Angel of Darkness (17 page)

However successful Parker may have thought he was at fooling his shrink, it was soon clear that the psychiatrist did not intend to testify that Parker should be set free pending his request for a new trial. He did not consider Parker well enough to be deemed competent and he announced outright to the lawyer that he felt Parker was still a danger to the public.

This was tantamount to saying he thought Parker was guilty of the earlier murders. The little guy had courage after all.

The shrink said this shortly after I entered the room. His whole body was rigid with fear when he said it. And no wonder. Parker was glaring at him as if he was contemplating ripping off the guy's head and breathing fire down his neck.

The psychiatrist cast a nervous glance at Parker and inched his chair away from his patient and looked longingly at the door. I knew from the lawyer's face that he, too, was regretting their decision not to restrain Parker.

‘Are you certain?' the lawyer asked Parker's doctor, breaking the awkward silence. ‘Do you need more time to examine him before you decide?'

The shrink shook his head in a barely perceptible gesture. I almost feel sorry for the little guy. He was an idiot, but to stand up for his convictions with Parker sitting inches away proved he had a backbone. It also meant that the psychiatrist knew that releasing Parker posed a direct and immediate threat to the safety of the public. He had not been fooled on that score.

The lawyer knew when a witness could not be bought. Resigned that they would not be able to change the psychiatrist's mind, he defused the situation. ‘I'll get back to you,' he told the doctor. ‘I'll let you know if we want to call you at the hearing or not.'

‘You do realize that I am essentially a government contractor?' the doctor said. ‘That I could well be called by opposing counsel to testify?'

Otis Parker shifted in his chair and his face flushed a deep red. The air in the room grew thick. I felt a fluttering in my chest as if something hungry and terrible had roosted there. Whatever lived in Otis Parker wanted out.

‘I'm sure we can find plenty of people willing to testify that Mr Parker has made incredible strides in his treatment,' the lawyer said calmly. ‘Combine that with the fact that he was railroaded for crimes he did not commit and I think we can find a panel sympathetic to his cause.'

The look of alarm that flickered over the shrink's face mirrored what I was feeling. Surely no one would sic Parker on the world? And yet, it was now a possibility.

The psychiatrist rose, going out of his way to stay as far away from Otis Parker as possible. ‘Good luck,' he muttered as he knocked too loudly at the door to the hallway. The click of the lock soon after confirmed that staff were standing right outside the room, waiting to come to the visitors' aid, if needed.

The huge orderly with the braided beard stuck his head into the room, his face cheerful as he asked, almost playfully, ‘Everything OK in here?' He beamed at Parker and then smiled at the lawyer. ‘Play nice, now,' the orderly said as he held the door open for the psychiatrist and locked it again.

Boy, did he know how to get Parker's goat. I could feel the hatred raging inside Parker. I hoped the orderly was prepared to put some serious money where his mouth was when the time came.

‘So you think we can get some other doctor to testify I'm fine?' Parker asked, once the shrink had scurried from the room.

‘Pay them enough and I can get you five doctors to testify you're fine,' the lawyer promised. He stared at Parker, gauging his mood. ‘Of course, the testimony of paid witnesses is not going to carry as much weight as that of the psychiatrist who actually treats you. You understand that, right?'

Parker gazed at his lawyer with a look so dispassionate, it was more terrifying than his glare. ‘Meaning what?'

‘Meaning, it's definitely a problem,' the lawyer said slowly. He was underestimating Parker's intelligence, and I knew he was grossly underestimating Parker's desire to be free. ‘You told me that he would not be a problem. You said you had his full support.'

‘He won't be a problem for long,' Parker predicted.

His lawyer shifted uneasily in his chair. Parker had sounded supremely confident.

‘What's that supposed to mean?' the lawyer asked, though he sounded as if he did not really want to know the answer.

‘It means, leave the doctor to me. You take care of the judge, and I'll take care of the psychiatrist.'

His lawyer looked uneasy. ‘By that, I presume you mean that you feel confident you will be able to change his mind about whether or not you should be released from here?'

