It was hardly the top story of the morning, but it stuck in the throat long after anxieties over air pollution and the war had been smoothed over. She was receiving treatment at the University Medical Center, pending examination by a team of specialists. I had only to consider the challenge and opportunity this girl’s condition offered, the groundbreaking research sure to yield mountains of publishable data, and I instantly became quite passionate about Jane Doe Seven’s plight. I was prepared to fight for her, never suspecting that she was already mine.
Traffic inched through the trough of its own petrochemical shit infinitely in both directions, each driver blankly despising the others as dumb, dead obstacles. Each of them heard the news and their faces froze in mid-curse. They were a bit less begrudging in allowing others into their lanes that morning, and congratulated themselves that at least the world wasn’t a mess because of them. It got me to the hospital that much faster, so I couldn’t condemn it. I was parking when my phone chirped and they offered me her case.
Jane Doe Seven was under heavy sedation in one of the soundproofed basement cells for quarantining infectious patients. Every light on the ward was switched off to simulate the darkness of her natural habitat.
She’d been curled up in a basement when firefighters found her, where she’d lain, by all accounts, since before she could walk or talk. She was skin and bones held together by a lifelong accretion of dirt, dust and spider webs. Once the nurses had cleaned her, she looked so raw and frail that you’d catch your breath for fear her onion-thin, moonstone-pale skin might break open with the slightest stirring of the air. Her limbs might come off with one wanton twist of the hand, like the legs of an insect. Nurses kept a vigil around her oxygen tent, intently playing miniature flashlights over her muted vital signs.
I was told to expect a social worker, Carmen Fuchs. A red-eyed woman with too much turquoise jewelry camped outside the girl’s door, studying a case file and nursing a coffee. She didn’t notice me when I leaned over her, so I tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped from her chair, but her mind lingered someplace else.
“Ms. Fuchs?”
She set down the file and offered her hand, clammy and shaky from caffeine and sleep deprivation. “I hope you’re Dr. Shields?”
I nodded. “How long have you been here?”
“Since they found her, at about two. I don’t know how much Dr. Randels told you over the phone, but you can look over the file I started. Early blood tests confirm he was hers. Nobody guessed he’d had a daughter until she was found in that basement. If not for the fire, she’d still be down there. She’d almost have been better off if he had beaten her… buried underground her entire life, in the dark, his own flesh and blood…” She choked back more tears, leaving me thinking she meant for me to comfort her, but she recoiled, eyes grazing the floor. “Maybe you should just go talk to the police, or Dr. Randels. I’m a little high strung right now.”
“I’d rather hear it from you, if you don’t mind. Maybe we could go to the cafeteria.”
“Sure,” she said, distracted. “Do you smoke?” I shook my head, and she moaned. She tried to uncoil her knotted neck muscles as I led her to the elevators.
“I never thought I’d run out of stomach for this job. Do you know why the lights are off in there? She was blinded by the first light the firemen shined on her, and went into deep shock. I don’t think she’s ever even seen light before. She’s below feral; she’s not even an animal, and the doctors say she’s twelve. I just wish he wasn’t killed in the fire, so he could answer for this.” She was looking beyond me, thinking out loud as fatigue and, perhaps, misplaced maternal instinct got the best of her.
“Maybe he couldn’t live with his sexual impulses towards the girl and locked her away,” I offered, “to protect her. Starting the fire would, then, be a predictable outcome to such a repressive syndrome.” I was trying to infuse some logic into the conversation. I should have known she’d have none of it.
“You’d say as much in court, wouldn’t you? Some things, even a sick mind is no excuse for. When I think of the loneliness he condemned her to, the chance for humanity he took away from her, I only hope they make Hell even hotter for him.”
She was obviously too overwrought to see reason on that subject. “What about the mother? Was Cykes ever married?”
“Yes, to a ‘Roja Zachardo.’ She was an illegal alien, from Guatemala. None of his neighbors reported having seen her for the last several years, and nobody’s been able to find her. His was the only body they found, so we’re assuming she left him, maybe went back over the border. I don’t know how anyone could throw away her daughter like that, but I hope she’s somewhere safe.”
What she told me made me want to see the house.
Even with the fire engines and the curiosity seekers gone, I had no trouble finding it. The house was deep in the heart of the Hispanic ghetto east of Watts, on a dead-end street that had somehow managed never to get paved. Chickens and kids selling bushel bags of oranges and hot dogs wrapped in bacon dodged my car and cursed my dust.
Clouds of ash and the overpowering reek of burning still marked the area. The Cykes house had been razed to its brick foundation, leaving only a gaping black cavity in a row of other likely firetraps. A pair of investigators in windbreakers and plastic hardhats knelt and sifted the ashes.
Norman Cykes was an orphan, raised in foster homes throughout the Eastern United States. He distinguished himself in school and received a grant from a research firm to study hematology at Stanford. Unlike many such hardship cases, whose scarred self-esteem prevents them from applying themselves, he buried himself in a cocoon of work. I wish I could have been half as dedicated as the young Dr. Cykes.
