Second Sight (11 page)

A phone rang in the spa room at Case’s Lancaster farm.

“It’s Troy.”

“Is it done?” Case cradled the receiver against his ear. He was pouring scotch over tumblers of ice. He let the towel fall from his waist and opened the door to the sauna. Wendy was sitting cross-legged on the bench, naked, her body beaded with perspiration.

“It’s done. I have the kid’s hard drive,” Troy said.

“Good, good. Destroy it.” He leaned forward in his wheelchair and handed the young woman her drink.

“There’s something else.”

“What?” Case asked impatiently.

“Veterans Affairs received a call from a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York. They said the caller wanted to speak with you personally. At your request.”

“What request?” Case pushed the glass against his forehead. “I didn’t request to speak with anyone,” he growled.

“All they said was that a patient named Monahan died and they had instructions to call the foundation.”

Case leaned against the door frame. “Say that again.”

“Monahan—he was a patient there and he died. Does that mean anything to you?”

There was a long moment of silence. Case leaned back in his wheelchair and shut the door to the sauna.

“How did he die? Did they say?”

“Aortal aneurysm.”

Case bent forward, elbows on knees, head cradled in his hands.

It had been years since he’d thought of Thomas Monahan. Even now the memory was indistinct. A boy of twenty or so, heavily bandaged and lying on a hospital gurney.

“That’s it? They didn’t say anything else?”

“That’s all.”

It had all happened in another lifetime, when Case was a very young man himself. When doctors fresh out of medical school were putting to practice theories that had only ever before been hypothesized on blackboards in the bowels of Cornell or Harvard or Yale. It was a new generation of knowledge. The world was there for the taking. And take it he did. He looked through the glass door at the young woman in his sauna, studying the curve of her hip and the purple polish on ten perfect toes.

Yes, he took, and long before the
Carpe Diem
T-shirt was in vogue. To take advantage of that small window in time when the world cared more about science than human lives. More about a future for all than about the rights of privacy and informed consent.

He had accomplished in two decades what would have required those so-called geniuses a lifetime. He had circumvented generations of clinical lab work by taking his drugs directly to the field. What better or faster way to know how humans might
react to certain combinations of chemicals than to test them on human beings from the beginning?

Society might not agree with that approach today, but from the 1950s to the 1970s it helped launch the ideas of two men to become an industry that would stand for centuries.

Case had no regrets for the lives sacrificed to his theories. How many more people had been saved? In fact, his only lament was the truth behind the adage that youth was wasted on the young. Oh, for just twenty more years, he thought.

The news about Monahan was a relief, but Lord, that man had taken his good old time to die. All those brilliant doctors in the room in 1950 and none had given the boy more than a decade to live. He would never walk again, they were all so sure. His lungs would not be able to keep up with his heart. He would be dead before he was thirty.

It was just another example of how little doctors knew about the human body in 1950. Monahan had outlived all of them, save Case.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning,” and he hung up the phone.

He opened the sauna door again and pulled himself out of the wheelchair and pivoted onto the bench next to Wendy, one finger tracing a line from her knee to her hip. He lifted his drink and raised it to his lips and felt her hand on him.

“Did you take your meds?” she whispered, looking up at him.

“The one that counts.” He brushed the sweat from her forehead and tucked her hair behind her ear.

Troy Weir should have had a long jump start on life. He was handsome, athletic, and certainly gifted, but Troy lacked something fundamental inside. He was emotionally void.

When he finally came to ask his stepfather for a job at Case and Kimble, he was aware that his life was spinning out of con
trol. That he needed to rein in his hostilities. He considered research monotonous, but it offered solitude and a way to anchor himself for at least part of the day. He had already seen three of his West Coast friends dead by age eighteen. His classmates at Franklin University in New York were all on Wall Street now, but corporations required far too much contact with cohorts and clients. He could never pull off so much sincerity in the light of day.

His stepfather was skeptical but assigned him to a research and development facility near Reading, Pennsylvania. Then an opening appeared in Lancaster for a clerk at Case and Kimble’s PR darling, the Global Responsibility Lab, or GRL “girl” lab, confined to research of cures for the world’s hot-list diseases, such as AIDS,
E. coli,
and West Nile virus.

