Twice Dying (3 page)

The eyes went veiled, the head rolling away: all the answer Monks was going to get.

He supposed it was a lesson of history, ethnic groups in a melting pot where the melting was too slow for their liking. In the Mission, the older Mexican and black gangs had kept things relatively stable, but now they were under fierce pressure from immigrant Central Americans, Vietnamese, Taiwanese pushing out from Chinatown,
and their own young. Throw in a few eye-watering spices—crack, crank, ice—and readily available weapons from Uzis to bazookas, and what you had was increasingly close to open warfare. In Monk’s boyhood on Chicago’s south side, tough guys fought with fists, really hard cases carried switchblades or chains, and a few zip guns were rumored. There was also an archaic concept known as “fighting fair.”

“I’ll get you something for the pain,” Monks said. He stepped out of the room, wanting a drink himself.

The ER was settling down, a sort of post-coital lull in the wake of crisis. Outside the lobby entrance, the dark figure of the patrolling officer moved through the night’s thickening fog. The Esposito boy’s gurney was rolling out of the ER, pushed by two attendants with a nurse alongside, on its way to surgery like a ship sailing off on a long journey: six inches of tube protruding from the chest, oxygen mask over the face, water-seal apparatus and IV bags hanging on the rails, and a cardiac monitor between the feet. The trauma room’s inside was littered with bloody debris, wrappings, used instruments, and trays. Vernon and Jackie, spattered with blood and body fluids, goggles pushed up on foreheads, stood like the survivors of a bombing raid.

“The kid next door’s had five milligrams of morphine IV,” he told Jackie. “Get him five more,
please. Clean him up and see if X-ray can locate that slug.” To Vernon he said, “His brother’s waiting in the conference room. Scared, very hostile. That’s part of the job, too.”

They both looked tense and exhausted: puzzled, as if not quite grasping that after all that had happened, their work might end wrong, that the giddiness of saving a life might still be shattered by the helplessness of losing it.

Monks said, “You might want to know it was nineteen minutes from entry to surgery. There was nothing—zero—more we could have done. You two were right there.”

“I lost it,” Vernon said. His head bowed to stare down into his large hands, as if they had dropped the winning touchdown pass.

Sharp annoyance hit Monks at the thought that Vernon was more concerned with his performance than with the patient.

“If I had any complaints, Doctor,” Monks said, “believe me, you’d hear them.”

He left, already regretting his tone. But Vernon’s mind would be off it soon enough, explaining to a young man pumped full of enraged machismo that in order for his little brother to live out the next hour, everything was going to have to go just right.

Monks stripped off gloves and gown and washed with automatic precision. His own scrubs were soaked with sweat and God knew what else,
but his shift was almost over. He reported to the Nurses’ Station.

“If there’s nothing urgent, I’m going to start on my charts,” he told Leah.

“There’s someone here to see you.”

“Mrs. Horvitz, last time I looked, there was a whole roomful of people here to see me. I’d like to think that’s because of my charming personality, but I suspect otherwise. Dr. Dickhaut will be available in a few minutes.”

“I think it might be the lady who called earlier.”

Leah’s usual concerned look was gone, replaced by something softer. Perhaps a trifle arch. Appraising.

Monks walked to the glass door of the waiting room. A woman stood just on the other side. She was wearing jeans, boots, and a leather jacket over a sweater. Chin-length chestnut hair. Slim but not willowy, shoulders suggesting strength. Wide mouth, high strong cheekbones, hazel eyes that sloed toward the exotic.

Alison Chapley said, “When are you going to get off the firing line, Rasp?”

The nickname was short for Rasputin. He had picked it up in the navy. Only a few people called him by it anymore. He realized that he was braced in the doorway, as if his body had stopped itself on its way toward her and was holding on to safety.

He said, “I keep trying.”

“Are those boys going to be all right?”

“One of them.”

“If you’re too busy, I’ll leave.”

Headlights arced into the parking lot. Monks watched, remembering that a carload of possibly armed young men had been sighted earlier. But the vehicle was a newish minivan, not a likely ride for a street gang.

He said, “Too busy for what?”

“It’s complicated.” She glanced around at the other faces in the waiting room, and Monks had the sudden sense that they were pressing close, listening covertly. “Could I buy you a drink?”

