Hide (Detective D.D. Warren, #2)(37)

"Nineteen seventy," Charlie said. "See, there was a reason the head nurse, Jill Cochran, liked us college boys. We were strong, sure, that definitely helped. But also… we were fresh, optimistic. We didn't just take care of the patients, we genuinely cared about them. Myself, I already knew back then I wanted to be a minister. A mental hospital is a good place to start if you want to reach troubled souls. I got to learn firsthand what a difference the right word at the right time can mean for a person. But I gotta say, it's a place where no one should linger, not even the staff.

"The older guys, the 'experienced' ANs who hung around for decades… hell, some of those guys grew loonier than the patients. They got institutionalized themselves, forgot what life was beyond the hospital walls. When I first started in reception, there was a patient with a filthy bandage on his leg. First night, I asked the Charge Attendant what was with the bandage. He had no idea. Hadn't even noticed the patient had a bandage on his leg. So I enter the patient's room, ask him if I can check out his leg. Minute I remove the bandage, a stream of pus shoots across the room. And then, right in front of my eyes, maggots pour out of the wound.

"Turns out, the poor guy got an ulceration on his leg two months before. Doctor bandaged it up. No one ever checked it again. Not a single AN. They'd been looking at the patient for months without ever seeing him.

"Well, that was bad enough. Neglectful. But sometimes things got a little worse."

Charlie broke off, looking uncomfortable again. Both Warren and Dodge were listening intently now. From my vantage point, slouched low in Dodge's car, I could tell both investigators were hanging on Charlie's every word. I know I was.

The retired minister took a deep breath. "So, one night I get a call from the nurse at the residence for female patients. Keri Stracke. She asks me if so-and-so is on duty. I say yes. Keri asks me where he is. Well, I do a little walkabout of the I-Building but don't see him. I tell her he's out, maybe gone for dinner. There's a long pause. Keri tells me, in a very peculiar voice, that I need to come over right now.

"Now, I'm the only one around. I can't just leave I-Building. I try to explain this, but she tells me again, in that funny little voice, that I don't have a choice. She means right now! What can I do? Now I'm really concerned. I go over. Keri meets me out front and without a word escorts me upstairs. She stops in front of the closed door of a patient's room. I look through the window, and there's my fellow AN, in bed with a patient. She's seventeen years old, real pretty, and catatonic. I've never wanted to hurt a fellow human being so badly in my life."

"What did you do?" Detective Dodge asked quietly.

"I opened the door. Minute Adam heard the noise, he looked up. You could see on his face he knew it was over. He climbed off her, zipped up, walked out of the room. I escorted him back to the I-Building, to the office, where I called our supervisor. Adam was fired on the spot, of course. I don't care what stories you hear about patient abuse, that kind of behavior was never condoned. Adam was done; he knew it, too."

Adam's last name?" Dodge asked.

"Schmidt," Charlie sighed.

"They file a police report?" Sergeant Warren asked, more sharply

Charlie shook his head. "No, management wanted to keep things quiet."

Warren raised a brow at that. "You know what happened to Adam?"

"Not really. But…" That hesitation again. "I saw him several more times. On the grounds. Twice from a distance, but I was pretty sure it was him. Third time, I caught up to him, asked him what the hell he was doing. He said he'd had to take care of some paperwork. Given it was nearly ten p.m., that didn't make much sense to me. Next day, I followed up with Jill Cochran. She didn't know anything about it. We kept an eye on the female patients for a bit. No one talked about it, but we were on guard. I didn't see Adam again, but this is a big property"

Dodge frowned. "You guys patrol the grounds, make any attempts at better securing the property?"

"We locked the gates at night, staffed the facility twenty-four/seven. But… in the odd hours of the morning, ANs like me were hardly wandering the grounds. We had patients to tend, we stayed in our offices." Charlie shrugged. "It's possible someone could've been coming and going, and we wouldn't have seen a thing. It had happened before, you know."

"Before?" Warren asked sharply.

"We had a murder on the grounds, a female nurse in the mid-seventies. I understand one of the ANs looked out a window of the admitting building and spotted the body first thing in the morning. Ingrid, Inga… Inge. Inge Lovell, I think it was. She'd been raped and beaten to death. Terrible, terrible tragedy. The police were called, but didn't have any witnesses—none of the other attendants had seen a thing."

Warren was nodding now, Charlie's story apparently having sparked her own memory of the event. "No arrest was ever made," she said.

"Rumor mill was that a patient had done it," Charlie supplied. "In fact, most folks thought Christopher Eola did it. Wouldn't surprise me. Eola was admitted after my days as an AN. I ran into him once or twice, however, when I came in on Sundays. Scary customer, Mr. Eola. The cold side of crazy."

Dodge was flipping through his pages. "Eola, Eola, Eola."

"The hotline," Warren murmured.