Melinda was chilled, but actually disappointed with the answer. She’d gotten her hopes up for a little more insight from Frost, not the stereotypical psychobabble he was reverting to.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Frost continued. “I don’t mean that in a way that a textbook sociopath might say it. Such a person believes himself to be the center of his own universe, and that everyone else is only here for his pleasure, which, in the more memorable cases, tends to involve torture, sexual deviation and murder.”
The reverend waved at the door glass and Melinda turned in time to see the guard returning with a scowl to his newspaper.
Frost beamed. “Where was I? Oh, my situation is different than that, although Dr. Valdez goes back and forth while trying to decide just how to classify me.”
He studied Melinda’s face for a moment. “But you’re not going to tell me what Dr. Valdez thinks, are you? Oh well. I know I’m not the center of the universe. Neither is God or any other benevolent being. We’re all here for the benefit of the most powerful psychopath imaginable. And what he—or she or it or they—does to us is the equivalent of tearing wings off flies.”
She was genuinely confused now. “But you’re not that superior being, correct?”
“Of course not. I’m the fly. Flies are so inferior to the rest of us that they’re barely real. Probably not even to other flies, except when compelled to mate. And that’s just instinct, not conscious desire.”
Frost leaned toward her again. He glanced once more at the guard in his glass cage and said, “Maybe the analogy’s all wrong. Let me try again. We are more like ants in an ant farm. Think about it. We hate flies, but are sometimes mildly intrigued by the antics of ants. They’re social creatures, of a sort. We watch them build their tunnel homes and social hierarchies. If one ant should eat another, it might be worth watching. We might even introduce another colony of ants into the farm just to watch the war. See, we care for the ant farm and want to keep it alive and thriving, but we couldn’t care less about the lives of individual ants.”
Melinda felt lost, confused. Probably, she told herself, because she was so weary. She was supposed to be asleep right now. She’d driven the forty miles here on her own time, sure that there was no way she could justify expensing it.
Earlier in the day she’d tried to catch the Kimberly Nan Reese murder investigation, but it absolutely wasn’t a sex case. It was, as the medical examiner had pointed out, a simple strangulation. No additional crimes committed before, after or during the attack. Reese wasn’t a member of the church. And obviously neither that case nor the Germaine Marberry assault had anything to do with the incarcerated Melvin Frost.
“So you think that someone—something—at the Utica Lane church was responsible for what you did to your family. And for the violence of the last several days.”
She was aware that she kept trying to put words in the mental patient’s mouth, kept trying to package his confusing, teasing statements into something concrete and useful. She vowed to stop. To simply wait him out and see what he’d say next.
“Tell me why you keep touching your right breast.”
She froze. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve done it six times since you’ve been here,” Frost said. “Does it hurt? Your tit. Maybe you’re subconsciously indicating physical attraction to me.”
She stood quickly, drawing the immediate attention of the guard who obviously hadn’t been as lost in his newspaper as he’d appeared. The door buzzed electronically as the uniformed man joined them.
“Ah, well,” Frost said, chuckling. “Here’s the list you asked me for through Dr. Valdez.” He pulled a folded sheet of lined notebook paper from his pocket and handed it to her.
As she took it from him and stuffed it into her purse he said, “Just answer me this. Have you visited the church yet?”
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Frost.” Deliberately not addressing him as “Reverend”.
“I thought so,” he said, laughing his private laugh. “I wonder what it found out about you.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
She retraced her steps down the long ivory corridor, her guard keeping his silent watch on her. This part of the facility, unlike the bright day room she’d just left, fulfilled Melinda’s expectations of a state-run facility for the criminally insane. Even the guard seemed to respect its dreary power. The two together didn’t make as much noise on the scrubbed tile floor as she’d expect from one person.
They passed steel door after steel door, each shut and presumably locked. Through diamond-patterned wire mesh windows she could see bedded patients. She could imagine rubber mouth guards holding in the screams while jolts of electricity fried faulty brain regions to toast, but she knew she was getting trite and melodramatic.
One door, however, was not shut or locked. It was open and she walked past it before something pulled her back. She watched her guard proceed several steps before realizing he walked alone. He stopped and looked back blankly at her.
Her head throbbing with fatigue, she told herself to continue on, to get back to Dr. Valdez and sign out and get in her car and leave this place and never ever think about it again. Instead, she looked in that open doorway.
“Miss, you’re not supposed to…” His words trailed off as if he couldn’t bring himself to issue a command to anyone with more social status than a mental patient.
“Wait here,” she said, and knew he would.
The shape under the covers sucked liquid nourishment from bags via a relay station of tubes that disappeared under the bed’s white linen. Melinda heard a rhythmic whooshing sound from the machine that was apparently breathing for the formless shape, and another mechanical device with digital readout that beeped to a different beat in monitoring the shape’s vital signs.
Melinda’s stomach hurt as she breathed in the smells she knew so well, the sterile odors of medicine and crisply bleached laundry and medically cleansed death. The smells, they hit her like a wall. She clutched her breast through her thin blouse and felt the grain-size lump growing and hardening.
