Bellows Falls

Chapter 1

MY DESK LAMP LIGHT BARELY REACHED the far corners of my small, glassed-in office, leaving the squad room beyond completely dark. The lighting shrouded the whole place with an uncharacteristic intimacy, enhancing the quiet isolation I enjoyed when working after hours. The phone’s sudden, electronic chirping came as a jarring intrusion.

“Gunther.”

“Lieutenant, this is Marshall Smith. Pierre and I are down at the Retreat. I think we’ve found someone you been wanting to talk to.”

“Who?”

“Jasper Morgan. One of the regulars started smashing chairs at a substance abuse meeting in the cafeteria, so they called us. When we were sorting things out, I saw Morgan trying to look invisible along the back wall.”

“He still there?” I asked.

“They all are. We figured the best way not to spook him was to keep everybody put. Pierre’s stalling for time right now-pretending to figure out who did what.”

“I’ll be right there.”

I left the ancient brick building housing the police department and headed for the Retreat in my car, letting the warm summer air flush out the stale interior. Jasper Morgan was a minor drug dealer, which, given Vermont’s overall activity in that field, made him pretty small fry. In addition, he wasn’t currently on parole, had no warrants outstanding, and had been keeping a discreet profile. But I’d heard rumors his business had picked up lately, and was wondering why. In a town the size of Brattleboro, with some twelve thousand residents, we could still afford to focus on the vagaries of a single crook, and, given the climbing crime statistics in Massachusetts, a mere ten miles south of us, a little mild paranoia seemed like worthwhile health insurance. If Morgan’s recent prosperity was due to some change in either supply or demand, I wanted to know about it.

Not that a single conversation would be all that enlightening. Morgan was experienced enough to know who-between us and his drug business colleagues-was the bigger threat to his health. But a chat would at least remind him of our continuing interest.

The Brattleboro Retreat is one of the town’s largest employers, and with some sixteen hundred acres, its largest landowner. A psychiatric hospital founded two years before Davy Crockett died at the Alamo, it began as an insane asylum, financed by a woman who took exception to a local lawyer being cured of his lunacy with an ice water immersion followed by a fatal dose of opium.

Its campus-like facility occupies a broad, mid-level plain on Brattleboro’s northern edge, below the town’s tree-shaded common, and above a sweeping, shallow backwater marking the confluence of the West and Connecticut rivers, called the Retreat Meadows from the days before a downstream dam turned pastureland into a lake. The Meadows form a natural magnet for the general population, luring fishermen and boaters in the summer, and providing ice fishing and skating when it turns colder. It forms a perfect sylvan backdrop to the Retreat’s impressive sprawl of massive brick buildings and carefully tended trees, all of which make the place look more like a small elite college than a place for the mentally disturbed.

I left the traffic circle that cut across the front of the commons, and turned right down Linden Street, which swept down off the hill to the Retreat’s entrance gate, and from which I had a brief overview of the institution’s layout, attractively lit by regularly spaced iron lampposts and discreetly hidden floodlights.

There was also a police car outside the cafeteria entrance, about midway down a long string of connected buildings.

I parked behind the cruiser, walked up to its driver’s window, and leaned in to kill the emergency lights. I saw no need to rile the tenants unnecessarily, especially just below its only high-security floor.

Marshall Smith met me at the cafeteria’s double doors.

Over his shoulder was a large, well-lit room, in the center of which were several overturned chairs and tables, a scattering of splintered wood littering the floor, and a man lying face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. Far to the rear of the room, a disparate group of silent men and women stood facing us, looking like a late afternoon crowd waiting for a bus. Pierre Lavoie was circulating among them, pad in hand, taking down names and statements.

“Where’re the staffers?” I asked Smith, noticing their absence.

“It’s an anonymous meeting. Staff isn’t allowed inside ’cause it’s open to outsiders and residents both. The residents are escorted in, and then the staff waits outside till they’re all done.”

