Rose rode with Fred to the hospital, but since he was on police business, she didn't go in at first. He called for backup and was met by uniformed officers. He was back sooner than she expected, shaking his head as he climbed in the car and slammed the door shut behind him. "Damn. I was afraid of that. The nurse doesn't want her patients disturbed by police and insists on a court order."
"No, that's not right," Rose said, opening her door. What she had told Paula was correct. The hospital had an obligation to cooperate if the patient was dangerous. She ought to know. She had worked at Harborview as the in-house social worker before going to work for the state. At the time, the state job was better. If the nurse was being difficult and making the police go through all the formalities before they could talk to the patient, then not only was Sno being put at risk, but more than likely Paula would be called on the carpet later.
"Where are you going?" Fred asked."If you don't mind, I'd like to talk to the nurse on duty."
"Well, be my guest if you think it'd do any good. I'll tag along and note your technique," he added, the tension in his voice giving way to a more lighthearted tone.
He allowed her to lead the way back up to the psych unit. She recognized the nurse from her days at Harborview and had had dealings with her a couple of times since, when she'd admitted clients and visited them later. Nadia Briggs was a fortyish, post-hippie veteran of the sixties peace and civil rights movements and was currently an activist for most other liberal causes including everything from environmental consciousness to women's rights, gay rights, animal rights and the right to die. Only her very determined jawline hinted at the steel that underlay the deceptively gentle flower-child manner. An air of professional competence was the only badge of office she wore besides a name tag. Her long light brown hair was loosely gathered at the nape of her neck and, like all of the psych staff, she wore plain clothes. Tonight it was jeans and a well-used sweater overlaid with a tapestry vest.
"Rose?" she asked, with a suspicious look at Fred and the uniformed cops standing behind her.
"Hi, Nadia," Rose said.
"Rose, I already told these officers that they'll need a court order to interrogate my John Doe. They can come back in the morning to talk to him. He's extremely disturbed and we've just got him quieted down."
"I appreciate that, Nadia, but I just thought you ought to know—well, did you watch the news this evening?"
"I caught part of it while I was getting meds out."
"There's a young girl missing—she was taken from her school on Friday afternoon after the kidnapper presented a letter from her father to the school. She was wearing a school uniform, including a red-and-black-checked scarf. One of the psych staff, another friend of mine, remembers seeing the letter and the scarf on your patient."
"That's breach of confidentiality!" Nadia said.
"The staff member was very concerned about that, which is why she asked me what she ought to do. I reminded her about what the code says about exceptions being made if the patient is a danger to others, and urged her to let me call Officer Moran, who's handled other clients of mine in a very sensitive and caring manner. It's winter out there, Nadia. My friend said the scarf the man had, the red-and-black one, was caked with blood. The girl may be badly hurt, alone, freezing. Your patient may have had nothing to do with it, but it sounds like he's at least met the guy who did. Please, the time it takes to get a court order may cost Sno her life."
Nadia cast a look of dislike back at Fred and the other policemen but led Rose and the others back into the ward. Fred shot Rose a surreptitious thumbs-up sign while Nadia strode ahead. "Not that you're going to get anything out of him by talking to him," she said. "He's very disturbed."
"I'd like to have a look at his effects first," Fred told her. "The scarf and the letter particularly, but also anything that might identify him."
Nadia shook her head. "It was kind of strange, really. He was apparently pretty well dressed and well groomed when he first came in, except for a recent flesh wound. But there was no identification on him, and God only knows how he came to be so well cared for. His psychotic break must have been extremely sudden, and that's a little unusual."
She unlocked a bin outside the room and extracted a plastic bag containing folded clothing and a wrinkled paper sack. Fred pulled on a plastic glove and shook out the paper sack, drawing forth a scarf crusted with blood and stinking.
"Great. It hasn't been washed," Fred said, though Nadia looked a little disapproving. He next extracted a folded and crinkled piece of paper, handling it with gloves, as if it were a priceless antique scroll. "This is it, okay," he said, grim satisfaction in his tone. He replaced the letter in the bag and handed everything to one of the uniformed officers. "I'll give you a receipt for those things," he told Nadia, which seemed to surprise her. "And I do need to talk to your patient, urgently, please. Now."