She was convinced that the figure under the covers was dead, until one withered hand poked through. As if scaling an impossible height, the hand climbed exhaustedly onto the figure’s still torso. Melinda could hear the beat of both the ventilator and the monitor adjusting to the nearly inert patient’s unaccustomed exertion.
The fingers were as thick and coarse as a man’s, but indefinably female. One digit, the index finger, lifted straight into the air. Melinda stared in horrific fascination as the finger bent and twitched, directing her forward.
And now she could hear the wheezing, and Melinda found her own breathing pattern matching that of the raspy woman.
The hand, the finger, and now the wrist were exposed. And the bracelet on the wrist. Melinda’s throat clogged as she stared at the “jade” piece her mother had bought from some street vendor in Mexico City some twenty years ago, back when Melinda’s dad was alive. Mom had continued to occasionally wear it as a joke on herself even after it left a pale-green impression on her skin.
Back when Mom was alive.
Melinda bumped against the door and felt herself blacking out, her legs wobbling.
The guard said, “Ma’am, I really don’t think you oughta…”
He didn’t finish. Just stood statue-still, glaring at her as if her crisis was putting a crimp in his newspaper-reading time. He would have had the crossword solved by now if not for her, his look seemed to say.
“Sure,” she mumbled. “I’m leaving.”
Of course she was mistaken. The cheap bracelet was certainly similar to her mother’s, but didn’t every American tourist come back home with a green bracelet masquerading as jade?
“Dr. Valdez,” her guard mumbled as she straightened up, obviously trying to tell her that his orders were to take her directly to the good doctor without detouring through someone’s private room.
“Yes, okay,” she said
, forcing herself to glance once more at the bed on her way out, if only to apologize to the poor woman whose suffering she’d ogled.
And then her head exploded and the lump-size growth in her breast beat with a pulse of its own. The bed stood rumpled and abandoned. The bags contained no nourishment and dangled from empty tubing. There was no whooshing or beeping machinery, just empty silence. No shape under the scattered covers. No beckoning hand with bracelet.
It had all slipped away as rapidly as Melinda’s mind seemed to be slipping from its moorings.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The precinct police station was housed in a brick building that didn’t appear to have as much square footage as the parking lot outside. He expected to be confronted by a scene out of any urban police drama—sullen career criminals sprawled handcuffed to chairs while gum-chomping hookers swore at rumpled cops as they hunted and pecked at electric typewriters. He’d hear phones ringing and young hoods and the token innocent guy wailing for mothers or justice or vengeance. The smells of urine and puke would bring tears to the eyes.
Jesus, he wasn’t looking forward to this.
He opened the door to find himself in a small waiting area with two low tables, empty but for two women talking in Spanish. Across the room was a wall posted with safety messages and a service counter, beyond which he could see a little activity. Very little. A uniformed cop on a phone who kept getting interrupted by a second cop, the first cop having to repeatedly put his hand over the mouthpiece and wave off his friend.
The cop doing all of the interrupting sat at the desk behind the counter and just kept talking while he shuffled through papers. He looked up. “Help you?”
“Vincent Applegate? I’m here to pick up William Tatum. I called ahead.” Sounding like he was claiming a hotel reservation.
The cop behind the counter kept shuffling his papers. He mumbled something to the cop on the phone behind him, but Vincent couldn’t hear it. The cop on the phone didn’t seem to either.
Vincent hadn’t known what to expect when William had called. It had been about twelve thirty on Thursday evening—no, make that Friday morning—and everyone in the Applegate household had been sound asleep. It hadn’t made much sense, the call, beyond the fact that it would cost William five hundred dollars he didn’t have if he didn’t want to spend a second night in jail. At that point, Vincent had asked to speak to someone in charge.
“I talked to someone awhile ago,” he said now. He held up a credit card as if it might explain everything.
It didn’t. The cop’s face remained impassive.
“Whoever it was said I could use Visa.”
The cop said, “Tatum,” but whether it was a question or a statement was unclear.
Vincent thought there must be something more to say, but he’d only been awake for the last half hour or so, so he set the credit card down on the counter and waited.
The old cop grunted. He grabbed the plastic, then began to peck away at the computer at his desk. He grunted something else to the younger cop with a phone still attached to his ear. The younger cop nodded, maybe to his partner, maybe to whoever was on the other end.
Vincent stepped away from the counter and plopped down on a stiff vinyl couch. He stared with glassy-eyed disinterest at framed photos of current or past police captains that decorated the walls.
He had time to memorize all of those faces before the door swung open and the old cop plowed toward him. “Tatum,” he barked. “William Tatum. Sign here.”
As if his cue was the calling out of his name, a very weary-looking man dragged himself into view behind the cop.
Vincent signed everywhere he was told and reclaimed his credit card.
“Tatum,” the cop growled again, as if the word was the only one in his vocabulary.
Vincent drove in stony silence, confident that his extreme annoyance was justified and that it was his passenger’s responsibility to get the conversation rolling. As a result, their silence went unbroken except for road directions—“Take the next right”—all the way to the Tatums’ apartment on a dead-end street off of West 25th in Ohio City.
