The Laughterhouse (43 page)

“What happened to her?” I ask.

The nurse turns toward me, and I show her my badge.

“Overdose,” she says. “By the time she got in here there wasn’t much we could do. It’s sad,” she says, “it’s always sad.”

I start pacing the corridor again and haven’t gotten much further before Dr. Forster finds me. There are cuts and grazes in his palms from where he broke our fall.

“Theo,” he says, and he’s puffing slightly as if he’s been running around looking for me. “I’ve spoken to the doctors,” he says. “Bridget’s blood pressure has plummeted and her heartbeat is erratic, but they are in the process of stabilizing her vitals,” he says.

“What the fuck does that even mean?” I ask.

“It means her body is crashing and they’re trying to save her.”

“Why? I don’t get it—she was awake, wasn’t she?”

He shakes his head. “She was, and now she isn’t. I don’t know why. We’ll know more when she stabilizes and we can look her over.”

“But she’ll be okay, right? And when this is over, she’ll be okay again? She’ll be normal?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“I want to see her.”

“You can’t. They’re working on her. There’s nothing you can do here,” he says.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know,” he says. “I’ll keep you updated.”

He leaves me alone. I grab my cell phone and see I’ve missed two calls from Schroder. I never even heard it ring. I call him back.

“How is she?” Schroder asks.

I start to tell him, and I have to sit to get through it all because my legs are ready to collapse. He listens without interrupting me, and then at the end he tells me he’s sorry.

“What’s happening with Jones?” I ask him.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asks.

It’s a dumb question but one he had to ask, and I give him the response he needs to hear. “I’ll be okay. And Jonas?”

“I don’t know. I was given a lift home. I’m out of the loop,” he says. “I had a call forwarded to me earlier from the hospital,” he says. “Apparently you’ve got a head injury you’re keeping to yourself. They were in the process of admitting you and you walked out. They want you back.”

“As soon as this is over,” I tell him.

“Theo—”

“I promise,” I tell him.

“It’s your brain,” he says. “Do what you want, and if you want to update the department before you die, call Detective Kent,” he says, and hangs up.

I give Kent a call.

“How’s your wife?” she asks.

“She’s fine,” I tell her. “What happened with Jonas?”

She pauses for a few seconds. “I’m thinking Jones must really be psychic,” she says, “because he already had his lawyer at the station waiting for us, which, unless his lawyer is psychic too, is pretty clever since we hadn’t let him make a call. Jones, according to the lawyer, has proven himself time and time again to be as he claims, a genuine psychic who wants
nothing more than to help the community, and in his role as community helper, Jonas was trying to use his tremendous gift to save a young girl’s life. No man should be held accountable for attempting such a feat. And no, Jonas had no idea he was stumbling into an ambush.”

“Wow, I guess we all should be thankful the world has Jonas Jones in it,” I say.

She gives a small soft laugh, the kind my wife used to give on the phone sometimes. “We should be, according to Jones and his lawyer. So we took a run at him for fifteen minutes and got nothing. That’s when Stevens came in and got us. Told me and Hutton to cut loose Jonas Jones, humanitarian slash psychic. Hutton pointed out that Jones cost us catching Cole, and Stevens pointed out we didn’t know that for a fact, that there was nothing more we could do, that we had every right to be pissed off but we needed to focus on finding Cole and not focus on pissing around with a guy who speaks to dead people.”

“Listen, I found Ariel Chancellor,” I tell her.

“What? Where?”

“She’s here,” I tell her. “At the hospital.”

“You’ve spoken to her?”

“No. That’s more Jonas Jones’s domain now,” I say, and explain the overdose. When I close my eyes I can see the tube hanging out of her mouth, the vomit on her neck, I can see her the way she was in her flat this morning telling me about her life.
She’ll die on those streets
her father told me, and the timing of it all—she may have been dying when he said those very words. She’s certainly been dying since the day James Whitby chased two scared little girls through a park.

“I’ll send somebody down to get the details,” she says. “Anything to do with Cole?” I shake my head even though she can’t see me. “You think she did it deliberately?”

