Mania (17 page)

At noon the next day, Nick was standing on the edge of Pioneer Square, staring across the street at the entrance to the Hudson Hotel. The sky had just burst, and all around him people were running for cover from the rain. Nick alone remained still, unfazed by the downpour. A woman wearing a translucent plastic slicker bumped into him, the spikes of her tattered black umbrella nearly skewering him in the eye as she passed, but Nick hardly noticed.

The rain soaked through his hair, and a few thick strands washed down into his eyes. At last he realized how wet his clothes were. He wasn’t wearing a parka or carrying an umbrella. His gray sweatshirt had turned black, and water was streaming down his chest and legs. Tucking his hair behind his ears, he joined a crowd of pedestrians rushing across the street, making his way toward the Seattle Emergency Shelter, where he had first stumbled upon Jackson Ferry.

As before, a throng of homeless men were huddled in the hallway leading to the dining room. Because of the rain, the line had degenerated into chaos. The doors to the dining room hadn’t opened yet, and the air in the corridor was steamy and close. The men were milling around impatiently, hungry for their meal. A short man with a red face and bloodshot eyes, dressed in an army jacket and ripped trousers, was waving his hands violently, as though he had to fend the rest of the men off him.
Get the hell back, you bastard. Touch me again. Just touch me again, and I’ll shove your fingers down your throat.
He was raging, but his eyes seemed focused on no one in particular. When Nick raised his camera to take a picture of him, one of the men hit the camera hard enough to jerk it away from Nick’s eye.
You don’t want to be doing that, buddy
, the man said to him.
It ain’t nice to take no one’s picture without permission.
Nick nodded a small apology.

Nick stepped in between a few men to reach the glass partition that separated the reception area from the public lobby. An overweight woman with thinning hair was sitting at the front desk, a carpal tunnel brace on her wrist. “I’m looking to talk to someone,” Nick said to her. “An administrator.”

“Are you a resident here?” she asked him.

“No.”

She gave him a closer look. “Are you a social worker?”

“No. I’m a journalist.” Nick glanced down at his camera. “I’d like to talk to whoever’s in charge. Your director. Whoever can tell me something about a couple of your residents.”

“Are you writing some kind of story?”

“I’m with the
Telegraph
,” Nick answered.

The woman picked up her phone and spoke a few inaudible words into the receiver, then buzzed Nick through a beaten-up door. “Take a seat,” she said, pointing toward a few vinyl chairs. “Carla Lewis—that’s our ED—she’ll see you in a few minutes when she’s got time.”

Carla Lewis was a short and squat woman with a chubby face and a shrill voice. She regarded Nick skeptically from behind her square glasses. Her office was stuffy with the smell of cigarette smoke, though she had opened a window to air it out. Rain was splattering against the windowsill, and Nick found himself shivering, his skin clammy and uncomfortable beneath his drenched clothes. “So you’re with the
Seattle Telegraph?
” she asked him.

Nick showed her his press card. “I’m wondering if you keep files on the people you serve here.”

“Is the
Telegraph
doing a piece on the shelter?”

Nick put his wallet back into his pocket. “I do work for the
Telegraph
,” he said carefully, “but I’m not here in connection with any story. My name is Nick Wilder. You can give my editor a call if you want to. Laura Daly. But she’ll just tell you the same thing. The paper’s not doing any reporting on the shelter right now—at least, not that I’m aware of.”

“So why are you here, Mr. Wilder?”

“Do you know a man named Jackson Ferry?”

The director’s eyes narrowed. “Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

Nick shrugged.

“I know who Ferry is.” She pinched a cigarette between her lips and lit it. “But I don’t know that I ever met him.” The putrid smell of her cigarette quickly permeated the room. “He’s been arrested, accused of murdering a man a couple of days ago.”

“My brother,” Nick said.

“What?”

“The man he killed was my brother. Sam Wilder.”

The director let a stream of smoke out through her nose.

“I was wondering what you can tell me about him. About Ferry.”

“Like I said, Mr. Wilder, I didn’t know Ferry myself. He had a room here for the past few months, upstairs. So I saw him coming and going a few times. I know his face. He’s a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. The last I heard, the police were moving him from the jail to Western State Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. But that’s all I know about him.”

“What does that mean—that he’s schizophrenic?”

