Wicked Lies (2 page)

One of the residents sucked in a breath. “Jesus, it’s Conrad!”

“Conrad?” Laura repeated in shock, gazing down at one of Ocean Park’s security guards: Conrad Weiser.

“What happened?” one of the trauma surgeons demanded.

“Attacked at Halo Valley,” the EMT responded. “He was on the way there to pick up a patient, and one of the crazies beat the hell out of him and escaped.”

“Halo Valley?” Laura repeated through lips that barely moved.

“Yeah, the mental hospital,” Dylan, the EMT, clarified soberly.

“Let’s get him in here,” the trauma surgeon ordered as a second victim on a gurney was off-loaded from the ambulance.

“You okay?” Dylan asked, frowning at Laura.

“Fine.”

Bringing herself back to the present, Laura helped guide the second wounded man’s gurney into the ER. He was awake but his throat was wrapped and he clearly couldn’t speak. His dark eyes glared at her, and Dylan said, almost in an aside, giving her a second shock, “This is Dr. Maurice Zellman from Halo Valley. He was stabbed in the throat.”

“Also by the escapee?” she asked.

“Looks like it.”

She watched as Zellman was hurriedly wheeled through the double doors to the ER as well, and was unable to control a full-body shivering that emanated from her very soul.

Halo Valley. The mental hospital for the criminally insane.

He
was there.

Wasn’t he?

Or, was that why he’d just tried to breach the wall in her mind? He’d escaped!

And he was coming after her.

Oh, God, no! Not now!
She thought of the baby and her heart nearly stopped. Fear crawled up her spine and nestled in her brain.
No, no, no!

Blindly, pushing back that horrid snaking fear, she turned to one of the other nurses. “Who did this?” she asked.

“Don’t you wish we could ask Zellman and find out?” Nurse Carlita Solano answered flatly. “Some nut job, for sure.”

Please, God, don’t let it be him.

But she knew it was. Justice Turnbull had escaped the walls of Halo Valley Security Hospital, and he was free to take up his murdering ways.

Laura watched the doors behind the injured doctor slowly close with a soft hiss and wondered how this had happened.

The day had started out like many others.

Dr. Maurice Zellman, one of Halo Valley Security Hospital’s premier psychiatrists . . . maybe the premier psychiatrist, if you’d asked him . . . had begun his morning with a piece of dry wheat toast, a soft-boiled egg, and a slice of cantaloupe before driving to the hospital and arriving punctually at 7:15 a.m. He had several consults before lunch, called his wife, Patricia, at noon and learned that their sixteen-year-old son, Brandt, had gotten in some kind of trouble at school and was facing detention for the rest of the week. With a snort of disgust, Zellman told Patricia that Brandt would be facing some serious punishment from his father as well, and then, ruffled, he visited a number of his patients in their rooms—cells, really, though no one referred to them as such—throughout the rest of the afternoon, his mind on other things.

By six o’clock he was finished with work, except that he hadn’t yet visited with his most notorious patient: Justice Turnbull, a psychotic killer who had tried to kill his own mother and had proven to be obsessed with murdering the group of women who lived together in a lodge called Siren Song along the Oregon coast. These women were whispered about by the locals as members of a cult dubbed the Colony and were reclusive, brooding, and odd. What Justice’s personal beef was with them remained a mystery, one Zellman had sought to crack in the over two years of Justice’s incarceration but hadn’t quite managed yet. Justice was also responsible for several other murders and was an odd bird by anyone’s definition.

No one at Halo Valley knew what to make of him, and they certainly didn’t know how to treat him. The other doctors just didn’t have it, as far as Zellman was concerned. They were adequate, in their way, whereas he, Maurice Zellman, was extraordinary. He actually
cured
patients instead of resorting to mere behavioral modifications.

And Justice . . . well . . . Maurice had made significant progress with him. Significant. Yes, the man was still obsessed with the Siren Song women, but that was because Justice was apparently related to them in some way. At least he thought he was, though that had yet to be proven. Maybe the women were a cult; maybe they weren’t. They were certainly paranoically reclusive and, in appearance, looked as if they came from another century. Zellman was inclined to think they should be left alone to their own devices. Everyone found a way to live in this world and there was no right way or wrong way, although getting Justice to see that point was a work in progress. For reasons of his own, Justice Turnbull seemed determined to snuff them all out.

