Bad Bones (Claire Morgan)

by Linda Ladd

  The door beside her suddenly opened and out walked the specified handler of the really, really bloodthirsty head cases captured anywhere in the wilds of the great state of Missouri. Which had once included one Thomas Landers, a psychopath who had displayed a neat bullet hole in his forehead the last time Claire had seen his scary face bathed in some equally eerie blue blinking light. But that nightmare was over now, and a hearty thank-you to Black for that rather excellent sharpshooting and deader-than-dead-man ending. But she didn’t want to think about that right now, or any other time ever in her entire future life, either. Never would be too soon, in fact.

  Black was up on his feet now, as athletic and agile as he was on the tennis court or golf course, no doubt, hand outstretched, that famous dimpled and killer smile on his face. He glad-handed his old colleague with lots of goodwill and happy feelings. “Hey, Hank. Good to see you. Thanks for seeing us so quickly.”

  Henry LeCorps looked and dressed a lot like some nerdy professor who played bridge with a bunch of women on Tuesdays and taught some dumb university course like Greek Literature and Its Effect on Hedonistic Values of the Renaissance Female, or something even worse. Little tiny guy, with a narrow blond mustache and wavy blond hair, black-rimmed glasses, navy argyle sweater vest with a yellow-and-blue pastel plaid shirt underneath, soft hands, soft face, soft everything. He was now smiling up at Black, way up, since Black was six-four and LeCorps was five-four, if that. “My pleasure, of course. It’s good to see you, too. What’s it been now? A couple of years, at least.”

  “Yeah, about that. Please allow me to introduce my fiancée, Claire Morgan. She’s the detective I was telling you about on the telephone.”

  LeCorps turned to her and observed her in such a professionally interested way that it made Claire wonder exactly what Black had been telling the guy about her on the telephone. Probably just about anything LeCorps heard about her life would necessitate an emergency clinical evaluation and immediate enforced hospitalization, straitjacket buckled tight.

  “So you are the Claire Morgan. Well, I can see now what all the stir is about.”

  After that, Claire had an almost irrepressible desire to insult him soundly about his last name. If Bud had been there instead of Black, and if Dr. Corpse hadn’t been Black’s old bud, she might have dressed him down a tad. However, she was no doubt overreacting again to her infamy and controlled herself and was nothing if not polite.

  “How do you do, doctor? I’m not sure what you mean by stir, but I guess you’re going to tell me, right?”

  LeCorps smiled and studied her face very closely some more, just like every stupid shrink she had ever been forced to go see, except for Black, who usually just wanted to kiss her and smooch a little when he stared at her like that. Okay, he’d wanted to analyze her, too, a couple of times, but not lately.

  “Oh, my dear, I fear that I have offended you. But please don’t take my words in the wrong way. It’s just that you were all that Thomas Landers would ever talk about in our sessions, and then after spending a lot of time in Landers’s company, Mr. Fitch did so as well. They were very good friends for a while when they were here together. Actually, they were inseparable during their free socialization time in the common room. But, please, come into my office so we can sit down and talk privately.”

  Yeah, a Landers and Fitch duet was a match made in hell, all right. One was already there. One down and one to go, if all went according to plan.

  But in they went and found the proverbial couch on which to have one’s head examined. Actually, it was a tufted red leather chaise longue with a matching doctor’s easy chair right beside it. Thank God, Black was forward thinking and avoided couches in his practice. She had reclined on more psychiatrists’ sofas than she liked to think about in her rather horror-filled past.

  They all sat down around his desk, and LeCorps studied Claire some more, enough, in fact, to set her teeth on edge. “I take it that you haven’t located Mr. Fitch yet,” he finally said. “We were all so shocked when he managed to escape the way he did.”

  “No, we haven’t. But I do have a court order right here that would allow us to look into his files as documenting his stay here at this hospital.”

  “Of course. It’s highly irregular, of course, but as I’m sure you know, Mr. Fitch is extremely dangerous. Even more so than was Thomas Landers, in my professional opinion. In fact, I believe he’s the most dangerous psychopath that I have ever encountered in my practice of thirty-two years.”

