The Secret Friend

'Like I said, I only caught a glimpse of him.'

'Just write down what you remember. You got a pen and paper?'

'No.'

'I'll get it for you,' Darby said. Bryson arrived half an hour later, along with a van containing six cops. It was after six and the evening sky was pitch black.

Nathan Reed, the owner of Reed Associates, the company that provided security for the hospital, was a tall, wiry man with crooked yellow teeth and fingers stained by nicotine. Darby guessed the man was somewhere in his sixties. He wore a check flannel jacket and an orange hunting cap with fur flaps that covered his ears.

'It was the oddest thing, this cop showing up here out of the blue,' Reed told them. They were standing at the bottom of the hill, their backs to the wind. 'He spoke to one of my guys, Chucky, and I just happened to be here, so Chucky got on the horn and called me. We can't have anyone wandering through the hospital without an escort for liability reasons.'

'How did you know he was a cop?' Darby asked.

'He showed me his badge.'

'What was his name?'

'I don't know. He didn't tell me.'

'Did you ask?'

'No, ma'am, I didn't. Cop comes knocking, you do what you're told and don't ask too many questions.'

'Did he have an accent?'

'As a matter of fact he did. British or something,' Reed said. 'He showed me his badge and said he needed to get inside and take a look around the C wing. I told him the place had been cleaned out – there's nothing up there. He said he wanted to take a look so I took him up.'

'Mr Reed, this is going to sound like an odd question, but did you see his eyes?'

'His eyes?'

'Did you notice what colour they were?'

'Haven't the foggiest,' Reed said. 'He was wearing sunglasses. I don't mean to be a Nosy Nelly, but why are you asking me all these questions? Don't you know why he was here? I assume you people work together.'

'This cop you met, we don't know who he is,' Darby said. He sure as hell sounded like Malcolm Fletcher. The description was dead-on. 'Anything you can tell us will be extremely helpful.'

Reed cupped his hand over a lighter and lit a cigarette. 'You ever see that Clint Eastwood movie High Plains Drifter?'

'Several times,' Darby said.

'This guy gave off that same type of menace. You know, do exactly what I ask or there'll be hell to pay. That's why I didn't ask any questions. I took him up there to C wing and let him look around for a bit. Truth be told, I was glad when he left.'

'What time did he leave?'

Reed thought it over for a moment. 'Around four, I'd say.'

'Did he find anything up there?'

'No. Like I said, there's nothing up there. The whole place has been cleaned out. I took him to C wing, he looked around for a bit, then he thanked me and left.'

'He specifically asked you to take him to the C wing,' Darby said.

'Yes ma'am. C wing's the place where they once housed the violent offenders, the real nasty ones like Johnny Barber. You remember him?'

'Can't say that I do.'

Reed took a long drag off his cigarette. 'Johnny Barber – his real name was Johnny Edwards or something – Johnny was a serial rapist back in the early sixties. Worked at a barber shop and cut up women's faces with a straight-edge razor – hence the name. Court found him guilty by reason of insanity so he was shipped off here.' He pointed his thumb to the long road winding its way through the woods. 'Turns out he was also a great artist. They hung some of his paintings on the walls, and I've got to say, they were pretty damn impressive. Then he attacked a doctor – tried to stab him with a paintbrush of all things – so they took his art supplies away and you know what the crazy son of a bitch did? He started using his own turds as crayons. The pictures weren't that bad. Smelled horrible though.' Reed's laugh echoed over the wind.

'I need you to show me where this cop went,' Darby said.

Reed flicked his cigarette into the woods. 'I managed to plough out the main road here before my truck shit the bed, but the top of the campus is a mess,' he said. 'I hope you two are in the mood for some exercise 'cause we got a lot of walking to do.'

29

Bryson already had a flashlight. Darby grabbed the spare she kept in the trunk of her car and then followed Reed, along with Bryson and the six other men, up the steep access road.

A slick layer of ice covered the pavement. She walked carefully, watching each step. The hill, bordered with pine trees, their branches weighed down with heavy, wet snow, seemed to stretch for miles with no end in sight.

'The campus is in the process of being torn down,' Reed said, his breath pluming in the cold air. 'I told your cop friend the same thing. There's nothing in there, nothing at all. The whole place has been cleared out.'

'When did the hospital close?' Darby asked.

'An electrical fire in the morgue gutted the Mason wing back in eighty-two. The lackeys on Beacon Hill decided it was too expensive to fix – the hospital is over two hundred years old – and with the statewide budget cuts in mental health, the hospital closed the following year.'

'There's a morgue in this building?'

'At one point in time, this place was a research hospital. When a patient died, the doctors would study their brains – this was back at the turn of the century when such things were allowed. Anyway, after the fire happened, the place shut down permanently – lack of funding and all that. I can't say I disagree with the decision. It would have cost a pretty penny to fix this place up.'

Darby nodded, not really listening, her focus turned inward on Malcolm Fletcher. What was his interest in an abandoned hospital? If he was, in fact, looking for something, why didn't he sneak in? Maybe he couldn't find another way in and decided to ask Reed for help.

When they reached the top of the hill, Darby was out of breath, her legs shaking with fatigue. Reed lit another cigarette.

The Sinclair Mental Health Facility, a massive Gothic structure of ancient brick and barred windows, was set around a wide courtyard holding the remains of a water fountain and several trees which were probably even older than the hospital. Some of the stained-glass windows were still intact.

'That there's the Kirkland building,' Reed said. 'Place is over two hundred years old.'

Darby had never seen anything so massive in both size and length. Going in there one could get lost. Forever.

'How big is this place?'

'About four hundred thousand square feet,' Reed said. 'There are eighteen floors not including the basement, which is a maze in and of itself. Kirkland is divided into two wings – Gable and Mason. You can't go inside Mason. The floors are pretty much rotted away, and the fire did a lot of damage, so we had the place sealed off back in eighty-nine. In another few months, everything you see here will be gone to make room for condos. Truth be told, I'm a little sad. This building's a historic landmark, the last of its kind. See those two buildings to your far left? Those used to be the tuberculosis buildings. They had one for male patients, one for female. There's a lot of history here.'

Darby waded through knee-high snow covering the courtyard. The place had the look and feel of a New England college campus from the early fifties – quaint and secluded, a sprawling mass of brick buildings tucked inside a heavily wooded area sitting on top of a hill overlooking Boston, eighteen miles to the south.

'Kirkland's become sort of a local tourist attraction ever since that movie Creepers came out,' Reed said. 'You see it?'

Darby shook her head. She was not a fan of horror movies any more. They hit too close to home.

'The Morrell book was much better,' Reed said. 'The story's about a group of urban explorers known as creepers who break into old historic buildings. The movie producers used the hospital as a location. We've had to increase security over the past five years. We have guards posted around the property twenty-four hours a day. Majority of people we arrest are teenagers and college students looking for a spot to drink and get high and screw, if you can believe it.'