Smith led me farther inside, so I could have a full view of the distant group. “I had Pierre begin to the far left to keep things slow. Morgan’s over to the right.”

With that, pure human instinct overrode all his careful planning. He stared directly at Jasper Morgan and began raising his hand to point. Simultaneously, between Morgan and where Lavoie was collecting statements, a door cracked open to reveal the inquiring face of one of the staffers outside.

The combination was all Morgan needed. He bolted for the door, wrenched it open, hip-checked the man beyond, and vanished from view.

“Oh, Christ,” Marshall muttered, realizing his mistake. “Pierre. Get him,” he shouted.

But Lavoie was already halfway through the door himself.

I pointed at the man handcuffed on the floor. “Stay with him and keep this room secure,” I told Smith, breaking into a run. “And call for backup.” Nearing the door, I saw the crowd beginning to shift indecisively, some backing away, others leaning toward the exit. “Nobody leave the room,” I shouted, and elbowed my way through them, slamming the door behind me.

Facing me was a bright, windowless, cement-walled corridor, its walls decorated with pictures and trophy cases, its ceiling overrun with pipes. The Retreat being built on a slight incline, the first-floor cafeteria connected directly to the adjoining building’s basement. The corridor was empty, except for the fading echoes of rapid footfalls upon the linoleum floor.

I ran to the first corner, rounded it at full tilt, and stumbled over Pierre Lavoie, who was rolling helplessly on the ground, holding his bleeding face with both hands.

“Shit,” I said, instinctively glancing at his holster. It was empty.

I grabbed the radio from his belt. “M-80 from 0–2. I have an officer down and an armed suspect on the loose inside the Retreat. Put out a mutual aid request for manpower, round up everyone of our people you can locate, and activate the Tac Team. This is only about thirty seconds old, so concentrate on locking up the Retreat grounds as tightly as possible. Also close off both ends of Linden Street and position people on the Putney Road in case he gets out and tries to reach it cross-country. Who’s the on-call detective?”

“Martens,” came the brisk reply.

“Have her lead the Tac Team-full combat gear. Put Klesczewski in charge of organizing the perimeter. And a couple of ambulances here-now.”

“10-4.”

I crouched near Lavoie’s head. “How’re you doing?”

His voice was muffled. “I think he broke my nose. Jesus, it hurts like hell.”

“Are you breathing all right? Any other injuries?”

“No. I mean, yeah, I’m breathing fine. I’m okay ’cept for the nose. He was waiting when I came around the corner. Must’ve been holding a club or something.”

I glanced around and saw a heavy book lying at some distance on the floor. “He got your gun,” I said.

“Oh, Christ.”

I patted his shoulder and stood up. “You stay put. I’m going to reconnoiter a bit.”

“Don’t do it, Lieutenant. Wait for the others.”

“Stay there.”

The hallway ahead was short, leading to another corner. Clearing my own gun, I approached it cautiously but with few expectations. I knew the sounds of running feet I’d heard had been Morgan’s and didn’t think he’d doubled back on tiptoe just to bushwhack me. Predictably, the next stretch of corridor was equally bright and empty. Outside, dulled by the thick walls, a crescendo of sirens approached.

I moved down to the next corner and stuck my head around, more careful now that I was some distance from Lavoie. I’d come to a junction of sorts. The hallway narrowed and became a ramp heading right, while opposite me, a short set of stairs led up to a closed door. It was darker here, beginning to resemble the basement it was.

Keeping my eyes glued to the far end of the ramp, I sidled over to the steps, and climbed up to try the doorknob. It was locked, as I’d hoped.

Relieved, I proceeded up the ramp and risked a quick look around yet another corner. The passageway here was low-ceilinged, dimly lit, cement-floored, and lined by an almost endless row of narrow, closed doors. At its peak, the Retreat had housed some six hundred patients and an appropriately large staff. It was a notorious rabbit warren of hallways, rooms, connector tunnels, attics, and utility crawl spaces, many of them isolated behind locked doors, and many not.

