and waited.
The garage surveillance tape is a grainy haze of colour without sound. On the TV screen, a man wearing jeans, a baseball cap and a windbreaker runs across the garage to the private elevator. He presses the button and then bows his head, his gloved hands making fists by his sides. His back is toward the camera.
The elevator doors open. The man steps inside. He doesn't turn around, just stands there with his head bowed. He knows the cameras are watching and recording.
The doors start to slide shut. He whips his head around and the camera catches a brief glimpse of his face as he presses the number for Emma's penthouse suite.
Jonathan Hale shifted his attention to the bottom right-hand corner of the TV screen, to the bold white lettering holding the date and time of the recording: July 20: 2:16 a.m. Emma had been missing for two months. The man who had abducted her had decided, for a reason known only to God, to come back to her home to retrieve a necklace.
Why? Why would this monster risk everything for a necklace? Why would he perform this seemingly kind act only to turn around and kill her?
The tape ended. The TV went dark.
Hale stared at the screen and imagined his daughter trapped in some rundown room with no windows or light, Emma alone, confused and scared, forced to do things only God could see. When she cried out in pain, when she asked God for comfort, did he listen or turn his back? Hale already knew the answer.
Fact: the man had entered in through the garage.
Fact: he had waited for the garage to open and then snuck inside.
Fact: Detective Bryson said he had people posted in front of the building. Why hadn't his people seen this man? If Bryson's men had done their goddamn job, they would have seen this man and caught him and Emma would be alive.
Fact.
Hale started the DVD again, pierced by a memory of Emma sitting in this same chair watching The Sound of Music. After Susan died, Emma watched the movie over and over again, insisted on watching it in here, in the office, so she could be close to him. Only now did he understand the connection – the mother died and the children found a new mother in the nanny. Emma must have watched the movie for comfort because I was unavailable.
Now Hale watched a movie for comfort. Again he watched the man who killed his daughter, the man who was last to see Emma alive, to speak with her, the last man to touch her.
Hale gripped the armchair as a new memory came to him: Emma, a little over a year old, sitting on his lap while he is talking on the phone. He doesn't remember what the call was about, although it was probably business related. What he remembers now, clearly, vividly, is the smell of his daughter's clean hair, the curve of her plump and downy cheek pressed up against his neck. He remembers the way Emma's mouth hangs open as she studies his pen. She holds it in her tiny hands, her eyes wide, amazed.
Hale knew he would spend the good part of whatever was left of his life wishing he could go back in time to that moment. If God would somehow grant him this impossible power to go back through time, he would hang up the phone and just stare at Emma playing with the pen. He knew he could stay wrapped up in that memory forever and be happy.
48
Malcolm Fletcher stood in front of a glassless window inside the dark, dusty remains of Sinclair's top floor, watching the main road. He had selected this location for its strong cellular signal and its sweeping view of the campus, one aided by the use of a pair of excellent night-vision binoculars equipped with infrared technology. With the flick of a switch he could locate the heat signatures of anyone sitting inside a car or van, conducting surveillance.
The binoculars pressed to his eyes, Fletcher surveyed the area. Reed's security staff patrolled the campus in shifts, focusing their attention on some of the more unorthodox ways one might enter the hospital. There were several points of entry, and many ways in which one could escape without being seen.
As he continued his campus search, Fletcher thought about the man he had seen on Emma Hale's garage surveillance tape. The man had made one critical mistake: he had turned around before the elevator doors shut. The security camera caught a brief glimpse of the man's face. It was enough. Fletcher captured the frame on his computer. The video-enhancing software did the rest.
The man who had retrieved the necklace from Emma Hale's home bore a striking resemblance to a patient named Walter Smith, a twelve-year-old paranoid schizophrenic burned in a gasoline fire. Drifting back through time, Fletcher replayed his first encounter with Walter.
The young boy sat on the bed inside his hospital cell, his head a hairless, red-clay mask of strips of scars and stitches and healing skin. A pair of glasses with thick lenses magnified the severe damage to his left eye. It was wide-open, unblinking.
Walter's arms were wrapped around his stomach. When he wasn't dry-heaving into the wastebasket, he gnawed on his tongue as he rocked back and forth, back and forth, trying to stop the trembling.
'I need Mary,' Walter said, pleading. 'I need you to take me to her.'
'Where is she?'
'At the chapel. Please bring me there so Mary can take away the pain.'
Hanging on the walls were pieces of construction paper holding remarkable, detailed drawings done in crayon and magic marker of a young boy free of scars and disfigurement holding the hand of or hugging a woman dressed in long, blue flowing robes with a red heart painted on the front of her white tunic.
'Mary's gone,' Walter said, his voice strangling on tears. Clutched in his good hand was a small plastic statue of the Blessed Mother of God. 'Dr Han put the medicine in my veins and it sent Mary away again. I need to talk to my mother, I'm lost without her. Please bring me to the chapel.'
Fletcher was snapped from the memory by the vibration of his cell phone. He answered the call but didn't take his eyes away from the binoculars. The heat signatures of four men were running through the woods, heading for Reed's heated trailer.
'Yes, Mr Hale?'
'I watched the DVD.' Hale's voice was thick with bourbon. 'Is this the man who killed my daughter?'
'I believe it is. His name is Walter Smith.'
'You know him?'
'I met Walter while he was a patient at the Sinclair Mental Health Facility in Danvers. He's a paranoid schizophrenic – the worst type, actually. His particular delusion is difficult to treat even with the proper medication, which, I'm sure, Walter is no longer taking. The medicine prevents him from hearing Mary.'
'Who's Mary?'
'The Virgin Mother of God,' Fletcher said. 'Walter believes the Blessed Mother speaks to him. Walter's real mother poured gasoline on him while he was sleeping. The burns covered over ninety per cent of his body, including his face. His mother died in the fire, and Walter was brought to the Shriners Burn Center in Boston for treatment.
'Walter survived two burns. His left hand was severely disfigured the previous year, when she put his hand into a pot of boiling water after she caught him masturbating. She didn't bring her son to the hospital. She treated him at home, where he was home-schooled.
'When it became clear that Walter was schizophrenic, he was placed at Sinclair. He was a patient there for many years. When it was forced to shut its doors, my guess is Walter was released into either a low-risk group home or back into the general population.'
'How do you know this?'
'I came to know Walter through his friendship with a sociopath named Samuel Dingle, a man the Saugus police believed to be responsible for the deaths of two women who were strangled and dumped along Route One. Saugus police asked me to interview Dingle because they had misplaced a key piece of evidence, a belt used to