But . . . there had been progress, Zellman reminded himself with a mental pat on the back. Initially, when Justice had first been incarcerated at Halo Valley, he’d bellowed long and loud that he would kill them all and their devil’s issue! The staff hadn’t known whom he meant, at first, but he made it clear that he wanted to wipe out all the
ssissterrss
at Siren Song. With the help of time and antipsychotics, he’d all but recanted this mission. He still was agitated about them; he couldn’t completely disguise it when Zellman would mention the women of the lodge, just to see. But Justice wasn’t nearly as single-minded as he had been at first. Was he cured? No. Would he ever be? In Justice Turnbull’s case, unlikely, though Dr. Maurice Zellman was definitely the man for the job if there was a chance.

And Maurice understood Justice was tortured by demons of his own making, which didn’t matter to his colleagues one whit. They had locked the man away for the next few decades with no chance of getting released. Paranoid schizophrenic. Sociopath. Psychopath. Homicidal maniac . . . Justice Turnbull might be a little of all, but he was still a patient in need of care.

With a glance at his watch, Zellman noted the time: 6:45 p.m. He had a surprise for Justice, one Justice had been asking for and Zellman had finally been able to put together, though not without much resistance. With a satisfied smile on his face, he headed for Justice’s room. It was at the end of the hall by design as no one wanted to visit him. In fact, no one ever did, outside of hospital personnel. He was considered weird by the other inmates, which was saying a lot, as they were criminally insane themselves, every last one. But every group had a pecking order, and Halo Valley Security Hospital was no exception. As one of the hospital’s leading physicians treating some of the most notorious patients—killers, sadists, rapists, to name a few—Maurice Zellman was intimately aware of how mentally unstable and deranged the men and women were on this side of the hospital, the side that housed those convicted of serious crimes. They might be excused from regular prison by reason of insanity, but it didn’t mean they weren’t the worst kind of criminals. That was why they were housed on Side B, as this sterile section of the hospital was euphemistically called. Side B. The side for the irredeemable. Connected to Side A, where the mentally ill without criminal tendencies were lodged, by a skyway, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and razor wire, which were partially hidden by a laurel hedge, all the better to make everyone think the hospital was a warm and cozy place. In truth, Side B was little more than a prison for the criminally insane.

Dr. Zellman was high in the pecking order of the specialists on Side B. He understood the criminal mind in a way that both fascinated and horrified the less imaginative doctors. Well, that was their problem, wasn’t it? he thought with a sniff. Dr. Maurice Zellman did his job. And he did it very, very well.

With a tightening of his lips, he picked up his pace. He was running late, and checking on Turnbull was going to make him later still, but he really had no choice as Justice was his patient and was patently feared by the rest of the staff. This fact half amused Zellman, who’d worked with the strange man ever since he’d been brought to Side B, because Justice was really no more frightening than any other psychotic. He was just a little more directionally motivated, focused on women, specifically these Colony women.

Just as Zellman reached Justice’s room, the door flew open and Bill Merkely, one of the guards, practically leapt into the hall. Merkely didn’t immediately see Zellman, as he was looking back into Justice’s room. “So, long, schizo!” he yelled harshly, his beefy face red. He yanked the door shut and checked the automatic lock as Zellman cleared his throat behind him. Merkely jumped as if prodded with a hot poker, his already red face turning magenta. “Fucker told me I was going to die!” he cried as an excuse.

“You can’t listen to him.”

“I don’t. But he sure as hell predicts a whole lot of shit!”

“What were you doing in his room?”

“Picking up his tray. But I had to leave it in there. Hope the food rots!”

He stomped off toward the guards’ station, which divided Halo Valley Security Hospital’s Side B from Side A, the gentler section, which housed patients who weren’t considered a serious threat to society. Zellman thought of Side A as an Alzheimer’s wing, though he would never say so aloud as they considered themselves to be a helluva lot more than institutional caretakers. He shook his head at the lot of them. Perception. So many people just didn’t get it.

