Speaking in Tongues (18 page)

Megan read through several other files. They were all similar—reports of patients killing themselves. One victim was found in the library. He’d apparently spent hours tearing apart books and magazines, looking for a sheet of paper sturdy enough to slice through the artery in his neck. He finally succeeded.

She shivered at the thought.

Someone else had leapt out of a tree and broken his neck. He didn’t die but was paralyzed for life. When asked about why he’d done it he said,
“He’d been talking to ‘some patients’ and he realized how pointless life was, how he was never going to get better. Death would bring some peace.”

Yet another report stated,
“Patient Matthews was the last person to see victim alive.”
The administrator wondered if he’d been involved and the boy had been interviewed and evaluated but no charges were brought.

Reading more, she found that not long after the last suicide a reporter from the
Washington Times
heard of the deaths and filed an investigative report. The state board of examiners looked into the matter and closed the hospital.

But Megan understood that the deaths weren’t suicides at all. How could they have missed it? Peter Matthews had killed the other patients and somehow covered up the evidence to make the deaths look like suicide.

She flipped through the rest of the files and clippings.

Nothing she found told her anything helpful. She shoved them under the bed. What can I do? There has to—

Then she heard the footsteps.

Faint at first.

Oh, no . . . Peter was coming back up the hall.

Well, he’d missed her before.

Closer, closer. Very soft now, as if he was trying not to make any noise. But she heard his breathing and remembered the picture of the eerie-looking boy—his twisted mouth, the tip of his pale tongue in the corner of his lips. She remembered the stained sheets and wondered if he was walking around, looking for her, masturbating . . .

Megan shivered violently. Started to cry. She eased up to the door, put her head against it, listened.

No sounds from the other side.

Had he—?

A fierce pounding on the door. The recoil knocked her to her knees.

Another crash.

A whispered voice. “Megan . . .” And in that faint word she heard lust and desperation and hunger. “Megan . . .”

He knows I’m here . . . He knows who I am!

Peter was rattling the lock. A few loud slams of a brick or baseball bat on the padlock.

No, please . . . Why’d Matthews leave her alone with him? As much as she hated the doctor, Megan prayed he’d return.

“Megannnnnnn?” It now sounded as if the boy was laughing.

A sudden crash, into the door itself. Then another. And another. Suddenly a rusty metal rod—like the spears in his horrible comic books—cracked
the wood and poked through a few inches. Just as Peter pulled the metal back out Megan leapt into the bathroom, plastered herself against the wall. She heard his breath on the door and she knew he was looking through the hole he’d made. Looking for her.

“Megan . . .”

But from that angle he couldn’t see that there was a bathroom; the door was to the side.

For an eternity she listened to his lecherous breathing. Finally he walked off.

She started back into the room. But stopped.

Had he really gone? she wondered.

She decided she’d wait until dark. Peter might be outside and he’d see her. And if she plugged up the hole he’d know for certain she was there.

She sat on the toilet, lowered her head to her hands and cried.

Come on, girl. Get up.

I can’t. No, I can’t. I’m scared.

Of course you’re scared,
Crazy Megan chides.
But what’s that got to do with anything? Lookit that. Lookit the bathroom window.

Megan looked at the bathroom window.

No, it’s nuts to think about it.

You know what you’ve got to do.

I can’t do it, Megan thought. I just can’t.

Yeah? What choice’ve you got?

Megan stood and walked to the window, reached through the bars and touched the filthy glass.

I can’t.

Yes, you can!

Megan crawled back into the room, praying that Peter wasn’t outside the door and looking through the peephole he’d made. She reached under the bed, sure she’d come up with a handful of rat. But no, she found only the manila file folder she’d been looking for. She returned to the bathroom and eased up to the window, pressed the folder against the glass. She drew back her fist and slugged the pane. The punch was hard but the glass held. She hit it again and this time a long crack spread from the top to the bottom of the window. Finally, another slug and the glass shattered. She pulled her fist back just as the sharp shards fell to the windowsill.

She picked a triangular piece of glass about eight inches long, narrow as a knife. Taking her cue from patient Victoria Skelling’s sad end, Megan, using her teeth, ripped a strip off one of the mattress pads on the wall. She wound this around the base of the splinter to make a handle.

Good,
C.M. says with approval. Proud of her other self.

No, better than good Megan reflected:
great.
Fuck you, Dr. Matthews. I feel
great!
It reminded her of how she’d felt when she’d written those letters to her parents in Dr. Hanson’s office. It was scary, it hurt, but it was completely honest.