He derailed his illustrious career almost before it began, however, when he quit his residency at a San Diego hospital and disappeared. He met Roja Zachardo there while treating her for an injury she sustained while crossing the border. They were married shortly thereafter and moved to Los Angeles. Cykes stole a lab’s worth of equipment from the hospital, and bought the house with the last of his meager savings. They had groceries delivered and performed their own repairs.
According to neighbors, Roja Cykes was a bruja, a Santeria witch, who healed ailments with rituals, prayer and transfusions of her own blood, probably their sole income. He’d only been sighted outside once, when he shot a dog caught rooting through his trash. A classic misanthrope, paranoid but hardly pathological. Mrs. Cykes stopped seeing patients seven years ago, and was believed to have run away. No one ever knew there was a daughter.
“Can I help you?” The investigator offered me a blackened glove and too-firm grip. He looked as if he’d lost a coin toss to talk to me. His eyes homed in on the clip-on badge I wore, and his face became static. I’ve grown accustomed to the guardedness many laymen adopt around shrinks. I once derived a banal thrill from tweaking their discomfort, but it’d long since become a bore.
“I’m Jane Doe Cykes’ psychiatrist,” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to see the basement.”
His broad, sunburned face soured. “Let me get some extra gear.” He walked back to his truck, where the other investigator was now reclining in the cab. They exchanged words about me while he rummaged in a tool locker. He returned with two flashlights and another hardhat. We crossed the sidewalk onto the Cykes property; as he held up the yellow CAUTION ribbon for me to cross, he introduced himself as Bart Shanley and remarked, “You figure out why he did it yet?”
“Unless the girl can speak, which is highly doubtful, we may never be able to do more than guess about his motives. Isolation can compound our anxieties over time, as our inner world, our imagination, takes the place of the outside world.”
He snorted. “I heard of a deputy sheriff, lived in a trailer park in Mono County, Krazy Glue’d his mother’s ass to a toilet seat to keep her from going off to a rest home. She sat there for six years before a Jehovah’s Witness heard her hollering that her TV was
busted. Said he loved her too much to let her go.”
I shrugged. “Anything’s possible. Is the cause of the fire known yet?”
“No mystery, there. Splashed a can of kerosene all through the place, blew out his pilot lights and opened a couple oxygen tanks upstairs. Place was full of old books and papers. Went up like a fucking bomb. You could see it for miles.” Shanley gazed out over the wreckage, inhaled the ashes lustily. Discussing fire plainly both relaxed and exhilarated him, even before a complete stranger. He was in his element in this sort of carnage and, very likely, was sexually aroused. “The cellar door’s around back.”
We skirted the ruin and passed through a warped wrought-iron gate into the backyard, a waist-high field of what looked like long black hair. It ran unbroken for fifty feet to a ramshackle scrap lumber fence. The investigator’s mind was lost among the hillocks of charred house bones until I asked him if anything had been salvaged.
“I doubt it. Something this old burns this hot, even the fixtures get melted down. The flashpoint—” the ruin’s heart, marked by a twisted tree that might have been the steel pipes of a bathtub, “—had a lot of heavy lab equipment, and it brought the whole second story down, when it went. Witness said the guy was watching from a window the whole time, like it was someone else’s house burning down. Totally batshit. That girl, she couldn’t have found a better place to hide. She was damned lucky being where she was. Here…”
We stood at the edge of the foundation, looking down into a hole in the weeds with a jagged border of splintered wood all around it. I could see no stairs. Our reflections glared up at us from a scummy pool on the basement floor, monochrome doppelgangers guarding a surrogate womb. The luxuriant stench of countless varieties of fungus ran riot here, even over the stink of burning.
“You still want to go in? That smell’s just a preview, I can tell you, and it’s only a crawlspace, about waist high, inside. The fireman that fell through the kitchen floor compounded his ankle trying to get out. He must’ve kicked her or something, and she started screaming her head off. They had to use axes on the storm door, over here.”
I stepped back where I couldn’t see my reflection. “I don’t think there’s any reason to go inside.”
“There sure isn’t.” It was obvious something more than just the basement disturbed him.
We circled back to the sidewalk, where I returned the hardhat. I thanked him and started for my car, when he said, “That storm-door had been nailed and caulked shut for years when they broke it down.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Her daddy locked her in there at least ten years ago and never went down there again.” He took a deep breath to anchor himself. “You saw the only way in, and the nails in that door were rusted over. So was the padlock, and the key was broken off in it. All the vents around the foundation were plugged up. Neighbors could see into the backyard, and they never saw him, or anybody else, out here. It’s like you said—anything’s possible, right?” He smiled as DT cases often do when trying to convince others to see their pink elephants.
“Are you the only one who’s noticed this… evidence?”
“Firemen told me about it, but they couldn’t put two and two together.”
“Then I don’t think telling me is the best course, unless you need someone to recommend you for a leave of absence.”
“I’m fucking serious! I’m not putting any of this in my report, because I know how it sounds. But either that little girl’s the New and Improved Jesus, or she’s been living off toadstools and her own shit her whole life. We didn’t find any of that laying around, by the by. The whole goddamned thing—” He settled back against my car door, his gaze still locked on the ruin.
