“Following him around. Trying to break into his house.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she do that?”
“She seemed to think he was guilty of a crime. She wanted to prove it.”
“What crime?”
“Murder. A whole series of murders.”
“She never said — I mean, she…”
“I know what you mean, Anson. She never told you anything about it, in all the years you kept in touch with her.”
“You know I can’t admit to that, Roy. Aiding and abetting, they call it.” He looked away. “But if she’d had any suspicion of such a thing, she’d have told me.”
“Not necessarily.” Shepherd hesitated. “Not if she thought it would hurt you.”
“Hurt me? How could anything Cray had done…? Oh. I see. It’s not Cray alone you’re thinking of. It’s Justin.”
“Possibly.”
“You think Cray got hooked up with Justin somehow? You think after he met with Regina, he sought out Justin on his own and struck up some kind of unholy partnership?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“It doesn’t add up, Roy. Whatever else you think of him, Cray’s smart. He wouldn’t need Justin’s help for anything. If he meant to kill somebody, he could do it all alone. What could Justin tell him?”
“How to hunt,” Shepherd said, the idea taking shape in his mind in the moment he uttered it aloud.
There was silence between them, just silence and the dark.
“Yes,” Anson allowed at last. “Yes, my boy could’ve taught him that.”
Shepherd rose from his chair. “What’s the fastest way from here to Hawk Ridge?”
“Take High Creek Road east and hook up with Highway Two-sixty-six. That’ll take you to One-ninety-one.”
“I’ll get going, then. Thanks for the root beer.”
Shepherd headed for the porch steps. Anson’s voice stopped him.
“Roy. You going to talk to Cray? Is that it?”
“Not Cray. Kaylie. She has a lot to tell me, I think. She tried more than once already. I’m afraid I didn’t listen.” Shepherd took the steps two at a time. “This time I will.”
At seven o’clock, midway through her three-to-eleven shift, Nurse Dana Cunningham headed down the hallway of Ward B to give Kaylie McMillan her evening injection.
An orderly walked beside her. Cunningham never entered the room of any violent patient without backup. This was a lesson she’d learned years ago at a youth facility in Phoenix, when a kid had gouged her cheek with the pull-tab of a soda can. She still saw the small puckered scar every time she looked in a mirror.
She didn’t mind the scar. It was helpful. It was a reminder.
“McMillan’s a tiny little thing,” she told the orderly, “but she killed a guy once — her husband, I think. So watch her.”
The orderly just nodded. Not a talker.
Cunningham’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the tile floor, but otherwise the ward was quiet. Most of the patients — those who were permitted free run of the hospital’s common areas throughout waking hours — were still in the commissary finishing dinner, or in the day hall watching TV.
A few of the hard cases lingered in their rooms, but they were so heavily sedated as to be barely sentient. Well, at least she’d persuaded Cray to consider lightening McMillan’s dosage.
At the door to Kaylie McMillan’s room, she paused and, as a standard precaution, looked through the plate-glass window before entering.
Kaylie was there.
Hanging.
Hanging from the grille of the air vent, Jesus, hanging with a rubber bedsheet around her neck…
After I’m dead, you’ll know he did it.
Kaylie’s words, less than an hour earlier. Not mere paranoia. A confused confession of suicidal intent.
Cunningham snapped a glance at the orderly, who was staring past her at the sight framed in the window. “Call security,” she said, not shouting, the words precise and calm. “Tell them we have a suicide attempt. Go.”
The orderly ran for the nurses’ station.
Cunningham found the latch button, depressed it with her fist, heard the release of the steel door’s pneumatic lock.
Then she was inside, pushing the plastic chair out of her way and running for Kaylie in the far corner, Kaylie who was suspended near the steel toilet she must have mounted to reach the ceiling, her body swinging slightly, blonde head lolling to one side, her back turned, left arm drooping, and Cunningham grabbed her….
Get her down, get her down. Still a chance to save her if her neck wasn’t broken — and if she hadn’t been hanging for too long…
The noose was knotted under Kaylie’s chin. Cunningham turned Kaylie toward her, groping for the knot, and she had time to see that Kaylie’s right elbow was crooked close to her chest, her hand wedged under the rubber noose to prevent asphyxiation, and her eyes — blue eyes, pretty eyes — were open wide.
Ambush.
This one word bloomed in Cunningham’s mind, and then Kaylie’s two legs came up together, bending at the knees, and with two slippered feet she kicked the nurse squarely in the face.
Dana Cunningham was a large woman, horse-strong, but the double kick caught her off balance, and she went down in a swirl of vertigo.
Kaylie cast off the noose and dropped to the floor.
Cunningham snatched blindly at Kaylie’s ankle, seized hold, yanked the girl to one knee. Got her, she thought with a flash of triumph, before Kaylie spun sideways and hefted the plastic chair and slammed it down on Cunningham’s head.
Pain dazzled her. She forgot Kaylie, forgot everything except the orderly’s name. “Eddie!” she screamed as Kaylie scrambled past her, out the door.
The orderly was still on the phone with security when he heard a crash from the far end of the ward, then Cunningham’s cry, and he knew there was worse trouble than a suicide.