CHAPTER 24
Harrison was buzzed into the reception area of
Seagull Pointe and then was immediately greeted with suspicion by
the woman at the desk as soon as he said he was a reporter. This
was nothing new; it was a condition of the job, a reporter’s bane.
After dealing with her, he was ushered swiftly into a small room
with a calming decor: gray walls, a jade plant near the window, a
seascape mounted over a bookcase that held a few tomes, including
the Holy Bible. He took a chair at the round Formica-topped table
and faced both the director of the place, Darius Morrow, a man in
his late sixties with a pious expression and a way of folding his
hands in front of him in a holier-than-thou way that set Harrison’s
teeth on edge, and his female head nurse/administrator/jailer, Inga
Anderssen, who, if you looked in the dictionary, the picture beside
her name would read “Battle-ax.”
“You need to be a relative to receive
information on a patient,” Darius informed him as soon as he asked
about Madeline Turnbull. The man had a habit of wrinkling his nose,
as if there were a bad smell in the room, and with the way he held
his hands, he looked as if he were about to pray.
“I understand Madeline died from either
smothering or strangulation,” Harrison said.
“Confidentiality, Mr. Frost,” he was
reminded tartly.
“The police are investigating,”
Harrison pointed out. He was winging it, in a way, but Geena Cho’s
information was generally golden, so it wasn’t that much of a
stretch, and he’d seen a cruiser parked outside. “They’re going to
release her name to the media soon enough. I’m going to start
reporting today, one way or another. You can give me facts, or I
can go on conjecture.”
Inga had leaned close to him, glaring
at his audacity, but Darius held up a smooth white palm. “Seagull
Pointe is a prime facility with an excellent reputation. Of course
we don’t want conjecture.”
Harrison thought he heard a little
capitulation in his tone. Just a little. “It sounds like Justice
Turnbull came to your facility, found his mother, and killed
her.”
“That is untrue. He could not get in,”
Inga snapped as she threw Darius a harsh look that said as well as
any words, “Don’t buy into his BS.” To Harrison, she said aloud,
“The doors are locked.”
“You need a code,” Darius explained and
Harrison nodded; he’d been granted entry by the woman at the desk,
who clearly watched every newcomer enter with a suspicious
eye.
“But if he had the code, he could get
in any door, right? He wouldn’t have to pass the front desk.”
Harrison sat back in his chair, growing impatient with the way they
carefully thought through every response.
Both Darius and Inga stared straight
ahead, as if they were both, independently, trying hard not to give
away something on their faces. Harrison reviewed what he’d just
said, and it came to him as if their thoughts had materialized in
the air in front of him. “The desk isn’t manned at
night.”
“After ten,” Darius
admitted.
“But he’d still need a code.” Harrison
was puzzling it out. “Is it a big secret, or just a means to
contain the patients with dementia?”
“He’s never been here before,” Inga
stated. “He would not know it.”
“Before,” Harrison repeated. “So, you
do think he did come last night. And it’s definitely what the
sheriff’s department thinks, too.” When they didn’t respond, he
said, “The other woman he killed . . . maybe she gave him the
code?”
“She wasn’t a patient here,” Darius
told him. “She is no one we know.”
“Maybe she was visiting
someone?”
“She was a stranger,” Inga said
firmly.
“You know everyone who visits
everyone?”
Darius dropped his pious look for a
brief moment to shrug and spread his hands. “This is a nursing home
and an assisted-living facility,” he explained. “If a new face
comes through, it’s noticed. Someone notices. No one knows this
woman, and she would not have been able . . .” He let his voice
trail off, as if realizing he was giving away more information than
necessary.
“Would not have been able . . . to . .
. let him in? Because she was already injured before she arrived?”
It was like pulling teeth.
“She was not attacked at Seagull
Pointe!” Inga declared.
On this, he thought she might be right.
She came here with him, Harrison realized. And, on the heels of
that thought . . . She was his transportation.
Darius pointedly consulted his watch at
the same moment Harrison’s phone bleeped at him: a new message. He
glanced down and saw it was a Portland number. He was pretty sure
it was Pauline Kirby.
“Excuse us,” Darius said, and he and
Inga turned toward the south hallway. Harrison headed back to the
reception area, but tried to keep out of earshot, searching for a
modicum of privacy. He found a nook with a fake ficus tree and a
window that overlooked the parking lot and punched out the number
for his mailbox. Sure enough it was Pauline who had left him a
voice mail.
