Deadlocked (33 page)

Mason motioned to two patients to move aside and make room for her. He was surprised at how calm the patients were. Either they were in shock or they were cured, Mason decided. He eased Adrienne into a sitting position and pulled off his denim shirt, giving it to her to press against the cut on her head.

"Easy," he told her. "You may have a concussion."

"I thought the person you wanted to visit was at Lakewood Gardens," she said as she took a deep breath.

"I took a wrong turn on my way over there," he said. "Good thing I did. Why did you come here instead of staying at the visitor's center?"

"I knew we were short-handed today. The nurse that's supposed to cover this floor called in sick. When the sirens went off, I knew my dad would need help."

"Your dad?" Mason asked. "Was he the guy on the desk downstairs?"

"That's him. Walt. Boy is he going to be in a bad mood. He was really looking forward to that football game."

More sirens signaled the arrival of rescue crews. The first firefighters made it to the second floor lobby. Mason signaled them.

"The cavalry has arrived," he told Adrienne. "They'll take good care of you."

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"No place. I was never here. Remember?"

"Yeah," she said, nodding and pressing his shirt to her scalp. "Sure I don't. Never saw you after you left the Visitor's Center. How's that for a concussion?"

"Perfect."

He kissed her cheek as a firefighter reached them, while others attended to the rest of the patients. Mason stepped out of the way, returning to Mary who was standing at the end of the hall beneath the exit sign.

"You okay?" Mason asked her.

"At least I'm not crazy," she said.

Chapter 46

A tornado destroys with the whimsy and precision of a psychopath: vicious, capricious, and remorseless. It may choose to pulverize a house into sawdust and leave neighbors on either side untouched. If so inclined, it might scoop up a car from a parking lot and fling it like a Frisbee half a mile down the street, indifferent to the makes and models not to its taste. It might uproot a stand of trees as easily as a gardener plucking carrots from the ground, save one lone survivor unable to explain its luck.

The tornado that struck Golden Years was such a killer. It peeled the roof off the psychiatric hospital like it was an aluminum pull tab, the swirling wind turning up its nose at the patients, taking none of them. A slab of roof rocketed down Eighty-seventh Street Parkway, pierced the windshield of a tractor-trailer rig, and killed the driver. The unfortunate man was the only fatality of the storm.

Mason held onto Mary's arm as they walked down the stairway at the end of the hall. A platoon of firemen had hustled by them on their way down. None of them questioned Mason's assurance that they were fine. The stairs quivered beneath them, Mason not certain whether it was the aftershocks as the building calmed itself or whether it was their own trembling. They came out the door that he had tried to get in earlier, the video camera dangling from an electrical thread as they passed beneath it.

They walked along the sidewalk toward the Visitors' Center, sidestepping fallen limbs that had been ripped from their trunks. Mason's arm was around Mary's waist, her arm stretched across his back. Her feet, unsteady at first, settled into a confident, short stride and she pulled away from his support. She offered no explanation for her presence at the hospital and, as anxious as he was to know, he let it ride for the moment.

Remnants of the roof littered the grounds along with furniture, bedding, and clothing that had been sucked into the whirlwind before drifting to earth. They stopped for a moment, looking back at the hospital. Shorn of its roof, its windows knocked out, it looked like a punch-drunk fighter.

A fleet of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars, their lights cascading red, white, and blue, were making their way around the cars that had been in the parking lot when the storm hit. Many of those vehicles had overturned, smashing into one another like a demolition derby. The back end of a Mazda Miata stuck out of the front seat of a Lincoln Navigator, the storm tossing the coupe like a dart into the SUV. The air reeked of gasoline, a stench that warned it was too early to sound the all clear.

Sirens continued to blare in the distance as more rescue units raced to the scene. Uniformed men and woman rushed to the aid of residents and patients, corralling them for triage. Some residents wandered about in a daze. Others sat on the ground, nursing cuts and bruises.

All of the buildings on the campus had suffered some damage, none as severe as the psychiatric hospital. The tornado had struck like precision guided meteorological munitions. Its target had been the hospital. Everything and everyone else was collateral damage.

