by B. E. Scully
“As you well know, we do not have the authority to require a person to check in or remain in any housing situation unless there is some kind of probationary order or—”
“Yeah, I’m up on the regulations,” Martinez grumbled. “I’m just asking if you know where he might have gone.”
“You’ll probably know before I do,” Dr. Woon said. “I usually go to your place whenever I need to find one of my patients.”
“Listen,” Cassie broke in, “I know you didn’t spend much time with Mr. Packard—”
“Of course I didn’t. That would require proper funding.”
“—but based on his history and present state of mind, do you think he’s capable of violence?”
“Anyone’s capable of violence. Despite what so many in your profession believe, unless they’re suffering from the same mental disturbances as any killer, the mentally ill aren’t any more prone to violence than the rest of us. Which also means that yes, with the right triggers, they can of course be as capable of violence as the rest of us.”
“And could one of those triggers be manipulation?” Shirdon asked. “By someone in a position of power?”
Dr. Woon frowned. “Too many people think of people suffering from mental illness as helpless or stupid. But they’re as varied as any other group of people. But I will also say that in the case of people who have spent a great portion of their lives in and out of usually not particularly humane or effective bureaucratic systems, then yes, I think they can be especially vulnerable to being manipulated by people in power. After all, they’ve already been manipulated by people in power most of their lives. Or ended up worse off for not being manipulated.”
“That’s all interesting,” Martinez said, “but what we really need to do is find this guy. Considering that he could be a threat to the safety of no less than the head of the entire homicide department, it’s a pretty big deal we keep some basic tabs on this guy. Which starts with where he is.”
“That’s why they call it ‘homeless,’” Dr. Woon said. “But as far as keeping tabs on him, that’s why we alerted Lieutenant Mickelson before Packard’s release, just as instructed.”
“Wait a minute, what instructions?”
Woon looked like he wanted to lobotomize both of them. “The ones that came from the head of the entire homicide department you were just lecturing me about.” When neither detective responded, he added, “Lieutenant Mickelson! He personally contacted the clinic’s director to make sure he was notified of Packard’s release before it happened. So as usual, the police have more power to ‘keep tabs’ on our patients than we do. Now if you’ll excuse me, detectives, I have some patients to treat and release so that you can arrest them and send back again. Keeps us all in jobs, after all.”
Back in the car, Martinez was grinding his teeth. “Just what I needed today—Dr. Doomsday with a stick of lit bitter up his ass. What a blow-hard.”
“I don’t know,” Shirdon said. “I kind of liked him.”
“Jesus, Shirdon! My poor cousin Dave, the world’s greatest guy if ever there was one, got the boot after, what, less than three months of dating? And this guy’s okay? The Hound’s right—the human population is doomed.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to breed with the guy, Monte. I just like that’s he’s tough and honest about his job. It’s the same way cops are, after all.”
“Yeah, and as you always say, maybe that’s part of the problem.”
“Being tough and honest?”
“No, what being tough and honest about certain jobs turns you into. I’ll tell you one thing, though—he can say all he wants about mentally ill people, but I’ll bet he wouldn’t let his kids alone in a house with the Hound for a million bucks.”
“If I had kids, I wouldn’t let them alone in the house with most of the human race for a million bucks.”
“Still though. Even if it’s not their fault, some people are so messed up in the heads that it’s P.C. bullshit to pretend they’re ‘just like anyone else.’ Believe me, I’m not saying that means they should be treated like shit or denied basic rights and respect. The Hound may talk about Great White Aliens, but I know what it’s like to grow up as an illegal brown one, and there was nothing great about it. But still. It’s crazy to act like there aren’t realities that need dealt with. That’s exactly how you get shit like the Stratton case, Cass. Everyone wants to give her the benefit of the doubt because she’s a woman, she’s a mother, she’s a victim—‘oh, the poor woman lost her child, why punish her more?’ When it should be, ‘What the hell was she doing with not one, but two abusive psychos in the first place? And let’s not forget, she stood by the one who raped and killed her own daughter.”
“You’ll get no argument from me, Monte. But here’s another question for you—if Mickelson thought the Hound was harmless enough to turn over to mental health, why did he go out of his way to get a heads up on when he was going to be released?”
“And why did he fail to mention that fact to anyone else working the case? You know, like us.” Martinez shook his head. “Something’s not right about this Hound thing, Cass. At first I thought it might just be some crazy guy talking nonsense because he wanted a dry place to sleep. But the gut keeps saying different. Something’s definitely not right here.”
“I agree. But we’re going to have to be really careful on this one. The Stratton hearing is in less than a week. The last thing we need to do is start kicking a hornet’s nest right now.”
Martinez gave his partner a sideways look. “Why, you allergic to bee stings or something?”
“No, but they hurt like hell. And leave a damn painful sore afterward.”
“Some kind of pain wimp, then?”
“Nope,” Shirdon smiled. “In fact, I think I may know where to start kicking.”
“Where?”
“The Hound’s medical files listed his nearest relatives. His father died several years ago and his mother is in a nursing home in Washington, but he has a sister who lives in Redding, California. Just a few short hours across the state line, as a matter of fact, and I just happened to write down the address. Might do you some good to get out of the rain and into some sunshine for a change. Vitamin D deficiency and depression, curse of the overcast crowd.”
