Walter was up to it, so long as he had clear instructions and a couple of visual aids.
One of these was a photo Cray had downloaded from the Internet during a brief on-line session this morning, and the other was a slip of paper filled out with a few letters and numbers in a large, careful hand.
“Do you understand?” he asked the man who sat with him on the sofa.
Walter nodded. His head gleamed in the sun. “I can do it, Dr. Cray”
Even so, Cray reviewed the matter one last time before sending Walter Luntz on his way.
At 10:30 he toured the facility, opening a succession of locked doors with his passkey, checking in with the psychiatrists and supervising nurses on duty in the two active wards. He had heard of hospital directors who stayed in their offices all day, inaccessible and aloof. This was not Cray’s approach.
Anyway, he needed to keep moving. There was a restlessness in him today, a droning background hum of frustration, of fury.
He had come so close with Kaylie. Had his reflexes been a few degrees sharper, or had he simply put the canister of liquid nitrogen in the backseat, safely out of her reach…
A hundred times he had replayed the scenario in the desert, always with himself as the victor.
God damn that woman. Still alive.
But perhaps not for long.
In Ward A, Nurse Killian reported a problem with a recently admitted patient who was not responding to a rather high dosage of Haldol.
“Let me talk to him,” Cray said. “What’s his name?”
“Roger.”
“Bring him out.”
Cray met Roger at the nurses’ station. The man was young and tall, and he had the moist, limpid eyes of a suffering artist.
“Have you been hospitalized before, Roger?” Cray asked kindly.
“Yes, sir.”
“And they gave you pills?”
“Yes.”
“Which ones?” Cray swept his hand over the metal tabletop, where he had laid out a variety of standard neuroleptics. “The red? The yellow? The green?”
“All of them.”
“Which ones worked?”
A ghostly smile lit up Roger’s pale face. “The red ones were pretty good. I got better on the red.”
“Then that’s what you need. Thank you, Roger.”
When the man was gone. Nurse Killian objected to the procedure. A patient could not be allowed to prescribe his own medication.
Dorothy Killian was a good RN, and Cray was lucky to have her, but she was new at Hawk Ridge, and she didn’t know how he did things.
“It’s been my observation,” Cray said, “that the patient, especially an experienced patient like Roger, often knows which pharmaceuticals have been most beneficial to him. Let’s take him at his word.”
He prescribed a loading dose of risperidone — the red pills — and left Nurse Killian shaking her head.
Next he visited the day hall, where those patients who were not confined to their rooms congregated throughout the morning and afternoon. The room was large and airy, although the high, arched windows were unfortunately crosshatched with iron bars. Open doors led to a veranda, which had been screened in for security reasons.
Cray was quite serious about security. In the fourteen years of his directorship, there had been just three significant escape attempts, only one of which had been successful.
Cray pursed his lips. Yes, only one.
He surveyed the day hall. Ceiling fans turned languidly overhead, and sunlight gleamed on the tile floor. The room would have been exotic and beautiful, if not for the TV set babbling behind a clear plastic shield, and the patients lolling on cheap lounge chairs and badly worn couches, and the ubiquitous smell of Lysol.
A therapy aide informed Cray that a patient named Lawton, known for disruptive behavior, was demanding a Bible. This was a common request at Hawk Ridge. An obsession with religion characterized more than half the patients at any given time.
It was Cray’s hypothesis that religious impulses originated not in the cerebral cortex, the seat of thought, but rather in the more primitive limbic system, where primal emotion held sway. The limbic brain — specifically the septal region — was known to be dysfunctional in most schizophrenics.
He had expounded on this idea in
Of course he had not made these last points in his book. Tactfully he had left his readers to draw their own conclusions.
“Give Lawton a Bible,” he told the attendant indifferently, “if he wants one. But make him understand that he can’t annoy or harass the others.”
“Dr. Gonzalez was afraid having the Bible might get him more agitated.”
Cray ordinarily did not overrule the psychiatrists working under him, but he saw no merit in Gonzalez’s concern. “If he gets agitated, tell him the meek will inherit the earth. That one has done the trick for centuries.” He started to move away, then added, “If he still won’t calm down, sedate him.”
A great many of Hawk Ridge’s patients were sedated throughout their stay. Some had been heavily tranquilized for years. The other psychiatrists, Cray’s subordinates, had been critical of this approach, believing that it impeded the patients’ recovery.
This might be true. But Cray would not have a lot of lunatics raising hell in the public parts of the hospital. They could scream all they liked while in seclusion, but the common areas must be kept safe and civilized.
He wandered among the patients in the day hall. They were men and women, young and old, all different, yet all curiously alike in their white sneakers and white socks and light blue, two-piece cotton garments, which looked very much like pajamas. At some institutions the patients were permitted to wear their street clothes, but Cray sniffed the dangerous scent of anarchy in this policy.
He ran a tight operation. His hospital was clean. The food in the commissary was nutritious and filling and sometimes even tasty. Discipline was enforced on both the patients and the staff. He made few mistakes.
But Kaylie — innocent little Kaylie with her freckled schoolgirl face and shy, hushed voice…
He’d made a mistake with her. And he was paying for it even now. He had paid for twelve years.
At 11:15 his pager buzzed, displaying his secretary’s number. He called her from a phone in Dr. Bernstein’s office.
“One of the groundskeepers was working near your house,” Margaret said, worry in her voice. “He found your garage window broken. He says it looks like someone tried to get in.”‘
Cray did his best to sound concerned. “I’ll be right over to take a look.”
The morning had been routine so far, but all of that was about to change.
22
'Cornflakes.”
