This was the first she’d heard that he’d gone back, and she thought about Terri’s guest room office and Marino’s comment that it appeared someone had groomed the carpet in there.
“After your buddy Marino found her laptops, I went back and checked out the place to make sure there wasn’t anything else missed,” Morales said. “By then I knew the autopsy results, had talked to Pester Lester. So I poked around for a lubricant. Nope, not there.”
“We noticed the carpet in her office,” she said.
“I bet you did,” he said. “My mama taught me to clean up after myself, straighten the fringe on the rug, be dutiful and responsible. Speaking of, guess I’d better bag up a few of these things. Did I tell you I got a search warrant just in case we found something good?”
He flashed her a bright, toothy smile and winked.
They returned to the bedroom with its gym equipment and foil tent. She opened a closet and scanned a shelf that had more foam-lined helmets and several antennas. She rifled through clothing, most of it casual, and noted plastic panels in the pockets of several blazers, yet another type of shield, and she remembered Oscar’s anxious comment in the infirmary about not having any protection with him.
On the floor were pairs of small snow boots, dress shoes, Nikes, and a wicker basket filled with hand grips, jump ropes, ankle weights, and a deflated fitness ball.
She picked up the Nikes. They looked old and not suitable for a serious athlete with potential joint and foot problems.
“These are the only running shoes?” she asked Morales. “Seems like he would have a better pair than this. In fact, multiple pairs.”
“I keep forgetting what they call you,” he said.
He moved next to her.
“Eagle eye,” he said. “Among other things.”
He was close enough for her to see faint reddish freckles scattered over his light brown skin, and she smelled his loud cologne.
“Wears a Brooks Ariel made especially for people who overpronate and need a lot of stability,” he said. “Kind of an irony.”
He waved his hand around the bedroom.
“I’d say your fan Oscar could use all the stability he can get,” Morales added. “Good for flat-footed people. Wide-bodied, unique tread pattern. I got the pair he was wearing last night and dropped it off at the labs. With his clothes.”
“Meaning he wore what, exactly, when he checked himself out of Bellevue a little while ago?” she asked.
“Another eagle-eye question.”
She kept inching away from him, and he continued to crowd her. She was almost in the closet, and she placed the Nikes back on the floor and stepped around and away from him.
“Last night when I agreed to take him to the crazy hotel,” Morales said, “I made a little deal. I said if he’d let me have his clothes, we’d stop by his apartment first so he could get a jump-out bag. Then he’d be all set when he was ready to leave.”
“Sounds like you were expecting he wouldn’t stay long.”
“I was expecting exactly that. He wasn’t going to stay long because his reason for being there was to see Benton and, most of all, you. He got his dream come true and he boogied.”
“He came in here by himself last night to get his so-called jump-out bag of clothes?”
“Wasn’t under arrest. Could do what he wanted. I waited in the car, and he went in, took him maybe ten minutes. Max. Maybe that’s why his little booby trap thread was on the floor. He forgot to drape it over the top of the door when he was leaving. He was a little upset.”
“Do we know what was in his jump-out bag?”
“One pair of jeans, a navy blue T-shirt, another pair of his Brooks running shoes, socks, underwear, and a zip-up wool coat. The ward’s got an inventory. Jeb went through it. You met Jeb.”
She didn’t say anything as they stood near the aluminum-foil tent, eye to eye.
“The corrections officer outside your door this afternoon. Making sure you were safe,” he said.
She was startled by Rod Stewart singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
The music ringtone on Morales’s personal digital assistant, a hefty and expensive one.
He pressed his Bluetooth earpiece and answered, “Yeah.”
She walked out and found Benton inside the library, his gloved hands holding a copy of a book, The Air Loom Gang.
Benton said, “About a machine controlling someone’s mind back in the late seventeen hundreds. You okay? I didn’t want to interfere. Figured you’d yell if you needed me to crush him into a cube.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“Read that loud and clear.”
He returned the book to its empty slot on a shelf.
“I was telling you about The Air Loom Gang ,” he said. “This apartment’s like a scene out of it. Bedlam.”
“I know.”
Their eyes met, as if he was waiting for her to tell him something.
“Did you know Oscar had a bag packed with clothing on the ward, in case he got the urge to leave?” she said. “And that Morales brought him over here last night?”
“I knew Oscar could leave whenever he chose,” he replied. “We’ve all known that.”
“I just think it’s uncanny. Almost as if Morales was encouraging him to leave, wanted him out of the hospital.”
“Why would you think that?” Benton asked.
“Some things he said.”
She glanced around at the open doorway, worrying Morales might suddenly walk in.
“A feeling there was a fair amount of negotiating going on last night when he drove Oscar away from the scene, for example,” she said.
“That wouldn’t be unusual.”
“You understand the predicament I’m in,” she said, scanning old books again, and disappointed again.
Oscar said the book with the CD would be in the second bookcase, left of the door, fourth shelf. The book wasn’t there. The fourth shelf was stacked with archival boxes, each of them labeled Circulars.
“What should he have in his collection that he doesn’t, in your opinion? To make it more complete.” Benton said it for a reason.
“Why do you ask?”
“There’s a certain corrections officer named Jeb who tells me things. Unfortunately, Jeb tells a lot of people things, but he sure didn’t want you getting hurt today when you were in the infirmary, and he wasn’t happy at all with your making him step outside. When I called and found out Oscar was gone, Jeb and I had a chat. Anyway, what’s Oscar missing in here?”
“I’m surprised he doesn’t have The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor. By Littleton Winslow.”
“That’s interesting,” Benton said. “Interesting you would come up with that.”
She tugged his sleeve and they got on the floor in front of the second bookcase.
She started pulling archival boxes off the bottom shelf, and was beginning to feel unhinged, as if she’d lost her GPS, anything that might tell her which direction was the right one. She didn’t know who was crazy and who wasn’t, who was lying or telling the truth, who was talking and to whom, or who might turn up next that she wasn’t supposed to see.
She opened an archival box and found an assortment of nineteenth-century pamphlets about mechanical restraints and water cures.
“I would have thought he’d have it,” she said.