I keep my eyes closed, pinching the bridge of my nose at the same time. I keep watching Ariel in her flat, taking a drink,
telling me she was living the dream. “Who knows,” I tell her. “So what’s the next step?”

“Now we call it a day,” she says. “All we can do is fill the streets with as many patrol cars as we can. What else is there? Knock on every door in the city?”

“Maybe you should call some of those psychics back that were calling Schroder.”

“You think there’s a term for a collective of psychics?” she asks. “You know, like a herd of cows, a murder of crows?”

“I’m sure there is,” I say, and I look for a one-liner, something clever, but my brain is too busy being clever by holding the headache at bay.

She says nothing for a few seconds and I get the feeling she’s building up to something.

“There a problem?”

“The psychics,” she says. “The thing is we started calling them back, you know, just because we have to be doing something, right?”

“Right . . .”

“Well, they weren’t ringing because they were having visions or speaking to the dead. They were ringing because they were all witnesses. Caleb Cole has been visiting them. He’s been trying to talk to his wife and daughter.”

“Jesus,” I say, wincing at the information.

“If we’d called them earlier . . .” she says, but adds nothing.

The problem is it was Schroder’s job to call them, or his job to have somebody else call them. The thing with psychics is that as soon as they call whoever is talking to them just switches off, they don’t hear what’s being said and barely make the effort to even take down a name and phone number. These people were probably saying they were seeing Caleb Cole and whoever was on the other end of the phone all thought they meant they were having “visions” of Caleb Cole. But no, that wasn’t it—
they all wanted some credit,
I remember Schroder saying that.

“Is that something we can use?” I ask.

“We’re contacting other psychics. We’re on it. And we’ll keep an eye on Jonas in case he’s a target. What do you think is going to happen to Schroder?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, and right now I’m just way too tired to look that far into the future. Maybe she should ask Jonas Jones.

“You think he’ll lose his job?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“I hope not,” she says.

“I gotta go,” I tell her.

“Listen,” she says, and in that moment she sounds like Schroder, good ol’ Schroder, who starts half of his sentences with either a
look
or a
listen.
“He wanted me to give you a message when you called. He said nobody was going to hold it against you if you didn’t show up here for a few days. He said with what you’ve done, Stevens is impressed. He’s not going to renege on his offer of letting you back on the force because you’re staying with your wife, and he doubts Stevens will hold it against you for lying earlier to protect him.”

“Okay. Thanks, Detective.”

“Rebecca,” she says. “And I’m glad your wife is okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I pace the room a few more times until my sore leg suggests sitting is the way to go. I hold my head in my hands and stare down at the floor until my head suggests looking down isn’t the best of angles because it makes my brain feel like it’s pressing against the back of my eyes. On the other side of the door Bridget is fighting for her life. Or the doctors are fighting for it. A nurse comes by and offers me some coffee and I tell her that would be great, but she never shows up with it. After an hour a doctor walks out of the operating room. He walks toward me and I stand up and wobble for a few seconds in front of him, and in those seconds are a world of possibilities. This is the moment where my life changes, just like it has done for all the others who have stood here before me.

“Your wife is fine,” he tells me, and everything is okay in the world. I almost hug him. I cry. And then I do hug him. He pats me on the back and pushes me away after a few seconds.

“We’ve stabilized her,” he says. “We’ll have to keep her for a few days, and I know Dr. Forster will want to run some tests and try to figure out what happened.”

“What did happen?” I ask.

He gives a small shake of the head. “Honestly, we don’t know. All we know is that her vitals crashed and for a while there it was touch and go.”

“And the coma?”

He holds my gaze and doesn’t flinch. “She’s unconscious,” he says, “but when she was with us she was unresponsive. I’m sorry,” he says, “but I can’t tell you anything more than that.”

“But it has to be a good thing, right? Her waking up like that?”

“Brain injuries are tricky things,” he says. “I’ve seen plenty of them over the years and in some ways they’re like fingerprints—no two are identical.”

“Can I see her?”

“We’ll move her into a room soon, and you can see her then for a few minutes,” he says. “We should know more tomorrow.”

