CHAPTER 1
Ican smell her!
Another one whose scent
betrays her!
Even inside my cell, I
can smell her sickness. Her filth. Her lust.
There have been others,
too, while I’ve languished here. Others who need to be avenged.
Others who, with their devil’s issue, must be driven back to the
deadly fires from which they were spawned!
Oh, sick women with
your uncontrollable needs.
I am coming for you. .
. .
Laura Adderley leaned a hand against
the bathroom stall, clutching the home pregnancy test in her other
fist, unable to look. She didn’t want this. Not when her marriage
was newly finished—a divorce she’d wanted as much as her newly
minted ex, maybe more. Byron had already taken up residence with
another woman, and he would undoubtedly cheat on her as much as
he’d cheated on Laura. It didn’t matter. Their marriage had been
ill-conceived from the beginning; it had just taken Laura three
years to recognize that fact.
Ill-conceived . . .
Grabbing on to her courage, she slowly
unfurled her fist, staring down at the two glaring pink lines of
the home pregnancy test.
Positive.
She’d known it would be.
Oh, God . .
.
Squeezing her eyes closed, Laura
inhaled a deep, calming breath. She’d ignored the signs for as long
as she could, but there was no keeping her head in the sand any
longer. She was pregnant. With her ex-husband’s child. They’d
signed the papers that very week, though Byron had tried to stall
because he simply didn’t want to give Laura what she wanted:
freedom from lies and tyranny.
But now
what?
Dr. Byron Adderley was an orthopedic
surgeon at Ocean Park Hospital, and she, Laura, was a floor nurse.
They’d moved to this smaller facility along the Oregon coast about
a year earlier, leaving one of Portland’s largest and most
prestigious hospitals for a slower-paced life. Laura hadn’t wanted
the move, had been adamantly against it. For reasons she didn’t
want to tell Byron, she wanted, needed, to stay far, far away from
Ocean Park and the surrounding hamlet of Deception
Bay.
But as if he’d somehow divined her
secrets, he’d announced he’d taken a position at the smaller
hospital and they were up and moving. Laura had been stunned. Had
told him she wasn’t going. Simply was not going. But in the end
he’d gotten his way, and though she’d dragged her feet, she’d
reluctantly made this move in the vain hope that she could get her
dying marriage off life support, though she knew she no longer
loved him, maybe never really had. But with a new start, it was
possible something could change. Maybe her heart could be rewon.
Maybe Byron would want just her. Maybe everything would be . . .
better.
Then he was discovered groping one of
the Ocean Park nurses in an empty hospital room. The hospital tried
to chastise Byron Adderley, but he wasn’t the kind of man to be
chastised. The nurse was summarily dismissed and the incident swept
under the hospital rugs . . . and Laura filed for
divorce.
At first he’d argued with her. Not that
he wanted her; it just wasn’t his decision and so therefore it
couldn’t be. She didn’t listen and he
changed tactics, humbly begging for a second chance. Laura was
suspicious of his motives, aware he might be acting. But she looked
down the road of her own future; and it was decidedly bleak and
lonely; and one night, three months ago, he’d sworn that he loved
her, that he would never cheat on her again, that he would seek
help for past mistakes. She had wanted to believe him so much.
Needed to. Shut the clamoring voice in her head that warned her to
be smart, and one thing led to another and they ended up making
desperate love together. A second chance, maybe a last chance that
Laura had to take.
And then another nurse came forward,
complaining that Dr. Adderley had made inappropriate advances
toward her. Byron vehemently denied the charge, but Laura, who had
abilities that he didn’t understand—some she didn’t understand
herself—knew without a doubt that he was lying through his
miserable white teeth.
She let the divorce proceedings run
their course, and being Byron, he took up with another woman. This
time Laura didn’t look back. She was through with Byron Adderley,
and until today, she’d been determined to move back to Portland and
find employment far, far away from Ocean Park and Deception
Bay.
But now . . .
The door to the bathroom opened.
“Laura?” Nurse Perez called.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Laura said,
flushing the toilet and wrapping the telltale wand in toilet paper
and shoving it in her purse.
“We need help in the ER. We’ve got a
head trauma coming in.”
“Okay.”
