The Secret Friend (11 page)

31

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Darby said, motioning to Bryson. ‘I’ve never been to purgatory.’

‘Haven’t you read Dante?’ Fletcher asked. ‘Or don’t they teach that in class any more?’

‘I’ve read
Paradiso.’

‘Yes. The good Catholic girls always learn about heaven first, don’t they?’

Fletcher laughed. Bryson stood behind Darby. She held the phone an inch from her ear so Bryson could listen.

‘The nuns should have made you read
Purgatorio,’
Fletcher said. ‘It’s where Dante describes purgatory as a place where suffering has a real purpose that can lead you to redemption, if you’re willing to go the distance. Are you willing to go the distance?’

‘I found the room with the photograph.’

‘Do you recognize the woman?’

‘No. Who is she?’

‘What do you think of the Virgin Mary statue?’

‘Is it supposed to have some sort of meaning?’

‘Now is not the time to be coy, Darby. The moment of revelation is at hand.’

‘Let’s talk about the woman in the photograph. Why did you leave it here?’

‘I’d be more inclined to answer your question if you answer one of mine,’ Fletcher said. ‘Is the statue on the windowsill the same one you found on Emma Hale and Judith Chen?’

Darby wasn’t about to give the former profiler any specifics about the case. ‘Why did you place it here?’ she asked. ‘Why did you want me to find it?’

‘Tell me about the statues and I’ll give you the name of the woman in the photograph.’

Bryson shook his head.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Darby said.

‘Why don’t you ask Detective Bryson? Or would you rather put him on the phone?’

How did Fletcher know Bryson was in the room?

He must be watching.

Bryson moved away, drawing his weapon, and ushered Reed inside the cell. Darby covered the phone’s mouthpiece.

‘Don’t tell him a goddamn thing,’ Bryson said, and then signalled his men.

Darby’s gloved hand gripped the SIG and slid it from the shoulder holster. She looked past the door, into the dark, decaying room cut with blades of light and steaming breath, wondering where the former profiler was hiding.

Darby pressed the phone back to her ear. ‘Tell me about the woman in the photograph.’

‘You can’t find this woman alone,’ Malcolm Fletcher said. ‘But if you’re willing to take the journey, I’ll be your guide.’

If this was some sort of trap, why would Fletcher stage it in an abandoned mental hospital with a room full of cops? It was too elaborate a setup. Could the man possibly be telling her the truth?

‘I think you need to explain your agenda,’ Darby said.

‘There’s no reason to fear me. We’re both after the same goal.’

‘Which is?’

‘The truth,’ Fletcher said. ‘I’ll lead you to the woman in the photograph, but once you open Pandora’s Box, there’s no turning back. You may want to give that some thought.’

‘And you’re going to guide me to her out of the goodness of your heart.’

‘Think of me as the boatman Charon guiding you across the river of hate.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s waiting for you downstairs.’

Darby’s breath caught. It took her a moment to regroup.

‘She’s here,’ she said.

‘Yes. Are you ready to meet her?’

There was no menace in Fletcher’s voice, none of that jovial taunting from the previous conversations. What Darby heard was a cool, neutral tone that conjured a memory from her childhood – ten years old and taking a shortcut through the Belham woods and seeing three boys from her class. They had found a dead coyote. One of the boys, Ricky something, the fat one with the mean eyes, asked her if she wanted to see it. Darby said no. They called her a chicken, a frightened little girl.

To prove them wrong, she marched down the embankment, tripped and fell. She came to a hard stop, dimly aware of the buzzing sound of flies behind the boys’ laughter, and when she pushed herself up, she felt something hot and alive squirming between her fingers. Maggots, hundreds of them, roiled inside the carcass. Darby screamed and the boys laughed harder. When she started to cry, the fat one, laughing, said, ‘Hey, don’t get mad at us. You’re the one who decided to go down there.’

The memory vanished when Fletcher said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m pressed for time. I need your answer now.’

Why was Fletcher doing this? Was this a ruse in order for him to try to get information about the case? Or did the former profiler actually know something?

Darby’s attention shifted to the Virgin Mary statue on the windowsill.
Where the hell did you get it?

Don’t tell him a goddamn thing,
Bryson had said.

Stay or go? Call it.

‘Call me when you’re ready to share,’ Darby said and hung up. She turned to Reed, who appeared visibly shaken. ‘How many floors are below us?’

The old caretaker took off his glove and wiped his face with a liver-spotted hand. ‘Four,’ he said, ‘and that’s not including the basement level.’

‘Have you been down there recently?’

‘Nobody’s been down there in years.’

‘We may need to search the hospital. I’ll need you and your men to help us.’

‘You want us to help you search the
entire
hospital? I can’t allow that, Miss McCormick. There are too many areas that are unstable. It’s not safe.’

Darby was staring at the photograph of the young woman. Was she somewhere inside the hospital? Was she alive? Was she hurt or injured?

