Mortal Fear

CHAPTER 15

Jason never even stopped at his apartment. As soon as Carol disappeared into her building, he told the cabdriver to drop him at his car and drove directly to GHP. He crossed immediately into the outpatient building. It was seven P.M. and the large waiting room was deserted. Jason went directly to his office, pulled off his jacket, and sat down at his computer terminal. GHP had spent a fortune on their computer system and was proud of it. Each station accessed the large mainframe where all patient data was entered. Although the individual charts were still the best source of patient information, most of the material could be obtained from the computer. Best of all, the sophisticated machinery could scan the entire patient base of GHP and graphically display the data on the screen, analyzed in almost any way one could wish.

Jason first called up the current survival curves. The graph that the computer drew was shaped like the steep slope of a mountain, starting high, then rounding and falling off. The graph compared the survival rate of GHP users by age. As one might expect, subscribers at the oldest end of the graph had the lowest survival rate. Over the past five years, although the median age of the GHP population had gradually increased, the survival curves stayed about the same.

Next, Jason asked the computer to print month-by-month graphs for the last half year. As he had feared, he saw the death rate rise for patients in their late fifties and early sixties, particularly during the last three months.

A sudden crash made him jump from his seat, but when he looked out in the hall he saw it was just the cleaning service.

Relieved, Jason returned to the computer. He wished he could separate the data on patients who had been given executive physicals, but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. Instead, he had to be content with crude death rates. These graphs compared the percentages of deaths associated with age. This time the curve went the other way. It started low, then as the age increased the percentage of deaths went up. But then Jason asked the computer to print out a series of such graphs over the previous several months, month by month. The results were striking, particularly over the last two months. The death curves rose sharply starting at age fifty.

Jason sat at the computer terminal for another half hour, trying to coax the machine into separating out the executive physicals. What he expected he would see if he’d been able, was a rapid increase in death rates for people fifty and over who had high-risk factors such as smoking, alcohol abuse, poor diets, and lack of exercise. But the data was not available. It had not been programmed to be extracted en masse. Jason would have to take each individual name and laboriously obtain the data himself, but he didn’t have time to do that. Besides, the crude death-rate curves were enough to corroborate his suspicions. He now knew he was right. But there was one more way to prove it. With enormous unease, he left his office and returned to his car.

Driving out the Riverway, Jason headed for Roslindale. The closer he got, the more nervous he became. He had no idea what he was about to confront, but he suspected it was not going to be pleasant. His destination was the Hartford School, the institution run by GHP for retarded children. If Alvin Hayes had been right about his own condition, he must have been right about his retarded son’s.

The Hartford School backed onto the Arnold Arboretum, an idyllic setting of graceful wooded hills, fields, and ponds. Jason turned into the parking lot, which was all but deserted, and stopped within fifty feet of the front entrance. The handsome, Colonial-style building had a deceptively serene look that belied the personal family tragedies it housed. Severe retardation was a hard subject even for professionals to deal with. Jason vividly remembered examining some of the children on previous visits to the school. Physically many were perfectly formed, which only made their low IQs that much more disturbing.

The front door was closed and locked, so Jason rang the buzzer and waited. The door was opened by an overweight security guard in a soiled blue uniform.

“Can I help you?” he said, making it clear he had no wish to.

“I’m a doctor,” Jason said. He tried to push by the security man, who stepped back to bar his way.

“Sorry — no visitors after six, doctor.” “I’m hardly a visitor,” Jason said. He pulled out his wallet and produced his GHP identity card.

The guard didn’t even look at the ID. “No visitors after six,” he repeated, adding, “and no exceptions.”

“But I…” Jason began. He stopped in midsentence. From the man’s expression, he knew discussion was futile.

“Call in the morning, sir,” the guard said, slamming the door.

Jason walked back down the front steps and gazed up at the five-story building. It was brick, with granite window casings. He wasn’t about to give up. Assuming the guard was watching, Jason went back to his car and drove out the driveway. About a hundred yards down the road, he pulled over to the side. He got out, and with some difficulty made his way through the Arboretum back to the school.

He circled the building, staying in the shadows. There were fire escapes on all sides but the front. They went right up to the roof. Unfortunately, as at Carol’s building, none was at ground level, and Jason couldn’t find anything to stand on to reach the first rung.

On the right side of the building, he spotted a flight of stairs that went down to a locked door. Feeling with his hands in the dark, he discovered the door had a central glass pane. He went back up the stairs and felt around the ground until he found a rock the size of a softball.

Holding his breath, Jason went back to the door and smashed the glass. In the quiet evening, the clatter seemed loud enough to wake the dead. Jason fled to the nearby trees and hid, watching the building. When no one appeared after fifteen minutes, he ventured out and returned to the door. Gingerly, he reached in and undid the latch. No alarm sounded.

