Identity Crisis td-97

by Warren Murphy

  Then there were the damn vultures that kept circling Folcroft.

  They had been doing that since Koldstad first rolled through the Folcroft gates at dawn. It was approaching dusk now, and they were still at it. No one could explain what they were or how they came to be there.

  They never broke off for food or rest or even to take a dump. It was infuriating. It defied all logic, all rules.

  Jack Koldstad was a stickler for rules. So he had one of his men fetch up a scope-mounted Ruger rifle and personally went out on the grass to bring those damn birds down.

  He went through an even dozen clips. Sure, he missed a time or three. But they were flying lazy circles. Impossible to miss time after time. Yet not a pinfeather came fluttering to earth.

  Most unnerving was the fact that they looked exactly the same through the scope as they did to the naked eye. Dark. Indistinct. Unidentifiable.

  Koldstad jerked out the twelfth and last clip from the rifle and threw it away in disgust.

  "You!"

  A G-12 flinched under the lash of his call. "Sir?"

  "You have bird duty."

  "Sir?"

  "Watch those birds. They have to tire sometime. When they do, follow them. Follow them and kill them if you can."

  "But why?"

  "Those damn birds are flouting the authority of the almighty Internal Revenue Service. That's why!"

  "Yes, sir."

  Koldstad stormed into Folcroft. This was ridiculous. They'd been on-site for most of the day already and they hadn't completed the search yet. It was all the fault of the damn DEA. They were fighting the IRS every step of the way. The unshaven bastards. Where did they get off trying to usurp IRS authority?

  He took the elevator to the second-floor office that bore the legend Dr. Harold W. Smith, Director on the door. When he opened the door, a blast of chilly mid-September air struck him. Hunching his shoulders, Koldstad went in and took the cracked leather executive's chair behind the desk, whose top was a slab of tempered black tinted glass.

  The cold air coming through the break in the picture window made the close-shaven skin on the back of his neck creep and bunch, but Jack Koldstad ignored it.

  It was time to report in to the local office, and Jack Koldstad wasn't looking forward to it. Still, he dialed the number without hesitation, even if his dialing finger did quiver a little.

  "Mr. Brull's office," a clipped female voice announced.

  Koldstad cleared his throat. "Jack Koldstad calling for Mr. Brull. "

  "One moment."

  The voice that came on the line a moment later sounded like two stones grinding together.

  "What's your report, Koldstad?"

  "We're still in the inventory stage," Koldstad said.

  "What the hell?"

  "This is a big place, sir. And with the DEA to contend with-"

  "Who's the DEA honcho on the ground there?"

  "Tardo. First name Wayne. Middle initial P. "

  "Social Security number?"

  "I haven't developed that information yet, sir."

  "Doesn't matter. How many Wayne P. Tardo's can be working out of the New York DEA? Did you ask him the question?"

  "I did."

  "His reply?"

  "He informed me that no, he had never been called in for a tax audit, Mr. Brull."

  "The bastard sweat when he answered you?"

  "No. But his upper lip twitched noticeably, and since then he's been on the quiet side."

  "Then you have no excuses. Get Folcroft buttoned up and locked down. I want answers. What has been going on down there, how long has it been going on, and how much money is the service owed?"

  "Understood, Mr. Brull. What about the DEA?"

  "Those bastards would seize a rendering plant if they knew it would come up for a government auction three months later. They're seizure happy, and that makes their people all ripe for a field audit. You won't be bothered by the DEA once I make some calls."

  "Very good, Mr. Brull."

  "And your estimates had better be damn high or I'll bust you down to extractor by the end of this fiscal quarter. Between that dead G-12 trainee and the wounded, this operation is going to send the service's risk insurance premiums into orbit. Make damn certain that Folcroft revenue more than covers the losses. Revenue neutral won't cut it."

  "Guaranteed, Mr. Brull. "

  The line went dead. Jack Koldstad replaced the receiver with sweaty palms. There was only one man on earth who could set his pores leaking, and that was Dick Brull. God help Jack Koldstad if he didn't squeeze every drop of money out of Folcroft Sanitarium. And God help anyone who got in his way of fulfilling his quota on this one.

