The Brain Vault (Stephanie Chalice Thrillers Book 3) (26 page)

“I just follow my instincts.”

“How can I argue with success? Be more careful next time. I need you.” Shearson brushed the soot off my shoulder and then buttoned her jacket. She turned toward where the media was devouring Paul and R. C. Liu. “I sense a photo op,” she said. “Come on, Detective, let’s get noticed.” We took a few steps and then Shearson stopped. “Don’t forget, you stand behind me. I don’t want to be upstaged by your pretty face and big chest.”

Ambler was nearby and obviously within earshot. I saw him smirk over Shearson’s orders. The woman was the consummate political animal. As sweet as she had come off, I knew she was only interested in me for what I could do for her—make her look good and facilitate her meteoric rise to the top. She may have been one hell of a polished bullshit artist, but I was an NYPD detective. It was my job to assess personality and motive. She spilled the beans when she said, “I need you.” I’d known others like her, affected personalities and lip service, empty promises and treachery. It would be a good long while before she’d earn my trust.

So I did as instructed and stood behind her while the press snapped our pictures.

“N
ice shooting, Kid.”
Ambler threw his big paw over my shoulder. “I tell you, Chalice, you’ve got a brass pair. I thought that I was a tough guy, but you, you take the cake, running around in the tunnels beneath a defunct nut house. Man, what a great story this is going to make.” Ambler stopped short and stung me with a stare, his demeanor doing an abrupt about face, “That was incredibly brave and incredibly stupid. You and Lido pull a hair-brained maneuver like that again and I’ll strangle the two of you myself. The two of you went after a cold-blooded killer with a Five and Dime flashlight. Do you know how bad your odds were? You’re lucky that you, Lido, and Paul Liu didn’t all end up dead.”

Ambler was not an overly emotional man, but I saw in his eyes that I had pushed him over the edge.

“I never want to be the one that has to tell Ma and Ricky that you were killed in the line of duty.” He shook me by the shoulders. “This is no joke. I want your word you’ll never do anything like that again.”

“One day that sixth sense of yours is going to get that ass of yours in a situation you won’t be able to extricate it from.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Okay, end of speech. Hector and Marsh are waiting for us inside. Marsh knows the true identity of our suspects.”

It was time to put emotion on the back shelf. There were so many questions. I couldn’t wait to sit down with Marsh and get the answers. My phone rang.

“I need you and Ambler back in the tunnel,” Lido said.

“Why, what’d you find?”

“Stop asking questions and get down here. You won’t believe it.”

I began to run with Ambler chasing after me, relaying Lido’s message along the way.

Edgewood had been transformed into a crime scene and the once cavernous, pitch black tunnel was now flowing with law enforcement personnel, and was adequately lit with emergency lighting systems. It was at the far end of the tunnel, where it articulated with Pilgrim State that we found Lido. He had a pair of bolt cutters in his hand. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him, but he appeared to be jazzed over his discovery.

“Lido was beaming. “Check it out.” A heavy metal chain and snapped padlock hung from a door handle. Lido pushed on the double doors and we walked into an old storage room not far from the tunnel entrance. Now you have to understand that this entire level had long since been abandoned. It was filthy and dilapidated—spider webs hanging from the ceiling were large enough to support a team of aerialists, I swear. But this storage room was neat and clean. It had been freshly painted a bright white, and the linoleum floor had been buffed to a clinically acceptable shine. Overhead lights had been replaced with modern operating room lamps and surgical instruments had been set out on trays. In the middle of the room were identical operating tables, surrounded by all manner of surgical gizmo and life support monitors. In short, anything and everything a madman could ever hope for—everything he might need in order to perform the surgical procedure Damien Zugg had imagined.

I have to admit, Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory had come to mind when Zugg first hypothesized as to the reason Paul Liu and Kevin Lee had been abducted. I had pictured massive Van de Graaff generators and operating tables being hoisted toward the night sky while lightning bolts flashed and werewolves bayed at the moon…but that was fiction. As difficult as it was to believe, at Edgewood Hospital, here in the middle of Long Island suburbia, reality had replaced fantasy.

“Ready for the best part?” Lido said.