For the next half hour Jason stumbled around a large basement he guessed was a storage — area. He found a stepladder and debated taking it outside to use to reach a fire escape, but gave up that idea and continued feeling about blindly for a light. His hands finally touched a switch and he flicked it on.

He was in a maintenance room filled with lawnmowers, shovels, and other equipment. Next to the light switch was a door. Slowly, Jason eased it open. Beyond was a much larger furnace room that was dimly illuminated.

Moving quickly, Jason crossed the second room and mounted a steep steel stairway. He opened the door at the top and immediately realized he had reached the front hall. From his previous visits he knew the stairs to the wards were to his right. On his left was an office where a middle-aged woman in a bulging white uniform was reading at a desk. Looking down toward the front entrance, Jason could see the guard’s feet perched on a chair. The man’s face was out of sight.

As quietly as possible, Jason slipped through the basement door and let it ease back into place. For a moment he was in full view of the woman in the office, but she didn’t look up from her book. Forcing himself to move slowly, he silently crossed the hall and entered the stairwell. He breathed a sigh of relief when he was completely out of sight of both the woman and the guard. Taking the stairs on tiptoe two at a time, he headed for the third floor, where the ward for boys aged four to twelve was located.

The stairs were marble, and even though he tried to be quiet, his footsteps echoed in the otherwise silent, cavernous space. Above him was a skylight, which at that time looked like a black onyx set into the ceiling.

On the third floor, Jason carefully opened the stairwell door. He remembered there was a glassed-in nurses’ office to the right at the end of a long hallway and noticed that although the corridor was dark, the office still blazed with light. A male attendant was, like the woman downstairs, busy reading.

Looking diagonally across the hall, Jason eyed the door to the ward. He noted it had a large central window with embedded wire. After one last check on the attendant, Jason tiptoed across the hall and let himself into the darkened room. Immediately, he was confronted by a musty smell. After waiting a moment to be sure the attendant hadn’t been disturbed, he began searching for the light. To confirm his suspicions, he would have to turn it on even if it meant being caught.

The drab room was suddenly flooded with raw, white fluorescent light. The ward was some fifty feet long, with low iron beds lined up on either side, leaving a narrow aisle. There were windows, but they were high, near the ceiling. At the end of the room were tiled toilet facilities with a coiled hose for cleaning and a bolted door to the fire escape. Jason walked down the aisle looking at the nameplates attached to the ends of beds: Harrison, Lyons, Gessner…. The children, disturbed by the light, began to sit up, staring with wide, vacant, and unknowing eyes at the intruder.

Jason stopped, and a terrible sense of revulsion that expanded to terror gripped him. It was worse than he’d imagined. Slowly, his eyes went from one pitiful face to another of the unwanted creatures. Instead of looking like the children they were, they all looked like miniature senile centenarians with beady eyes, wrinkled dry skin, and thinned white hair, showing scaly patches of scalp. Jason spotted the name Hayes. Like the others, the child appeared prematurely aged. He’d lost most of his eyelashes and his lower lids hung down. In place of his pupils were the glass-white reflection of dense cataracts. Except for light perception, the child was blind.

Some of the children began getting out of their beds, balancing precariously on wasted limbs. Then, to Jason’s horror they began to move toward him. One of them began to say feebly the word “please” over and over in a high-pitched, grating voice. Soon the others joined in a terrifying, unearthly chorus.

Jason backed up, afraid to be touched. Hayes’s son got out of his bed and began to feel his way forward, his bony, uncoordinated little arms making helpless swirling motions in the air.

The mob of children backed Jason up against the ward door and began to tug at his clothes. Frightened and nauseated, Jason pushed open the ward door and retreated into the hall. After he closed the door, the children pressed their mummylike faces against the glass, still silently voicing the word “please.”

“Hey, you!” Jason heard a rasping voice behind him.

Turning his head, he saw the attendant standing outside his office, waving his open book in astonishment. “What’s goin’ on?” the man yelled.

Jason ran across the hall to the stairwell, but he’d descended only a few steps before a second voice echoed up from below. “Kevin? What gives?”

Looking over the railing, Jason saw the guard down on the first-floor landing.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the guard said, and charged up the stairs, club in hand.

Reversing direction, Jason returned to the third floor. The attendant was still standing in the doorway of his office, apparently too dumbfounded to move as Jason sprinted across the hall and back into the ward. Some of the children were wandering aimlessly about the room; others had collapsed back on their beds. Jason frantically beckoned them over, opened the door, and as the attendant and guard appeared, they were immediately surrounded by a swarm of boys.

They tried to shove their way through the crowd, but the children clung to them, shouting their eerie, monotonous chorus of please.

Reaching the emergency door at the opposite end of the room, Jason depressed its lever which, for safety’s sake, was positioned six feet off the floor. At first the door wouldn’t open. Obviously, it had not been used for years. Jason could see that paint had sealed it shut. Putting his shoulder against it, Jason finally got it to swing free. Stepping out into the dark night, he pushed several of the boys back into the ward before closing the heavy door.

