Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 05 - Monroe Beach (11 page)

“Look, Judith, a gazebo,” Wade said at one point and tried to pull me inside.

I grabbed his hand and led him to the main building.

When we got inside there was a woman with big hair sitting at the reception desk filing her nails.
Her hair had been dyed an unlikely pitch black and she had white pasty looking skin. I hate to say it like this, but she was fat. Even her hands were fat and snow white with long red lacquered nails.

She had gum in her mouth that she chewed very slowly
opening her mouth wide before chomping down again.

W
hen she looked up at us, she looked bored, “Kin I hep ye?”

It took a few seconds to figure out what she said.
I grew up in Georgia, but this southern drawl was extreme.

“We’re here to see a patient, Randolph Edwards.”

The chewing slowed down and she opened her mouth really wide with each chew. She looked Mark up and down and then looked at me.

“Will, Doc Pullen ain’t hire.
So I gess yer outa lick.”

Mark threw up his hands, “What? You mean he didn’t tell you about us coming by today?
I’m Dr. Muncie and this is Dr. Jacobs. Dr. Pullen told us that he wouldn’t be here, but that you would be able to help us.

“He called us in as consultants.
We flew all the way from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute to evaluate the patient. He said we could rely on you to help us.”

“Oh! Whyncha til me who yer wire.
Cours I kin hep ye.”

I couldn’t believe they would hire someone like this to meet the public.
She got up and told us to follow her. When she turned to lead us down the hall, I noticed she had a lot of fat between her bra and waist but that her butt was flat.

Wade
put his lips to my ear and whispered, “All meat and no potatoes.”

I giggled and she looked over her shoulders but didn’t say anything.

She took us into what looked like a living room in a home. It had sofa, love seat, recliner, and so on with beautiful paintings on the walls. The lamps were turned down low and there was a fireplace in the corner. I thought it must be very cozy in here in the winter.

She gave us a tight smile and left without a word for which I was grateful.
I found it stressful to try to interpret her language

Wade walked around studying paintings and picking up knick knacks before coming over and sitting by me on the sofa.
He winked at me but didn’t try to touch me.

The receptionist came in with a silver tray with coffee and Danish.
Wade winked at her and thanked her. She blushed and left.

The door opened again and a big black man came in escorting a dazed looking Randolph.
He started to say something and Wade spoke up before he could say anything, “Mr. Edwards I’m Dr. Muncie and this is Dr. Jacobs. Dr. Pullen called us in to consult on your case.”

Randolph sat down on the loveseat and the orderly took the recliner and pushed it back like he was getting comfortable.

“You’ll have to leave,” I said.

He sighed, “Noam
I has to stay. Patients ain’t allowed to have unsupervised visitors.”

I put o
n my most professional voice, “We are not visitors. We’re psychiatrists called in by Dr. Pullen to consult. What goes on her is highly confidential. I’m sorry, I know you’re only doing your job, but ask Ms. Kirk, (I had read her name on a sign on the front desk) she’ll vouch for us.”

He pushed the recliner to a sitting position and stood, “I’ll be just outside the door,” he said and left.

CHAPTER 24

Randolph put his finger to his lips and started walking around, looking at the ceiling and under tables. At one point he lay down on the floor and ran his hand under the sofa, loveseat, and recliner.

Wade
nodded and took something out of his pocket that I never noticed him carrying before. It looked like a fountain pen but when he took the top off he was able to extend it. He ran it all along the edge of the carpet and all over the ceiling and under all the furniture. He then went over to the door and opened it quickly and the orderly almost fell in.

“This is confidential,” Mark said as he closed the door.

Randolph leaned towards us, “I never killed anyone. Check the records in the office and you’ll see that the killings started before I escaped, unless the records have been altered.”

“Randolph, what about you invading our dreams and getting us to do things we didn’t want to do?”

“It was a stupid adolescent prank. I didn’t make you do anything really bad.”

“How are you able to do it and why would you want to?”

“It started when my parents put me in here and abandoned me. I used to lie in my bed at night and close my eyes and see if I could contact my parents. I was only thirteen and I was lonely and scared.

“So, I would close my eyes and concentrate really hard.
One night I fell asleep while I was trying to contact them. I ended up in a dream my mom was having. She was in a swing as a teenager and my dad was pushing her. I don’t know how it happened but I was suddenly pushing her and my dad wasn’t around.”

He looked at me and grinned, “Very Freudian, right?
In the dream, when my mom looked over her shoulder and saw me, I woke up. I assumed she did too at that point.”

He stood up and started pacing and I now saw him as a very sensitive young man who had been hurt by his parents.

He came over to me and squatted down.  “Dr. McCain, you’ve got to help me. I can’t stay in here. I can’t stand these experiments he continues to do with us. You’ve got to help us all. The others don’t have a way to escape, in their mind, like I do. And I can’t escape either while they keep forcing me too take the drugs.”

“What do these experiments involve?”

“The drugs he develops. The name of the drug keeps changing as he experiments with different combinations of drugs. Some of the combinations he’s used cause headaches but that’s not the worst thing. Sometimes he gives us one of his new concoctions and we have horrible hallucinations. We are being used as guinea pigs, Dr. McCain.

