33
Central State Hospital Campus
Noon
Jo stared up at the Jones Building. Vines had crept over the brick, like evil arms stretching up to draw this place into the ground, into the depths of hell where it belonged. On the dome two black crows sat staring at those who dared to pass.
Just like eighteen years ago. She remembered thinking that those black crows were surely signs that evil lurked here. Griffin’s stories had reminded her of her early days as a freshman at Georgia College. On several occasions she had tagged along with a group of other freshmen who’d heard about the old asylum and wanted to poke around. Parts of the asylum had still been in operation at the time so they’d had to be on their best behavior—or at least pretend to be until no one was watching.
Voices whispered through her. Giggles and whispers. Young girls with nothing better to do on a Saturday morning than explore the local ghost stories. They had found a room filled with old patient files in one of the buildings. The others had laughed as they read the notes but Jo hadn’t laughed. She’d read, absorbing the horrific details, the anguish generated by the words creating a sort of movie in her brain. The words, some written by doctors and others posted by nurses, spoke of fear and desperation, hopelessness and coldheartedness.
Without enough staff for a pediatric ward, the children were often placed in cages to protect them from the older patients. Their fear is palpable, but so is that of the few remaining nurses. The children are small but they are violent and cannot be trusted.
How had anyone left a child in this place? She closed her eyes and tried to block the images, like scenes from a horror movie, her mind automatically created.
“I’ll keep driving,” Tony said, his voice startling her. “You tell me when something looks familiar.”
“I came here a few times that first semester,” she said. “Exploring with some other students, but I know what you mean.” He wanted her to look for anything that looked familiar during or after the abduction.
She focused on the buildings and the landscape as he drove. He moved so slowly she wanted to jump out of the car and push to make it go faster. It all looked vaguely familiar. Something dark and foreboding pulsed in her blood, made her heart beat too fast. She had come with those girls and a couple of guys from her orientation class several times. It was part of the freshman ritual. You explored all the spooky old shit. How was she supposed to remember if any aspect of this shithole felt familiar in any way that related to the fourteen days she had spent in the pits of hell? For the past eighteen years she had worked diligently to block those memories from her brain.
Stop, Jo. Just stop. He was desperate to find his niece. She wanted to finish this as much as he did. She wanted it to end and she wanted the people involved to pay.
She also recognized the other aspect of what drove him, perhaps better than he did. He wanted to find his niece alive before she was turned into what Jo and Ellen had become. She could understand wanting to save someone he loved. He needed her help to do that and she wanted to help. The problem was she didn’t know how to help! She had told him all she could that might somehow make a difference. So many of the events that led up to what happened eighteen years ago were hardly more than theories. She was positive that Conway and Martin or whatever her name was were involved, but she couldn’t actually prove it. She couldn’t point to a place here or near the highway and say this is it—which was what he wanted. She had no idea how she and Ellen ended up where they did. They had awakened in those woods with no one and nothing around them but trees.
The car in the side mirror caught her attention. Security.
She dropped her head back against the headrest. “And it begins.”
Tony had spotted them, as well. He probably noticed them before she did. She stared at his profile and wondered how much longer he would permit her evasion and lies on the parts she didn’t want to share. Lying wasn’t right, not really. She’d told him the truth—at least everything she’d told him had been the truth. But he knew she was holding back. He’d been some big-deal profiler with the FBI. He probably knew her better just by watching her than she knew herself. She could say the same about him. Maybe she should have been a profiler.
Like her, he was desperate on a number of levels. His life had hit a place almost as low as her long-term situation. His career was in the toilet and, from what she’d seen so far, so was his personal life. The two of them were a pair for sure. How the hell were they supposed to figure this out when they couldn’t even figure out their own lives? Maybe he just didn’t want to do this alone. Maybe he needed a friend.
Was that what they were? Friends?
Her boss was a friend, sort of, maybe.
He liked her. She liked him. To some degree they counted on each other. What was the definition of a friend anyway? She’d considered the same about Ellen and decided they weren’t really friends, but maybe she was wrong.
But LeDoux? The two of them were acquaintances, she decided. She had a number of those, though she rarely exchanged body fluids with an acquaintance. Getting close to LeDoux had required the extra effort. Her occasional sexual encounter was never with anyone she’d met before and the chosen partner never knew her real name. Telling LeDoux was necessary, wasn’t it?
