[Criminally Insane 01.0] Bad Karma

by Douglas Clegg

  The police were still there, an invisible presence, for they were down in Ward A getting coffee. Jim didn’t feel they were that necessary, except for incarcerating Rob Fallon yet again, this time in a less psychiatric-friendly prison—but that would come later, after Rob underwent yet another trial for murder and another psychiatric evaluation. Cops just got in the way, Jim thought. They tended to be brutish and nasty about the inmates; Jim felt a kind of paternal concern for the psychos on his shift. Thank god the cops are out of my hair for now.

  But they’d be back soon, sniffing around for Donna’s body. Jim had no doubt that she was stuffed into some locker or cupboard somewhere on the hall. It wasn’t the first time a staff member had bitten it, but it was the first time, to Jim’s knowledge, that it had been a woman murdered. And one as seemingly competent as Donna Howe. Only Rob Fallon would know where her body lay, and he wasn’t going to start talking ‘til his shrink showed up.

  “Rita,” Jim said. “You want to hear something funny?”

  Rita Paulsen looked up from the tray. She was not very bright, nor was she particularly competent, but she was tough on the job. She had a face like an angel, but she could hold down a patient in the middle of a psychotic rage if the situation arose. She was definitely an asset to the ward. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “That was Campbell on the phone. He thinks that Hatcher killed Donna. Says she’s in her bed waiting for us.” He laughed thinking of how absurd the idea was. He had a laugh like a bull elephant. It echoed down the ward. “Ever since he shot that guy in his backyard, he’s been completely paranoid.”

  Rita shook her head, “Can’t blame him, given this place. But, let’s face it, if Hatcher had wanted to get us, she would’ve done it earlier. I was in there. She was snoring like a baby, you know, same old same old.” Rita looked at her watch. “Well, we can test out his theory. You want to come with me to go feed the Gorgon?”

  Gorgon was Hatcher’s nickname among some of the staff. They were all afraid of her eyes, because she seemed smarter and more watchful than the other patients. Although that was not the reason for the cloth over her face. The cloth was there because if the staff needed to feed her or be anywhere near her face, she had a mean overbite. Still, the face-cloth added to the myth of the Gorgon.

  “Okay,” Jim said. “Sure. Let’s go feed the Gorgon. But I don’t want to look at her. Last time I did, it was like she was studying me for something.”

  “For her next meal,” Rita Paulsen grinned. “Ready?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Agnes Hatcher’s room had been an enormous walk-in refrigerator twenty years before. Then it was converted into a room for a patient named Emily Freund who had murdered her children and spent most of her life trying to tear the flesh off her own bones. The refrigerator walls were knocked out, and the room expanded, but it was again reinforced with steel doors. Most patients were able to come and go at certain times of the day, but Agnes, owing to her constant violent and aggressive tendencies, was restrained almost ‘round the clock. In the afternoon, she was allowed to stand for four hours, restrained with her arms up in straps and her feet secured near the floor. She had one hour of exercise a day, in another room, almost a cell, by herself. A television monitor played an exercise tape, if she so chose to do calisthenics. But the majority of the rest of her life would be spent in that bed, strapped in, face covered. To outsiders, this often seemed horrifying.

  But then, as the therapists, doctors, and psych techs and orderlies knew, this was Agnes Hatcher.

  This was the Gorgon.

  She had been a patient at Darden after being transferred from another hospital up the coast, because she had caused a riot among the patients. A very liberal-thinking doctor had given her a certain amount of freedom, believing that her psychosis arose from a childhood of abuse and deprivation. She rewarded her doctor by operating on him, as he was held down by the weight of concrete blocks, without the benefit of anesthesia. They said he lived for six more hours, but when he was found, he was begging for death—which came within minutes of the paramedics’ arrival.

  At Darden, she had bitten off three fingers of an orderly within two hours of her check-in. Within twenty-four hours, she was under constant restraint.

