The Madman - Страница 92

The Angel hovered next to me, spitting with rage.

He did not have to say why, for every word I'd written told him.

I twisted on the floor, as if some electric current were charging through my body. They never gave me electric shock treatment at Western State. Probably that was the only cruelty masquerading as a cure that I haven't had to endure. But I suspected the pain that I was in this moment was little different.

I could see.

That was what hurt me.

When I turned in that corridor inside the hospital and spoke those words to Peter and Lucy, it was as if I were opening the one door within myself that I had never wanted to open. The greatest barricaded, nailed shut and sealed tight door within me. When you are mad, you're capable of nothing. But you're also capable of everything. To be caught between the two extremes is agony.

All my life, all I wanted was to be normal. Even tortured, like Peter and Lucy were, but normal. Able to modestly function in the outside world, enjoy the simplest of things. A fine morning. A greeting from a friend. A tasty meal. A routine conversation. A sense of belonging. But I couldn't, because I knew, right in that moment, that I would forever be doomed to be closer in spirit and action to the man I hated and the man that scared me. The Angel was giving in and luxuriating in all the murderous evil thoughts that lurked within me. He was a fun house mirror version of myself. I had the same rage. The same desire. The same evil. I had just concealed it, shunted it away, thrown it into the deepest hole within me that I could find and covered it up with every mad thought, like boulders and dirt, so that it was buried where I hoped it could never burst forth.

In the hospital, the Angel truly made only one mistake.

He should have killed me when he could.

"So," he whispered in my ear, "I'm here now to rectify that error in judgment."

"There's no time," Lucy said. She was staring down at the cluttered files spread across her desk in the makeshift office where her makeshift investigation was centered. Peter was pacing to the side, clearly sorting through all sorts of conflicted thoughts. When she spoke, he looked up, slightly cockeyed at her.

"How so?"

"I'm going to get pulled out of here. Probably within the next few days. I spoke with my boss, and he thinks that I'm just spinning my wheels here. He didn't like the idea of me being here in the first place, but when I insisted, he gave in. That's about to come to a sudden stop…"

Peter nodded. "I'm not going to be here much longer, either," he said. "At least I don't think so." He didn't elaborate, but did add, "But Francis will be left behind."

"Not just Francis," Lucy said.

"That's right. Not just Francis." He hesitated. "Do you think he's right? About the Angel, I mean. Being someone we wouldn't look at…"

Lucy took a deep breath. She was clenching her hands tightly, then releasing them, almost in rhythm with her breathing, like someone on the verge of fury, trying to control their emotions. This was an alien concept in the hospital, where so many people gave vent to so many emotions on a near constant basis. Restraint other than that encouraged by antipsychotic medications was pretty much impossible. But Lucy seemed to wear some sort of punishment behind her eyes, and when she looked up at Peter, he could see great waves of trouble behind her words.

"I cannot stand it," she said, very quietly.

He did not respond, for he knew she would explain herself within moments.

Lucy sat down hard on the wooden chair, and then, just as swiftly, stood back up. She leaned forward to grasp the edges of the desk, as if that would steady her from the buffeting winds of her turmoil. When she looked over at Peter, he was unsure whether it was a murderous harshness in her eyes, or something else.

"The idea of leaving a rapist and killer behind in here is almost too much to imagine. Whether or not the Angel and the man who killed the women in my other three cases are one and the same and I think they are leaving him in here untouched makes my skin crawl."

Again, he did not say anything.

"I won't do it," she said. "I can't do it."

"Suppose you're forced to walk away?" Peter asked. He might as well have been asking the same question of himself.

She looked hard at him. "How do you do that?" she answered, a question to match a question.

There was a momentary silence in the room, and then, suddenly, Lucy looked down at the stack of patient dossiers on the desktop. In a single, abrupt motion, she swept her arm across the desk, dashing the folders against the wall. "Goddamn it!" she said.

The manila folders made a slapping sound, and papers fluttered to the floor.

Peter kept quiet and Lucy stepped back, took aim with her shoe at a metal wastebasket and sent it skittering across the room with a well-placed kick.

She looked up at Peter. "I won't do it," she said. "Tell me, which is more evil? Being a killer or allowing a killer to kill again?"

There was an answer to this question, but Peter wasn't sure that he wanted to say it out loud.

Lucy took a few deep breaths, before lifting her eyes to where they locked in on Peter's.

"Do you understand, Peter," she whispered, "I know in my heart one thing: If I leave here without finding this man, someone else will die. I don't know how long it will be, but sometime, a month, six months, a year from now, I will be standing over another body, staring down at a right hand that's missing four fingers and now a thumb, as well. And all I'll be able to see is the opportunity that I lost, right here. And even if I catch the guy, and see him sitting in a courtroom, and get to stand up and read off the list of charges to a judge and jury, I'll still know that someone died, because I failed here, right at this moment in time."

Peter finally slumped down in a chair and lowered his own face into his hands, as if he was washing up, but he was not. When he looked up at Lucy, he didn't really address what she said, but then, in his own way, he did.

"You know, Lucy," he said softly, as if someone might be listening, "before I became an arson investigator, I spent some time hauling hoses. I liked it, you know. Fighting a fire is just one of those things that has little ambivalence about it. You put out the fire, or else it destroys something. Simple, right? Sometimes, on a really big, bad blowup, you could feel the heat on your face and hear the sound that a fire makes when it is really out of control. It's an awful, angry sound. Comes straight from hell. And then there's this second when everything in your body says to you "Don't go in there!" but you do, anyway. You go ahead, because the fire is bad, and because the other members of your brigade are already inside, and you simply know that you have to. It's the hardest easy decision you can ever make."

Lucy seemed to consider what Peter said, and then asked. "So what about now?"

"I think," he said slowly, "that we're going to have to take some chances."

"Chances?"

"Yes."

"What about what Francis said," she continued. "You think in here everything is upside down? If we were on the outside, doing this investigation, and a detective came to us and said we need to look at the least likely suspect, not the most likely, I would, of course, pretty much have that guy fired from the case. It makes no sense at all, and if nothing else, investigations are supposed to make sense."

"Nothing in here really makes sense," Peter said.

"Which is why Francis is probably right. He's been right about a bunch of things, anyway."

"So, what do we do? Go over every hospital file again searching for…" He paused, then asked,"… Searching for what?"

"What else can we do?"

Peter hesitated again, thinking hard about what had happened. After a moment, he shrugged a little and shook his head. "I don't know," he said slowly. "I'm reluctant…"

"Reluctant for what?"

"Well, when we shook up the Williams housing unit, what happened?"

"A man got killed. Except they don't think so…"

"No, beyond that, what happened? The Angel emerged. He came out to kill the Dancer maybe. We don't know for certain. But we do know that he showed up in the dormitory room to threaten Francis with his knife."