by Chaz McGee
Now, only traces of the psychiatrist’s life force and his battered body remained – a body that was barely recognizable as human. Photos of a younger, happier version of Parker’s psychiatrist were scattered throughout the apartment, to tell the responding officers who lived there. No one would have recognized him in the mountain of flesh and blood and bone heaped in the bathtub otherwise. He looked even smaller in death, the violence done to his body reducing him to something less than human. I could not even tell whether he lay face up or face down in the tub.
As I stood over what was left of his body, one of the responding officers ran from the room covering his mouth. This, I thought to myself, is where evil lives. I could feel it around me just looking at his body. I, too, wanted to run, but I forced myself to stay. He deserved to have someone with him.
But no one deserved what had been done to the shrink and I felt ashamed of how I had judged him, how I had made fun of his size and his secret desires. Maybe he was just another poor bastard trying to get through life, just another traveler struggling to understand what it meant to do the right thing. If he had unconsciously turned to studying the human mind in an effort to understand himself a little bit better, then so be it. He had also tried to help other people along the way. It didn’t seem fair that his life had ended in such an undignified frenzy of violence. My guess was that he had been stripped naked and forced into the bathtub before being beaten to death, which meant he had found neither the mental nor the physical strength to fight back. He had simply complied. What humiliation he must have felt at the end. His diminutive stature had failed him. His mental superiority had failed him. He had lost out to brute strength.
But whose?
The staging of his death was curious. Killing him in the bathtub had certainly been a tidy choice, but what kind of killer exults in brutality while clinging to neatness? I suspected he had been left in the bathtub for a different reason. Congealed blood and bits of tissue had quickly clogged the drain, causing a small but persistent leak from the faucet to eventually fill the tub until it overflowed. I wondered if the leak had been deliberate, if the faucet had been left turned on so that the body would be discovered more quickly and not left for days as might have happened otherwise.
I thought about it some more.
Parker wanted out of Holloway as quickly as possible. The psychiatrist had stood in his way. Now he was dead and no longer an obstacle. He would never testify against Parker’s release now in a competency hearing. The hearing would move forward without him.
Parker’s follower was at it again. And whoever he was, I feared that he had enjoyed the task. The psychiatrist had been destroyed beyond the point of death, as if the person inflicting the damage was extracting revenge on more than just one man and had unleashed his rage at the entire world on a single victim.
I did not think one death would be enough to diffuse that rage. I knew that this death was a beginning.
I felt and saw all of these things within minutes of arriving at the crime scene. When I heard Maggie and Calvano coming through the door, I knew that they would understand it, too. This had been more than a murder.
This was a message and, regardless of whose hand it had been written in, it was a message signed by Otis Redman Parker.
TWENTY-FIVE
If Maggie and Calvano had been the only ones to believe that Otis Parker was somehow involved in Darcy Swan’s and Vincent D’Amato’s murders, the psychiatrist’s brutal death changed all that. Within twenty-four hours of the shrink’s death, media outlets nationally were full of speculation that all three murders were somehow connected. While most of them focused on the fact that two Holloway staff members had been killed, they struggled to find a connection to Darcy Swan. But then a local television station with an alert news anchor who had been on the job for over a decade – and who remembered Otis Parker and what he was capable of all too well – noticed the resemblance of Darcy Swan’s murder to those Parker had been suspected of before being sent to Holloway. They reported on the connection as fact and the theory spread nationwide within hours.
Whether Commander Gonzales liked it or not, the public agreed that Otis Parker was somehow behind everything. Whether that theory would hold any sway with the panel convening to reconsider his commitment was anyone’s guess. Parker tried to tip the scales in his favor by having his lawyer release a statement saying that Parker was deeply saddened by the tragic loss of lives and in no way connected to any of the murders. As an innocent man, he maintained, he prayed that other people would consider the facts and acknowledged that it had been impossible for him to have anything to do with any of the murders. ‘I have been unjustly accused,’ he maintained. ‘I ask that good people everywhere take steps to make sure it does not happen again.’
Now, that took balls. Otis Parker even using the word ‘pray’ was like a fox trying to cluck like a chicken.
The publicity catapulted Holloway into turmoil. Though the latest murder had not occurred on hospital grounds, the connection to Holloway was inescapable. Staff members failed to show for work, terrified they would be next. One by one, families arrived to take patients home.
Connie arrived for Michael as soon as the psychiatrist’s death hit local news outlets. She didn’t bother with paperwork or calling ahead. She simply showed up, threw all of Michael’s clothing into a duffel bag and led him out the door. Michael was too confused and too scared by the crazy rumors sweeping through the juvenile ward to protest.
Cal saw her marching across the lawn with Michael in tow and reversed course to try and reason with her. The look she gave him stopped him before he got close enough to speak. He saw her face, turned on his heels and hurried after another distraught family instead.