Normally, I would have stopped there, not knowing which of the doors along the corridor might be hiding my frightened quarry. But a splash of light coming off the wall along which I was positioned, and a glitter of broken glass splayed out across the floor, drew me farther along.

My back against the wall, I sidestepped to the source of the light.

What I found was typical of the whole building. Beyond a heavy door, its glass now shattered, lay another hallway, but in contrast to where I stood, it was as opulent as my surroundings were utilitarian. The walls were hardwood paneled, the floor thickly carpeted, antique furniture was placed along its length, and the ceiling was made entirely of lovingly maintained tin bas-relief.

I felt like a fish peering through the porthole of a luxury liner.

I gently turned the doorknob just beneath the gaping hole in the glass. It opened without a sound, but I stayed where I was. I’d been too reckless already and wasn’t about to join Lavoie in a trip to the hospital.

I keyed the radio and told the others where to find me.

The next quarter hour was organized bedlam. Officers from the State Police, the Sheriff’s Department, and one each from the surrounding towns of Hinsdale, Vernon, and Chesterfield, all joined us to close off the exits of the Retreat buildings. Sammie Martens, the detective on call and my second-in command, arrived in full black battle dress, complete with body armor and Kevlar helmet, leading seven other similarly outfitted members of the Special Reaction Team, or Tac Team. Finally, to help us make some sense of the facility’s labyrinthine layout, the Retreat’s plant manager, Ben Coven, was asked to join us with a complete set of blueprints.

The approach, unlike my wandering down the hallway, was to be run by the book. The Tac Team would conduct the search in two squads of four, each covering a separate segment of the complex. As they cleared an assigned area, a uniformed officer or two would be left behind to insure Morgan couldn’t slip into their wake and hide. Communications would be over a restricted tactical channel, and geographic updates would be continuous, to ensure one team wouldn’t wind up in a potential crossfire with the other. Coven and I were to roam between the two teams, depending on where we were needed. As the plant manager ruefully pointed out from the start, the blueprints-especially where they covered the oldest buildings-were approximations only. He had more in his head than we would ever find on paper, especially where it came to the fine details.

The process, once begun, reminded me of those World War Two Navy movies, where the brass stands around a darkened communications center and listens to a battle taking place over the loudspeakers, tracking its developments by moving small symbols around a transparent Plexiglas panel. In our case, that center was the cafeteria, now empty of its first crowd, with Coven and me and a couple of runners playing the brass, surrounded by several radios, a phone, and three tables covered with blueprints. Listening to Sammie and the others exchanging terse phrases in a clipped monotone, I longed to be anywhere but where I was, standing around, fully expecting to hear gunshots at any moment.

The search was mercifully restricted to the basements, the lower floors, and the utility tunnels that ran in a tangled maze between every building on campus. Tracking Morgan by the damage he’d left behind, we discovered that while he’d tried for higher ground, he’d soon returned to where the traveling wasn’t so confined by locked doors.

Corridor by corridor, section by section, we followed the progress of both Tac Teams until Sammie’s group arrived under the main reception area.

“Lieutenant?”

“Go ahead, Sam.”

“We’ve got a complication here. Looks like a low, broad cement-floor tunnel with some really old rooms off to both sides. They’re all connected, like catacombs, and we can’t tell how many passageways might be leading off them.”

“Hold on.” I looked inquiringly at Ben Coven.

He tapped his finger on the blueprint before us. “Oldest part of the complex, or near enough. It’s a rat’s nest.”

I glanced at another map, to where the second Tac Team was searching. So far, there was no telling which one was hotter on Morgan’s trail. I decided against combining forces.

