Body of Evidence (34 page)

She waited. I did not respond.

"I mean, he was very sweet and polite to me, would watch me very closely, do everything I told him to do."

"He liked you, then," I said.

"He knitted a scarf for me. I just remembered. Red, white, and blue. I'd completely forgotten. I wonder what happened to it?"

Her voice trailed off. "I must have given it to the Salvation Army or something. I don't know. Frankie, well, I think he sort of had a crush on me."She laughed nervously.

"Mrs. Wilson, what did Frankie look like?"

"Tall, thin, with dark hair." She briefly shut her eyes.

"It was so long ago."

She was looking at me again. "He doesn't stand out. But I don't remember him as being particularly nice looking. You know, I would remember him better, maybe, if he had been really nice looking or really ugly. So I think he was kind of plain."

"Would your hospital have any photographs of him on file?"

"No."

Silence again. Then she looked at me with surprise.

"He stuttered," she said slowly, then again with conviction.

"Pardon?"

"Sometimes he stuttered. I remember. When Frankie got extremely excited or nervous, he stuttered."

Jim Jim.

Al Hunt had meant exactly what he had said. When Frankie was telling Hunt what Barnes had done or tried to do, Frankie would have been upset, agitated. He would have stuttered. He would have stuttered whenever he talked to Hunt about Jim Barnes. Jim Jim!

I hit the first pay phone after leaving Jeanie Wilson's house. Marino, the dope, had gone bowling.

Monday rolled in on a tide of clouds marbled an ominous gray that shrouded the Blue Ridge foothills and obscured Valhalla from view. Wind buffeted Marino's car, and by the time he parked at the hospital tiny flakes of snow were clicking against the windshield.

"Shit," he complained as we got out. "That's all we need."

"It's not supposed to amount to anything," I reassured him, flinching as icy flakes stung my cheeks. We bent our heads against the wind and hurried in frigid silence toward the front entrance.

Dr. Masterson was waiting for us in the lobby, his face as hard as stone behind his forced smile. When the two men shook hands, they eyed each other like unfriendly cats, and I did nothing to ease the tension, for I was frankly sick of the psychiatrist's games. He had information we wanted, and he would give it to us unvarnished and in its entirety by virtue of cooperation or a court order. He could take his pick. Without delay we accompanied him to his office, and this time he shut the door.

"Now, what may I help you with?" he asked right off as he took his chair.

"More information," I replied.

"Of course. But I must confess, Dr. Scarpetta," he went on as if Marino were not in the room, "I fail to see what else I can tell you about Al Hunt that might assist you in your cases. You've reviewed his record, and I've told you as much as I remember--"

Marino cut him off. "Yeah, well, we're here to massage that memory of yours," he said, getting out his cigarettes. "And it ain't Al Hunt we're all that interested in."

"I don't understand."

"We're more interested in his pal," Marino said.

"What pair' Dr. Masterson appraised him coldly.

"The name Frankie ring a bell?"

Dr. Masterson began cleaning his glasses, and I decided this was a favorite ploy of his for buying time to think.

"There was a patient here when Al Hunt was, a kid named Frankie," Marino added.

"I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank."

"Draw all the blanks you want, Doc. Just tell us who Frankie is."

"We have three hundred patients at Valhalla at any given time, Lieutenant," he answered. "It isn't possible for me to remember everybody who's been here, particularly those whose stay was of a brief duration."

"So, you're telling me this Frankie character didn't stay very long?"

Marino said.

Dr. Masterson reached for his pipe. He had made a slip, and I could see the anger in his eyes. "I'm not telling you anything of the sort, Lieutenant."

He began slowly tamping tobacco into the bowl. "But perhaps if you could give me a little more information about this patient, the young man you refer to as Frankie, I might at least have a glimmer. Can you tell me something about him other than that he was a 'kid'?"

I intervened. "Apparently, Al Hunt had a friend while he was here, someone he referred to as Frankie. Al mentioned him to me during our conversation. We believe this individual may have been restricted to Backhall after he was admitted, and then transferred to a different floor where he may have become acquainted with Al. Frankie has been described as tall, dark, slender. He also liked to knit, a hobby rather atypical among male patients, I should think."

"This is what Al Hunt told you?" Dr. Masterson asked unemphatically.

"Frankie was also obsessively neat," I said, evading the question.

"I'm afraid a patient's enjoyment of knitting isn't likely to be something brought to my attention," he commented, relighting his pipe.

"It's also possible he had a tendency to stutter when he was under stress," I added, controlling my impatience.

"Hmm. Perhaps someone with spastic dysphonia in his differential diagnosis. That might be a place to start--"

"The place to start is for you to cut the shit," Marino said rudely.

"Really, Lieutenant." Dr. Masterson gave him a condescending smile. "Your hostility is unwarranted."

"Yeah, yeah, and you're unwarranted at the moment, too. But I just might get the itch to change that in a minute, slap you with a warrant and haul your ass off to lockup for accessory to murder. How's that sound?" Marino glared at him.

"I think I've about had enough of your impertinence," he replied with maddening calm. "I don't respond well to threats, Lieutenant."

"And I don't respond well to someone jerking me around," Marino retorted.

"Who is Frankie?" I tried again.

"I assure you I don't know, offhand," Dr. Masterson replied. "But if you'll be so kind as to wait a few minutes, I'll go see what we can pull up on our computer."

"Thank you," I said. "We'll be right here."

The psychiatrist had barely gotten out the door before Marino started in.

"What a dirt bag."

"Marino," I said wearily.

