The Secret Friend

by Unknown

  ‘I need you to show me where this cop went,’ Darby said.

  Reed flicked his cigarette into the woods. ‘I managed to plough out the main road here before my truck shit the bed, but the top of the campus is a mess,’ he said. ‘I hope you two are in the mood for some exercise ’cause we got a lot of walking to do.’

  29

  Bryson already had a flashlight. Darby grabbed the spare she kept in the trunk of her car and then followed Reed, along with Bryson and the six other men, up the steep access road.

  A slick layer of ice covered the pavement. She walked carefully, watching each step. The hill, bordered with pine trees, their branches weighed down with heavy, wet snow, seemed to stretch for miles with no end in sight.

  ‘The campus is in the process of being torn down,’ Reed said, his breath pluming in the cold air. ‘I told your cop friend the same thing. There’s nothing in there, nothing at all. The whole place has been cleared out.’

  ‘When did the hospital close?’ Darby asked.

  ‘An electrical fire in the morgue gutted the Mason wing back in eighty-two. The lackeys on Beacon Hill decided it was too expensive to fix – the hospital is over two hundred years old – and with the statewide budget cuts in mental health, the hospital closed the following year.’

  ‘There’s a morgue in this building?’

  ‘At one point in time, this place was a research hospital. When a patient died, the doctors would study their brains – this was back at the turn of the century when such things were allowed. Anyway, after the fire happened, the place shut down permanently – lack of funding and all that. I can’t say I disagree with the decision. It would have cost a pretty penny to fix this place up.’

  Darby nodded, not really listening, her focus turned inward on Malcolm Fletcher. What was his interest in an abandoned hospital? If he was, in fact, looking for something, why didn’t he sneak in? Maybe he couldn’t find another way in and decided to ask Reed for help.

  When they reached the top of the hill, Darby was out of breath, her legs shaking with fatigue. Reed lit another cigarette.

  The Sinclair Mental Health Facility, a massive Gothic structure of ancient brick and barred windows, was set around a wide courtyard holding the remains of a water fountain and several trees which were probably even older than the hospital. Some of the stained-glass windows were still intact.

  ‘That there’s the Kirkland building,’ Reed said. ‘Place is over two hundred years old.’

  Darby had never seen anything so massive in both size and length. Going in there one could get lost. Forever.

  ‘How big is this place?’

  ‘About four hundred thousand square feet,’ Reed said. ‘There are eighteen floors not including the basement, which is a maze in and of itself. Kirkland is divided into two wings – Gable and Mason. You can’t go inside Mason. The floors are pretty much rotted away, and the fire did a lot of damage, so we had the place sealed off back in eighty-nine. In another few months, everything you see here will be gone to make room for condos. Truth be told, I’m a little sad. This building’s a historic landmark, the last of its kind. See those two buildings to your far left? Those used to be the tuberculosis buildings. They had one for male patients, one for female. There’s a lot of history here.’

  Darby waded through knee-high snow covering the courtyard. The place had the look and feel of a New England college campus from the early fifties – quaint and secluded, a sprawling mass of brick buildings tucked inside a heavily wooded area sitting on top of a hill overlooking Boston, eighteen miles to the south.

  ‘Kirkland’s become sort of a local tourist attraction ever since that movie Creepers came out,’ Reed said. ‘You see it?’

  Darby shook her head. She was not a fan of horror movies any more. They hit too close to home.

  ‘The Morrell book was much better,’ Reed said. ‘The story’s about a group of urban explorers known as creepers who break into old historic buildings. The movie producers used the hospital as a location. We’ve had to increase security over the past five years. We have guards posted around the property twenty-four hours a day. Majority of people we arrest are teenagers and college students looking for a spot to drink and get high and screw, if you can believe it.’

  Reed took out his keys and walked up the stairs to the main doors. The glass behind the steel security grate was cracked.

  ‘You brought him through the front door?’ Darby asked.

  ‘Yes ma’am.’

  ‘Is this the only way you can access the hospital?’

  ‘The front door is the safest way to enter the hospital,’ Reed said. ‘There are some other entrances through the basement ducts and some old tunnels that lead out into different parts of the property, but half of ’em have collapsed or are about to. You try and go in that way, you’re risking your life. That’s why we got all this security around here. Place is a liability. Back in ninety-one, some asshole broke into the property, fell and cracked his head open. He sued and won a nice little settlement for himself. If you saw the legal bills, your head would spin.’

  Beyond the front door was a hallway that opened up into a large, rectangular-shaped room stripped clean of its furniture. There was nothing in here but bare floors and walls covered with flecks of chipped white paint.

  ‘This used to be the reception area,’ Reed said. ‘Grab a hardhat from that box over there. You two don’t scare easily, do you?’

  ‘If he gets scared, I’ll hold his hand,’ Darby said, glancing to Bryson. Tim didn’t hear the comment. He was moving the beam of his flashlight around the room.

  ‘This one time, I took a group of ghost hunters through here for some TV show,’ Reed said. ‘They were carrying these weird gadgets that looked like props from that movie Ghostbusters. One of them thought they saw a ghost and the stupid son of a bitch ran away screaming and fell through a hole and fractured his foot. Stay behind me and watch your step.’

