Cypress Grove

Chapter Eight

A year or so into playing detective, I pulled the chit on a missing-persons case. Rightfully it should have gone to Banks, who was senior and next up. But Banks was actively pursuing leads, the Lieutenant told me, on a series of abductions and rapes at local private schools. Would I mind.

A patient had disappeared from an extended-care facility. Patricia Pope, nineteen years old. Shed been out with friends celebrating her birthday with slabs of pizza and pitchers of Co’Cola. As they ferried home around eight in the evening, a drunk driver smashed head-on into their car. He’d been drinking since he got off work at five and somehow had entered the new interstate by an exit ramp. The other four in the car were killed. Patricia, riding in the front passenger seat, went through the windshield and onto the hood of the drunk’s F-1 50. She’d received acute care in Baptist Hospital’s ER, from there had been moved up to neuro ICU for several days where a shunt in her head dripped fluid into a graduated cylinder, then onto a general ward, finally to a separate, step-down facility. She made no acknowledgment when spoken to, reacted but slightly to pain. (In ER they pinched nipples and twisted. Upstairs, kinder and gentler, they poked pins about feet, ankles, forearms, torso.) Her hands had begun curling in upon themselves, first in a series of contractures pitching muscle against bone. Eyes rolled left to right continually. She was incontinent, provided nutrients through a tube that had to be reintroduced with each feeding. Caretakers threaded these tubes down her nose, blew in air through a syringe and listened with a stethoscope to be certain the tube was in her stomach.

The incident occurred on April 3. Patricia had been relocated to the EC facility on April 20. When oncoming nurses went in to check patients early in their shift on the morning of June 17, Patricia was absent from her bed. That was the way the administrator put it when he called. Absent from her bed. Like it was summer camp. The call came in at 7:06. Half an hour later, 7:38 by the brass-and-walnut clock on the wall, I was sitting in the administrator’s office with a cup of venomous coffee in hand watching said administrator, Daniel Covici, MBA, CEO, rub a thumb against the burnished surface of his desk. It was the facility’s desk, of course, but I had no doubt he thought of it as his own.

Most investigations are little more than paint by the numbers. You ask a string of questions in the proper order, when they don’t get answered you ask them again, sooner or later you find your way to the husband or wife, spurned boy- or girlfriend, business partner, parent, younger brother, gardener, eccentric uncle, jealous neighbor. This was no different. Within the hour, down in the Human Resources basement office looking over a list of recent terminations, I came across the name of an orderly who had quit without prior notice at the end of his shift on June 16, saying simply that he was going on to another, better job. He’d been with the hospital sixteen years. Douglas Lynds. Address out by what was at that time Southwestern, a tiny freestanding wooden house.

From the street I caught glimpses of the university’s Gothic spires and buttresses among the trees. The house sat ten or twelve yards back, though the frontage could scarcely be called a yard. Traces of old foundation showed, like teeth rotted to gum level. Probably there had once been a stand of such structures, housing for graduate students maybe, of which only the one remained. It was in immaculate condition, however, freshly painted pristine white, window frames and trim a light, minty green.

Things were a lot looser those days. When I didn’t get a response to my knock, I went around back, knocked again there, then shimmed the kitchen door. If it ever came to it, I’d just say the door was ajar, I heard sounds inside, suspected intruders.

Three rooms. Kitchen with counters and stove immaculate, bath just off it to the right, living room straight ahead, bedroom to the left. That’s where I found her. She was propped up with pillows, dressed in a pale pink nightgown with small blue flowers at neck and hem and larger blue flowers for buttons. Her hair, clean and bright, lay on the pillow, framing a face wherein eyes rolled left, right, left. Mucus ran out of one nostril and snarled towards the slack mouth.

“Please don’t hurt her,” a voice said behind me.

I told him I wouldn’t, told him who I was.

“I’ve been out shopping. I never leave her alone any more than I have to.” He put the bag of groceries on the floor by the door. “She needs changing. All right if I do that?”

Yes.

Going to the bed, he unbuttoned the nightgown and unpinned the towel doing service as diaper. The strong chemical smell of her feces spilled into the room. He took the diaper into the bathroom, to a covered pail there. He ran water till it was warm, and wet a facecloth. Brought it out and, holding her up effortlessly with the flat of one arm, wiped her clean. He took the facecloth back into the bathroom, rinsed and hung it on a rack there, washed his hands. He replaced the diaper, buttoned her gown and smoothed it. Then reached up to snap a fingernail against the IV feed, checking patency, drip rate, level.

“I thought I’d have longer with her. Just the two of us.”

“I’m sorry.”

He hadn’t meant for this to happen, he told me, standing there looking down at her, into her face; hadn’t intended to cause any trouble. He only wanted to take care of her. That’s what he’d been doing at Parkview, for a long time now. Cleaning and bathing her, seeing after her feeds. But there was always too much else to do, too many others needing attention. She deserved better than that.

“What will happen to her now?”

“She’ll go back to the hospital.”

“Parkview, you mean.”

“Right.”

“And I’ll be going to jail.”

“For a while.”

“Any notion how long?”

“Hard to say.” God knows what they’d charge him with. Kidnapping, endangerment? Excessive kindness? “A year, eighteen months, something like that. After that you’d be on probation.”

He nodded.

“Once I’m out, I’ll be able to visit her.”