“Let me get this straight,” said Klug, when Pender had finished telling him about their new suspect. “This guy Mesker is going around killing people named in Sweet’s journal because Sweet told him to?”
“You got it,” said Pender. “I suspect we’ll have a more detailed answer after we track down his psychiatrist, but we wanted to bring you up to date first.”
Klug’s eyes narrowed. “And am I?” He took a last lung-charring drag off the Camel, then flicked it over the side of the pier.
“Are you what?”
“Up to date. Because I’ve got the distinct feeling you’re holding out on me.”
“Hey, what I got, you got.” Pender was the picture of injured innocence. He sounded so sincere that even Skip might have believed him, if he hadn’t already known about the list of potential victims in Luke’s journal. Skip also noticed that during the course of the conversation, Pender had gradually adopted an unobtrusive version of Klug’s Philadelphia accent.
After the meeting with Klug, Pender used the magic cell phone to track down Dr. Fredu Hillovi, Charles Mesker’s staff psychiatrist at Meadows Road, to the regional burn center at Valley Medical in San Jose, where he was still a patient. To Pender’s surprise, when he spoke with the night charge nurse to find out when he and his colleague could interview Dr. Hillovi, she asked him how soon they could get there.
“You mean, like tonight?” Pender’s plans had been tending more toward a few drinks, a motel room, and beddy-bye.
“Yes, tonight. As soon as possible, in fact. He’s having a terrible time, pain-wise, and doesn’t want to be left alone. Meanwhile I’m short-staffed beyond belief, so you’d be doing us both a favor.”
“In that case, keep a light in the window,” said Pender. “We’re on our way.”
8
When Lorraine Neely had failed to pick up her four-year-old daughter at her mother’s house by 4:30 Saturday afternoon, as arranged, her mother had tried calling the library but reached the answering machine. By six o’clock she’d been worried enough to call her husband and ask him to stop by the library on his way home from work. Irv Neely, who owned the hardware store on John Marshall Avenue, thought it was a waste of time, but he’d rapped on the locked library door anyway.
When no one responded, he’d turned to leave, and spied a bloody shoe print on the cement walk to his left, just outside the exit door, pointing away from the building. Stooping, he’d seen a second, lighter print a little farther on, and the faint trace of a third. He’d immediately called 911 from the pay phone on the cantilevered fieldstone wall to the right of the library entrance.
Officer William Baer, responding for the Marshall City Police Department, had agreed with Irv that the waffle-soled shoe prints might have resulted from someone stepping in blood, but he’d also thought they could have been left by wood stain, paint, or sealant. So rather than break in, he’d asked the dispatcher to notify the head librarian, who’d arrived with a key fifteen minutes later. Officer Baer had asked the other two to wait outside and entered the hushed, dimly lighted building alone.
The trail of waffle-soled prints, right shoe only, had led backward into the room, growing more distinct as it skirted past the crumpled body of the first victim and continued on around behind the checkout desk. The young officer, recognizing that the first victim did not appear to have lost enough blood to supply all those prints, had circled the enclosure apprehensively, his right hand resting on the butt of his holstered weapon for reassurance, and had discovered the second victim lying facedown behind the desk.
Although the body’d had that rag doll look that came with multiple broken bones, most of the blood, which had fanned out in a pool around her head, was later determined to have come from a broken nose, one of her lesser injuries. Following procedure, Officer Baer had secured the premises by herding Irv Neely and the head librarian away from the entrance before he called in the double homicide.
The hamsterlike county medical examiner, Dr. Flemm, had arrived half an hour later, his mustache quivering busily. “Everybody got their photos?” he’d asked briskly, donning his dust-free, latex-free rubber gloves and stooping beside the first victim. After checking for morbidity and lividity, and taking a rectal temperature to establish the time of death, he’d rolled the victim onto her back. “Oh, I know her,” he’d said, as if he were pleasantly surprised. Then, over his shoulder to the homicide detective, as more flashbulbs glared: “Heart shot—looks like about a thirty-eight.”
