The Path of Silence

by Edita A. Petrick

  “Maybe so but Patterson’s just too young to be such an accomplished specialist.” Patterson’s slate gray eyes, sparking with youthful vitality, bothered me. So did that voluminous shag. Youth, verve, irreverence, defiance—those would be the words I would use to define Dr. Patterson.

  Dr. Martin, sight unseen, sat in my mental window like a solid, middle-aged stone. Well dressed, well groomed, well versed in corporate lingo, I saw him as an epitome of ambivalence. That would have been his primary motivation for taking a boring and mostly administrative job as a company staff physician. Was I stereotyping because it was the easiest route? Had I already fallen into a dangerous mindset, a gouge in my imagination that would enlarge, as I grew older, to where everything had to be compartmentalized, fit a precise pattern?

  But patterns were what a detective’s job was all about. Especially criminal behavior patterns that gave rise to categories used in profiling. Then again, this criminal mastermind had opened up a new category and he was its first and only member. His motives could be easily categorized but the nature of his crime was unique. He implanted his victims with a deadly device that only he could activate whenever it suited his purpose. This meant that even if he’d tagged a victim with an explosive pacemaker, if the killer didn’t need to eliminate him, the victim could live out his life naturally and not even know he had a bomb planted in his chest. Would such a person still be considered a victim? Wouldn’t he be on the same level as someone born with an undetected heart defect that could kill at any time—or equally could let the person live out his life naturally? Did this unique method of control make the killer the true keeper of the dead? Is that how he saw himself—the ruler of the underworld, holding the life-leashes he could cut at any time? And did this image fit Patterson? Being the Chief Resident at a huge stage psychiatric facility meant he was ambitious but did his ambition stop at this healthy level or did it grow, like a malignant plant shooting its roots in all directions, seeking control?

  Wild and outrageous theories used to thrill me. The impossible and improbable used to be exciting, new challenges, not roadblocks.

  “Let’s visit the Mongrove facility and then you can tell me what you think of Dr. Patterson,” I said, abandoning my critical review.

  We stopped by our district office. Sven was waiting for us with the court order. The mere fact that he didn’t mention having any difficulties obtaining the document so quickly, told me that the entire BPD had been put on notice.

  Bourke would have asked Sven one question. “Is this going to help solve the case—quickly?” Sven was a good cop, smart too. His answer in the affirmative was all Bourke would have needed.

  Ken phoned the Mongrove to inform them of our impending visit. I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea. Patterson would be prepared. But Ken insisted on following protocol.

  The moment I walked out of the small armored cage that was the waiting area at Mongrove and entered the stark, cold expanse of gray-white quarry, I felt something was wrong.

  Field kept staring at the nearly vertical staircase sweeping ahead of us and murmured something about mountain climbing. Ken kept shuffling his feet as if wiping them. He wore rubber-soled shoes and still managed to raise an unearthly echo. I felt the ghostly sound was a warning. I’ve seen churches that had soaring ceilings. Such grandeur had always made me want to kneel and bow my head. Here, I wanted to turn and run.

  I heard a sound in the distance. It was sharp, precise—like a military march.

  This time, Patterson came alone. I saw him when he was still just a tiny figure in this stone temple, indeed a high priest in this severe shrine. The shag whipped wildly around his shoulders. This visual disturbance arrived long before he did.

  He shook Field’s hand with a curious greeting. “I’m sorry. Of course, I’m at your disposal.”

  I started to wonder whether I should file all my education, training and experience in the “false alarm” drawer and work with my “feelings” as the only reliable tool.

  “Social services has looked after all the arrangements,” Patterson was saying, as I quickly banished my reflections. “The funeral expenses as well as the legal requirements. They will post ads in all the major newspapers, asking for any relatives to step forward but according to her file, there were none. She was cremated. I haven’t yet received notification as to where her remains will be interred, though it’s due shortly.”