“Sammie? We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

Coven grabbed the relevant blueprints and led the way out of the cafeteria and along several passageways that had already been cleared. He reached a narrow steel door at the foot of a twisting flight of stairs and pulled a jangling key ring from his pocket. Swinging open the door, he took us down into a hot, humid, dark environment filled with the restless echoes of Sammie’s team muttering among themselves in a short cul-de-sac just off the bottom of the staircase.

Her face looking unnaturally pale, floating between a black helmet and vest, Sammie appeared out of the gloom. She was dripping with sweat. “Any ideas?” she asked.

I took the map from Coven and spread it out on the rough cement floor. Several flashlight beams suddenly appeared to help us see. I pointed to our location. “This is the official version. How’s it compare to what you’ve seen?”

Sammie crouched next to Coven and me. The plant manager began moving the tip of his finger along the paper. “This is the main tunnel you described.” He glanced up quickly, “Right around that corner. It’s basically north-south and runs from the underground passage between Tyler Building and here to a sealed bulkhead that gives onto the service road overlooking the Meadows. The catacombs, as you called them, are on both sides-basically a series of small, dirt-floored rooms that interconnect to each other and to the central tunnel.”

Sammie straightened from peering at the blueprint. “That’s not so bad. I thought there might be rooms off the rooms, or maybe more tunnels we couldn’t see.”

Ben Coven sighed slightly, the obvious bearer of bad news. “Well, there are a few outlets that don’t show up here. I wouldn’t call them tunnels, exactly, but they are big enough for someone who’s desperate.”

“I think this qualifies,” I said.

“I don’t know what they’re for or where they lead,” Coven continued. “Maybe they’re old drainage pipes. Some of them seem to be dug into the dirt, right under the cement floor, and others look like old, abandoned culverts. I always thought they were mostly dead ends, but I never bothered finding out.”

“Where are they?” Sammie asked, jutting her chin toward the blueprint.

Coven sketched them out. “For sure, there’re three of them, and I think that’s it, but to me they’re just something to step around so I don’t break my neck. I can’t swear there aren’t more.”

Sammie looked up at me. “You want to lead it?”

Her deferral was technically in order, since I was the ranking officer, and with her military background Sammie took whatever she was given from the top down, no questions asked. But I knew her better than that.

“It’s your team, Sammie. Tell me where you want me.”

I’d already borrowed a vest, but without a helmet I was correctly assigned a backup position. Ben Coven was sent back to the cafeteria after I’d cleared his passage by radio.

Sammie positioned us as if we were taking a street, house by house-in homage to the eerie layout. The Retreat’s “torture chambers” and “secret caches of human bones” were common topics among the locals, born of the idiot folklore attending any treatment center for the mentally ill. But being in one of the famous cellars at last, and seeing it extend out into the gloom, with ancient brick archways, mysterious tunnels, and an inmate on the loose, it was hard not to give the tall tales some credit.

Sammie went strictly according to procedure, everybody covering someone else, flashlights either directed forward or extinguished altogether, to avoid night blindness and giving the opposition a better target. No corner was rounded without first being checked with a hand-held mirror. Sammie herself operated a night vision monocular and scanned continually back and forth, watching for any surreptitious movements.

The few tunnels Ben Coven had mentioned were trickier, being too tight for more than a single, small, crawling individual. The safest bet would have been to use gas canisters and flush out whoever might be down there, but given the kind of facility we were in, that wasn’t an option. What we did, therefore, harkened back to Vietnam, and the tunnel-rats of Chu-Chi. One by one, again starting with mirrors, the smallest members of the team dropped down into the holes without backup and made their way to a dead end in every case.

By the time we reached the sealed bulkhead at the far end, we were drenched in sweat, our eyes were aching, and we’d built up enough nervous energy to run a generator. It was with obvious relief that Sammie announced the “all clear.”

Only in the following relaxed silence did we all distinctly hear the distant, muffled sound of something in motion.

“Cover,” Sammie yelled, causing us to flatten onto the ground in a circle, facing out. In the total darkness, Sammie made a slow, careful pan of our surroundings with the night scope.