Parker nodded eagerly. ‘Sure, that's right. That's exactly what I meant.'

And though he was grinning broadly and looked relaxed, the wall behind him filled with the shape of his terrible, dark essence. I could feel the air in the room vibrate with anti-cipation and hunger.

Whatever Otis Parker had in mind, I knew that it was ugly.

TWENTY-THREE

N
ever underestimate the love of a mother for her child. That night, when I went to stand watch over my son, I discovered Connie sleeping on the sofa in the common room. A nurse was covering her with a blanket when I arrived. I knew Connie and I understood that, reassurances or not, she needed to be near Michael. If Michael was not going to come home, then she would come to Michael.

I lingered for a while, watching her sleep. She was getting older and, yet, she looked so much younger than she had when I had been alive. I was ashamed of what her responsibility for me had done to her and I was glad she had a second chance without me to drag her down.

I, too, needed to make the most of my second chance. I decided to leave Michael in the care of his mother and to spend the night watching Otis Redman Parker. His confidence that the psychiatrist would not be a problem nagged at me. He had been so sure, so absolutely convinced that the way was clear for his release. He knew something that the rest of us didn't. I needed to find out what it was.

When I arrived, he was in the shower room taking one of his famously long and fastidious showers. He could not abide being anything but scrupulously clean, as if the filth he harbored inside had to be kept from showing on the outside at any cost. Spying on Otis Parker naked was not my idea of a good time, so I waited until he had been returned to his room to assume my vigil. I was not looking forward to the hours that lay ahead. Otis Parker's thoughts filled me with a nearly unbearable sadness at all times and, sometimes, with a horror that transcended any I had felt while alive. He looked like a man, and yet I always had this feeling that little more than a tissue-thin barrier separated me – and, indeed, the world – from unspeakable viciousness that waited within him.

I honestly did not know if I could make it through a whole night near him. But I knew I had to try.

I sat on the floor of his room, as far away from him as I could possibly get, praying for my soul. The room held little more than a steel bed bolted to the linoleum floor and he kept the window shut. Before long, the room had filled with his body heat and the smell of his acrid sweat. Both sensations were unpleasant, but neither one as unpleasant as his thoughts.

Parker lay on his back, on top of the bleached sheets and thin blanket, at home in his austere surroundings. He had spent years in foster homes and orphanages as a child and he was comfortable in the institutionalized environment of Holloway. He had thrived in prison, too, rising quickly to rule whatever wing he landed in during his many incarcerations. His complete self-interest and his brutality served him well in dangerous, confined environments.

That made Parker no different from thousands of other men, of course. But what did set him apart were the dark thoughts that he stored in his memory and took out each evening to lovingly relive, extracting every jolt of gratification he could from the memories of what he had done. I was forced to relive every violation of flesh with him again and again that night.

As he relived each murder, a feeling of heavy darkness filled the room, as if the room was a receptacle filling with his victim's despair. I could sense a change in Parker as every moment of this nightly ritual of his passed. He fell further and further away from where he was until his breathing grew more rapid and then dropped off abruptly into an unconscious state. His pulse slowed and the air in the room turned cold.

The further away he felt from wakefulness, the more I fell into anguish. All the sadness I had ever fought off in my life washed over me in waves. I was reminded of every hurt that I had suffered, every pain I had inflicted, every regret I had never faced. I wanted to weep. I wanted to throw myself from the window and pray for a body that might break upon the fall to save me from myself. All hope, all joy, all of the love I had learned to find in my afterlife was taken from me in those hours. I felt myself falling into darkness.

A scratch at Parker's door saved me. I heard the peephole being drawn back and saw a bright-blue eye peer through it into Parker's room. I felt a sudden lifting of my despair and, unable to resist, I followed that blue eye into the hallway, leaving Parker to his strange, solitary state of half slumber. Outside Parker's room, the orderly with the braided beard seemed to be standing his own watch by the door. He had to be on his second straight shift, and yet he seemed determined to keep Parker under his watch. He would check on other patients, scribble notes in files, sometimes confirm a dose on the computer, but he always returned periodically to stand outside Parker's door, listening carefully.