She heard the door close and let
herself out of the bathroom. Washing her hands, she looked hard at
her reflection in the mirror. Serious blue-gray eyes stared back at
her; and she could see the beginning of her own dishwater blond
hair reappearing at her hairline, the longer, darker tresses trying
to escape their ponytail and curl under her chin, a strong chin,
she’d been told, that, along with high cheekbones and thick lashes,
gave her a slightly aristocratic look, something far from what she
really was.
A familiar pressure built inside her
head, and she mentally pushed it back, visualizing a
twenty-foot-high iron gate to withstand the force coming at her.
This was an automatic response that clicked in almost unconsciously
when particularly strong, unwanted—bad—thoughts attacked her. For years she thought
everyone had this ability but then slowly realized that it was
unique to her alone. It was like someone, or ones, was knocking at
her brain, trying to get inside, and she would push up a mental
wall to keep them out. But this time was different; there was more
urgency and determination. As if this someone were pounding a metal
hammer at her wall. At her brain.
Sisssterrrr!
Laura jerked to attention and glanced
around, half expecting to see who had spoken. But there was no one.
Nary a soul. And the voice had been decidedly male.
Her eyes widened; she watched the
autonomic response happen in the mirror as realization dawned, a
realization she wanted desperately to deny. He was
back.
Shutting her lids tightly, she squeezed
at her brain, holding the wall firm until the hammering turned into
a tinny, little ping, ping, ping and was
gone.
By the time she reached the ER, the
ambulance was screaming up the drive. It was 8:30 p.m. Late June,
so it was still light out, though she could see the shadows forming
beneath the gnarled branches of the scrub pine that lined the
asphalt. Red and white lights flashed in opposite rotation and the
woo-woo . . . woo-woo
. . . woo-woo of the shrieking siren seemed
to vibrate the very air.
With a squeal of brakes the ambulance
jumped to a halt. EMTs leapt out and ran to the back of the
vehicle. Doors flew open, and a victim was rushed in on a gurney,
head surrounded by a white bandage that was dark red with
blood.
One of the residents sucked in a
breath. “Jesus, it’s Conrad!”
“Conrad?” Laura repeated in shock,
gazing down at one of Ocean Park’s security guards: Conrad
Weiser.
“What happened?” one of the trauma
surgeons demanded.
“Attacked at Halo Valley,” the EMT
responded. “He was on the way there to pick up a patient, and one
of the crazies beat the hell out of him and escaped.”
“Halo Valley?” Laura repeated through
lips that barely moved.
“Yeah, the mental hospital,” Dylan, the
EMT, clarified soberly.
“Let’s get him in here,” the trauma
surgeon ordered as a second victim on a gurney was off-loaded from
the ambulance.
“You okay?” Dylan asked, frowning at
Laura.
“Fine.”
Bringing herself back to the present,
Laura helped guide the second wounded man’s gurney into the ER. He
was awake but his throat was wrapped and he clearly couldn’t speak.
His dark eyes glared at her, and Dylan said, almost in an aside,
giving her a second shock, “This is Dr. Maurice Zellman from Halo
Valley. He was stabbed in the throat.”
“Also by the escapee?” she
asked.
“Looks like it.”
She watched as Zellman was hurriedly
wheeled through the double doors to the ER as well, and was unable
to control a full-body shivering that emanated from her very
soul.
Halo Valley. The mental hospital for
the criminally insane.
He was
there.
Wasn’t he?
Or, was that why he’d just tried to
breach the wall in her mind? He’d escaped!
And he was coming after
her.
Oh, God, no! Not
now! She thought of the baby and her heart nearly stopped.
Fear crawled up her spine and nestled in her brain. No, no, no!
Blindly, pushing back that horrid
snaking fear, she turned to one of the other nurses. “Who did
this?” she asked.
“Don’t you wish we could ask Zellman
and find out?” Nurse Carlita Solano answered flatly. “Some nut job,
for sure.”
Please, God, don’t let
it be him.
But she knew it was. Justice Turnbull
had escaped the walls of Halo Valley Security Hospital, and he was
free to take up his murdering ways.
Laura watched the doors behind the
injured doctor slowly close with a soft hiss and wondered how this
had happened.
The day had started out like many
others.