“Ha!” Martinez snorted. “The last time I went south it was to talk to Sherry Stratton’s ex-boyfriend or husband or whatever the hell she calls her current slime bag in residence. And look how well that turned out.”
“No overnight trips or slime bag felons on this one, I promise. Plus I’ll buy lunch.”
“Lunch and the next round of drinks at the Slammer and it’s a deal.”
“Deal,” Cassie said. “And Monte? Let’s keep this one off the books as much as possible, as long as possible. I have a feeling we’re going to want to play this one very close.”
Monte let the silence steep and then nodded. Both the city and the department were wired like a time bomb right now, and the Stratton case was a match just waiting to be struck. Now a mentally ill man communing with spirits from the past was claiming a cop had come out of it to take revenge on another cop. These days, playing it close might be the only hope either of them had of not getting caught in the blast and blown to bits.
5
The little boy had one eye closed and the other bright-blue eye open. He was dressed in a striped sailor suit and wore his golden sheaf of synthetic hair in a smooth, shiny pageboy. But most unsettling of all was the lad’s wide open smile, complete with two rows of tiny, hand-painted teeth.
The doll winked up at Martinez from his place among the fake potted plants collecting dust on a side table. “Thing looks like it could chew your arm off.”
“Definitely not the usual décor for an accountant’s office,” Shirdon said.
A door opened and a tall woman with an immaculate bob of wheat sheaf hair not unlike the doll’s came into the narrow reception area. “Sorry, my secretary’s at lunch right now, but you can come on
back.”
On their way in, Martinez whispered, “I hope there aren’t any more of those flesh-eating mini-monsters in there.”
But despite the aesthetically questionable sailor boy, Beatrice Packard Doyle’s office was as tastefully turned out as she was.
“I’ve only got about half an hour before my next client,” she said, giving her phone a quick check. “And unless there’s something my husband or two kids haven’t told me, I assume you’re here about my brother. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be rude or flippant,” she said before anyone accused her of being either. “But when the police show up, it’s usually about my brother. I take it he’s not in Arizona anymore.”
“No, he’s not,” Martinez said. “He’s back in Oregon, and he’s threatening to kill a police officer—the head of the homicide department, to be exact.”
Doyle sighed, reached into the pocket of her suit jacket, and then sighed again. “I was going to ask if you minded if I smoke, then I remembered that I quit smoking two weeks ago. Then I remembered that it’s been years since I’ve actually smoked a cigarette inside a building. Even one I help pay rent on. Old habits die hard.”
“I hear you,” Martinez said. “It’s been almost six months for me, and I’m just now getting to the point where I don’t think about wanting a smoke for, oh, maybe a whole hour at a time. On a good day.”
“Wow,” Doyle said, smiling for the first time since they’d arrived. “That actually does seem like something to look forward to at this point. I’m still at about the five minute mark. On a good day.” Then the smile vanished. “Years ago, right around the time he disappeared to Arizona, my brother turned up with almost ten thousand dollars. I didn’t even want to know where he got that kind of money, but he told me anyway. And do you know what he said? That D.B. Cooper showed him where to find it.”
“D.B. Cooper the hijacker? From the nineteen-seventies?” Shirdon asked.
“The very same one. As you probably know by now, my brother is obsessed with history. It’s what he wanted to do with his life before the schizophrenia got in the way. He wanted to be a history teacher or maybe go all the way up to university professor. He could have, too. He had a real gift. You know, I hate talking about him in the past tense, like he’s dead. Our whole family started doing that after things got bad. I always hated it, but now I do the same thing.”
She shook her head, the worry line between her eyes deepening. “It’s easy to do, I guess, when one day your smart, sensitive brother comes home for winter break a totally different person than he was six months ago. It seemed to happen that fast.”
“I read in his files that the schizophrenia started manifesting when Sean was in his mid-twenties,” Shirdon said.
Doyle nodded. “Which is fairly typical. It started one summer when he was home from college. I was out of the house by then, but our family is close—or used to be, anyway—so I heard all about it. He started saying people were talking to him inside his head, and he just got stranger from there. He’d spend hours in his room talking to himself and laughing. Then out of nowhere he’d get very upset and run out of his room, down the stairs, and straight out the door. He’d stay gone for hours at a time, sometimes even days, and no one knew where he was.
“When he went back to school in the fall, our parents got a call from the student health clinic. Sean was convinced ‘someone’ was poisoning him. Everything tasted ‘funny,’ and he lost a ton of weight. He would only drink out of a mug he carried around himself and he stopped eating in the student cafeteria. He would only eat food in single serving sizes, to make sure no one could slip something into it, and whatever he didn’t finish, he’d throw away. As you can imagine, it got pretty expensive. He accused his professors of stealing his ideas and publishing them in secret underground journals, claiming them as their own. Then the story came out about that ancient mummy found in the Alps—”
“Iceman,” Martinez broke in.