“If you saw any of the other patients, you’ll notice there are very few girls left.
That’s the other thing he does. He has some sort of church services but not like any you’ve ever seen. Attendance is mandatory.

“Each week he chooses a different girl and gets her in front of the group.
She is forced to wear a long white robe. He tells us what a sinner the girl is and that she brings out evil in men.

“He says the evil in girls started with Eve and
that his own mother forced him to commit evil with her. It goes on a long time with him telling the group all about her sins. She has to repent to him and then he says he has to baptize her. There’s a trail behind this building that leads to a lake.

“We have to watch while he rapes her, the whole time crying out that she is evil and has made him do this to her.
Then he baptizes her, but he holds her in the water until she’s dead.

“W
e have to help dig her grave,” he said as he ended up sobbing.

I looked at Wade and saw that he was as shocked as I was.
“Are all the staff in on this, Randolph?” I asked

“No, just Pete,” He nodded toward the door.
“He has a gun and so you can’t run. One poor boy tried to run the first week he was here and Pete shot him in the back. We had to bury two that week.”

I put my arms around Randolph and he cried on my shoulder.

“What about their parents?” I asked.

“He only accepts kids
whose parents don’t want them. Oh they pretend to care like my parents did when they dropped me off. One of the girls here had gotten kind of plump. Her parents own a health spa and it was bad advertisement to have her around.”

“You mean to tell me that none of these parents ever come by to check up on their kids?”

“That’s right. He has them sign a paper saying they will have no contact until they are cured. That it’s for the good of the teenager to concentrate totally on their treatment.”

I stared at him with my hand over my mouth.
I was afraid to ask but knew I must. “Randolph, does anyone ever get to leave this place?”

He snorted, “Yeah, they leave all right, in a damned pine box.
Once they are past the adolescent years, they are no longer any use to him and that’s why I’m scared. I just turned 19 last September. I’m no longer any use to him.”

Wade had been silent so far
, but now he said as if speaking to himself, “And yet he rescued you, paid for an attorney, and brought you back here. He let everyone believe you had committed those horrible crimes.

“Why?
If he wanted to get rid of you, why didn’t he let you get the death penalty? Why go to all that trouble and expense so he could destroy you himself?”

Randolph and I looked at each other and slowly Randolph said,
while slowly nodding his head, “He won’t destroy me. He needs me as his alibi. He is the killer. All he has to do is say I escaped and killed another girl. Who will believe me over him?”

“Randolph, where is Dr. Pullen?”

“He told the group this morning that he had to go to Atlanta to a conference.”

I looked at Wade, “There is no conference in Atlanta.
I get information for all psychiatric and psychological conferences.” I got out my cell phone and dialed Dr. Anna.

“Your grandma and I are having so much fun, Judith,” she said before I could say anything.

“Dr. Anna, is there a psychiatric conference in Atlanta going on right now that you know about?”

“No, there was one just last week there
, but not now. Why, Judith?”

“I’ll explain later,” I said and hung up.

I next called Robert. “I’m glad you called, Judith. Sarah is having a lot of trouble. She’s seeing herself more and more in the mirror.”

“Robert,
don’t let her out of your sight. Call Simon to get the FBI here with a search warrant and tell them there are bodies buried in the back of this building by the lake. Dr. Pullen is the killer and he’s out there somewhere probably looking for a chance to kill Sarah. We’ll wait for the FBI to get here and then we’ll be on our way.”

I was glad to see the orderly pacing up and down the hall instead of hanging around outside the door.
He took Randolph back to his room.

CHAPTER 25

We told Pete, the orderly
, that Dr. Pullen had given us permission to tour the place. He said he would accompany us.

From what we saw, you would never have guessed what was really going on here.
The patient’s rooms were nice and large, with TVs, a private bath, and a sitting area. There was a huge game room with pool table, ping pong table and video games.

I noticed that there were no outside activities but there was an indoor gym with basketball court, tennis cour
t, and some gym equipment. We made the tour last as long as possible while waiting for the FBI to show up.

They showed up wit
h search warrants and handcuffs. Pete was cuffed and put in one of the unmarked cars with an agent. One agent gathered the rest of the staff in the large conference room. They were taken one-by-one into the main office by two other agents for questioning.

There was a CSI unit
, who started gathering evidence and digging in the back yard near the lake.

A bus pulled up and the teenagers were loaded into it to be taken to children’s protective services.
Randolph was taken into custody but put into a different car than Pete.

# # #

“I’m glad we didn’t unpack yet,” Wade said as we headed toward the house we had rented.

“I’m sorry about the ruin
ed vacation plans, Wade.”

“I’m not.
My heart went out to that poor boy. Imagine your parents abandoning you and then being experimented on, having to watch your friends die then on top of everything else, being framed for murder.”

“I wonder if the whole staff kne
w about this,” I said.

“I don’t know, let Simon and them figure it out. Right now we have to help Sarah and hopefully capture that son-of-a-bitch.”

He laughed.
“A vacation with you would have been nice but I love catching the bad guys, especially when they are hurting kids,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

# # #

Sarah was at the sheriff’s office when we got there. After all the hugs and kisses, we gathered in Robert’s office and filled him in on what we had learned.

“I just got a call from my friend, Simon
, and he said there were agents there already with a search warrant. They’re closing the place down and the staff is in the process of calling the parents to come get the kids.