Terry Hopping, in charge of the lab, was typical for a GRL group leader. Beautiful, photogenic, racially diverse (part Irish, part Cherokee Indian), pedigreed (cellular pathologist from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Medicine), and quirky (she appeared to be as fascinated by sex as she was by homeostasis). In other words, she was window dressing for Case and Kimble’s much touted and purely self-serving philanthropic contribution to humanity around the world.

Hopping’s team worked on public relation cases, donating time, equipment, and manpower wherever news cameras appeared. In reality they were underfunded and overworked, and Hopping had also been demoted from the mainstream C&K career ladder for numerous complaints of sexual harassment.

She was all but ecstatic when Troy Weir ended up in her group. It was innocent enough at first, brushing against him in the confines of the small office, lewd intimations in conversation, displaying her underwear at any opportunity that presented itself—she found plenty of reasons to sit across from him or to bend over to give him a good view of her thong.

She had another act, which included stripping down to her
bra and panties to step into her yellow protective suit that she wore in the biocontainment chamber. This she did in full view of a glass vacuum-sealed door, and Troy gave her what he considered her humiliation, the proper attention she sought.

Then came the day they were alone and a breach alarm sounded in the chamber. Troy ran into the lab to see what was wrong and noticed that the warning patch on the breast of her suit was flashing red. Hopping was holding a glass slide smeared with blood and there was a half-inch tear in the finger of her glove.

She looked up as he ran to the observation window. Her eyes went wide when he punched the emergency bar locking the chamber, and though it emitted a piercing shriek to alert staff there was a breach, there was no one to hear it that day but him. Hopping dropped the slide and screamed in silent rage as she ran to the window, pressed her mask against the glass, teeth bared, lips demanding, then begging Troy to unlock the door. Her demands diminished to whimpers by the time the first blotches of black and red appeared on her face, and fifteen minutes later she slipped to the floor, where she died of convulsions.

The lab was heavily criticized for allowing a clerk into the unit, even though he was the owner’s stepson. You couldn’t blame the death of a scientist on a clerk, and you couldn’t blame the clerk for understaffing the lab. It looked like what it was, a bad management decision. Even police were unsure how to proceed until Case himself got involved.

In the end Troy was exonerated, an internal board fired an administrator, and sixteen single-spaced pages were added to the organization’s general operating procedures. And a bronze plaque bearing a likeness of Terry Hopping was placed in an obscure hallway near the GRL lab.

Edward Case, however, was suddenly more interested in the young man who so coldly watched a scientist die rather than
open the door and put himself others at risk. It took a special kind of person to do that, a man very much like himself at that age. Even the best trained in the business had a tendency to let their hearts and emotions interfere with their minds.

The company’s board of directors would make noise about employing Troy again, but not where Ed Case needed him most. In Ed Case’s world there were places for a man like Troy.

“Remember a patient named T.J. Monahan? Thomas J. Monahan?” Sherry asked.

Betsy nodded, sipping from her straw. She touched her lips with a napkin.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I haven’t thought of him in years, but, yes, he came with the asylum.”

They were just starting their second pitcher of Mississippi Muds, a concoction of ice cream, Kahlúa, and Southern Comfort. Sherry, enjoying the moment, was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t been a bore all these years. It wasn’t like her to deviate from the serious beers she favored toward candy-like drinks she’d always considered frivolous. The wonder of sight seemed to have brought about a sea change in Sherry’s approach to life.

Sherry nodded. “Any family?”

“None,” Betsy said. “Never had a visitor in my seventeen years.”

“You said he came with the asylum?”

“Nineteen fifty, as I recall. He’s probably in his late seventies now. He outlived anyone that was there when he was admitted.”

Brigham shook his head. “He died.”

Betsy turned abruptly. “Monahan’s dead?” she said softly. “He was like the saddest thing you ever saw. He was there in a way and yet not. We could move him around, stand him on his own two feet, but there was no one inside. He’d just stare at the walls, year after year; sometimes he’d move his lips, but never said an intelligible word. We brought him to every holiday celebration, gave him a birthday and baked him cakes; he was like our mascot.” She smiled. “We always kidded about how he was the best patient in the ward. We didn’t mean anything by it. We really loved him.”

“Do you know how he got there?” Brigham asked.