Ambler and I shrugged. I couldn’t imagine how he could top what we had just seen.

Lido approached a wall mounted X-ray viewer and flipped on the light. The illuminated x-ray clipped to the viewer was of Rat’s deformed skull. Zugg had been right on the money.

L
ido’s sense of the macabre had not been sufficiently sated, so we left him below ground to nose around the operating room while Ambler and I hoofed it back up to Pilgrim State to debrief Dr. Marsh.

Marsh looked nothing like I expected. He had WASP-fro hair. How’s that for a portmanteau? He was wearing plaid pants and was puffing on a pipe. Oddly, he reminded me of an aging porn star, reminiscent of the days when adult films were shot in 8mm.

Marsh and Hector were huddled over a pair of folders, reviewing notes, when Ambler and I arrived. We sat down at the conference room table and waited a moment while the good doctors completed their current stream of thought. This was my first contact with Marsh. I reached across the table and shook his hand.

Marsh turned the folders around so that we could examine the photos they contained. The first folder contained pictures of the man who had been posing as the late Dr. John Maiguay. The photos spanned several years chronicling him as he progressed from a young boy into a teenager. His cleft lip scar was clearly visible in the early photos; the one’s taken before he developed facial hair. With the dark mustache in place, it was almost impossible to detect his birth defect. I recalled the first time I’d met him, the minutest hint of a scar just peeking out from behind his mustache and commenting to myself that only a very observant eye would notice it. He was the lucky one—the photos of Rat were impossible to bear.

Here too, the photographs had recorded his development as he progressed from a young boy into a teen. As Zugg had foretold, Rat’s abnormalities were congenital. The early photos were the hardest to look at, the child’s face with the enormous cyst on the forehead occluding his eye. It was more than I could handle. I closed the folders and pushed them back across the table.

“Their names are James and Terrance Ryan,” Marsh said.

“Ryan?” Ambler queried, no doubt surprised, as I was that the boys did not have Asian names.

“That’s right, James and Terrance Ryan, twin brothers, the sons of Patrick and Mayra Ryan. Patrick Ryan was a veteran, born and raised on Long Island. As a vet, he had his military benefits to pay for the care of his boys.”

“Which one is which?”

“James is the one that’s been impersonating the deceased Dr. Maiguay. Terrance is the one with the extreme deformities.”

“Then their mother was Asian?”

Marsh nodded.

My mind once again flashed back to my initial encounter with the man posing as Dr. Maiguay. I recalled thinking that his features were a curious blend of Oriental and occidental—now it made sense. “You seem to be very familiar with this case.”

“Detective, I was employed here at Pilgrim State for almost thirty years. I started as a staff psychiatrist right out of medical school and worked here until I retired a few years back—in charge of the facility for the last twenty. You have no idea what I’ve seen over the years.” Marsh took a moment to wet his lips. “I haven’t come across a more difficult case study than the one involving Terrance and James. One of the most tragic stories I’ve ever encountered.”

I honestly didn’t know that I had the strength to hear Marsh’s story, but I knew I had to. “I’m sure this is difficult for you, Doctor. We don’t need all the gory details, a high level overview will suffice.”

“That might be best,” Marsh said.

It was getting very late and I was beginning to feel physically and emotionally spent. Whatever it was that had kept me going had run out. We had recovered Paul Liu and had two suspects in custody. It was only a macabre sense of curiosity that kept me in my chair while my queen sized sleigh bed and pillow cried out for me. I was dying for a good night’s sleep and would be happy enough to wrap up the details in the morning—or so I thought.

Marsh took a moment while he packed more tobacco in his pipe. Thank God he didn’t light up. “Ryan met his wife and married overseas—the Philippines I believe.” He reviewed the folder before continuing. “Mother’s name was Mayra de la Cruz.” He shut the folder and looked me in the eye. “The Philippines is the Third World. Have you ever been to a Third World country, either of you?”

“I’ve been to Haiti,” Ambler said. “It’s not pretty, children running around naked, hungry people living in shacks. It’s very bleak.”

“That’s right, inadequate nutrition, disease, lack of medical care—all adds up to a high level of birth defects. Do you understand where I’m going with this?”