“Literally, schizophrenia means the splitting or shattering of the mind. It can assume as many different forms as there are people. As far as I’m aware, in Ferry’s case, he experiences positive symptoms of the illness—delusions, hallucinations, but no thought disorder. I don’t have any experience with him, though. I don’t know more than that.”

“Tell me what those terms mean,” Nick said. “
Delusions, hallucinations
. He sees things?”

“Yes.” The director took a drag on her cigarette. “He sees things, hears things. In layman’s terms, he’s lost touch with reality. He isn’t able to distinguish between his own thoughts and reality.”

Nick felt himself shiver. “Was he being treated?”

Nick noticed the director’s hesitation. “I wish I could offer you more help, Mr. Wilder,” she said, “but I really don’t know. He was another one of our residents, nothing more. There are a lot of people here just like him, Mr. Wilder.”

“Capable of violence?”

“Everyone is capable of violence under the right circumstances. You know that, Mr. Wilder. In most cases, though, the person most at risk of harm is the schizophrenic himself.”

“And in Ferry’s case?”

The director examined Nick from behind her glasses. “From what I remember, he’s a pretty big man. He was loud—that was my impression. Angry. Threatening. But is he violent? I’m not a doctor, Mr. Wilder, just a social worker. And I’m only five-two, though.” She tried to smile. “So everyone’s big to me.”

“What about Henry Dean?” Nick pressed. “Does the name Henry Dean mean anything to you?”

“Should it?” The director considered the name. “No,” she said at last. “Henry Dean, no.”

“What about James Warren?”

The director pursed her lips and shook her head.

“Do you keep records of the people you serve here?” Nick asked a second time.

“That depends on what you mean by serve, I suppose. We offer a number of different services. We provide over a thousand meals a day in our dining room, and we don’t keep track of the people who eat with us. We also offer counseling services and programs like vocational training and drug-dependency clinics. It would be up to the groups and individuals running those programs whether they keep track of the individuals in attendance. The people who use our facilities are transient, and often they don’t carry government IDs or passports or Social Security cards. Usually they don’t even have birth records. Keeping accurate track of our population can be a challenge—not to say a waste of time.”

“What about the people who live here? Doesn’t the shelter keep records of the people occupying its rooms?”

“We do our best,” the director acknowledged.

“Can you access your files for me, then?”

“To what end, Mr. Wilder?”

“A few weeks ago, in New York City, an indigent man by the name of Henry Dean became psychotic, entered a boutique, and without motive murdered two people with a broken bottle.”

The director fastened Nick with a curious stare, waiting for him to continue.

“A few months ago, in Milwaukee, a homeless man, Jimmy Warren, became psychotic, broke into a private home, and without motive killed two people in their sleep.”

“You think the murders are related somehow? And related to your brother’s murder as well?”

“I don’t know.” Nick realized how tentative he sounded. “I do have reason to believe, though, that both Dean and Warren lived in Seattle. Like Ferry.”

“I see.” The director took a pen and wrote the two names down on a sheet of paper. “Why don’t you leave it with me? And give me your phone number. I’ll look into it. If I can find anything out about either man, I’ll give you a call.”

A few minutes after Nick left her office, Carla Lewis picked up her phone. Holding the receiver against her ear with her shoulder, she punched in a number and lit another cigarette at the same time. “It’s me,” she said when a man answered. “Yeah, I’m okay.” She brushed some ash from the front of her dark blue polyester shirt. “Listen, I thought I’d ask you a question. I just had an interesting visit from a man asking around about a few of our population. Hmmm?” She puckered her lips sideways and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Nick Wilder. He’s from the
Telegraph
. But that’s not what brought him here. He also happens to be the brother of the man Jackson Ferry stabbed to death last week down on the waterfront. Yeah. Nick Wilder. Sam Wilder’s brother.” She inhaled, turning a half inch of her cigarette into ash, then again breathed a billowing cloud of smoke into the stuffy room. “What’s that? Yeah.” She looked down at the sheet of paper on her desk. “Henry Dean and James Warren. I thought I’d give you a call, see if you could place them. I don’t think either one of them was a resident here, so I couldn’t be of much use. I’ll double-check, but in the meantime I thought maybe you might know them. Maybe you saw them at the clinic?” The director took another drag on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in an overflowing ashtray. “Sure,” she said. “Whenever you get the chance.” Then she hung up the phone.

