Projection (23 page)

"What does it say?" Anderson asked.

"He was admitted for plastic surgery.  His face is badly scarred from chemical burns."  I shook my head, stunned at the link between Michael Lucas’ medical needs and Trevor Lucas’ medical specialty.  I fanned through the chart, my eyes locking on the drawings of the procedures Lucas had undergone.  "It looks like all of his admissions were for different facial surgeries."

"Didn't you say Trevor Lucas is a plastic surgeon?" Anderson asked.

I nodded, still fanning pages.  I stopped on two side-view photos of Lucas labeled ‘Before’ and ‘After.’  In the top photo his ear looked like an irregular triangle with folded corners, and his nose was skeleton slim, as if most of the flesh had melted, leaving skin and bone.  The bottom photo showed marked improvements in shape, coming closer, but not very close, to what nature had intended.  In both photos, the visible part of Lucas’ scalp was a patchwork of shiny scars and fine clumps of hair.  I couldn't tell from either shot whether Michael Lucas resembled Trevor.

I turned to the ‘Personal, Social and Family History’ portion of the first admission.  Typical for a surgical write-up, the biography consisted of a few sentences.

This unmarried, unemployed male with no children has never worked, describes himself as a ‘hermit’.  Denies alcohol and illicit drugs.  Lives alone.  No hobbies.  Extended free care since 1969 due to grave medical need.

On the next page I found a genogram charting three generations.  A box with an arrow pointing at it signified the patient.  Slash marks through the box and circle one level above him indicated his parents were deceased.  According to the diagram, he had no siblings.  "Damn," I muttered.

"What?" Anderson said.

"It says he had no brothers or sisters."  I quickly found the family histories from the other admissions.  Each listed the patient the same way.  "Every one of these write-ups lists him as an only child."  I looked at him.

"Well, I certainly wouldn’t take that to the bank," he grinned.

Chapter 12

Anderson pulled to the curb in front of the Stouffer around 3:15
A.M.
  "If you want a ride to Jasper Street, I could manage to get out of the rest of the shift.  It's over at seven, anyhow."

"A police escort might spook him," I said.  I held out my hand.  "I'll call if my luck runs out."

"Fair enough."  He shook my hand.  "Thanks."

"Same here."  People who have shared the truth are like atoms that share electrons.  You feel the force of the bond most powerfully as you take leave of it.  I got out of the cruiser, but poked my head back inside.  "Be careful, will you?"

"Nobody's attacked a police station yet."  He winked.

I watched him pull away, then headed into the hotel.  I figured I would hook up with Cynthia and taxi over to Jasper Street.  If Michael Lucas’ plastic surgeries turned out to be irrelevant, we could make it out to City Hall by the time it opened at 9:00
A.M.
  Anderson had promised to help us with access to the police archives there.

I knocked at the door to our room, but there was no answer.  I knocked again.  Nothing.  I assumed Cynthia had fallen asleep or headed downstairs for food or coffee.  I had one of the card keys for the room with me.  I slipped it into the high-tech lock, pulled open the door and stepped inside.  A paper airplane was wedged, nose down, in the binding.  I walked over, picked it up and read the note Cynthia had left me:  "You're late.  Flew to check out Michael L.  Back ASAP."

I dropped the note and raced for the elevator.  I pored all through the horrors imaginable — Cynthia being abducted, raped, murdered.  I knew my mind was in overdrive partly because Rachel had been killed in the crossfire of my life, but recognizing that afforded me no comfort.  Personal histories tend to repeat themselves, like the histories of nations, until the lessons they would teach are fully learned.  Paranoia gripped me.  I started to fear that Trevor had again maneuvered me into sacrificing the woman I needed in my life.

I rant to the semicircle in front of the hotel and climbed into the first taxi in a line of four or five.  "Jasper Street," I said.

The driver, a gaunt, half-shaven man in his fifties, turned around.  "Know how to get there?"

"No."

"Me neither.  Maybe you should ask that guy."  He pointed at the cab behind us."

Cab drivers sometimes feign ignorance to avoid a short run and wait to score a fare to the airport.  I had a feeling this was one of those drivers and one of those times.  I reached into my pocket and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills.  I tossed them over the front seat.  "Get me there."