Wasting no time, he clambered down the fire escape. There was no need to be quiet now. He was at the second level when the door above him opened. Once again he heard the shrieking of the children. Then he felt the vibration of heavy boots on the fire escape.

Pulling out a pin caused the final ladder to descend with a deep thud, as it hit the asphalt of the parking lot below. Even before it had touched down, Jason was on it. The slight delay enabled the guard behind Jason to close the distance between them.

Once on the lawn, though, Jason’s running ability soon left the beefy guard far behind, and by the time Jason reached his car, he had plenty of time to start the engine, put it in gear, and pull away. In his rearview mirror he could barely see the man just reaching the edge of the road, shaking his fist in the light of a street lamp.

Jason could barely control his disgust and fury at what he’d seen. He drove directly to Boston police headquarters and brazenly left his car in a no-parking zone in front of the building.

“I want to see Detective Curran,” Jason told the officer at the desk, then identified himself.

The policeman calmly checked his watch, then called up to Homicide. He spoke for a minute, then covered the receiver with his hand. “Would anyone else do?”

“No. I want Curran. And now, please.”

The policeman spoke into the phone a few minutes more, then hung up. “Detective Curran isn’t available, sir.”

“I think he’ll talk with me. Even if he’s off duty.”

“That’s not the problem,” the policeman said. “Detective Curran is on a double homicide in Revere. He should be calling in within an hour or so. If you want, you can wait or leave your number. It’s up to you, sir.”

Jason thought for a moment. He’d been up most of the night, his nerves were shot, and the idea of a shower, a change of clothes, and food had a lot of appeal. Besides, once he got together with Curran, he would be busy for some time. He left his, home number, asking that Curran call as soon as possible.

The United flight from Seattle had been delayed considerably, and by the time it landed at Logan, Juan Diaz was in a sour mood. He’d not screwed up an assignment so badly since he hit the wrong man in New York. That fiasco was excusable, but his current one was not. He’d been within a few seconds of popping both the doctor and the nightclub puta when Jason, an amateur, had outsmarted him. Juan had no excuse and had told the contact as much. He knew he had to redeem himself or else, and he looked forward to it eagerly. As soon as he got off the plane, he went to the phone. It was answered on the second ring.

Jason drove the short distance from the police station to Louisburg Square, trying to erase the horrible image of the prematurely aged children at the school. He didn’t even want to think about Hayes and his discovery until he was safely in Curran’s presence.

When he got to his building, he drove around the block a couple of times to make sure no one was watching it. Finally, convincing himself that the guard at the school had not looked at his ID, and hence had no idea who he was, Jason parked his car, carried his luggage up to his apartment, and turned on the lights. To his relief, the place was exactly as he’d left it. When he glanced out at the square, it seemed as peaceful as ever.

Jason was about to get into the shower when he remembered the one other person he should speak to besides the detective. He dialed Shirley. She finally answered on the eighth ring. Jason could hear animated voices in the background.

“Jason!” she exclaimed. “When did you get back from vacation?”

“I got in tonight.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked, picking up on the exhaustion and worry in his voice.

“Big trouble. I think I’ve figured out not only Hayes’s discovery, but how it was being misused. It involves the GHP in a far worse way than you could ever imagine.”

“Tell me.”

“Not over the phone.”

“Then come right over. I have guests here, but I’ll get rid of them.”

“I’m waiting to speak to Curran in Homicide.” “I see… you’ve already contacted him?”

“He’s out on a case, but he should be calling shortly.”

“Then why don’t I come to your apartment? You’ve got me really terrified now.”

“Welcome to the club,” Jason said with a short, bitter laugh. “You might as well come over. You probably should be present when I talk to Curran.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Oh, one other thing. Do you remember who’s currently medical director at the Hartford School?”

“Dr. Peterson, I believe,” Shirley said. “I can find out for certain tomorrow.”

“Wasn’t Peterson closely involved in Hayes’s clinical studies?” Jason asked, suddenly remembering that Peterson was the. doctor who had done the physical on Hayes.

“I think so. Is it important?”

“I’m not sure,” Jason said. “But if you’re coming, hurry. Curran should be calling any minute.”

Jason hung up and was again about to take his shower when he realized Carol too might be in danger. Picking up the phone again, he dialed her number.

“I want you to be sure to stay at home,” he said the moment she answered. “I’m not fooling. Don’t answer your door — don’t go out.”

“Now what is it?”

“The Hayes conspiracy is worse than anything I could imagine.”

“You sound anxious, Jason.”

In spite of himself, Jason smiled. Sometimes Carol could sound like a psychiatrist.

“I’m not anxious, I’m scared to death. But I’ll be talking with the police shortly.”

“Will you let me know what’s going on?” Carol demanded.

“I promise.” Jason hung up and finally went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.