Did he see the real Joanna Guthrie? The empty shell?
Maybe she was borrowing trouble. She almost smiled at the phrase. Her mother had used that phrase all the time. Yes, Jo was borrowing trouble. Easy to do, spending so much time with a man like LeDoux. Not true, Jo. He wasn’t the problem. She was the problem. This part she knew with complete certainty. She spent 99 percent of her time completely alone and had since she was eighteen years old. How was she supposed to know the intricacies of carrying on a normal conversation much less being a friend? Concern for his niece likely had him off his game or he would have seen through her completely already.
She had a niece and a nephew. She’d never met either one. The boy was twelve, his sister ten. Without question, Ray was a good father. He’d always taken really good care of Jo—until she moved away to college. He’d tried then. He would show up on weekends. Her roommates would get all giddy because a cute older guy smiled at them. Jo had teased her brother relentlessly about it. Eventually, he stopped coming so often. Their mom had told him to let Jo be. She could just hear her. She needs to be making friends, not hanging out with her brother.
Jo had a family. Once. A good one. But then she’d tossed away the life she had known. Why had she thrown them away, too?
She pushed the painful thoughts away and stared out the window at one of the ugliest parts of humanity’s past. The screams and wails of patients echoed through her soul. One of the freshmen had read aloud newspaper articles about the old asylum when they toured the place the second time. The notes from the patient files they had found were right. Children were often kept in cages among the adults. Experimental treatments were the norm.
What sort of desperation did it take to prompt a person to bring a loved one to a place like this and leave him or her? As if you have the right to judge. Hell, she didn’t even trust herself to take care of a cat much less another human. The neighbor at the last place where she lived had offered her a kitten from the unexpected litter her cat had dropped on her. Jo had insisted she traveled too much for a pet. Funny how the lies came so easy after so many years.
She ordered her brain to stay on track. Focus on those fourteen days. If she was held here surely something would feel more deeply familiar. She powered the window down and inhaled the scents of the place. Listened to the sounds.
She remembered the crunch of leaves under their feet as they ran through the woods after they escaped. They’d done what they had to do; the other girl hadn’t made it. It was just the two of them.
They’d done what they had to do.
Jo closed her eyes and silently repeated the words, then she opened them again and stared forward. Bile churned in her stomach. She tried to swallow, to keep the bitterness at bay.
She cleared her throat. “Tell me, Agent LeDoux, is a victim still a victim even when she does whatever it takes to survive?”
He slowed for an intersection at a maze of buildings. Thankfully the security vehicle had turned onto another street. Tony scrutinized her for a moment. “Did you do what you had to do, Joanna?”
“It’s a hypothetical question.” She looked away from him, stared forward. “I think a friend of mine did.”
“Victims do what they have to do to survive,” he agreed. “The survival instinct is strong in most people, unless it has been drummed out by previous bumps in the road.”
“Like drugs or hard luck?”
“That can do it, yes. Abusive parents or spouses can do it, too.”
They rode in silence for half a minute before he said more. Maybe he was considering whether or not he was driving around with a person who’d done something really bad.
“With some people, their will to survive isn’t as strong because they have much less to live for. Maybe they’ve suffered tragic loss. I have a friend, a homicide detective. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama. A serial killer murdered her husband and was responsible for the deaths of her little boy, her partner and a dear friend. She was one of those people who decided she didn’t have anything worth surviving for.”
Jo understood that feeling so damned well. “Did she die?”
He shook his head. “No. She survived so she could find the killer and make sure he paid for what he’d done.”
“Did she?”
Tony braked for another stop. He nodded. “She did. She picked up the pieces and now she’s married again.”
“She’s happy?”
“She is.”
Jo didn’t see how that was possible. “With those kinds of scars to her psyche I don’t see how she could put it behind her and ever be normal.”
“What’s normal?”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. Go on living life as if nothing happened.”
“You’d have to ask her about that.” He focused on driving.
Jo studied his profile again. “You have a few scars of your own.”
“I spent a lot of years profiling killers. Yeah. I have a few.”
Maybe more than a few. “You tell me your secrets. I’ve told you mine.”