  Patricia Vanier was dead. Perhaps I knew it—felt it—even as I had stepped through the door. Stone was impervious to suffering and anguish but I felt it emanating from the walls. They gave off gloom, as if the tiny pores in the stone matrix could trap misery, justifying their cold, heartless existence.

  Patricia had a history of violence and roaming while she was incarcerated in Mongrove. Prior to being committed, she was only prone to worry, fear and anxiety on behalf of her fiancé. This drove her to report him missing, kidnapped, threatened, tortured, or murdered—four times in a span of fifteen months. Mongrove drove her to her death.

  “About a week ago, we had a very busy and difficult night,” Patterson said, his voice tinged with fatigue that was not apparent in his military bearing.

  He was not a King Cobra today but neither was he in a good mood. He took us to his office. I was surprised to see it was an edifice, not a cage. The ceilings must have been at least fifteen feet tall and once again, as everywhere else in the facility, unspoiled by higher architectural ambition or finishing touches. All the piping and ducts were exposed, though some had been painted a drab gray color to blend in with the rest of the décor. The amount of metal filing cabinets would have filled a surplus warehouse. They looked like tall, cold grave markers and were appropriately colored in smudged newsprint black. I hadn’t seen a wooden office chair in a long time and reflected that it was because any remaining office furniture from the thirties had been donated to Mongrove. Patterson’s office made a loud statement about the financial status of his facility, perhaps louder than his chipped plastic nametag.

  “It was the night of the full moon. Even the most docile patients were agitated. Only three orderlies were on duty. Five were missing, for medical reasons. Still, even if we’d been at full staff, ten times that many would not have been enough to cope that night. We had more than thirty patients in the lounge, the quieter cases. It reduced the workload for my staff and freed them to attend to the difficult ones individually. This is an old building,” he swept the office that was three times the size of our largest conference room with his hand and continued. “Patricia was surprisingly quiet. That’s why she was included with the patients in the lounge. There is an old laundry chute opening in one corner, in the wall, low to the floor. We had no idea it was there. There are no plans, no blueprints for this building. She crumbled and chipped away the putty and sealant that were pasted over the opening and crawled into the chute. It was a long slide down but that’s not how she broke her neck.” He tossed his head and sent that glorious shag on a violent dance. It was still settling around his shoulders, wriggling like a nest of snakes, when I heard a click.

  “You can watch the rest. The laundry facility area is monitored,” he invited us to turn and face a silver gray sheet covering the wall.

  Ken’s phone call must have given him a chance to prepare this show. For a facility that depended on State grants, Mongrove had a superb monitoring system—in color. Patterson was full of clicks—and surprises. In order to afford us an unobstructed view, he went over to a huge wooden desk. I heard a staccato of clicks. Immediately, a whole row of metal gravestones whirred and moved to the side. Another row tilted as it slid diagonally to clear the view, then returned to horizontal position so gently I was still waiting for the inevitable dunk when the metal connected with the floor. It never came. The tall, rectangular windows darkened. Therefore one of those clicks must have rotated the built-in shutters. By now I would not have been surprised to see a chair approach me on its own. I lowered my head to search the floor for tracks of magneti
c strips. All through this automated show, I kept thinking how much it resembled what went on in the morgue when Joe was working. What were the chances that two Baltimore doctors from unrelated medical disciplines nurtured passion for hi-tech automation? I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a strip of putting green and the ubiquitous white plastic cup with the putting setup driven by some form of automation. Doctors especially needed such stress-reducing measures in their office. Even the NASA control room was probably not operated on remote the way Patterson’s office whirred to life. I started to look around for telltale research journals and magazines lying around when Patterson’s voice made me abandon my preoccupation with impressive automation and technology in a place that claimed to be fearfully underfunded.

  I looked up at the screen and watched Patricia’s final adventure with a sense of foreboding.

