the way in. That would be better. So for two years, you’ve had someone in Boston, slipping me drugs.”
“Not Boston,” Cawley said quietly. “Here.”
“Here?”
He nodded. “Here. You’ve been here for two years. A patient of this institution.”
Teddy could hear the tide coming in now, angry, hurling itself against the base of the bluff. He clasped his hands together to quiet the tremors and tried to ignore the pulsing behind his eye, growing hotter and more insistent.
“I’m a U.S. marshal,” Teddy said.
“
“Am,” Teddy said. “I am a federal marshal with the United States government. I left Boston on Monday morning, September the twenty-second, 1954.”
“Really?” Cawley said. “Tell me how you got to the ferry. Did you drive? Where did you park?”
“I took the subway.”
“The subway doesn’t go out that far.”
“Transferred to a bus.”
“Why didn’t you drive?”
“Car’s in the shop.”
“Oh. And Sunday, what is your recollection of Sunday? Can you tell me what you did? Can you honestly tell me anything about your day before you woke up in the bathroom of the ferry?”
Teddy could. Well, he would have been able to, but the fucking wire in his head was digging through the back of his eye and into his sinus passages.
All right. Remember. Tell him what you did Sunday. You came home from work. You went to your apartment on Buttonwood. No, no. Not Buttonwood. Buttonwood burned to the ground when Laeddis lit it on fire. No, no. Where do you live? Jesus. He could see the place. Right, right. The place on…the place on…Castlemont. That’s it. Castlemont Avenue. By the water.
Okay, okay. Relax. You came back to the place on Castlemont and you ate dinner and drank some milk and went to bed. Right? Right.
Cawley said, “What about this? Did you get a chance to look at this?”
He pushed Laeddis’s intake form across the table.
“No.”
“No?” He whistled. “You came here for it. If you got that piece of paper back to Senator Hurly—proof of a sixty-seventh patient we claim to have no record of—you could have blown the lid off this place.”
“True.”
“Hell yes, true. And you couldn’t find time in the last twenty-four hours to give it a glance?”
“Again, things were a bit—”
“Hectic, yes. I understand. Well, take a look at it now.”
Teddy glanced down at it, saw the pertinent name, age, date of intake info for Laeddis. In the comments section, he read:
Patient is highly intelligent and highly delusional. Known proclivity for violence. Extremely agitated. Shows no remorse for his crime because his denial is such that no crime ever took place. Patient has erected a series of highly developed and highly fantastical narratives which preclude, at this time, his facing the truth of his actions.
The signature below read
Teddy said, “Sounds about right.”
“About right?”
Teddy nodded.
“In regards to whom?”
“Laeddis.”
Cawley stood. He walked over to the wall and pulled down one of the sheets.
Four names were written there in block letters six inches high:
EDWARD DANIELS—ANDREW LAEDDIS
RACHEL SOLANDO—DOLORES CHANAL
Teddy waited, but Cawley seemed to be waiting too, neither of them saying a word for a full minute.
Eventually Teddy said, “You have a point, I’m guessing.”
“Look at the names.”
“I see them.”
“Your name, Patient Sixty-seven’s name, the missing patient’s name, and your wife’s name.”
“Uh-huh. I’m not blind.”
“There’s your rule of four,” Cawley said.
“How so?” Teddy rubbed his temple hard, trying to massage that wire out of there.
“Well, you’re the genius with code. You tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“What do the names Edward Daniels and Andrew Laeddis have in common?”
Teddy looked at his own name and Laeddis’s for a moment. “They both have thirteen letters.”
“Yes, they do,” Cawley said. “Yes, they do. Anything else?”
Teddy stared and stared. “Nope.”
“Oh, come on.” Cawley removed his lab coat, placed it over the back of a chair.
Teddy tried to concentrate, already tiring of this parlor game.
“Take your time.”
Teddy stared at the letters until their edges grew soft.
“Anything?” Cawley said.
“No. I can’t see anything. Just thirteen letters.”
Cawley whacked the names with the back of his hand. “Come on!”
Teddy shook his head and felt nauseated. The letters jumped.
“Concentrate.”
“I am concentrating.”
“What do these letters have in common?” Cawley said.
“I don’t…There are thirteen of them. Thirteen.”
“What else?”
Teddy peered at the letters until they blurred. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” Teddy said. “What do you want me to say? I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I can’t—”
Cawley shouted it: “They’re the same letters!”
Teddy hunched forward, tried to get the letters to stop quivering. “What?”
“They’re the same letters.”
“No.”
“The names are anagrams for each other.”
Teddy said it again: “No.”
“No?” Cawley frowned and moved his hand across the line. “Those are the exact same letters. Look at them. Edward Daniels. Andrew Laeddis. Same letters. You’re gifted with code, even flirted with becoming a code breaker in the war, isn’t that right? Tell me that you don’t see the same thirteen letters when you look up at these two names.”
“No!” Teddy rammed the heels of his hands against his eyes, trying to clear them or blot out the light, he wasn’t sure.
“’No,’ as in they’re not the same letters? Or ‘no,’ as in you don’t
“They can’t be.”
“They are. Open your eyes. Look at them.”