How had I missed appreciating Connie’s strength when I was alive?
By the following afternoon, almost all of the short-term patients had been pulled out of Holloway. Next door, in the long-term unit, not all of the patients were that lucky. Some had no families to rescue them, others had no place to go. Among these: Lily, the young girl whose parents had no choice but to leave her there because of what she would do to their other child. Harold Babbitt stayed, too. He would, I suspected, be at Holloway until the day he died. But, unlike the others, Harold was perfectly content to be at Holloway. He did not want to be anywhere else. He entertained himself well into the evening hours the day of the exodus by keeping watch out the windows of his unit shouting ‘Harold Babbitt sees someone leaving! Harold Babbitt sees someone leaving!’ over and over again.
The little dude would have made one hell of a border crossing guard.
Olivia, too, was left behind, whether by necessity or choice I did not know. I thought of the young daughter she had lost and of the way she spoke of her husband, and I wondered if she had anyone left to go home to. Whether she stayed or not didn’t seem to make a difference to her. She spent most of the day after the shrink’s death sitting on her bench by the fountain watching the other patients leave. I drifted by in late afternoon, inflicted with the same agitation and indecision that everyone around me was suffering from, and she gave me a half wave. I waved back automatically – and then realized that Olivia being able to see me was not a good sign. It meant she was inching closer to my world.
I went to her and sat at the other end of her bench. ‘There are a lot of people leaving us today,’ I said.
She watched an old woman leading a profoundly retarded middle-aged man down the walkway. ‘Everyone is afraid,’ she said. ‘That little girl Lily is walking around telling everyone that there are dark angels coming out of the ground to get us. I think she likes scaring people. I want to get out of here. I want to go home. But there’s no one that I can call to come and get me.’
I did not know what to say to that. ‘Maybe it’s a good sign that you want to go home,’ I offered. ‘Maybe that’s the first step to getting out of here. Did you tell your doctor that?’
‘My doctor is dead,’ Olivia told me. ‘He’s
dead, just like everyone else I ever cared for. A nurse told me this morning when he didn’t show up for our appointment. She made me take extra pills because she thought I would be upset. But I’m not upset, not really.’ She hesitated. ‘He never really liked me, you know. Sometimes when I talked to him, I knew he wasn’t listening to me.’ She looked at me, seeking absolution. ‘It’s terrible of me, isn’t it? I should feel sad he’s gone. I should feel bad that he’s dead. But I feel nothing. I’m getting used to death.’
Her eyes widened as she considered me more closely. ‘Are you death?’ she asked.
I was startled. I did not know what to say. That I was dead, but not death?
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Olivia said. She stared at the fountain, transfixed by the water that tumbled over the stone figures and pooled at its base. ‘Death follows me and always will.’
I could not think of anything that I could say. The moments stretched out. ‘Don’t you think they will give you someone new to talk to?’ I finally said. ‘Surely they will assign you a new psychiatrist. Maybe they’ll be better than he was?’
‘Maybe,’ she agreed. ‘Maybe.’
She turned her attention back to the fountain, as if I were not there at all. I was used to feeling invisible and moved on.
I spotted Maggie in the distance, showing her badge to one of the guards at the overpass entrance that led to the parking deck. Holloway’s administrators had gotten serious about security and there were now two guards posted at the bottom of the steps. They had printouts of all patient names and their next of kin. A line had formed that stretched across the walkway as people waited to be admitted to the grounds.
Maggie was on a mission. As soon as the guards let her through, she took off at a near run. I followed her to the administrative building and straight to the corner office where Connie’s fiancé, Cal, worked. Maggie did not stop to ask the receptionist permission before she opened his door, her badge held up high in front of her so that it would be the first thing he saw.
Cal was handing a stack of files over to Miranda, the therapist treating my son. Cal looked as if he had aged ten years overnight. He was startled at Maggie’s abrupt entrance, so startled that he said nothing and simply stared.
Maggie knew Miranda and nodded an apology at her. ‘Sorry,’ Maggie said, backing out of the room. ‘I’ll wait outside until you’re done.’
‘It won’t take long,’ Miranda called after her.
I stayed to see what they were up to.
They were trying to find a way to salvage the treatment of patients affected by the death of Parker’s psychiatrist. How like Parker, I thought, to order a man’s life taken because it was expedient for him, and to not give a thought to the many struggling people left behind who now had to confront the abrupt death of the one person in the world they had come to trust, on top of everything else they faced.
‘I need you to take more,’ Cal was begging Miranda. He held several patient files in his hands. ‘Just until we can get a psychiatrist on staff.’
Miranda took the files and paged through them, putting the first two in her lap but tossing the other one back on Cal’s desk. ‘Not that one,’ she said firmly.
‘Someone has to represent our interests at his hearing,’ he said to her. ‘Please, Miranda – just this once.’