  Outside Darden’s walls, she had surgically removed a woman’s liver on her coffee table, and played with it for awhile. She claimed that the woman was a recovering alcoholic who had lapsed one too many times. Her liver had been her problem. She had murdered a police officer, which was the crime that led to her arrest and the discovery of all her other murders. When the police arrested her, it took six men, and she had to be beaten into submission. On the walls of her house, they found dozens of notes with the addresses of all the policemen who had ever bothered her, and their children’s schools; also, of doctors who had examined her, and their families, and of lawyers who had been unkind or threatening to her over bad debts. Others, too, names and addresses to which she had no apparent connection—all were slated for torture and death. On some of them, she intended to perform her perverse surgery.

  She had been planning on slicing off parts of their bodies as souvenirs.

  In her home, they found a collection of penises, bladders, livers, hearts, and lungs, and one jar of preserved brains. Some had come from animals, some from unidentified humans. She owned several surgical instruments, most of which had been stolen from hospitals over the years. She had created her own, using hybrids of fingernail scissors and metal nail files and other household items. She had turned the small den of her home in Pasadena into her surgery, and there was enough evidence of carnage there that one of the investigating officers had remarked, “Forensics is going to spend years trying to figure out what belongs to who.”

  She had been a high school teacher in Pasadena for several years.

  She believed strongly in reincarnation, and that life was a continuum from one incarnation to the next; she attended All Saints Church, and considered herself an heretical Episcopalian.

  She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley. With a degree in forensic science.

  At the time of her arrest, she was a teacher and lecturer at various police academies in the southern California area.

  She was a member of the Junior League.

  Her ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, but had not been to a meeting in several years.

  She contributed heavily to the Children’s Defense Fund and the World Wildlife Fund.

  She voted Republican whenever she voted, but leaned towards a Libertarian philosophy.

  She was a member in good standing of MENSA.

  A neighbor, just before Agnes’ arrest, had been trying to set her up with his cousin.

  She had subscription tickets to the L.A. Philharmonic.

  She was the Gorgon.

  Rita opened the door to Agnes Hatcher’s room. Flicked the light up. “Time to wake up, Miss Hatcher.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the bed, the patient moaned.

  Waking up.

  “Jesus,” Jim Anderson said, stepping around Rita Paulsen, “Has she been spitting up blood?”

  A spackling of red was on the olive drab blanket.

  In his mind, he knew that Campbell had been right. The Gorgon must’ve killed Donna Howe. She must’ve somehow gotten loose. She was playing a game with them. He held his breath for a second, wondering if he should call Howie and Dave into the room to help hold Hatcher down.

  But he saw her hand; it was in the restraint. It was definitely in the restraint.

  The cloth face cover was soaked red.

  “It wasn’t like that earlier,” Rita said, sounding a bit defensive as well as confused.

  Jim knew that Rita was occasionally negligent. He knew, considering all the black marks in her file, that she might be fired for not noticing something like this on her rounds. Maybe, he thought, with the lights out, maybe
you wouldn’t see the red. Maybe you wouldn’t even look at where Hatcher’s face was, because you thought of her as the Gorgon and didn’t even like thinking of her as a human being.

  His first impulse was to remove the face cover, but he remembered, for a second, what Campbell had told him.

  Or warned him about.

  No cops in the hall, and no metal rods on hand. He looked at Rita. “You ready to see her?”

  Rita Paulsen shuddered a little. “Whenever.”

  “She may attack. Stand back a little, okay?”

  Rita moved to the side, but did not seem very nervous.

  At least, not as nervous as Jim Anderson felt inside. He figured if he pulled the face cover off swiftly, then maybe he could jump back. It was important to not lean into inmates like this. It was important to be ready to step backwards, so that if they lunged, you’d be safe.

  Cautiously, he went over to the edge of the bed.

  The hand in the restraint, what he could see of it, twitched slightly, then dropped as if Hatcher were asleep and dreaming.

