Seeking Asylum (12 page)

His voice carried a pain that Rachel could only imagine. If Caleb were her brother, wouldn’t she believe him?

The lonely ache inside her intensified. Probably not. Her experience with her mother had cured her of believing people with mental illness. She would take care of them, but she’d never trust them.

“Don’t you want to help your mother?”

Eric’s question irritated her. “My mother doesn’t need my help. Husband number three has that happy task now. She’s better off without me around.”

“Why is that?”

“Let’s just say I find it easier to deal with people when I’m not so emotionally involved.”

“So how do you do your job without getting involved?” His voice held a chill.

“I didn’t mean I don’t get involved at all. Of course I care for my patients. But it’s not personal.”

“So, Rachel.” His voice echoed through her. “That sounds like a lonely way to live.”

A deep ache settled under her heart and intensified with every heartbeat. She sank down into the bed and curled into a fetal position.

The seconds ticked by.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “That was a thoughtless comment. I had no right.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she mumbled. “I’m just sleepy, all of a sudden. I’m fading fast.”

“Okay. Call me at nine-fifteen. And, Rachel—”

She didn’t answer. Her lower lip trembled. Her eyes stung.

“Thanks for being there for me. And remember, I’m here for you, too, if you ever need to talk. Don’t forget to turn off your com unit. Good night.”

The noise in her head went silent. She fisted her hands in the pillow and lay quiet, trying to recapture the feeling of his low, sweet voice reverberating in her ears.

As she tried to relax and concentrate on clearing her mind, one question stuck in her brain like a compelling melody.

How would it feel to have Eric’s voice enveloping her in its promise of protection all the time? To have his strong body stretched out beside her, shielding her, every night?

“Dream on,” she muttered, pressing on her ear to turn the unit off. She rolled over onto her back.

Eric Baldwyn was here for only one purpose. He was risking his life for his brother. He was using her—the FBI was using her—as bait to track down a killer.

SOMEONE OPENED the blinds, letting in glaring sunlight. Eric groaned and squinted. In front of him stood a small, gray-haired woman in one of those silly jackets covered with cartoon cats and dogs and umbrellas that made her look as though she’d wandered in from the pediatric ward.

“Good morning, Caleb,” she said, turning to smile at him. “It’s nice to have you back. Are you feeling better?”

Eric blessed his excellent vision as he blinked and
squinted at her name tag. MARIE SAMPLES. He assessed her as she pulled out her stethoscope and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his bare upper arm. What had her relationship to Caleb been? She seemed to be sincere, and as far as he could tell, genuinely glad to see him—or Caleb.

She frowned slightly. “Your blood pressure is low. Are you on any different meds since you got back?”

Eric considered her question. He had very little knowledge of how Caleb reacted to normal, everyday events. All he knew was that his brother was schizophrenic and paranoid. That probably made it easier, in a sense. If Eric said anything odd or out of character…well, what exactly was in character for a paranoid schizophrenic young man who might be receiving deadly chemicals?

“Not that I know of, ma’am. But you know what goes on around here. They could have snuck in and given me something while I was sedated.”

Marie chuckled, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“What does it say in my chart?”

“You know what you’re on. Ten milligrams of fenpiprazole by injection daily.”

“Daily?” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He cringed and suppressed a shudder. He was going to receive an injection every day. “I haven’t gotten a dose today.”

She slung her stethoscope around her neck. “No. Yesterday you received a sedative. Dr. Metzger doesn’t like to mix medication. If you had been having trouble breathing, he would have ordered a dose.”

“Maybe they should change my medication.”

She patted his cheek with a motherly caress. “Try to do what the doctors tell you, dear. I hate to see you suffering. Dr. Metzger knows what’s best.”

“Does he?”

“Now, Caleb, you know we don’t talk about the doctors.” She checked the clipboard hanging on the door. “Let’s see what your day is like. Oh, you’re supposed to see Dr. Metzger at ten o’clock. You’d better get up. I’ll see you back here for lunch, then this afternoon you’re scheduled for some tests.”

