22

"Cornflakes.”

Shepherd stopped at the front steps of the Hawk Ridge Institute, facing a pair of gray-haired patients in matching cotton outfits.

“Excuse me?” he asked the one who had spoken, a chinless man with a face made of wrinkles and liver spots.

“Cornflakes,” the man repeated. “Cornflakes with milk.”

He smiled. His two front teeth were missing. He looked like a mischievous child.

The man’s companion, a woman with glazed eyes, asked Shepherd if he had ever been to Venice.

“No,” Shepherd said. “Never.”

The woman nodded, satisfied. She and her friend returned their attention to an empty ambulance slant-parked in a loading zone. They stood staring at it raptly, and Shepherd headed up the steps.

The front doors opened on a small lobby, musty and inadequately lit. Another patient was inside, this one a middle-aged woman who sat curled on a wooden bench, studying her sneakers as she hummed to herself.

She had a proud, photogenic face, and Shepherd felt a touch of sadness when he thought of the person she might have been, if illness hadn’t stolen her mind.

At the front desk sat a receptionist, paying no attention to the patient. Her concentration was fixed on the flickering amber monitor of an antique computer terminal. For a moment she reminded him of Ginnie. There was no physical resemblance, only the pose she had struck, the air of intent concentration as her careful hands worked the keyboard.

Somewhere deep inside him there was a revival of the old pain. He felt it, hated it, and at the same time, oddly, he was almost bored with it, because the pain had been with him for so long now, and had gotten tiresome.

Maybe this was what people meant when they spoke of healing. He hoped so.

“May I help you?” the receptionist asked without looking up.

“I’d like to see Dr. Cray.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She frowned. The garish amber light glinted on her granny glasses. “Which patient is this regarding?”

“None.” He showed his badge. “I need to talk to Dr. Cray about a police matter.”

The woman barely glanced at the badge. She seemed unimpressed. It occurred to Shepherd that the institute’s staff must be accustomed to police inquiries. Kroft had said the hospital had regular dealings with the local sheriff’s department. Certain obviously unstable suspects—transients, arsonists—were held here for psychiatric evaluation.

“You’ll have to sign in, please.”

Shepherd filled out the sign-in sheet fastened to a clipboard. The receptionist put it away without looking at it.

“Dr. Cray’s in his office. Second floor. Room twenty-two. Elevator works only if you’ve got a key, and anyway, it’s busted. Take the stairs.”

She jerked her head at a door with a steel handle and a posted sign that read STAFF ONLY.

Shepherd thanked her, but she was already bent over her keyboard again.

The stairwell smelled of disinfectant. Shepherd disliked that smell. It reminded him of hospitals—well, of course, this was a hospital, wasn’t it?—but he was thinking of the other kind of hospital, the normal kind, like the University Medical Center in Tucson, where, two years ago, he had spent a long series of days and nights, praying, eating too little, crying when he was alone and no one could see.

God, he wanted to be out of this place. He would talk to Cray, size him up, and go.

The door at the top of the stairs opened on a hallway. Shepherd had thought that mental hospitals were always decorated in light green or blue tones to soothe the patients, but the walls here were white, and so were the doors—everything, white.

Some of the doors were open. Walking past, he glimpsed staff members on the phone or typing at actual typewriters, IBM Selectrics or some similar equipment. He hadn’t thought anybody used typewriters anymore. He wondered if Hawk Ridge’s employees used carbon paper too, and mimeograph machines.

In one room, marked ADMISSIONS, the two paramedics who had arrived in the ambulance stood flanking a disheveled teenager in an overcoat. A woman who must be a doctor was interviewing the kid, jotting down notes on a clipboard,

“And what did you do after you got home?” she asked.

“I watched TV, and the guy in the car commercial told me I needed to start a fire in the toolshed. He told me I had to burn the fucker down. I didn’t want to. I’m scared of fire. But the guy was on TV, you know? When they’re on TV, you gotta do what they say....”

Room 22 was at the end of the hall. This door was also open. Shepherd entered an anteroom furnished with a desk, a few file cabinets, and a couch. A plaque on the desk read MARGARET. Cray’s secretary, or assistant, or whatever she should be called.

Her swivel chair was empty. The clock on the wall pointed to 12:15. She must have left for lunch.

But Cray was here. Shepherd saw him through the doorway of his office, seated at his desk, a telephone in one hand and a file folder in the other.

