Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series)

by Douglas Clegg

  It is called Program 28, so-named because it is the 28th such program to handle specific psychologically labeled patients in a controlled environment since the Programs were first implemented at Darden State in 1966, neatly coinciding with the era in which Darden went from a place of shock treatments and rumored lobotomies to drug treatment and sedation. All of the previous 27 programs failed to some greater or lesser extent. Each of them was designed by a team of psychiatrists who bring in state and sometimes federal funding into the hospital. The positions at Darden State are as often political as they are medical and supervisory.

  Program 28's patient designation is SSPVS7. Sexual Sadistic Predator Violent Sociopath, Level 7.

  Each has been a high profile case, involving the most heinous murders, even among the general inmate population of Darden.

  Restraints through the night were the norm in Program 28. Each patient in Program 28 had at least two psychiatric technicians with them on each shift.

  Michael Scoleri was in a room by himself, in Program 28.

  Scoleri, an SPVS7. Good looking young man, small eyes slightly wide apart. Blond hair, cut short.

  The rain outside his window, like pebbles thrown on glass.

  Restraints on his wrists and around his ankles.

  Michael Scoleri nodded to the voice he heard.

  “Yeah,” Scoleri said. “Sure. You needed that one. The little girl."

  3

  At Darden State, wake up in Program 28 was at 6 a.m. in the patient dormitories. This was to get the six patients through their routines a good forty minutes before the other patients were roused, so as to keep the Program 28 patients separate from the rest. The first meds of the day arrive at 8. Between those two hours, the Program 28 patients shower, clean up their rooms, make their beds, and then get breakfast in the cafeteria.

  In the showers, twenty minutes later, a non-Program 28, Rob Fallon, counted the tiles as he washed, making sure to scrub the parts of his body his mother had labeled dirty twenty years earlier. Rob Fallon was an SVP, but often went with the Program 28s because of his recent attacks on staff. It was either that, or he'd have been transferred north, and north didn't want him. Neither did Patton State. He didn't live in the pods of Program 28, but just outside them.

  Because Rob didn't have the harsher designation of Program 28, he had a bit of free rein on the ward and in the dormitories, although he still had a one-on-one psych tech at all times to make sure he didn't go off and begin his systematic seduction of other inmates or staff.

  It had been his affair with a staff nurse, named Howe, the previous summer that had turned tragic. It was one of the problems of Darden State: if a sociopath was attractive, and a staffer was messed up enough on the inside, bad things resulted. Staff that had been at Darden more than a decade were now given routine psychological testing and subsequent counseling to ensure that they had not begun identifying too much with the patients.

  4

  The white bar of soap smelled like others who had used it before him, and he didn't like thinking about their filth, their dirty parts. He had no name for them, other than the ones he’d found out about in Biology class in high school, but even then he couldn’t say them aloud. The soap lather felt like a foam pillow rubbing him. The more he rubbed, the more it began to smell like clean bleach, like a white bottle of clean bleach poured over a wound. So damn nice. He rubbed he soap against his skin so much that his skin turned a raw pink color, and the soap disappeared into milky fragments. He liked getting clean, and had no respect for some of the patients who were depressed and remained filthy most days. He liked shedding his hospital clothes and getting under the hot jets of spray.

  It was a lot like high school gym class, and he’d always enjoyed showering with others. He wished some of the guys would talk more, but they all went into their own little worlds in the shower. Watching the yellow tiles while he lathered up and rinsed off, spied on by the perv orderlies and psych techs just didn’t do it for him anymore. He needed some entertainment. He hadn't had much entertainment in Darden State for a long time.

  It was his sixth year in Darden State, for what the media had called the Adonis murders. They were right on the Adonis part, he knew. Just not the word “murder.” He had been merely asserting himself, taking his rightful place.

  When Rob thought about how they bled, sometimes he smiled.

