Point of Origin

'I don't have a clue.' She was reading the letter, a perplexed expression on her face.

'Possibly the one-place part is a play off One Hogan Place, or the address of the District Attorney that eventually would have prosecuted her.'

'I don't have a clue as to what was going through her mind.'

'Let's talk about pheasants,' I then said. 'You have pheasants along the riverbank right outside your door.'

'I haven't noticed.'

'I noticed because we landed in the field there. And that's right, you wouldn't have noticed unless you waded through half an acre of overgrown grass and weeds and went to the water's edge, near the old pier.'

She said nothing, but I could tell she was getting unsettled.

'So my question is, how might Carrie or any of the inmates have known about the pheasants?'

Still, she was silent.

'You know very well why, don't you?' I forced her.

She stared at me.

'A maximum security patient should never have been in that field or even close to it, Ms Blaustein. If you don't wish to talk to me about it, then I'll just let the police take it up with you, since Carrie's escape is rather much a priority for law enforcement these days. Indeed, I'm sure your fine mayor isn't happy about the continuing bad publicity Carrie brings to a city that has become famous for defeating crime.'

'I don't know how Carrie knew,' Ms Blaustein finally said. 'This is the first I've ever heard of fucking pheasants. Maybe someone on the staff said something to her. Maybe one of the delivery people from the store, someone from the outside, such as yourself, in other words.'

'What store?'

'The patient privilege programs allow them to earn credits or money for the store. Snacks, mostly. They get one delivery a week, and they have to use their own money.'

'Where did Carrie get money?'

Blaustein would not say.

'What day did her deliveries come?'

'Depends. Usually early in the week, Monday, Tuesday, late in the afternoon, usually.'

'She escaped late in the afternoon, on a Tuesday,' I said.

'That's correct.' Her eyes got harder.

'And what about the deliveryperson?' I then asked. 'Has anybody bothered to see if he or she might have had anything to do with this?'

'The deliveryperson was a he,' Blaustein said with no emotion. 'No one has been able to locate him. He was a substitute for the usual person, who apparently was out sick.'

'A substitute? Right. Carrie was interested in more than potato chips!' My voice rose. 'Let me guess. The delivery people wear uniforms and drive a van. Carrie puts on a uniform and walks right out with her deliveryman. Gets in the van and is out of here.'

'Speculation. We don't know how she got out.'

'Oh, I think you do, Ms Blaustein. And I'm wondering if you didn't help Carrie with money, too, since she was so special to you.'

She got to her feet and pointed her finger at me again.

'If you're accusing me of helping her escape…'

'You helped her in one way or another,' I cut her off.

I fought back tears as I thought of Carrie free on the streets, as I thought about Benton.

'You monster,' I said, and my eyes were hot on hers. 'I'd like you to spend just one day with the victims. Just one goddamn day, putting your hands in their blood and touching their wounds. The innocent people the Carries of the world butcher for sport. I think there would be some people who would not be too happy to know about Carrie, her privileges, and unaccounted source of income,' I said. 'Others besides me.'

We were interrupted by a knock on her door, and Dr Ensor walked in.

'I thought I might take you on your tour,' she said to me. 'Susan seems busy. Are you finished up here?' she asked the legal aid attorney.

'Quite.'

'Very good,' she said with a chilly smile.

I knew then that the director was perfectly clear on how much Susan Blaustein had abused power, trust, and common decency. In the end, Blaustein had manipulated the hospital as much as Carrie had.

'Thank you,' I said to the director.

I left, turning my back on Carrie's defender.

May you rot in hell, I thought.

I followed Dr Ensor again, this time to a large stainless steel elevator that opened onto barren beige hallways closed off with heavy red doors that required codes for entry. Everything was monitored by closed circuit TV. Apparently Carrie had enjoyed working in the pet program, which entailed daily visits to the eleventh floor, where animals were kept in cages inside a small room with a view of razor wire.

The menagerie was dimly lit and moist with the musky smells of animals and wood chips, and the skittering of claws. There were parakeets, guinea pigs, and a Russian dwarf hamster. On a table was a box of rich soil thick with tender shoots.

'We grow our own birdseed here,' Dr Ensor explained. 'The patients are encouraged to raise and sell it. Of course, we're not talking mass production here. There's barely enough for our own birds, and as you can see by what's in some of the cages and on the floor, the patients tend to be fond of feeding their pets cheese puffs and potato chips.'

'Carrie was up here every day?' I asked.

'So I've been told, now that I've been looking into everything she did while she was here.' She paused, looking around the cages as small animals with pink noses twitched and scratched.

'Obviously I didn't know everything at the time. For example, coincidentally, during the six months Carrie supervised the pet program, we had an unusual number of fatalities and inexplicable escapes. A parakeet here, a hamster there. Patients would come in and find their wards dead in their cages, or a cage door open and a bird nowhere to be found.'

She walked back out into the hallway, her lips firmly pressed.

'It's too bad you weren't here on those occasions,' she said wryly. 'Perhaps you could have told me what they were dying from. Or who.'

There was another door down the hall, and this one opened onto a small, dimly lit room where there was one relatively modern computer and printer on a plain wooden table. I also noted a phone jack in the wall. A sense of foreshadowing darkened my thoughts even before Dr Ensor spoke.

'This was perhaps where Carrie spent most of her free time,' she said. 'As you no doubt know, she has an extensive background in computers. She was extremely good about encouraging other patients to learn, and the PC was her idea. She suggested we find donors of used equipment, and we now have one computer and printer on each floor.'

I walked over to the terminal and sat down in front of it. Hitting a key, I turned off the screen saver and looked at icons that told me what programs were available.

'When patients worked in here,' I said, 'were they supervised?'

'No. They were shown in and the door was shut and locked. An hour later, they were shown back to their ward.' She grew thoughtful. 'I'd be the first to admit that I was impressed with how many of the patients have started learning word processing, and in some instances, spread sheets.'

I went into America Online and was prompted for a username and password. The director watched what I was doing.

'They absolutely had no access to the Internet,' she said.

'How do we know that?'

'The computers aren't hooked up to it.'

'But they do have modems,' I said. 'Or at least this one does. It's simply not connecting because there's no telephone line plugged into the telephone jack.'

I pointed to the tiny receptacle in the wall, then turned around to face her.

'Any chance a telephone line might have disappeared from somewhere?' I asked. 'Perhaps from one of the offices? Susan Blaustein's office, for example?'