32
With the aid of a flashlight, Malcolm Fletcher carefully made his way down a hallway with rotted floorboards, far away from the Boston police.
Fletcher had an excellent visual memory. He remembered the layout of the hospital, having roamed through its corridors lives and lives ago when he was employed as a special agent for the FBI's newly formed Behavioral Science Unit.
In 1954, Hurricane Edna had ripped one of the massive oaks in front of the hospital and sent the tree crashing into the roof, the falling debris crushing most of the floors. Given the exorbitant cost of fixing the floors, the board of directors decided to seal off the passages.
When an electrical fire gutted a good portion of the Mason wing in 1982, the hospital was already under state care. Lawmakers, sensing a potentially lucrative payday, put the land up for sale. A historical society looking to save the hospital, considered by many to be an architectural landmark, the last of its kind, filed petitions and injunctions. Potential buyers were scared off by the threat of significant legal costs and a long, protracted court fight.
For twenty-odd years the hospital had been abandoned, and during that time, the long New England winters had caused significant rot and water damage to the walls and floors. It had taken a considerable amount of patience and skill to find a safe passage to the top floor; the amount of decay and ruin was severe.
Fletcher slid into a room with broken windows. He removed his cell phone, found a signal and called Jonathan Hale.
'I believe I know the man who killed your daughter,' Fletcher said. Darby had left her car unlocked. Her kit was in the trunk. Reed radioed Kevin, the young man parked in the pickup at the end of the road, and asked him to bring the orange box in the trunk to the C wing, which he did, half an hour later.
She took pictures then decided she wanted help processing the hospital room. She bagged the photograph and statue and called Coop from the road.
'Fletcher left us two gifts,' Darby said. 'A photograph and – get this – a Virgin Mary statue. I'm pretty sure the statue is the same one we found with Hale and Chen.'
'Do we know where or how Special Agent Creepy found the statue?'
'We do not.'
'Why lead you to an abandoned hospital, though? What's the point? He could have dropped the photograph and statue in the mail.'
'It's not as dramatic.'
'True.'
'And maybe Fletcher wants us to discover something about that particular room. He deliberately left the statue and photograph inside a patient room that housed violent offenders – the same room he had been to earlier in the day.'
'How long did you say the hospital has been closed?'
'At least twenty years,' Darby said. 'Probably more like thirty.'
'And you think you're going to find the name of the patient or patients who occupied that particular room? Good luck with that.'
'I'll see you in an hour.'
As Darby drove, she thought about Coop's parting words.
When Sinclair closed, the truly violent offenders were most likely transferred to other psychiatric hospitals. The schizophrenics, the patients who were bipolar or manic depressive, would be evaluated and then, thanks to the ever constant squeeze of mental health dollars, treated on an outpatient basis and pushed back into the street. The files had been floating through the state's mental health system for decades. Trying to track down a patient file, even with a specific name, was tantamount to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. ? Coop was waiting for her inside their office.
'Where's Keith?' Darby asked.
'He went home to have dinner with the wife and kids and then is coming back to the lab to help us process the room. Let's take a look at the photograph first.'
After taking pictures, Coop examined the paper. It didn't contain any marks or distinguishing characteristics.
'The woman in the picture, with the hairstyle and clothes, I'm guessing it was taken in the early eighties,' Darby said. 'What are you going to use to treat the paper?'
'Ninhydrin mixed with heptane,' Coop said, flicking the switch for the ventilation unit.
Darby put on the safety goggles and a breathing mask. Coop, wearing a pair of nitrile gloves, sprayed the back of the paper. It turned purple. They both examined the paper, waiting for the ninhydrin to react with the amino acids left by the human hand.
There were no fingerprints.
Coop sprayed the side holding the photograph.
'No prints,' Coop said. 'Lucky for us we already know who he is.'
33
Hannah Givens sat on the bed with the tray of food – toast and eggs – that the man named Walter Smith had left inside the sliding food carrier. She didn't have a clock or a calendar, but this was her second breakfast. Today must be Sunday.
She didn't have windows, either, but she did have plenty of light. Two pretty Tiffany-style lamps were inside the room – one on the nightstand next to the bed, the other set up on a small reading table full of thumbed-through issues of People, Star, Us, Cosmopolitan and Glamour.
The most interesting item was the big white armoire. The shirts were small and mediums; Hannah was a large, a size 12. Shoes were arranged neatly at the bottom – Prada, Kenneth Cole and two pairs of Jimmy Choos, all of them a size six. Hannah wore a size ten. Clearly the shoes and clothes hadn't been picked out for her.
Hannah thought about the clothes and magazines with their wrinkled pages and again wondered if another woman had lived in here before her. If so, what had happened to her? The question left a cold space in her stomach.
She wrapped the down comforter around her even though the room was warm. The fear was still there but it wasn't holding her hostage any more. It had drifted to some other place and, for a reason she couldn't quite explain, she didn't feel the need to cry or scream. She had done all of that, anyway.
Waking up in the dark for the first time, her head foggy, Hannah had a brief moment where she believed she was at home. Then the memory of what had happened descended on her like scalding water and she was out of the bed and stumbling through the strange dark, bumping into foreign objects as her fear reached a hysterical pitch and then she was screaming, screaming it all out until her throat was raw.
Finally, she summoned the nerve to face the dark and searched the room as a blind person would – slow, cautious steps; hands feeling over each object to register its shape. Here was a table. Here, a chair – leather, judging by its cool, smooth feel. Next a nightstand, and what was this? It felt like a lamp. She found the switch and turned it on.
The first thing she noticed was her pyjamas – soft, pink flannel. They were her size but these weren't her pyjamas. The man named Walter had undressed her. He had come in here while she was unconscious and taken off her jacket and clothes. He had seen her naked.
Walter, Hannah was sure, hadn't raped her. The two times she had had sex, she had woken up the next morning feeling slightly sore. Walter hadn't raped her but he had undressed her. Had he touched her? Taken pictures? What? What was he going to do to her? Why did he want her?
One thing was clear: Walter didn't want her to leave. The room had one door but no doorknob. Mounted on the wall was a keypad unit much like the ones she had seen in office buildings; you needed a keycard and a code to open it. Drilled into the door was a oneway peephole. Walter could see in but Hannah couldn't see out.
Clearly Walter wanted her to feel comfortable. The room was the size of a small studio apartment, windowless, with a small kitchenette and walls painted a warm yellow. A beautiful red cashmere throw blanket was draped over the back of a leather reading chair with matching ottoman. Behind the chair was a bookshelf holding well-read paperback romance books. A cloth shower curtain hid a toilet but there was no bath or shower. The room even had its own thermostat.