The Stolen Ones (22 page)

Word had floated through the Roundhouse, and the department, that Detective Raymond Torrance was back in town.

Torrance had worked in a number of different squads and districts over his more than two decades on the force, had made a lot of friends. A few enemies, too, of course. It came with the territory. It was virtually impossible to do twenty years or more as a detective and not step on other cops’ cases, not ruffle feathers, not ride forensic and science teams a little hard. It all depended on your style, and your closure rate. Detectives who closed cases got a lot more leeway.

Then there were the people you put in jail. They did not remember you fondly.

The fliers were put on bulletin boards at every district in the city. The party would be held at Finnigan’s Wake.

Jessica watched the man work his way around the duty room. She had seen Ray Torrance around at events back in his day, but had not known him. She
had
heard the legend. When it came to the Special Victims Unit, Ray Torrance’s name was spoken in whispers.

Jessica also knew that he had been injured badly on the job a few years ago, but did not know the details. Byrne told her what he knew about the incident, which wasn’t very much.

‘Who was the teenaged girl?’ Jessica asked.

‘I don’t know. All I know is Ray gave her a heart locket, and told her to show it to any detective in Philly if she ever needed help.’

‘Did you know about it?’

Byrne nodded. ‘He told me about it when he was in the hospital.’

Jessica looked across the room, saw Ray Torrance sharing a moment with Dana Westbrook.

And then it hit her.

‘Oh my God, Kevin. The locket was —’

‘Yeah,’ Byrne said. ‘The little charm attached to Violet’s purse.’

Before Jessica could say another word she looked up to see Ray Torrance slipping on his overcoat, shaking hands with the other detectives. He was getting ready to leave.

Jessica glanced at her watch. She had to leave as well. If she was lucky, she would get about five hours of sleep this night. She had an early-morning class.

Ray Torrance walked over to where Jessica and Byrne were standing. He gestured to the less than elegant décor that was the homicide unit.

‘Some things never change,’ he said.

‘Not the good stuff,’ Byrne replied.

Torrance turned to Jessica. It looked like he was about to say something, but remained silent.

For some strange reason, at that moment, Jessica wanted to hug him – he looked so pained, so lost – but she stopped herself, even though his sad eyes brought out every maternal instinct within her. She extended her hand.

‘It’s great to see you,’ Jessica said.

‘The pleasure is mine,’ Torrance replied. They shook hands. Ray Torrance’s hand was calloused, but his grip was warm and gentle.

‘Hope to see you again soon,’ Jessica said.

Torrance smiled. ‘I’ll be around.’

The next day they spent the morning and early afternoon on the phones, trying to track down personnel who had worked at Cold River, without any luck. By two o’clock they had called every hospital in Philadelphia, Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery counties. Although the offices for the administrators were for the most part forthcoming, they were told that, to the best of their knowledge, there were no doctors or nurses on staff who were at one time employed by the Delaware Valley State Hospital.

It seemed unlikely, but Cold River’s reputation, such as it was, might have made for less than full disclosure on application forms.

What had gone on there?
Jessica wondered.

Jessica looked at the legal pad on Byrne’s desk. All but two of the hospitals had been crossed out.

‘I knew the place had problems, but I didn’t think it was this bad,’ Jessica said. ‘Nobody worked there?’

Byrne just stared at his computer screen.

At two o’clock Colleen walked into the duty room. She sat at one of the empty desks. Byrne got her attention.

‘I’ve got two more calls to make and then we can go,’ he signed. ‘You okay?’

Colleen smiled. ‘I’m fine.’

Jessica made her next call, to a small clinic in Chester County. She was soon routed to the person who handled HR, Human Resources, for the facility. As she had been told for most of the day, no one currently employed, or recently employed, had once worked at the Delaware Valley State Hospital.

She was just about to make the final call on her list when she looked over to see Byrne with his hand in the air, trying to get her attention. She and Colleen walked over to where Byrne was sitting.

‘Yes,’ Byrne said into the phone. ‘That would be great.’ Byrne gave a thumbs-up. ‘We’ll be up in about an hour. Who should we ask for?’ Byrne scribbled a name on his notebook. He underlined it three times. ‘That would be fine. Thanks very much.’

Byrne hung up.

‘You found someone who worked at Cold River?’ Jessica asked.

