The one time he showed it to me, he threatened to cut off all my hair if I ever said anything to them. It was seven or eight more years before they died, and I don't think they ever found out. Isn't that funny?…
Eric?"
Eric had propped his forehead on the heel of his hand, and was staring down at his plate. Slowly, he looked up at her. His eyes were cold and hollow.
"The tattoo," he said hoarsely. "What was it of?"
"Roses. Why?"
"Three roses."
"That's right." She looked at him strangely.
"With writing underneath each one."
Now Laura paled.
"Mom, Dad, and Laurie," she said. "Eric, what's going on?"
Eric ran his fingers through his hair.
"It doesn't make sense," he said.
"What? Please, Eric, what?"
"That derelict, Thomas Jordan. He had that tattoo.
I'm sure of it."
They left the restaurant without finishing dinner, and walked in numb silence through Watertown Square and down along the Charles River.
Overhead, through the hazy reflected glow of the city, flecks of stars dotted the spring sky. Laura slipped her hand into the crook of Eric's arm and pulled him close to her.
"You're really certain?" she asked finally.
"I see a lot of tattoos, many on people I would never have expected to have one. They interest me, so I remember a fair number of them anyhow.
And that one was unique because of where it was, and also because it was beautifully done. It struck me at the time because, frankly, there wasn't anything else the least bit appealing about the man who had it."
"Scott was one of the most appealing men I've ever known," she said. "He has a wonderful face, and the most expressive eyes.
Couldn't the tattoo just be a coincidence?"
"Of course it could."
"You don't believe that. I can tell."
Eric shrugged helplessly.
"Tern Dillard, the nurse who felt she recognized Jordan as Scott, is a pretty sharp person. The scientist side of me is prepared to consider one coincidence, but now this would be two."
"But the funeral director… the fingerprints… the death certificate. It doesn't make sense. How could the medical examiner have misidentified the body?"
"I don't think he could have," Eric said grimly.
"He lied?"
"Either he did, or Donald Devine."
"But why?"
"I don't know. I've heard that medical schools pay a hell of a lot for bodies. Maybe they've got some sort of scam going."
"How can we find out?"
"Well, for a start, I think we should have a talk with Dr. Bushnell, the M.E."
They walked away from the river and found a diner with a pay phone.
Bushnell, M.D was listed with a Beacon Hill address.
"It's only eight-thirty," Laura said. "Do you think it's worth trying to call him?"
"I'd rather try it in person. If there's something weird going on, I don't want this guy to have time to think about it."
"Should we go now?" she asked.
Eric took both her hands and held them.
"Can you think of a better time?" he said.
There were two observation huts in Charity, Utah: one at the west end of the main street, built atop what was once the Miner's Bank and Trust building and was now the laundry; and one by the clinic in the east end, set beside the water tower, which still functioned quite nicely, storing water pumped up from the spring deep beneath the town.
This evening Garrett Pike sat on a threelegged stool in the east end hut, gazing out across miles of rolling desert at the sun, now a huge copper plate dropping close to the horizon.
He was nearing the end of one of his three-month stints at the hospital and was getting antsy to return to L.A. for a three-week break. The setup, which Dr. Barber had suggested to him at his hiring nearly two years before, was perfect. Three straight months of relative solitude in the desert was about all he could handle, and three weeks of the smog and bullshit in L.A. was just about enough as well.
Pike's title was mental health worker, and in fact he did speak to the patients from time to time-ask them their problems and such. But in truth, since he had barely graduated from high school and had been given no formal training by Dr. Barber, he knew that he was more a caretaker than anything else. And a caretaker was what the thirty or so patients living at any one time in the Charity Project needed. They were so heavily medicated, so sluggish, that.having one oversleep and miss a meal or a shift at work was far more likely than having one slip off into the desert or commit an act of violence.
Initially, when he had answered Dr. Barber's ad in the L.A. Times, Pike had been reluctant to consider working at a hospital for the criminally insane, especially one stuck out in the middle of nowhere.
But the pay was great-several times what he was making as a security guard-and Barber had assured him that the project had proven completely successful at keeping patients docile. The key was a long-acting tranquilizer, which was itself being evaluated for more general use.
Whenever the boredom began to get to him, Pike liked to think back to how it was before he took the job, back to the days when he didn't have a pot to piss in, and owed money to everyone and his brother.
Now he had a car, a decent little apartment in the city, and even some money in the bank. The secrecy bothered him a little-he was barred from entering the clinic building, and promised immediate termination should he speak of the Charity Project to anyone. But he enjoyed feeling that he was doing something of value to society. And as long as he could go hunting in the desert, and drive into town every few weeks to get his rocks off with one of the girls at Cathie's Place, the bennies of the job far outweighted the drawbacks.
Pike checked the hour and then took his clipboard and pushed himself to his feet. It was time for evening rounds. On the street below, he could see the last of the patients shuffling their way from the dining hall to the barracks. All in all, he mused, the government must consider the Charity Project to be a huge success. Besides himself, there was John Fairweather doing maintenance; the old Indian.woman, Jane, in the kitchen; and Dr. Barber. The rest of the jobs at the hospital-all menial and repetitive tasks-were done by the patients themselves. Three workers and one doctor for thirty or forty patients. talk about costeffectiveness!
Pike clipped the two-way radio over his left hip and hung his night stick from a leather thong over his right. There were shotguns locked on the wall in each hut, but the only time he had needed one on the job was a year or so ago, when a young couple from L.A. had stumbled into the town by accident. Pike smiled at the memory of how tough he had acted, and how frightened the psychologist and his pushy wife had looked facing the business end of the Remington. Dr. Barber had given him a decent bonus for handling things so well.
Pike started his rounds by checking through the fields and greenhouses.
It had been a while since he had last thought about the couple, and he wondered, as he usually did when that affair crossed his mind, what sort of deal Dr. Barber had struck with them to keep the existence of the Charity Project a secret. A day or two after the pair had left Charity, he had asked John Fairweather about them. But the tight-hoped Navajo had just shrugged.
The store, the laundry, the gymnasium, the showers, the vitamin shop, the women's barracks, the maintenance shed. Pike worked his way down Main Street, one building at a time. As usual, everything and everybody were in place. Except for the arrival of a new patient every two weeks or so, or the departure or death of an old one at about the same rate, there was never a change in the place. Pike assumed that those who left were transferred to a medical hospital, or back to a regular prison, but neither Barber nor John Fairweather had ever actually told him.