I waited to see if more was coming.
“They were very small. Probably nothing at all, but I can’t account for them.”
“Like from a needle? Was he drugged?”
“Tox tests didn’t reveal any drugs in his system.”
“But that’s the kind of punctures we’re talking about.
Like from a needle or—”
“Yeah. They would’ve been easy to miss. I’m surprised I discovered them.”
“Could they be where drops of blood were drawn, like for a slide?”
“Possibly.”
“What about from checking his blood sugar levels?”
“Sure. Something like that,” he said. “Except he wasn’t a diabetic.”
“You got a book on hypnotherapy?”
“Several,” Hahn said.
“I need a textbook-type definition of what hypnotherapy is used for.”
“Why?”
“Something Baldwin said—well, stopped herself from saying.”
“You don’t need a book, you’ve got me.
Hypnotherapy is used to treat pain, depression, anxiety, stress, phobias, hemophilia, skin conditions, post-surgical recovery, relief of—”
“That’s it.”
“That’s what?”
“What she stopped herself from saying.”
“What?”
“Post-surgical recovery.”
“Really? That’s interesting.”
“You mind walking me through exactly how hypnotherapy works?”
“I can do better than that,” she said. “I can give you a demonstration.”
“I want you to be comfortable,” Hahn said in a slow, soft, monotonous voice. “Adjust your clothes, your shoes, the way you’re sitting, so you can be free and comfortable.”
The inmate in the seat in front of her, a small, pale boy with fine blond hair, began to move his limbs and wiggle into his chair just a little more in an attempt to be comfortable and free.
“Now, as we begin, you’re going to be aware that we’re in a professional environment and that we’re being watched, but as you relax, there is no need for the things surrounding us to have any impact on this process.”
He nodded, his head and eyelids already seeming relaxed and heavy.
“I’m going to ask you to look up, fixing your gaze on a particular spot that you are comfortable with, okay?”
He nodded and began to stare at a picture of Freud on the wall behind Hahn.
“Found one?” He nodded.
“Once you’ve fixed your eyes on it, don’t turn away from it. Keep your head in that position so that your ears’ll remain still and you’ll be able to hear the various inflections and intonations of my voice. That’ll enable you to better focus on what we’re doing.”
Hahn paused, but he didn’t respond in any way I could observe.
“Don’t worry about your thoughts,” she continued. “There will be many racing through your head. You might wonder, ‘Am I doing this right?’ or ‘What does she mean?’ Nothing is wrong. Everything is right. Everything. Okay? Don’t waste time trying to play a role you think you’re supposed to or doing what you’ve done before. Just relax, be comfortable, and be yourself.”
Hahn’s office was warmer than usual, and I wondered if that had anything to do with the hypnotic process. It might not have, but the heat and the continual monotonous sound of her voice were making me sleepy.
“Now, you’ll notice that your eyes will blink from time to time,” she continued, her voice droning on like a recording. “It’s a very natural thing. It’s a protective mechanism because the eyes weren’t designed to maintain a fixed stare. When it happens, feel comfortable about it. Your eyes will also tear. It’s a normal reaction to your eyes’ fixed state. It’s okay. Everything is okay. The object you’re staring at may distort occasionally. That’s natural too, so expect that to happen. Let it happen. It’s okay. Everything is okay. And finally, your eyes will grow heavy and want to close. It’s the same thing that happens when you read or watch TV. When it happens, let it. Let them naturally close, and then feel how you can seem to funnel back into the privacy of yourself.”
His eyes were beginning to blink more frequently and then close, only opening occasionally.
“That’s it,” she said. “You’re doing great. I notice that you are already relaxing. That’s fine. You’re doing fine. You’ll notice that you’re beginning to feel much more comfortable. Your eyes are more comfortable closed than open. Just relax and be comfortable. You’re doing great.”
She paused for a moment, then continued.
“Now if you take a deep breath and let it go, you’ll find you’re descending into the realm of relaxation . . . each muscle letting go, so that you feel limp like a rag doll. Take whatever number of deep breaths you need, letting them out slowly. Feel yourself descend, level by level, descend until you arrive at the place where you need to be for us to accomplish what we’re here to accomplish.”
It looked to me like he had already arrived at that place. His whole body had changed, relaxing in on itself somehow, and he was sitting like he might if he were alone, but not how he would had he been aware of our presence in the room.
His eyes were already closed. He was already under. If hypnotism was being used for destructive purposes, then inmates like this one were sheep to the slaughter.
“. . . off the merry-go-round,” Hahn was saying.
She never stopped talking during this process. “This is the first time your mind doesn’t have to act like an executive in making all your decisions, in resolving all your concerns. Now, feel the sensation as if every cell, every organ, every system in your body is being rejuvenated. Reborn.”
I realized that Hahn and the inmate had become my fixed objects and I was about to go under. I shook my head and looked away. Being hypnotized came far more easy than I would’ve thought.
