An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)

by P J Parrish

  Louis stared at the cartoon for a moment, then put it down. “Depressing,” he said.

  “The severe overcrowding led to a sharp decline in care,” Dr. Seraphin went on, “which led to a return to old practices like restraints, ice baths, and shock therapy. But then, in the 1930s, mental health got the answer to its problems—transorbital lobotomy.”

  “That’s what they gave to Jack Nicholson in that movie,” Louis said.

  Dr. Seraphin gave a nod and a grimace.

  “How did it work?” Louis asked.

  Dr. Seraphin let out a long breath. “First they would sedate the patient, then insert a device through the eyelid into the frontal lobe. They would then tap the device with a hammer and after the appropriate depth was achieved, manipulate the device back and forth in a swiping motion within the patient’s head.” She paused. “It was very quick, very efficient, and very popular.”

  She saw the horrified look on Louis’s face and went on.

  “The lobotomy was mental health’s darkest hour, and I only tell you this so you can understand how far we have come,” she said.

  Louis leveled his eyes at her. “I’m here to learn from you, Doctor, not condemn you.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she carefully gathered up the old postcard and the newspaper clipping and slipped them back in her desk drawer.

  “So how did things get from lobotomies to mass patient releases?” Louis asked.

  Dr. Seraphin looked up. “To oversimplify things, Thorazine.”

  “That’s a drug,” Louis said.

  She nodded. “Thorazine and other drugs made it possible to cut down on the time patients needed to spend in hospitals. Plus, opinion shifted. It was thought that with proper medication, patients could function on their own in society.”

  She toyed with the edge of a folder on her desk. “The intention was good. The idea was to protect the rights of mental patients.”

  Louis was getting impatient. “So how does this explain how a serial rapist and murderer could have been let loose?”

  Her eyes shot up to his. “I am sure that did not happen at Hidden Lake.”

  Louis shook his head slowly. “With all due respect, Dr. Seraphin, what you have been describing makes me believe just about anything is possible.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then folded her hands and placed them on the desk. “In 1960, there were half a million people in mental institutions in this country,” she said. “Things changed fast—legislation, insurance, public opinion, psychiatry. Places like Hidden Lake were expected to do everything—train staff, treat and diagnose outpatients, do research. Before, Hidden Lake had been like a caretaker, but it got so we were being asked to do everything with no funding or support. It was like a Model T trying to compete in the Indy 500.”

  She paused. “I knew it was going to end,” she said softly. “I had worked at Hidden Lake for more than twenty years, but I knew the world was closing in on us and it was just a matter of time.”

  Louis waited. The doctor was staring at her folded hands. Finally she looked up. “The end for places like Hidden Lake came, for all practical purposes, in 1972.”

  “Why then?” Louis prodded.

  “A federal court ruled that patients couldn’t work unless they were paid.”

  She gave a small laugh. “Sounds so benign, doesn’t it? But that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. We had always relied on the patients to run Hidden Lake—the gardens, the dairy, the kitchens, the apple orchards. We made quite a tidy profit selling apples and cider and such.”

  She looked up at Louis. “But it wasn’t just the money. The work was good for the patients. It gave them a sense of purpose, of being part of something real and productive.”

  She shook her head. “After that, there was more pressure to move patients. We were even given monetary rewards for decreasing the number of our inpatients. We released three-fourths of our population in the early seventies.”

  “Where did they go?” Louis asked.

  “Halfway houses, nursing homes, some back to their families.” She shook her head slowly. “Many just ended up on the street. It was very traumatic for patients.”

  Louis thought of the homeless men and women he had seen crouched in the storefronts of downtown Fort Myers or hunched on beachfront benches. He thought of Charlie, finding his way to the gates of Hidden Lake with nowhere else to go.

  And he thought of some faceless, senseless, murderous man who had somehow been let loose from Hidden Lake decades ago and now had come back to haunt its ruins.

  “Dr. Seraphin,” Louis said, “why would he come back?”

  She stared at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Whoever killed these women at Hidden Lake. Why now? Why would he come back and commit his crimes there?”

  She leveled her piercing eyes at him. “Because it’s his home.”

  There was a soft tap on the glass of the door. Dr. Seraphin’s eyes went to the door and then to her wristwatch. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “but I have an appointment.”

  Louis rose, picking up his jacket. The doctor got up and went to the door, opening it. A young woman, clutching some books, was waiting.

  “Go on in, Mona, I’ll only be a moment,” Dr. Seraphin said. She led Louis out into the hall and closed the door behind her.

  “I need your help,” Louis said.

  “I don’t know what I can do,” Dr. Seraphin said.

  “We need to find a suspect in those files still in E Building.”

  “I don’t how much use I can be. As I told you, I was the assistant deputy superintendent. By 1956, I no longer had direct contact with any patients.”

  “But you would know who to look for,” Louis said.

  She shook her head.

  Louis leaned forward. “Dr. Seraphin, this guy isn’t going to stop. We need some help.”

  She was quiet, looking at him. “All right,” she said finally. “If you can get access to the files legally I could look at them and try to interpret the contents, perhaps tell you what symptoms to look for.”