“What’s wrong with here?”

Her fingers touched his arm. “Please.”

The minivan’s occupants were getting out, a woman helping a heavy man who moved with a hand pressed to his flank, lifting his right foot mincingly. Appendix, sciatica, maybe kidney stones: nothing Vernon couldn’t handle by himself.

Monks said, “I’m due off at ten. I could meet you.”

“Zack’s?”

Monks nodded.

“Thanks for the gift,” he said. “It’s classy.”

“I found it in an antique store. I thought of you right off.”

“Why a razor?”

She smiled. “I don’t know, exactly. It just seemed right. Maybe something about an edge.”

Monks watched her walk away, hips swinging, bootheels clicking on the pavement. He turned back inside to find Leah’s gaze still on him, as if she could see into his memory.

A
lison was sitting at the near end of the bar when Monks walked in. He was not surprised to see a man standing next to her, leaning against the rail, talking. The man’s hand rested familiarly on her shoulder.

Monks stepped to her other side. She turned to him quickly, shrugging off the hand as if it were a suddenly discovered annoyance. The man glanced at Monks, a sour look that stopped just short of belligerence, and drank from his beer bottle.

The place had the feel of a saloon, with a pool table, a country juke box, and a bandstand that offered bluegrass on Friday and Saturday nights. The clientele was mostly male, fit young men wearing tight jeans and work shins. In gay San
Francisco, Zack’s was straight and determined to show it.

“I’m buying,” she said. “Is it still vodka?”

“It is. But not now.” Monks had debated the issue on the drive here. He wanted a drink fiercely, but a single drink had never done him any good, and there remained the residual business of the ER charts to finish and patients who were still in some way his.

She pushed a key ring toward him. Monks recognized a large Ford key, to the Bronco, and a worn older one: the key to his house.

“I thought you might want these back,” she said.

He left them untouched on the bar. “I might.”

She laughed. “I’m out of practice sparring.”

“Best I can recall, you never had much competition.”

“Not in a place like this.” Her voice was loud enough for the man behind her to hear.

Monks gripped her wrist tightly. Her smile faded.

He said, “Whatever this is, let’s get to it.”

Her gaze shifted away. She stood. Monks released her, waiting to see if she would walk out.

“I could use a cigarette,” she said. She called to the bartender, “Warren, another one, please. I’ll be right back.” He was washing glasses and did not look up.

Monks followed her out onto Clement Street,
moderately busy with late-night traffic. Alison paused to search in her purse. Monks noted that she was still smoking Marlboro Lights, and still wearing a single ring, an elliptical black opal, on her right hand. Bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe, psychology doctorate from Stanford, post-doc work at UCSF. The kind of facial bone structure that spoke of generations of blue blood, and plenty of money. Chapley, she had once told him, was from DeChaplais, Huguenots who had come to this country fleeing persecution in the early eighteenth century, and had kept track of every ancestor before and since.

It was a package she could have parlayed into anything she wanted. What she had chosen was to specialize in the treatment of dangerously violent men.

“I quit smoking for two years,” she murmured, cigarette in mouth.

Monks was not one to criticize a self-destructive vice. He took her lighter and watched her hair spill forward, brushing her neck as she leaned into the flame.

He said, “I’m flattered that you remembered me, Alison. I’m waiting to find out why.”

She exhaled, a thin stream of smoke that blended with the fog.

“Still in the investigation business?”

“Strictly armchair,” Monks said warily. “Same as always.”

“Someone’s been coming around to people I know, asking questions about me. He’s posing as a state licensing inspector. Says he’s checking me out for a job, and I haven’t applied for any.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Partying. That sort of thing.”

“Did your friends get his name?”

“Stryker. And I didn’t say they were my friends.”

Monks said, “People you bought drugs from?”

She nodded curtly. “One. Who’s seriously annoyed at me right now. He thinks I shot my mouth off and dial Stryker’s an undercover cop.”

“I assume this didn’t come out of the blue.”

She started walking again. Monks paced beside her.

“You know the term NGI?” she said.