Phone tag, he
thought. Pain in the ass. Punching in his
security code, he waited for his voice mail to
deliver.
“Hey, there.” Pauline’s assured tone
reached his ears. “You avoiding me, Frost? And just when we found
each other again. Give me a call. We’re rolling, but I’d like your
thoughts. . . .” She rattled off her cell number, which matched the
one on his caller ID.
Yeah, right. She’d like his thoughts.
She’d like to rip the facts that Harrison had gathered, put her own
spin on them, and regurgitate them like they were her
own.
Sure thing, Pauline.
Can’t wait for it.
Nevertheless he called her back, once
more deflected by her voice mail. Tersely, he told her he would be
available most of the afternoon. Hanging up, he gave a mental
shrug. What the hell did he really care, anyway? If Pauline wanted
to bounce over to the Deadly Sinners story, so be it; he couldn’t
stop her. Harrison planned to meet with Noah Vernon the next day
and hopefully get the boy’s skewed perspective on the whole thing,
but then he was going to move full speed ahead on the Justice
Turnbull investigation.
An older gentleman in a V-necked navy
sweater and gray sweatpants came into the reception area from the
north side hallway at that moment. He was pushing an empty
wheelchair in front of him. Seeing Harrison, he cocked his head.
“You the one who was talking to our esteemed director just now?
What’s his name again?”
“You mean Darius Morrow?”
“Oh, yes.” He pursed his lips and
rolled his eyes like he’d had more than enough of
Morrow.
Having been brushed off by both Morrow
and Anderssen, Harrison considered this new source. The
receptionist looked like she wanted to say something, but then the
desk phone rang and she was forced to answer it. Taking his moment,
Harrison crossed to meet the man. He could feel the woman at the
desk shooting him daggers. He half expected her to slam down the
phone and call security.
“I’m Herm Smythe,” the older man
greeted him with a handshake. “Mind if I sit down?” He indicated
the chair he was pushing.
“Do it,” Harrison invited, holding the
chair while Herm worked his way around to the other side, sinking
heavily into its leather seat, heaving a sigh.
“Who’d you come to see?” Herm asked him
and waved toward the hallway, as if he expected Harrison to push
his chair.
“Anyone who knows something about
Madeline Turnbull’s death. I’m a reporter.”
“Mad Maddie’s dead?” He sounded
surprised and upset. “Nobody tells me anything!”
“You knew her?” Harrison proceeded to
wheel the chair down the hallway from the direction Herm Smythe had
appeared. He probably had five to ten minutes before the forces of
Morrow and/or Anderssen descended on him.
“Sure did. I knew all the women like
her.”
Wondering what that meant, Harrison was
nevertheless beginning to think he might have happened upon a gold
mine of information. “Which women, Herm?”
“Catherine. Mary. Maddie. I wrote their
history, you know,” he added proudly.
“The women of Siren Song?” Harrison
asked in surprise.
“The Colony,” he said, nodding his head
with satisfaction. “That’s what they’re called.”
“You wrote their
history?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, mister.
Wrote it down in a book,” he said proudly. Then, “Where the hell is
that thing? Parnell had it last.”
“Parnell?”
“Dr. Parnell Loman. I didn’t give it to
him. He took it. But he’s dead now . . . a long time. Killed
himself off the jetty. Wait. Whoa, Nellie. Here’s my room.” He
pointed to the door with his name on it.
Harrison processed the information Herm
had given him as he turned the chair and wheeled the older man
inside. The room was furnished with two orange molded-plastic
chairs and little else besides Herm’s bed. Herm eased himself from
the wheelchair into one of the chairs and waved Harrison to the
other one.
Harrison perched himself on its edge,
glancing toward the open door.
“Close it,” Herm ordered. “Don’t need
’em all listening in.”
He rose to shut the door, then reseated
himself. “There’s a Dr. Loman at Ocean Park Hospital,” Harrison
said. “An osteopath . . .”
“That’s Dolph.” Herm spat the words.
“Parnell’s brother. A pompous ass, if there ever was
one!”
Harrison silently agreed on that point.
“This Parnell did not write the book, but it was in his
possession.”
“That’s right.”
“You wrote the book of the Colony’s
history. The book that’s at the Deception Bay Historical
Society?”