‘Yes,’ Byrne said. ‘I talked to a woman in HR at this place called Sunnyvale. She said that there was a woman in her facility who once was one of the administrators at Cold River.’

‘What is Sunnyvale?’

‘It’s a nursing home in Montgomery County. She said this woman – Miriam Gale – was a director of personnel at Cold River for a long time, right up until they closed the main hospital. The woman I spoke to said Miriam is ninety-one.’

‘Will this woman talk to us?’

‘She said that Miriam would not have a problem talking to us, but
we
might have a problem talking to
her
.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Byrne glanced at Colleen, back at Jessica. ‘Miriam Gale is deaf.’

Jessica took this in. They would need an interpreter. ‘Does anyone at Sunnyvale sign?’

‘I didn’t get that far. I figured we’d go up there and wing it. If we have to, we can write out the questions on paper.’

Jessica could see that Byrne was doing his best not to look at his daughter. Colleen thumped a hand on the desk, got his attention. She signed: ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ Byrne replied.

‘
Hello
? Deaf person here.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Let me help.’

Byrne took a few moments. ‘That’s okay, honey,’ he said. ‘I can sign pretty well, you know. I can handle this.’

Colleen brought her hand to her mouth. She was trying to keep the laugh inside.

‘What?’

Colleen waved the question away. ‘Nothing.’

Byrne looked at Jessica, then back at his daughter. ‘I can’t ask you to do this, Colleen.’

‘
Dad
.’

‘I would have to clear it with the boss, and I just don’t think she’d —’

‘I’ll ask,’ Jessica said. She slid off the desk, crossed the duty room.

On the way, she and Colleen did a quick, covert fist bump.

The Sunnyvale Center was a long-term, non-profit nursing home funded, in part, by the taxpayers of Montgomery County. The 360-bed facility provided sub-acute and skilled care to its residents.

On the way to the nursing home Jessica had written a number of questions on a notebook page, and Colleen had typed them into her MacBook Air. The plan was – that is, if everything was cleared by not only the administrators and caregivers of the facility, but the woman herself – that Colleen would ask the woman questions in American Sign Language, then type the woman’s answers into the laptop so that Jessica and Byrne could read them.

When they met the chief administrator, they were given the expected caveats – that being that Miriam Gale was ninety-one, was on a host of medications, and could only answer their questions for a short period of time.

Having cleared that hurdle, Jessica, Byrne and Colleen were led down a broad corridor to the woman’s room. Before they entered, Colleen took Jessica and Byrne to the side.

‘I think I should go in first,’ Colleen signed.

‘Why?’ Byrne asked.

Colleen thought for a moment. ‘You can be kind of a scary guy, sometimes,’ she said. ‘I hope that doesn’t come as a shock.’

Byrne looked at Jessica, back at Colleen. For a moment it looked like he was going to argue the point. In the end he just made the sign for: ‘Okay.’

A few minutes later Colleen walked out of the woman’s room.

‘How did it go?’ Byrne asked.

‘She’s really sweet. I asked her about her deafness. There’s a big difference between someone who was born deaf, like me, and someone who became deaf later in life.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘She said she’d always had some degree of hearing loss, even as a child, but when she contracted meningitis in her late forties she became deaf.’

‘Does she know why we want to talk to her?’

‘Not all of it. I don’t
know
all of it. I just told her that you are with the police, and that she can help. I told her that you just wanted to know a little bit about Cold River.’

‘Thanks, honey,’ Byrne said. ‘Good work.’ He looked at Jessica. ‘Ready?’

Jessica nodded.

They entered the room.

The space was a two-bed room with a highly polished floor, cream-colored walls, and a pair of healthy plants on the windowsill. The floral print of the drapes matched the bedspreads, and a pair of bright Mylar balloons were attached to both tray tables.

Miriam Gale sat in a wheelchair by the window, a green and white afghan over her legs. Her hair was cloud white, pulled back into a long braid that curled around one narrow shoulder. At the bottom was a turquoise clip.

Colleen got the woman’s attention.

One at a time Colleen finger-spelled ‘Jessica’ and ‘Kevin’. There was no real need for either detective to produce ID. Jessica thought about shaking the woman’s hand, but she didn’t know if she should. The woman looked frail. Instead, Jessica just waved.

Miriam Gale smiled.

