Consumed (23 page)

“Be ready with that strap,” I said.

I took aim on Kirkwood and fired. I wouldn’t waste my breath asking him if he’d allow us to tie him up. The probes on the wires connected with his chest. The confetti-like AFID tags, used to identify the gun that was fired, flew through the air. The yellow plastic probe covers landed on the floor across the room. Kirkwood went stiff and fell to the floor. Two agents rushed from behind my back and wrapped the tow strap around him, securing his biceps at his sides. Kirkwood was bound before he regained function.

“Let me get something to tie that arm off with,” Beth said. “We don’t need him bleeding out before the medics get here.” She went to search.

Kirkwood, bound and being held to the ground by a pair of agents, started whistling, and the song sounded vaguely familiar. As much as I tried to tune him out, the melody registered in my head within a few more verses. He was whistling the theme song from a soap opera that my wife Karen watched.

I shook my head.

Beth returned a moment later with some cable ties she’d found in a kitchen drawer away from the blood and mess. She connected a few and pulled them tight around the area, just below the elbow, that he’d ripped his arm from.

“Any clue there on how this nut just pulled his own arm off?” I asked.

Beth stuck her face close to the arm where it was severed. “I don’t know. All I see is blood.”

Kirkwood chuckled. “I had a little accident yesterday with a hacksaw.”

I noticed that his voice was noticeably softer than it was a moment prior—he was bleeding out.

“Um,” Beth said. “She stood from her crouched position and took a step toward me. “We have something going on in that kitchen.”

As soon as she said the words, a smell filled my nose. I imagined the smell had been growing since we’d arrived in the house—something was cooking, and I had a feeling I knew what it was. I felt my mouth filling with saliva and jammed my index finger and thumb up my nostrils to block the smell from entering my nose.

“I’m going to need a minute,” I said in a nasal voice. “Have one of Tom’s agents take care of whatever is going on in there.”

I left the living room quickly and walked from the front of the house. I paced the front yard, trying to breathe fresh air and not become sick. When the feeling finally subsided, I put on my game face and started back for the front door. The sound of gravel crunching came from behind me, and I looked back to see an ambulance coming down the driveway. The paramedics parked near the front door and came toward me.

“One inside that requires immediate medical attention,” I said. “Two gunshot wounds to the upper-left side of his back. He also has a severed arm just below the elbow. He’s currently bound, and it would be best—for everyone involved—if he stayed that way. Also, two deceased inside the home.”

The EMTs confirmed and made their way into the house. I began to follow them but caught a whiff of whatever was cooking wafting from the home. I still needed another minute, so I pulled my phone and dialed Ball.

“Ball,” he answered.

“It’s Hank. We, um, I guess found the chief deputy, who is dead. We have Kirkwood, though.”

“What? Really? What happened?”

I gave him the story.

Ball let out a breath and said a single word. “Damn.”

“Are you ready?” Beth asked. She stood in the open doorway of my hotel room.

“Um, yeah, one second.” I waved her in while I went to the shelf and gathered my notepad with the list of questions I’d been working on. I slipped it into my inner suit-jacket pocket and grabbed the car keys for my rental.

“You’re driving?” Beth asked.

“You’ve been driving since we got here. I figured we may as well get a little use of the second rental.”

“Sure,” she said.

We left my room, stopped for a quick coffee at the hotel restaurant, and made our way out to the parking structure. Beth and I hopped into my rental and pulled from the lot.

I stopped just outside the parking structure at the curb. “Which way is the hospital?” I asked.

“Hold on. I’m looking it up now. We had to get out of the parking structure for my GPS to work. I know it’s downtown here somewhere.” Beth clicked on the screen of her phone with her fingertip. She looked over at me and tucked her brown hair behind her ear. “Two point two miles. Forward to the first street and make a right.”

“Got it.” I cranked the wheel and pulled from the curb. “Who did you talk to there?” I asked.

“The agents that are keeping Kirkwood under guard are from the Nashville resident agency—an Agent Boone and an Agent Ebron. I spoke with the people over at their home office a little bit ago and told them that we’d be heading over.”