  Claire and Black exchanged a skeptical look at that one. “That is surprising,” Claire said to him. “Even worse than Thomas Landers, you say?” Who had been an insane, bloodthirsty, raving maniac, plus some.

  “I understand why you would be surprised. Nick told me some of the background concerning your association with Mr. Landers, and of course, I already knew a lot of what had transpired from Thomas’s own words and actions during our sessions. I am so sorry that you had to go through so much at his hands, detective.”

  Well, that makes two of us, Claire thought. But she did not want to talk about that. “Why do you think Fitch is more dangerous than Landers and the others?”

  “For one thing, Thomas Landers was really only interested in you. He would only harm people who he felt were keeping him away from you or that you cared about or who would help you get away from him or who he needed to kill in order to get to you. You see, it was all about you, every single facet of his life. Fitch, on the other hand, he kills at will because he likes it. He likes to kill just about anything breathing, but he especially loves killing people, and anyone will do. Man, woman, or child. Apparently, he’s been trained from childhood to hammer a person with his fists with no regard for their pain or horror or terror. He has zero empathy, absolutely none. He could care less if he hurts someone, or if he subjects them to inhuman amounts of pain and suffering. He came from a highly dysfunctional family, you understand.”

  No kidding, Einstein, thought Claire. “Yes, sir, I’ve met a few Fitches in person, which is a few too many.”

  “His father was so brutal to him and his brothers that it’s a wonder any of them turned out to be normal functioning members of society.”

  “Yes, I gathered that, too. And I don’t think any of them are normally functioning human beings, none that I’ve met, anyway.” Both shrinks nodded sagely, all of them in agreement on that account, despite her lack of shrink licensure. But back to business. She needed to pick this nerd’s brain, and time was a-wasting. “I have been told that he has a twin brother, one who is even more screwed up than he is. That they had a good old time together, sort of swimming through life, side by side, like a man-eating shark tag team, and did so enjoy their time beating up anybody who even looked at them sideways, especially true of the other twin. You know anything about any of that?”

  LeCorps considered her for a moment. “Well, I’m afraid you didn’t get quite the correct information.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean that after several years sitting here in this office and listening to detailed stories about his twin brother, of whom he appeared to be extremely fond but also frightened, we finally deduced that his twin was a mere figment of his fractured mind.”

  Black said, “Are you saying that Fitch has DID?”

  “What’s that mean?” Claire said, always annoyed by tossed-around psychiatry jargon. “Are you talking about a split personality?”

  “Exactly, Detective Morgan. We finally diagnosed him with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Some call it Multiple Personality Disorder. He’s probably somewhere on the schizophrenic spectrum, as well. He truly believes that it was his brother performing the heinous acts that he himself perpetrated, but in truth it was him while he was entrenched in his other evil personality. He considered himself an innocent victim who could not control his twin brother’s terrible deeds. We believe that he was so brutalized when he was a small child that he psychologically hibernated, so to speak. His true personali
ty went deep inside his psyche and let his stronger alter ego come out to handle whatever horrible things that were being done to him at the moment.”

  Claire considered that diagnosis while LeCorps and Black commenced with a lot of shrink mumbo jumbo with big terms and nary the word crazy ever uttered. But crazy this guy was, and it appeared he just loved to use his fists when he killed people. And he was on the loose at the moment in her neck of the woods with nobody hot on his bloodstained trail, free as a bird to pummel to pulp whomever he chose in whatever manner he chose. And according to LeCorps, he always chose an ending that equated with dead, baby, dead.

  “Doctor, could you tell me more about him? I need to know everything I can in order to track him down.”

  So the doctor did so, and it was all quite chilling and grotesque, of course. Just like most psychotic serial killers that she had run into. “Did the family commit him? Or was it the court system?”

