Projection (4 page)

*            *            *

I sped down Route 16 to the Lynnway, took a right on to Union Street and followed it through the decay of Lynn until it dead-ended into Jessup Road, almost at the Saugus line.  Halfway to the state hospital, I stopped at a roadblock of wooden horses.  A state trooper in black leather boots laced to the knee was standing in front of them.  Three TV vans and a few other cars were lined up on the side of the road.  I noticed Calvin Sanger from the
Item
talking with Josh Resnek, an investigative reporter for the
Boston Globe
.  Sanger noticed me, too, and nodded.

The trooper lumbered to my window and passed the beam of his flashlight over my face.  "Only official vehicles past this point," he said.  "Trouble at the hospital."

"I heard.  That's where I'm headed."  I pointed at my Forensic Examiner's badge on the dash.

He aimed the light at it and squinted doubtfully.  "I don't think they're looking for more local people," he said.  "We've got experts from the state up there."

I glanced at my watch.  8:50
P.M. 
"Stop busting my balls," I said.

"Huh?"  He planted his hands on his hips.

"I said, ‘Stop busting my balls.’  I've got to meet Emma Hancock, and you're wasting my fucking time."

"Get out of the car."

The thought of Lucas killing somebody at the hospital when I was the one responsible for him being locked up there overshadowed everything else.  "You want me out, drag me out.  My friends over there in the press will eat it up.  You'll be patrolling skating rinks and public bathrooms.  Tomorrow."

He didn't flinch.  His hand moved to his baton.

"Look," I said, trying another tack.  "Hancock told me to get my ass up there.  If I'm late, she'll come down on me like a ton of bricks."

"Cunt."

His venom took me by surprise.  I knew I should try to keep pace with it, but didn't have any hatred toward Hancock to draw on.  "Give a woman a little power," I managed, "and she thinks she's actually supposed to use it."

"Somebody ought to give that bitch what she really needs."  He patted the handle of his baton.

I reached back to my college football locker room days.  "The high hard one."

He slammed his fist into his palm three times.  "Right up the ass."  He walked to the horses and dragged them out of the way.  As I accelerated past him, he gave me a thumbs-up sign.

A convoy of ambulances and fire trucks lined the last fifty yards leading to the hospital.  A dozen cruisers, lights flashing, were parked haphazardly on the green out front.  Two SWAT vans were nose-to-nose in the semicircular driveway.  A huge spotlight illuminated the façade of the building, its seven stories of brick a monolith against the darkness.

I spotted Emma Hancock's red Jeep Cherokee in the center of the chaos.  She was standing beside the car, talking with a willowy man in a trench coat.  I parked and started toward them.

Hancock saw me, waved and walked to meet me on the green.

"What the hell is going on here?" I asked her.  "It's like World War—"

She held up a hand.  "I'll bring you up to speed."  She let out a long breath.  "Lucas took control of Ward Five.  We don't know how, but he got hold of a knife.  A couple of other maniacs up there have knives, too."

"Did somebody hit a panic button?  How did you find out?"

"Lucas sent one of the orderlies down to the station with an ultimatum."

"What did he say he wants?"

"Cardinal Bernard Law, for starters.  He wants a private consultation with him."

"Is Law in town?"

"Who knows?  We're certainly not getting the Boston diocese mixed up in this."

"What else does he want?"

"A helicopter."

"What did he say would happen if his demands aren't met?"

"He didn't.  We've evacuated the rest of the building, but there are three nurses, two social workers and a dietician up there on the unit."  She shook her head.  "One of the nurses is pregnant."

"Jesus."

"The orderly said there was also a visitor."

"Any idea who?"

"The description fits Elmonte, and nobody's been able to locate her.  That makes seven people at risk up there."  She paused.  "Actually, eight.  The unborn child."

"Not to mention the patients."

"Yeah, right, the ‘patients.’  Like Gray Kaminsky, the lowlife who kidnapped and raped that little girl on Elm Street, then claimed voices made him do it.  And he's not the worst of them, Frank.  Peter Zweig is up there."

Zweig was a nineteen-year-old black man who had killed his mother and father, then brought their remains to a local church to offer them as sacrifices.  "He's very sick," I said.