  30

  The adjoining room was as long and wide as a football field, with a vaulted ceiling and mouldy, water-stained wallpaper printed with tiny red and blue roses. The back wall had custom-made picture windows, many of which were broken or missing. The linoleum floor was covered in snow and patches of melting ice.

  ‘This used to be the main dining room,’ Reed said. ‘Back in the forties, they had professional chefs that cooked all this fancy food. Brought in lobsters during the summer, had these big cookouts for the patients on the front lawn – there used to be a small golf course here, too, believe it or not. I wouldn’t have minded staying here during those days. Place sounds like a resort. How much you know about Sinclair?’

  ‘We don’t know much,’ Darby said.

  ‘You want, I can tell you about the history. Might help pass the time. We got a lot of walking to do.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  Reed walked through the dining room, his footsteps crunching over the snow and ice. ‘When the hospital was first built back in the late eighteenth century, it was called the State Lunatic Hospital,’ he said. ‘The place was known for its humane treatment of patients. Dr Dale Linus – that would be the first hospital director – he believed in a humanistic approach to treating mental illness – fresh air, healthy food and exercise. It was a pretty radical idea at the time. Linus kept the number of patients to five hundred, making sure each patient got the help and treatment they deserved. In the beginning, they treated all types of people, not just criminals. A lot of the patients came here from all over the world because of the progressive therapies Linus invented.’

  ‘What sort of progressive therapies?’

  ‘Let’s see… Well, there were the water therapies where they’d dunk patients into freezing cold water to try and cure their schizophrenia. Then they tried something called insulin comas. That was supposed to help calm patients down. Sinclair was the first hospital in the country to perform a lobotomy.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s necessarily progressive.’

>   ‘It was at the time. Now it seems barbaric, given the fact that you can pretty much pop a pill to treat almost any mental disorder. Sinclair was so successful, so revolutionary in its approaches to treating the mind, two buildings were devoted strictly to teaching doctors who came in from all over the world – they had to build a dormitory to house them all.’

  Darby followed Reed into a cold corridor – same concrete, same chipped paint. A lot of the walls were covered in graffiti. One hallway was sunken in with debris.

  ‘When did the hospital name change over to Sinclair?’ Darby asked.

  ‘Dr Phinneus Sinclair became the hospital director back in, oh, sixty-two, I think. That was around the time they started taking in only criminals. The more normal patients, for lack of a better term, went over to the McLean Hospital, which was gaining a reputation for treating the rich, rock stars and weirdo writers and poets, people like that. McLean was the place to go if you had money. Sinclair became the place to come to if you wanted to pursue studying the criminal mind. Dr Sinclair was trying to discover the origins of violent behaviour. He did a lot of studies involving children who came from broken homes.’

  Darby had never come across Sinclair’s name during her doctorate work. Maybe the studies were considered radical at one time. Now, in the twenty-first century, finding the origins of violent and deviant behaviour rooted in childhood trauma seemed commonplace.

  Reed ducked underneath a beam and took them down a long corridor that opened up into a large, rectangular area with doors on both sides. Darby moved the beam of her flashlight through the rooms of broken windows. The rooms were various sizes. All of them were empty.

  ‘These are the doctors’ offices,’ Reed said. ‘Man, you should have seen the furniture in there. All antiques. Some guy bid on all of it, hauled it away and made a small fortune.’

  He paused in front of a big room holding an ornate stained-glass window. ‘This was the hospital director’s office. Your cop friend stopped here for a moment, just stared for a bit like he was reminiscing or something. He didn’t say anything but…’

  ‘What?’ Darby prompted.

  ‘It’s not important, really, just sort of odd. I just remembered he didn’t take off his sunglasses. I mentioned he might want to take them off, given where we were heading, and he just ignored me and walked off like he knew where he was going.’

  Darby followed Reed down three flights of dusty stairs, the ancient building creaking and moaning around her. Ten minutes later, Reed stopped in front of an old steel door and shined his light on the faded red lettering: ward c.

  ‘This is where they did the prefrontal lobotomies,’ Reed said, opening the door. ‘Watch your step in here. Moisture collects on the tiles, even in the winter. Place is sealed tighter than a flea’s ass. It’s slippery as hell.’

  No windows, just pitch-black darkness. The cold room reeked of mildew. Mounted against the wall was an old General Electric clock covered in rust. Darby spotted several spigots. They probably hooked up hoses to them to wash away the blood. She wondered how many patients had undergone what was considered, at one point in time, to be a progressive medical solution to treating mental illness.

  Reed’s boots squeaked across the tiles. ‘When I first took the job, the steel tables with the leather restraints were still in here. They used to do shock treatments in here, too.’

  A creaking sound as he opened the door at the far end. The adjoining hallway was in a state of partial ruin. Darby followed the man through another hallway and then it opened into a wide space full of two floors that reminded her of a prison. Cells were on either side, each steel door equipped with locks and a grating so doctors could look in on their patients. The doors were rusted, the small rooms stripped clean.

  ‘This here’s C wing,’ Reed said. ‘The cop walked over to this room here.’