Colleen put her laptop on one of the tray tables, opened it. She sat down in front of Miriam, adjusted the table so that Jessica and Byrne could see the screen.

When Colleen was set, she looked at her father. Byrne nodded. It was time to begin. Colleen glanced at the laptop screen, signed the first question.

‘What years did you work at Cold River?’

The woman began to sign slowly, carefully crafting each word.

‘I started in nineteen fifty-three. I worked there until just before they closed the main hospital for good.’

‘When was that?’

The old woman thought for a moment. ‘It was nineteen ninety-two.’

‘How did you come to be employed at Cold River?’ Colleen signed.

‘It was right after the Korean War. My husband Andrew was wounded at Pork Chop Hill. He was in Company K. When he came back his doctor admitted him to Cold River. Now, keep in mind, this was long before they called it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Back then they just called it shell shock. Did you know that?’

Colleen shook her head.

‘That’s what they called it back then. When I went to visit Andrew I learned they needed nurse’s assistants and orderlies.’

‘This was in nineteen fifty-three?’ Colleen asked.

‘Yes. It was September of nineteen fifty-three.’

As the woman signed her responses, Colleen typed them on the laptop. Jessica was more than impressed with the young woman’s typing skills. Any mistakes she made – and there were few – were instantly corrected.

‘By the time I got there, it was already overcrowded, of course. There was a relatively new kitchen and dietary building, but the patient-to-staff ratio was terrible, something like sixty to four. Still, we made do. Cold River was like a self-contained little city.’

Every so often, as Miriam signed, she would stop to massage her hands. Jessica imagined that the woman must be in some pain to do what she was doing. Without being asked another question, she continued.

‘The newest addition to the hospital after I had been there for a while was N3. This was called the Active Therapy Building. Personnel and staff were excited about this, because it represented a step forward in patient care, as opposed to the mere warehousing of the mentally ill.’

‘Did you work in N3?’

‘Oh, yes. Now, there was that big pharmaceutical company based in Camden back then. They were working on this new wonder drug similar to Thorazine. In those days the hospital had upwards of two thousand patients who were wards of the state. I’m sad to say that many of these men – and they were mostly men – were eager to volunteer as test subjects, having no idea what they were getting into.’

The woman stopped for a moment, massaged her hands, continued.

‘Although we were not privy to the numbers, the rumors were that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of patients died from sickness related to pharmaceutical testing.’

The woman thought for a few moments, then raised her hands to continue signing. Jessica noticed from the corner of her eye that Colleen had stopped typing. When she looked a little more closely, she noticed that Colleen’s hands had begun to tremble. Jessica got Byrne’s attention.

Byrne raised a finger, getting the woman’s attention. He crossed the room, knelt down in front of his daughter. With his back to the old woman he spoke very carefully, so that Colleen could follow him.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

Colleen nodded. Jessica wasn’t so sure.

‘Do you want to stop?’

At this, Colleen took a deep breath, exhaled. She shook her head.
I’m fine,
she mouthed silently.

Byrne took a few more moments, scrutinizing his daughter’s eyes. Jessica could see that Byrne was having second thoughts about allowing this to happen. She glanced at Miriam. The woman was sitting with her hands in her lap, looking out the window. In the powdery late winter light Jessica could see the young woman who had gone to work at the Delaware Valley State Hospital sixty years earlier.

Byrne stood up, reached out, touched the woman on her shoulder. She looked up at him. Byrne signed: ‘Would you like to continue?’

After a moment the woman smiled at Byrne. She took his hands in hers, and formed the proper ASL sign for the word
continue
.

Byrne smiled, repeated the question, this time signing properly. The woman nodded. Byrne crossed the room, stood again by the door. Colleen looked over. Byrne nodded.

Colleen glanced at the laptop screen. She seemed a bit lost. The old woman got her attention, and continued.

‘By the time I was promoted to be the assistant to one of the administrators, I had already lost all my hearing, but I learned to lip read pretty well as a child, and I took to ASL rather quickly. At that time there were almost 6,500 patients at Cold River, in fifty-eight buildings.’

Miriam reached out to her tray, took the plastic cup in both hands. Jessica wanted to sprint across the room and get it for her, but she could see the pride the woman took in doing it herself. When she had taken a few sips, she continued.