“. . . gather all the physical discomfort and tension, and imagine putting it on your shoulders and then having God lift it off. Doesn’t that feel wonderful? Aren’t you lighter, more relaxed? Now, as I continue, it isn’t necessary for you to constantly pay attention to what I’m saying. You can go to wherever you feel most comfortable, and you’ll hear me at an unconscious level.”
Hahn glanced over at me and mouthed, Watch this.
“Okay, now, I want you to rub your pants leg with your right arm.”
He moved his right arm down and began to rub his right pant leg.
“As you continue feeling your clothing with your fingers, your fingers and even your hand will get lighter. It will grow lighter and lighter. I don’t know which finger feels the lightest, but one of them will feel so light it will begin to float, then the others will follow, then your wrist will feel so light it will begin to float, then your whole hand.”
Within a minute, his right hand was floating out beside him, his arm dangling down as if an invisible cord was holding up his hand.
“Now you’re going to lose all feeling in your floating hand. Do you feel it going numb? From your fingertips to your wrist, you have no feeling in your right hand.”
She then took out a small needle and began to poke it into the tips of his fingers, tiny droplets of blood oozing out onto the skin and point of the needle as she did, but he showed no response whatsoever.
When I left Hahn’s office, I found the nearest phone and called Hank Sproul back about the autopsy.
“It’s John Jordan. Got a quick question for you.”
“Okay.”
“The pinpricks you mentioned, could they’ve been from testing the feeling in his hand?”
“Whatta you mean?” His voice rising, interested. “I guess that’s possible. There nothing to suggest it’s not. What in the world made you think of that?”
“Hypnotism,” I said. “That’s how hypnotists check to see if their patient is fully inducted.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Walking back to my office, I ran into
Emile Rollins.
“I just came from the chapel,” he said. “I was hoping to talk to you.”
He turned and fell into step with me.
“Is somebody tryin’ to kill me—I mean the Kings?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I feel like I’m in danger—more so than usual—and I’s wondering if it’s paranoia or . . .”
A school bell rang, and inmates poured out of the classrooms to our right the same way they must have when they were children. Many of them still were. Big, spoiled, obnoxious kids, unwilling or unable to grow up.
Several inmates passing by us were making fun of what they would be served that evening in the chow hall, and I was amazed again at their ingratitude and sense of entitlement.
He shook his head. “This place, man . . . Life is cheap. It’s fuckin’ bleak. Where’s God?”
I shrugged. “Obscured by the bleakness maybe? I’m meant to be God’s representative. But as usual . . . falling down on my job.”
“No. I didn’t mean . . . I just meant . . .”
“If God is love, works through love, then the bleakness you’re talking about is an absence of love.”
Emile Rollins walked like a robot, his movements stiff and awkward, self-conscious—as if someone were watching him and it made him nervous or his joints didn’t bend as far as they should.
“I wasn’t really asking,” he said. “It was just sort of rhetorical. I didn’t want to be preached at.”
Although Emile worked on an outside community work squad, his uniform was neatly pressed and spotless, and showed no sign of fading or wear, and I wondered if Brent Allen was taking care of his fellow Suicide King.
“You see Dr. Baldwin?” I asked. “That relevant to my safety?”
I nodded.
“Yeah. She’s good. Helped me more than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“She use hypnotherapy on you?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I don’t know what it does, but it works. Works better than anything I’ve ever tried.”
“You remember what you worked on when you come out?”
“No. I think that’s the point.”
“Anyone else ever hypnotize you?”
He shrugged. “She’s taught a lot of us how to do it.”
When we reached my office, my phone was ringing.
I unlocked the door and rushed in to pick it up. Emile Rollins followed.
“Chaplain Jordan,” I said into the receiver.
I hadn’t been in my office much lately. The air was still and stale, the large plants in need of water. A fine patina of dust covered their leaves, my books, frames, and the pile of papers on my desktop. My chapel orderlies could only come in and clean when I was here to supervise them.
“Yes, Chaplain, this is Margaret Allen. An inmate incarcerated there, Brent Allen, is my son.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“His grandfather, Charles Allen, has been put in the hospital and I’d like for him to be able to call and talk to him. They don’t expect him to make it through the night. It’d mean so much to him. My husband’s dead and Brent is the only grandchild, the only family my father-in-law has.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Let me get some information from you and I’ll call Brent in and let him call the hospital as soon as possible.”
“Thank you.”
She gave me the information and we hung up. “Brent’s granddaddy?” Rollins said when I hung up the phone.
I didn’t answer him.
“Well,” he added, “guess I’ll go so you can deal with that.”
When I told Brent his grandfather was in the hospital, he nodded as if he’d been expecting the news, then just sat there, uninterested, inattentive.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’ve been expecting it, you know? I’m just glad it wasn’t my mom. He’s lived a long, prosperous life. He’s had it good and easy.”
“Would you like to call the hospital? I can get him on the line in here and you can talk to him in private.”
“My mom still there?”
“I would think.”
“Sure, let’s do it.”