He turns and heads back into the room, and I collapse into the chair. Bridget is fine. Everything that’s gone on, she’s going to be fine. I lean back and my head touches the wall and immediately the room starts to sway. I’m hit with an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. The ceiling gets blurry, it swims in and out of focus for the next fifteen minutes until a nurse comes and gets me and takes me through to my wife.

Caleb Cole stares at the ceiling, then closes his eyes for a few seconds and stares at the ceiling again. The view between the two doesn’t change much. He thinks about Jonas Jones. Whether or not the psychic is a fraud it doesn’t matter. Jones is in custody. He’s as impossible to get to as Mrs. Whitby.

He thinks about Mrs. Whitby, about how satisfying it would be to cut her into a thousand pieces. It’s an idea he often falls asleep having.

Most of all he’s thinking about the man from the cemetery—Theodore Tate. An idea is starting to come to him. An exciting idea that came from his conversation with Tabitha earlier when he suggested that she kill Mrs. Whitby for him.

He gets off the bed and walks to the kitchen, this end of the house getting some of the street light so he can see better. He fills a glass of water and sits in the living room and uses his cell phone to quickly go online. If the police didn’t have his number before, they will have it after he phoned in for the pizzas.
It’s amazing how much technology can fit into one small phone, but it is a pain to use.

He looks up Theodore Tate. They were in prison at the same time—four months they were in the same complex, but Caleb doesn’t remember ever seeing him. They must have been in different wings. An ex-cop, he would have been put into a section of jail where he didn’t have the life kicked out of him every day. It would have been a good gig for him. At least comparatively. It meant he never would have had the real prison experience. Caleb is envious of that.

Three years ago Tate lost his daughter in an accident. A drunk driver ran her down, along with her mother, when they were walking out of a movie theater through a public parking lot. The mother survived, if that’s what you could call it. The man who hit them was released on bail and went missing. He skipped the country, so the articles say.

Caleb keeps reading. There’s the Burial Killer case from last year, where a psychopath was replacing interred corpses in a cemetery with fresh victims. Then there’s the case from earlier this year where some whack job was kidnapping people and taking them to Grover Hills, the same institution James Whitby was taken to, only Grover Hills closed down a few years ago.

Theodore Tate. Ex-policeman turned private investigator, turned inmate, turned private investigator again, turned police consultant, and somewhere in there a killer of bad men.

The more he reads, the more he begins to relate, and the more he relates, the more his excitement builds. This is working out better than he hoped. Theodore Tate—husband and father, but so much more, perhaps even a man with his very own monster who hunted down the man who killed his daughter.

Yes. Theodore Tate will do quite nicely for what he has planned.

I drive through town, reaching intersections and having moments where I have no recollection of even driving there. I get caught for ten minutes in boy-racer traffic but I just don’t care. Cars are tooting and cars are weaving in and out of the flow of traffic. My eyes are half-closed and all I want to do is get home and fall into bed. My head is hurting a little and massaging it isn’t really helping. Schroder’s car is an automatic and thank God it is, because if I had to spend mental energy on changing gears I’d break down and cry. When I do make it home I leave Schroder’s car in the driveway.

I still have my keys, other than my car key, which is somewhere with my car back at the station. I fumble my way inside and the only food I can find is a loaf of bread in the freezer that has been there since last year. I make a few slices of toast and eat it while staring out the back window toward the spot in the ground where I had to bury my cat after some psycho killed it the day after I got out of jail. I force the toast into my body to stem the hunger pains. It’s too late for coffee, too complicated
to make it anyway, so I settle for water. I reach into my pocket for the painkillers the nurse gave me for the dog bite. I take two of them and tip the rest down the sink, not wanting to risk another addiction, not wanting to hide the symptoms in case there is something wrong inside of me. I can see my reflection in the window, I can still see the hospital room, I can still see my wife wired up to medical equipment like something in a science fiction movie the same way she was three years ago. I sat by her side and held her hand for the five minutes I was allowed, waiting for her eyes to open knowing they wouldn’t—and they didn’t. I finish the toast and head to the bedroom.