Betsy shook her head. “Security brought him in one day, we were told. He took a fall off the rocks on Mount Tamathy, up at the overlook where you guys went today. The road wasn’t there back then, and the guardrails, the fencing before you get to the rocks, were all open. There wasn’t much in the records, but he was with the army base that used to be up here, one of those high-security areas, secret Cold War stuff. I guess he didn’t have any family and since he was brain-dead, they just left him at the asylum. Nowadays there’s a VA hospital in Syracuse, but…” She shrugged and sipped her drink.

“An army base?” Sherry repeated, thinking of the images she had seen in Monahan’s memories.

“That base was the talk of the town when I was kid. When it finally closed the boys used to go up and root around the rubble they left behind. Some people came around now and then and wrote articles on it; I think it was Discovery or one of the science-fiction channels that did a documentary of it. They were supposed to have been doing some kind of top-secret research there, very sensitive stuff. Of course now, like everything else, it’s supposed to be haunted.”

“When did the army abandon it?”

“Early seventies. One day they just came in with trucks and hauled everything away. You remember when the CIA was in front of Congress over refusing to release old records? The old administration destroyed thousands of documents; it was”—she shook a finger—“it’s on the tip of my tongue….”

“Richard Helms,” Brigham said. “He ordered that their secret research projects be destroyed.”

“What about Monahan’s hospital records? Don’t they say what happened to him?” Sherry asked.

Betsy topped off her drink and turned on her stool, knee pressed tightly against the side of Brigham’s thigh. Her eyes were a very dark, perhaps a Scandinavian, blue, he thought.

“So how are you related to T.J.?” she asked.

“We’re not,” Brigham said.

Betsy withdrew her knee and looked at Brigham, then at Sherry.

“I’m beginning to think you aren’t as interested in my pancakes and catfish as what goes on in that asylum. Are you two lawyers or something? You know, you could have just asked me some questions at the diner if that’s what you’re here for.”

“Please don’t be offended. I’m really enjoying your company,” Brigham said with extraordinary sincerity. “No, we’re not lawyers and it’s certainly not what you’re thinking.”

“It’s about me,” Sherry said. “And it’s kind of difficult to explain.”

Brigham put up his hand. “Have you ever heard of a woman who can take the hand of a dead person and see their last memories before they died?”

Betsy looked at him like he was crazy. She shook her head no and looked at her drink.

“I have a story to tell you, then,” he said. “It’s a little long, but worth hearing, I assure you. Will you give me a few minutes?”

Betsy nodded her head slowly, but uncertainly.

Thirty minutes later her knee was back against Brigham’s thigh. She was on her fourth Mississippi Mud.

“You know, I heard there was a statistic floating around about our hospital having the highest cancer rate for patients across the country.”

“What about Monahan’s medical history when he came in?”

“There wasn’t a single document in his file about his admission,” Betsy said. “The only thing we ever had was an authorization to continue care and send bills to the Veterans Administration in Washington, D.C. The staff tried to find family through the army for years, we called half the Monahans in the country just out of curiosity, but no one ever found a next of kin and the army refused to talk about him.”

“Normally a vet would rate funeral arrangements,” Brigham said.

She shook her head. “Whole body donor. It was marked in his jacket from day one. I’m really sorry to hear he’s gone.”

“You said security brought him into the hospital, not the army?”

Betsy nodded. “Jack McCullough was the asylum security chief back then. His widow, sweet lady, still lives here, just up the street. It was on a Thanksgiving, I remember, because she talked about how they waited for him all day. She said he got called out early in the morning for an inmate that was supposed to have escaped. When he finally got home he had blood all over his shirt and said they found one of the army boys that jumped from the rocks on Mount Tamathy. The story sticks with everyone so well, because Jack shot himself a few weeks later. December twenty-sixth. The state police did an investigation because no one that knew him believed he could do that to himself, but in the end, he was alone in his office and the door was locked.”

“His office? You mean his office up at the asylum?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you know her well you said? The widow?”

Betsy nodded. “Her name’s Corcoran now. Carla Corcoran. Her new husband owns a golf course off the Ashokan Reservoir.”

“Do you think she’d talk with us?”

Betsy shrugged. “She talks to everyone. She’s just a nice lady, like I said.”

Betsy put her hand on Brigham’s arm. “Did you know there is a wine bar in Kingston that features port tastings?”

Brigham studied the woman carefully.

“You don’t say?” He smiled.