Reed took out his keys and walked up the stairs to the main doors. The glass behind the steel security grate was cracked.
'You brought him through the front door?' Darby asked.
'Yes ma'am.'
'Is this the only way you can access the hospital?'
'The front door is the safest way to enter the hospital,' Reed said. 'There are some other entrances through the basement ducts and some old tunnels that lead out into different parts of the property, but half of 'em have collapsed or are about to. You try and go in that way, you're risking your life. That's why we got all this security around here. Place is a liability. Back in ninety-one, some asshole broke into the property, fell and cracked his head open. He sued and won a nice little settlement for himself. If you saw the legal bills, your head would spin.'
Beyond the front door was a hallway that opened up into a large, rectangular-shaped room stripped clean of its furniture. There was nothing in here but bare floors and walls covered with flecks of chipped white paint.
'This used to be the reception area,' Reed said. 'Grab a hardhat from that box over there. You two don't scare easily, do you?'
'If he gets scared, I'll hold his hand,' Darby said, glancing to Bryson. Tim didn't hear the comment. He was moving the beam of his flashlight around the room.
'This one time, I took a group of ghost hunters through here for some TV show,' Reed said. 'They were carrying these weird gadgets that looked like props from that movie Ghostbusters. One of them thought they saw a ghost and the stupid son of a bitch ran away screaming and fell through a hole and fractured his foot. Stay behind me and watch your step.'
30
The adjoining room was as long and wide as a football field, with a vaulted ceiling and mouldy, water-stained wallpaper printed with tiny red and blue roses. The back wall had custom-made picture windows, many of which were broken or missing. The linoleum floor was covered in snow and patches of melting ice.
'This used to be the main dining room,' Reed said. 'Back in the forties, they had professional chefs that cooked all this fancy food. Brought in lobsters during the summer, had these big cookouts for the patients on the front lawn – there used to be a small golf course here, too, believe it or not. I wouldn't have minded staying here during those days. Place sounds like a resort. How much you know about Sinclair?'
'We don't know much,' Darby said.
'You want, I can tell you about the history. Might help pass the time. We got a lot of walking to do.'
'Sounds good.'
Reed walked through the dining room, his footsteps crunching over the snow and ice. 'When the hospital was first built back in the late eighteenth century, it was called the State Lunatic Hospital,' he said. 'The place was known for its humane treatment of patients. Dr Dale Linus – that would be the first hospital director – he believed in a humanistic approach to treating mental illness – fresh air, healthy food and exercise. It was a pretty radical idea at the time. Linus kept the number of patients to five hundred, making sure each patient got the help and treatment they deserved. In the beginning, they treated all types of people, not just criminals. A lot of the patients came here from all over the world because of the progressive therapies Linus invented.'
'What sort of progressive therapies?'
'Let's see… Well, there were the water therapies where they'd dunk patients into freezing cold water to try and cure their schizophrenia. Then they tried something called insulin comas. That was supposed to help calm patients down. Sinclair was the first hospital in the country to perform a lobotomy.'
'I don't know if that's necessarily progressive.'
'It was at the time. Now it seems barbaric, given the fact that you can pretty much pop a pill to treat almost any mental disorder. Sinclair was so successful, so revolutionary in its approaches to treating the mind, two buildings were devoted strictly to teaching doctors who came in from all over the world – they had to build a dormitory to house them all.'
Darby followed Reed into a cold corridor – same concrete, same chipped paint. A lot of the walls were covered in graffiti. One hallway was sunken in with debris.
'When did the hospital name change over to Sinclair?' Darby asked.
'Dr Phinneus Sinclair became the hospital director back in, oh, sixty-two, I think. That was around the time they started taking in only criminals. The more normal patients, for lack of a better term, went over to the McLean Hospital, which was gaining a reputation for treating the rich, rock stars and weirdo writers and poets, people like that. McLean was the place to go if you had money. Sinclair became the place to come to if you wanted to pursue studying the criminal mind. Dr Sinclair was trying to discover the origins of violent behaviour. He did a lot of studies involving children who came from broken homes.'
Darby had never come across Sinclair's name during her doctorate work. Maybe the studies were considered radical at one time. Now, in the twenty-first century, finding the origins of violent and deviant behaviour rooted in childhood trauma seemed commonplace.
Reed ducked underneath a beam and took them down a long corridor that opened up into a large, rectangular area with doors on both sides. Darby moved the beam of her flashlight through the rooms of broken windows. The rooms were various sizes. All of them were empty.
'These are the doctors' offices,' Reed said. 'Man, you should have seen the furniture in there. All antiques. Some guy bid on all of it, hauled it away and made a small fortune.'
He paused in front of a big room holding an ornate stained-glass window. 'This was the hospital director's office. Your cop friend stopped here for a moment, just stared for a bit like he was reminiscing or something. He didn't say anything but…'
'What?' Darby prompted.
'It's not important, really, just sort of odd. I just remembered he didn't take off his sunglasses. I mentioned he might want to take them off, given where we were heading, and he just ignored me and walked off like he knew where he was going.'
Darby followed Reed down three flights of dusty stairs, the ancient building creaking and moaning around her. Ten minutes later, Reed stopped in front of an old steel door and shined his light on the faded red lettering: ward c.
'This is where they did the prefrontal lobotomies,' Reed said, opening the door. 'Watch your step in here. Moisture collects on the tiles, even in the winter. Place is sealed tighter than a flea's ass. It's slippery as hell.'
No windows, just pitch-black darkness. The cold room reeked of mildew. Mounted against the wall was an old General Electric clock covered in rust. Darby spotted several spigots. They probably hooked up hoses to them to wash away the blood. She wondered how many patients had undergone what was considered, at one point in time, to be a progressive medical solution to treating mental illness.
Reed's boots squeaked across the tiles. 'When I first took the job, the steel tables with the leather restraints were still in here. They used to do shock treatments in here, too.'
A creaking sound as he opened the door at the far end. The adjoining hallway was in a state of partial ruin. Darby followed the man through another hallway and then it opened into a wide space full of two floors that reminded her of a prison. Cells were on either side, each steel door equipped with locks and a grating so doctors could look in on their patients. The doors were rusted, the small rooms stripped clean.
'This here's C wing,' Reed said. 'The cop walked over to this room here.'
Reed moved the beam of his flashlight inside and jumped back from the door. Darby moved past the man and looked into the cell.
Thumb-tacked to the wall underneath a windowsill was a photograph, a headshot of a woman with long blonde hair parted in the middle and feathered. She had piercing blue eyes in a deeply tanned face and wore a white collared shirt.