Projection (19 page)

I called Matt Hollander from a pay phone at the gate, just minutes before the 9:05 takeoff.  It took the operator a while to find him.  "I can't talk long," I said.

"Shoot."

"Emma Hancock knows about Kathy."

"Knows how much?" he asked.

"She seems to know what Kathy did, not where she is.  But Hancock's a pro.  She'll work day and night to find out the rest.  I've mentioned you and Austin Grate to her more than once over the years."

"I worried this might happen.  I had to fire that counselor — Scott Trembley. He came in to talk with  Kathy on a shift when he wasn't even scheduled to work.  He felt me a message to call him.  Maybe he's looking for a payoff."

"Or reward money.  Whichever is richer."

"Or whichever comes first," he said.  "I'm not above making an investment in my future.  I'll call him back right now."

"I'm headed to Baltimore, Lucas’ hometown," I said.  "I've got to find out what happened to him growing up."

"He's letting you get that close?"

Hollander's choice of words made me think about the murderous jealousy my journey could provoke in Kathy.  "Yes.  He asked me to."

"Magnificent."

I took a deep breath.  "Matt, there's no way Kathy can get out of there..."

"That may be the single thing you don't have to worry about," he said.  "This place is a fortress."

"Right."  I remembered the double iron door at the entrance to the unit, the half-inch plate glass windows, the furniture bolted to the floor.  "The trip's about an hour long.  My pager should still work in the air, but it'll definitely be working in Baltimore."

"I'll check in with any news."

The overhead speaker announced final boarding for US Air 515 to Baltimore.

"We better go," Cynthia said.

"Be careful, Matt," I said.  "Hancock's grief over losing her niece is all rage now."  I started to hang up.

"Frank," he shouted.

"Yup."

"Whatever happens, I'm proud of you," he said.

My lips pressed together.  I swallowed hard.  "Thanks."

Cynthia and I rushed onto the plane.  We were two of about twenty passengers.  We took seats just in back of a wing, several rows from anyone else.  I felt less shaky, having inhaled a pinch of the heroin and a bit of the coke in the men's room prior to our departure.  I had also washed the blood off my face and washed as much of Bishop's blood out of my pant leg as possible.  I could feel the rest of the drugs where I'd stashed them under the arches of my feet.

We sat silently in the darkened cabin until after takeoff.  I was glad Cynthia was beside me because I felt cut off from the rest of the world.  Jetting away from Massachusetts, I worried whether Rice would stick to our deal — a deal I had blackmailed him into — and wait the full twenty-four hours before sending SWAT teams through the fifth floor windows.  And there was no was for me to be certain whether Calvin Sanger's presence on the ward would help stave off Lieutenant Patterson's assault plan or make Lucas more paranoid and move him toward a mass suicide.

"What do you think you'll find out about Trevor Lucas in Baltimore?" Cynthia asked.

I checked my watch.  We had been flying ten minutes.  "I’m not sure I'll find out anything.  I'm looking for an explanation why Lucas’ psyche fractured in prison while he waited for his trial to start.  I'm looking for the first cracks in the foundation of his mind, the roots of his religious delusions.  I need to know the reason he crumbled into psychosis."

"Does there have to be a reason?  Can't you just be born with bad nerves?"

"No."  My quick answer surprised me.  In discussions with other psychiatrists, I would equivocate, allowing it was conceivable that some people come into the world with weak nervous systems prone to collapse under routine pressures.  Buy Cynthia, unadorned as she was, called forth my naked belief.  In my heart I had no doubt that trauma is always to blame when a man loses his mind.  "The nervous system is not different than shocks on a car," I said.  "It wears out when you hit too many bumps in the road.  Some people may be built like Ferraris, born with fragile suspensions, but treated with care they wouldn't fail."

"I've hit a few too many potholes myself," Cynthia grinned.  "How do you get your shocks replaced?"  She suddenly looked tired to me.  She let her head fall onto my shoulder.

"I think psychotherapy is the best way," I said.  "A priest would tell you that prayer can work."  I felt her breath against my neck.  "Love can probably do it, too."  I closed my eyes.  "They're probably all the same thing."