  Someone watched him (they always did, he knew it, he kept watch of them as they watched him), along with the four other men from D Ward. The man watching them, named Jim, was big and stupid and was so used to nothing happening that anything could happen and he'd be unprepared. It was the way things went at Darden. Unlike many others he knew in D Ward, he didn’t fool himself into pretending they weren’t in a prison even though it looked a bit like a hospital at times, and other times like an old junior high school.

  He glanced at the others through the sprays of water.

  Rob noticed how he stacked up against him. How much more masculine he himself was. How much more real. His chest and stomach had thin dark hairs, and his private parts (for he could not use the bad words for that area even when he tried) were not as ugly as other men’s. His mother had always told him how beautiful he was because of his genes. Good genes were everything. Good genes and getting clean. His muscles, despite being in Darden, were still long and sinewy. He still had his youth inside him, and knew that he would never ever grow old. He had been created that way.

  Rob could tick off their names: Noodles, the guy who cut heads off his girlfriends(and apparently had, Rob noticed, one testicle), Jake “the Whistler”, a serial rapist and scalp collector (undersized penis), Arnie, the guy who tried to assassinate the President’s wife but never made it further than a debutante ball in San Diego, and then Scoleri.

  Michael Scoleri.

  Scoleri was sometimes brought in. Sometimes the Ward mixed them together. It was a Program 28 directive. Early morning only.

  Rob Fallon didn't like it one bit.

  It also meant more psych techs were around.

  Not that Rob minded being watched in the showers. He looked damn good, and he liked the attention.

  But Scoleri.

  Still looked like a kid, even naked in the showers. Couldn't have been more than twenty-six. A scared kid in a den of wolves.

  On his stomach, those words.

  SUFFER THE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME.

  On the inside of his thighs, names.

  He was a damn sideshow freak, as far as Rob Fallon was concerned.

  Like a fart: silent but deadly.

  Rob grinned at Scoleri, holding his hands out. “Toss the soap.”

  Scoleri glanced at him. Scoleri picked up a bar of the yellow soap and handed it to Rob. Whether it was women or men, Rob knew that everyone loved him. He was beautiful, and smart, and irresistible. People told him their secrets.

  That tended to coincide with the times that he’d cut their throats.

  But not inside.

  Inside he was a good boy because he was being watched.

  He glanced at the orderly and the psych tech, standing in the entryway to the showers.

  “You still don’t talk much, huh,” Fallon said. He arched his back as he scrubbed the soap beneath his underarms. “Well, I got some news down the wire today. I hear Campbell’s coming back.”

  Scoleri barely glanced at him.

  “I like Campbell. Always have. Last summer, one of the women here went after him. And his family. But Campbell got through it okay. I knew he would." Fallon turned around, showing that he didn’t care if Scoleri watched him or not. He flexed his muscles. Rob liked to turn men on. To turn women on. It was a trait of some of the smarter sociopaths and thrill kill junkies.

  When he turned people on, he got things. He found out their whys. Their most intimate secrets. He was smarter than nearly everybody else, and once he figured out the whys of people, he could get what he wanted from them.

  He knew that Scoleri had a why, hidd
en somewhere inside him.

  He rinsed off his back. The hot water was delicious on him. It washed away all the grit and nastiness of the night. Cleanliness was good. Dirty things annoyed him a great deal. Most of the patients were dirty. Practically crawling with vermin. Some of them didn't even know how to clean themselves well. Rob liked the ones who did. Like Scoleri. He got scrubbed good.

  “I guess you didn’t know Campbell. He’s one of the good ones,” Rob said this last part, nodding in the direction of the bulky psych tech standing guard by the entrance to the showers. “Not like him. He’s what my mother would call a three dollar bill.”

  Scoleri shrugged. “I don’t know too many people here.” He had a voice like a sparrow. Just a chirp. The water from the showerhead poured over his thin hair, matting it to the sides of his face. A halo of water. “I hear some things sometimes,” he said barely above the noise of the showers.