Dr. Maurice Zellman, one of Halo Valley
Security Hospital’s premier psychiatrists . . . maybe the premier
psychiatrist, if you’d asked him . . . had begun his morning with a
piece of dry wheat toast, a soft-boiled egg, and a slice of
cantaloupe before driving to the hospital and arriving punctually
at 7:15 a.m. He had several consults before lunch, called his wife,
Patricia, at noon and learned that their sixteen-year-old son,
Brandt, had gotten in some kind of trouble at school and was facing
detention for the rest of the week. With a snort of disgust,
Zellman told Patricia that Brandt would be facing some serious
punishment from his father as well, and then, ruffled, he visited a
number of his patients in their rooms—cells, really, though no one
referred to them as such—throughout the rest of the afternoon, his
mind on other things.
By six o’clock he was finished with
work, except that he hadn’t yet visited with his most notorious
patient: Justice Turnbull, a psychotic killer who had tried to kill
his own mother and had proven to be obsessed with murdering the
group of women who lived together in a lodge called Siren Song
along the Oregon coast. These women were whispered about by the
locals as members of a cult dubbed the Colony and were reclusive,
brooding, and odd. What Justice’s personal beef was with them
remained a mystery, one Zellman had sought to crack in the over two
years of Justice’s incarceration but hadn’t quite managed yet.
Justice was also responsible for several other murders and was an
odd bird by anyone’s definition.
No one at Halo Valley knew what to make
of him, and they certainly didn’t know how to treat him. The other
doctors just didn’t have it, as far as Zellman was concerned. They
were adequate, in their way, whereas he, Maurice Zellman, was
extraordinary. He actually cured patients
instead of resorting to mere behavioral modifications.
And Justice . . . well . . . Maurice
had made significant progress with him. Significant. Yes, the man
was still obsessed with the Siren Song women, but that was because
Justice was apparently related to them in some way. At least he
thought he was, though that had yet to be proven. Maybe the women
were a cult; maybe they weren’t. They were certainly paranoically
reclusive and, in appearance, looked as if they came from another
century. Zellman was inclined to think they should be left alone to
their own devices. Everyone found a way to live in this world and
there was no right way or wrong way, although getting Justice to
see that point was a work in progress. For reasons of his own,
Justice Turnbull seemed determined to snuff them all
out.
But . . . there had been progress,
Zellman reminded himself with a mental pat on the back. Initially,
when Justice had first been incarcerated at Halo Valley, he’d
bellowed long and loud that he would kill them all and their
devil’s issue! The staff hadn’t known whom he meant, at first, but
he made it clear that he wanted to wipe out all the ssissterrss at Siren Song. With the help of time and
antipsychotics, he’d all but recanted this mission. He still was
agitated about them; he couldn’t completely disguise it when
Zellman would mention the women of the lodge, just to see. But
Justice wasn’t nearly as single-minded as he had been at first. Was
he cured? No. Would he ever be? In Justice Turnbull’s case,
unlikely, though Dr. Maurice Zellman was definitely the man for the
job if there was a chance.
And Maurice understood Justice was
tortured by demons of his own making, which didn’t matter to his
colleagues one whit. They had locked the man away for the next few
decades with no chance of getting released. Paranoid schizophrenic.
Sociopath. Psychopath. Homicidal maniac . . . Justice Turnbull
might be a little of all, but he was still a patient in need of
care.
With a glance at his watch, Zellman
noted the time: 6:45 p.m. He had a surprise for Justice, one
Justice had been asking for and Zellman had finally been able to
put together, though not without much resistance. With a satisfied
smile on his face, he headed for Justice’s room. It was at the end
of the hall by design as no one wanted to visit him. In fact, no
one ever did, outside of hospital personnel. He was considered
weird by the other inmates, which was saying a lot, as they were
criminally insane themselves, every last one. But every group had a
pecking order, and Halo Valley Security Hospital was no exception.
As one of the hospital’s leading physicians treating some of the
most notorious patients—killers, sadists, rapists, to name a
few—Maurice Zellman was intimately aware of how mentally unstable
and deranged the men and women were on this side of the hospital,
the side that housed those convicted of serious crimes. They might
be excused from regular prison by reason of insanity, but it didn’t
mean they weren’t the worst kind of criminals. That was why they
were housed on Side B, as this sterile section of the hospital was
euphemistically called. Side B. The side for the irredeemable.
