the news. Probably got out of the habit when the Destructor was featured regularly. As reminders of ex-boyfriends went, that had to have been bad. “Please, go on.”
“West Corp financed the whole thing. The only thing worse than failure is failure in front of your investors. But Sito insisted on showing off the experiment. At any rate, instead of focusing the energy in a beam that could be directed at specific targets—such as parts of the brain, for therapy—the entire room got a dose of the radiation. Now, the dose was weak. It was designed to be safe for use on people, of course. I don’t think anyone was hurt by it. But Mr. West shut down the project and gave everyone who was there quite generous severance payments. He decided the research was too radical to continue safely. Dr. Sito never recovered from the disappointment.
“He … he came to me that night. Drunk out of his mind, despairing. He needed comfort. I suppose I felt sorry for him. That was the night I conceived. By the time I learned I was pregnant, Sito had been institutionalized. I couldn’t keep the baby, then. I couldn’t raise it alone, with the father in an asylum—” She looked at her hands and flattened them on her legs in an effort to stop wringing them. The tendons stood out.
“I never saw Simon again,” she said. “At least, not in person. When he started making the news years later, I didn’t recognize him. I’ve avoided hearing anything about him. I must be the only person in Commerce City not following his trial.”
“He doesn’t know that he has a child,” Celia said. Janet shook her head. “You could probably sell your story to one of the tabloids for a lot of money.” She was mostly joking.
“I could,” Janet said, her smile thin and bitter. “But can you imagine if the child—
Maybe a little like having Captain Olympus as a father. It would be different, of course, having a hero to look up to rather than a villain to despise. But somehow, it would also be the same.
How was she going to tell all this to Mark?
“Ms. Travers—I know who your son is. I’ve met him. Would you like to hear about him?”
She looked back, stricken. The
Abruptly, Janet shook her head. “I put that behind me years ago. I’ve kept it secret for a very long time. If I heard about him, I would want to meet him. I’d want to know if I’m a grandmother, then I might want to
“Then I’ll leave you alone. Thank you very much for speaking with me.” This time when she offered her hand, Janet shook it, lightly, fleetingly.
“You won’t tell anyone about me, will you? You’ll keep my secret?”
The photocopy of the birth certificate burned in her pocket. No one else had seen it. No one else had to. She’d get rid of it. “I’ll keep your secret. Thank you again.”
She had one last exorcism to attempt.
Elroy Asylum was one of the places people ended up when they couldn’t afford institutions like Greenbriar. Industrial and sadly out of date, the four-story cinder-block monolith had a functional sterility that made it hard not to feel a little sorry for its inhabitants. Except that one wing of the hospital was dedicated to criminals. Technically not criminal, she supposed—they’d been deemed insane. Technically, every one of them stood a chance of being cured and set loose in the world.
But some of them, Celia believed, were simply evil. If evil was a form of insanity, so be it. But those people didn’t want to be cured. Knowing what she knew now, she wasn’t sure whether Sito was sick or evil. She didn’t know if he wanted to be cured.
She only knew she never wanted to see him back in the world of the living.
Scuffed linoleum floor and fluorescent lighting were the prominent features of the asylum’s reception area. A man in the white uniform of an orderly occupied the desk and seemed deeply involved in sorting a stack of folders. Celia loomed politely until he looked up.
“Hi, I wondered if it would be possible to visit a patient.” She smiled hopefully.
“That depends on the patient’s status; let me check that for you. Who do you want to see?”
Deep breath. “Simon Sito.”
He stared at her. Her smile froze. All right, so this was rather odd. All she needed now was for him to recognize who she was, and he’d be on the phone to the police.
“I’m sorry, that won’t be possible,” the receptionist said. “He’s under strict security protocols. No visitors.”
“No exceptions?”
“I’m afraid not.” He couldn’t have been any older than she was, but he had the authority of the uniform. She couldn’t stare him down.
She didn’t have a warrant from the DA. She didn’t have permission. She didn’t have a reason for being here, except to satisfy her own curiosity.
“What if I said it’s really important and the fate of the city could rest on whether or not I see him?”
The guy chuckled. “Fate of the city? Who do you think you are? Captain Olympus?”
That didn’t even merit a response. “Well, then. Thanks for your time.”
She took a quick look around. The reception area had two doors. The one behind the desk had a security card scanner. Presumably, it was locked. A door to the left had a regular-looking handle.
She turned back to the orderly. “Do you have a public restroom?”
He nodded at the left-hand door. “Through there, third door on the right.”
“Thank you.”
She was in. Now, she just had to make her way through the maze to the secure section. She tried every door, hoping she’d stumble upon a forgotten back entrance that didn’t require a key card. Instead, she found classrooms, offices, the bathroom, and a janitor’s closet. She snooped for spare key cards lying around. No luck. But in one classroom, she found an open window looking out on an inner courtyard, hemmed in by tall gray walls. And across the courtyard was another open window.
The windows were aluminum framed, the old-fashioned kind that swiveled inward, leaving a gap at the top. Thank God she was thin. She stood on the inside sill, stepped through the opening to the outside sill, held her breath, and slid. These kinds of windows were designed to keep elementary-school children from escaping their classrooms. It was definitely a tight fit. Her shirt scooted up; she tried to hold it in place, but she had to hold her arms up to give her torso enough room to slip through. After a bit of contorting, she let her feet drop to the ground and slid the rest of the way through the window.
She stood on a narrow strip of lawn and tugged her clothes back into place.
A couple of people in bathrobes were staring at her.
A young, thin man sat on a park bench near a security-locked doorway. The other, an older man, had presumably been walking a circuit around the courtyard. He’d stopped and, like the young man, watched her, his mouth open. Patients, presumably. The low-risk kind, out for some fresh air.
This could be interesting.
She ignored them and hoped for the best, striding across the lawn like she belonged there, reaching the next open window, and hoisting herself onto the sill. Reversing the process, poking her head in through the window, she squirmed her way into the next room. Her witnesses didn’t say a word.
Once again, she straightened her clothes. This new room was a lab, long and narrow, with a workbench holding lots of microscopes and other equipment running along one side of it, cabinets and refrigerators on the other side. Fortunately, the place wasn’t currently in use. She didn’t know how long that would last, though.
She paused long enough to consult a fire-escape floor plan on the back of the door. It even had a helpful YOU ARE HERE star. A label marked the high-security section.
She borrowed a white lab coat off the back of a chair and a clipboard and pen off a desk.
The high-security section had an on-duty guard at a desk station. He monitored the wing via a half-dozen televisions connected to closed-circuit cameras, which flipped between scenes inside patients’ rooms. The patients showed the whole range of reactions to their institutionalization: some seemed entirely normal; some huddled in