His jaw tightened. Ah, so he was good at telling others how to do it but he couldn’t do it himself.
“What a hypocrite.” She stared out the window once more.
The high fences with their concertina wire tops made her insides tighten. She remembered the buildings that later had been turned to small prisons. At some point in the past half century or so treatment for the mentally ill had changed and so the need for places like this one had waned. Some parts of the property had been repurposed, so to speak. Eventually, even those new purposes became obsolete and were abandoned. The side roads that went off into the woods made her shudder. She hated this place.
“I was very good at my job.”
His voice startled her. She’d thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“So good that the idea of defeat was unthinkable. I made a decision to do whatever necessary to make sure I never failed. There was this one serial killer who remained elusive after years of tracking him. I wanted him so badly I could taste it.”
She waited for him to go on, the sound of his voice making her relax. Or maybe it was the idea that he was admitting his flaws that made her feel more at ease.
“He dropped a body in Montgomery so I rushed there and I met Detective Bobbie Gentry. When I looked at her I was stunned. She was the perfect example of all that this killer craved in a victim.”
Jo watched his throat work in an effort to swallow. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
“I used her to bait him. And he came back. He murdered her husband, took her...the things he did to her...”
He drew in a deep breath. “Unimaginable torture. He raped her over and over for weeks. Beat her so badly. Broke her leg and carved up her body. Starved her to the point that she was so weak she could hardly walk. But somehow she got away. Despite the broken bones she walked for miles through the freezing cold.”
Another of those long lapses of silence.
“But she made it,” Jo offered, foolishly needing to hear a happy ending.
“She did, but I did that to her. All I cared about was my career. I lost my marriage and eventually my career because I lost sight of what really mattered. When I realized what I had done, I made it my life’s goal to do whatever necessary to make it right.”
He was preaching to the choir and the sermon was one she knew all too well.
Jo shook her head. “I can’t be like you.”
He stopped the car and turned to her. “You are like me. You’re like Bobbie. You’re a survivor. That’s why you came back to this place. To stop the persons who did this to you and to all the others.”
“Yeah well, that’s not really working out so far. Your niece is still missing. By now she believes no one is coming, including her super cool uncle the FBI profiler.”
“Does it make you feel better to throw that at me?”
She refused to look at him.
He rolled back onto the road. “Maybe you don’t care how this turns out. You survived. You can just walk away like you did before. You don’t need anyone or anything. Is that how you feel?”
“You don’t know me.”
Her cell vibrated. The text was from her boss.
You still alive?
She almost laughed out loud. She hadn’t been alive in nearly two decades. To avoid more of her boss’s questions, she sent him a yes in response along with a happy face. That should really freak him out.
“Tell me the part you haven’t told anyone else, Joanna. I don’t care if it was right or wrong. I only care that it might help me find my niece alive.”
“That building.” She pointed to the upcoming one on the right. “It looks more familiar than all the others.”
It didn’t but she was tired of his questions. He’d hit too close to home. The only reason she pointed the building out was because the gate was open. The twelve-foot fence would have kept them out otherwise. Beyond the open gate, one of the entry doors stood open, too. Seemed like a good place to change the subject.
He pulled over and turned off the car.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m not sure of anything.” She opened the car door and got out.
He rounded the hood and followed her through the gate.
The whirr of something moving jerked her attention upward. A camera was focused on them as they approached the entry door. Old man Griffin had said there were cameras everywhere.
Why was that?
If there was nothing here, why all the cameras? Maybe the old man was right about the pockets of activities.
Tony came up beside her. “Let me go in first.”
She should be ashamed of herself for sending him on a wild-goose chase like this. He really was trying to help her. Had she grown so coldhearted that she didn’t care about him or his niece? Was Ellen’s death for nothing? “Wait.”
He turned back to her.
“I—”
He held up a hand for her to give him a minute, and then he reached for his cell. “LeDoux.”
He listened for a few seconds, glanced at her, and then listened some more.
“I’ll be right there.”
He shoved his phone into his pocket and she asked, “What’s going on?”
“That was Phelps. Hailey Martin—Madelyn Houser—is dead.”
It’s coming down to you, Jo.
Everyone else who knew what really happened was dying.
What’re you going to do now?