Ashes, Ashes

by Charles Atkins

  The third murder Barrett had been forced to witness. She’d felt numb, disconnected and not quite real, as she saw the life flow out of the beautiful young man with his poetic eyes. Snippets of pop tunes that had kept him in the public eye for nearly a decade shot through her head – Wake up, Baby Baby and the infectious Let Me be Your Candy. She’d bought that album online, unable to shake the tune from her head, admiring the pop star’s use of baroque themes, harpsichord and all, updated and electrified.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she’d mouthed as Glash had looked straight at her. He was like a child wanting his mommy to see him dive into the swimming pool – Mommy, Mommy, watch me! He needed an audience. It was the only reason she could find to explain why she was still alive. Yet that didn’t seem like reason enough.

  She twisted slightly away from Carla and on to her back – her shoulder started to throb. Through the edge of the tarp she glimpsed blue sky. The van had left the smooth highway surface and they were now going over a pockmarked road. Overhead she saw trees and the tops of buildings. One redbrick structure caught her attention, the architecture similar to the turn-of-the-century buildings on the sprawling grounds outside of Croton.

  The van stopped and she braced herself. Carla was now awake and struggling to breathe through her nose.

  She heard the doors open; her heart pounded; a wave of warm air swept under the tarp, billowing it upward.

  Glash ripped it off and looked at her. She tensed and didn’t speak as he studied her and then Carla, whose face was contorted as she struggled to take in breath through her nostrils. He seemed to be deciding something.

  Was this the moment he’d decided to kill them? She realized that somehow she had stopped being afraid, her fear replaced by a kind of numbness, as she stared back at Glash.

  ‘If you scream again, I’ll kill you,’ he said to Carla, and then he viciously ripped the duct tape from her mouth.

  She gasped. ‘Please don’t kill me,’ she pleaded. ‘I have a little girl. Her name is April. Please don’t kill me.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he told her, but quietly. He looked at Barrett. ‘I’m going to untape your legs. If you run, I’ll kill her, then I’ll kill you.’

  ‘I won’t run,’ Barrett said.

  ‘Good.’

  As she looked behind him she recognized where he’d taken them. She saw several deserted buildings that comprised the abandoned Albomar State Mental Hospital. It was one of several sprawling facilities that at the heyday of long-term institutionalization of people with psychiatric illnesses would have housed thousands of patients. It was here that Richard Glash had spent the majority of his childhood. In a weird way, he’d brought them home.

  He reached over and dragged Carla by her legs to the back doors of the van. Barrett watched as he hoisted the bound woman over his shoulder and holding a gun in his free hand, ordered her out.

  She blinked against the blinding sunlight and felt her knees start to buckle.

  ‘Stay in front of me,’ he told her, and directed her up the stairs into what had once been the children’s residential hospital.

  He took them through a service entrance. A chain and padlock had been removed and there was a gaping hole in the door where the lock had been.

  Her mind spat out questions. How would he have known the building was open? Why was the building open? Who the fuck was helping him?

  There were working lights inside, which didn’t surprise her, as the state hadn’t yet decided what to do with these old deserted buildings. She also knew that there’d be some kind of skeleton maintenance and grounds crew. Often they were given small houses rent-free somewhere on the sprawling acreage. The thought gave her a glimmer of hope, but if Glash had the wherewithal to get Justin Green, she doubted he’d overlooked something this basic.

  ‘Open it,’ he instructed, as they came to a gray steel door.

  She pushed hard and found herself staring down a hallway lined with metal doors, each leading into a small square patient room. The doors had been painted different bright colors, someone’s attempt to personalize the cold and scary place that had been home to hundreds of seriously disturbed children. She heard the outside steel door close behind her.

  Carla’s head shot up from Glash’s back as she stared at the door, ‘Oh God …’

  Glash ordered Barrett into a glass observation room with a padded rubber floor across from the nurses’ station. ‘Face the wall.’ She heard him enter behind her. And through her periphery saw him drop Carla on to a bolted-down metal cot.

