The Madman - Страница 60

Lucy smiled. "Of course," she said. "So on the night of the homicide "

Griggs cut her off. "I was asleep upstairs. Tucked in for the night. Zonked out on whatever the shit they give us."

Pausing, Lucy glanced at the yellow pad in front of her, before raising her eyes and fixing them on the patient. "You refused medication that night. There's a note in your file."

He opened his mouth, started to say one thing, then stopped. "You ought ' ta know," he said, "just because you say you won't take it, it don't mean you get a pass. All it means is that some goon like this one" he waved at Big Black, and Francis had the distinct impression that Griggs would have used some other epithet, if he hadn't been scared of the massive black man "forces you to take it. So I did. Few minutes later, I was off in dreamland."

"You didn't like the nurse-trainee, did you?"

Griggs grinned. "Don't like any of 'em. No secret in that."

"Why is that?"

"They like to lord it over us. Make us do stuff. Like we don't mean anything."

Griggs used us and we but Francis didn't think he had any plurality in mind, other than himself.

"Fighting women is easier, isn't it?" Lucy asked.

The patient shrugged. "You think I could fight him?" he replied, again indicating Big Black.

Lucy didn't answer the man's question, instead, she bent forward slightly. "You don't like women, do you?"

Griggs snarled, slightly, and spoke in a low-pitched, fierce voice. "Don't like you much."

"You like to hurt women, don't you?" Lucy asked.

He burst out in a wheezing laugh, but didn't answer.

Keeping her own voice steady and cold, Lucy then suddenly shifted direction. "Where were you in November," she asked abruptly. "About sixteen months ago."

"Huh?"

"You heard me."

"I'm supposed to remember back that far?"

"Is that a problem for you? Because I sure as hell can find out fast enough."

Griggs shifted about in his seat, gaining a little time. Francis could see the man's mind working hard, as if trying to see some danger through a fog. "I was working on a construction site in Springfield," he said. "Road crew. Bridge repair. Nasty job."

"Ever been in Concord?" she asked.

"Concord?"

"You heard me."

"No, I never been in Concord. That's in the whole other part of the state."

"Your boss on that construction crew, when I call him up, he's not going to tell me that you had access to a company truck, is he? And he's not going to tell me that he sent you on trips to the Boston area?"

Griggs looked a little scared and confused, a momentary flight of doubt. "No," he said. "Other guys got those easy jobs. I worked in the pits."

Lucy suddenly had one of the crime scene photographs in her hand. Francis saw that it was the body of the second victim. She rose up and leaned across the table and thrust it under Griggs's nose. "You remember this?" she demanded. "You remember doing this?"

"No," he said, his voice losing some more of its bravado. "Who's that?"

"You tell me."

"Never seen her before."

"I think you have."

"No."

"You know that road crew you worked on, there's records that show where everyone was each and every day. So proving that you were in Concord's gonna be easy for me. Just like that notation that you didn't get any medication the night the nurse was killed right here. It's just a matter of paperwork, filling in the blanks. Now, try again: Did you do this?"

Griggs shook his head.

"If you could, you would, wouldn't you?"

He shook his head again.

"You're lying to me."

Griggs seemed to breath in slowly, wheezing, getting a deep, lungful of air. When he did speak, it was with a high-pitched, barely restrained anger. "I didn't do that to no girl I never seen, and you're lying to me if you think I did."

"What do you do to women you don't like?"

He smiled sickly. "I cut 'em."

Lucy sat back and nodded. "Like the nurse-trainee?"

Griggs again shook his head. Then he looked across the room, eyeing first Evans, then over at Francis. "Not going to answer no more questions," he said. "You want to charge me with something, then you go ahead and do it."

"Okay," Lucy said. "Then you're finished for now. But maybe we'll talk again."

Griggs didn't say anything else. He simply rose. He worked some saliva around his mouth, and for a moment Francis thought he was going to spit on Lucy Jones. Big Black must have thought the same, because Griggs took a step forward, only to have the huge attendant's hand descend like a vise grip on his shoulder.

"You finished here, now," Big Black said calmly. "Don't do nothing that makes me any angrier than I might already be."

Griggs shrugged out of the attendant's grasp, and turned. Francis thought he clearly wanted to say something else, but instead, exited after pushing the chair a little, so that it scraped a small ways across the floor. A minor display of defiance.

Lucy ignored this, and started to write some notes down on the yellow legal pad. Mister Evans, too, was writing something down on a small notebook page. Lucy spotted this and said, "Well, he didn't precisely rule himself out, did he? What are you writing?"

Francis kept quiet, as Evans looked up. He wore a slightly self-satisfied look on his face. "What am I writing?" he asked. "Well, for starters, a note to myself to adjust Griggs's medications over the next few days. He seemed significantly agitated by your questions, and I would say is likely to act out aggressively, probably toward one of the more vulnerable patients around here. One of the old women, for example. Or perhaps one of the staff. That's equally possible. I can increase some doses over the short term, preventing that anger from manifesting itself."

Lucy stopped. "You're going to what?"

"Chill him out for a week or so. Maybe longer."

Mister Evil hesitated, then added, still keeping the smug tone in his words, "You know, I could have provided a bit of a shortcut here. You are correct that Griggs refused his medication on the night of the homicide. But that refusal meant that he was given an intravenous injection later that night. See the second notation on the chart? I was there for that, and I supervised the procedure. So, when he says he was asleep when the murder took place, I can assure you he's telling the truth. He was sedated."

Again, Evans paused, then continued. "Perhaps there are others you want to question, where I can help in advance?"

Lucy looked up frustrated. Francis could see that she not only hated wasting her time, but hated dealing with the situation in the hospital. He thought, it must be difficult for her, because she had never been in a place like this. Then he realized that very few people with any claim on normalcy had ever been in a place like the hospital.

He bit down on his lip, holding back from saying anything. His mind was churning, fierce images from the interview just completed. Even his voices were remaining quiet within him, because, as he'd listened to the other patient speak, Francis had begun to see things. Not hallucinations. Not delusions. But things about the man speaking. He had seen ridges of fury and hatred, he had seen a sneering delight in the man's eyes as he saw the picture of death. He had seen a man capable of much depravity. But, at the same time, he'd seen a man with a great and terrible weakness inside. A man who would always want but would rarely do. Not the man they were looking for, because all of Griggs's anger had been so obvious. And Francis knew, right in that second, sitting in that small room, that there would be little obvious about the Angel.

At the very moment that Francis was sitting stricken because he had seen things that went beyond the small office where Lucy, Mister Evil, and he had conducted the interview, Peter the Fireman and Little Black were completing their search of the modest living area claimed by the patient Griggs. Peter had discarded his usual outfit, and set aside his beaten Boston Red Sox cap, and was wearing the ubiquitous snow-white slacks and coat of a hospital attendant. The uniform had been Little Black's idea. It was, in some ways, a perfect camouflage inside the hospital; one would have to look twice to see that the person wearing it wasn't really an attendant, but was actually Peter. In a world filled with hallucination and delusion, it would create some doubt. It gave him, he hoped, just enough cover so that he could do the job that Lucy had defined for him, although he knew that if he were to get spotted by Gulp-a-pill or Mister Evil or any of the others who knew him well enough, he would be immediately slammed into an isolation cell, and Little Black would be severely reprimanded. The wiry attendant hadn't been terribly concerned about this, saying "Unusual circumstances require unusual solutions," a comment that seemed more sophisticated than Peter would have earlier given him credit for making. Little Black also pointed out that he was the local union's shop steward, and his large brother was the union secretary, which gave them some armor in case they were caught.