  “Well, actually, he killed his grandfather, and also a man who married some girl with whom he was infatuated. Both of them with his bare hands and some kind of club. The coroner said that Fitch beat his girlfriend’s new husband to death, still whaling on him until he could barely lift his arms to strike him anymore. They had to knock him unconscious to stop him. Both victims died, of course. Fitch was still in his teens. That’s when the family decided he was way too dangerous to be allowed to roam free and his temper much too volatile to remain living at their farm with the rest of the family. So they brought him over here to us, tied up nice and tight in the back of a pickup truck. After that, he vowed he was going to get out and kill them all. One by one and in the worst possible manner.”

  Well, well, what’d you know. Claire found that more than interesting since she had checked the background of all Fitch and Parker crimes in Canton County and had seen no mention of any such crime. She told the shrink as much.

  “They probably didn’t report it to the police. They keep to themselves. I believe the victim was one of their own. I doubt very much if they ever report any kind of crime occurring on their property. In our sessions, Fitch talked a lot about the fights they liked to sponsor out around where he was born, and how he was the best of the best. Truth? He just loves to fight and hit other human beings until they stop moving. Anywhere, any time, anybody, and that was exactly the way he put it. He said it gave him great pleasure, as nothing else could. Although he was transferring much of that onto his fictitious brother that he referred to as Bones.”

  Great news, just what she wanted to hear when she went out looking for him again. “And he vowed to kill the members of his own family?” It appeared that he had already started out upon that deadly murder quest. Blythe Parker was a Fitch, and one that was easy to get at, all frail and alone in that big empty house of hers. Easy pickings for a homicidal maniac on the loose.

  Black was still asking doctor-specific questions. “Did Fitch ever transform into his alter ego in your sessions?”

  “No, but he did it with some of the other patients, especially after Landers managed to get away from here. We caught his violence on camera several times in the common room. It was a textbook transition. Fitch always seemed rather subdued and quiet when in his day-to-day reality, the one in which he wanted us to call him Punk Fitch. But when he became Bones Fitch, and as I said, that’s the name he called his imaginary brother, he became angry and irate and loud and brutal and looking for a fight. He did manage at one time to beat another patient seriously enough that he had to be hospitalized in the intensive care unit for a week. That’s when we realized just how dangerous he was and the kind of brutality of which he was capable.”

  Wonderful, just great, now she’d probably have to strap all three guns on her person, Claire thought. “And you are absolutely certain there is not another brother, a twin called Bones?”

  “Yes, absolutely convinced. We did in-depth family histories with the people who brought him here, members of the Fitch family. They all knew that he was convinced he had a twin brother, but they swore to a person that he did not. They said his fantasy about having a twin called Bones started very young, at which time Fitch made up several imaginary playmates, but he was especially adamant about the brother named Bones. We got the same information from the family in which he grew to manhood. All of it was well documented by every doctor on our staff who worked with him.”

  “Let me get this straight. Now you are telling me that this guy’s not really a Fitch?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Mr. Fitch is a Fitch on his mother’s side. She was a Fitch. His father was a Parker.”

  “I see.” Claire thought about that a moment. “That’s surprising. Considering how the two families loathe each other.”

  “Yes. The mother was shunned for a time, until her family took pity on her and allowed her to return to the fold. Apparently, her husband was rather brutal, to both her and the boys, so after our patient was born, she took him and went back home to live. When he was about five, she died, and his father took him back to live at the Parker household. That’s when we believe his personality split into the Bones and Punk personalities.”

  “So what was this guy’s real name? The name on his birth certificate?”

  “His birth name is Preston Parker, but he wanted everybody to call him Punk Fitch when he moved back in with his mother’s family, which he did in order to be with the girl he loved at the time. When he was in residence here, he would become angry if we called him Preston Parker, and insisted that we call him Punk Fitch. So we did so, in order to keep him calm and cooperative. I believe, however, that the dominant personality is Bones.”

  Good grief, was this guy a whack job of epic proportions, or what? “So he is one of the Parker brothers who still live out there in the hills?”