  He left and locked them in.

  Barrett turned and let out a long breath. Through the two-inch thick, shatterproof glass she watched Glash disappear down the hallway. When he was gone she tried the door. It wouldn’t budge.

  Carla was sobbing. ‘We’ve got to stop him. He’s going to do something horrible.’

  ‘I know,’ Barrett said, thinking again how this was all Carla’s fault. But like her fear of Glash, something had happened to her anger. She found it hard to even look at Carla, her face horribly bruised, her hair matted down with blood on one side where he’d gashed her skull with the butt of his gun.

  ‘He’s going to kill us all,’ Carla said. ‘I know it. Everything I worked for. He’s going to undo it all. People will say he’s why people with mental illnesses should all be locked away. They’re going to say we’re dangerous. I should have known. I should have believed him. I just thought he was paranoid or grandiose. I thought it was all fantasy.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Barrett asked, realizing that as Glash’s attorney Carla might have learned something important.

  ‘He’s going to kill us all,’ she repeated. ‘It’s what he wants. It’s all he ever wanted.’

  ‘Ssh!’ Barrett ordered, as she heard the outer corridor door open. Glash had returned carrying a television set he’d taken from the Saunders’ home. He placed it on the counter of the nurses’ station so that the two women could see the screen. He turned it on and holding the remote flipped through the channels. The reception was bad, as the cable had long ago been disconnected. He found a local station and then another out of Manhattan, and a third that was mostly snow, but they could make out the sound. Two were carrying stories of the manhunt and the murders; the other was a kids’ show with singing puppets. He disappeared back into the nurses’ station and returned with two smaller and older TV sets; he put them on, and fiddled with their antiquated chrome antennae. The manhunt for Glash and his murder spree crackled through two, while the puppets – that came in the clearest – sang about the importance of washing your hands. They’d found Justin Green’s body and the pop star’s face, and clips of his recent videos, were interspersed with interviews of FBI agents and aerial photos of the crime scene at Croton.

  Glash seemed disinterested in the news or the puppets as he set down the large metal box he’d retrieved at Albert’s cabin. He took a screwdriver and using it like a chisel, hammered off the lock.

  Fascinated, Barrett watched through the glass as he fished out a black-and-white notebook. He flipped it open and for the next couple of hours, he read through it page by page, oblivious to the cacophony of the TV sets tuned to different stations. As he read, he tapped his fingers on the edge of the counter, his mouth moved and he appeared to be counting very rapidly, as though what he was reading was written in a language that had more to do with math than English. Eventually, he came to the last page and shut the notebook.

  He looked at Barrett. ‘I’m going to be very famous.’ She could just hear him through the glass and above the televisions. ‘I’m already more famous than you are. I’m not as famous as Justin Green. Not yet.’ He looked at her wrists, still shackled in the black plastic restraints, and walked up to the door. ‘Are your hands hurt very badly?’ he asked.

  His apparent concern took Barrett completely unawares. ‘They’re OK,’ she said, flexing her long fingers.

  ‘If you couldn’t write I’d kill you now. You write well. You get pub
lished. You’ll write about me before you die.’

  His matter-of-fact tone and the way he stared at her through the window left little doubt. ‘Why are you dong this?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought you knew that, Dr Conyors.’

  ‘Just to be famous? Why would you kill all these people? They’ve never hurt—’ she stopped herself.

  ‘Say it,’ he ordered. ‘You were about to lie to me. I don’t like it when people lie to me.’

  She kept silent.

  ‘Don’t lie. They have hurt me. They’ve hurt me and lied to me ever since I was little. You were trying to hurt me, but I don’t think you lied. You wanted to keep me locked up. Now I’m free and it’s my turn to make people hurt. Everyone who’s ever lied to me, who told me that my foster family would love me, or that the new hospital they were sending me to was just as good as a real home. They all lied, and soon they’ll all die. You’ll die, as will your sister and your mother,’ he stated without emotion. ‘I will too, but it’s not a hundred percent certain. I might not die.’