“Tests?” Eric’s pulse sped up. “What kind of tests?”

Marie waved a hand. “I’m sure it’s just the usual. They probably want a follow-up brain scan, after everything you’ve been through the past few days. Now it’s time to get up. You’re going to miss breakfast if you don’t hurry.”

Eric glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was a few minutes before nine o’clock. By the time he got dressed, it would be nine-fifteen. Time for Rachel to call.

Rachel.
He’d dreamed about her. As he quickly showered, he let his brain replay the dream. She and Caleb were hanging by their fingertips from a cliff. Below them, fiery waves broke and sizzled against red glowing rock, and the tide was rising. Eric only had one rope, and it wasn’t long enough. Even if he climbed down the rope himself, he could only save one of them.

He lifted his face to the warm flow of water, trying to wash away the startling images and the leftover drowsiness from the sedative. It didn’t take a psychiatrist to interpret the dream. He felt responsible for both Rachel and Caleb, and he was worried that he couldn’t protect them both.

It weakened his knees anew each time he thought about Caleb, locked away all this time. How could he not have known that his brother was alive?

He closed his eyes, searching for the connection he remembered from his childhood. The sense that he wasn’t alone.

With a pain as sharp as a knife piercing his heart, he realized that he had never been alone. He’d spent his childhood trying to protect his brother. Then, when he’d been told Caleb had died, he’d felt ripped in two. To discover, twenty years later, that his brother was alive had been a brutal shock, but also a relief.

He’d spent all that time nearly paralyzed by fear that the whispers in his brain and the odd dreams were precursors to schizophrenia.

He shook his head under the shower spray. Now he knew. The odd formless whispers he’d always endured were from his brother.

Caleb had always been there.

He tried to search, to connect with Caleb in a more concrete way, as they’d occasionally done as children. But he was distracted, probably because of the medication.

Plus, his brain was suffused with Rachel’s face. Her melodic voice in his ear last night had stirred him, even in his sedated state. By the time their conversation was over, her sexy bell-like murmurs had swirled around him like fine perfume and he’d ached with restless wanting.

Now, just thinking about her, his body sprang to life. What the hell was the matter with him? Suddenly he was reacting like a randy teenager. He hadn’t done much of that, even when he
was
an adolescent. Those years had been spent in grief and guilt, missing his brother and traumatized by his death.

With a groan, he turned off the hot water and quickly finished under icy spray.

As he exited the bathroom, he glanced at the clock and pressed his ear, activating the com unit.

A movement in the mirror startled him. He looked up and froze. He hadn’t realized how much he looked like
Caleb. The new, shorter haircut made all the difference. He glanced down at his ragged fingernails, then back up. Deliberately he forced a dark, fearful glare into his eyes.

Paranoid. Angry. Haunted.

“Eric?”

The word hummed like a harp in his ears, breaking the spell. He glanced down at his nakedness.

The sounds he’d heard last night, the splash of water and quiet sighs as Rachel had showered, painted an erotic picture in his mind: Rachel, nude, her creamy skin glistening with droplets of water, her midnight hair plastered to her head, her brilliant blue eyes surrounded by wet, spiky eyelashes.

He watched himself grow hard.

“Yeah?” he croaked.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Where are you?”

“At the Women’s Center. I’ll be here all day.”

He tossed the towel aside and opened a drawer. Gritting his teeth, he pulled on underwear and jeans and grabbed a T-shirt. “I’m meeting with Metzger. What will he want?”

“He’s probably fishing to see what you told me. What you—what Caleb—told the FBI.”

“Is this unusual or does Metzger meet with his patients a lot?

“I think he has private sessions with his schizophrenia patients at least once a week. Eric, last night Gracie mentioned a
list.
I’ve never heard that before. She told me she’d had to call Security because Caleb is on the
list.
”

“That list may be a group of special patients, the ones Caleb said Metzger experiments on. Have you talked to Natasha?”

“Not yet. I’ll call her in a few minutes.”

“Make the call quick. Tell her we need a recent aerial photograph of the building. Tell her to overlay the original blueprint, and then mark every single spot that doesn’t exactly match. I don’t care if it’s a new window shutter. And tell her about the list.”