He had a key to Justice’s room himself, and he cautiously unlocked the door. Justice had never attacked him; he’d never attacked anyone since he’d been brought to the hospital, but the man had a history, oh, yes, indeedy he did.

Now the patient stood on the far side of the room, disengaged from whatever little drama had occurred between him and Merkely. Justice was tall, dusty blond, and slim, almost skinny, but hard and tough as rawhide. He didn’t make eye contact as Zellman entered, but he flicked a look toward the meal tray, which had been untouched except for the apple.

“That man is afraid of me,” Justice said, now in his sibilant voice. Always a faint hiss to his words.
An affectation,
Zellman thought.

“Yes, he is.”

“He always leaves the tray.”

Zellman had a clipboard with a pen attached shoved under one arm. There were cameras in Justice’s one-room cell, tracking his every move. Zellman didn’t need to watch reams of film to remind himself of the content of each of their meetings. He wrote himself copious notes and typed up reports, which he suspected no one ever read. They all wanted to forget Justice Turnbull and his strangeness. When first brought to Halo Valley, he’d referred to the women he sought to harm as “Sister,” in his hissing way. “
Sssiissterrrs . . . ,
” he would rasp. “
Have to kill them all!
” he’d warned. But a lot of that dramatic act had disappeared over time.

Not that he wasn’t dangerous. Before his incarceration he’d killed and terrorized a number of women. He had also cut a swath through some peripheral people and had nearly slain his own mentally ill mother. She now lay in a twilight state in a care facility with no memory of the attack and not a lot of connection with the real world.

“Justice,” Maurice Zellman said now in a stern, yet friendly, voice, one he’d cultivated over the years. “You’ve finally got clearance to have those medical tests run at Ocean Park Hospital. The van’s on its way here now. I’m warning you, though. If this stomach problem proves to be just a means to get out of Halo Valley, you’ll be further restricted. No more walks in the yard. No being outside and staring toward the sea.” Zellman heard his faintly mocking voice and clamped down on that. “No privileges.”

Justice turned to look at him through clear blue eyes that were almost translucent. He was extraordinarily good-looking except . . . there was just something unnatural about him that made one hesitate upon meeting him. A reaction to something he emanated that Zellman had never quite put his finger on. Now his mouth was turned down at the corners and he winced slightly, as if he were in pain.

Over time and in-depth sessions with him, Zellman had come to realize that some of Justice’s deeply rooted problems were because he’d been rejected and scorned. Rejected and scorned by women. Maybe even his own mother. The women of the Colony particularly bothered him. They might not be his sisters, per se, but he seemed to think they were. Was there any shared genetic makeup between them? Zellman thought it unlikely. Justice’s world was all of his own making.

Still, Justice definitely believed the Siren Song occupants were the Chosen Ones, while he was kept outside the gates. Locked out. Barred. Left with a mother who had been spiraling into mental illness most of her adult life, Zellman guessed. Who knew about his father? Certainly not Justice or anyone Zellman had ever talked to.

Not a great childhood by any stretch of the imagination.

“Can we go now?” Justice stared at him hard.

Zellman nodded. Justice wore loose gray pants and a white shirt, the regulated outfit for the patients on Side B. “I need to get the handcuffs, first. Sorry.”

Justice asked softly, “From the guard?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t try to escape.”

“It’s hospital policy.”

A spasm crossed his face, and he clutched a palm to his stomach. “This pain is killing me.”

Zellman considered the man. Inside the van Justice would be chained around the waist and locked to the side of the vehicle for the ride to Ocean Park. The handcuffs were merely an extra precaution. Sure, it would be against protocol to give him this small freedom as they made their way to the van—against the most basic rule of the hospital. But the stomach pain Justice had been complaining of was definitely worsening, and anyway, Zellman knew when someone was telling the truth and when they were lying. It was just . . . his gift. Justice was telling the truth.

It would take time to get the damned handcuffs, time and effort. And Maurice disliked Bill Merkely almost as much as Justice did. “Come on, then,” he said. “Hurry up.”