Connected to Side A, where the mentally ill without criminal
tendencies were lodged, by a skyway, surrounded by a tall
chain-link fence and razor wire, which were partially hidden by a
laurel hedge, all the better to make everyone think the hospital
was a warm and cozy place. In truth, Side B was little more than a
prison for the criminally insane.
Dr. Zellman was high in the pecking
order of the specialists on Side B. He understood the criminal mind
in a way that both fascinated and horrified the less imaginative
doctors. Well, that was their problem, wasn’t it? he thought with a
sniff. Dr. Maurice Zellman did his job. And he did it very, very
well.
With a tightening of his lips, he
picked up his pace. He was running late, and checking on Turnbull
was going to make him later still, but he really had no choice as
Justice was his patient and was patently feared by the rest of the
staff. This fact half amused Zellman, who’d worked with the strange
man ever since he’d been brought to Side B, because Justice was
really no more frightening than any other psychotic. He was just a
little more directionally motivated, focused on women, specifically
these Colony women.
Just as Zellman reached Justice’s room,
the door flew open and Bill Merkely, one of the guards, practically
leapt into the hall. Merkely didn’t immediately see Zellman, as he
was looking back into Justice’s room. “So, long, schizo!” he yelled
harshly, his beefy face red. He yanked the door shut and checked
the automatic lock as Zellman cleared his throat behind him.
Merkely jumped as if prodded with a hot poker, his already red face
turning magenta. “Fucker told me I was going to die!” he cried as
an excuse.
“You can’t listen to him.”
“I don’t. But he sure as hell predicts
a whole lot of shit!”
“What were you doing in his
room?”
“Picking up his tray. But I had to
leave it in there. Hope the food rots!”
He stomped off toward the guards’
station, which divided Halo Valley Security Hospital’s Side B from
Side A, the gentler section, which housed patients who weren’t
considered a serious threat to society. Zellman thought of Side A
as an Alzheimer’s wing, though he would never say so aloud as they
considered themselves to be a helluva lot more than institutional
caretakers. He shook his head at the lot of them. Perception. So
many people just didn’t get it.
He had a key to Justice’s room himself,
and he cautiously unlocked the door. Justice had never attacked
him; he’d never attacked anyone since he’d been brought to the
hospital, but the man had a history, oh, yes, indeedy he
did.
Now the patient stood on the far side
of the room, disengaged from whatever little drama had occurred
between him and Merkely. Justice was tall, dusty blond, and slim,
almost skinny, but hard and tough as rawhide. He didn’t make eye
contact as Zellman entered, but he flicked a look toward the meal
tray, which had been untouched except for the apple.
“That man is afraid of me,” Justice
said, now in his sibilant voice. Always a faint hiss to his words.
An affectation, Zellman
thought.
“Yes, he is.”
“He always leaves the
tray.”
Zellman had a clipboard with a pen
attached shoved under one arm. There were cameras in Justice’s
one-room cell, tracking his every move. Zellman didn’t need to
watch reams of film to remind himself of the content of each of
their meetings. He wrote himself copious notes and typed up
reports, which he suspected no one ever read. They all wanted to
forget Justice Turnbull and his strangeness. When first brought to
Halo Valley, he’d referred to the women he sought to harm as
“Sister,” in his hissing way. “Sssiissterrrs . . .
,” he would rasp. “Have to kill them
all!” he’d warned. But a lot of that dramatic act had
disappeared over time.
Not that he wasn’t dangerous. Before
his incarceration he’d killed and terrorized a number of women. He
had also cut a swath through some peripheral people and had nearly
slain his own mentally ill mother. She now lay in a twilight state
in a care facility with no memory of the attack and not a lot of
connection with the real world.
“Justice,” Maurice Zellman said now in
a stern, yet friendly, voice, one he’d cultivated over the years.
“You’ve finally got clearance to have those medical tests run at
Ocean Park Hospital. The van’s on its way here now. I’m warning
you, though. If this stomach problem proves to be just a means to
get out of Halo Valley, you’ll be further restricted. No more walks
in the yard. No being outside and staring toward the sea.” Zellman
heard his faintly mocking voice and clamped down on that. “No
privileges.”
Justice turned to look at him through
clear blue eyes that were almost translucent. He was
extraordinarily good-looking except . . . there was just something
unnatural about him that made one hesitate upon meeting him. A
reaction to something he emanated that Zellman had never quite put
his finger on. Now his mouth was turned down at the corners and he
winced slightly, as if he were in pain.