‘Please stay inside this room, Mr Reed, until I come back.’

Darby, her pistol drawn, stuck close to the walls. Above her and across the room, Bryson’s men slammed back cell doors, searching for Malcolm Fletcher. She doubted they would find him. The former federal agent was too skilled at hiding. He had eluded capture for decades.

Tim Bryson stood at the end of the hallway, breath steaming in the cold air above the beam of the tactical flashlight mounted underneath his handgun, a 9mm Beretta. She got Bryson’s attention and nodded to an empty room. The window had bars on it, the broken glass protected by a mesh grille. Snow had collected on the sill.

‘I think we need to organize a search party,’ Darby told Bryson.

‘You think the woman in the picture is waiting for us somewhere in here?’

‘He wanted to lead us downstairs. I think we need to take a look.’

Bryson thought it over for a moment. He was sweating.

‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘I’ll organize the search. Process the room, and get back to the lab. I want to know what the son of a bitch is up to.’

32

With the aid of a flashlight, Malcolm Fletcher carefully made his way down a hallway with rotted floorboards, far away from the Boston police.

Fletcher had an excellent visual memory. He remembered the layout of the hospital, having roamed through its corridors lives and lives ago when he was employed as a special agent for the FBI’s newly formed Behavioral Science Unit.

In 1954, Hurricane Edna had ripped one of the massive oaks in front of the hospital and sent the tree crashing into the roof, the falling debris crushing most of the floors. Given the exorbitant cost of fixing the floors, the board of directors decided to seal off the passages.

When an electrical fire gutted a good portion of the Mason wing in 1982, the hospital was already under state care. Lawmakers, sensing a potentially lucrative payday, put the land up for sale. A historical society looking to save the hospital, considered by many to be an architectural landmark, the last of its kind, filed petitions and injunctions. Potential buyers were scared off by the threat of significant legal costs and a long, protracted court fight.

For twenty-odd years the hospital had been abandoned, and during that time, the long New England winters had caused significant rot and water damage to the walls and floors. It had taken a considerable amount of patience and skill to find a safe passage to the top floor; the amount of decay and ruin was severe.

Fletcher slid into a room with broken windows. He removed his cell phone, found a signal and called Jonathan Hale.

‘I believe I know the man who killed your daughter,’ Fletcher said.

Darby had left her car unlocked. Her kit was in the trunk. Reed radioed Kevin, the young man parked in the pickup at the end of the road, and asked him to bring the orange box in the trunk to the C wing, which he did, half an hour later.

She took pictures then decided she wanted help processing the hospital room. She bagged the photograph and statue and called Coop from the road.

‘Fletcher left us two gifts,’ Darby said. ‘A photograph and – get this – a Virgin Mary statue. I’m pretty sure the statue is the same one we found with Hale and Chen.’

‘Do we know where or how Special Agent Creepy found the statue?’

‘We do not.’

‘Why lead you to an abandoned hospital, though? What’s the point? He could have dropped the photograph and statue in the mail.’

‘It’s not as dramatic.’

‘True.’

‘And maybe Fletcher wants us to discover something about that particular room. He deliberately left the statue and photograph inside a patient room that housed violent offenders – the same room he had been to earlier in the day.’

‘How long did you say the hospital has been closed?’

‘At least twenty years,’ Darby said. ‘Probably more like thirty.’

‘And you think you’re going to find the name of the patient or patients who occupied that particular room? Good luck with that.’

‘I’ll see you in an hour.’

As Darby drove, she thought about Coop’s parting words.

When Sinclair closed, the truly violent offenders were most likely transferred to other psychiatric hospitals. The schizophrenics, the patients who were bipolar or manic depressive, would be evaluated and then, thanks to the ever constant squeeze of mental health dollars, treated on an outpatient basis and pushed back into the street. The files had been floating through the state’s mental health system for decades. Trying to track down a patient file, even with a specific name, was tantamount to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

∗

Coop was waiting for her inside their office.

‘Where’s Keith?’ Darby asked.

‘He went home to have dinner with the wife and kids and then is coming back to the lab to help us process the room. Let’s take a look at the photograph first.’

After taking pictures, Coop examined the paper. It didn’t contain any marks or distinguishing characteristics.

‘The woman in the picture, with the hairstyle and clothes, I’m guessing it was taken in the early eighties,’ Darby said. ‘What are you going to use to treat the paper?’

‘Ninhydrin mixed with heptane,’ Coop said, flicking the switch for the ventilation unit.

Darby put on the safety goggles and a breathing mask. Coop, wearing a pair of nitrile gloves, sprayed the back of the paper. It turned purple. They both examined the paper, waiting for the ninhydrin to react with the amino acids left by the human hand.

There were no fingerprints.

Coop sprayed the side holding the photograph.

‘No prints,’ Coop said. ‘Lucky for us we already know who he is.’

33

Hannah Givens sat on the bed with the tray of food – toast and eggs – that the man named Walter Smith had left inside the sliding food carrier. She didn’t have a clock or a calendar, but this was her second breakfast. Today must be Sunday.