The patient was in a locked isolation room and as Nadia unlocked the door, Rose could see a form inside the room, squatting against one of the walls.
Before Fred was quite in the room or Nadia had closed the door behind her, the patient emitted a noise that sounded like a monstrous belch and leaped up and halfway across the room. The uniformed officers grabbed for their guns but Rose blocked their way to the door and meanwhile the patient leaped back, just as far, just as fast. The police kept their hands near their weapons but relaxed a little, and pushed their way past Rose. Fred waved them back again.
"It's okay," Nadia told the patient in a calm, everyday voice. "We're just here to see if you're okay. This man wants to talk to you. I'm sorry if we startled you."
"Reedeep?" the patient asked in a puzzled, slightly querulous tone, and began randomly hopping around the room, croaking.
Nadia had been correct about one thing. Questioning the patient was useless. But Fred didn't seem too disappointed as, a short time later, they left the hospital, the bag of clothing carried by one of the uniformed officers, while Fred tenderly carried the brown paper sack in his gloved hand.
"Thanks for the assist, Rosie. You were great," he said, sounding as happy as if he had a new toy.
"What did you think about the patient?" she asked, her question concealing the pleasurable glow his praise gave her. She had been pretty great, hadn't she? Of course, it was really just that she knew Nadia, who didn't much like cops anyway, but was not a fool or deliberately obstructive, merely conscientious. Her relationship with the nurse and the unit had always been collaborative, whereas Nadia still saw the cops as adversaries."It'll take some checking, but he's our boy," Fred said.
"You're sure?"
"The letter cinches it. Unless, by some weird chance, he just happened on it, he's the perp."
"But he seems too crazy to have planned something like that," Rose said. "Unless he's pretending and somehow, I don't think so."
"I hate to say it, but neither do I. But the only other alternative is that somehow or other he met the guy who did do it, who planted the stuff on him. That seems about as unlikely. Why not just get rid of it? No, I think he's our guy, he did the deed and then went gaga. There's the knife wound, for one thing. According to your girlfriend, it was already treated before he was admitted. Too bad the knife wasn't still on him. But if the wound had already been treated, maybe he got cut when he snatched the girl, which means he might have had himself treated closer to where he left her, so we can check that with area hospitals. That's about as close as we're gonna get to learning useful information from him for now."
"He didn't seem to respond well to your third-degree back there," Rose admitted.
Fred shook his head, wonderingly. "I don't know how anybody that nuts convinced the school to let him take the girl or the girl to go with him or how he even got himself checked into the hospital. Unless he's giving an Oscar-caliber performance, the guy's as seriously psycho as anybody I've ever seen. Is there some kind of technical name for it?"
"What?"
"You know, a guy thinking he's a toad?"
"A—You didn't happen to notice if there were any skin changes or anything, did you?"
"You kidding? That sucker could give you mega-warts if you got too close."
She smacked at him playfully. "You'd better can that kind of unprofessional stuff, officer, or I'll sic Nadia on you."
"Well, he was one froggy dude, you've got to admit."
"Yeah," she said. "Hmm," she added, a nasty suspicion rising in her mind when she remembered certain frogs from the fairy tales. Banishing the unwelcome thought that made her wonder if she was as crazy as Nadia's patient, she returned her focus to her most immediate interest in the case and said, "Well, at least since it is evidence, Paula won't get in trouble for breaking confidentiality, and finding the letter will certainly contribute information to finding Sno, won't it? And there's a reward."
"What? You get a kickback?"
"Of course not. But Paula really needs it."
"Yeah," he said. "She looked like she could use a break."
"Seriously, Fred, could you let me know what you find out? Because of Sno and Paula."
"I'll let you know what I can," he said. "Listen, do you have to go right back home?"
She checked her watch. "The last ferry's history by now. I'll call Patrick and Gail and see if I can stay with them tonight. That's what I usually do if I need to stay over when I'm not on call."