Within ten minutes, without a single wrong turn, the taxi came to a stop across from 2304 Jasper Street, a brick row house indistinguishable from dozens of others lined up on either side of it.  Metal signs that read
NO TRESPASSING
and
PRIVATE
were wired to the chain-link fence surrounding an overgrown, postage-stamp front yard.  I jumped out and walked up the stairs to the door.  I gently tried the handle.  Locked.  I leaned over the railing, trying to see inside the first-floor window, but a paper shade stained yellow and brown, crumbling in places, blocked most of my view.  The glimpses I did get were of books — hundreds of them, some stacked neatly against the walls, some thrown into a three-foot pile beside a sooty white marble fireplace.

I thought I heard voices.  Or had I?  I listened harder.  The sounds seemed to be coming from the back of the house.

I hopped the fence and plowed through waist-high grass and weeds to reach the backyard.  I stumbled over something that turned out to be a rusted tricycle old enough to be in an antique shop.  A child's two-wheel bike of the same vintage lay next to it, a decomposing mud-brown baseball glove still tied to its seat.  I heard crying.  I picked up my pace, but when I made it to the backyard the only sounds were the creaking of branches and the fluttering of an American flag hanging from a fire escape.  I looked up and saw that all the shades in the back windows were drawn.  Then I heard a man's voice.  I couldn't make out his words, but they were drifting from the basement.  My eyes scanned the foundation and locked on a half-window that had been painted black, but was cracked like a spider web.  There was a jagged two-inch hole in one corner.

I crouched next to the window and peered through it.  I saw Cynthia, her face wet and flushed from crying, her eyes filled with terror.  She was standing on a dirt floor beside what looked like an animal cage, older and more substantial than the wire ones sold today, large enough to house a Great Dane.  I could just see the tip of a man's bare shoulder, closer to me, off to the right.  The man was talking, but I still couldn't hear what he was saying.  My racing thoughts filled in the blanks.  I pictured him holding a gun or a knife, demanding Cynthia climb into the cage.  I imagined him concocting lurid plans.  I scrambled to my feet and scoured the back of the house for a weapon.  The only thing I could lay my hands on was an old baseball bat.  I ran to a set of wooden doors built into the ground — the opening, I guessed onto the stairs to the basement.  A padlock held them closed, but it seemed to be rusted through, like everything else around the place.  I didn't hesitate.  I smashed the lock with the bat.  It broke apart with the first blow.  I reached down and flung one door aside, then bolted down a set of concrete steps and kicked in a flimsy door at the bottom of them.  I rushed past Cynthia just as Michael Lucas, perfectly muscled and naked to the waist, his face even more grotesque in life than in his photos, rushed at me.  Cynthia's screams filled the musty air.  Lucas planted his knee in my abdomen.  His fist landed above my eye.  I felt my skin rip.  His hands closed around my neck.  I summoned every ounce of strength I could and drove my shoulder up into his chest, knocking him off me.  I gripped each end of the bat and used it as a plow to drive him against the cement wall of the foundation.  I pressed the wood hard across his neck.  Now he was the one who looked terrified.  Now he could think about losing his life, instead of me losing someone I loved.  I watched his smooth, shiny, melted skin turn pinker for want of oxygen.  I stared into his eyes — Trevor's black eyes — and pushed harder with the bat.  And only then did I realize that Cynthia was screaming more, not less, than before, that her fists were raining down on my shoulders.  I was so deafened by my fury that I had to force myself to listen to her actual words.

"Frank!  Stop it!" she pleaded.  "Leave him alone!"

It took me a few seconds to trust what I was hearing over what I felt.  I moved the bat an inch off Lucas’ neck.  He coughed and gasped for air.

"He wasn't hurting me," Cynthia cried.  She yanked at my jacket.  Let him go!"

I backed up a few steps and let the bat fall to my side.  Lucas dropped to his knees and watched me as he caught his breath.  Half his face bore a strong resemblance to Trevor's, but the other half was reconstructed into something that looked like a high school art student's C+ rendering from clay.  The flesh looked layered on in places, the contours of jaw and cheekbone irregular.  His upper lip pulled noticeably to the damaged side.  One eyelid drooped, the fleshy pocket cradling a tiny pool of clear fluid — an eternal tear.  His hair was the patchwork I had seen in the medical record.

I let Cynthia drag me another couple of feet from him.  I was trembling.  "I thought he was trying to put you in there," I said, glancing at the cage.

"He wasn't," she said.  "He was showing me where his mother kept Trevor."

"Kept..."

