“Well, the Secret Service has a Twitter account. That’s hardly a good way to keep secrets.”
Forsyth knew Twitter was some kind of Internet thing, and he was happy to stay away from it. As far as he could tell, all it did was get people in trouble when they said things they shouldn’t.
“You don’t have to worry about what the Secret Service does. You’d better be worrying about what Dominic Scagnelli does. Don’t forget who you work for.”
“You say that a lot.”
“Because you work for me. Where are the Morgans now?”
“They’re walking around an abandoned lot. I checked out the property on my laptop. It’s owned by CRO Pharmaceuticals but apparently it was shut down after a fatal industrial accident last year.”
“You don’t say.”
“Morgan worked for CRO. Real high up the ladder, a guy just doing his job. And he gave it all up to become a cop?”
“No, he gave it up for his wife. He just didn’t know it at the time.”
“Women. They sure know how to fuck up a good thing. The most selfish creatures on God’s green earth.”
Forsyth winced a little. He’d been married once. He’d lain his lovely Louisa to rest fifteen years back, and he’d never found her equal. He was content to finish up his time here and be reunited in heaven with his monogamy still intact.
Scagnelli sputtered on, the amphetamines fueling his tirade. “After the nuclear holocaust when all the dust settles, first will come the cockroaches, and then some cats will pussyfoot out of their holes. And then a few women will crawl out of the rubble. If ever you want to learn about self-preservation-”
“Did the Morgans see you?”
“Of course not.” Scagnelli sounded offended, which was exactly what Forsyth intended. “He looks a little jittery but otherwise they’re just hacking through the weeds like they’re looking for a way inside the fence.”
“Monitor them but don’t take no action.”
“What if they find something?”
“There ain’t nothing left to find.”
“Okay, I’ll just send you a text.”
“Why don’t you Twitter it?”
“Tweet.”
“Whatever. Or ram it up a carrier pigeon’s butt and have it sing ‘Dixie’ on the way over.”
Scagnelli laughed, taking Forsyth’s gruffness for folksy humor. Forsyth could tell Scagnelli was underestimating him. Just the way he liked it.
He clicked the cell phone dead and turned into the parking lot of Central Regional Hospital. It had once been named Umstead Hospital after one of the state’s endless series of mental-health reformers dating all the way back to Dorothea Dix, whose own namesake hospital was nearly dead.
Two and a half centuries of meddling in people’s heads and they still ain’t got things right.
The hospital was two stories at ground level, although it was set on a gentle slope that allowed for a lower floor at the back end of the building. The flat roof and glass facade suggested a 1990s-era design, back when architects didn’t realize how quickly their futuristic designs would look bulldozer-ready. The lot was relatively empty, since the hospital didn’t get a lot of visitors. Many of the patients were of the sort that no one wanted to acknowledge, much less spend time with.
The assistant director was waiting by the front desk, wearing a crisp pants suit. She was of late middle-age, her hair white and fluffy, although her face was relatively unlined. She greeted him with a smile and shining blue eyes that suggested unflagging optimism in the face of her grim duties as a shepherd of the lost and hopeless.
“Mr. Forsyth,” she said, shaking his hand like a man. “I’m a fan of your work. Except for that proposal to cut federal support for mental health services. I’m Paula Redfern.”
“A real pleasure, Dr. Redfern. And about that-”
“I know you’re a busy man, so let’s not waste your time. Besides, I don’t vote in your district.”
As she led him down the hall and into the labyrinth, Forsyth found himself admiring her spunk as she described the various missions of the hospital. He liked the graceful way she moved, too, but he was wise enough to keep it on an aesthetic level, like a man watching someone else’s thoroughbred gallop through a meadow.
“We focus on interdisciplinary approaches individualized to each patient’s desired therapeutic outcomes,” she said.
“I ain’t sure what that means,” he said, “but your funding just went up a million dollars.”
She laughed and kept on with the tour. Forsyth was pleased the hospital had honored his request to keep the tour private. Because every entity receiving public funding was now in intense competition with all the other entities, people grabbed any advantage they could. Everybody in the country was in favor of smaller government until it came time to take a pay cut themselves.
“We’re not just a treatment center, we have research and forensic wings as well,” Dr. Redfern said. “UNC and Duke conduct research work here.”
“I know a few researchers down this way,” Forsyth said. “As you know, I’m a close friend of Senator Burchfield’s and-”
“I vote against him every chance I get, but I am sure he’s an honorable man in private.”
They were entering the Acute Adult Unit, where psychiatric patients with little hope of release were confined. Dr. Redfern continued on with her chipper presentation in wholesale denial of the fact that the ward wasn’t much of an upgrade from the mental asylums of old. The main differences were better lighting and a diverse array of designer drugs, plus the fact that the public couldn’t pay admission to derive some cheap entertainment.
Forsyth signed in with an armed guard while Redfern blathered airily about the “pathophysiology and psychosocial precipitants of mental illness,” getting an extra lift when she started in on “comprehensive community-based intervention modules.”
The first patient they passed, a shuffling young man in paper slippers with a strand of drool dangling down to his chest, looked like he could care less what the community thought.
Forsyth nodded at him out of rote politeness but the man simply took another sliding step away from reality and toward whatever mercy God granted the deranged.
The patients in open confinement were largely clean and passive. A bald black man sat playing checkers with himself, although there was no board on the coffee table. A woman in street clothes stood looking out the barred window as if waiting for a bus that would never come. Another woman with palsy muttered to herself over and over, and it took Forsyth a moment to realize she was faithfully reciting the Gospel According to Luke.
Then they entered the ward with the private rooms. These resembled regular hospital rooms, although through the doors of the unoccupied ones, Forsyth saw padding on the walls and restraint devices made of steel and leather. An occasional wail reverberated from a distant hellhole, a sound as lonely of that of a barn owl in the October night.
“What’s your interest in Mr. Underwood?” Dr. Redfern asked.
“One of those researchers I spoke of asked me to look in on him,” Forsyth said. “A cousin. Just between you and me, I suspect he’s afraid that sort of thing runs in the family.”
A few howls stitched themselves together into a caterwauling melody. It wasn’t until the sounds repeated that Forsyth made it out. The old western folk song “Home on the Range.”
“Mr. Underwood is one of our more…interesting…cases,” Dr. Redfern said. “He’s clinging to a persistent delusion that he’s the subject of a secret government experiment. He was connected with a clinical trial during his college years, and one of the subjects died. Apparently the guilt and trauma lingered, triggering a latent schizophrenia.”
Forsyth probed her a little in case David Underwood’s psychotic ramblings had aroused any suspicion. “I thought schizophrenia was genetic.”
“There are certainly links,” she said. “But current research is focusing on neurobiology. Drug use could worsen such a condition.”
“What kind of drugs?”