‘At that time a lot of prefab housing was built to the west of the hospital, and a lot of the staff bought them. Some of them went for as little as four thousand dollars. Imagine.’

Colleen smiled, signed: ‘A good sofa costs four thousand dollars today.’

‘It does?’

The woman looked at Jessica, winked.

‘After that I worked my way up in administration. Andrew died in nineteen seventy-eight. We had no children. Work was my life. Eventually the governor ordered Cold River to be closed in phases. That was the beginning of the end.’ She took another sip of water. ‘Cold River was bad in the later years. We all knew how bad it was.’

‘What do you mean?’ Colleen asked.

‘You have to understand. The nineteen seventies and eighties were a time of great strides in the research, development and administration of revolutionary new medications. Thorazine was on the way out. Prozac was being developed.’

Colleen pointed to the next question on the laptop, looked at her father. Byrne nodded.

‘Did you ever hear of a patient called Null?’

The woman looked confused for a moment. She turned to look at Colleen, who finger-spelled the word null. Although the woman did not immediately respond, Jessica could see that the name meant something to her.

‘You hear all sorts of things in an institution the size of Cold River. At its height, on any given day, there were more than seven thousand human beings in those buildings, and people will talk. Add to the mix the fact that a large percentage of those people – and by no means do I mean this to be constrained to patients only – were given to hallucinations, and you begin to doubt a great deal of what you hear.’

She paused again, massaged her hands. Jessica sensed that they were coming to the end of the interview.

‘There were a lot of well-known doctors, both clinicians and researchers, who passed through Cold River over the years. There was one man who caused quite a stir when he arrived. His name was Dr Godehard Kirsch. They even built that new building for him. G10. It stayed open after the hospital closed. He died in a fire there.’

‘When did Dr Kirsch come to Cold River?’

The old woman looked out the window for a few moments, perhaps gathering her thoughts. The rain looked to be turning to snow.

‘I think it was nineteen ninety-one or ’ninety-two. I was only in G10 twice, mind you,’ she signed. ‘And that was only the first floor. The basement was sealed off from the rest of the staff and personnel.’

‘What sort of work did Dr Kirsch do?’

‘I never met the man, nor knew anybody who did. I never saw any of the documents that they produced, but his work was said to be in the area of dream engineering.’

Byrne stepped forward, typed a new question. Colleen signed what Byrne wrote.

‘Who did you mean when you say “documents that they produced”?’ Who is they?’

‘Dr Kirsch assembled a small team. I believe there was an anesthesiologist, a psychiatric nurse and one orderly. They had a funny name. I don’t know if the name was official, but it was what they were known as throughout the rest of the facility.’

‘What were they called?’

The old woman looked right at Jessica when she answered. ‘They were called
Die Traumkaufleute
.’ She finger-spelled the foreign words.

Colleen did her best to type this. When she was finished, she asked: ‘Do you know what that means?’

The old woman nodded. ‘I only know this because my mother’s family were German. The name means “‘The Dream Merchants”.’

Byrne typed a final question. Colleen asked it.

‘What happened to the indigent patients who died at Cold River?’

The woman took a long pause. For a moment, Jessica thought she might not answer. Finally, she signed: ‘I can’t say for sure, but we heard that many of them were buried in a field across Chancel Lane. In a place called Priory Park.’

Before they left, Colleen showed the woman a list of names. Robert Freitag, Joan Delacroix, Edward Richmond, Leonard Pintar, Lucius Winter. One by one the woman shook her head. She did not know any of them.

Colleen hugged the old woman, then turned away quickly. Jessica could see the tears in her eyes. She left the room first.

As a nurse’s assistant took Miriam Gale’s blood pressure and temperature, Jessica looked at the small bookcase in the corner of the room.

‘Kevin.’

Byrne looked over. There, on the woman’s shelf, were a handful of books. One of them was titled
Nightworld
by a man named Martin Léopold. She opened the book, turned to the back flap.

There was no photograph, but rather a short bio.

The author lives in Philadelphia.
 

‘Martin Léopold,’ Jessica said. ‘Do you think he’s the Leo your friend Lenny Pintar was talking about?’

‘He could very well be.’

While Byrne brought the car around, Jessica lingered in the doorway, watching Miriam Gale sit by the window. Every so often she would massage her hands.

Before she turned away, the woman raised her hands, signed something. Jessica wondered for whom it was meant.