  She wore the same dingy beige tracksuit and moved between the rows of huge steel drums and looming boxes as if playing hide-and-seek. She turned often, walking sideways, crossing her feet over each other, like a line-dancer. I couldn’t see her face. The monitoring cameras were behind her. However, from the way she would incline her head now and then, when she stopped, I got an impression that she was listening. Indeed, she moved through the sprawling laundry facility equipped with ancient machinery, as if guided by a voice—listening to instructions—and obeying them.

  Suddenly, her hands flew up above her head and she disappeared.

  “You can’t see it on the tape,” Patterson said from behind us. “The angle of the camera is too high to sweep that portion of the floor but she fell into an open access hole. It’s about the size of a manhole. Maintenance was being done on the conduits that feed through this portion of the facility. The grating had been removed and the maintenance staff forgot to put it back. Of course, we’re investigating this negligence but no one has stepped forward to confess. During the day, when the laundry facility is staffed, there would have been a safety cage with fluorescent flags around that open manhole. It must have interfered with the laundry bins, since they are large and need corresponding clearance to wheel around. Someone must have removed the cage.” He shut off the tape and the screen returned to its flat texture.

  “We’ve established that she was missing no longer than thirty, forty minutes before her disappearance was noticed and a search started. We found her at seven o’clock in the morning, when the first shift arrived at the laundry. Of course, by then security had reviewed the last night’s tapes and we knew where to look.” He finished with that sigh I felt was driven by frustration rather than sorrow or concern.

  We left with every piece of paper that had ever made it into Patricia’s file, no mention of court order necessary. Patterson made the offer before Field and Ken had a chance to raise the subject.

  As we headed for the car, I could hear the shrill cries of gulls, fighting over scraps of food that slithered in the crevices of vast stretches of crumbling concrete. Daniel Kane’s parting words rose like a sorcerer’s chant in my memory. “Certainly, Detective. But would it be safe?”

  Did we endanger Patricia’s life, indeed, shorten it, with our first visit to Mongrove? I consoled myself with reminder that the criminals were winding down their Baltimore operations and the trail of victims was a byproduct. It was a logical conclusion, objective, but its mercenary sub-tone bothered me.

  Field drove to the office and we spent an hour, raining instructions and giving helpful hints to Agent Gould. The distance from Washington must have awakened a little rebel in her because today, she wore jeans—and a well-starched, impeccably ironed pale blue gentleman’s shirt with gold cufflinks. I thought that the little navy blue bowtie was a nice diplomatic touch. When we entered, her marine-blue, boxy jacket was slung over the back of her chair but she hurriedly put it on when her boss appeared.

  I gave her all the good work I’d done on the Washington armored car service and managed not to look relieved when I stacked three fat folders in front of her.

  “Creeslow closed down its operations in Baltimore two months ago,” I told her. “It might be a good idea to check all eleven Washington outfits for their length of time in operation. All might be longtime Washington operators but there’s such a thing as absorbing your competition, accepting new partners—amalgamating. One of those places might have recently expanded to absorb Creeslow, though they would not have kept the name.”

  “I will check the business registry database,” she replied, glancing at her boss for approval and confirmation.

  She received both and for a moment her studious expression softened. Her eyes didn’t just measure her boss but stroked him. I wondered whether Inspector Weston was aware of this tender adoration, no matter how subtle and infrequent it was. His colleague liked her boss—a lot—and not just as a boss.

  “There.” I smacked my hand on top of the file stack. “It’s not in any particular order but everything I’ve pulled off the internet and got over the phone, is in there. The connection is the limos that are provided to ferry the customers in privacy, luxury and with discretion.”

  “Why discretion?” Her eyes glazed over with a hard impersonal sheen. I knew she resented the sound my hand had made on the stack. I’d shot down her tender moment.

  “The function that the customer would be driven to would not be the kind he would advertise or discuss with anyone, except perhaps his closest friends. The second victim, Jeffries, volunteered as a drug-testing subject at pharmacological laboratories. He was well paid for a weekend of blood testing and filling out endless questionnaires. But it’s not the sort of thing you would boast about. Other than his friend, Amato, no one at his work knew what he did on the weekends. Ask those places whether they keep a record of purposes for which they rent or use their limos. The name of a business or a customer would be nice to have too.”