Vincent found a parking space on the curb. He shut off the engine and listened to it tick. The night air was cool and drizzly enough to have required a few swipes of the wipers. The two men sat in silence and watched the glass fog over with a rain so fine they couldn’t see it fall. It looked like the glass was sweating.
The last thing Vincent wanted was to be sitting long after midnight in this questionable neighborhood. Not with Sandy and the kids home alone, a thought that brought Vincent around to his sleeping wife and their half-empty bed.
“Thanks.” That said, the door opened and his passenger slipped out and closed the door after him.
The hell? thought Vincent as he watched William Tatum plod wearily toward a narrow, high house. Vincent just watched until the man in his financial custody was nearly out of sight, then he let out a breath of exasperation and climbed out of his car to follow.
William must have heard him, the two of them taking the exterior metal stairs to the second-floor apartment, but William didn’t react. However, he left the door open for Vincent as he clicked on an overhead light.
The front room was rather neat, but that had less to do with the housekeeping than with the fact that it was nearly cleaned out. A cooler occupied the center of the floor and served as a stand for a small lamp without shade or bulb. There were no drapes on the windows, and the one bookcase stood empty under the landlord’s-special, avocado carpeting. Vincent could also see into the next room, where clothing was folded and piled neatly against a wall.
“She’s not here, is she?” Vincent said. Meaning Candy.
William plopped cross-legged on the floor next to the cooler. He smiled, shook his head and removed the lamp from its lid so he could reach in.
Vincent could hear water that had once been ice sloshing around in there before William pulled out a dripping can and gently shook off excess moisture. He snapped the tab and sucked deeply. When he’d drained what must have been half the can, he opened the cooler once more and cocked an eyebrow at Vincent.
His first instinct was to turn him down. Drinking beer more than a half hour after you’ve been to sleep struck Vincent as being nearly as wrong as having it for breakfast. But he also saw it as an opportunity to talk, so he nodded, accepted a beer can and grimaced as he let his long body slide to a sitting position on the thinly carpeted floor. His back ached and ass throbbed almost immediately.
As a social worker trying to find employment for ex-cons in an impossible economy, Vincent was hardly a virgin at pulling clients out of the clutches of the law—even in the middle of the night—but he couldn’t remember ever feeling so grumpy about it. Maybe he was just getting too damn old for this.
Or maybe all of the previous times he’d left his bed in a hurry he’d trusted that his side of it would remain empty.
Which was paranoia speaking, he knew. But just because you’re paranoid, someone had famously said, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. He forced his dark thoughts aside to focus on the man squatting across from him and digging into the cooler for yet another brewski.
Vincent had wasted enough time waiting for him to speak. He opened his own can and took a couple delicate swallows. “I take it you and Candy had a fight and she left.”
William’s expression broke into a grin or a grimace. Little of both. “Gone. Left when I called her yesterday from the police station. Just like she tole me she was going to do.”
Vincent thought about this. “If they picked you up yesterday, why didn’t you call me right after Candy turned you down?”
“Because you’re the last person I wanted to see.”
Vincent watched the man’s long jaw almost break into another grin, but not quite make it. There was another emotion jockeying for position on his face. It took Vincent a few seconds to identify it as fear. He set aside his own hurt feelings at the other man’s remar
k and said, “When you called, I didn’t quite understand what the charges were. Can you go over it again?”
Beating out a quick pattern with his long fingernails on the aluminum can, William said, “Filing a false police report,” shrugging as though his intent was obvious.
He grinned his big grin at Vincent’s blank-eyed stare. “Candy’s mama said the relationship would come to no good, and damn if she wasn’t right. That was even before I got sent to Lucasville on the coke charges. The irony is, all while her mom was telling Candy to stay away from me, Candy was warning me away from her own brother, Andy. Said he was only going to get me in trouble.”
William tucked his head and chuckled in a way that didn’t show any of his mouth. He stared at the cooler, and burped long and low. “I hung out with him anyway ’cuz he was the only one in the goddamn family who’d accept me. He was fun too, I gotta admit. We’d go out drinking. Just the two of us, me ’n Andy, and Candy’d be laying there in bed, all cold and silent, when I got back. We were living together by then, which meant none of her family would talk to any of us. ’Cept Andy, of course. Lucky me.”
William stared again at the cooler, but this time reached in and grabbed another. He wiped it dry on his shirttail before opening it. “Me ’n Andy, we did a little coke and then a little more, and I got to coming home later and later and sometimes not at all.”
Vincent waited for more, but that seemed to be the end of it. William making years of bad choices and endless regrets sound as easy as that.
Vincent shifted uncomfortably, longing for his bed as he watched the other man either staring into his own lap or dozing off. He figured he could tiptoe quietly out of that depressing and mostly empty apartment, but he had to know. Had to know.
He cleared his throat. “You didn’t go to prison for three years just for snorting coke, right?”
William looked up, startled, like he’d forgotten he had a visitor. Vincent assumed he hadn’t slept well during his latest stay in jail. “No.”
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