Miranda shook her head. ‘First of all, I’m not a psychiatrist and his lawyer would take me apart on the stand. Every reason why I chose not to be one will be ripped apart, my credibility will be destroyed and, I feel certain, my self-confidence will go with it.’
‘Can you not just do it temporarily? How about if I bring in someone from the outside and you bring them up to speed on Parker? You take them through what Alan was working on with Parker. I know he talked to you about him and I’ll give you access to his files. You could just give the new hire your impressions.’
Miranda was quiet for a moment, deciding how she would phrase what she was about to say. In the end, she kept it simple. ‘Cal, the best way I can say it is this: every day, I deal with adults so fragile they may not make it through the week, and every day I deal with teenagers who cannot see the future because they are overwhelmed by the present. It is a precarious balance and sometimes I am the only one keeping them here. Do you understand?’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Really, Miranda, I do. I am more grateful than I can say for what you’re doing for Michael. I look on him like a son.’
Hey, that’s my son, buddy, not yours.
‘I know that you are grateful and that you care about Michael,’ she said sincerely. ‘That’s why you’ll understand when I tell you that I do not want Otis Parker in my life, in any way, shape, form or period of time. I suspect Parker is very adept at finding what you believe is lacking in your own persona and using that to own you somehow. I will not be owned by him. I will not allow his depravity to occupy a single moment of my life, nor will I allow the evil he embodies to become a part of my patients’ lives – and it will, if I start to see him. You cannot be around evil without it clinging to you. Believe me when I say that I know.’ Her face was sad and I realized I knew nothing about her, not where she came from nor why she worked so hard on behalf of others. ‘Cal, you must do everything you can to keep Parker from being freed. You must find someone who will fight to keep him inside and who is capable of telling the courts what he is. Otis Parker cannot be allowed to go free.’
Cal looked frightened. ‘I can’t change your mind?’
Miranda rose. ‘Not in a million years.’ She took her new patient files and left the room, nodding to Maggie in passing. I wondered how much Maggie had overheard of their conversation while she waited outside.
Maggie entered Cal’s office looking more sympathetic than she had the first time around. ‘Rough day?’ she asked.
Cal nodded. He looked exhausted.
‘Cheer up, then. I may be the only one in this entire state having a worse day than you. As I am sure you know, the general consensus seems to be that Otis Parker is behind the killings and that he has an accomplice working with him. If we don’t find out who the accomplice is, this town is going to explode in fear and panic. People will start turning against each other and if, on top of all that, Otis Parker goes free . . .’ She shook her head, unwilling to contemplate that outcome.
Cal ran his hands through his hair and sighed wearily. I wondered if he had slept the night before. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’
‘My partner says that you’ve asked for a court order before you’ll let us have the employee photos,’ Maggie explained. ‘We don’t have that time. I need them now. I need to find out if Darcy Swan knew anyone who worked here. I need those photos.’
Cal had been defeated by the violence that had penetrated his sanctuary, and he was weary from putting out fires for days. The conversation with Miranda had shaken him and he no longer cared about the legalities. ‘Take them,’ he said. ‘I’ll call Security and ask them to give you a disk with everyone’s photos on it. We keep them on file in case someone loses their employee badge. But there will be a lot of them. We have around two hundred people working here at Holloway, and that’s not even including the outside contractors.’
‘How many are outside contractors?’ Maggie knew they’d be harder to track down.
‘Another fifty or so, maybe more. It’s become more cost-effective to hire specialists from the outside for a lot of services,’ he explained. ‘For example, we don’t need a full-time physical therapist, so we contract with an outside agency to send someone over a few times a week. Same thing goes for the physical plant. We keep a grounds maintenance crew on staff and a handyman, but that’s about it. If we need an electrician or a plumber or roofer or what have you, we hire someone from the outside. Obviously, we don’t have outside contractor photos on file. After this, however, I wager to say that we will.’
‘Who would have a list of outside contractors?’
‘Accounting could give you a list of any of
the businesses we’ve used this past year. Some of them, like the electricians and plumbers, might be one-man shops, so it will be easy to track down who actually worked here. Others are larger companies and you’ll have to ask them who clocked in at Holloway. But they should have records, since they have to bill us for their services by the hour.’
Maggie already had her cell phone out and was dialing Calvano. ‘Can you set that up immediately?’ she asked.
Cal looked startled. ‘Of course. I’ll make the call now.’
TWENTY-SIX
Otis Parker was once again a celebrity. In the days that followed the psychiatrist’s death, even the most disconnected among the maximum security patients knew that something was going on involving Parker and that he had somehow gamed the system. Some high-fived him, others gave him admiring glances and still more whispered their private theories that he would soon be out of Holloway. Parker basked in it all. He had transformed from being a bully to being admired. He shook other inmates’ hands, he patted them on the back and he cracked jokes as he swaggered across the exercise yard.