  “I need more than that,” Louis said. “I need you to give me some possible names.”

  Dr. Seraphin’s chin tilted up in surprise. “That would be unethical,” she said.

  “I know,” Louis said. “But isn’t there some ethic about alerting the authorities when a patient poses a danger to others?”

  “In a manner of speaking, but you’re asking me to put dozens of people under the police spotlight simply because they once were patients, and for those who have managed to pull their lives together, it could be devastating.”

  “Just give us some names to check out,” Louis said, hearing an urgency in his own voice. “I promise you if they don’t look to be a suspect we won’t even speak with them.”

  Dr. Seraphin was quiet, and he could not tell if she was growing irritated or contemplating his request. He tried something else.

  “Look,” he said, “right now, he’s attracted to Hidden Lake. That’s where he kills and that may be where he’s still living. But when the place closes, he’ll have no choice but to move on, and when that happens, we may never find him.”

  She moved a manicured hand through her cropped gray hair and glanced down the hall. Then she sighed.

  “I need your word,” Dr. Seraphin said, “that you will not contact any of these people until you are almost positive they could be your killer.”

  “You have it.”

  Dr. Seraphin sighed again. “I will have to refresh my memory,” she said. “You said the E Building files were still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will need to look through them.”

  “You’ll come out there?”

  Dr. Seraphin offered a half smile. “Unlike you, Mr. Kincaid, I have no qualms about E Building. It was my home for many years, too.”

  “When can you come?”

  “I have to go to Milwaukee tomorrow for a seminar, but I will be
back Wednesday,” she said. “I have a place out on Wampler’s Lake and was planning on taking a few days’ rest there when I get back. I suppose I could meet you at Hidden Lake Thursday morning.”

  “That would be great,” Louis said.

  “I think it would be helpful if I were to see whatever information you have on the murders.”

  “You want to profile him?”

  She nodded. “Exactly. Whatever you can provide will be useful.”

  “Thank you,” Louis said, extending a hand.

  Dr. Seraphin shook his hand slowly. “Now I have a request of you, Mr. Kincaid.”

  “Anything.”

  “No one is to know I’m coming back to Hidden Lake. I will meet only with you.”

  “I understand.”

  Dr. Seraphin turned toward her office. “I hope so,” she said. Then she disappeared inside, the door closing softly behind her.

  CHAPTER 26

  The house was quiet. Louis waited just inside the door for a moment, listening for movement, but there was none. Phillip’s second car, a small silver Ford, was not in the driveway and Louis had assumed either Phillip or Frances was out, but it seemed they both were. He was surprised. The last few times he had been in a room with both of them, they hadn’t been able to look at each other. So maybe this was good.

  Upstairs in his room, he pulled off his jacket and shoes, thinking about Dr. Seraphin.

  He knew that what she was going to do was unethical and Louis wasn’t sure that farther down the road their little trip back through those records wouldn’t end up destroying an entire case against this guy. And he felt bad that he couldn’t tell Dalum.

  All the way home from Ann Arbor, Louis had thought about the Ardmore badge in his wallet, and he had to remind himself that some of the things he had grown used to doing as a P.I. couldn’t be done here. But then he remembered how Rebecca Gruber’s thighs had looked, and how her insides had been torn up by someone jamming a piece of metal up her, and he knew he would go through with it, and that he would let Dr. Seraphin go through with it, too.

  When he came back downstairs to the kitchen, he noticed a note next to the phone. It was from Phillip, a message that Joe had called. Louis picked up the phone and dialed her Miami number. It rang eight times before he heard her voice. But it was the answering machine.

  “Hey, Joe,” he said after the beep. “It’s me. Just got back and got your message you called. Listen, I’ve got a lot going here right now and I still don’t know when I’ll be home. I’ve gotten involved in a case . . .”

  He paused for a second, always struck with the weirdness of speaking into a machine.

  “This case is a tough one,” he went on. “I wish you were here so I could bounce some things off you, like we do sometimes. But anyway, if I get a chance, I’ll call later.”

  Again, he paused, thinking he should say something else, but he didn’t. He hung up the phone and went out to the living room, stretching out on the sofa, watching the shadows of an early darkness move across the ceiling. It occurred to him that he still might be here at Christmas. Joe would understand, because she knew how a case could crawl inside and eat at you until it was solved. But eleven-year old Ben would not. They had plans for the holidays.

  Damn it. He wanted to wrap this up. And maybe with Dr. Seraphin’s help, they could find the killer soon. But what about Claudia?

  He had deliberately avoided giving Phillip any more details beyond the suggestion that maybe Claudia had been cremated in error. He hadn’t told him about those cans of ashes. And he was thinking now that maybe it was better to bring him home an urn filled with the ashes of an unknown patient and let Phillip believe what he needed to so he could grieve in a way that wouldn’t destroy the rest of his life.

  But that was just another lie on top of a case filled with them, and before he did that, there was something he needed to do. He wanted to give Claudia one more chance to tell him where she was.

  Louis went upstairs and pulled out Claudia’s medical folder. He flipped it open. Her photo was right on top and he gave it a long look, hoping to see something new in her face that would help him know more about her. But there was nothing but those dark holes that were her eyes.

