The Madman - Страница 35

She did not respond.

"Well," he continued, puncturing the momentary silence, "Peter and Francis are, unfortunately, currently restricted to this floor. And outside access for all patients, regardless of their status, is being limited until the anxiety created by the murder and the arrest of Lanky has dissipated. To make things more complicated, your very presence on the unit well, I hate to say this, but it really prolongs the mini crisis we are experiencing. So for the foreseeable future, we'll be in a heightened security mode. Not precisely unlike a prison lock-down, Miss Jones, but our own version of the same. Movement around the hospital is being curtailed. Until we get the affected patients fully stabilized again."

Lucy started to respond, but then stopped. Finally, she asked, "Well, certainly they can show me the crime scene, and this floor, and fill me in on what they saw and what they did, just as they have for the police. That's not too challenging to the rules, is it? And then perhaps you, or one of the Moses brothers can accompany me through the remainder of the building and to the companion units?"

"Of course," Mister Evil replied. "A short tour followed by a longer tour. I will make the arrangements."

Lucy turned back to Peter and Francis. "Let's just go over that night once more," she said.

"C-Bird," Peter said, stepping in front of Mister Evil, "lead the way."

The crime scene in the closet had been dutifully swabbed down and cleaned up, and when Lucy opened the door, it stank of recently applied disinfectant, and no longer seemed to Francis to contain any of the evil that he recalled. It was as if a place of utter hellishness had been returned to normalcy, suddenly completely benign. Cleaning fluids, mops, buckets, spare lightbulbs, brooms, stacked sheets, and a coiled hose were all arranged in an orderly fashion on the shelves. The overhead light made the floor glisten, but not with any sign of Short Blond's blood. Francis was slightly taken aback by how clean and routine it all appeared, and he thought for a moment that turning the closet back into a closet was almost as obscene as the act that had taken place there.

Lucy bent down and ran her finger over the place where the body had come to rest, as if, Francis thought, by feeling the cool linoleum floor she could somehow connect with the life that had flowed out in that spot.

"So, she died here?" Lucy said, turning toward Peter. He bent down beside her, and when he did answer, it was in a low, confidential voice.

"Yes. But I think she was already unconscious."

"Why?"

"Because the stuff that surrounded the body didn't resemble a setting where a fight took place. I think that the cleaning fluids were thrown about to disrupt the crime scene, and to make people think something different about what took place."

"Why would he douse her body in cleaning fluid?"

"To compromise any forensic evidence he might have left behind."

Lucy nodded. "That would make sense."

Peter looked across at Lucy, saw that she wasn't saying something, rubbed his hand against his chin, then rose up, shaking his head slightly. "The other cases you're looking at. How was the crime scene in those?"

Lucy Jones smiled, but it was humorless. "Good question," she said. "Hard rain," she said quietly. "Thunderstorms. Each killing took place out-of-doors during a rainy period. As best as anyone can figure, the murders happened in one spot, then the corpse was moved to a hidden, but exposed location. Probably preselected. Very difficult for the crime scene analysts. The weather compromised virtually all the physical evidence. Or so I have been told."

Peter looked around the closet, then stepped back.

"He made his own rain, here."

Lucy stepped out of the closet as well. She looked down toward the nursing station. "So, if there was a fight…"

"It took place down there."

For a moment, Lucy's head pivoted about. "But what about noise?" she asked.

Francis had been quiet up to that point. But with that question, Peter turned to him. "You tell her, C-Bird."

Francis flushed, abruptly put on the spot, and his first thought was that he had absolutely no idea, and he opened his mouth to say that, but stopped. Instead, he considered the question for an instant, saw an answer and then replied, "Two things, Miss Jones. First, all the walls are thickly insulated and all the doors are steel, so it is difficult for sound to penetrate any of them. There's lots of noise here in the hospital, but it is usually muffled. But more important, what good would it do to call for help?"

Deep within him, he heard a rumbling of his own voices. Tell her! they shouted. Tell her what it's like!

He continued. "People cry out all the time. They have nightmares. They have fears. They see things or they hear things, or maybe just feel things. Everyone here is accustomed to the noises made by tension, I guess. So, if someone yelled out, "Help me!" " He paused, then finished: "It would be no different from any other time someone cried out with more or less the same request. If they yelled out "Murder!" or simply screamed, it wouldn't be all that much out of the ordinary. And no one ever comes, Miss Jones. No matter how scared you are and how hard it is. In here, your nightmares are your own to handle."

She looked at him, and in that second she saw that he spoke from experience on that point. She smiled at the young man, and saw that he was rubbing his hands together slightly nervously, but with an eagerness to contribute and she thought suddenly that inside the Western State Hospital there must be all sorts of different types of fears, beyond the one she had come hunting for. She wondered if she would have to come to know all of them. "Francis," she said, "you seem to have a poetic streak. Still, it must be difficult."

The voices that had been so muted in recent days had raised their own sound to a near shout that seemed to echo through the space behind Francis's eyes. To quiet them, he said, "It would probably help, Miss Jones, if you understand that while we are all thrown in here together, we are all really alone. More alone than anywhere else, I guess."

What he truly wanted to say was more alone that anywhere else in the entire world.

Lucy looked at him closely. She understood one thing: In the outside world, when someone calls for help, there is a duty for the person who overhears that plea to act. A basic civility, she thought. But in the Western State Hospital, everyone called out, all the time. Everyone needed help, all the time. Ignoring those summons, no matter how desperate and heartfelt, was really just a part of the hospital's daily routine.

She shrugged off a bit of the claustrophobia that descended upon her in that second. She turned to look at Peter, and saw him standing with his arms crossed, but a grin on his face. "I think," he said, "you should see the dormitory where we were asleep when all this happened."

And, with that, he led her down the corridor, pausing only to point at spots where blood had pooled up. But these, too, had been erased.

"The police," he said quietly, "thought all these blood spots were like the trail Lanky left behind. And, they were a mess, because the idiot security guard stepped all over them. He even slipped on one and fell and spread it all over the place."

"What did you think?" Lucy asked.

"I thought they were a trail, all right. But one that led to him. Not one that he made."

"He had her blood on his nightclothes."

"The Angel embraced him."

"The Angel?"

"That's what he called him. The Angel that came down to his bedside and told him that evil was destroyed."

"You think…"

"What I think, Miss Jones, is pretty obvious."

He opened the door to the dormitory, and they went inside. Francis pointed out where his bunk was, as did Peter the Fireman. They also showed her Lanky's bed, which had been stripped, and the mattress removed, so that only the steel frame and metal coils remained. The small foot locker that he'd had to hold his few clothes and personal items had also been taken, so that Lanky's modest space in the dormitory now seemed nothing more than a skeleton. Francis saw Lucy note the distances, measuring with her eyes the space between the bunks, the path to the door, the door to the adjacent bathroom. For a moment, he was a little embarrassed showing her where they lived. He was acutely aware, in that moment, how little privacy they had, and, in that crowded room, how much humanity had been stripped away from them. It made him angry, and more than a little self-conscious, as he watched the prosecutor survey the room.