“The chart’s in front of me now,” he was saying. “Moban, seventy-five milligrams. Maintain him on that dosage for two weeks, and then, if necessary, we’ll take another look.”

He hung up, raised his head, and noticed Shepherd in the anteroom. “Yes?” he snapped.

Every cop was good at assessing people. Shepherd processed what he could see of Dr. John Cray—sharp eyes, high forehead, small mouth, hollow cheeks—and decided the man was intelligent, arrogant, controlling, and very tired.

“Dr. Cray.” Shepherd stepped through the doorway into Cray’s office. “I’m Detective Roy Shepherd, Tucson PD.”

He watched Cray’s face for a reaction. Cray merely frowned.

“Tucson? I was expecting someone from the sheriff’s department.”

This response baffled Shepherd. He let a moment pass as he approached the desk. Automatically he noted Cray’s age, approximately mid-forties, and a few other details.

He wore no wedding band. His complexion was sallow; he did not get out in the sun very much. He wore a brown suit of good quality, in need of being pressed. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, revealing a taut, muscular neck.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Shepherd said finally.

Cray looked impatient. “This is about the vandalism, isn’t it?”

“Vandalism?”

A sigh leaked out of Cray, the sigh of a man who was smarter and better organized than everyone around him, and weary of this burden. Shepherd decided he disliked John Cray.

But the truth was, he disliked all psychiatrists, disliked the profession of psychiatry as such. He had his reasons.

“Apparently,” Cray said, “we’ve got our wires crossed. You see, my sport-utility vehicle was vandalized last night. I called the sheriff’s department about it just half an hour ago. They said they’d send someone to take a report. But of course that’s not at all why you’re here.”

“No.”

“Still, I have a feeling your visit could be related to my little problem.” Cray leaned back in his chair, studying Shepherd over the neat stacks of paper on the desk. “It’s about her, isn’t it?”

“Her?”

“Kaylie McMillan. Isn’t she why you’ve come to see me?”

“I guess I’m a little slow today, Doctor. Who exactly is Kaylie McMillan?”

“The person who trashed my Lexus—or so I believe.” Cray smiled, a surprisingly warm smile that illumined his face and made him look younger, “I’d better start at the beginning, hadn’t I?”

“That might be good.”

“Please have a seat. Care for some coffee? It’s quite good. One-hundred-percent fresh-ground Kona. There’s a coffee house in Tucson that sells it.”

So he went into Tucson now and then. Hardly a startling admission, but Shepherd took note of it as he pulled a metal chair close to the desk and sat. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“Then perhaps, before I tell you about Kaylie, you might enlighten me as to why you’re here. Since, quite obviously, my guesswork on the subject was all wrong.”

Shepherd kept his answer vague. “Someone’s made some rather serious allegations, Doctor. Allegations concerning yourself. Now, I’m just looking into this on a purely preliminary basis—”

“Kaylie,” Cray said.

He was nodding, his expression curiously content, like a man who’d found the answer to a riddle and was pleased with his own cleverness.

Shepherd shrugged. “Excuse me?”

“These allegations were made anonymously, isn’t that so?”

“Well, yes.”

“Kaylie did it. What precisely did she accuse me of? Kidnapping parochial-school girls and selling them into slavery? Using my basement as a torture chamber? A series of ax murders, perhaps?”

“You’re taking this kind of lightly.”

“I’m not taking it lightly at all. She vandalized my Lexus. She’s evidently spreading false accusations of a nature sufficiently serious to require your presence in my office. And she’s stalking me.”

“Stalking you?”

“Yes. What did she accuse me of?”

Shepherd hadn’t wanted to reveal the charge too soon, but he saw no way around it. “She said ... Well, she said you were the White Mountains Killer. You know the case—”

“Yes, of course. Her claim is original, at least. But hardly unexpected. That crime has received a good deal of publicity, and psychotics are highly suggestible.”

“Kaylie’s a psychotic?”

“Oh, yes. She was a patient here, you see. One of the more difficult ones.”

The woman’s voice on the 911 tape spoke in Shepherd’s memory: I’m not crazy.

“When was this?” he asked.

“Twelve years ago, when she was nineteen. The sheriff’s department placed her in our care after her arrest.”

“On what charge?”

“Homicide.” Cray took another sip of his Kona coffee. “She and her husband, Justin, had been married less than three months when dear, sweet Kaylie shot him in the heart.”