  Jim checked his own balance to ensure that, if she did make a grab for him, he could move back without falling.

  He leaned over the inmate, and lifted the face cover.

  Beneath it, a mass of blood.

  A woman’s eyes staring up at him, as if she were trying to scream but could not with her mouth, nor would her vocal cords muster much more than a reedy whine.

  Only with her eyes, wide open, could she signal pain and suffering.

  He knew those eyes.

  His first thought:

  Campbell was wrong.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Trey Campbell had grown experienced at blocking bad memories. This was one of the side effects of working at Darden. For those psych techs and orderlies who could not block out or deny the work environment reality, there were often breakdowns or burn outs. Several psychiatrists over the past three decades had left Darden never to practice their craft again because they no longer believed in the gods of Jung and Freud. Occasionally, there were suicide attempts.

  But Trey could not block the memory that hit him full force as he sat back, after hanging up the phone with Anderson.

  Trey was twenty two, a new hire at Darden. He was going for walks with Hatcher in the garden. He believed that Agnes Hatcher was somewhere inside the abused woman beside him. He believed her childhood had been taken away and her brain had been damaged through torture. She was smart, he thought. He believed then that if a person was smart enough, she could be rehabilitated in some form. He played chess with her often; he brought her books, mainly Charles Dickens novels, which she loved.

  And then, one day, he slipped.

  He told her something which he regretted as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “It’s Ballantine. He has this theory about human behavior.”

  Agnes bent down to pick a flower. “Look at these roses,” she said, glancing back at him. Her blond hair fell to one side of her neck. She was pretty, although the faintest scar tissue could still be seen just at the corners of her eyes, and along her neck. “The psychiatrist? I like him.”

  “I just don’t think you need to be in those restraints all the time. That’s all. You’ve proven to me that your illness is chemical and behavioral. Ballantine talks about my patients like they’re…” He searched for the appropriate word.

  “Monsters?” she asked. She stood up again. “You believe in me, don’t you?”

  “I believe that no human being should be shut away and hog-tied.” That was when he knew he had said too much. She had a way about her, though. Something which inspired confidence. An almost hypnotic quality. For a moment, he felt like the patient, and she, the psych tech. “Let’s go back. You’re due for some meds.”

  “I don’t like Ballantine,” she said. He watched her face for signs of tension, but she seemed perfectly balanced, perfectly relaxed.

  It wasn’t until he came upon her two weeks later that he knew he had made a mistake of gargantuan proportion.

  She had just gone in her room from one of her walks. The psychiatrist, Ballantine, had been there with his clipboard and drawings for her to examine. Agnes was already on every pill known to the medical community at that time. Every pill that would subdue the strongest man.

  Trey could not forget: walking down the hallway, smiling at one of the nurses, who smiled back. The way his head was throbbing from a mid-afternoon headache. The smell of the laundry, for back then, it had been on his ward. That clean soap smell that seemed to cover all the other smells of Darden State. He was thinking of the fishing trip he and his buddies were going to take in a few days—deep-sea fishing off San Pedro, three hours out. He had thrown in his sixty bucks towards the boat rental. He was broke for the week from that, but he would catch enough fish to fill his freezer and then some.

  He walked past Agnes Hatcher’s room, glancing through the thick glass windows. Sometimes he nodded to her as he went.

  He stopped, turned, and went back to her door.

  Through the window, he saw Agnes leaning over the psychiatrist like a lioness over her prey.

  She turned and saw him.

  A faint oval of red around her mouth.

  The psychiatrist’s skin had been peeled back along his scalp.

  She had been trying to open his skull up to find his brain. After hours of operations and grafts, Ballantine survived, but never practiced at Darden again.

  Later, restrained, she told Trey, “He lived in his head. I wanted to set him free.”

  It was the last time that Trey Campbell had ever seen Agnes Hatcher without her face cover on.

  It was the beginning of her obsession with him. An obsession which would last right up to the present summer day, July third, when he was thirty-six.