"Well, look, as soon as I turn in this report, I'll be off too. How about a cup of coffee—I mean, in addition to all the other cups of coffee I will of course offer you at the office if you'll hang on while I finish up."
"Okay, as long as I can hold the bear."
"You got a deal."
They passed by the desk right inside the courthouse door into a long corridor. Rose had been here a time or two before, once on a tour given to DFS employees. It was a large office complex composed of three big partitioned rooms, one devoted to crimes specifically relating to child molestation and abuse and rape cases. Adjoining that room on the left was another of the "detective's bullpens" containing perhaps fifty stations, this room devoted to other kinds of crime. In addition, on the far side of the first room there was a softly lit, hushed area that resembled the bridge of the starship Enterprise with blinking computer screens set in a circle around a room padded with carpet on the desks and the backstops. This was the communications center. Across the hall from these areas were the fingerprint labs and other evidence-processing facilities, including an awesome file room with six entire walls of black-bound, two-inch-thick folders full of evidence pertaining to the Green River killer, a case continuing to baffle all of the area's law enforcement agencies.
She drank her first promised cup of coffee in the break room while Fred filled out paperwork and sent the bag to the lab, and began scanning mug shots in the computer.
While he was doing that, she called Patrick's house to beg the guest room but no one answered.
Although the child protection and rape area was no doubt often very busy late at night, tonight there were only a few diehard detectives at their desks and no one waiting to be interviewed in the outer room. The fluorescents looked more garish than fluorescents usually looked, and their buzz was louder and more annoying. The loudest sound in the room, however, was the clicking of computer keys and the low murmur of voices on the telephones.
After a while, Rose wandered back to Fred's desk. He stared intently at the screen as it showed him first one face, then another. There was the click of his fingers on the key, then a pause. Click. Pause. Click. Pause. And another face would materialize, turning to show all angles in computer simulation from the original photograph.
"I thought you'd see several pictures at a time," Rose said. "Like pages in a photo album."
"That's right, it normally does, but I've already scanned in the photograph of the suspect we took tonight," he said. "The computer's only calling up possible matches. Wait. Look. That's him. Got him."
"Yeah, it sort of looks like him, but . . ." The face on the screen was sane, or at least if not, had a calculating, paranoid, different sort of insanity than the hopping, croaking psychotic she had just seen. The mug shot was of a man who resembled the pony-tailed, foot-fighting hero of a series of violent martial arts movies.
"That's him, okay. Robert C. Hunter, age thirty-eight, lists an L.A. address here. Let's read his biography. Not very long in terms of record. Brought up for drug dealing a couple of times, and released, one arrest for assault, but released, arrested for suspected murder, but released."
About that time, a detective from the next room passed by on the way to communications and glanced curiously at the screen. "Whatcha got goin' with Hunter, Moran? Don't tell me the sonofabitch is going after kids now?"
"You know this guy? I met him tonight, trying to eat flies on the psych unit at Harborview. Seems to think he's a toad."
"No kidding?"
"None whatsoever."
"Mercy me. How the mighty are fallen," the detective said with a low whistle, staring more intently at the screen.
"What?" Fred asked.
"Well, Hunter may be a loony now, but he is no ordinary loony, believe me."
"No?"
"He's an executioner. Six states have been trying to pin something on him for a long time."
"Nurses' aide found what looks like the Quantrill girl's scarf and the letter he used to snatch her still in his possession when he was admitted to the psych unit. He had a knife wound on the left lower abdomen that had already been treated when he was admitted to Harborview. If we distribute this picture to area hospitals, maybe we'll find out where he was when he got the wound."
"You sure he's crazy on the level? You can't sweat it out of him?"
"Nah, you can't do it to this guy," Fred said with a wink to Rose. "He'd croak."
"Maybe he's got a frog in his throat," the other detective said with a chuckle. "Otherwise, what you're saying is toadally out of character. Of course, I guess you could say he's been a toady for organized crime for some time."
"Stop! I surrender. Enough already. Can you give me what you got on this guy for tomorrow? I need to give Rose a lift—oh, Milt Bowersox, this is Rose Samson. Rose works at Family Services."
Milt nodded hello, but he was already on his way again to the communications room.