"As a penance.  He had to pray morning and night...  for his salvation."  She took a moment to catch her breath.  "Trevor was eight.  Michael was five.  They were chasing each other through the kitchen, past the stove.  Trevor reached up and knocked a big pot of cooking oil off its burner.  Michael was right behind him."

I thought of the ritualistic prayer Lucas was demanding of patients and hostages on the locked unit.  "How long did she keep him in there?"

"Almost a year."

I stood there, thinking about the nightmare it must have been for Trevor Lucas to be kept behind bars awaiting trial for murder.  It had to bring all the fear and guilt and hatred of his tortured childhood crashing back.  I remembered visiting him at the Lynn jail shortly after he had surrendered.  He had been seated Indian style on the floor, chanting, a pose I saw as an overblown display of false self-possession.  But perhaps it was not arrogance, but desperation I had witnessed, an attempt to mentally escape the confines of that cell — of the cage — to keep the past from overtaking him.  After he was transferred to the state prison, as the days and weeks and months dragged on, it was easy to understand how meditation would fail to keep the past at bay, an his mind would stumble upon the ultimate way out, liberating itself wholly from reality.  Psychosis is the supreme vanishing act.

Michael Lucas struggled to his feet.  He cleared his throat and massaged his neck.  "Dr. Clevenger, I presume."  His voice was cultured, almost melodic, not unlike Trevor's.  A hint of a smile played across his mismatched lips.  "Cynthia mentioned you might stop by.  You could have knocked.  It worked for her."

"I didn't understand what was going on.  I'm sorry."

"Not that I dare counsel a psychiatrist to
think
, but had you, I would be saved a bruised windpipe, and you, that ugly cut."

I touched my brow and felt the warm, wet opening in my skin.  "Forgive me."

"Not my place, I'm afraid."

"Has Cynthia told you why we're here?"

"She told me what my brother has done."

"I'm trying to help him.  I need to know more about him."

"I have neither seen nor heard from Trevor since he left home."  He paused.  "Of course I'm not shocked he would wreak havoc in the world.  He did in mine."

"If I can't convince him to surrender, he'll be killed."

Several seconds passed in silence.  "At least he was free for a time.  I've been imprisoned my whole life.  This house.  This face."  He turned and took a few steps toward the staircase to the first floor.  "I'll trust you to let yourselves out," he said, without looking back at us.

I stood there with Cynthia as Lucas walked slowly up the stairs.  A door opened, then closed.  "Did he tell you anything else?" I asked her.

"I wasn't here long enough.  It took him a while to admit he knew Trevor at all.  When I told him about the locked unit, he brought me to see the cage."

I needed every page of Trevor's life history I could get.  "I'm going upstairs."

"He came to the front door with a shotgun when I rang the bell."

"He could have turned you away with a simple lie when you called him at midnight.  He could have not answered the front door at all when you rang the bell.  And he certainly didn't have to bring you down here."  I shook my head.  "He's not going to shoot me.  He's got his own questions about Trevor's life — maybe about his own."  I thought back to Harry yelling out for Louie in the Hopkins emergency room.  "They're brothers, no matter what happened."  I started up the stairs, then realized that Cynthia was right behind me.  I turned around.

She heard my objection without my speaking it.  "I didn't come this far to hide in the basement," she said.  "If it's safe enough for you to go up there after you attacked him, it's got to be safe enough for me."

I realized I wasn't sure what would happen when I confronted Lucas again.  I was still wary of replaying Rachel's demise.  "I'm going alone."

She shook her head.  "It's too late for that."

I tried staring her down, but lost.  I started to tell her I loved her, partly because I felt that way, partly because I hadn't gotten to tell Rachel.  "In case you don't know...," I said.

"I do," she said.  "Save it, though.  Tell me when I can show you."

*            *            *

We found Lucas seated on a threadbare couch in the living room, surrounded by his haphazard library, staring into the fireplace.  A dozen or more crucifixes adorned the walls, along with dime-store framed passages from the Bible.  Charred books and a few half-burned split logs lay cold on the andirons.  His shotgun was on the cushion next to him.  I kept a respectable distance, just inside the room, with Cynthia behind me, off to my right.  I moved slowly to the nearest stack of books and picked up a copy of Plutarch's
Lives
, revealing Saint Thomas Aquinas’
Summa Theologica
beneath it.  A tattered copy of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, was at the top of the next stack. 
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Invisible Man
and
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
lay askew atop the third.  I was in the company of a learned man.  "An impressive collection," I said, keeping my voice soft and even.  "Which ones get burned?"