His blank stare moved about my office as I punched in the number to the hospital. Nothing seemed to interest him. Not the plants, not the beautiful day beyond the window, not the colorful religious iconography. Nothing.
“Mom,” he said into the phone when I handed it to him. “How are you? Yeah. Yeah. I’m good. No, really. I am. Mom, I’m not going to . . . I’m not even sad. I promise.
I’ve got more reasons to live now than ever before.” He paused a moment.
“I really don’t want to. He’s not asleep or in a coma or something?”
He rolled his eyes while he listened.
“I wouldn’t know what to say. No. Okay. I will. But listen, I need you to send me some money. My account’s about empty. You know I need my canteen. It’s all I’ve got. It’s the only way I can survive in here. Understand? There’ll be plenty now. Don’t hold back.”
He waited, making an unpleasant expression as he did.
Rarely did I grant an inmate a crisis phone call that he didn’t ask his distraught family to send money. No matter how severe the crisis, how difficult the circumstance, far too often it seemed their primary purpose for calling.
It seemed Brent, like many of the men in here, was detached and dissociated from any emotional connections in his life.
“Grandpa . . . How are you?”
His voice was soft and filled with a concern his facial expressions and body language didn’t confirm.
“Ah, you’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ll see. You’re a tough old bastard. You’ll show them. Well . . . okay, then. Take care. Huh? Oh . . . yeah, me too.”
He waited for another moment.
“Okay, Mom. Okay. Don’t forget to send me some. Do it tonight. What? No. I need it now. Okay. Don’t forget. You too. Bye.”
Chapter Thirty-five
After Brent left, I walked to the kitchen in the back of the chapel for a cup of coffee. As I was about to walk back to my office, I heard what sounded like muffled screams coming from the inmate bathroom.
I dropped my cup on the counter and ran out of the kitchen, across the hallway, and into the bathroom.
Inside, I found Lance Phillips hanging from a thin rope that was tied to the top of the frame of the metal stall. His hands were bound at the wrists and he was struggling against the noose to no avail.
As I rushed over to help him, I detected movement to my right, and turned just in time to see a huge inmate wearing a white hood made from a pillowcase with eyeholes in it coming at me with a brass candle holder from the altar in the chapel.
He swung it down on me, but I ducked under it, threw my arms up and blocked it somehow.
The pain in my right arm hurt all the way down to the bone.
Lance shrieked and I turned toward him. He was losing consciousness. When I moved toward him, the big guy dropped the candle holder and dashed out of the restroom.
I ran over and grabbed Lance’s legs and lifted him up. I held him that way for a minute as he gasped and coughed, trying to breathe.
I looked up at him. “You okay?” He nodded.
I lifted him a little higher and he raised his arms and worked the noose from around his neck. I then eased him to the cold tile floor, amazed again at how easy it was to lift him. He looked anorexic, and he was lighter than he looked.
“If you’re okay I wanna try to catch him before he leaves the chapel.”
“Go ahead. I’m good.”
I dashed out the door, back through the fellowship hall, and into the chapel. Lance was right behind me, and when I stopped abruptly he slammed into me.
We had run right into a small group of inmates, all of whom were wearing the pillowcase hoods to cover their faces.
They quickly surrounded us, putting us in the center of the circle they formed. They were all breat
hing heavily, their labored breaths coming fast and smelling bad.
“Chaplain, walk away now and you live.”
They were all holding various weapons in their hands, from blunt objects found in the chapel to compound shivs and shanks.
I said, “I’ll make you all the same offer.”
They laughed at that . . .Until they saw Mr. Smith leading Merrill into the chapel.
Their laughter didn’t fade, but stopped suddenly, as if it had been turned off.
They froze as he walked over toward us.
“It’s just attempted assault,” one of them said, easing his shank toward the floor. “That’s nothing. We cool.”
Just before his shank touched the floor, he flicked his wrist, the shank straightening, and he lunged at me. Coming in low, he was falling forward more than rushing.
I brought my knee up and it connected, bone to cartilage, blood bursting from his broken nose. His neck snapped back and he fell to the floor, the shank falling quietly on the carpet as he did.
The others began to slowly place their weapons on the floor.
“We cool,” another one said.
“We’ve heard that before,” Merrill said. “Get your asses on the ground.”
In another moment, all four inmates were on the ground.
“Those men were contract killers,” I said. “It wasn’t personal. They were doing it for someone else.”
“That’s what I figured,” Lance said.
He shook his head slowly, tears welling up in his clear blue eyes.
We were in the infirmary where Dr. Alvarez had just finished examining him. He was reclined on the bed closest to the door, and I was standing next to him. We were the only two people in the infirmary.
“They have a king of hearts with them?” he asked. “They had already put it in your pocket.”
He nodded.
We were quiet a moment. “Will they talk?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Don’t think so. The charges are nothing compared to what they already have. If they’re being paid as well as they say . . . they’ve got no reason to tell us anything.”
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