She didn’t have windows, either, but she did have plenty of light. Two pretty Tiffany-style lamps were inside the room – one on the nightstand next to the bed, the other set up on a small reading table full of thumbed-through issues of
People, Star, Us, Cosmopolitan
and
Glamour.

The most interesting item was the big white armoire. The shirts were small and mediums; Hannah was a large, a size 12. Shoes were arranged neatly at the bottom – Prada, Kenneth Cole and two pairs of Jimmy Choos, all of them a size six. Hannah wore a size ten. Clearly the shoes and clothes hadn’t been picked out for her.

Hannah thought about the clothes and magazines with their wrinkled pages and again wondered if another woman had lived in here before her. If so, what had happened to her? The question left a cold space in her stomach.

She wrapped the down comforter around her even though the room was warm. The fear was still there but it wasn’t holding her hostage any more. It had drifted to some other place and, for a reason she couldn’t quite explain, she didn’t feel the need to cry or scream. She had done all of that, anyway.

Waking up in the dark for the first time, her head foggy, Hannah had a brief moment where she believed she was at home. Then the memory of what had happened descended on her like scalding water and she was out of the bed and stumbling through the strange dark, bumping into foreign objects as her fear reached a hysterical pitch and then she was screaming, screaming it all out until her throat was raw.

Finally, she summoned the nerve to face the dark and searched the room as a blind person would – slow, cautious steps; hands feeling over each object to register its shape. Here was a table. Here, a chair – leather, judging by its cool, smooth feel. Next a nightstand, and what was this? It felt like a lamp. She found the switch and turned it on.

The first thing she noticed was her pyjamas – soft, pink flannel. They were her size but these weren’t her pyjamas. The man named Walter had undressed her. He had come in here while she was unconscious and taken off her jacket and clothes. He had seen her naked.

Walter, Hannah was sure, hadn’t raped her. The two times she had had sex, she had woken up the next morning feeling slightly sore. Walter hadn’t raped her but he
had
undressed her. Had he touched her? Taken pictures? What? What was he going to do to her?
Why
did he want her?

One thing was clear: Walter didn’t want her to leave. The room had one door but no doorknob. Mounted on the wall was a keypad unit much like the ones she had seen in office buildings; you needed a keycard and a code to open it. Drilled into the door was a oneway peephole. Walter could see in but Hannah couldn’t see out.

Clearly Walter wanted her to feel comfortable. The room was the size of a small studio apartment, windowless, with a small kitchenette and walls painted a warm yellow. A beautiful red cashmere throw blanket was draped over the back of a leather reading chair with matching ottoman. Behind the chair was a bookshelf holding well-read paperback romance books. A cloth shower curtain hid a toilet but there was no bath or shower. The room even had its own thermostat.

The two cabinets above the kitchen sink held boxes of cereal and Saltine crackers. There were no dishes. No stove. The drawers didn’t contain any silverware or anything sharp, just paper and sanitary napkins, tampons and an odd assortment of makeup. The refrigerator was stocked with cartons of milk, orange juice, yogurt, plastic bottles of Poland Spring and almost every type of soda – Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Dr Pepper and Slice.

Hannah’s attention shifted to the centre of the room, to the white roses in a plastic vase sitting on top of the small, circular dining table. The petals had started to wilt.

A rapist wouldn’t leave flowers for her. A rapist would come in and have his way with her.

Walter hadn’t come into her room
(yet,
she reminded herself). Every time he brought her meals (three times a day) he placed a plastic tray in the food carrier and slid it through without saying a word. For lunch (or was it dinner?) he had made chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy.

Hannah rolled over in her bed and shut her eyes. Her roommates had to be wondering why she hadn’t returned home. Monday morning she was scheduled to work the early shift at the deli. If she didn’t show up, the owner, Mr Alves, would call her at home and leave a nasty message on the answering machine. Robin or Terry would hear the message and call her parents. Her parents would call the police. People would start looking for her. She needed to find a way to hold on and survive until she was found.

What if they couldn’t find her? Wouldn’t there come a point where the police would stop looking?

She couldn’t think about that. She needed to stay positive, as impossible as it seemed, and keep her head clear so she could think.

Yesterday, after breakfast, Hannah searched the room for something she might be able to use as a weapon. No microwave or coffee pot. The small colour TV was bolted to its small wooden stand. No hot water in the sink, only cold. The refrigerator’s produce drawers had been taken out. Apparently Walter was afraid of her using one of the drawers to try and knock him over the head or something. He had used chains and padlocks to secure the two dining chairs to the table legs. She could move the chairs out to sit but she couldn’t use them as weapons. Walter had foreseen that option. The table legs were too thick and sturdy; she couldn’t break one off unless she had a saw.

At some point Walter would want to have his way with her and she needed to be prepared. Taking a deep breath, Hannah forced herself to look at the room again.