“Did you talk to anyone on the medical staff there and see if he’s even capable of speaking with us?”

“Way ahead of you,” Beth said. “I spoke with a doctor named Mitchell who has been attending to Kirkwood. He says it should be fine to speak with him, but we’re supposed to ask for the doctor when we arrive.”

“Okay.” I clicked on my turn signal and made the right hand turn.

“Did you want to pop over to the property afterward and meet with the Memphis agents?” Beth asked.

“We probably should, even if it’s just for a bit. What time did they say they would be there?”

“I’m not sure, but they have the excavation crew, another forensics crew, and who knows who else heading out there. I’d guess there will be people there all day.”

I nodded.

“Make a left on Jo Johnston Ave,” Beth said. “Should be the next street.”

The drive took us another couple minutes. We pulled up to the ten-plus-story white building that read Metro General Hospital at the top and made a left into the matching white parking structure across the street. I found us a spot, and we headed toward the complex. As Beth and I crossed the street, I took in the medical complex, consisting of the white high-rise on our left and a conical brown-brick building, labeled The Meharry Clinic, before us. More matching brown-brick buildings stood in the distance.

“Do we have any idea where we’re supposed to be going, here?” I asked.

“Nope,” Beth said. “Main entrance looks like it’s this way, though. I’m sure someone will be able to tell us where we need to go.”

Beth headed past the roundabout for dropping patients off and pulled open the door at the ground level of the white high-rise. I followed her in.

We stopped briefly at the reception desk and asked for Doctor Mitchell. The woman in scrubs at the front desk told us he would be with us shortly, so we took a seat in the waiting area. A few magazine articles later, a man appearing in his late fifties approached the front desk. He was short, balding, and wearing a set of blue scrubs with a white lab coat—he looked the part of a doctor. The receptionist pointed over at Beth and me, and the man walked up.

“I’m Doctor Mitchell,” he said. “Are you the agents from the FBI that called?”

Beth and I stood. “Agents Hank Rawlings and Beth Harper,” I said.

“And you said that you wanted to speak with the patient that is under guard here, correct?” he asked.

“Correct,” Beth said.

“Sure. We have him in our secure wing on the fourth floor. You need to be with someone to get through, which is the reason I had you guys ask for me. Why don’t you guys follow me, and I’ll lead you up.”

We followed the doctor toward the elevators.

“What’s Kirkwood’s condition?” I asked.

“He’s stable but, um, I can’t say he’s going to win any awards for being a model patient,” Doctor Mitchell said.

“What did he do?” I asked.

The doctor thumbed the button for the elevator. “He came out of surgery last night. Well, the first thing he did when he came to was try to get out of his restraints, which is to be expected, I guess. We use a canvas wrap that goes around his chest and thighs. His arm that remained was also restrained, so we weren’t too worried about him getting out. However, when one of our night nurses went in to try to calm him down, he bit at her, catching a handful of her hair in his mouth. Her hair actually had to be cut with scissors to free her. We’ve since sedated him and fitted him with a bite shield.”

“Bite shield? Like…” I held my hand over my mouth and chin.

“Exactly.”

The elevator doors opened, and we stepped in.

“There hasn’t been anyone by to try to see what he has going on mentally, but just judging by his continued conversations with no one, there has to be something going on there,” Doctor Mitchell said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Beth said.

“Rumor has it he pulled off and tried eating his own arm,” the doctor said. He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“Yeah,” I said.

The doctor said nothing.

The elevator doors opened, and we followed Doctor Mitchell to the left down the glossy-white-floored hallway. He stopped at an office outside a pair of gray doors with small security-glass windows.

The doctor rapped his knuckle on the sliding glass window of the office. A security guard slid open the window. He was slim and a few inches under six foot. I spotted another security guard seated behind him that looked a bit bigger. Both men looked in their early thirties and were armed.

“Doc,” the first guard said.

“We have two more agents to see our guest,” Doctor Mitchell said.