  Reed moved the beam of his flashlight inside and jumped back from the door. Darby moved past the man and looked into the cell.

  Thumb-tacked to the wall underneath a windowsill was a photograph, a headshot of a woman with long blonde hair parted in the middle and feathered. She had piercing blue eyes in a deeply tanned face and wore a white collared shirt.

  ‘That wasn’t here this afternoon,’ Reed said. ‘I’ll swear on a stack of bibles.’

  Darby’s attention was on the windowsill. Standing above the photograph was a statue of the Virgin Mary – the same statue that had been sewn inside Emma Hale and Judith Chen’s pockets.

  She turned to Bryson, who was staring at the statue, mesmerized.

  ‘Do you know this woman?’

  Bryson shook his head.

  Darby examined the picture. It was printed on thick, glossy paper. There was no writing on the back, no date or time-stamp anywhere on the paper. Darby wondered if this picture had been printed on a computer. Every photography and drug store had kiosks where you could slip in a memory card and print out digital pictures in a matter of minutes.

  ‘Mr Reed, would you excuse us for a moment?’

  The caretaker nodded. He stepped away from the cell and joined the other men who were wandering around the vast room, beams of light crisscrossing over one another as they searched the cells on the two floors. Darby turned to Bryson.

  ‘I’ve got evidence bags in the trunk, along with a spare kit. I can process this room myself, and you can be the witness to anything we find. It will be quicker than having to get people from the lab in here.’

  ‘What about a camera?’

  ‘I’ve got a Polaroid and a digital.’

  Darby’s cell phone vibrated against her hip.

  ‘What do you think of Sinclair?’ Malcolm Fletcher asked. ‘It’s like walking through purgatory, isn’t it?’

  31

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Darby said, motioning to Bryson. ‘I’ve never been to purgatory.’

  ‘Haven’t you read Dante?’ Fletcher asked. ‘Or don’t they teach that in class any more?’

  ‘I’ve read Paradiso.’

  ‘Yes. The good Catholic girls always learn about heaven first, don’t they?’

  Fletcher laughed. Bryson stood behind Darby. She held the phone an inch from her ear so Bryson could listen.

  ‘The nuns should have made you read Purgatorio,’ Fletcher said. ‘It’s where Dante describes purgatory as a place where suffering has a real purpose that can lead you to redemption, if you’re willing to go the distance. Are you willing to go the distance?’

  ‘I found the room with the photograph.’

  ‘Do you recognize the woman?’

  ‘No. Who is she?’

  ‘What do you think of the Virgin Mary statue?’

  ‘Is it supposed to have some sort of meaning?’

  ‘Now is not the time to be coy, Darby. The moment of revelation is at hand.’

  ‘Let’s talk about the woman in the photograph. Why did you leave it here?’

  ‘I’d be more inclined to answer your question if you answer one of mine,’ Fletcher said. ‘Is the statue on the windowsill the same one you found on Emma Hale and Judith Chen?’

  Darby wasn’t about to give the former profiler any specifics about the case. ‘Why did you place it here?’ she asked. ‘Why did you want me to find it?’

  ‘Tell me about the statues and I’ll give you the name of the woman in the photograph.’

  Bryson shook his head.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Darby said.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Detective Bryson? Or would you rather put him on the phone?’

  How did Fletcher know Bryson was in the room?

  He must be watching.

  Bryson moved away, drawing his weapon, and ushered Reed inside the cell. Darby covered the phone’s mouthpiece.

  ‘Don’t tell him a goddamn thing,’ Bryson said, and then signalled his men.

  Darby’s gloved hand gripped the SIG and slid it from the shoulder holster. She looked past the door, into the dark, decaying room cut w
ith blades of light and steaming breath, wondering where the former profiler was hiding.

  Darby pressed the phone back to her ear. ‘Tell me about the woman in the photograph.’

  ‘You can’t find this woman alone,’ Malcolm Fletcher said. ‘But if you’re willing to take the journey, I’ll be your guide.’

  If this was some sort of trap, why would Fletcher stage it in an abandoned mental hospital with a room full of cops? It was too elaborate a setup. Could the man possibly be telling her the truth?

  ‘I think you need to explain your agenda,’ Darby said.

  ‘There’s no reason to fear me. We’re both after the same goal.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The truth,’ Fletcher said. ‘I’ll lead you to the woman in the photograph, but once you open Pandora’s Box, there’s no turning back. You may want to give that some thought.’

  ‘And you’re going to guide me to her out of the goodness of your heart.’

  ‘Think of me as the boatman Charon guiding you across the river of hate.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s waiting for you downstairs.’

  Darby’s breath caught. It took her a moment to regroup.

  ‘She’s here,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Are you ready to meet her?’

  There was no menace in Fletcher’s voice, none of that jovial taunting from the previous conversations. What Darby heard was a cool, neutral tone that conjured a memory from her childhood – ten years old and taking a shortcut through the Belham woods and seeing three boys from her class. They had found a dead coyote. One of the boys, Ricky something, the fat one with the mean eyes, asked her if she wanted to see it. Darby said no. They called her a chicken, a frightened little girl.