The old gentleman was writing in a tablet with a fountain pen. His hands seemed delicate, the nails manicured. He worked with diligence, writing a few words, pursing his lips over what he’d written, continuing. He seemed oblivious to our presence.
“What you working on, Mister Buck?” Miss Gracie asked.
The old man looked up. It took several seconds for our presence to register.
“The answer to everything,” he said, his voice dry and faint. He returned to his work.
“May we see?”
His hands shook when he wasn’t writing. He licked his lips and hoisted the page for us to view. Meaningless scribbles. He giggled, a strand of drool falling from the side of his mouth. Miss Gracie made comforting childlike noises in his direction, returned me to the elevator. The doors hissed shut.
“Buck Kincannon Senior, right?” I said. “He looks healthy. Glowing.”
“Mister Buck wear a diaper. He sleep fifteen hours a day. Half the time, I spoon food in him. Car’s all shiny, but the motor’s burned up.”
The whole second floor was a sham, a theatrical set to give Daddy Kincannon a sense of place after all his years in business. The elevator door opened on the first floor.
“Why did you show me Mister Buck?” I asked.
A long pause. “He wanders, like Freddy. If you see him moving around, it’s best you know he ain’t tryin’ to hurt you. You understand?”
I found her tone discordant, almost imploring. I said, “I understand.” But I didn’t.
Miss Gracie wheeled me down the hall, again passing the occupied rooms.
“Lucas is kept in the red room?” I asked. “The padded room?”
“Sometimes.”
“When he’s bad? When his madness presents?”
Another pause. “Mr. Lucas go in there when his mama come. She can look at him through the door. It’s how she’s been told.”
“To keep her safe from him?”
“To keep something safe for someone.”
A sleepy voice came from behind us. “Carson? Is that you?”
Miss Gracie spun the bed. Freddy was at his doorway, watching. The puppet hung from his hand.
“What you doing up, Mister Freddy?” Miss Gracie asked. “You supposed to be sleeping.”
“I saw Carson. Puppy and I want to play.”
“You get right back in that bed. I’m takin’ this fella on a look-see an’ we don’t need any company.”
“No fair.”
“Get yourself in bed now, mister. You can play when it’s morning.”
Freddy grumbled and pouted back to his bed. He jumped in, pretended to fall asleep, growling out fake snores. He half-opened one eye and winked at me, like he’d put a big one over on Miss Gracie.
She sighed as she pushed me past the room. “That boy think he’s so cool.”
“Boy? He must be nearing his forties.”
“He still a child, always be one.” She looked at her watch. “I got to make checks, change diapers, make sure Freddy got his butt in bed. If that boy don’t get a full eight, he’s cranky all day. I’ll be back once more ’fore I turn off the lights.” She started to the door, stopped. Turned her head to me, her eyes dark with mystery.
“You don’t say nothin’ to no one about that little ride you took, that’s the way, right?”
“What ride, Miss Gracie?”
CHAPTER 42
I stared at the slatted door and replayed what I’d learned during Miss Gracie’s tour. I now knew my location. I knew who was in here with me, and perhaps a bit of why.
I tried to mesh the information with what Crandell’s questions had suggested. I’d repeatedly told him Taneesha and Dani’s relationship was no more than brief mentoring on Dani’s part. But his insistence and the direction of his questions led me to a conclusion: Crandell was sure that whatever Taneesha had uncovered or been looking into had been shared with Dani.
“Buck Kincannon is Danbury’s boyfriend,” I remembered screaming, the pain a blazing rope stretched from my groin to my brain. “Have that bastard verify it.”
“Buck got the bitch off the street,” Crandell had replied. “That’s his end of it for now.”
Off the street?
I repeated the phrase in my mind. Had Dani’s promotion from investigative reporter to anchor been a scheme to pull her inside, keep her busy with new tasks to learn? Kept under watch? The methodology fit: Move the potentially troublesome piece to a new board, as with Pettigrew.
Dani’s insistence that someone had been in her house now seemed likely. Buck Kincannon had taken her out that night so Crandell or some lock-picking subcontractor could get inside, search for notes, for some tie between Dani and Taneesha.
But the suspicions of Dani’s potential involvement demonstrated a lack of knowledge about journalists, their ferocity in protecting stories. The rush-hot pinnacle of the craft was breaking a fresh story, the celebrated exclusive. Even a fledgling like Taneesha Franklin would have kept her cards tight to her bosom.
Crandell had not believed me: I could have been screaming that the earth was flat.
The door pushed open. I held my breath. Miss Gracie clattered the cart into the room, snapped open a diaper. She dropped it into the wastebasket beside my bed. I raised an eyebrow and she tapped the bag slung on the IV holder.
“The bottle got muscle-relaxing dope in it. Keep you too loose-kneed to walk if you manage to get up. I messed with the tubes a bit, got it dripping onto a diaper in the waste can. Unless you want me to keep the IV in for the pain.”
“No!”
She snapped her finger to her lips, frowned. “Shhhh. I never know when he gonna walk in, checking.”
“Crandell?”
She closed her eyes, her face a mask of sorrow.
“Craziness. Jus’ like it was four years back. Last year, too. Ever’ time that nasty man’s here, the world fall into hell.”
She reached for a second diaper, snapped it open. I arched my back and let her perform her tasks.
“Tell me more about Lucas,” I said. “His youth. Did you know him back then?”
“Mister Lucas was a crazy type, wild notions. It was like everyone else was running on little batteries and Lucas got plugged in to the full two-twenty volts. He’d take angry fits: yellin’ at parties, saying what a bunch of fakes they all were, stomping away wishing he lived with a normal family. One time he started a big fire. Lift yo’ butt.”
“Fire?”
“There was a family gathering. It was like usual. Ever’one came to Mister Buck’s. Someone said something and Mister Nelson ran outside and began beating on Mister Racine’s new car with a lamp. Them folks never stop fighting. There was a big howling set-to until the fire started. You can set your butt down now.”
“Lucas set a fire in the house?”
“He splashed charcoal lighter on some flowers outside, tossed a match. Then he put on another of his big screaming shows, calling ever’one names, saying what a bunch of hypocrites they all were.”
An earlier mention of Lucas and fire made me suspect pyromania, one of the major markers of a serial killer’s pathology. But the pyromaniac is generally elusive and secretive: setting fires in abandoned buildings, off-hours construction sites, parked cars. The setter often retreats a short distance and watches in anonymity as clamor ensues.
Behold my power.
“Lucas didn’t run off?” I asked.
“He stood there watchin’, jumping up and down, screaming what a bunch of idiots they all were, how he wished they were all dead. Miz Kincannon was bad upset, I heard. Crying. An’ that woman never cries.”
It stopped me: Maylene Kincannon crying?
I figured it took incredible emotional turmoil to evoke tears in someone devoted to absolute control. I wondered if Lucas’s behavior had plunged Maylene Kincannon into her past. Made her terrified that her shrieking, fire-setting son was transmogrifying into a maniacal killer, like the sad and savage brother in her dysfunctional family.
What could someone do with that kind of fear? I wondered.