  Trey took three aspirin, and swallowed them dry. He stood in the kitchen of the rented house and kept trying to block those old memories. We’re safe, he told himself. We’re in a cottage on an island twenty-six miles off the coast, about one hundred and forty miles from Darden State. She’s in her restraints. She can’t do anything to us. To me.

  Carly sauntered into the kitchen and said, “How about a little romance to take your mind off this?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Now? I thought you were going to take a nap,” Trey said, wiping his hands clean with a washcloth. He hadn’t heard back from Jim Anderson just yet. He had gone to make some fresh orange juice, but spilled juice all over the counter instead. Carly stood in the doorway in his blue T-shirt that barely covered her thighs.

  “Yes, now,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep. We have the place to ourselves for a few hours…why not now?”

  Trey got a sponge and wiped the rest of the counter and cutting-board clean of juice. He dropped the sponge in the sink.

  His mind was still on Agnes Hatcher. He found that the more he tried to block his fear about her from his mind, the more she seemed to be engraved in his thoughts. He glanced at Carly. Strange to think of both Carly and the Gorgon, as if one face was, briefly, superimposed over the other. Agnes Hatcher was not a bad looking woman, either; different, though, petite, blond, an elfish kind of face. Almost innocent. And then those eyes…When Agnes Hatcher flashed them at you, it was like a lightning bolt, it was like twin lasers cutting through your skin. She was only a human being, but Trey Campbell had seen those small blue eyes enough times to know that they contained the ferocity of a tiger.

  Carly frowned. It must’ve been obvious to her that his mind was elsewhere.

  “Trey, just you and me and Catalina,” Carly walked right up to him and threw her arms around his waist. “The smell of the ocean, the clean air, the breeze…what are we waiting for, violins and roses? When we get back, it’ll be nothing but work for months to come. No get-aways, no times to ourselves. Just enough time for kids and jobs. But, right now…” She brought a hand up to his collar and stroked the edge of his chin. She let her hand slide down to his chest. “Sometimes I for
get how to even be romantic—where to put my arms, how to relax, how to be just like when we met, when it was you and me and chemistry. Remember?”

  Trey nodded, grinning. “All that stuff at work,” he said. “It’s just got me so wound up.” He felt incredibly warm with her, comfortable, as if they were not two people, but one person, complete, together. They’d had the roughest year of their marriage—not because they didn’t love each other or care for each other, but because the kids and the job and school all seemed to conspire to keep them unconnected.

  And that dark morning with the shadow and the white flash from gunshot.

  The memory always threatened the horizon for him, like a coming storm. He shut his eyes, opened them, as if it would stop the memory from coming.

  “No work talk,” she rested her head against his chest.

  “Jim’s supposed to call back soon.”

  “Fine. Then he’ll call back soon and you can deal with it. But if we have even a half hour to ourselves in this love nest, I say, let’s take advantage of it.” She looked up at him; he could tell that she was trying to see if interest was stirring. She kissed him, rather aggressively.

  Her lips tasted like the sea. He closed his eyes. Her taste was always wonderful, sweet and sour at the same time. He brought his arms around her, his hands exploring her back, down to her thighs. The sensations he felt were both exciting and soothing.

  She wiped her lips across his face, to his chin, his neck. He kissed the rim of her ear. As if by instinct, he lifted her up, his hands beneath her, her legs wrapping around him, and carried her over to the couch. The blinds were up, but there was nothing in view other than the pool and the hills. A hawk circled above the hills, against a blue and white sky.

  She whispered, “I love you, I love you.”

  He, too, whispered the warmest things he knew, and felt burning and strong as he made love to his wife, the woman he had dreamed of loving since the moment he’d first seen her. She moved beneath him, and his body responded. In the last moment, he glanced out the porch doors, out to the hawk in the sky and watched it dive after some unseen prey, dive down until it was invisible among the trees.