“And how long would you say she’s been dead?”
“Around three hours.”
“Yeah, that fits.” The library closed at four on Saturdays, and the other victim’s analog wristwatch, having been stomped to death along with its owner, still read 4:17.
After changing gloves, Dr. Flemm had taken his time examining the second woman, kneeling beside her behind the checkout desk and running his plump hands up and down her body, feeling for broken bones. Her rib cage he’d seemed to find particularly fascinating. In twenty years, he’d never encountered a torso so thoroughly crushed, he’d told the detective, with the possible exception of an artichoke grower in Castroville who’d been run over by his own thresher.
“The only possible way anyone could have done that much damage,” Dr. Flemm had added, “was to climb on top of this desk here, jump down and land on her with both feet, then climb back up and do it again—maybe ten, fifteen times.”
“Oh, Christ.” The homicide detective had sounded almost awed.
9
Highway 17 was somewhat intimidating in the dark. Skip was glad they’d taken the Buick, especially when the truck drivers decided to make up on the narrow, twisting downhill stretches the time they’d lost on the uphill climbs. But the highway leveled out on the other side of the mountains, and they reached the medical center, which appeared to have been built with giant see-through Legos, around eleven-thirty on Saturday night.
Once again Skip used his blue placard to claim a prime parking space. They took the elevator up to the burn unit, where the restive quiet was accentuated by the muted wheezing of respirators, the soft beeping of monitors, the whispered conversations of nurses padding about on rubber-soled shoes.
The charge nurse was waiting for them with sterile caps, gowns, gloves, and masks. “Infection is the burn patient’s most dangerous enemy,” she explained, sounding like she was quoting from a manual. She even subjected Pender’s badge case, notebook, and half-chewed pencil stub to a UV-ray decontamination before allowing him to enter Dr. Hillovi’s room.
The patient lay on his right side, swaddled fore and aft with ointment-stained dressings, and covered by a sheet supported by a frame to keep it from touching his skin. “Pardon me if I don’t get up,” he said, in an urbane, British-inflected Czech accent. Dr. Hillovi had colorless, quarter-inch stubble for hair and a long, narrow face anchored by an aristocratically aquiline nose.
“We’ll give you a pass, considering the circumstances.” Pender, mountainous in green, his face masked, held his badge in front of the doctor’s eyes. “I’m Special Agent Pender, this is Mr. Ep-stine.”
“Fredu Hillovi. What can I do for you gentlemen?”
“We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions about one of your former patients at Meadows Road,” said Pender.
“Within the bounds of confidentiality, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And the patient’s name?”
“Charles Mesker.”
“Charles Mesker?” Hillovi appeared to have been taken by surprise but recovered quickly. “Ah, yes, poor Charles. I remember that, when I saw his name listed among the casualties, I was almost, well, not exactly happy about it, but I thought, at least he’s finally at peace.”
“Not exactly,” said Pender.
“Oh?”
“Charles Mesker and another patient appear to have escaped from the facility after the fire.” Skip noticed that Pender was now echoing Hillovi’s choice of wo
rds and relatively formal diction. “The other patient, the man whom we believe was actually responsible for setting the initial explosion in the boiler room, later died of injuries sustained in the explosion. Mesker, though, is still very much at large.”
Hillovi closed his eyes. Thirty seconds or so—an eternity in burn unit time—wheezed and beeped and whispered by before he opened them again. “This other patient, the one who caused the fire—it was Luke Sweet, wasn’t it?”
Pender was startled; his eyebrows bobbed upward, momentarily wrinkling the prodigious expanse of brow between themselves and the green surgical cap perched like a beanie atop his big bald head. “How did you know?”
“There’s an old Czech saying, my friend: if you want to find the truth, look for it among your fears.” The psychiatrist’s eyes were still open, but his gaze had turned inward. “First, do no harm,” he muttered softly, more to himself than to his visitors. “Ha!”