Cynthia gently kissed my ear.  The warmth of her lips, then her tongue was enough to make my emotions overflow, the way a tight abscess will burst at a surgeon's first touch.  Tears ran down my face.  She brushed her hand over my cheeks and jaw, wiping the wetness away, then buried her fingers in my hair and brought my mouth to hers.  I relaxed as she pressed herself inside me.  I wanted to be filled up by something other than fear and hatred and violence.  I ached to feel human again.  I inhaled as deeply as I could of the subtle perfume at her neck as he ran her hand between my legs, then unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans.  Making sure no flight attendant or passenger was nearby, she freed me and made me hard with her wet palm.  My breathing quickened with the motion of her hand.  The delicious need for release built in my groin.  Before I came she bent over my lap and took me inside her mouth, each caress of her lips promising I could pour myself into her, that I was neither poisoned nor poison myself, that God had not forsaken me.

Chapter 10

The plane touched down at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport at 10:20
P.M.
  We took a taxi down Route 295 to the city.  I had the driver drop us at the Stouffer, a well-appointed hotel close to City Hall, equidistant from the trendy Inner Harbor shopping complex and Baltimore's red light zone, and not far from the Johns Hopkins Hospital.  I had stayed there nearly two decades before when I'd interviewed for a psychiatry residency at Hopkins.  Wherever my search for Lucas’ roots led, I wanted a safe base at the center of things.

"What now?  How do we start?" Cynthia asked after we stepped into our room.

I walked to the windows.  New buildings stretched as far as I could see, testimony to Baltimore's newfound vitality.  For a moment I felt defeated, as if it was folly to think I could find one boy's story alive in a city that had died and been reborn itself.  But I reminded myself that Lucas’ childhood pain had had enough staying power to reach through the years and capture him — and me.  I was no more lost in Baltimore as I had been sitting with the buried traumas of men and women Lucas’ age and older who I had treated in my psychotherapy office.  After listening to a pat life story, I had to summon the will to ask my first penetrating question, to begin our work in earnest by putting the patient's mind on notice that I knew the truth was still encoded deep in some web of neurons and that I meant to have it.  Sometimes the question had to be shocking — an assault at the door of denial.  My own therapist, Dr. James, had used the verbal equivalent of a battering ram after listening to me jabber about an on-again, off-again romance for the first half of our initial session together: 
How can you expect to be properly loved, Frank, when you hate yourself?
  "We start with the first question," I told Cynthia.  "Then we ask another and another and another."  I walked to the desk, opened the top drawer and pulled out a phone book.  I flipped to the letter
L
.  There were dozens of Lucases listed.  "How do you feel about playing census taker?" I asked.

"At least it's an original fantasy.  I'll try anything once."

I smiled.  "I want you to reach as many Lucas families as possible.  Ask whoever answers whether Trevor Lucas is one of their relatives.  Say you have him listed on the census at that address."

"Won't they be a little shocked to hear from a census worker at midnight?"

"We don't have the luxury of timing.  And catching people half asleep might not be a bad thing; somebody might actually talk to you."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to the police station to find out whether the name Lucas rings a bell with anyone.  I'll swing back here before I head anywhere else."

I walked down Lombard to Gay Street then over to East Fayette, passing the ten or eleven bars and couple of X-rated video arcades that made up the Baltimore ‘zone.’  A few vagrants clutching bottles in brown paper bags and a group of teenagers dressed in black sweats eyed me, but inspired no fear.  The are was lighted like a carnival, and Baltimore Police Headquarters was a block and a half away.

Headquarters itself was darker.  Citizens I would not want to meet on the streets were milling about, presumably waiting for news of loved ones in the lockup.  A man seated on a  bench just inside the door was bleeding through a gauze patch taped to his eye.  Another, wearing a leather vest emblazoned with the words
Live Free and Die
, had coils of barbed wire tattooed up every finger, both hands and both forearms.

The counter that stretched across the main room was manned by three cops presumably collecting bad news and doling out half-answers, like tellers in a foundering bank of humanity.  I approached the one in the middle because he was the oldest, and his lined face and white hair suggested kindness.  He was still filling out a form sparked by the last story he'd heard.  "How can I help you?" he asked, without looking up.