Over time and in-depth sessions with
him, Zellman had come to realize that some of Justice’s deeply
rooted problems were because he’d been rejected and scorned.
Rejected and scorned by women. Maybe even his own mother. The women
of the Colony particularly bothered him. They might not be his
sisters, per se, but he seemed to think they were. Was there any
shared genetic makeup between them? Zellman thought it unlikely.
Justice’s world was all of his own making.
Still, Justice definitely believed the
Siren Song occupants were the Chosen Ones, while he was kept
outside the gates. Locked out. Barred. Left with a mother who had
been spiraling into mental illness most of her adult life, Zellman
guessed. Who knew about his father? Certainly not Justice or anyone
Zellman had ever talked to.
Not a great childhood by any stretch of
the imagination.
“Can we go now?” Justice stared at him
hard.
Zellman nodded. Justice wore loose gray
pants and a white shirt, the regulated outfit for the patients on
Side B. “I need to get the handcuffs, first. Sorry.”
Justice asked softly, “From the
guard?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t try to escape.”
“It’s hospital policy.”
A spasm crossed his face, and he
clutched a palm to his stomach. “This pain is killing
me.”
Zellman considered the man. Inside the
van Justice would be chained around the waist and locked to the
side of the vehicle for the ride to Ocean Park. The handcuffs were
merely an extra precaution. Sure, it would be against protocol to
give him this small freedom as they made their way to the
van—against the most basic rule of the hospital. But the stomach
pain Justice had been complaining of was definitely worsening, and
anyway, Zellman knew when someone was telling the truth and when
they were lying. It was just . . . his gift. Justice was telling
the truth.
It would take time to get the damned
handcuffs, time and effort. And Maurice disliked Bill Merkely
almost as much as Justice did. “Come on, then,” he said. “Hurry
up.”
Justice’s expression brightened a
little, the most anyone could ever scare out of him. He was in gray
felt slippers, and he eagerly walked through the door ahead of
Zellman. There were precautions overhead in the hall: big, glossy,
mirrored half circles that housed hidden cameras. Justice looked up
at them as they passed, and Zellman smiled to himself. There would
be hell to pay later when the handcuff protocol breach was noticed.
Dr. Jean Dayton, a mild-mannered little brown bird with a permanent
scowl, would scream her pinched-tight ass off.
They walked along the hall together
and, side by side, clambered up the utilitarian metal stairway that
led to the ground level. At the top it was a short walk toward a
set of gunmetal gray, locked double doors with small windows filled
with wire netting—doors that led to the outside. They stood
together just inside, looking through the windows, waiting while a
white hospital van with the Ocean Park logo pulled under the
portico beyond. Daylight was disappearing, the fading sun fingering
stripes of dark gold along the grass that fanned out on the far
side of the portico, night still an hour or so away.
As Zellman watched, the driver, an
orderly from Ocean Park, jumped from the van. The man would be
expecting Justice to be handcuffed, and with a faint feather of
remorse touching his skin, Zellman turned to Justice and opened his
mouth to . . . what? Ask him to be good?
Swift as lightning, Justice snatched
Zellman’s clipboard and pen away from him. The clipboard clattered
to the floor, and while Zellman goggled in surprise, Justice jammed
the pen deep into Zellman’s throat and out again.
Twice.
Blood spurted in a geyser.
“Wha? Wha? Wha?” Zellman
burbled.
The door opened and the driver stepped
in. Justice grabbed the man by his head and slammed it into the
metal door. Once, twice, three times. More blood. Pints of
it.
“Keys,” Justice demanded.
“Van . . . van,” the man mumbled, his
eyes rolling around in his head.
And like that, Justice was
gone.
Shoved aside and tossed to the floor
like a rag doll, Zellman clutched at his throat helplessly, blood
squeezing through his fingers. Shocked and outraged that Justice
had lied. About the stomach pain. About needing to go to the
hospital. About every damned
thing!
And he, Dr. Maurice Zellman, a doctor
of psychiatry, a member of Mensa, had believed him. Worse than the
sting of pain at his throat, the bite of his own damned pen, was
the knowledge that he, Dr. Maurice Zellman, had been wrong, after
all.