  “Oh yeah? So what’s on the radio this morning?” Rob meant it as an idle comment. Scoleri’s nickname was Radio since he seemed to both be on another wavelength from the other sociopaths and psychopaths of Darden State, and because he claimed he got messages. Special messages. The COs on the hall talked about it. Scoleri would sometimes tell them things about themselves that he couldn't possibly know.

  “He’s out hunting, is all,” Scoleri said in that little boy voice that belied his six foot frame and slightly receding hairline. "He wants more children."

  “Who?” Rob Fallon asked.

  Scoleri glanced at the guards at the shower exit, and at the other inmates. For just a second, Rob Fallon felt fear, something he didn't always feel. It was refreshing to get a taste of it. It was a sexual fear. He suddenly had the feeling that Scoleri was going to touch him.

  Scoleri stepped closer to Rob Fallon, pressing his lips almost to his ear.

  Fallon thought he felt Scoleri’s tongue on his earlobe as Scoleri whispered his answer.

  Scoleri reached up, holding Rob’s head close to him, so he could keep his mouth almost right inside his ear while he whispered all the secrets he knew.

  When it was over, Rob Fallon drew back in disgust, furious that Scoleri had gotten so close to him. Invaded the space near his flesh. He was the one who did that to others. They didn't do it to him. He hated Scoleri. He hated him with a passion, and wanted to hurt him. Nobody got that close unless Fallon himself was taking control. He didn’t want men like that. He didn’t want the touch of any man, not like that. He felt himself go all dark inside like when he'd been a kid and his mother had caught him doing dirty things to himself with pins and tape.

  Rob made a fist and threw a hard punch into the side of Scoleri’s mouth.

  When the impact came, the crunch of knuckle to face was like a shotgun blast.

  Scoleri slipped, falling against the tile floor.

  Blood spurt from between his lips.

  Rob watched the blood flow into the soapy water that ran pink down the drain in the floor.

  Two of the other men stepped back, but Jake the Whistler leapt forward to grab Rob by the throat. The psych techs in the doorway were already running across the slippery tiles when Rob Fallon began to black out from Jake’s expert strangulation techniques.

  "Don't alarm!" one of the psych techs shouted to the other. "We can control this."

  The other psych tech put his alarm pen back in his breast pocket. Then, when Noodles, out of nowhere leapt upon him, he managed to reach in, press the panic button on the alarm pen, just before he fell to the slippery tile floor.

  The strobe lights began going on and off, and the inter-ward alarm sounded.

  A brief period of shut down would follow. The doors to the ward would close and lock automatically, and no one would be able to get out. COs would show up momentarily, and with luck, the psych techs wouldn't be too banged up.

  Now and then a Ward-wide riot might erupt if controls and restraints weren't in place fast enough.

  Or if staff members, including the psychiatric technicians and the nurses and the ward doctors and the corrections officers didn't act in a timely and efficient manner.

  5

  Michael Scoleri stood over Fallon and the psych tech who wrestled around on the tiles. Water streamed off his pale skin.

  Curious smile growing on his face as he watched the struggle at his feet.

  The lights flashed on and off around him.

  When a psych tech grabbed him from behind, Scoleri got violent.

  He went for the eyes.

  His fingernails went in the orbital ridge and he felt that warm moisture around the eye itself.

  6

  Michael Scoleri, in his room, minutes later, bound, the restraints impossibly tight around his hands, nodding his head as if listening to someone who was not there.

  Chapter Twelve

  Rob Fallon had been shut off into his room, still shivering from the shower, and with the taste of blood in his mouth from where he'd been thrown against the wall by a psych tech who was afraid of him.

  He wrapped himself in his sheet, and when the staff nurse came around to give him some meds to help calm him a bit, he told her that he had an important message to deliver.

  "Who to?" the nurse asked.

  Two husky psych techs stood near the doorway, ready in case Fallon caused any trouble.

  "My doctor," he said. "It's important. It's real important. I gotta tell her!"

  But his psychiatrist wasn't in yet.