“Right. Iceman. Sean was convinced that uncovering the Iceman had set off some kind of, I don’t know, cosmic disruption, I guess. He became even more obsessed with history and stories about historical figures. Eventually, he thought the voices he was hearing were coming from them—from people long dead and gone. He thought they were sending him special communications or messages across time.
“When I came home to visit at Christmas that year, Sean was like a different person. He’d always been funny and articulate, but now he couldn’t seem to express basic ideas clearly or even organize his thoughts. Other times, he’d talk in a language no one else understood. I now know these are called ‘word salads’ and aren’t uncommon with schizophrenia. But at the time all this was truly terrifying. He would call everyone by these strange names and say there were aliens hidden among us that wanted to enslave the human race. He would come out of his room and scream at us in this invented language and tell us we were all going to die. He would spend hours staring at his hands, saying someone else was controlling them. And if this story sounds rehearsed, that’s because it is. After a while, you come up with ‘the speech’ to give every new person that comes into your life.”
“And he eventually got professional help?” Martinez asked.
“Oh, definitely,” Doyle said. “But it took lots of trial and error to get the right medication combos, not to mention the side effects. Even so, the doctors told us straight off that seventy-five percent of schizophrenics hear voices, and twenty to thirty per cent of those cases don’t respond to medication. Even the ones who do, and who manage to take them consistently, it’s a constant process of tinkering. Sean was on a combo that seemed to be working for a while, then it just didn’t. The doctors also told us straight off—and I still remember their exact words to this day—they told us ‘the course of the disorder appears to be favorable in about twenty percent of patients.’ Those are some tough numbers for a twenty-four-year-old to handle. Not to mention his loved ones.”
There was a knock on the door. Doyle’s secretary popped her head into the office, but Doyle held up her hand and shook her head, and the secretary disappeared. “The psychiatric profession has obviously improved greatly since the times of lobotomies and electric shock, but we’re still mostly in the dark when it comes to the brain. There’s certainly no ‘quick fix’ for serious neurological disorders like schizophrenia, and my brother was no exception.” She shook her head and closed her eyes. “Is. My brother is no exception.”
“How long ago did you fall out of regular contact with him?” Shirdon asked.
“Longer ago than I’d like to admit. It took about four years for him to get somewhat stabilized, but by then he was disillusioned with everything about the medical profession. He thought the doctors were in league with the aliens, that they were all linked up by some kind of universal computer in order to keep track of him.”
Based on some of the things he and Cass had seen in recent years, Martinez wasn’t sure the spying computer part didn’t have some merit. The jury was still out on the aliens, though. “Did your brother ever mention anything to you about Great White Aliens specifically?”
Doyle frowned, thinking. “I don’t remember that term specifically. But like I said, I haven’t been close with Sean for years. I try to at least keep track of where he is, and talk to him on the phone or even visit now and then. But it’s hard. And not just because I don’t know where to find him all the time, either. Sometimes it’s just easier not to. I know how that must sound, but it’s true.”
Shirdon nodded. “How long ago did Sean move to Arizona?”
“Let’s see…I lost track of him around two-thousand-and-three, two-thousand-and-four, maybe.” Shirdon and Martinez exchanged a glance—around eleven years ago, the same time Morris Falten disappeared. “Then I got a call out of the blue one day saying he was in Arizona. We kept in touch for a while, but it never lasts for long. Obviously, since I didn’t even know he was back in Oregon. You know, I went to visit him once in Arizona, and his right eye was missi
ng. Completely gone, as if someone had just scooped it out with a spoon. And someone might as well have, because you know how it happened? Sean gauged it out himself—he put out his own eye! With a stick,” Doyle said, shaking her head.
“Did he say why?” Martinez asked.
“He said he did it to protect himself, something along those lines.”
Martinez leaned forward. “I know a lot of what your brother says doesn’t make sense, Ms. Doyle—”
“Bea is fine.”
“Okay, Bea—but this could be very important. Did he describe or say anything specific about who or what he was trying to protect himself from? Anything at all you can remember could help us out in a big way, even something that doesn’t seem that important.”
Doyle’s worry line reappeared. “The Bone Man.” Both detectives sat up a little straighter at the now familiar name. “He said something one time about ‘the Bone Man,’ but when I asked him more about it, he clammed up completely. Said he could never, ever talk about it.” She gave the detectives a worried look. “I didn’t think it was important. I mean, it’s so hard to tell…is my brother in some kind of serious trouble?”
“I’m going to be honest with you, Bea,” Martinez said, “we’re not sure at this point. Which is why anything you can remember about your brother’s life before he left for Arizona, or anything he might have said about the Bone Man, is very important.”
Another knock at the door. “Your next client is early,” Doyle’s secretary whispered, casting a wary look at the two detectives.
“Tell him I’ll be right with him,” Doyle said, checking her phone. “Listen, I wish I could help more, and I’ll definitely think over everything you’ve been asking about. But a big part of the problem with psychotic disorders is how hard it is to recognize when they’re happening to you. In one of his good periods, Sean told me that even though he knows what’s happening to him isn’t ‘real’ in terms of what everyone else is experiencing, it’s as real to him as sitting here talking right now is to us.”