  “Yes, but when we tried to interview them, they wouldn’t claim kin to him, either. They said he wasn’t their brother, and never had been. We couldn’t get them to admit it. Personally, I believe that they are so afraid of him that they didn’t want to tell us anything. I think they feared that if he ever got out, he’d go after them if they told us anything about him. Therefore, they completely denied his existence. This is a very strange case, believe me.”

  Claire glanced at Black. He was wearing a massive frown, one of professional bent. When he looked like that, it meant that said subject was big-time weirded out up to the rafters. “Surely there were school records that verified Preston Parker’s existence. School pictures that we could obtain? Surely you have pictures of this Punk/Bones guy while he was under your care?”

  “All the Parker children were homeschooled. No school records could be found. No medical records to speak of. A few hospital visits for the father and a couple of the boys, but the admission information given was vague. But yes, we do have a picture of him when he was admitted here.” He opened the manila file in front of him and slid a photograph across the desk to her.

  Claire picked it up and stared at it. It was a close-up of a young man who looked a whole hell of a lot like Paulie Parker. Problem was, though, he also looked a whole helluva lot like a younger version of Patrick. And Percy. And Phin. And Petey. And Chef Phillip. The guy in the picture even looked a slight bit like the randy little Malachi Fitch. Yep, they all looked so much alike that they could be quintuplets or sextuplets, especially now that they were all older and bearded and dressed exactly alike in green and brown camouflage. Oh, fabulous. And inbreeding raises its ugly head. One of them was a psycho who was killing people right and left. All she had to do was figure out which one it was. Maybe she’d just arrest them all, and wait for the full moon to see who howled.

  Claire sighed, not exactly thrilled at the road she could see stretching out ahead of her. “So he was a Parker as a child, and it was a Parker father who beat him when he was small. Do I have that much right?”

  “From what we can ascertain. We interviewed everyone in both families who would agree to talk to us. That’s the way we understood it. But some of the stori
es they told didn’t always make sense to us or go along with what the Punk Fitch personality told us.”

  “No kidding,” Claire said. “Think any of it is true?”

  At that juncture, Black decided to jump into the fray. “Are there other credible extenuating factors from his childhood that indicate he was DID that far back?”

  “Yes. Punk told us that he was often placed into dog pens and metal cages for punishment and for long periods of time, and without food or water, but that apparently caused him to bear a strong love of canines. He admitted that he adopted their habits and that he enjoyed licking other people and himself the way dogs do. He told us that it gave him insight into their souls and what they were thinking. Especially if he managed to insert his tongue into their mouth or ears.”

  Well, yuck, yuck, and more yuck. “Well, that’s just about as gross as gross can get, Dr. LeCorps.” Man, she just could not get that name to roll easily off her tongue. Same went for cadaver and decapitation.

  “Yes, it is. But it was something he felt he had to do upon meeting someone new. Sometimes he was strong enough to physically force himself on his victims. Not so with Thomas Landers. Landers liked the licking. Punk apparently taught Landers how to lick the face and neck for sexual gratification, and Landers took to the whole process at once. It was a very clinically significant development in their relationship. You can see why, I’m sure.”

  And Claire was beginning to see why, all right. They were after a super psycho/pervert/dog licker, to be sure, but that wasn’t exactly news to her. She had seen Paulie Parker’s frozen body and the bloody brutality of Blythe Parker’s murder, too. Bones Fitch/Punk Fitch/Preston Parker/Nut Job was indeed a whacko of the highest order, all right, and he was running all over the place and probably licking God knew what as they spoke. Great. As far as Claire was concerned, he could be anybody in either one of the Fitch or Parker clans. And the Petrovs, too, with their murderous proclivities, as far as that went. Maybe she should arrest the whole lot of them, all three families en masse, and make the world a safer place in which to grow and prosper and stay alive. Meanwhile, she would take a copy of Dr. LeCorps’s file home with her and read about crazy people until she went crazy herself. Which wouldn’t take long, not the way things were going.