there's no turning back. You may want to give that some thought.'
'And you're going to guide me to her out of the goodness of your heart.'
'Think of me as the boatman Charon guiding you across the river of hate.'
'Where is she?'
'She's waiting for you downstairs.'
Darby's breath caught. It took her a moment to regroup.
'She's here,' she said.
'Yes. Are you ready to meet her?'
There was no menace in Fletcher's voice, none of that jovial taunting from the previous conversations. What Darby heard was a cool, neutral tone that conjured a memory from her childhood – ten years old and taking a shortcut through the Belham woods and seeing three boys from her class. They had found a dead coyote. One of the boys, Ricky something, the fat one with the mean eyes, asked her if she wanted to see it. Darby said no. They called her a chicken, a frightened little girl.
To prove them wrong, she marched down the embankment, tripped and fell. She came to a hard stop, dimly aware of the buzzing sound of flies behind the boys' laughter, and when she pushed herself up, she felt something hot and alive squirming between her fingers. Maggots, hundreds of them, roiled inside the carcass. Darby screamed and the boys laughed harder. When she started to cry, the fat one, laughing, said, 'Hey, don't get mad at us. You're the one who decided to go down there.'
The memory vanished when Fletcher said, 'I don't mean to be rude, but I'm pressed for time. I need your answer now.'
Why was Fletcher doing this? Was this a ruse in order for him to try to get information about the case? Or did the former profiler actually know something?
Darby's attention shifted to the Virgin Mary statue on the windowsill. Where the hell did you get it?
Don't tell him a goddamn thing, Bryson had said.
Stay or go? Call it.
'Call me when you're ready to share,' Darby said and hung up. She turned to Reed, who appeared visibly shaken. 'How many floors are below us?'
The old caretaker took off his glove and wiped his face with a liver-spotted hand. 'Four,' he said, 'and that's not including the basement level.'
'Have you been down there recently?'
'Nobody's been down there in years.'
'We may need to search the hospital. I'll need you and your men to help us.'
'You want us to help you search the entire hospital? I can't allow that, Miss McCormick. There are too many areas that are unstable. It's not safe.'
Darby was staring at the photograph of the young woman. Was she somewhere inside the hospital? Was she alive? Was she hurt or injured?
'Please stay inside this room, Mr Reed, until I come back.'
Darby, her pistol drawn, stuck close to the walls. Above her and across the room, Bryson's men slammed back cell doors, searching for Malcolm Fletcher. She doubted they would find him. The former federal agent was too skilled at hiding. He had eluded capture for decades.
Tim Bryson stood at the end of the hallway, breath steaming in the cold air above the beam of the tactical flashlight mounted underneath his handgun, a 9mm Beretta. She got Bryson's attention and nodded to an empty room. The window had bars on it, the broken glass protected by a mesh grille. Snow had collected on the sill.
'I think we need to organize a search party,' Darby told Bryson.
'You think the woman in the picture is waiting for us somewhere in here?'
'He wanted to lead us downstairs. I think we need to take a look.'
Bryson thought it over for a moment. He was sweating.
'You may be right,' he said. 'I'll organize the search. Process the room, and get back to the lab. I want to know what the son of a bitch is up to.'
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