“Okay. How will she get the information to us?”

“You may have to leave the grounds to meet someone. Pretend you’re going out to dinner or something. I’ve got to go.”

“Eric, your brother is a charmer and a smart aleck. Mezger will expect you to talk back to him and to question everything. He’ll be watching you closely.”

“Okay. Thanks. Open your com unit every hour on the fifteen-minute mark for about five minutes, but don’t speak. I’ll talk to you when I can.”

He toggled the com unit off and wiped a hand down his face. There was no way he could concentrate with her voice in his head all the time.

Looking back at the mirror, he watched the haunted look return to his eyes. Deliberately he smiled, raising his brows in a sardonic slant. Did he look like a smart-ass?

He winked at his reflection, thinking that it would be easier for him to endure a slow, long torture than to be charming. He headed for the dining room.

GERHARDT METZGER scratched his mutton-chop sideburns and frowned as Caleb Baldwyn left his office. The young man’s attitude had been one of irritation and wariness.

During the forty-eight hours Baldwyn had been away from the Meadows, something about him had changed. Metzger couldn’t pinpoint the exact difference, but it was there.

Even though Baldwyn had eyed Metzger the same way he always had, as if trying to reverse their roles, his entire demeanor was different today.

For one thing, he was stiffer, more controlled. Metzger pulled a legal pad toward him and picked up his fountain pen.

The pen scratched reassuringly against the paper as he quickly wrote his assessment of Caleb.

“Alert. Calm. Appeared tired, but not ill. Respiration normal, color normal, no indication of schizophrenic symptoms, except mild paranoia. Less communicative than usual. Healthy.”

Healthy.

Metzger stared at the word.

Too healthy. The young mental patient had been receiving the solution of extracted brain chemicals daily for seven years, making him Metzger’s longest continuously running experiment. In all that time, there was only one documented incident of a missed dose—a nursing error during one of Caleb’s transfers to the Independent Living Center. Within twelve hours, he’d become increasingly paranoid and had experienced several episodes of difficulty breathing. As soon as he’d been given a booster of the solution, his vital signs had returned to normal.

“No evidence of withdrawal from the mixture,” Metzger wrote, then tapped the cap of his fountain pen against the paper.

He reached into his pocket for his cell phone, checked the time, then keyed in a familiar number, a number in Germany.

“James, my friend.”

“Gerhardt, I was just about to leave for the day. Has your patient been returned to you?”

“
Ja.
And in good health.”

“Really? How many injections did he miss?”

Metzger nodded in satisfaction. True to form, James knew immediately the source of Metzger’s biggest concern.

“Two. He was gone for forty-eight hours. He should have gone into respiratory arrest.” It was always satisfying to talk to the one man who understood the importance of Metzger’s work and the gravity of the situation.

Dr. James Farmer, a Nobel Laureate in medicine, had been Metzger’s friend and mentor for many years. It was Farmer who had discovered an important pathway in the brain that had led him to his controversial theory of mental illness as an autoimmune disease. A theory his protégé Metzger shared.

“Didn’t you tell me he kidnapped a psychiatrist?”

“Yes. Dr. Rachel Harper. I had mentioned her to you before.”

“Ah, yes, the young woman who is so devoted to you.”

“To our theories. Her background and training combined with a personal crusade to cure mental illness made her a good choice to replace Dr. Green.”

“And she was with the subject for how long?”

“Approximately twenty-four hours. They both were hospitalized at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., for observation, then brought back here.”

“What was her assessment?”

Metzger tapped his fountain pen. “She noticed what she termed ‘slight’ respiratory depression. Said it came and went. Essentially the same information I got from the hospital where he was taken. There’s something wrong.”

“I agree. Is it at all possible that Baldwyn has developed a resistance to the respiratory effects over the years?”

“I don’t believe so. Only eighteen months ago, a nurse missed administering his daily injection and he reacted as we would expect. Difficulty breathing, increased paranoia, reduced oxygen levels in his blood.”