“What do you think it was?” she asked, finding nothing.

“It sounded far away,” I answered, “like an echo.”

Ward Washburn, one of the team, muttered, “There is no far away, for crying out loud.”

Instinctively, we all returned to total silence, straining to hear it again. Working from memory, I crawled to a spot left of the bulkhead, and to a small, jagged hole in the crumbling concrete floor. My fingers wrapped around some rebar covering the top of a caved-in drainage pipe-a barrier we’d pulled on earlier to no effect.

This time, I pushed it down instead, and the heavy mesh gave way like a swinging trapdoor. “Sammie, come here.”

They all joined me to stare at the tiny opening. “You’re kidding,” Washburn said softly. Sammie dropped to her stomach and put her head into the pipe, the night scope in her eye. “It’s open as far as I can see toward Linden Street.”

The sound came again, clearer this time-something metallic dropping into place. It floated out of the twenty-inch-wide drain as from an ancient loudspeaker.

“Must be something else,” a voice spoke up behind me.

Sammie looked up. “You going to make that assumption?”

“No one can fit in there.”

“I can,” she countered.

I spoke into the radio. “This is Gunther. Somebody escort Ben Coven back here on the double.”

The plant manager was by our side in under three minutes.

“You know where this connects?” I asked him.

He spread out his papers doubtfully, already shaking his head. “I’d be amazed if we have it. Looks too old and too small for us to mess with.”

A moment later, he straightened up. “Nope. No sign of it.”

“I’m going in,” Sammie announced. “I’m the only one as small as Morgan.”

I laid a hand on her shoulder but looked at Coven. “Sammie thinks this runs toward Linden Street. What might it hook up with?”

Coven consulted his plans again. “Utility tunnel maybe?”

I glanced over at the old bulkhead. “That wouldn’t make sense. It looks more like a drainage culvert, to take away any water that might leak in through that thing.”

Coven tapped a spot with his finger. “Then this is probably your best bet. It’s a collection pipe for most of the drainage in this area. It’s good-sized, and accessible by manhole, so you could backtrack along it and see if this connects to it.”

I looked up at Sammie. “I like that idea a lot better.”

Coven unlocked the bulkhead and led us into the comparative coolness of the night air. We walked along a paved service road to a manhole cover some two hundred feet to the west. He swung his arm like a pendulum, bisecting the road. “Runs in this direction, about ten feet down, angling toward the Meadows.”

Two of the team members had already pried open the cover and were cautiously shining their lights down. Sammie stepped up to the hole’s edge.

I poked Washburn in the side and pointed at his helmet, addressing Sammie. “I’m coming with you.” Washburn handed me the helmet and I followed Sammie underground.

The cement tube at the bottom of a steel ladder was straight, clean, odorless, and big enough to walk in, stooped over.

And utterly silent.

We went up the slight incline, pacing the distance until we reached the approximate axis of the drainage pipe from the basement we’d just left. To my satisfaction, we found a rough opening, eroded by decades of runoff and rot. The tiny garden of brittle, crystalline growth that had taken root on its ragged edge had been partially scraped clean by the recent passage of something large and heavy.

I showed the traces to Sammie. “I think this just turned into a ‘good-news-bad news’ story.” I pointed down slope. “And I bet the bad news is out there.”

We retraced our steps past the manhole, to where the pipe emptied into the Retreat Meadows. There, in a narrow strip of muddy ground, right at water’s edge, a fresh set of sneaker tracks headed off toward the northwest.

I used the radio to expand the cordon we’d set around the campus, asked for additional backup and some tracking dogs, and issued a statewide Be-On-the-Alert for Jasper Morgan, but I wasn’t optimistic. If he’d been motivated enough to get this far, he wasn’t going to be picked up in an hour downing beers at some local dive.

In any case, his escape was no longer what truly concerned me. It was the effort he’d made-and the reasons behind it.