“Hey, Doc, I gotta talk to you.”
Bobby Fremont. Twenty-three years old. Suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder and at the tail end of a manic episode. His voice was muffled through the glass.
Tolan held a finger up to Blackburn, then moved to an intercom mounted near the door and flicked a switch. “What is it, Bobby?”
“Who’s the new girl? The one they brought in this morning?”
“That isn’t your concern.”
“Come on, man, cut me a break here. I’ve had a stiffy ever since I saw them drag her down the hallway.”
Tolan frowned at him. “Sorry they even let you see her, Bobby. They should’ve closed your shade.”
The detention unit was coed only out of necessity. Which sometimes created problems. Especially for guys like Bobby, who was often sexually aggressive.
“Fuck that,” Fremont said. “Why you always wanna spoil my fun?”
“That’s not what I’m trying to—”
“You fucking with me, Doc? Huh? Is that what you’re doing? You start fucking with me, I’ll rip your goddamn head off and shit down your throat.”
Tolan paused. That was a new one.
“I mean it, asshole. You’ll be puking blood all over the goddamn linoleum. And when I’m done with you, I’ll stick that bitch six ways to Sunday and she’ll love every minute of it.”
“Jesus,” Blackburn muttered.
Tolan shot him a look, then returned his attention to Fremont. The kid had been in and out of jailhouses and psych wards since he was eleven years old, presenting the typical behavior associated with the disorder: truancy, stealing, vandalism, assault, and more fights than he was able or willing to remember.
The cops, who dealt with him on a regular basis, had brought him here two days earlier for his umpteenth psych evaluation after he’d beaten a drug dealer almost senseless and urinated on his head. Just another day for Bobby.
A sudden thought occurred to Tolan.
This morning’s phone call.
I just wanted to wish you a happy anniversary before I slit your throat.
Could the caller have been Bobby? He certainly had the necessary temperament. But how could he have gotten hold of a phone? Or, for that matter, Tolan’s cell phone number?
Making a mental note to check with staff, Tolan said, “Why don’t we talk about this in session?”
Fremont slapped a palm against the glass. “Fuck session. Just let me out of this freak factory.”
“It’s either here or jail, Bobby. You know that.”
“Fuck you,” Fremont said. “You’re a dead man. You hear me? Don’t you ever turn your back on me.” He kicked the door, then disappeared from sight.
Tolan flicked off the intercom and sighed. Aggressive behavior had kept Fremont from maintaining a job or any significant social relationships for the better part of his life. After treating him on and off for the last several months, Tolan was convinced that, despite claims to the contrary, Bobby was purposely looking for ways to get himself back inside.
He suspected it was loneliness more than anything else that brought him here. The only staff member Fremont had developed a decent relationship with was Lisa, and Tolan wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she was part of the allure.
“And I thought I had the world’s shittiest job,” Blackburn said.
Tolan turned. “Do me a favor and keep your comments to yourself. Especially when I’m talking to a patient.”
“Sorry, Doc.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’ve got a couple of exes don’t think I say it enough.”
“I can only imagine.”
Cassie Gerritt, a third-year med school student who moonlighted as an orderly, was stationed inside the observation booth. She was a ruddy-faced kid with an easy, Southern smile, who just happened to be built like a fullback — a physical trait that often came in handy when dealing with some of their more uncooperative patients.
She was seated at a computer, her concentration centered on the glowing monitor, when Tolan and Blackburn stepped into the booth.
She looked up in surprise. “Dr. Tolan. You’re up awfully early.”
“Nothing like a little Circadian Rhythm Disorder to keep things interesting,” he said. “This is Frank Blackburn.”
As Cassie and Blackburn exchanged hellos and shook hands, Tolan looked through the one-way mirror into the small room beyond, which, like everything else in the building, was showing its age.
A single fluorescent fixture above the bed did little to illuminate pale green walls that had been scarred by several decades of graffiti. Each year a new coat of paint was slapped on, only to be followed by another layer of desperate and often incoherent messages scratched into the surface by fingernail, pencil, or anything else a patient could manage to get his hands on.
Some of them were written in blood.
Jane Doe Number 314 lay in the fetal position, her back to the glass, her hair still damp from the shower the nursing staff had given her. Her blanket lay at her feet and she was hugging herself, the thin white hospital smock doing little to warm her.
Tolan turned to Cassie. “She’s shivering. You might want to turn up the heat in there.” One of the few good things the unit had been blessed with was climate-controlled rooms. In theory, at least.
“She isn’t reacting to the cold,” Cassie said. “It’s already set at seventy-eight degrees.”
“Oh?”
“Ever since we put her in there, she’s been shivering and twitching like she’s got bugs in her veins. You ask me, we’re looking at an acute case of RLS.” Like most med school students, Cassie was always anxious to demonstrate her diagnostic skills, but her accuracy rate left something to be desired.
Blackburn said, “That’s that restless leg thing, right?”
She nodded. “It’s a neurologic movement disorder. Affects about ten percent of the population.”
“I think my first wife had it. Drove me nuts with all her kicking and twitching in the middle of the night. I always told her she was possessed by the Devil. Which pretty much turned out to be true.”
They both looked at him and Blackburn shrugged. “Just making conversation.”
Tolan returned his gaze to Jane Doe. She was much smaller than he had expected.
Although psychotic rage — if that indeed was what she had experienced — often gave its victims strength beyond their size, the way Blackburn had described her, Tolan had envisioned another Cassie.
An Amazon, not a pixie.
He guessed she was about 5’ 1”, with a weight count just over 100 lbs.
With the exception of Lisa and, of course, Cassie, it seemed to Tolan that he had always been surrounded by an inordinate amount of petite women: his mother and two sisters, several of the nurses on staff — and Abby, who had often shopped in the junior section of Macy’s because the clothes fit her better.
At 6’ 2”, he had towered over her. To some, their pairing had seemed incongruous, like an old vaudevillian comedy team. But he had loved the compactness of her body, the small, soft curves, and the way it fit so naturally with his.
Adjusting to Lisa’s taller, more muscular frame had taken time. And sometimes, like this morning, when they made love, he found himself yearning for, even imagining, those small, soft curves. Then he’d open his eyes, see Lisa staring up at him, and the feeling of finality, the sense of loss that had plagued him for so long, was as devastating as a blow to the chest.
Tolan suddenly realized that Cassie was saying something. A jumble of words flitted by without fully registering on the radar.
“Sorry,” he said. “What was that?”
“I hear she’s quite a handful. You want me to go in there with you?”