  He took the folder back to the bed and spread it open, setting the picture up against the lamp on the nightstand. He started with dated treatment notes, hoping to find the periods of isolation Millie Reuben had told him about. But after Phillip had torn the file apart, Louis hadn’t put it back together in any kind of order. Things were hard to find and he had to sort each piece of paper, trying to match it up with papers that looked similar or had the same headings.

  The bedroom grew dark and he had gone through two Dr Peppers and a sandwich by the time he was able to figure out that the long gaps in any kind of treatments or medications must be the isolation periods. He wrote them down on a legal pad.

  Claudia had been admitted to Hidden Lake in October of 1951, and had been put on Thorazine. But the records showed she had been taken off the drug almost immediately. There were no other treatments recorded until the late summer of 1952, when Claudia and Millie tried to escape.

  Claudia had been sent to E Building right after that, and for the next few years, her treatments were frequent, alternating between ice baths and electric shock until early 1955, when the notes from the same period stated “the patient remains angry and unresponsive to therapy.”

  Louis adjusted his glasses, trying to decipher the scrawled writings: Patient delusional; speaks of visits from her father. According to the patient’s family history, patient’s father committed suicide.

  Louis stared at that line for a moment. He had heard things about mental illness running in families and he wondered when and how the father had done this. He scribbled a note to himself to find out and went on reading.

  The insulin therapy was begun within months of the previous notation. The remarks changed from labeling Claudia as rebellious to compliant: Patient seems listless and unconcerned about her own welfare. Refuses to bathe herself. Patient also has become delusional and speaks of hearing voices.

  It was much of the same for the next four or five years. Daily doses of Thorazine. Occasional insulin shock. And the notation: Patient is unresponsive.

  Louis closed his eyes for a second, and lifted his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. Then he glanced over at Claudia’s photo on the nightstand. He was up to 1959 now. Claudia was twenty-five. The prime of her life. A time she should have been getting married, having children, or starting a career.

  He went back to the file.

  January 1959: Patient isolated in West Isolation Ward. The paperwork gave no reason, but maybe it was written down somewhere else he couldn’t find, or maybe they didn’t even need a reason.

  December 29, 1959: Patient returned to general population. Patient now self-injurious, cutting herself and burning herself.

  Louis leaned closer, reading the words again.

  Jesus . . .

  Claudia had been burned. But had she done it herself—or had she been a victim like Millie and Rebecca? If it was the latter, he had a third rape victim tied to the hospital. But the time line was different now. The earliest date was no longer Millie’s burning and rape in 1964; it was Claudia’s burn notation in 1959.

  But how could something like that happen to both Millie and Claudia five years apart in a place that was supposed to be secure? How could a patient run wild and victimize women?

  Louis leaned back against the headboard. Maybe the rapist wasn’t a patient. Maybe he simply dressed like one so the women didn’t know who he really was. Maybe he was an orderly, or worse, a doctor.

  He reached over to take a drink of Dr Pepper and adjusted his glasses to keep reading.

  Claudia was isolated again in the fall of 1961, and again in late 1963, both times for almost a year. There were no additional references to burns, but he had no reason to assume she couldn’t have been raped and burned again during those time
s.

  By late 1969, her treatments started to dwindle off to almost nothing. The doctor’s remarks grew infrequent, almost like Claudia was no longer receiving any significant care. And he guessed by that time, the insulin had eaten away any functioning part of her brain. Then he read something that confirmed what he had been thinking:

  Patient experiences long periods of depression, and at times appears catatonic and unresponsive to outside stimuli. Patient still hearing voices and no longer recognizes visitors.

  Louis stared at the last line. Visitors?

  He set that paper aside and started rifling through the others for something else. They kept track of visitors at prisons. Why wouldn’t they do it at this place?

  Here it was.

  The first entry was December 1951, about two months after she was admitted. The visitor was Rodney DeFoe. There were probably fifteen other entries on this page that went up to early 1962, and Rodney DeFoe was on every line. It looked like he visited her a couple of times a year, mostly in the spring. No one else was on the visitors’ log.

  But there were ten more years of visitor logs to look at, and Louis started sifting through the papers, but he only found two for Claudia: April 1969 and the last entry, April 1972.

  April 1972?

  That didn’t seem right. What had Phillip said?

  It was right after my fortieth birthday. I went back to the hospital and they told me she had died there a year before.

  Louis knew Phillip’s birthday was December 18. And if he remembered right, Phillip was born in 1932, which meant his fortieth birthday was December of 1972. Dr. Seraphin had told him that Claudia died during a flu epidemic during the winter of ’71-’72.

  But this log listed a visit from Rodney in April of 1972, four or five months after Dr. Seraphin claimed Claudia was already dead.

  Louis pulled off his glasses. Something was wrong. Or someone was mistaken. Memories—especially hard ones—could be unreliable, and Phillip was having a tough enough time with all this. Or maybe he himself was wrong about the year Phillip was born. Or maybe he wasn’t remembering clearly what Dr. Seraphin had told him.