Dr. West inclined her head. “Perhaps you would care to wait out here while Mr. Oakes consults with Dr. Phillips?”
“She’s with me,” Davis said, taking Celinda’s arm. “And this isn’t a consultation. It’s Guild business. We’d like to see Phillips immediately.”
Dr. West’s smile faded into an expression of grave concern. “Of course,” she said, sounding a little anxious now. “Come with me.”
She led them into an expensively paneled and carpeted office. A receptionist smiled at them, but before she could speak, the door of the inner office opened. A small, rumpled man with a crown of thinning gray hair bounded out. He grabbed Davis’s hand and pumped it energetically.
“Good to see you, Davis,” he said, beaming. “How are you feeling?”
“Normal, thanks.” Davis freed himself. “This is Celinda Ingram. She’s a friend. Celinda, Dr. Phillips.”
“Dr. Phillips,” she said.
Phillips turned to her, still smiling broadly. “A pleasure, Miss Ingram. What do you say we all go outside onto the veranda? It’s a lovely day.”
She opened herself to the psi energy emanating from the little man. His warmth and smile were genuine.
Within minutes they were all seated on a wide, shaded veranda overlooking the lush gardens and a tranquil pool. The setting was very restful, Celinda thought. Maybe too restful for a private investigator. No doubt about it, the place would probably have driven Davis crazy, even if he hadn’t been medicated.
“We’ve been very worried about you, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Phillips said earnestly, speaking to Davis. “But seeing you here today, I am vastly reassured. You appear to be in excellent health.”
“I appreciate your concern.” Davis’s tone could have frozen hot lava. “But I didn’t come here today to talk about my case. I want to ask you about one of your other patients, a man named Robert C. Brinker.”
“I see.” Disappointment flashed briefly across Phillips’s face. “I thought perhaps you had finally decided to respond to my letters. I know that your experience here was extremely unpleasant. Please believe me when I tell you that we did the best we could under the circumstances. We had never seen a case like yours before. We thought for a time that we were going to lose you altogether or that you would be trapped in a coma for the rest of your life. We were desperate.”
“About Brinker,” Davis said flatly.
Phillips hesitated and then evidently decided to surrender to the inevitable. “You know I am bound by rules of confidentiality.”
“This is Guild business,” Davis said. “In any event, the patient is deceased.”
“Dead?” Phillips was clearly shocked. “How did he die?”
“The cause is still under investigation, but there is a high probability that it was murder.”
“Good Lord.” Shaken, Phillips leaned back in his chair. “This is terrible.”
“Brinker was a Guild man,” Davis said. “His death occurred in the course of an investigation that I am pursuing on behalf of Mercer Wyatt.”
Phillips pondered that closely for a few seconds and then nodded once. “Well, under those circumstances, I suppose I can talk about Mr. Brinker’s case. But I’m not sure if I can supply you with any useful information.”
“I’d like to see the file.”
“Very well.” Phillips got to his feet. “I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared through the glass doors of his office. When he returned, he had a blue folder in one hand. He gave the folder to Davis.
“Brinker was brought here after he sustained a very serious psi burn in the catacombs,” Phillips said, sitting back down. “The trauma was bad enough, but it was made much worse by the fact that he had a long-standing drug habit that had rendered his parapsych profile extremely fragile and unstable.”
Davis flipped open the folder and leafed through the notes, pausing occasionally to read more carefully. “It says here that when he regained consciousness, he was prone to both visual and auditory hallucinations. In other words, he heard voices?”
“Yes.” Phillips sighed. “It was a very sad situation and complicated, as I told you, by his addiction history.”
Davis went back to the file. “He was treated by several doctors. I recognize most of the names.”
“No doubt.”
“They’re all still here at the clinic?”
Phillips looked troubled by the question. “All but one. Seton Hollings was on the staff at the time Brinker was a patient. He left us shortly before you came to us as a patient.”
Davis looked up at that, very focused. He might not be sensitive to psi wave patterns, Celinda thought, but there were other ways to read people, ways a good private investigator no doubt utilized instinctively.
“Why did Hollings leave?” he asked.
Phillips hesitated. For a few seconds, Celinda was afraid he might not answer at all. She wasn’t sure what Davis would do if that happened. He wanted answers.
“I’m not certain if the reasons for Hollings’s dismissal come under the heading of Guild business,” Phillips said quietly.
Davis fixed him with a steady expression. “If he was dismissed in connection with the Brinker case, it does.”
Phillips struggled with his professional ethics a moment longer and then exhaled heavily. “Very well. It’s not as though I have any interest in protecting the bastard.”
The outrage in the words made Celinda straighten a little in her chair.
“You didn’t like Dr. Hollings?” she asked.
“He was a disgrace to the profession.” Phillips got to his feet and started to pace the veranda, hands clasped behind his back. “In the beginning we were delighted to have him on the staff. He came to us with credentials that positively glowed. But later we learned that most of his publications and references were fraudulent. What’s more, he had been dismissed from his previous post.”
“Don’t you run background checks on your people?” Davis asked.
“Of course. But they are fairly routine in nature. We don’t conduct in-depth investigations. Hollings was very clever. He had gone to great lengths to make himself look good on paper, and I’m sorry to say he succeeded.”
“When did you discover that he was a problem?” Davis asked.
Phillips came to a halt, his expression grim. “When I realized that he was conducting unauthorized experiments on a small number of the most severely traumatized patients.”
“Patients like Brinker?” Celinda said.
“Yes.” Phillips’s mouth tightened at the corners. “The nature of Brinker’s parapsych illness made him extremely vulnerable.”
“What sort of experiments did Hollings perform on him?” Davis asked.
“Hollings was a leading light in dream state research. As you may know, new research has confirmed that the dream state is the only state in which the barriers between the normal and paranormal planes are not clearly defined.”
“No,” Davis said. “Can’t say I did know that.”
“The study of the dream state is a new and rather esoteric field,” Phillips explained. “Hollings was fascinated with the subject. He was also an expert with psi drugs. I fear he combined the two skills to conduct experiments that can only be described as mind control.”
Davis watched him closely. “How did he attempt to control Brinker?”
“To be quite honest, I have no way of knowing how much damage he did to poor Brinker, because shortly after Hollings was dismissed, Brinker, himself, disappeared. In the past nine months I have sent a number of letters to the address that we had on file for him, but he never responded.” Phillips rubbed his forehead in an agitated way. “Now you tell me that he is dead.”
“I want to talk to Hollings. Where did he go after he left the institute?”
“Certainly not to a reputable hospital or clinic here in Cadence. I would never have given him a reference, and he knew it. In fact, I filed a complaint with the License Review Board of the Association of Para-Psychiatrists. But by the time they got around to acting on it, Hollings had vanished.”
“What do you mean?” Celinda asked.