  The trouble was, so far Folcroft showed no signs of illegal activity outside of that twelve-million-dollar bombshell in the bank account.

  As he got up to set the downsizing of Folcroft Sanitarium in motion, his heel struck a piece of the broken picture window lying on the floor. The shard cracked underfoot.

  Swearing, Koldstad reached down to pick up the glass. He froze.

  The fragment of glass had broken into three pieces. Three separate mirror reflections of Jack Koldstad's grim face stared back at him.

  Koldstad scooped up the largest piece. It was a mirror. But when he turned it around, he could see his fingers through transparent glass.

  "Damn!"

  He went to the fractured window. The hole was large enough for his head but the edges were too sharp to risk it, so he stuck his hand out, holding the piece of glass mirror-side in.

  The mirror's own reflection showed up in the glass. Koldstad should have seen himself reflected. The other side of the window was obviously a mirror, too.

  "A damn one-way window," Koldstad growled. "Folcroft isn't so innocent after all."

  He dropped the shard into a wastepaper basket as he strode out of the office, his squeezed-in temples making him look like a man with the most excruciating headache in the universe.

  Chapter 7

  Desk Sergeant Troy Tremaine had seen it all.

  During his thirty years on the Port Chester, New York, police force, he had seen every human aberration, every nut case, nut job, dimwit, chuckle head and dip-shit loser come through the frosted-glass front doors and step up to his old-fashioned high precinct desk.

  The skinny guy with the thick wrists didn't look like one of those. In fact, he looked very sincere. There was great sincerity in his deep-set brown eyes. They were veritable wells of sincerity. Sergeant Tremaine would have staked his pension on the skinny guy's high sincerity quotient.

  He walked up, squeezed the front edge of the desk with his fingers and said in a very sincere voice, "My wife is missing."

  Tremaine, who had a wife himself, immediately felt for the poor guy. But business was business.

  "How long?"

  "Two days."

  "We need three days before we can file a missing-person report."

  "Did I say days? I meant weeks."

  Tremaine's hot button should have gone off right then. But the guy was so sincere. He looked exactly as though he was heartsick over the loss of his wife.

  So Troy said, "You said two days."

  "I'm upset. I meant weeks."

  "Her name?"

  "Esmerelda."

  Troy looked up. "Esmerelda?"

  "It was her mother's name, too. Esmerelda Lolobrigida."

  "That would make you..."

  "Remo Lolobrigida." And the skinny guy produced an ID card that said he was Remo Lolobrigida, private investigator.

  "You try looking for her yourself?"

  Remo Lolobrigida nodded soberly. "Yeah. For the past week." His voice dripped sincerity.

  "But you said she was missing two."

  "I was out of town one week. Look, this is serious. I gotta find her."

  "Okay, let me hand you off to a detective." He craned his bull neck and lifted his voice to a passing uniform. "Hey, who's catching today?"

  The answer came b
ack. "Boyle. But he's out to lunch."

  "Damn. Okay, I'll take it. Give me the particulars, friend."

  "She's about, I'd say twenty-eight."

  "Say?"

  "I think she lied about her age before we married. You know how women are."

  "Right. Right."

  "She's brown on brown, slim, wears her hair long."

  "Recent photo available?"

  "No. She was camera shy."

  Oh, great, Tremaine thought. He kept it to himself. "How do you expect us to find your wife, buddy, without a recent snapshot?"

  "Is there a police artist around? I know I can describe her pretty well"

  Tremaine chewed on that as he erased something he had written.

  "Guess we can try that." He picked up a phone and said, "DeVito. Got a guy out here who's missing his wife. Yeah. No recent photo. In fact, no photo at all. Want to take a crack at it? Sure."

  Tremaine pointed to a door. "Go through there. DeVito will help you. Good luck, pal."

  "Thanks," said the skinny guy, walking away. Only then did Troy Tremaine think that it was damn cool out there to be walking around in a T-shirt. By then it was too late.

