I follow the stairs to the concrete floor. There’s another room ahead of me, this one sealed off by an iron door. A cell of some kind. The door has a small window and I look through it but can’t see much beyond. I tap my knuckle against the door and it echoes through the room. There’s a latch on this side of it that is unlocked. I swing open the door where there is even less light. There’s a dark shape against the wall that turns out to be a bed, and there’s a bad smell in here, maybe stale body fluids. I step away from the door to let more light into the room. The bed has an old mattress and a pillow that looks like it could contain about a thousand different kinds of germs. There’s nothing else in there. I step back into the main room. There’s an empty bookcase on this side of the cell, an old couch, an old coffee table. I try to imagine people being brought down here, locked in this room and kept in the darkness. Did these rooms predate the padded rooms upstairs? Or was this basement used for the worst of the patients? And why the couch, did people sit down here and relax while others were locked up? How long were people kept down here, and how many people knew about it? Is this standard practice? I can’t imagine that it is. A room like this may have been necessary. Jesse Cartman, the man who bit off pieces of his sister’s flesh, probably spent time down here. It may have been the only way to keep the others safe. As bad as this cell is, if the padded rooms upstairs were full, then there wasn’t anywhere else for those people in those moments. Only if that were the case, why not pad this cell too?
The person who killed Pamela Deans-how much time did he spend down here?
More than ever I feel like somebody is watching me.
On the way back up the stairs I notice the dark stains. They look like oil stains, dark patches on the stairs. I reach down and push my finger against it, whatever the stain is it’s dry, but my fingertip comes away with a red powdery film across it. Could be blood. Could be tomato juice. There’s lots of it.
I head outside and am thankful for the heat of the sun. I lean back against the car and stare at the building. No sign of Cooper. No sign of Emma Green. No sign of whoever killed my cat. Just furniture and benches with spaces in the dust and what could be blood on the basement steps, which could be a day old or five years old.
I pass Schroder on the way back into town while still on one of the narrow nowhere streets. He’s parked on the side of the road with another detective, they’re standing outside with a map sprawled out over the hood, two patrol cars behind him. That means he’s going to Grover Hills with the idea he’s going to find Cooper Riley. He looks up as I drive toward him. He sees it’s me and shakes his head slowly. I give him a small salute. He rolls his eyes and grins for about two seconds before the frown slips back into place. He looks down at the map and I drive past, ribbons of dirt coming off the tires and flooding the air, a wall of it between him and my rearview mirror as I find my way back to the highway.
I drive back past the same paddocks. The same guys in the same tractors are plowing the same fields and moving the same bunches of animals back and forth. I pass the prison and don’t feel any sense of longing. There’s a dead cow just off the side of the road covered in flies about a hundred meters past the big Christchurch sign. I drive down Memorial Avenue where the houses are big and cold-looking and the trees out front are even bigger, this part of town screaming family money, women weighed down with jewelry sitting on front porches ordering the gardeners about. Traffic is thick and the air-conditioning in the rental keeps me sane. When I get into town I find a parking space opposite the museum where approximately forty Asian tourists are standing next to a bus taking photographs of each other, all smiles and waves, unaware the police might end up going through their photos later in the week to figure out what happened to one of the group who went missing. I load up the parking meter and three bucks gets me an hour’s worth of parking, putting the council’s greed on a par with that of the criminals. I walk the thirty meters to the entrance of the Botanical Gardens, the front of it lined with a green iron-bar fence bolted into rock and mortar and streaked in bird shit. I buy a newspaper on the way, tear off the front page, and toss the rest in a recycling bin.
The Gardens is the one place in the city you can guarantee the plants are getting watered as it’s a pretty big drawing card for the tourists. The gardens cover thirty hectares of land, the Avon River winding through it like a fat black snake. Say what you will about Christchurch, but this is easily one of the most beautiful places in the country. Every direction is blanketed in color with flowers in full bloom, some pathways lined with tulips, others with evergreen bushes, trees and flowers and shrubs and ducks all living in peace, nature getting along.
There are plenty of people enjoying the day, most of them sitting in the shade. There are couples lying in the grass, men lying on their backs in the soft lawn, straddled by women, lots of bumping and grinding going on beneath the flowing skirts. Kids in kayaks are paddling up the Avon, splashing water at their friends and having a good time. I make my way to the small tourist center. A severely overweight woman behind the counter who isn’t aware that wearing a tight tank-top is a crime against humanity tells me where I can find Jesse Cartman. I follow her instructions to a giant glass house in the middle of the gardens, home to about two thousand ferns with an offshoot room that houses dozens of cacti. The air surrounding the ferns is thick and warm and moist and a few breaths inside make me sleepy. There’s a concrete rectangular walkway within the enclosure surrounding the plants, with a second level of the same thing above.
Jesse towers over me by about twenty centimeters but looks thin enough to slip under a door. He looks the same in some ways since I last saw him, but vitally different in many others. When he was seventeen he was diagnosed with depression, at nineteen he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, at twenty his parents made an urgent call to the police for help. We got to the family house to find his father pinning Jesse against the floor, and his mother cradling his dead sister. He’s thirty-five now, and in the years between he’s been medicated and something must have worked, because now he’s clean-shaven with his hair neatly combed and, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t tried to eat anybody since his release. His clothes are tidy with his sleeves rolled up revealing darkly tanned forearms. He turns off the hose and turns toward me when he senses somebody staring.
“I know you from somewhere,” he says, “you’re either a doctor or a cop.”
“I’m not a doctor,” I tell him.
“You were there when I was arrested,” he says, and I’m impressed with his memory. “Officer somebody, right?” he says, smiling, and for a creepy moment I think he’s about to offer his hand, the same hand that dug into his sister to pull out the soft meat. He doesn’t.
“It’s detective now,” I tell him, figuring if I’m going to lie, I may as well give myself a promotion at the same time. “How you doing, Jesse?” I ask.
“Good. Things are good now,” he says, and they seem to be. The darkness that was in his eyes when we arrested him is gone, replaced by a light that the magic pills are giving him. “You know, the meds keep me in shape. Problem is the better they make me feel, the worse I feel about what I did to my sister, and that makes me want to stop taking them.”
Before I can say anything, he holds up his hand, full of calluses with dirt packed into the wrinkles in his palms. “Don’t worry, I know how that sounds, and I owe it to her to keep taking them. I owe it to my whole family to feel bad about what I done. Back then things were so different. There were so many voices and I could never sleep because they always kept me awake, so many I could never focus on them. Now the only voice I hear is my own. So why are you here? My therapist ask you to check up on me? I only missed the appointment because it was my sister’s birthday and I had to, you know, spend the day out at her grave.”