heard the steady beep of machinery and murmured conversations. Some doors had small windows built into them. Most of the patients lying in the beds wore pressure-garments over their faces and arms. It was impossible to tell if they were male or female. Many of the burn patients were children.
Some patients wandered through the hallways. Darby looked away from their mangled faces and limbs.
The hospital pharmacy had a computer system which allowed searches based on a patient's name or the name of a particular medication. Darby searched for 'Samuel Dingle.' No one named Dingle was listed in the pharmacy database.
The list of male patients using Lycoprime totalled 146.
The man who had Hannah Givens would be young, white and probably in his late twenties to early thirties. Physically, he would have to look and appear young. A college student would be reluctant to climb inside the car of an older man, but they might be more inclined to do so if they believed the person appeared to be a college student too, possibly one who said he was attending the same college. Darby believed the killer was local. He wouldn't want to live too far from Sinclair. She would pay close attention to those who had criminal records.
For that she would have to rely on Neil Joseph, who was sitting at his desk waiting for her to call. Neil could easily find a criminal record provided it wasn't a juvenile offence. Those records were sealed and couldn't be accessed without a court order. Darby hoped that wouldn't be the case.
'Can you sort the Lycoprime list by the patient's age?' she asked Tobias. 'I'd like to review the younger patients first.'
'I can't print out a single, definitive list starting with age – you'd have to examine each file to find that information. We could, however, print out the list of all male patients using Lycoprime.'
'What about patients using Lycoprime in conjunction with Derma?'
'The problem is you won't get an accurate sampling. We stopped selling Derma, oh, I'd probably say at least four years ago. It's no longer a prescription item.'
'If a patient is using Derma, would it be listed in their file?'
'In the older files, yes,' Tobias said. 'We recommend Derma to all of our patients. It's an excellent product. We give out trial samples to our patients to see what colour best matches their skin tone, and then they can order the particular shade over the company website.'
Meaning there's no way to track recent Derma orders from the pharmacy records, Darby thought.
'I know you're anxious to get to this,' Tobias said, 'so in the interest of saving time, I'd recommend Craig – that would be the gentleman to your left, Craig Henderson, our pharmacist – I can have Craig send the Lycoprime patient files to my office printer. They'll start alphabetically by the patient's last name. You can use my office computer to access the actual patient files. You can't access the patient database through the pharmacy's computer. The patient files are on a separate system.'
Tobias' laser printer was dreadfully slow. Each pharmacy file contained the patient's name, date of birth, address and health insurance information. The patient's entire prescription history was listed.
It took an hour to print Lycoprime patients A through H. The ages ranged from five to fifty.
Dr Tobias helped her sort the patients into two piles – one for ages up to fifteen, the other pile for ages sixteen and older.
Most of the patient records were of young male children or teenagers who had been burned in a house fire caused by a parent falling asleep with a lit cigarette. Some had been accidentally scalded by boiling water left on a stove. One boy, a ten-year-old, had decided for some ungodly reason to light firecrackers near a plastic gas jug in his parents' garage. The fire was so severe he couldn't breathe without the aid of a ventilator. He later died.
And then there were the other files, the ones dealing with parents who had dumped their screaming infant or meddlesome toddler into a tub of scalding water; parents who, in a moment of anger or drunken rage, shoved their son into a fireplace or wood stove. Jesus, here was a file on a father who, wanting to teach his eleven-year- old a lesson about the dangers of fire, lit a match and held it to up to his son's hand. The flame caught on the boy's polyester pyjamas. They melted against his skin, covering him with permanent burn scars.
One patient seemed promising: a twenty-nine-year-old white male named Frank Hayden. In 1996, at age seventeen, Hayden was jumping a faulty car battery when it exploded. The battery acid burned his face. His patient file listed the dozens of reconstruction surgeries Hayden had endured over the past decade.
Hayden also had a criminal record. In 2003 he had been arrested for attempted rape. He served two years in Walpole. After his release, he went back to live with his mother in Dorchester.
Coop called as Darby was examining another patient file. Coop was at a Cambridge dermatologist's office who was the third largest supplier of Lycoprime.
'Nothing on Sam Dingle, but I found six male patients who use Lycoprime,' he said. 'The oldest is twenty-eight. Ten years ago, this guy's father was in massive debt and took out insurance policies on his family. The asshole lit the house on fire, tried to make it look like they were victims of arson. The whole house went up in flames, and when the fire department arrived, they managed to save this kid. His parents and four other siblings burned to death.' Sighing, he added, 'I think I need to find another profession.'
'What about a criminal record?'
'Drug offences,' Coop said. 'Kid's both a user and a dealer. The other five patients are clean. No criminal records.'
'Who's next on your list?'
'I was thinking of tackling Mass General's Burn Center.'
Massachusetts General Hospital was the second largest supplier of Lycoprime in New England.
'Head over,' Darby said. 'Depending on what time I finish up here, I'll either join you at Mass General or we'll head over together to Beth Israel.'
An hour later her phone rang again.
'I think you can scratch Frank Hayden off your list,' Neil Joseph said. 'I just got off the phone with the guy's mother. Hayden's been living in Montana for the past year. He's an auto mechanic.'
'Hold on.' Darby shuffled through her papers, found Hayden's pharmacy records. 'He refilled his Lycoprime prescription two months ago.'
'Yeah, I know. The mother says she goes to the hospital, picks it up and mails it out to him. He can't get his hands on it down there.'
'What about Derma?'
'She didn't mention it. I have people looking into Hayden just to be sure. Do you have any more names?'
'Not yet.'
The hum of the printer filled the room. It was after eight and the windows were dark.
Darby picked up the fresh stack of patient files and started reading. Please God, give me something.
77
Walter parked his car in the back lot of the Sleepy Time Motel on Route One. He never drove into the hospital campus. Security trucks patrolled the area day and night. Walking through the woods behind the motel was long and hard, especially in the snow, but he always made the journey because he never wanted to do anything to put his Blessed Mother at risk.
The access tunnel was on the south side of the Sinclair campus, an ancient water duct built sometime after the turn of the twentieth century. Walter reached it after a long hike up a steep, snow-covered hill.
When the hospital officially closed in 1983, the security staff in charge of monitoring the property installed a metal gate with a lock across the tunnel's opening. Walter came back with a pair of bolt-cutters and a lock of his own – the same make, model and size. Security never found out about the replacement lock because they never came out this way.
Walter shook the snow off his boots. He turned on his flashlight and unlocked the gate.
During his stay at Sinclair, Walter had become very well acquainted with the hospital. Danvers City Hall had a copy of the original architectural blueprints on file. For a cost of only twenty dollars, they printed out the several colour pages detailing each floor.
The problem was the amount of decay and ruin. Many of the basement hallways had collapsed. It had taken