Mason led Mary through the chaos, waving off inquiries and offers of help. She was, as nearly as he could tell, unhurt. He wanted to get her out of there without answering questions from someone checking names off a list to confirm who was a victim and who was not. And he had questions of his own that would have to wait.

He caught a glimpse of Adrienne's father, Walt, cutting through the crowd. Mason wasn't certain whether he was looking for patients that were still unaccounted for or whether he was looking for Mason and Mary. Any doubt vanished when Dixon Smith ran up to the man, poking him in the chest with his finger, gesturing wildly. Walt brushed Smith's hand away. The two men nearly came to blows until Walt saw Adrienne being helped by a paramedic to an ambulance and left Smith to argue alone.

Mason unhitched his tool belt, dropping it on the ground along with his ball cap. A navy blue windbreaker had blown across the grounds, lodging against the heel of a bench. Mason snatched it and slipped it on, ignoring the snug fit. It was all he could do to change his appearance. Placing his hand on the small of Mary's back, he urged her to pick up the pace.

They walked down the long drive toward Eighty-seventh Street Parkway through a growing crowd. Once the storm had passed and news of its attack on Golden Years was broadcast by radio and television, people came to offer help and to witness the destruction firsthand. The police were busy directing emergency vehicles in and out and hadn't had time for crowd control.

A police officer directing traffic from the middle of the street held up his hand, signaling them to wait. Mary stood quietly on his left as Mason shifted his feet impatiently.

The traffic cop finally motioned them to cross, a new companion lagging a few steps behind but otherwise keeping pace. When they reached Mason's car, he opened the passenger door for Mary, closing it as she slid in. Walking around to his door, he found a woman standing in front of his car.

"Can I help you?" Mason asked.

"I want to go home," the woman answered. She was near his height with a slender frame and erect bearing. She was wearing a raincoat over pants and sneakers and a floppy hat pulled down low on her pale checks

"Where do you live?" Mason asked.

She hesitated and pulled her cap off, her tangled blonde hair pressed tightly against her head. Twisting the cap like it was a wet cloth, she looked around. "It's been so long," she said.

Her face was drawn, her eyes hollow but alive, not drugged. She was old enough to live at Golden Years, though he couldn't guess at which facility.

"You followed us out of Golden Years. Is that where you live?" Mason asked. He was sure she did and was equally certain that he didn't want to take her back and that he couldn't leave her in the parking lot, her uncertainty convincing him that she shouldn't be left alone.

"That's not my home," she answered. "I want to go home."

"Can I call someone for you?" Mason offered.

His question provoked a panic as her lips quivered and her eyes widened. She raised a hand to her mouth. "No calls," she said. "No more phone calls."

"Okay, okay," Mason said, looking over the woman's shoulder at the traffic cop, deciding that he had to take her at least that far. "What's your name?"

"Victoria King," she said. "And I want to go home."

A car turned into the parking lot from Eighty-seventh Street Parkway, circling away from Mason. It was a black BMW sedan with tinted passenger windows, the same model as Whitney King's car. He caught a glimpse of the driver through the windshield as the car turned away but didn't get a good enough look to tell if it was Whitney, though the chill in his gut was confirmation enough.

Crafting a quick mental argument on the difference between giving someone a ride home and kidnapping, Mason said, "I'll take you," and ushered the woman into the backseat.

Glad that he had parked the car facing out, he started his engine just as the BMW screeched to a stop behind him, the passenger window sliding down. He looked in his rearview mirror as Whitney King stared back at him. King's lips were peeled back in a snarl and his eyes were blacker than the storm. Hearing the car, Mary and Victoria both turned around. King's face twisted with rage as he pounded his steering wheel.

Gunning his car, Mason raced toward the street. Whitney was out of position to maneuver through Mason's parking space and was forced to drive around the long line of parked cars. The added distance Whitney had to travel was enough to let Mason escape from the parking lot, cutting in front of another fire truck on Eighty-seventh Street Parkway as the traffic cop shook his fist at him.

Looking over his shoulder, he saw Whitney trapped by the fire truck and the angry cop. Mary gaped at Mason as if he was the inmate who had just escaped from the asylum. Before she could speak, he made the introductions.