"My heart bleeds for him," she scoffed.  "He's as guilty of multiple homicide as Lucas."

I shuddered at that truth.  "You could be right."

"I know I'm right.  If it weren't for the staff and Elmonte, I'd seal of the building and come back next spring for proper burials."

"That's very Christian of you."

"It's a lot more Christian than letting demons walk the earth."

The man in the trench coat walked up to us.  He wore a black goatee and was carrying a bullhorn.  He looked about forty-five years old.  "Dr. Lawrence Winston," he said, staring into my eyes.

We shook hands.  "Frank Clevenger."

"Dr. Winston is a psychologist working with the State Police," Hancock said.  She glanced at me and rolled her eyes.  "We have additional resources because the hospital is a state facility."

"Glad for the help," I told him.

"The majority of my time is spent teaching at Harvard," Winston offered.  "But fieldwork is still fascinating to me.  I understand you work in the community full-time."

I glanced at his tie — shiny red silk with embroidered Harvard crests.  "That's right."  I winked.  "I'm a full-time field hand."

"I always tell my students how important it is to have the perspective of a local psychologist."

I heard
local
loud and clear.  "Psychiatrist," I countered.  "I went the medical school route."  I paused.  "Do you have an M.D. supervising you?  Maybe I know him?"

His face fell.  "You might not.  He spends most of his time at Harvard, too."

"Try me."

"Abraham Hodges."

Hodges and I had closed a few bars in Cambridge together.  He was book smart and street smart, a rare combination.  "Abe's a good man," I said.  "You're lucky.  You can learn a lot from him."

Winston cleared his throat.  "Commissioner Hancock and I were discussing Dr. Lucas’ character structure before you arrived."

"Dr. Winston feels that giving in to Lucas’ demands would be the wrong move," Hancock said.  "It plays into his narcissism."

"If we stand firm, Lucas will fold his hand," Winston smiled.  "No pun intended. 
Alien hand
, what a crock."  He turned serious again.  "The only way people are going to get hurt is if we let ourselves be manipulated."

I thought about that.  I didn't make sense.  "Your theory would be correct if we were dealing with a pure sociopath," I said, "but I'm not sure Lucas is in control of his behavior anymore.  I think he may be truly psychotic.  You can win a game of tug-of-war with somebody insane and end up with a rope around your neck."

"Are you familiar with the latest study on hostage situations in the
American Journal of Forensic Psychology
?  Grovner and Waznoff, et al.?"

"Quoting scientific literature is a warning sign of an expert with no intuition. "I don't read the journals a lot," I said.

"I won't bore you with the details.  I found the study design a bit cumbersome myself.  But the conclusion was illuminating.  In nineteen hostage crises involving barricade, eighty-four percent were resolved to the satisfaction of law enforcement authorities when a strategy of rigid noncooperation was employed."

"I think law enforcement was pretty satisfied with Waco and Ruby Ridge."

Hancock stiffened.

"The helicopter might reassure him he has a way out," I went on.

"I'd rather convince him he doesn't," Winston shot back.  "Then he'll realize from the beginning that he has nothing to gain by violence."

"He nearly tore his arm off trying to escape from the last place he was locked up.  He didn't stand to gain much from doing that."

"And he didn't accomplish anything other than hurting himself.  I suggest we be as immovable as the bars of his cell."  His eyes lit up, and his gazed flicked from me, to Hancock, then back, as if he expected congratulations for the simile.

I was about to suggest he check out his idea with Abe Hodges when shouts erupted from the front of the green.  I turned and saw two firefighters and a cop looking up at a naked, obese woman who was leaning out the fifth-floor window at the far corner of the building.  They ran toward her.

"No one say a word," Winston yelled at the men on the ground.  He took off after them.

I walked, not that it mattered what I did.  The poor woman would be spooked whether four shadowy figures raced toward her or five.  Before any of us were halfway there, she shrieked once and dove from the window.  Complete silence descended as she plunged toward the ground.  I heard her skull crack against the sidewalk.  For a few moments, everyone stood still, staring at her body on the cement.  Then we all ran the rest of the way toward her.  When we reached her, we fell silent again as we stood over her twisted body.  Her long, white hair lay in a pool of blood.  Her neck, breasts and stomach were carved up.