“Yes, I . . .” Herm considered a
moment, concentrating hard. He pressed a finger to his lips, then
shook his head in frustration. “Dinah told me something about it. .
. . I don’t remember. . . . Damn, it’s hell getting
old!”
“Dinah?” Harrison
prompted.
“My daughter.” His gray eyes held a
secret. “She might be a sister to one of ’em, you know? A half
sister, anyway.”
“To the women of the Colony?” Harrison
felt a little like he was swimming upstream. Every time he made
progress, he seemed to slip backward.
“I had my times with Mary.” Herm
twinkled at Harrison. “I was quite a swordsman in my day, you
know.”
Another time Harrison would have
encouraged Herm Smythe’s amusing dialogue, but it just felt like
the conversation was seesawing from one side to another without
direction on a topic Harrison really wanted to hear. “What did
Dinah tell you about the book?”
“Parnell took it,” he said. “He wasn’t
supposed to, but he took it.”
Harrison inwardly sighed. “The book at
the historical society.”
“Yes, the book I wrote. It’s a history
of the Colony. Did I mention that?”
“You said Dinah told you something
about the book,” Harrison reminded.
He nodded. “Dinah’s my
daughter.”
“Yes.”
“It’s all about their history, you
know. The Colony. How they came to be what they are. You say the
book’s at the historical society now?”
“A friend told me that,” Harrison
agreed. “She thought a doctor wrote it.”
He vehemently shook his head. “What
friend?”
“Her name’s Laura,” Harrison said,
wondering if he’d tapped the older man out of
information.
“Who’s Laura? You mean
Lorelei?”
Harrison couldn’t quite contain his
surprise. He hoped it wasn’t as obvious to Herm as he sidestepped,
“My friend’s a nurse at Ocean Park Hospital.”
“With that bastard, Dolph.” He nodded
sagely. “He was always jealous of me. Mary liked me, and Parnell,
but she couldn’t stomach Dolph.” He cackled out a laugh. “Yeah, I
wrote the book, but it doesn’t really have the good stuff. Mary was
a loose woman, you know. Free love. It was the seventies and
eighties. We were all into it. But Catherine put the kibosh on
everything. She never, ever liked me. Doesn’t matter, ’cause Mary
and I had our times, you know.” He skewered a look at Harrison with
his gray eyes under salt and pepper brows. “That DNA stuff that’s
all over television? Sometimes I think I should go back there and
test some of those girls, find out if one of ’em’s mine, you know.
Can you do that for me?”
“I don’t think so.” He wasn’t unkind.
“When you were with Mary?” Harrison prodded. “What year was
that?”
He shrugged, uncaring. “Ask
Dinah.”
“Do you have a number for
her?”
“Sure.” He waved a hand over to his
bedside table. “Go over there.”
Harrison cruised around the bed and
found a list of phone numbers written in large black lettering on a
paper that was taped to the table. Dinah’s number was listed, along
with several others that weren’t labeled. Harrison scratched them
all into his small notebook, just in case they had a meaning that
he couldn’t quite see yet.
There was a knock on Herm’s door, to
which he called gaily, “Come on in!” as if he’d completely
forgotten his earlier desire for privacy.
One of the staff members stuck her head
inside, her eyes darting to Harrison. “Everything okay,
Herm?”
“Oh, sure. This is my guest. . . .” He
glanced toward Harrison with a faint frown.
“Harrison,” he said.
“He’s dating my daughter,
Dinah.”
The woman stepped into the room,
standing erect and giving Harrison a long, meaningful look. She was
in her thirties, heavyset, with a cold manner that said nobody, but
nobody, better mess with her. Her gaze never wavered as she said,
“Oh, I don’t think so. He doesn’t look like Dinah’s
type.”
“I was just leaving,” Harrison said,
giving her his best smile. He shook Herm Smythe’s
hand.
“You wanted to know about Mad Maddie,”
Herm suddenly said. “She’s down the hall. The other
side.”
At the mention of Madeline Turnbull’s
name, the aide visibly stiffened.
Harrison didn’t remind Herm that Mad
Maddie was gone. It probably wouldn’t stick in the older guy’s
mind, anyway. “Thanks.”
The woman stepped back into the hallway
and Harrison followed her out. Her name tag read TONI. Harrison nodded at her, but there was no way she
was going to let him go without a postmortem.
