Stop fretting, I told myself, and returned to the computer, carrying a mug of mango tea. Joel Ransler had postponed our charter to investigate what he said was a murder scene. It didn’t take me long to find the few facts available. An eighty-two-year-old man, Clayton Edwards, had died of “multiple wounds” in a Sematee County mobile home park and his trailer had been ransacked. Murder-robbery was suspected.
The name Edwards is mentioned often in Florida history, so I spent another fifteen minutes searching for more information, then gave up. I had a lot to do: Fisherfolk Inc., the nonprofit organization based in Carnicero, had to have a founder, possibly even a board. What were their names? There were newspaper articles I needed to read about the Dwight Helms murder, and I also wanted to confirm what Birdy had told me about the Candors.
What kind of psychiatric research had Dr. Alice Candor conducted? Birdy hadn’t had time at the sheriff’s department to find out, or it was possible that medical journals were kept locked to all but subscribers. I also wanted to run a background check on Joel Ransler, who had confirmed by text he was meeting me at the dock in the morning. Everything about the man seemed genuine and likable, so why did I distrust him? No… that wasn’t fair. Truth was, I didn’t want to trust him because… why? Was it because I found Ransler attractive, was flattered by his interest, even though I was already in love with a good man?
Nothing wrong with that, my conscience insisted. Finish with the computer, then go to bed. You won’t have to sleep in an office much longer.
It was never easy for me to be alone in this building at night. Living next to a strip mall was like waiting for a traffic light to change or for a bus to arrive-some sudden transitional signal that would thrust me forward into my future. Finally, it was happening. The beautiful little Marlow cruising boat would soon be my home, which is why most of my things were already packed in boxes. The office was becoming an office again, but that didn’t change the emptiness I felt as I sat alone, trying to ignore the headlights and rumble of passing cars, the voices of faceless strangers who parked outside to use the fitness center or to buy beer at the Shop N Go.
Soon, the search engines, which debit our agency monthly, began to produce information I could not have found on my laptop, and the noise outside was silenced. One by one, I created folders labeled Fisherfolk, Candors, and Helms Murder, then dragged files into them as they appeared. I wanted to arrange the files chronologically before I began my reading. Because I dreaded what I might discover about the murder of Dwight Helms, I also wanted to save it for last.
I opened the Candor file first, even before the search engines had completed their work. Everything Birdy told me about the couple was true, but her words hadn’t had the impact of seeing the mug shots of Dr. Alice Candor and her husband glowering at me from clippings in the Toledo Blade and Cleveland Plain Dealer. The charges made against their company, Firelands Physicians Regional Health Care, had made headlines. Something Birdy hadn’t mentioned was their company had also managed rehab clinics for the state penal system. It was a lucrative contract that had been canceled when six inmate patients followed through on a suicide pact that, supposedly, didn’t include a note explaining why they’d killed themselves. During the scandal that followed, letters to the editor about the Candors were so venomous, it was no wonder they had fled to Florida-a state where the best of people, and the worst, come to reinvent their lives.
Raymond-I now knew the husband’s name. I had seen him from a distance and hadn’t noticed his graying mustache or his pale, nervous eyes. A dog that fears his master’s voice and hand-the expression on the husband’s face was similar. Alice Candor’s credentials-degrees from Oberlin, Ohio State, and Johns Hopkins-suggested that she, the overachiever, was the dominant of the two. She had done research at a psychiatric hospital prior to going into private practice, then chairing Firelands Health Care, but had published in only two journals. As feared, access to both was restricted, then further restricted when I attempted to subscribe: licensed physicians, medical students, and authorized clinicians only.
Even so, I found an abstract of Dr. Candor’s first research paper, which produced a familiar chill because it suggested the doctor had done research using prison inmates as subjects:
Effects of Benzedrine on Violent Habitual Offenders Unresponsive to Standard Protocols
A two-year study that suggests clinicians can assert surrogate influence on habitually violent and criminal behavior after administering Benzedrine in dosages that avoid addiction (but exceed the accepted maximum) via media that manipulate the subject’s frontal lobes.
In high school, I got A’s in physiology and chemistry but now couldn’t remember what Benzedrine was for or remember the role our frontal lobe plays in the human brain. I knew what assert surrogate influence and manipulate meant, though, and it scared me. In this case, the assertive surrogate was Alice Candor. How she had manipulated the brains of her inmate patients, the abstract didn’t say, but she’d readied them by administering a drug in large dosages. Could assertive influence also be translated as control? Was that why six prison inmates had committed suicide?
I looked up Human brain, frontal lobes and found too much to digest in one night. Basically, the frontal lobe is two sections of brain that presses against our foreheads. Combined, they are responsible for our behavior, our ability to learn, and all of our voluntary movements.
Voluntary movements-I wondered if the distinction was significant. To a man or woman in prison, I had no doubt that it was.
As I puzzled over the wording, my phone buzzed, which caused me to jump. I stood, checked the time-9:20 p.m.-then opened a text from Birdy Tupplemeyer, which read Just leaving. Place closest me no luck. Can’t call now. How long U up?
Using two fast thumbs, I replied, Late as you want, get out of there, be careful! because her note could only mean one thing: she had gone alone to a dump site near her condo in South Fort Myers, one of the places we’d discussed earlier. It was a county landfill that was gated and guarded after hours but a common destination for trucks loaded with raw earth to unload.
“Crazy woman,” I muttered but had to smile. I often meet people who talk bravely about their intentions, but Birdy, by god, was a doer, not just a talker. My respect for her had just climbed several notches.
As an afterthought, I sent a second text: Don’t go alone again! Mean it! And I did. I had agreed to help the redhead, why hadn’t she waited for another night? I walked around the office, expecting a response that didn’t come. After five minutes had passed, I was worried enough to consider sending a third text, but decided Tupplemeyer-a cop-didn’t need a babysitter, so I went to the bathroom, used the toilet, and washed my face to collect myself.
Assert surrogate influence. I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head. Levi Thurloe, a huge man with a child’s brain, was working for the Candors. Had Alice, the research psychiatrist, been giving Levi drugs and then… what? Issuing hypnotic commands? Whispering into his ear during lunch breaks, then sending him out to intimidate people she considered to be enemies? Or even ordering them killed with an axe? It sounded like ridiculous science fiction. But the couple now owned several small Florida clinics, according to Birdy. Dr. Alice was still licensed to practice, she had worked with violent criminals in the past, and the woman still had access to lord knows what types of drugs. Maybe the scenario wasn’t so silly after all.