  She didn’t like taking instructions from me. Her pen flew angrily across the sheet of paper as she made notes.

  “We’re going to see Kim’s family.” I nodded at Field who said he would tackle Patricia’s files with Agent Mattis’ help.

  “What do you think is the connection there? How did they get to Kim?” he asked in a tone that put me not just on his level but damn well in his lap. Agent Gould’s pen performed a forceful slash on the paper—an exclamation mark at the end of her notes.

  “Brick worked for Creeslow. He was a sitting duck. Jeffries liked the fringe benefits offered to lab rats. Kim was a college grad with a Master’s degree and a dull bank job—though I’m sure that’s not how he saw it. There had to be a piece of cheese just right for him.”

  “Everyone has a vice?” Field asked, tipping his eyebrows.

  “You never miss if you target human nature.”

  He thought about this for a long time then said, “There’s a lot of raw human nature hiding underneath the polished exterior of Washington’s politicians.”

  “As far as these people are concerned, Washington is the biggest cheese factory there is and they already have the right trap.”

  “Dinner tonight?” His voice vibrated after me. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to see the gloom-box with the navy blue bowtie.

  Speaking over my shoulder, I answered, “You can help my housekeeper cook it and feed my kid if I’m not home by six.”

  Chapter 29

  “It looks the same, Ken,” I said, for the umpteenth time, watching my partner circle his Malibu in our parking lot. He was not convinced. After another five minutes of reassuring him that his car looked as good as it had before a dead body landed on it, we headed west, for Violetville, for our appointment with Felix Kim’s parents.

  Violent, uncontrolled grief can be frightening but also purging and liberating. Once the rage and outpouring of emotions run their gamut, there is settling, spiritual reconciliation and eventually a heavy peace that with time, grows lighter.

  Samuel and Celia Kim were holding their grief inside. The pressure from keeping something so violent and painful caged
had to be enormous and yet they greeted us with subdued politeness and cordiality. Their reserve had to have roots in their Oriental heritage and their strength in their family and friends who had gathered to offer support.

  The sprawling bungalow was teeming with visitors when we were invited to step inside. Black was the predominant color of attire but the children were allowed to wear their party best. I apologized for intruding on their private commemorative gathering. They assured me with incredible calm that they understood and were ready to answer our questions. As we passed through the kitchen, on our way to the library in the rear of the house, I saw a black lacquer bowl on the table, filled with glossy, flaming red envelopes embossed with gold Chinese characters. When we left, we each carried, one in our pockets, a ceremonial envelope with a silver coin inside. It was an ancient custom, part of a Chinese wake, though the services had been conducted in the Roman Catholic faith.

  It was difficult to ask questions meant to discover their dead son’s vices but once again, they were incredibly understanding—and sensitive. Felix had a younger sister, still in college, working toward a degree in accounting. He was the male in the family and much hope had rested on his shoulders when it came to continuing the family name. It was a traditional outlook, parochial but I couldn’t fault them for it. He was a good son and made them proud all his life. Perhaps that’s why they saw no harm in his passion for gambling. It was not a destructive vice that made a huge dent in his wallet but from what they told us—once again with astonishing frankness and clarity—it was a commanding habit. He worked hard at the bank and when he amassed overtime, he would take it off and enjoy a junket to Atlantic City.

  “Let’s see if Endless Tours is still in business,” Ken said as we left the somber house of grief.

  “You drive and I’ll be your navigator,” I told him.

  An hour later, we were lost but only because my partner couldn’t tell the difference between tollway, highway, Interstate and freeway symbols, though he was pretty good recognizing the numbers. Once we sorted out our feelings and decided to compromise in terms of where to lay the blame, we took the first exit and found ourselves in Overlea. Ten minutes later, we parked in front of the Endless Tours travel bureau, on a surprisingly quiet business street.