"Lord God," Winston whispered.

Sweat had blanketed me.  I started to shiver in the cold night air.

The firefighters knelt down beside her.  The older one listened for breathing.  "Nothing," he said.  He felt for a pulse and shook his head.  They started CPR.

Even with reflected light bathing the woman's body, it took me a minute to figure out that the bloody lines cut into her weren't haphazard.  They looked like letters, upside down.  I moved to her feet, but the two men kept leaning over her, then backing off, so I couldn't manage to get a good view.

"No go," the younger firefighter said.  "We should shock her."  He ran toward the ambulance for a defibrillator.

Hancock knelt down.  She squinted at the hospital identification bracelet around the woman's wrist.  "Grace Cummings," she said.  "Birth date, September 11, 1929.  She was sixty-eight."

"Grace Cummings.  Sounds familiar," Winston said.

"She was the one who drove her car into the group of kids waiting for a bus on Glover Street in Saugus," Hancock said.  "One of them ended up paralyzed.  It got a lot of press.  She was awaiting trial for assault with intent to murder."

Blood flowed from the letters carved into her.  I couldn't make them out.  "Why would they kill her?"

Winston shook his head.  "Nobody necessarily forced her out the window.  What's to say she didn't slash herself up and jump?"

I knelt down next to Hancock and started to blot the wounds with my sleeve.

"What are you doing?" she asked.  She tried to pull my hand away from the body, but I kept at it.  After a few seconds, she stopped tugging at me, settled back on her heels and stared at the body.

The letters were starting to ooze again, but the words were legible.

SWEET BOY

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Hancock asked.

My pulse moved to my throat.  "I don't know," I said.  "But I think Lucas will see to it we find out."

"Trevor Lucas, this is Dr. Winston," the bullhorn blared.

I turned and saw Winston walking toward the front of the green, holding the bullhorn to his lips.  "Make him stop," I told Hancock.

"I'm a psychologist with the state," Winston went on.

"I don't have clear authority here, Frank," Hancock said.  "He does."  She pointed at a black Caprice just pulling into the hospital lot.

"Who's that?"

"Jack Rice.  He's a State Police captain.  Winston reports to him."

"Come  out and meet me, one-on-one," Winston said.  "Whatever has angered you cannot be changed through violence."

"We better get to Rice."  I jogged to his car.  Hancock followed.

When Rice stepped out of the passenger side I was surprised to see that he was only five feet tall and pudgy, almost swollen-looking.  His hair was light brown and baby-fine.  He wore a tailored gray suit, blue pin-striped button-down and red paisley tie that made him look like an oversized display item from a Brooks Brothers window.  He greeted Hancock, who introduced me.

"Your man Winston is going to screw things up if you let him bully Lucas," I said immediately.

Hancock tried to be diplomatic.  "Dr. Clevenger appreciates Dr. Winston's training in these matters, but we've had experience with Lucas.  He's an extraordinary..."

Rice glanced over my shoulder at Winston.

"We just had a death," Hancock said.  "A woman jumped from the fifth floor.  She'd been cut up, badly."

"I got the report on my way over.  Who was she?"

"Grace Cummings.  Sixty-eight years old."

"A nurse?"

"No.  A prisoner."

"Thank God."

Winston's electric monotone filled the hospital grounds.  "I want you to tell me your concerns, face-to-face.  Man-to-man."

I hung my head in despair.

"What's your problem, doctor?" Rice asked me.

"The language is too threatening for someone paranoid," I said.  "To Lucas, being called out like this can seem like a test of his manhood.  We don't want that.  We want him to feel safe, at least for now.  That's why telling him we'll get him in touch with Cardinal Law, or get him that helicopter..."

Rice shook his head.  "Absolutely not.  I've already made my position on that clear to Commissioner Hancock.  We don't make deals with kidnappers."

"I'm not talking about making a deal.  I'm talking about a strategy," I said.  "Bullying Lucas isn't going to work.  He capable of anything."

"That doesn't put me in the mood to give in to him."

"Winston's approach won't work."