"I'm Dr. Frank Clevenger," I started.

He glanced at me.  His brow wrinkled as he tried to square the ‘Dr.’ with the gash in my face, my ponytail and my black Harley jacket.  "What kind of doctor would you be?"  He went back to filling out his form.

Right about then I was thinking I
would
be a dermatologist if I had followed my head, rather than my heart, in medical school.  My roommates and I used to joke that a single rule governed the whole specialty:  If it's wet, put something dry on it; if it's dry, put something wet on it.  But I had been bored on the surface of things.  "I'm a psychiatrist," I said.

"We could use one around here."  He looked up again, then back down.  "You don't look like any shrink I've ever seen."

I'd heard that line more times than I could remember.  I didn't look like any shrink I'd ever seen, either.  "I'm here from Boston," I said, knowing that really didn't explain the incongruity.  "I work with the police in Lynn, Massachusetts."

"Clevenger?" a black officer to our left said, looking over at me.  He held up a hand to stop the wiry man in front of him from speaking.  "Give me a minute."

"All I'm saying," the man persisted, "is that Harry's got sugar."  He shrugged inside his faded Orioles baseball jacket and pulled nervously at his graying, scraggly beard.  "You put a breathalyzer in front of him when he's real bad off, it lights up.  I seen it happen once before.  Don't matter that my brother..."  His own alcohol breath wafted my way.

"Shhhh," the officer demanded.  He looked barely thirty, with pale blue eyes, a goatee and a shaved head.  He looked over at me again.  "We got a call about you from the State Police up there."

I wasn't sure whether the call had been to help me or hurt me.  I stepped closer to him.  "And..."

"We got nothing on any Lucas.  At least nothing in our computer."

"How long do your records go back?"

The thin man began rocking against the countertop.  "My brother Harry been around.  He knowed—" he said.

"On the computer, ten years," the officer interrupted.

"What I'm looking for would have happened much longer ago."

"Fuckin’ Ronnie Lucas," the man blurted out.

I turned to him.

The officer had tuned him out.  "You could check police archives in the morning, but that's in City Hall.  You'll need to go through proper channels over there.  You may need a court order."

"You know somebody named Lucas?" I asked the man.

"Piece of shit broke Harry's jaw."

"Ronnie Lucas?" I asked.  "
L-u-c-a-s?
"

"Ronnie Lucas," the older officer echoed.

"You know him?" I asked.

"Small-time bookmaker, loan shark.  Hung around Fells Point.  Drove a lemon yellow Pontiac LeMans convertible.  White seats.  Real low profile."

The black officer chuckled.  "You never forget a goddamn thing."

"They didn't have computers when I was on the street."

"Have you heard of a Trevor Lucas?" I asked him.

"Nope."

I turned back to the thin man.

He shook his head.  "I only knowed Ronnie owing to I chased him away from my garage with a tire iron when I caught him laying for Harry, maybe five years ago.  This is after he already busted my brother's jaw.  OK?  Then he comes back with two other guys lookin’ to mess
me
up.  So I paid him."  He looked at the young officer and shrugged.  "What the fuck was I gonna do?"

"Call the police?" he suggested.

The man rolled his eyes.

"Where's Ronnie now?" I asked.

"I ain't seen him."

"He's got to be seventy, if he's still around," the older cop said.

I didn't want to waste time on Ronnie Lucas if Trevor was no relation.  "Would your brother know more about Lucas than you?"

"Probably so.  He was into Ronnie a long time.  Bad with the ponies and the dogs, you know?"

"Yes, I do."

"But he don't drink."

I looked at the young black officer.  "Can I talk to Harry?"

"He's drunk."

"
I
drink," the man interrupted, shaking his head.  "Like I told ya, Ronnie's got sugar."

"Can I give it a shot?" I asked again.

"You can try.  I doubt you'll get anything from him until he dried out."  He anticipated an argument from the thin man.  "Quiet.  I'm not going to tell you again."

I figured out it must have been Jack Rice who had called from Massachusetts.  If Lieutenant Patterson had phoned I wouldn't have any chance of visiting a subject in custody.