Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(57)

Mahoney turned the car into the winding drive that led up to the psychiatric facility. He said, “And yet Willingham’s ex-wife came to believe that Howard did not commit the crime. How did that happen?”

“And why did she even care in the first place?” I said. “Who got her on Howard’s side? She told me he wrote her letters. Did we ever find any in her house?”

“Letters from death row? No, I don’t remember seeing anything like that on the evidence manifest.”

We went inside the building, found Abigail, the same cheery receptionist with the ice daggers for eyes, and told her we wanted to see Drs. Nathan Tolliver and Jeanne Hicks.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Abigail sniffed. “They’re making rounds.”

Mahoney said, “You like your computer, Abigail?”

She craned her head around at the monitor. “I do. Brand-new.” He held up a piece of paper and pressed it to the glass that separated us. “This is a federal order. We want to see Tolliver and Hicks and all documents pertaining to Kay Sutter Willingham now or I will bring in an army of FBI agents and they will take your brand-new computer and every other computer in this place along with all the records.”

Abigail pulled back. “You can’t do that. We have patients.”

“Watch me,” Mahoney said. “I’m giving them five minutes.”

Four minutes later, a flushed Nathan Tolliver ran to the security door and motioned us in, breathing hard. “Do you have to threaten people like that?”

“If I’m not getting what I want when I want it, yes.”

“The files are being gathered, and Dr. Hicks is just finishing up,” he said. “May I see the court order?”

Mahoney handed it to him. He studied it, his lips moving, while we walked.

“Everything look right?” I asked when we arrived at his office.

“Appears so,” he said, handing the order to Ned. He gestured toward the office. “Please.”

We entered. A few moments later, his secretary came in holding several files. She was followed by Dr. Hicks.

“There’s a lot to digest,” Tolliver said. “We’re here to help.”

“And we appreciate it,” I said.

The secretary put two files down in front of us. I flipped one open. Ned opened the other. I scanned the first few pages, recognizing them as much the same as the file the vice president had shown us. I said, “You believed Kay Willingham’s problem was largely chemical.”

Dr. Hicks nodded. “She’d go off her meds and within weeks, she’d have a crash.”

“What were the triggers for her going off the meds?”

“Usually a traumatic incident.”

“Such as the death of her mother?”

“That occurred shortly before she checked in last time, yes.”

Ned said, “Big mom issues?”

Hicks glanced at Tolliver, who was listening intently. She said, “She had all sorts of issues, some of which included her mother. But then again, I’d hear about them when she was fragmented mentally. One day her mother was a saint and her father her best friend. The next she’d claim her father was a racist who killed black people and that her mother was a willing accomplice and so was half of Montgomery and on and on, all the way to the White House and back. It was incredibly paranoid, delusional, and hard to follow.”

“And the parents?” Mahoney asked.

Tolliver said, “Both her mother and father had deep local roots, money, and land going back generations. The dad was a city father in Montgomery. Her mother hosted charity balls.”

“When Kay was here, even in her fragmented state, did she ever talk about Napoleon Howard?”





CHAPTER 63





DR. HICKS HESITATED, THEN SAID, “She believed he was innocent, framed for murder, but she couldn’t prove it. She obsessed on his case, as a matter of fact.”

“Any reason for her interest and belief in his innocence?”

Tolliver said, “He wrote her. I think they carried on a correspondence.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Hicks said.

I said, “In the file, there’s not a lot of narrative about her state of mind and not a lot of history about her earlier stays here.”

Dr. Hicks smiled. “There’s not a lot of narrative because we are psychiatrists, not psychologists, Dr. Cross. Whatever Kay’s issues were, as far as we could tell, her psychiatric challenges were largely chemical. It’s the population we serve.”

“And earlier files we have to shred after seven years,” Tolliver said. “That’s the law.”

“Of course,” I said, because I had to do the same with my client files. I began wondering if this had been a wild-goose chase, coming down to Alabama, sticking our noses in Kay’s past because of Higgins’s dying words.

While Mahoney determined how Kay paid for her stays at West Briar, I went back to her medical file and started going through the pages again, deeper this time. I found the intake form for her most recent stay at the facility. Near the bottom, I saw a scrawled notation I must have missed in the vice president’s copy of the file.

Patient friend AL says patient state deteriorating rapidly since she went off meds while dealing with two deaths, mother and close friend.