We did, and I’m sure he could read in our eyes that we didn’t need to know the gruesome details pertaining to Terrance Ryan’s congenital birth defects.

“You can leave out the details concerning the boy’s physical deformities, Dr. Marsh,” Ambler said. “We’re more concerned with their behavior and anything that would help us to understand why they became deviant.”

“These boys never had a chance. By the time they were brought here for care, they had already endured their mother’s suicide and years of rejection and ridicule. Their father blamed them for their mother’s suicide. He was a very traditional Irishman with strong opinions. He didn’t make their lives easy.”

I didn’t want to assume, but could understand why Mayra de la Cruz had taken her own life—the pain she must have endured as a foreign woman trying to bring up two deformed children with no support from family or friends. All the same, I had to ask. “Do you know if the mother left a suicide note?”

“No,” Marsh said. “I only know about the suicide because it was disclosed during the intake procedure.”

“And their father is dead?”

“I can only assume so. He was in a bad way when he brought the boys here.”

“Bad way?” Ambler asked.

“Out of work—I suspect he was a lush. He dropped the boys off and never came back. Despite our best efforts, the boys endured a living hell while they were here.”

“How long was that?”

“Almost ten years as I remember. They were discharged when they reached their majority. They took advantage of outpatient services for a while after that—eventually we lost track of them.”

“And Maiguay was a physician here?” Ambler asked.

“Yes, he worked in the infirmary for many years. The man had a good heart.”

“How so?”

“Well, just the fact that he devoted so many years to this facility. The state doesn’t pay all that well, you know. He passed up many lucrative offers, just so that he could take care of Pilgrim’s resident population—he was one of the only kind souls the Ryan boys knew. Finally though, economics won out and he accepted a position at Lenox Hill in the city.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Just before I retired, three to four years ago.”

Ambler and I looked at each other, presumably arriving at a similar conclusion at the same time. The real John Maiguay never made it to his new job at Lenox Hill. Somehow James Ryan must have stayed close to Maiguay, learning enough medicine to pose as a physician and take his spot at Lenox Hill. The real John Maiguay, the devoted physician that cared so deeply for these unfortunate twins never made it out of The Pine Barrens, and was likely the twins’ first victim.

“It’s not hard to see why they turned out the way they did. Still, James must have been a brilliant child in order to pull off the elaborate scheme that he did.”

“Oh yes, James was bright alright, extremely bright. Both boys had above average IQs, especially Terrance.”

“But I thought he was mentally impaired,” Ambler said.

“Terrance, mentally impaired? Why would you say that?” He flipped open one of the folders and began looking through it. “He was tested a number of times—consistently scored over one hundred sixty on the Wexler Adult Intelligence Scale.”

“I knew it,” Ambler shouted. “He’s a goddamn faker.”

“What do you mean he was faking it?” Hector asked.

“Terrance was psychologically evaluated shortly after he was apprehended. We were led to believe that he had very limited intelligence, likely as a result of his congenital deformities. We were told he had limited executive functioning.”

“Not the Terrance I knew,” Marsh said. “He was brilliant despite everything he was going through. If either of these boys was capable of committing a complex crime, it’s Terrance. Despite his small size, he completely dominated James. He was physically abusive. He used to slice his brother’s scalp with glass, beat him, and burn him, but smart enough not to leave any marks on the face or arms. He got away with it for years and James never turned him in.”

“Why do you suppose that was, Dr. Marsh? Why do you suppose James put up with physical abuse? He was bigger, stronger—it just doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense,” Ambler said.

“It makes all the sense in the world. You see, all the physical size in the world won’t help you when you’re intimidated, and in this case, the simple answer is that James was afraid of his brother.”

“James was afraid of Terrance?”

“Oh certainly,” Marsh said, “Almost everyone was.” He took a pack of cigarettes out of one pocket and retrieved a lighter from the other. “Anyone mind if I smoke?”

I wasn’t a fan of smoking, but I wasn’t going stop him. We were finished with Marsh’s debriefing. He lit the cigarette. The first whiff of it sent my mind flying. “I’ve got to go. Thank you for your time.” As I left the room I wondered why I hadn’t made the connection before.