On the other end of the line, a tall, athletic man replaced the phone into its cradle. He stood up from his expansive, teak desk and walked to the huge plate-glass window at the corner of his office. Lifting a sheer privacy curtain, he gazed down thirty stories beneath him at the façade of the Four Seasons Hotel. Cars took on the aspect of toys from this height, and he let his eyes follow a Tonka-sized city bus down the street. At last, straightening his elegant jacket, he returned to his desk.

“Who am I seeing next?” he asked, pressing an intercom button on the high-tech phone.

“You’re free for another half hour, Dr. Barnes,” a pleasant feminine voice replied.

“Thanks, Millicent,” he said. Then he crossed his office to a cashmere upholstered daybed beside a pair of gleaming teak bookshelves and, sitting down, rested his head pensively in his hands, his elbows on his knees.

When Nick opened his eyes, he had the feeling that he hadn’t slept. He had been dreaming, though—a dream so intense that he thought it was real. The sheets were wet with sweat, and his shoulder ached horribly. He lay still, searching the room with his eyes, then shifted onto his back. He didn’t want to wake Sara. He waited, listening to her even breathing until he was satisfied that he hadn’t disturbed her, then got out of bed.

Since the evening of the gala, Nick had been dogged with the sense that he had seen the man with whom Hamlin had been speaking somewhere before. As the official from the EPA responsible for awarding the Elliott Bay contract to Hamlin’s company, Ralph Van Gundy had been in the news. This association alone hadn’t felt right, though. Nick couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he
knew
the man.

In his dream, he had been standing in front of the massage parlor on Fourth Avenue, looking up at the red neon sign in the second-floor window. A light rain had been falling, and the sky was low and threatening. Nick was by himself on the street. The clerk inside the dingy store on the ground floor of the building had become a Doberman, and he snarled ominously at Nick from behind the plate-glass window, teeth bared. The flimsy, ragged door swung open. Yellow light spilled like water into the dark street. And then Hamlin stepped outside, dressed incongruously in the tuxedo he had worn at the gala, followed by the stout man he had led into the concert hall. The head of the Washington EPA. Ralph Van Gundy.

Nick crossed the small apartment to his desk. His laptop was buried under a pile of papers, bills he had been ignoring for the last few weeks. He pulled the computer out, then powered it up. He had long since deleted the photographs from his camera. The resolution was too high for him to store too many pictures on a single memory stick. He kept backups on his computer, though, and he opened the folder that contained the massage parlor pictures.

“What is it, darling?”

Nick hadn’t heard Sara approach, and her voice made his heart jump. She put a hand on his shoulder, then leaned down against him, snuggling him from behind.

“Is there something wrong?”

“I just can’t sleep,” Nick said. “That’s all.”

“What are you doing?” She peered at the screen of the laptop. “Who’s that?”

Nick shrugged. “No one.”

“Tell me,” she said, giving his neck a soft kiss.

“A man named Ralph Van Gundy.” Nick couldn’t think of any reason why Sara shouldn’t know. “An associate of your father’s.”

“Jason’s not my father,” she said, pulling away from him.

“I’m sorry. Your stepfather, I mean.” He glanced over his shoulder to look at her. “Hamlin was blackmailing him, I think. To win some government business.”

“What?” She sounded genuinely shocked.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“Tell me, Nick. Can you prove it?”

Nick shook his head, his mind starting to check off possibilities. “Not yet. Maybe.” He reached forward and pulled the screen down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Come back to bed, darling.”

“I can’t,” Nick said. “I’ve got to go.”

Nick parked his car outside a white shingle house set back from the street behind a lush, verdant lawn, partially hidden by a copse of giant elms. It was still dark, and from what Nick could see there was no movement inside the house yet. Nick knew that Laura Daly was an early riser. She was in the newsroom most mornings before six
A.M.
It was Sunday, though. Maybe Daly was sleeping in. Finally, at seven o’clock, Nick couldn’t wait any longer. Lifting his laptop off the passenger seat, he opened the door and braved the cold, heading up the rain-soaked concrete path to the front door. He rang the buzzer; then, when he still didn’t hear anyone moving inside, raised the knocker and gave it a few taps.

Daly looked flustered when she pulled the door open. Her hair was mussed from her pillow, her cheeks lined with a few sleep creases. She had pulled a heavy terrycloth robe over her pajamas, but she hadn’t been able to find her slippers, and her feet were bare. “Nick?” Daly squinted, trying to bring the young man into focus. “Is that you? What are you doing here? It’s barely seven o’clock.”

“I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I thought you’d be awake.”