“Keri said you were a
reporter.”
“Keri works at the front desk,”
Harrison guessed.
“Mr. Smythe isn’t a reliable source,”
she said tightly. “As I’m sure you noticed, he has trouble with his
short-term memory.”
“But his long term’s
okay?”
“Whatever you’re working on, his word
isn’t to be taken as fact. He wanders from the past to the present
to places of his own fantasy. As for anything about Ms. Turnbull,
you’d be better off speaking to the director.”
“Already had the pleasure,” Harrison
said.
They reached the reception area
together. Keri glanced over at him balefully, and he responded with
a smile, as if they were old friends.
“Can we help you with anything else?”
Toni demanded.
The buzzing of his cell phone prevented
him from having to answer her. Shaking his head, he moved to the
door, waiting for Keri to buzz him out. He clicked on to his cell.
“Frost.”
“Well, well, well. We finally connect.”
Pauline Kirby’s cool tones made Harrison almost smile. She might be
an out-and-out bitch whose narcissism was legendary and whose
interview technique was tactless, discomfiting, and altogether
annoying, but there was something about her chasing him for a story
that definitely warmed the cockles of his heart.
“Pauline,” he said, a world of meaning
in his tone.
“Look, I don’t have a lot of time. I
just want a quick few words on what you think of these entitled,
pissant teenagers. Are they dangerous, or just
poseurs?”
“Both.”
“Think their daddies’ll get ’em
off?”
“Only property crimes, so far. What do
you think?”
“The tone of your writing, Mr. Frost,
suggests that you would like to see the little darlings have to pay
for their mistakes with more than a slap to the
wrist.”
“I think they should know there are
consequences to every choice. Action and reaction. Yin and
yang.”
“Are you saying they should go to
jail?” Pauline asked.
“I’m saying that they need to get the
big picture somehow,” Harrison responded.
“How do we get them to do
that?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.
“What makes a good parent? What makes a responsible child? Who’s at
fault? Why does this happen? What can we do to prevent our own
children from taking the wrong fork in the road?”
“Do you have children, Mr. Frost?” She
sounded truly curious, but Harrison knew better.
“No.”
“Plan to have them?”
He flashed on Laura, his feelings for
her. His amorphous thoughts about a possible future together. “Not
if they’re going to break into other people’s homes just because
they can. I gotta go.”
“Just one more thing. I get the feeling
that you’ve moved on.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Something in your tone. Your
impatience, maybe.”
“Maybe I’m just impatient with you,
Pauline.”
“No.” She sounded sure of herself, and
he figured she’d already guessed what he was working on. “You’re on
to the Justice Turnbull story, aren’t you? I mean, it’s practically
in your backyard. Hope you don’t mind if I check in with you some
more as we go along.”
Harrison couldn’t decide if he was
outraged or amused. He settled on the latter. “It’s flattering that
you need to follow after me to find your own news,
Pauline.”
She laughed. “Are you still mad about
that whole episode with your brother-in-law? C’mon, Frost. We’re
all adults here.”
He could practically see her sharklike
smile. “Are we?” he asked, then clicked off before he lost his
sense of humor.
Lang wanted to clap his hands over his
ears at the rhythmic moaning filling the offices. He felt like he
couldn’t just leave, although O’Halloran had no such qualms, and
was at his desk, finishing up some work he’d planned to put off
till tomorrow. He might have stuck around the department, but he
was definitely glad that both Johnson and Geena Cho had been the
ones to separate James Cosmo Danielson’s significant other from her
clinging children so that Savvy Dunbar could escort the hysterical
woman to the morgue to identify the body. The woman’s ID had been
positive—a loud keening wail before flinging herself atop the body,
according to Savvy—and now she, who had said her name was Virgin,
short for Virginia, according to her ID, was crying softly and
rocking her children to and fro. The aforementioned sister had been
called to come collect her, and the sister and her husband were on
their way to the TCSD together as Virgin had the sister’s vehicle.
The sister’s husband was going to drive the flowered van back home,
but there was the impound to pay, and it was that injustice added
to Cosmo’s death that had sent Virgin into her current chanting,
rocking fugue.
Into this distracting noise, Lang’s
cell phone rang. It was lying on his desk and he snatched it up. He
recognized the number displayed on his LCD as Sam McNally’s, so he
headed out of the squad room to the relative quiet of the sheriff’s
office, closing the door behind him.