He did.
Not Guilty by reason of Insanity,
the designation for psychotically violent offenders who were found unable to understand the criminal nature of their act. In California, they were outside the criminal justice system and not subject to regular imprisonment. Usually they were remanded to high-security mental institutions.

“I’ve been consulting for Clevinger Hospital, in the East Bay,” she said. “It has a top-line NGI rehabilitation program. Big-time funding and prestige.”

Monks knew about Clevinger, a county institution with a psych ward that verged on the notorious: by all accounts a cheerless place.

He said, “The money must be good.”

“With the county? You know damned well it’s not.”

“Then what’s the draw?”

“A chance to work with the great man who founded the program. At least that’s what I thought.”

“Who’s the man?”

“A psychiatrist named Francis Jephson. He’s British. Heard of him?”

Monks shook his head. “I don’t deal much with psychiatrists.”

“He was very polite all through the hiring process, but it didn’t take me long to figure out he didn’t want anything to do with me,” she said. “He conducts all the NGI therapy in private. All their testing. When I offered to help, he patted me on the hand and told me in so many words to go powder my nose.”

Monks’s laugh was involuntary. “Sorry. He obviously doesn’t know you very well.”

“It pissed me off.” She ground out the cigarette against a lamppost.

Monks waited.

“One of the NGIs is scheduled for release next month,” she said. “John James Garlick. He’s a woman beater: hospitalized several girlfriends, finally killed one.”

“He’s getting out?”

“Officially, he’s been a model rehab client.”

“Just asking.”

“I don’t like it either. I’ve been having problems with him from the first. I’ve caught him baiting the general ward patients in calculating ways.”

“That’s a red flag?”

“One of several. Signs that there’s no real thought disorder. So I took a good hard look at his file. Everything was nice and neat. Too neat, especially this.”

She took a manila envelope from her purse and pulled out several sheets of paper. She held one up to the lit front of a shop. Monks could make out a graph with perhaps a dozen lines plotted across.

“It’s called the Psychosis Assessment Profile,” she said. “It’s administered every few months to rate patient improvement and adjust medications. One of the tests I’m supposed to give that Jephson won’t let me. Garlick’s shows him going from highly psychotic to within the normal range, over twenty-two months. I’ve been a clinician twelve years now, Rasp, and I know what I see. Garlick is no more psychotic than you or I. He never was.”

Monks said, “The graph’s a fake?”

“That’s just openers. I started thinking I’d seen a file like that before. It took me a while to remember: a man who was released right after I started at Clevinger: Caymas Schulte. He’d raped and strangled a nine-year-old boy. I wasn’t around him much, but I had the same take as with
John Garlick: dangerous, sociopathic, but in control of his actions. I went into the records library one night after the regular staff was gone. Went through ten years of files and found Caymas Schulte’s, and three more besides.”

She held up the remaining sheets of paper, fanned out to show the graphed lines. Except for minor variations, they were identical.

“All with similar diagnoses, schizo-affective disorders,” she said. “All reporting similar reactions in the same categories. The same steady improvement. There are probably others I missed. I think they’re sociopaths that Jephson’s been selecting. Not every patient: maybe one in eight or ten. He provides them a false diagnosis of schizophrenia, then coaches them through his program.”

She folded her arms, as if daring him to disagree.

“I believe you, Alison,” Monks said. “But I don’t get the why of it.”

“It gives him a statistical edge that keeps him top dog. They’re guaranteed successes.”

Monks had seen his share of medical scams, but usually the payoff was obvious: cash.

He said, “You think he’s embezzling from his funding?”

“I don’t think it’s about money. You’re talking an ego that’s off the charts. He was a
Wunderkind
thirty years ago. Cambridge. Princeton. But he made claims he couldn’t back up. He kept changing
jobs—moving down the ladder. A place like Clevinger’s the end of the line. Or it was, until he started working his miracles.”

“He’s taking a hell of a risk.”

“The real risk is to the public, Rasp. These men are out on the street after two years, with no parole and nobody keeping track of where they are. They’re supposed to report to outpatient clinics for medications, but there’s no way to make them. They can change areas, even identities, cover their tracks. They just don’t have any conscience, and there’s no therapy for that. Like John Garlick. He’ll be out in a few weeks and he’s going to kill more women, I know it.”