Another eternity ticked by. Skip, sitting on the molded plastic chair by the head of the bed, was exhausted and wanted to hurry the interview along. But when he glanced over his shoulder at Pender, who was standing behind him, Pender shook his head almost imperceptibly. There were two kinds of silence employed by reluctant subjects, he explained to the Academy recruits every year when he gave his lecture on the art of affective interviewing. One meant make me talk, and required more aggressive questioning; the other meant let me talk, and required only patience.
Clearly, Dr. Hillovi belonged to the let-me-talk camp. It took him another minute to get started, but once he got going, there was no stopping him until he’d finished unburdening.
“On some level, I think I must have known all along,” he began quietly, speaking with a sort of bemused intensity. “I just didn’t want to admit it—not even to myself.” He looked from Skip to Pender and back; his eyes were gray, Skip noticed, and the pupils so dilated he could see his reflection in their curved, black mirrors.
“When I took charge of his psychiatric care two years ago, I was dismayed to learn that Luke Sweet had been under continuous chemical restraint since his admission over seven years earlier.
“To some extent, this was understandable. Young Sweet, who’d scored an impressive thirty-nine on the Psychopathy Checklist, seemed to have a penchant for unprovoked attacks on nurses and orderlies. And since no one’s ever developed an even remotely successful treatment protocol for psychopathy, chemical restraint certainly had to be considered as a viable alternative to a straitjacket and a padded cell.
“But not continuous chemical restraint. Because while there is no known treatment for psychopathy, there is a kind of self-correcting mechanism that sometimes comes into play with maturity.
“Most psychopaths, you see, are highly intelligent, testing out at ten to twenty points higher than the norm. This enables some of them, in the fullness of time, to reason out intellectually what most of us learned and internalized in early childhood: how to moderate one’s behavior in order to achieve rewards and avoid punishments.
“In life, if he learns it early enough (I say he because almost all psychopaths are male), he becomes a so-called successful psychopath: a politician, a captain of industry, or yes, even a doctor. Or if he figures it out after he’s already in prison, which is where the majority of psychopathy diagnoses are made, he might very well transform himself into a model inmate, even a mentor for other prisoners.
“But under continuous high-dosage chemical restraint, Sweet would never have had the opportunity to mature intellectually, nor would we have known it if he had. This means that, along with the opportunity of injuring others, he’d also been deprived of any chance he’d ever have to help himself.
“So my first decision when I was assigned the case was to cut back on the number of medications and reduce the dosages of the drugs we continued to administer. And when there was no immediate amelioration of the side effects, which included lethargy, emotional dullness, and most alarmingly, moderate to severe tardive dyskinesia—facial tics, uncontrollable grimacing, loss of motor control—I ordered further cutbacks.
“By mid-April, after two years of the new drug regimen, Luke Sweet was to all intents and purposes drug-free. Yet still the side effects, including the dyskinesia, continued unabated. I was of course concerned that my patient had suffered permanent damage to his nervous system as a result of extended chemical restraint, and scheduled him for a complete neurological workup in May.
“And yes, I did realize there was a possibility he might be feigning the symptoms in order to avoid whatever criminal charges he would have faced if he were ever declared compos mentis. But it never occurred to me he might be planning to blow the entire hospital to kingdom come.”
Hillovi’s voice had by then degenerated into a painful rasp. “Please,” he said, gesturing toward the glass of water on the bedside table. Skip held the glass to his mouth and placed the straw between his lips. Hillovi took a sip, thanked Skip, then lowered his cheek to the pillow and closed his eyes.
But Pender was by no means through with him. “Excuse me, Doctor, there’s something I don’t understand. When I asked you how you’d guessed that it was Sweet who’d set the explosion, you said something about that being one of your worst fears. But a moment ago you said it never occurred to you that Sweet might be planning to blow up the hospital. So when did you first begin to suspect that—”
“From the moment I saw your badge,” Hillovi interrupted. “It wasn’t a question of suspecting, either. I knew it—I knew it in my bones, to put it unscientifically. That’s why I was so surprised when you told me you wanted to talk about Charles Mesker instead.”