  POLICE SKETCH ARTIST Tony DeVito thought nothing of the skinny guy's light attire, either. He waved him into his office and said, "First I want you to look at some head shapes. Just to get us started."

  The skinny guy went through the book and picked out a nice oval. Tony transferred the oval to his sketch pad and said, "Let's start with the eyes. What kind of eyes did-I mean does-your wife have?"

  "Nice."

  Tony winced. "Can you be more specific?"

  "Sad."

  "Sad but nice. Okay," Tony said, rolling his own eyes. Why did people think it was possible to draw nice? "Were they long, round or square?"

  "Round."

  Tony sketched round eyes. "Eyebrows?"

  "Thick. Not plucked. But not too thick."

  Tony drew Brooke Shields eyebrows, figuring he could subtract hair later on.

  "Now the nose. Snub? Ski? Or sharp?"

  "Neither. More of an Anne Archer nose."

  Tony closed his eyes in thought. Anne Archer had a nice face and a memorable nose. He drew it from memory.

  "Can you describe the mouth?"

  "Not too full, not too wide."

  "Good. More?"

  "It was nice. Kind. Kind of motherly."

  "I can draw kind, but not nice," he said tightly. "Do better than that."

  They argued over the mouth for another ninety seconds before settling on a Susan Lucci mouth.

  Tony started to put his pencil to the sheet and couldn't for the life of him remember what Susan Lucci's mouth looked like. Her legs, yes. Her eyes, sure. Her mouth, no.

  "Any other actress besides Susan have a mouth like your wife's?" Tony asked.

  "Minnie Mouse."

  "Her I can draw."

  The face came out surprisingly well for a first try. It was a nice face, even if the eyes were on the sad side.

  "All we need is the hair," Tony said.

  "Long in the back, but combed off the forehead."

  "That's easy to do."

  In the end Tony turned the sketch around and asked, "How close is that?"

  The citizen frowned. "No, that's not her at all. The mouth is too thin, the nose too sharp, and the eyes are all wrong."

  "Other than that it's a good likeness, right?" Tony asked dryly.

  "The hair looks about right," Remo Lolobrigida admitted.

  Great, Tony thought. It's a style twenty or thirty years out of date, but I'm right on the money with it.

  "Okay," he said, "let's try tweaking the facial elements." He began erasing. "How about if I do this to the eyes?"

  "She looks angry."

  "Okay, she looks angry. Does she ever look like this when she's angry?"

  "I never saw her angry."

  "Married long?"

  "No."

  "Okay, how about this?"

  "That looks about right."

  "Let's bring the nose down, too."

  It took twenty more minutes, but in the end the distraught husband said, "That's her. That's exactly her."

  "Sure? This is going to go on posters everywhere. We want it exactly right."

  The worried husband took the sheet of paper from Tony's hand and stared at it for an unnaturally long time. He was searching the face as if seeing it for the first time in a very, very long while.

  "It's exactly her," he said in a wistful tone.

  "Okay, let's get this on the wire."

  Tony started to stand up. The worried husband reached out with an absent hand, his eyes never coming off the sketch. The hand caught him by the right knee and locked. Tony felt as if a pair of steel pliers had taken hold of him. The plierslike hand forced Tony back into his hard wooden chair with inexorable strength.

  "Hey!"

  The hand let go and found his throat. The man had gotten up, his eyes still locked with those of the woman in the sketch.

  Everything went dark after that for Tony DeVito. When he came to, he was slumping in his chair and the desk sergeant was throwing water into his face.

  "What happened?"

  "What do you mean, what happened?" Sergeant Tremaine exploded. "You were out like a light. You tell me what freaking happened!"

  "I was doing this sketch for that guy, Lolobrigida. And he started acting hinky." Tony looked around. "Where is he?"

  "Where is he? He never came out!"

  Then they noticed the open window. A very cool breeze was blowing in to disturb the papers on Tony's desk.

  "What kind of guy goes to the trouble of having us sketch his missing wife and then walks off with the sketch?" Tony wondered dazedly.

  "A nut job," barked Tremaine. "I knew he was a nut job the minute he walked into the place."

  "He seemed perfectly normal to me."