  ‘Monster,’ Carla muttered. ‘How can you do this? After what I did for you, how can you do this? I tried to make things better. I tried to help you. I never lied to you. I never tricked you. I never told you anything that wasn’t true. Why are you doing this to me?’

  ‘You need to shut up,’ he said. ‘I don’t need you to write. I might not need you at all.’

  Carla bit her lip; tears streamed down her face, and her eyes darted frantically. ‘Don’t you care about anything, Richard? I have a little girl who I’ll never see again. Think about what happened to you; you’re doing the same thing to me and my little girl.’

  Barrett braced herself. She knew he was armed, and if he didn’t need Carla, killing her would mean nothing to him.

  Surprisingly, he turned and walked away. He stopped halfway down the corridor and pulled out a cell phone.

  Barrett strained to hear who he was talking too. She thought back through many hours spent evaluating Glash, and couldn’t come up with a single person who he’d ever identified as a friend. His own family, just a couple of uncles, wanted nothing to do with either him or his murderous father. So who was on the other end? And what were they doing? She thought back through the last forty-eight hours, the pickup truck in the parking lot, the brutal scene at the Saunders’ home, finding Justin Green’s location, the smashed locks downstairs. Whoever was on the phone was setting the course. But it was impossible to hear through the glass and din of the TVs.

  He hung up, and turned his head. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, raising his voice over the TVs. ‘I need new clothes. I need to look nice for my girlfriend. I’m going to ask her to marry me. Now that I’m famous, do you think she’ll say yes?’

  Barrett looked at Carla. ‘Do you know anything about this?’ she whispered.

  Carla shook her head.

  Barrett tried to think of any woman who’d had contact with Glash. All she could come up with was that sometimes murderers get fans who send them letters. Was this his accomplice? ‘I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,’ she shouted back.

  ‘Famous people have no trouble getting dates.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Barrett answered.

  ‘What should I buy?’ he asked. ‘What should I wear?’

  It took her totally off guard, and then she realized that Glash, who was wearing an ill-fitting pair of pants and a torn tee-shirt he’d stolen from Saunders, had spent the majority of his life locked up in either a psychiatric hospital or a maximum-security prison. Buying clothes was something he’d never done. ‘For pants you should get jeans or khakis, maybe a blue shirt to match your eyes.’

  ‘What kind of shoes should I purchase?’

  ‘Sneakers, walking shoes or maybe work boots.’

  ‘What color?’

  She understood that despite his incredible artistic talents and complex planning abilities, the simple act of picking out a wardrobe was throwing him. ‘Black or white sneakers – don’t get any other colors – and if you do get work boots they should be black or tan.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Richard,’ she called after him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Buy a comb.’

  He nodded and walked away.

  As he disappeared, Barrett’s gaze fell on Albert’s notebook; whatever was inside figured heavily in Glash’s scheme. Now she thought of Justine and her mother, and threw herself at the door handle. She strained and pulled. It was useless.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ Carla said.

  And as the televisions flashed awful images – Justin Green; Glash; the hotel in the Catskills; an Andy Griffith rerun; the bloody walls of the Saunders’ home; recent photos of Barrett and Carla; concerned cops; even the governor – the two women, with their hands still bound, exhausted themselves.

  ‘We’ve got to stop him,’ Carla sobbed, banging her now bloody fists against the door handle. ‘He’s going to kill us. I’ll never see my daughter again.’

  ‘We can’t think like that,’ Barrett said. ‘As long as we’re alive we’ve got a chance. I also think you kind of got to him with that.’

  Carla sank to the floor. ‘I can’t believe that I let this happen … you tried to warn me. But I’ve spent so much time hating you. You could have said anything and it wouldn’t have mattered.’