“I still do,” said Pender. “And in case you have any qualms about breaching doctor-patient confidentiality, let me assure you that by almost any reasonable standard of judgment, Charles Mesker represents an immediate and serious threat to public safety.”
“I don’t doubt that for a moment—not if he’s at large and off his meds. What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with the diagnosis,” said Pender, irradiated notebook and pencil stub in hand.
“Substance-induced psychotic disorder.”
Pender jotted that down. “And the substance?”
“The—” The doctor broke into another coughing fit. Skip refilled the glass with ice water from a plastic carafe and gave him another sip. Hillovi nodded his thanks. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”
“You were about to tell us the name of the substance that induced Charles Mesker’s psychotic disorder.”
“Yes, yes, of course. The substance was Asmador.”
10
A dark green 1994 Jeep Cherokee with New Jersey plates pulled into an isolated rest stop off Highway 101 North between Geyserville and Cloverdale around 10:00 P.M. Saturday. Asmador, who’d nodded off in the driver’s seat of the BMW, was awakened by Sammael in time to see two humans climbing wearily out of the Cherokee, groaning and stretching. The male of the couple tweaked his crotch to relieve a wedgie, then they departed, bound for separate restrooms.
“You really think he looks like me?” Asmador said doubtfully.
“Near enough,” replied Sammael. “Nobody examines those driver’s license pictures closely anyway.”
“If you say so.”
“I just did.” Once again, the snarky Poison Angel got in the last word before vanishing.
Asmador climbed out of the BMW carrying the suitcase with the remainder of his cash and weed, leaving the Beemer unlocked behind him in the hope that someone would steal it. The male of the couple returned first and resumed his seat behind the wheel of the Cherokee. Asmador waited for the female to return and climb up into the passenger’s seat, then strode toward her with the suitcase in his left hand. “Excuse me,” he called, in a generic foreign accent. “Could you answer for me a qvestion?”
As he’d hoped, the woman rolled down her window, whereupon he drew his gun from inside his denim jacket and jammed it against the side of her
head. “Don’t try anything stupid,” he told her husband. “All I need is a ride.”
Asmador was never sure whether they believed him or not, but in the end it didn’t matter. They followed orders with alacrity and died together, kneeling and holding hands, in a dark redwood grove three hundred yards off the side of Highway 128, somewhere between Boonville and Philo.
11
“Asmador?” Pender and Epstein exchanged baffled glances.
“Asmador,” said Hillovi.
“But that’s what he calls himself.”
“Yes, that’s his alter ego whenever his delusions get the better of him—which is to say, when he’s not sedated to the point of near-catatonia. Originally, however, Dr. Shiffman’s Asmador was the commercial name for a popular over-the-counter asthma remedy. Its major active ingredient was belladonna. I don’t recall what else was in it, but I remember it came in a powdered form, and was intended to be burned in a smudge fire or smoked in a cigarette to alleviate severe asthma symptoms.
“There was a period of time, however, back in the late sixties and early seventies, when certain poor souls decided it would be a good idea to ingest the stuff. Those that vomited immediately survived with relatively minor damage. Those with stronger stomachs fared less well. They became highly delusional, were unable to differentiate between reality and hallucination, and exhibited behavior patterns that ranged from unusual to downright bizarre.
“Some mistook human beings for objects and vice versa, another saw a solid floor as a piranha-infested lagoon, and still another passed most of his time watching Technicolor movies on his thumbnail. One patient died as a result of banging his head against a wall, trying to turn off a radio only he could hear. Another was run over by an automobile while trying to dig a hole in the middle of a busy street to free the people he believed were trapped beneath the pavement.”
The Boys from Santa Cruz Page 22