"Mary Kowalczyk, say hello to Victoria King."

Chapter 47

Neither woman spoke. Mary stared at Victoria, her face filled with questions. Victoria gazed back at Mary, no hint of recognition in her blank expression. After a moment, Victoria looked away, finding the passing scenery out her window of more interest.

"She doesn't know who I am," Mary said softly.

Mason looked at Victoria in his rearview mirror. "I'm not certain how much she knows about anything. She seems out of it."

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"I'll know when we get there," he said.

Mason sped east on Eighty-seventh Street Parkway, cutting north on a side street, working his way through a patchwork of subdivisions to avoid Whitney King. The aftermath of the storm added its own detours. Some streets were closed due to downed power lines. Others were blocked by fallen trees. People were already out in their yards, chainsaws in hand, cleaning up. No one gave them a second look and no black BMWs suddenly appeared in Mason's rearview mirror.

As badly as he wanted to talk with Mary about what had happened to her, he didn't want to do it in front of Victoria. He assumed Mary hadn't checked in to Golden Years for her health, which meant that taking her home was not an option. He didn't know where Victoria lived before she was at Golden Years and didn't want to take her there even if he did know. She was his ace, though he couldn't decide how to play her.

Whitney King knew that both women were with Mason. King couldn't report Mason to the cops for kidnapping his mother without implicating himself in Mary's disappearance.

Better yet, King had some explaining to do about his mother. Sandra Connelly suspected that Victoria King didn't belong at Golden Years. If Sandra was right, Victoria wasn't crazy and Whitney King had bundled his mother into the loony bin for some other reason. Mason's best guess was that Victoria knew that Whitney was guilty of the Byrnes's murders. Proving that there's an ounce of good in everyone, Whitney couldn't bring himself to off his mother. Instead, he warehoused her.

One thing bothered Mason about his theory. Victoria was out of it, muttering about going home and not wanting any more phone calls. Mason was no shrink, but Victoria didn't look right to him.

King's other problem was that the cops were looking for him. If he wanted his mother back, he'd have to come get her. In the meantime, Mason needed a place where both women could stay while he figured out what to do next.

Mason introduced Mary and Victoria to Claire who said how pleased she was to meet them and didn't ask any questions. She knew enough to understand who they were and knew Mason well enough to know that he wouldn't have brought them to her house if he had had another option. Harry stood behind her in the front hall of her first floor office.

"This is Harry," she said to Mary and Victoria, offering no further explanation. "Let me take you upstairs."

Mason and Harry watched as they climbed the stairs.

"Where'd you find them?" Harry asked him.

"Golden Years."

"You were there when the tornado hit or did they just drop out of the sky like Dorothy and Toto?" Harry asked, keeping his voice level.

"I was there," Mason answered. "And so were they. I was looking for Victoria. Mary was a bonus."

"What was Mary doing there?" Harry asked.

"I haven't had a chance to ask her yet. We've been kind of busy."

"You suppose Whitney King is going to be looking for his momma?"

"I suppose," Mason said, giving Harry a quick rundown on what had happened.

"What do you have in mind?" Harry asked.

"Been a long day," Mason said. "I think I'll have a chat with Mary and then Victoria. After that, I'm going to take the rest of the weekend off. See what Monday brings."

"You stirred up the shit stew and now you want to see what happens. Is that it?" Harry asked.

"Sometimes I'm a lot better at stirring stuff up than I am at figuring it out."

"Well then, you better get upstairs. Claire's probably taken their orders for breakfast already."

"Does she offer rooms with the American or European meal plan?" Mason asked.

"Doesn't matter. You know the woman can't cook."

***

When Claire bought her house, she renovated the first floor into her law office, keeping the existing rooms intact. She knocked out every wall on the second floor, stripping the space to the exterior frame, and started over. She had liked the open feeling of the loft she had lived in downtown but didn't want as much space. Here, the kitchen merged with dining and living areas into a single room. There were two bedrooms, each with a bath, tucked at one end. The walls were white, the floors were hard, but Claire warmed the atmosphere with plants, primitive art, and herself.