“Detective Stone.”
“Sam McNally,” he responded in a
serious tone. “I understand you’ve been trying to get hold of
me.”
“That’s right. About Justice
Turnbull.”
“He escaped from that hospital,
huh?”
“Friday night. We think he’s driven
back here and is somewhere on the coast.”
A pause. A soft remark that sounded
like “Shit.” Then McNally said, “You know he’s after those women at
the lodge, Siren Song.”
“Yeah. And you were the lead
investigator the last time he was after them,” Lang
replied.
“I worked with your department. There’s
a woman who lives in my county. Rebecca Sutcliff Walker. She was
adopted out as a child, but she’s one of them. She was tops on his
hit list last time but escaped. I’m going to put some protection
around her. Otherwise, he’ll probably try to get to the ones at the
lodge. He’s got a total obsession about them.”
“He wants to kill them all. . . .” Lang
heard the questions in his words, even though he had meant to make
a statement.
“He seems to try to pick off the ones
outside the gates, but that doesn’t guarantee he won’t go after the
ones inside. He’s really a whack job. I mean it, a bona fide
psycho.”
“I got that,” Lang said with
feeling.
“Any others on the outside that you
know of?”
“I don’t think so,” Lang said slowly.
“I could ask Catherine. She’s like the matriarch,” he said, for
lack of a better term.
“You talk to her?” McNally was bowled
over.
“Some. Our sheriff, O’Halloran, has
known her for years, and my fiancée is a doctor at Halo Valley.
She’s talked to Catherine a few times. Has even been inside the
lodge,” Lang admitted.
“Really.” McNally sounded amazed.
“That’s more than Rebecca ever managed.”
“What can you tell me about Justice?
Something that might help find him now.”
“Nothing you probably don’t already
know,” McNally said. “He squatted in the lighthouse. His mother
owned that motel, which I understand has been boarded up ever
since. She went to a nursing home, I believe, after he attacked
her.”
“Seagull Pointe,” Lang clarified. “It
hasn’t been publicized yet, but it looks like Justice got in and
smothered her last night or early this morning.”
“What? For the love of God!” Then with
more urgency, “You gotta keep those women safe, Stone. If you can
reach this Catherine, do it. Hell, we don’t even know if they’re
aware he’s out.”
“Yeah, well, they have interesting ways
of getting information,” Lang said. “But I’ll try to breach the
gates, make sure they’re all okay. We’ve been patrolling outside
their lodge, and they have to know it, so they must know
something’s up. Sam, can you update me a little bit on what
happened last time? I’ve got the gist of it, but since you led the
case . . . ?”
“Call me Mac. Everyone does.” He then
went on to explain how Justice had targeted Rebecca Sutcliff and
nearly managed to kill her. Sutcliff and her then-boyfriend, now
husband, Hudson Walker, had learned that Rebecca was once a member
of the Colony but had been adopted out when she was a baby. But
Justice, who had a thing against all of them, had found her by a
means they didn’t fully understand and had gone after her, intent
upon killing her, and it wasn’t the first time he’d attempted to;
it was just the first time Rebecca was aware that she was his
target.
Mac went on to explain about a murder
over twenty years earlier that had links to the Colony and how this
murder had played into the investigation that had finally led to
Justice’s capture.
He finished with, “You know, I just got
back from a camping trip with my son, Levi, who’s thirteen. He met
a kid at a soccer tournament last fall. Mike Ferguson. Mike and
some buddies and his older brother were at that school that was
razed a few years ago, St. Elizabeth’s. There was a maze attached
to the school and the kids were trying to scare each other and they
uncovered a skeleton which had been buried in the middle of the
maze, in front of a statue of the Madonna. That’s when I got
involved with the case. The discovery of those remains kicked off
the Turnbull investigation.
“Anyway, this Ferguson kid knew I was
Levi’s dad and that I headed up that case not long before I
retired. He’s apparently been following it. Really into it. Wonder
what he thinks about Justice’s escape.”
“Yeah,” Lang said, his mind already
moving on to a possible meeting with Catherine, Keeper of the
Gates. “Kids, huh,” he added, echoing Clausen.
“You just never know what they’re gonna
get up to. . . .” McNally warned.
But Lang was already hanging up. He had
a lot of other things to think about.