  It was too early.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1

  San Pascal County is something of a joke in the Inland Empire of Southern California, for it was a diamond shaped wasteland until the 1980s, when developers saw a gold mine in creating a series of commuter communities beneath its mountains. Most of it is high mountains and canyons off a corner of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Its mountains connect with the San Bernardino Mountains and National Forest, briefly, and sustain ski resorts at elevations exceeding 11,000 feet. Far below, almost a plummet of the roads, the flat lands of the inhabited portion of San Pascal County. Now, a bedroom community, it once was a flood area. Some say that if it rains hard enough, it'll be nothing but mudslides, like it was in the 1930s when torrential rains swept through the then-uninhabited area, taking out a chunk of a hillside with it.

  2

  Early morning, too early to get up, but the little boy always got up early. And this was an extra-special morning. A morning that would be remembered forever, he knew, because it was going to be Lucas Day. Officially. His mother had declared it, and he reminded her of it every single day until the day on his calendar came up: MONDAY.

  Beneath this in red felt tip marker, his mother had written:

  NATIONAL LUCAS DAY. NO SCHOOL. DAY OFF! CHRISTMAS VACATION STARTS!

  Lucas, who was just eight years old, scruffed his hair with his hands, and yawned. He smelled the morning, the threat of rain outside his window, slightly cracked with one of his hundreds of toy soldiers. The smell, also, of the woman next door, beneath the condominium, who always put her laundry out in the mornings. Fresh clean laundry smell mixed with that just-before-it-rains odor. He pictured Mrs. Randel running out as the rain came down, gathering up all her clothes from the line. It made him happy to think it.

  When he got out of bed, he went over to the pile of toys in the corner of his room. He picked through them, tossing the little trucks to the side, stepping on some marbles and almost falling down. He picked through the toy lizards and bugs he collected. Finally, he found the large Mickey Mouse Clock. He looked at the hands of the clock carefully. Then he picked up one of the big rubber spiders his dad had bought him when they’d spent the summer in Los Angeles with his dad’s new wife. He stuffed the spider, named Charlotte, in the pocket of the shorts he intended to wear that day. Then, he picked up a green toy soldier and stuffed it in the other pocket. He padded from his room, to the bathroom to brush his teeth and “go,” then over to his mommy’s room. She was still asleep. He got up on th
e covers, and stared at her awhile.

  Soon, she opened her eyes, almost startled to see him.

  “It’s today already,” he said. He thought she was so pretty. A lot prettier than his daddy’s new wife.

  “Ten more minutes,” she said, turning over into the comforter, covering her head with the pillow.

  “No more minutes,” he said, reaching over and tugging the pillow from her arms. When he had it, he gave her a scolding look. “Go get ready.”

  “You first,” she said, groggily. Her eyes looked like they were glued shut. Still, she managed a grin. “All excited about today, are you, kiddo?”

  “You know who you look like right now?” he said. He didn’t wait for her answer. “Like a movie star.”

  “I feel like a very sleepy mommy,” she said.

  Then, her beeper went off on the bedside table. She reached for it, her hand fumbling across all the books and papers she always kept there. When she picked it up, she lifted it to her face, squinting. “It’s too early for me to see,” she said. Holding the beeper to Lucas’s face, she asked, “What’s the number?”

  He read her the number and then frowned. “I know what that is. That’s work.”

  “Coffee,” was all she said in reply.

  “Can I take Stuart with us?”

  “Coffee,” she repeated.

  He scrambled off the bed and ran out to the kitchen to turn on the coffee machine. He went to the cooler and poured out exactly enough water to get to the halfway point of the coffee pot. Then, he carefully poured it into the machine. It was always up to Lucas to flick it on, so that it would start sputtering the coffee into the pot. As he watched it begin it’s steaming, he wondered if he’d be able to sneak a taste. Then, he went and poured himself a bowl of Fruit Loops. He carried it with him, munching on the cereal as he went to feed his hamster. The hamster cage was in the small den, which was part play room and part his mother’s home office.