  ‘I know,’ Barrett said, and realizing that she was getting nowhere with the door, she sat down next to her on the floor. ‘I should have gotten myself pulled off the case when I saw you were the attorney. But I couldn’t; it was too important and I’d already evaluated all of them. Plus …’

  Carla gave a half smile. ‘You couldn’t trust it to someone else, could you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To me, when I realized you were the expert for the state, it was my chance finally to get back at you. I wondered if in some twisted way you wanted another crack at me. Or maybe this was God’s weird joke to throw us together. All these years I’ve thought about what happened, and then when I saw you, and realized that you’d try to stop the transfers, it was my chance for payback. I wanted you to fail. I wanted you to feel a fraction of the hell you put me through.’

  ‘I know it’s kind of late in the day,’ Barrett said, ‘but I am so sorry for what happened, and for whatever role I played in it.’

  Carla nodded. ‘When I left the hospital, my marriage was over. I could have dealt with that, but having my parental rights terminated was devastating. Everything I’d ever wanted was gone – even my career.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Bill and I had agreed when we got married that I’d put my law career on hold while he got his started. When I left the hospital all I could think about was how I’d kill myself. I’d intended to take all of the pills I was given when you discharged me and overdose; it seemed fitting. I even wondered if you’d feel guilty, knowing that I’d ended my life with the very medications you’d prescribed.’

  ‘I never meant to hurt you,’ Barrett said, feeling tears start to well.

  Carla bit her lip and shook her head. ‘Do you know how angry that makes me? If you could feel the rage I’ve had to carry. How many times I listen to psychiatrists talk about doing everything in the patient’s best interest. You have no idea what kind of power you wield. With just a flick of a pen you can have someone locked up, or have a conservator appointed so that they can’t handle their own money or where they choose to live. But it’s all in our best interest. In the course of a few weeks you took everything from me. Years of my life gone. How can you do that to someone?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, for what happened,’ Barrett said.

  ‘I think you are,’ Carla said, trying to keep her temper under control. ‘But that’s just it, nothing changes. I’ve had three manic episodes in my life: one in college; one after I’d spent three weeks studying for the Bar exam, which I passed on the first try; and the third after I gave birth to April. I spent so much of my life being frightened and afraid of the illness. Not in the way you think, but mo
re because of how people treated me once they found out. It’s like you suddenly become something less than human, not quite a real person. I never told Bill. I was afraid he’d leave me. Obviously, I was right.’

  ‘What happened after you left the hospital?’ Barrett asked, feeling battered by Carla’s story, and the part she’d played.

  ‘I came close to committing suicide. But as I was setting out to do it, I actually thought about something you’d told me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, you’d tried to give me hope, to say that in time and with the medication I’d get back on track. That there was no reason I couldn’t practice law, have a family. As you were saying those things to me, I was so filled with hate, not to mention being way over-medicated. But when I got home – or should I say back in my parents’ house and the bedroom I’d grown up in – I heard it a different way. What you’d done to me, I knew you were doing to others. And not just you … but every shrink in every hospital. How many times a day do women lose their children because of this? Or people have all their civil liberties stripped because they happen to hear voices or are paranoid? It was like a light went on, and I knew that yes, I would pull it together. I would practice law, and I would make sure that what was done to me, would become a thing of the past. Killing myself would have just made things worse – Oh, the poor mental patient, they were right to take away her kid, to lock her up. When I hear people talk about what’s “in my best interest” it makes me furious.’

  ‘I’ve noticed,’ Barrett commented. As she said that her stomach cramped and she started to dry heave. All that came up was a bit of the last granola bar and some saliva.

  ‘Are you sick?’ Carla asked.

  ‘No,’ Barrett said, still hunched forward, waiting for the feeling to pass and thinking about what Carla had just told her. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Fourteen

  With one hand on the wheel of the Crown Vic and the other holding his cell, Hobbs tried to calm Justine on the other end of the line, as he drove through the lush green pine forests of the Catskills. His nerves were frayed, he was beyond exhaustion, and the words coming out of his mouth rang false: ‘She’s going to be OK,’ he said, ‘we’re going to bring her home.’