“Sure, can I see your IDs quick?” the guy asked.

Beth and I handed our credentials to the man. He looked at them both and slid us a sheet to sign in. We did.

The man took back the clipboard the sign-in sheet was attached to. “Inside the room—one next to the bed and one near the door—are large red buttons. Those are for alarms. Use them if necessary. They alert our office here and the entire floor.”

“Sure,” I said.

The security guard reached under the table next to him and must have pressed a button to unlock the doors—they buzzed to our right. The doctor pushed one of the doors open and held it ajar with his foot. Past the doctor, two men in suits were sitting in chairs at the end of the short hall. Both had newspapers in their laps. “He’s in that room there with the guards,” Doctor Mitchell said. He jerked his chin toward the two seated men. “I actually have to go do my rounds. If you need anything else from me, just have them page me.”

“Thank you,” Beth said.

We walked past the doctor toward the agents standing guard. I heard the door latch closed at our backs.

The two agents stood as we approached. The nearer of the two stood my height and build—a few inches over six foot and a few pounds under two hundred. He had short, dark hair and a black suit. The agent farther from us had blond spiked hair and a gray suit—he stood a few inches shorter than his partner and looked in his early thirties.

“Beth Harper,” Beth said. “And this is Hank Rawlings.” She pointed at me.

We exchanged a round of handshakes with the other agents—each man had a firm grip.

“We got a call that we should be expecting you,” the taller of the two said. “Agent Alex Boone, and this is Agent Tim Ebron. We got sent over from the Nashville office to supervise this guy until they get him transferred somewhere.”

“Anything unexpected?” Beth asked.

“I don’t know about unexpected, but listen,” Agent Ebron said.

The two went silent, and I could hear Kirkwood talking inside the room.

“That’s been going on since we got here,” Agent Boone said. “Full-out conversations with nobody. I listened to the topic for a bit. It was something about whatever he was watching on television, like he was discussing the show with someone.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks, guys. We should just be a bit in here.”

“Let us know if you need something,” Agent Boone said.

I motioned for Beth to enter the room. She flipped the lock on the outside of the door and pushed it open. Kirkwood’s conversation came to an abrupt end, and the room went silent. I followed her inside and closed the door at my back. I noticed the sterile smell of hospital immediately as I looked over the room. The floor was a glossy white, matching the hall—the walls were also white and bare aside from outlets and sockets that I assumed some kind of medical equipment plugged into. A bathroom was directly to my left, the foot of Kirkwood’s bed just beyond it, also to the left. The right wall had a television hanging from the ceiling but was bare aside from that. A blue faux-leather chair stood in the right corner against the back wall. The room had no windows.

Beth walked to the foot of the bed. I followed and looked at Kirkwood. His eyes were open, staring past us and up at the television on the wall as if we weren’t even there. I looked over my right shoulder to see what he was watching—it looked like some kind of morning talk show. I looked back at Kirkwood. His eyes were the only visible part of his face. His hair covered his forehead, and the frosted-white bite shield he wore covered his nose and extended down past his chin before vanishing into his thick black-and-gray beard—the shield was some kind of plastic. The straps from the bite shield circled his head and pulled his hair and beard close. He lay on top of the blankets in a white hospital gown. Tan canvas straps secured his body to the bed. Another canvas strap secured his right wrist—his right hand clutched the remote control for the TV. What remained of his left arm was wrapped in a bandage. I looked down to his ankles—also bound by the straps.

His eyes darted to Beth and me the second I heard the television behind us go to commercial. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice muffled by the shield.

Beth pulled her voice recorder from her pocket and clicked the button to start it. “Agents Beth Harper and Hank Rawlings with Richard Kirkwood. Mr. Kirkwood, we’d like to ask you some questions.”

“Between commercials,” he said. “You two open your yaps during my show, and you can see yourselves the hell out.”

I pulled the notepad from my pocket and flipped to the page where I’d written my questions.

“Are there bodies on your property that weren’t in the houses?” Beth asked.

“Probably,” he said.

“Where would they be?” Beth asked.