“Normally I would be. Are you okay, son?”

The raw concern in Daly’s voice made Nick pause with regret, and he didn’t reply.

“I couldn’t find my slippers.” Daly looked down at her uncovered feet, as if to prove the point. “Just give me a moment—I feel naked without them. Come inside, why don’t you? There’s coffee on the stove from last night. Pour yourself a cup, and I’ll be right down.”

A few minutes later, they were sitting across the small kitchen table in the dim light of the early morning. The kitchen’s exterior wall was cased in glass, and even though the rain had stopped falling, drops of water cascaded from the trees, trickling in streams down the windowpanes. Nick had placed the laptop on the table between them, and Daly was staring at the screen, slowly shaking her head. “There’s no doubt about it,” she said, a hard note in her voice. Despite the situation, the editor’s posture didn’t reflect a suggestion of any hesitation. “No doubt at all. That’s him. That’s Van Gundy.”

“I took these pictures outside the massage parlor.”

“I remember.”

“We sat at your desk and discussed them when I turned them in.”

“I know, Nick. I was there. I remember.”

“You paid me for them.”

Daly looked up at Nick. Her frustration was palpable. “What are you suggesting?”

“What happened to the story, Laura?”

The editor’s eyes blazed, then dimmed.

“I’ve had so much on my mind I almost didn’t notice. You never printed these pictures. You didn’t run the story.”

Daly looked away from Nick, then, pushing her chair backward clumsily, stood up from the table, gathering her robe as if she were cold. Nick understood that his suspicions had been correct. Still, he couldn’t believe it. He followed the editor with his eyes as she walked across the kitchen to the wall of windows, waiting for her to speak the truth.

“It was Hamlin,” she said at last. Her voice was low, barely a whisper.

Nick waited for her to continue, stunned by the confession.

“This wasn’t a piece we were going to run. It was never a story at all.” The aging editor stared out into the backyard. The house was set on at least an acre, and there wasn’t another structure in sight, only a carefully tended garden. “Jason came to my office and told me about the bust. The police were going to raid the massage parlor—just like I told you, just like they did. He said he wanted pictures taken. I didn’t ask him why.”

“You didn’t want to know why Hamlin was going to all that trouble?”

The gray-haired woman shrugged her shoulders. “You took the pictures, I gave them to Jason. I didn’t want anything to do with it beyond that.”

Nick glanced back at the screen of his computer, trying to make sense of the situation. “I’ve still got the pictures,” he said at last.

“Let’s take him down, Nick.”

Nick felt suddenly cold.

“I never should have let it go this far.” The editor sounded weary. Her gaze didn’t waver. At last she turned to face Nick. “What you’ve got right there is enough.”

“You want to run these now?”

Daly shook her head. “We don’t publish them. We use them. Just like Hamlin used them to coerce Van Gundy to award him that contract. Only we use them against him this time.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Me? I’m not going to do anything. You are.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“You take these pictures to Van Gundy, Nick. Get him to flip. He won’t have a choice. You tell him we’ve got proof that Hamlin threatened to run a story in the
Telegraph
ruining him if the EPA didn’t award him the contract to clean up Elliott Bay. It’s up to him. He can be part of the story or part of the solution. Either way, the pictures are coming out, so he might as well join us.”

“If he cooperates with us,” Nick said, following the editor’s logic, “the story will be about Hamlin. If he doesn’t, it will be about him.”

“Exactly.”

Something was still bothering Nick. “What I don’t understand,” he said, thinking out loud, “is why the police let Van Gundy go that day.”

The editor’s eyes narrowed.

“They arrested the other two johns,” Nick said, finishing his thought. “Why didn’t they arrest Van Gundy?”

“Hamlin’s a very rich man. He’s got friends, Nick.” Daly smiled weakly. “Think about it. How did Jason know about the bust in the first place? And how did he know that Van Gundy would be there? He had a lot of good help setting Van Gundy up. There’s no telling where this thing will lead you once you start digging.”

“What about you, Laura?”

“Me?”

“You’re part of this, too. Aren’t you?”

The editor clenched her jaw.

“Aren’t you?”

To Nick, she looked suddenly like an old woman. “You let me worry about that. I’ve been waiting years for this. Years. It’s time to take that bastard down.”

Gathering her robe, she walked across the kitchen toward the study just opposite. “You wait here. I’ve got a few calls to make. It’s Sunday, but I’ll raise Johnnie and see if I can’t get a phone number for Van Gundy.”