  Tremaine slammed down the window. "It's gotta be forty out there, and he's walking around in a stupid T-shirt. A nut job. Just like I said. I can spot them coming from three miles off."

  "Then why didn't you warn me?"

  Troy Tremaine shrugged. "Hey, he had a legitimate beef, and I can be wrong about people. But not nut jobs."

  "What do we do?"

  "Me, I don't do nothing. You, start sketching. I wanna post that nut job's face on the squad-room wall so the uniforms can see it."

  Chapter 8

  Dr. Aldace Gerling was nervous. Very nervous.

  As chief of psychiatry at Folcroft Sanitarium, he was an expert on neuroses, psychoses and every other form of mental illness known to modern man.

  He could not account for what was happening to him.

  It was a drumming. Others had heard it before him. Unfortunately those others were all patients in Folcroft's psychiatric wing. An orderly had been the first person not institutionalized in Folcroft to report hearing the drumming noise.

  Dr. Gerling had dismissed the orderly's report as a mere auditory hallucination. So many others had reported the sound that the staff had begun listening for it. It was only natural that someone would hear something that made them think of drumming. It was the power of suggestion at work. Nothing more.

  And then Dr. Gerling had heard it.

  It was a distinct drumbeat, slow, steady. Oddly familiar, too. Gerling had raced to the spot, only to find the drumming noise racing ahead of him. Around every corner just ahead of him. As fast as he could waddle, the measured drumbeat outpaced him, its source annoyingly elusive.

  Finally Dr. Gerling had turned the last corner on the psychiatric wing and thought he had the drumming trapped in a utility closet.

  He had opened it, but there was nothing there. The drumming had stopped cold. There was nothing inside that could have produced the phenomenon. Not even remotely.

  Still, Dr. Gerling had felt it incumbent on him to report this event to Dr. Smith, and did.

  As he made his rounds, Dr. Gerling wondered if Dr. Smith had ever gott
en his report. He wondered if Dr. Smith would ever receive any report at all, considering the regretful state he was now in. Gerling had looked in on him and went pale at the sight. Smith appeared to be in some form a paralytic state. Utterly unmoving, eyes wide, every muscle rigid as if struggling to escape his useless body.

  Dr. Gerling paused in front of the door of one of the more difficult patients at Folcroft, Jeremiah Purcell.

  Purcell was a thin, pale young man with long cornsilk hair and almost no mind to speak off. When he had first been brought to Folcroft, he was a complete imbecile. He could not feed himself or dress without help, and had regressed to childhood so completely his toilet training had to be redone.

  Thankfully he could now take care of most of those personal chores himself. Nevertheless, he seemed frozen in a state of utter befuddlement, watching cartoons and other such childish programs for hours and hours on end. There was no character disorder on record to explain it, so Dr. Gerling had coined one: adult-onset autistic regression. He would have written a paper on this new frontier in mental illness, but Dr. Smith frowned on any publicity that directed a spotlight upon Folcroft, no matter how positive.

  Dr. Gerling observed his remarkable patient through the tiny square window in the steel door. Purcell sat in a big comfortable chair, intense neon blue eyes glued to the TV screen, long canvas sleeves buckled to the back of his straitjacket. From time to time he giggled. He seemed very pleased with his program, so Dr. Gerling made a remark on his clipboard that the patient was in elevated spirits today. On the clipboard, he prescribed only half of the daily forty milligrams of haloperidol.

  He passed on.

  The next patient was not in good spirits. He had been a resident of Folcroft for a much shorter time. About two years.

  The man was perfectly normal intellectually, but he suffered from a character disorder whose chief symptom manifested itself as delusions of grandeur. The patient thought he was Uncle Sam Beasley, the famous cartoonist and founder of the Sam Beasley entertainment empire, which included a movie studio and a chain of theme parks around the world.

  He was dressed as a pirate, right down to the rakish black eye patch and swashbuckler boots. Why a person who imagined he was a twenty-five-years-dead cartoonist would wear pirate clothes was beyond Aldace Gerling's understanding, so in his first interview with the man he probed these matters.