—the central meeting area of Halo Valley hospital—and saw, past the main foyer, Balfour Transport arrive, a van service for patients, which could be converted to carry a gurney or a wheelchair, or basic seats. She headed down the curving stairway to the first level and glass front doors as outside a wheelchair was hydraulically lowered to the ground with Jane Doe sitting quietly in its seat. Her hands were folded across her lap and she wore a robe over hospital garb. Wind snatched at her blond locks but she didn’t respond, just stared straight ahead.

Claire stepped outside to meet them, and the driver, a Hispanic man who couldn’t have been more than five-six but with a weightlifter’s muscles, thrust a clipboard at her. She signed and he looked at the name and asked, “Dr. Freeman?”

“Freeson. He’s here, somewhere.”

“I need his signature.”

Claire turned her attention to the patient. “Let me take you inside,” she said, ignoring the driver, who was looking past her, hoping for Freeson to appear.

“I can’t leave till I have his signature.”

“He’ll be here.” She pushed the wheelchair inside and was met by Fran from administration, who did all the paperwork for this side of the hospital. Claire signaled back toward the driver and Fran collected the papers Laurelton General had sent over on the patient.

Freeson appeared at that moment, racewalking toward them. “I’ll take her from here,” he told Claire brusquely.

Claire looked past him and saw that Dr. Paolo Avanti had chosen to join Freeson in this venture. His dark hair was smoothly combed to his head, and he wore it a little longish, not too much, just enough to appear more youthful. He was in his middle forties but wanted people to believe he was still in his thirties. He could almost pull it off with his swarthy good looks and quiet, commanding style, but Claire knew him too well. Behind a practiced smile lurked a man whose narcissism surpassed Freeson’s. Avanti liked conquests. In sports. In debate. In women. He wasn’t shy, but he was cagey. Like Freeson, he’d circled Claire early on, though she’d given him no indication she was interested in him at all. Avanti had stepped back, smarter than Freeson, parrying the rejection before it came. But he hadn’t given up entirely. He was biding his time, waiting for a more perfect opening, one that Claire steadfastly refused to give. How he expected this after the way he’d abandoned her in her hour of need, Claire couldn’t fathom. Male ego. Who knew?

“So, this is our new arrival,” he said, examining Jane Doe with a frown. “She’s young.”

“Old enough to have a baby,” Freeson observed.

Claire gave him a look, wondering if that comment had deeper meaning. “We don’t know anything about her.”

“Pauline Kirby wants to do a follow-up story,” Avanti said, not taking his eyes off the patient. “No one’s come forward since they aired her picture, so I think it’s a good idea.”

“The news crew’s coming here?” Freeson asked casually, as if he didn’t care.

Claire schooled her expression. They both wanted the publicity and notoriety. An attractive young woman who would garner empathy by her very looks was perfect for their purposes.

“You’re not letting them film her, are you?” Claire asked.

“No, no. Just the outside of the hospital. And a still frame of her face.” Avanti’s dark, liquid eyes bored into Claire. “You do want her to find her people, don’t you, Dr. Norris?”

“Yes.”

Nurse Darlene, a tall woman with blunt-cut brown bangs and hair and an attitude to match, fresh from taking care of Gibby, reached them at that moment. “Her room’s ready. Right down the hall.”

Freeson’s goatee quivered and he looked ready to wrestle Darlene for the patient, but when Claire pretended to lose interest and headed toward the morning room, he simply followed after Darlene, close enough to damn near give her a flat tire. Darlene threw him a look and he backed off while Avanti sauntered off in another direction.

Determined to check in on Jane Doe as soon as Freeson stopped circling the area and went back to his own office—where he spent most of his time, as his people skills were practically nil and he was best forming speeches and pontificating at hospital fund-raisers—Claire looked for Bradford Gibson, Gibby, a twenty-eight-year-old mentally handicapped patient with the mind and intellect of a five-year-old. In the morning room she saw that he was working on an art project of some kind. His tongue was buried in his cheek as he concentrated. His hair was buzz cut as he had a tendency to rip it out by the roots. He was a little on the heavy side with eyes so round and unblinking that he looked eerily like an owl sometimes. But he was sweet and generally satisfied, unless thwarted in his routine.

One of the aides, Alison, slim, with a mop of unruly dark hair, said, “He thought Thomas wanted his picture,” as way of explanation for the outburst.

“Ah.” Claire headed back to her office. She had a ten o’clock appointment with a regular outpatient. She would check on Jane Doe later.

The morning room was a misnomer at Halo Valley Security Hospital, as it was used all day and it was a patient gathering area with tables, chairs, bookshelves, and a television. The walls were painted yellow and patient artwork was displayed in a haphazard fashion, placed there by the artists themselves. Gibby carefully taped his latest spaceship onto the wall and looked on in satisfaction. It was blue and red and silver flames shooted into the sky. He glanced around and surreptitiously took Maribel’s horse picture down to make room. Maribel was stupid, anyway. She never remembered nothing. Gibby was pretty sure she had that Zimer’s disease. At least she wasn’t really, really crazy like those guys in the other building.

Shivering, Gibby glanced out the window on the back side of the morning room. They tried to hide it with trees and stuff, but there was a really mean fence over there with curly wire on top, the kind he’d seen on that show about criminals that he wasn’t supposed to watch. Every time he turned on the TV without permission, one of those nurse people came. Greg was okay, but Darlene was a witch with a capital B. That’s what his mom always said. A witch with a capital B, and that meant she was really, really bad.

But the morning room was a great place. He was safe here. The halls were scary with creatures popping their heads out of rooms. Everyone told Gibby he was just imagining them, that the rooms held people, either patients or hospital personnel, but Gibby knew better. They just weren’t able to see. But here, they never bothered him. Once he got inside the morning room sliding doors, he was safe. He always wanted to close the doors, but it was against the rules. This bothered Gibby, but since the creatures couldn’t cross into this space without burning up from the inside out, he could live with it. And if he was in his special chair, he was really, really safe. If someone was sitting in his chair like Maribel, though, anything could happen, but today the chair was free so Gibby grabbed it and sat down hard. The nurse people had brought in another chair, not as good as Gibby’s but it was blue, which was his favorite color, and it looked not hard like those wood ones. Darlene was helping a lady with yellow hair into it.

Greg, one of the big nurse guys, looked at the lady and said, “She okay to be here?”

Darlene stood up and walked away and Greg followed. Gibby heard her say, “Dr. Freeson wants her to have lots of stimuli.”

Gibby thought that maybe Darlene didn’t think that was the thing to do, but then Darlene was mean. The yellow-haired lady was staring at the TV though the TV wasn’t on.

Shooting a look at Darlene and Greg, Gibby said in a whisper to the woman, “You have to ast. They won’t turn it on unless you ast.”

She didn’t respond. Didn’t even move. Gibby saw her belly and wondered why she was hiding a ball under her clothes. “They’ll do it for free if you ast,” he told her conspiratorially. “You just have to ast.”

Maribel cruised by, then turned around and sat down right on Gibby’s lap. He started yelling at the top of his lungs and Darlene came over and helped Maribel off. Gibby watched as Maribel wandered away, touching everything as she went.

“You have pretty hair,” Gibby told the woman in the chair. “What’s your name?”

“She doesn’t have a name,” Darlene said crushingly, making Gibby jump the way she creeped up on him. She was mean, oh, she was mean! He stared at the lady in horrified wonder. No name? “She hast to have a name!”

But Darlene was heading out of the room. Good. Gibby didn’t like her. She smelled like an ashtray. That’s what his mom always said. She smelled like an ashtray.