“I need to talk to you, Sara.”

Nick and Sara were walking along the water in Seward Park a few hours later, hand in hand, making a circuit of the small peninsula in a light rain. It was late afternoon already. A cold, moist wind was blowing off Lake Washington, and it was so misty there was no sky. Nick tried to make sense of the large houses lining the opposite shore, hovering without perspective in the fabric of the air.

“I’m not sure how you’re going to feel about this,” he said, struggling for the right words.

“You know, you can tell me anything,” Sara reassured him.

“The man whose picture you saw on my computer this morning—Ralph Van Gundy—I told you I thought your stepfather was blackmailing him.”

“You told me you couldn’t prove it,” Sara said.

“We’re going to go after him.” Nick faced Sara, gauging her reaction. “I’m meeting Van Gundy later today. I think he’s going to testify against your stepfather, even if it means going down himself.”

Sara took the information in somberly. “I see.”

“It’s going to be bad for your stepfather.” Nick wanted to make his point clear. “Hamlin’s a wealthy man, but he’s not immune. I wanted to tell you first, because I’m not sure how you’ll feel.”

“Are you asking my permission?”

Nick thought about the question. “I don’t know. Maybe. I just don’t want anything to come between us.”

“Because if you are, you have it.”

Despite himself, Nick was surprised by Sara’s reaction. As intimidating as he was, Hamlin was Sara’s stepfather. He had adopted her legally when he married Jillian. “I’ve never really understood your relationship,” Nick said carefully. “With Hamlin, I mean.”

“Are you asking me a question?”

Nick realized that he wanted to know what Sara thought of Hamlin. “Yes,” he said. “I guess I am.”

Sara walked in silence. Nick was wondering whether he had gone too far when she spoke. “People didn’t understand why my mom got involved with Jason,” she began. “There were rumors. People said that Jason wasn’t in love with my mother. They said that he married her for another reason.”

Nick had never liked the way Sara called her stepfather
Jason
, by his first name. It sounded so intimate. “I don’t know about any of that,” he admitted. “Those types of stories wouldn’t mean anything to me, even if I had heard them.”

Waiting for Sara to continue, he listened to the nearly still water lapping the shore, barely visible beneath the fog shrouding them. The branches of a few large trees reached toward them, suspended eerily in the swirling mist. He had the momentary sensation that he was walking through the scenery of a dream. A gigantic whirl of steam rolled past them overhead, tendrils breaking off and reaching down to caress their faces. Nick resisted the urge to duck out of the way. “If he wasn’t in love with your mother,” he prompted when Sara remained silent, “what other reason could he have to marry her?”

He felt Sara’s fingers wrap more tightly around his bicep. A sailboat emerged from the mist, gliding soundlessly across water, its tall sails billowing out above its polished teak deck. Nick became aware of the splash of its hull slicing the bay only after it disappeared once again into another bank of fog.

“When Mother met Jason,” Sara said at last with a slight tremor, “he was already engaged to someone else.” She bristled at the memory. “He broke off the engagement to marry my mother.”

Nick tried to piece together what she was telling him.

“He’s sixty. Jillian’s only forty-six. And he’s a powerful man. Physically, I mean. He’s very, very strong.” Sara’s fingers dug into Nick’s muscles, constricting the flow of his blood through his arm. “A man like Jason’s used to getting his way—everything he wants.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.” Nick’s confusion was melting into an apprehension he couldn’t yet define.

“A man like Jason doesn’t act impulsively. He’s always in control. He dominates.”

Nick knew firsthand how threatening the silver-haired man could be.

“A man like Jason doesn’t break off an engagement lightly.”

“So he must have loved Jillian very much, then.”

“People blamed
me
,” Sara continued, ignoring him. “They said terrible things. They said I tricked Jason into marrying Mother. They said I seduced him.”

Nick’s blood turned cold all at once. The back of his neck felt strange, as if someone were tickling his skin. Each of Sara’s fingers now was cutting into his arm.

“I didn’t seduce him, though. He raped me.”

Nick stopped walking. When he turned to face her, the thin silver chain that he had given to her glinted in the weak light, drawing his eye to Sara’s neck.

“Jason raped me, Nick. Then he married Mother.”

Nick took Sara in his arms. The white mist surrounding them had turned gray, and Nick held on tight. Her cheek was cold against his skin, then warm with tears. For the first time since he had met her, Sara was crying.