Unfortunately, the other orderlies were less conscientious about Otis Parker and this one could not work every shift. Parker would have more freedom when he was gone.

There was something intensely compelling about this particular orderly, though. He triggered feelings I had never experienced before. As I watched him perform his night-time rituals, I felt the world around me fall away as I entered an even deeper plane of consciousness. I felt filled with a heavy, almost magnetic tingling. That was when I noticed them: strange, albescent figures, little more than white shapes at first, that glowed in the artificial twilight of the hallway, perambulating up and down the unit floor, as if following the bearded orderly on his rounds.

I calmed my mind and the figures came into sharper focus. I saw a man dressed in blue jeans with a scraggly beard, long hair, beaded headband and vacant eyes. I saw a woman who wore a turn-of-the-century dress and clutched a lace handkerchief in one hand. I saw an old man whose well-worn linen pants, handmade shoes and oddly shaped hat had come from another era, followed by a man in a dapper top hat who wore spats and carried a cane.

The dead were all around me.

The lost souls who had lived and then died behind Holloway's stone walls still roamed its buildings and its gardens, just as those patients who still lived there roamed them aimlessly. They were all seeking the same things, I knew: peace, a way out of Holloway, and a home they had yet to find.

Why did they feel compelled to follow the bearded orderly? I did not know. All I knew was that, all through the night, they came and they went, figures that were there, and yet not really there – the people of Holloway.

TWENTY-FOUR

B
y morning, despite my vigil of the night before, Otis Parker's psychiatrist was dead. His body was discovered by a downstairs neighbor after she noticed water dripping through her ceiling. The puddle staining her carpet was pink and she insisted that the super investigate. The poor man complied, only to suffer a heart attack when he discovered the source of the leak. Paramedics had to take the super to the emergency room. There was no point in taking the shrink anywhere. The psychiatrist had been stuffed in his bathtub either before or after he was beaten so badly the medical examiner could only harvest three usable fingerprints to confirm his identification.

I saw – and felt – the aftermath of his brutal death first-hand. I had been enjoying the morning sun with Colin Gunn, Maggie's father, keeping him company while he listened to his ever-present police band radio. I liked to sit on his couch and pretend we were friends while he had his morning coffee. Sometimes he even talked to me, though he could not see me, and at other times he talked to his dead wife as well. He had just said, ‘Fahey, if you're skulking about this fine morning, you better get your ass out there and keep an eye on my girl,' when the dispatcher on duty issued a special call for Maggie and Calvano to report to an address immediately.

I knew it had to be related to the case they were working on, so I beat them to the scene. When I first entered the apartment, I could feel a void in the air, the kind of emptiness left behind when a living being leaves the earth, and the living left behind have not yet filled in the gap. Then I stepped into a patch of lingering pain and felt an undercurrent of humiliation mixed with sadness. I knew then whose apartment it must be. Otis Parker had taken care of ‘his problem.' His psychiatrist was dead. I could feel what his last few seconds of life had been like. He had been both terrified and ashamed, as if he blamed himself for his own death and felt that he had once again failed somehow. He had not fought back, I could feel that clearly. He had frozen up, paralysed by his own physical inadequacies, and accepted the terrible, terrible beating and the painful death that followed as his due. He had gone out, not with a bang, but truly with a whimper, his last image that of a memory from childhood: a hiding spot beneath thick overhanging vines, where he could read his beloved books in secret, safe from the teasing attacks of other children, a small Styrofoam cooler full of drinks and snacks by his side.

Now, only traces of the psychiatrist's life force and his battered body remained – a body that was barely recognizable as human. Photos of a younger, happier version of Parker's psychiatrist were scattered throughout the apartment, to tell the responding officers who lived there. No one would have recognized him in the mountain of flesh and blood and bone heaped in the bathtub otherwise. He looked even smaller in death, the violence done to his body reducing him to something less than human. I could not even tell whether he lay face up or face down in the tub.