“Did you consider that what the fireman fell through was probably a trapdoor? Listen, I’ve really got to go—”
“Have they done anything about her, um… bleeding?” he asked.
“She sustained no injuries that I was aware of. Why do you ask?”
“No, nothing like that. Her, you know... her period. I was on-site when they brought her to the ambulance. I saw blood running down her thighs. Unless she was hemorrhaging, it had to be her period. Do starving cave-kids get their periods regular, doc?”
“Her development has been stunted to such a degree that menstruation would be highly unlikely. I suppose you were the only one who saw this, as well.” I sidestepped Shanley and slipped into my car. His eyes on the ground, he returned to the gutted house as I drove away.
I’d decided not to report Shanley’s hysteria by the time I arrived at the hospital. Everyone was upset by the case, particularly those who were parents. I suppose this was why I’d been chosen to treat her. I never had any family myself, so I could remain detached.
The drive back was all gridlocked freeway again, and Jane Doe Cykes’ magic had long since worn off. I spent every minute of the ninety it took to return considering the girl. In the scant few similar cases on record, years of intensive treatment had left the patients with little better than a four-year-old mentality. When the doctors exhausted their pet treatment theories, the patient cycled through abusive foster homes and ended up in a state institution, the forgotten flotsam of another failed experiment.
I sincerely thought I would succeed where they all failed. Jane Doe Cykes would be moved out of the quarantine cell as soon as she regained consciousness, and her humanization would commence.
Shanley’s delusions and Fuchs’ unreasoning rage kept intruding on my thoughts. If I had children of my own, would such melodramatic notions affect me as well?
I found Ms. Fuchs asleep in a chair outside my door, her files spilled out around her. I snuck past her and sat at my desk, then checked my messages.
The forensics team had uncovered a steel case in the ashes. It contained several journals filled with markings in an erratic code, probably devised by Cykes. Very likely it would never be deciphered, as it had meaning only to his disturbed mind.
The case had also contained six one-liter mason jars full of dark crimson fluid. They were marked “ROJA.” They were full of human blood.
I had a nurse bring coffee and woke Fuchs. She already knew.
“I’m sorry I nodded off, there. I can’t believe—”
“I know. What’s been done with the remains?”
“You mean the jars?” she asked, and I nodded. “They were brought here by ambulance. The lab tested them. San Diego has no patient records for Roja Zachardo, because Cykes stole them, but the blood tests out almost identical to our girl, so it must be hers. This is all so sick…” Her chest quavered, and a sob escaped. I drew the curtains.
I elected not to repeat what Shanley had told me about the cellar. She’d take it too seriously, I thought, wondering if she had children of her own, or wished she had. I excused myself and went to see the patient.
Dr. Randels was checking Jane Doe Cykes’ pulse, his eyes on his watch. I’d seen Randels professionally on a few occasions, so I expected him to behave somewhat distantly. He was the kind that tries to get laid at funerals, but a decent pediatrician.
“Dr. Shields, I know you were briefed by Ms. Fuchs,” he whispered. “All in all, she’s doing amazingly well.”
I looked past him at the delicate figure in the bed. The oxygen tent had been taken down, but she still seemed scarcely human, an elfin changeling. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I studied her frail musculature and birdlike bones. She’d come out of total solitude, her whole world shaped by the darkness, the mysteries of her own body and the formless phantoms of her own mind. Perhaps years had passed between the thunder of each heartbeat. Had they frightened her? Or did they sound like God, speaking only to her?
“Yes, it is quite incredible,” I returned.
“Her growth was a touch stunted, and her muscles are atrophied, but her blood sugar’s not much below normal. Whatever else he did, he didn’t starve her.”
“How much longer do you plan to keep her under? I’d like
to get some EEGs and an MRI before she wakes up.”
“I don’t see why we can’t let you have at her as soon as she regains consciousness, but we want to leave her alone until then. Waking up to a brain-mapping would freak out a normal person. We’ll move her into pediatrics as soon as she learns to adjust to the light. Right now, that’s our biggest obstacle. The outside world’s going to be one hell of a shock, I don’t have to tell you.”
Randels scooped his clipboard up off the EKG monitor and walked to the door. He furtively picked his nose. “I’ve got to see another patient upstairs. You coming?” Afraid to let me alone with his star patient, I knew.
I leaned over the girl. Randels opened the door so that only my shadow sheltered her from the beam of an orderly’s flashlight. Her lustrous black hair drank in the glow from the light off her translucent skin. The dark canals of her veins stood out, the only part of her that seemed alive.
“Is there any possibility she may have entered her menarche?”
I felt, rather than saw, Randel’s bemusement, as he sprayed it in my ear. “Impossible. She’s of the right age, but her bodily functions have been heavily traumatized, as you know. Why do you ask?”
“Just something somebody thought he saw.” I followed him out and gently pulled the door shut.
“It’s funny you should mention blood, though,” Randels said. “You heard about the jars?”
“Yes, I was told. Symptomatic of an obsession with his studies. Perhaps a memento.”
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 4
