Lucy grimaced, more than a little angry at the doctor's evasiveness.
Doctor Gulptilil coughed. "But, of course, Miss Jones, if what you suspect is true, and your visit here is not rooted in error, as so many seem to think, then clearly there is one patient who has been significantly misdiagnosed."
He reached up, unlocked the front door to Amherst with a key, and then held the door open for her with a small bow and slightly forced gallantry.
Chapter 14
Lucy headed to her small room on the second floor of the nurse-trainees' dormitory late that evening, darkness surrounding her every step. It was one of the more obscure buildings on the hospital grounds, isolated in a shadowy corner, not far from the power plant with its constant hum and smoke plume, and overlooking the small hospital graveyard. It was as if the dead, haphazardly buried nearby, helped hush the sounds around the building. It was a stiff and square, three-storied, ivy-covered, federal-styled brick house with some imposing white Doric columns outside the front portico, that had been converted fifty years earlier and then reconfigured again in the late Forties and early Sixties, so that whatever remained of its first incarnation as someone's fine and grand hillside home was now merely memory. In two hands, she carried a brown cardboard box jammed with perhaps three dozen patient files, a group with a loosely defined potential, that she had selected from the list of names she was steadily compiling. Included in her selection were the files belonging to both Peter the Fireman and Francis, which she had taken when Mister Evans wasn't paying as much attention as perhaps he should have been. These were to satisfy, she hoped, some lingering curiosity about what had landed her two partners in the mental hospital.
Her overall idea was to start in familiarizing herself with what generally went into the dossiers, and then she would begin to interview patients once she had a firm grasp of what sort of information was already available. She couldn't really immediately see any other approach. There was no physical evidence in her possession that could be pursued although she was well aware that there was significant physical evidence somewhere. A knife, or some other highly sharpened weapon, like a prison shank or a set of razor-sharp box cutters, she thought. That was carefully hidden. There had to be some other bloody clothes, and perhaps a shoe with its sole still rimmed with the nurse's blood. And somewhere there were the four missing fingertips.
She had telephoned the detectives who had taken Lanky into custody and asked about these. They had been singularly unhelpful. One believed that he had sliced them off, then flushed them down a toilet. A lot of effort to no discernible reason, she thought. The other, without stating it clearly, danced around the suggestion that Lanky had perhaps ingested them. "After all," the detective said, "the guy's crazy as a loon."
They were not, Lucy thought, particularly interested in considering any alternatives. "Come on, Miss Jones," the first detective had said, "we've got the guy. And a prosecutable case, except for the fact that he's nuts."
The box of files was heavy and she balanced it on her knee as she pulled open the side door to the dormitory. So far, she thought, she had yet to see some telltale indicators of a kind of behavior that might be examined more closely. Inside the hospital, everyone was strange. It was a world that suspended the ordinary laws of reason. Outside the hospital, there would be some neighbor who noticed some odd behavior. Or a coworker in an office who felt uncomfortable. Perhaps a relative who held unsettled doubts.
That wasn't the case here, she told herself. She had to discover new routes. It was a matter of outwitting the killer she believed hid in the hospital. At that particular game, she was confident of success. It shouldn't, she thought, be all that difficult to outmaneuver a crazy man. Or a man posing as crazy. The problem that existed, she realized with a sense of discouragement, was how she could define the parameters of the game.
Once the rules were in place, she thought, as she dragged herself up the steep stairwell one slow step at a time, feeling the same sort of exhaustion one feels after a long and debilitating illness, she would win. She had been taught to believe that all investigations were ultimately the same, a predictable set piece played out on a well-defined stage. This was true examining the books of some tax-dodging corporation, or finding a bank robber, child pornographer, or scam artist. One item would link to another, and then lead her to a third, until all, or at least enough, of the puzzle was visible. Failed investigations of which she had yet to be a part were the accidental result of one of those links being hidden, or obscured, and that absence exploited. She blew out and shrugged. It was critical, she told herself, for her to create the external pressure necessary for the man they had taken to calling the Angel to make some mistakes.
He would do this, she thought coldly.
The first thing was to search the files for small acts of violence. She didn't think that a man capable of the killings she was investigating would be able to completely hide a propensity for anger, even in the hospital confines. There will be some sign, she told herself. An outburst. A threat. An explosion. She just needed to make sure that she recognized it when it raised itself up. In the off-center world of the mental hospital, someone had to have seen something that didn't fit any of the acceptable patterns of behavior.
She was completely confident, as well, that once she began to ask questions, she would see answers. Lucy had great trust in her ability to cross-examine her way to the truth. She did not consider, at that moment, the distinctions between asking a sane person a question and asking a certifiably crazy person the same inquiry.
The stairwell reminded her a little of some of the dormitories at Harvard. Her footsteps echoed against the concrete risers, and she was abruptly aware that she was alone, in a solitary, confined space. A shaft of awful memory creased through her, and she caught her breath sharply. She exhaled slowly, as if blowing hot air out of her lungs would carry with it the ripples of remembrance that iced over her heart. She looked around wildly, for a moment, thinking I have been here before and then, instantly dismissing this fear. There were no windows, and no sound penetrated from the outside. It was the second time that day, she thought, that noise had surprised her. The first time was when she had realized that there was a constant cacophony about the hospital. Groans, shrieks, catcalls, and mutterings. In short order, she had grown accustomed to the constancy of racket. She stopped in her tracks.
Quiet, she said to herself, is as unsettling as a scream.
The echoes faded around her, and she listened to the raspy sound of her own breath. She waited until a complete silence had enveloped her. She leaned over the black iron banister, searching up and down, to make certain she was alone. She could see no one. The stairwell was well lit, and there were no shadows to hide in. She waited another moment or two, trying to shake off a sense of narrowing that overcame her. It was as if the walls had closed in ever so slightly. There was a chill in the stairwell, which made her think that the heating system in the dormitory didn't penetrate to that space, and she shivered, and then thought that was completely wrong, because she could suddenly feel sweat dripping beneath her arms.