"It ain't like this joint's overrun with kids. I'm willing to bet seventy-five percent of the patients here's over the age of sixty. You know, young people would stand out in your memory, right? He knows damn well who Frankie is, probably could tell us what size shoes the drone wears."

"Perhaps."

"There's nothing perhaps about it. I'm telling you the guy's jerking us around."

"And he'll continue to do so as long as you antagonize him, Marino."

"Shit."

He got up and went to the window behind Dr. Masterson's desk. Parting the curtains, he stared out into the bleak late morning. "I hate like shit when someone lies to me. Swear to God I'll pop 'im if I have to, nail his ass. That's the thing about shrinks that frosts me so bad. They can have Jack the Ripper for a patient and they don't care. They'll still lie to you, tuck the animal in bed and spoon-feed him chicken soup like he's Mr. Apple Pie America." He paused, mumbling inanely, "At least the snow's stopped."

Waiting until he sat back down, I said, "I think threatening to charge him with accessory to murder was a bit much."

"Got his attention, didn't I?"

"Give him a chance to save face, Marino."

He stared sullenly at the curtained window as he smoked.

"I think by now he's realizing it's in his best interest to help us," I said.

"Yeah, well, it's not in my best interest to sit around playing cat and mouse with him. Even as we speak, Frank-ie Fruitcake's on the street thinking his screwy thoughts, ticking away like a damn bomb about to go off."

I thought of my quiet house in my quiet neighborhood, of Gary Harper's necklace looped over the knob of my back door, and the whispery voice on my answering machine. Is your hair naturally blond, or do you bleach it.... How odd. I puzzled over the significance of that question. Why did it matter to him?

"If Frankie is our killer," I said quietly, taking a deep breath, "I can't imagine how there can be any connection between Sparacino and these homicides."

"We'll see," he muttered, lighting up another cigarette and staring sourly at the empty doorway.

"What do you mean, 'we'll see'?"

"Never ceases to surprise me how one thing leads to another," he replied cryptically.

"What? What things lead to other things, Marino?"

He glanced at his watch and cursed. "Where the hell is he, anyhow? He go out to lunch?"

"Hopefully he's tracking down Frankie's record."

"Yeah. Hopefully."

"What things lead to other things?" I asked him again. "What are you thinking about? You mind being a little more specific?"

"Let's just put it this way," Marino said. "I got a real strong feeling if it wasn't for that damn book Beryl was writing, all three of 'em would still be alive. In fact, Hunt would probably still be alive, too."

"I can't say that with certainty."

"Course you can't. You're always so goddamn objective. So I'm saying it, okay?"

He looked over at me and rubbed his tired eyes, his face flushed. "I got this feeling, all right? It's telling me Sparacino, the book, is the connection. It's what initially linked the killer to Beryl, and then one thing led to another. Next, the squirrel whacks Harper. After that Miss Harper takes enough pills to kill a damn horse so she don't have to rattle around in that big crib of hers all alone while cancer eats her alive. Then Hunt's swinging from the rafters in his fuckin' undershorts."

The orange fiber with its peculiar three-leaf clover shape drifted through my mind, as did Beryl's manuscript, Sparacino, Jeb Price, Senator Partin's Hollywood son, Mrs. McTigue, and Mark. They were limbs and ligaments of a body I could not piece together. In some inexplicable way, they were the alchemy by which seemingly unrelated people and events had been fashioned into Frankie.

Marino was right. One thing always leads to another. Murder never emerges full blown from a vacuum. Nothing evil ever does.

"Do you have any theories as to just what exactly this link might be?"

I asked Marino.

"Nope, not a goddamn one," he replied with a yawn at the exact moment Dr. Masterson walked into the office and shut the door.

I noticed with satisfaction that he had a stack of case files in hand.

"Now then," he said coolly and without looking at either of us, "I found no one with the name Frankie, which I'm assuming may be a nickname. Therefore, I pulled cases by date of treatment, age, and race. What I have here are the records of six white males, excluding Al Hunt, who were patients at Valhalla during the interval you're interested in. All of them are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four."

"How about you just let us go through them while you sit back and smoke your pipe."

Marino was a little less combative, but not much.

"I would prefer to give you only their histories, for confidentiality reasons, Lieutenant. If one is of keen interest, we'll go through his record in detail. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," I said before Marino could argue.

"The first case," Dr. Masterson began, opening the top file, "is a nineteen-year-old from Highland Park, Illinois, admitted in December of 1978 with a history of substance abuse--heroin, specifically."

He flipped a page. "He was five-foot-eight, weighed one-seventy, brown eyes, brown hair. His treatment was three months in duration."

"Al Hunt wasn't admitted until that following April," I reminded the psychiatrist. "They wouldn't have been patients at the same time."

"Yes, I believe you're right. An oversight on my part. So we can strike him."

He set the file on his ink blotter as I gave Marino a warning glance. I knew he was about to explode, his face as red as Christmas.

Opening a second file, Dr. Masterson resumed, "Next we have a fourteen-year-old male, blond, blue-eyed, five-foot-three, one-fifteen pounds. He was admitted in February 1979, discharged six months later. He had a history of withdrawal and fragmentary delusions, and was diagnosed as schizophrenic of the disorganized or hebephrenic type."

"You mind explaining what the hell that means?" Marino asked.

"It presented as incoherence, bizarre mannerisms, extreme social withdrawal, and other oddities of behavior. For example"--he paused to look over a page--"he would leave for the bus stop in the morning but fail to show up at school, and on one occasion was found sitting under a tree drawing peculiar, nonsensical designs in his notebook."

"Yeah. And now he's a famous artist living in New York," Marino mumbled sardonically. "His name Frank, Franklin, or begin with an F?"