Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [52]
Enemies. Yes.
Every psychiatrist made enemies, and a man like Cray, a man who supervised a mental institution harboring scores of patients, would make more enemies than most.
Rivera laughed. “Man, I told you she’s a squirrel.”
Stern, at least, was polite enough not to say a word.
“Sounds like you were right,” Shepherd said without rancor. “On the other hand, just because he’s a shrink doesn’t mean he’s not a killer.”
This was, in part, bravado. But he couldn’t shake free of that word mask. It fit the case too well.
“You happen to ask if Cray drives a Lexus?” he added.
Kroft’s smile slipped a little. “Yeah, I asked. He’s got one—an SUV, like the woman said. But any of his patients could know that. It doesn’t prove anything.”
“No,” Shepherd said. “It doesn’t.” He scraped back his chair and got up. “Better get moving. It’s still early. I might be able to catch him before he goes to lunch.”
Kroft looked baffled. “You figure it’s even necessary to do a meet-and-greet? I mean, you could phone the guy, or I could have Wheelihan send some deputies to chat him up.”
“I can’t tell much from a phone call. And it sounds like the local deputies are a little too friendly with this guy.”
Stern spoke. “You don’t still think there’s anything to this?”
“I’ll know soon enough when I talk to Cray. And when I take a look at that Lexus of his.”
Brookings looked unhappy. “I’m betting it hasn’t got a scratch. Face it, Shep. The lady’s a head case.”
“My second one today. Looks like I hit the jackpot. Lucky me.”
He meant it as a joke, but it hit too close to home, and nobody was laughing as Roy Shepherd walked out the door.
21
The Hawk Ridge Institute for Psychiatric Care was a large, rambling complex of brick buildings, none higher than two stories, set amid rolling greenery in the foothills of the Pinaleno Mountains. Route 366 was nearby, feeding traffic into Safford, but the institute lay on a desolate back road, and its neighbors were farms and ranches and, a few miles distant, a federal prison camp.
From the road, the institute looked something like a prison itself, with its high iron fence and the guardhouse at the gate. But once inside the grounds, visitors were surprised to see flower beds, neatly tended, and sparkling fountains and birdbaths and colonnades of eucalyptus trees. The less severely afflicted patients were free to roam the property, and they could be seen here and there, some clustered in companionable groups, others solitary.
The administration building and one ward of the institute had been built in 1942. By the mid-1960s two more wards had been added, both of them L-shaped one-story structures well removed from the heart of the complex.
Then the trend of deinstitutionalizing mental patients had begun, and over the next thirty years Hawk Ridge’s population dropped by more than half. Today the institute housed one hundred and thirty-three patients, most of them considered chronic and untreatable—the hard cases who did not respond to medication. Only two of the three wards were in use; the third. Ward C, had been shut down as an economy measure. It stood in decrepit isolation, a windowless shell, one of its doors padlocked, the other bolted shut. Occasionally a staff member with a passkey slipped inside to smoke a joint or indulge some other secret vice.
Hawk Ridge was a peaceful place, and remarkably picturesque. The staid facade of the administrative center was softened by closely trimmed fir trees. Behind and above the building were the tall mountains, brownish at the lower elevations, rising to green, the details of even the highest ridgeline visible in the pellucid air.
Sometimes a hawk or, more seldom, a turkey vulture could be seen riding the high thermals, circling above a hidden gorge, and at night the cries of coyotes were heard, shrill and ghostly and unmelodic, though all too often they were drowned out by the screams.
There were screams, of course. In Ward B, known as the violent ward, where the hardest of the hard cases were kept, the screams seemed never to end. There were