Great.

Crazy Megan wonders,
So what’s next?

“Fuck the kid up with the knife,” Megan responded out loud. “Then get his keys and book on out of here.”

Atta girl,
C.M. offers.
But what about the dogs?

They’ve got claws,
I’ve
got claws. Megan dramatically held up the glass.

Crazy Megan is impressed as hell.

•   •   •

“There’s a van.”

“A van?” Bett asked.

“Following us,” Tate continued, as they drove past the Ski Chalet in Chantilly.

Bett started to turn.

“No, don’t,” he said.

She turned back. Looked at her hands, fingers tipped in faint purple polish. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. A white van.”

Tate made a slow circle through the shopping center then exited on Route 50 and sped east. He pulled into the Greenbriar strip mall, stopped at the Starbucks and climbed out. He bought two teas topped with foamed milk and returned to the car.

They sipped them for a moment and when a red Ford Explorer cut between his Lexus and the van he hit the gas and took off past a bookstore, streaking onto Majestic Lane and just catching the tail end of the light that put him back on Route 50, heading west this time.

When he settled into the right lane he noticed the white van was still with him.

“How’d he do that?” Tate wondered aloud.

“He’s still there?”

“Yep. Hell, he’s good.”

They continued west, passing under Route 28, which was the dividing line between civilization here and the farmland that led eventually to the mountains.

“What’re we going to do?”

But Tate didn’t answer, hardly even heard the question. He was looking at a large sign that said,
FUTURE HOME OF LIBERTY PARK
 . . .

He laughed out loud.

This was one of those odd things, noticing the sign at the same time the van was following them. A high-grade coincidence, he would have said. Bett—well, the old Bett—would of course have attributed it to the stars or the spirits or past lives or something. Didn’t matter. He’d made the connection and at last he had a solid lead.

“What?” she cried, alarmed, responding both to his outrageous U-turn, skidding 180 degrees over the grassy median and the harsh laugh coming from his throat.

“I just figured something out. We’re going to my place for a minute. I have to get something.”

“Oh. What?”

“A gun.”

Bett’s head turned toward him then away. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yep. Very serious.”

Some years ago, when Tate had been prosecuting the improbable case of the murder of a Jamaican drug dealer at a Wendy’s restaurant in suburban Burke, Konnie Konstantinatis had poked his head into Tate’s office.

“Time you got yourself a piece.”

“Of what?”

“Ha. You’ll want a revolver ’cause all you do is point ’n’ shoot. You’re not a boy to mess with clips and safeties and stuff like that.”

“What’s a clip?”

Tate had been joking, of course—every commonwealth’s attorney in Virginia was well versed in the lore of firearms—but the fact was he really didn’t know guns well. The Judge didn’t hold with weapons, didn’t see any need for them and believed the countryside would be much more highly populated without weaponry.

But Konnie wouldn’t take no for an answer and within a week Tate found himself the owner of a very unglamorous Smith & Wesson .38 Special, sporting six chambers, only five loaded, the one under the hammer being forever empty, as Konnie always preached.

This gun was locked away where it’d been for the past three or four years—in a trunk in Tate’s barn. He now sped up his driveway and leapt out, observing that with his manic driving he’d lost the white van without intending to. He ran into the barn, found the key on his chain and after much jiggling managed to open the trunk. The gun, still coated with oil as he’d left it, was in a Ziploc bag. He took it out, wiped it clean and slipped it into his pocket.

In the car Bett asked him timidly, “You have it?” the way a college girl might ask her boyfriend if he’d brought a condom on a date.

He nodded.

“Is it loaded?”

“Oh.” He’d forgotten to look. He took it out and fiddled with the gun until he remembered how to open it. Five silver eyes of bullets stared back from the cylinder.

“Yep.”

He clicked it shut and put the heavy gun in his pocket.

“It’s not going to just go off, is it? I mean, by itself.”

“No.” He noticed Bett staring at him. “What?” he asked, starting the engine of the Lexus.

“You’re . . . you look scary.”

He laughed coldly. “I
feel
scary. Let’s go.”

•   •   •

Manassas, Virginia, is this:

Big-wheeled trucks, sullen pick-a-fight teenagers (the description fitting both the boys and the girls), cars on the street and cars on blocks, Confederate stars ’n’ bars, strip malls, PCP labs tucked away in the woods, concrete postwar bungalows, quiet mothers and skinny fathers struggling, struggling, struggling. It’s domestic fights. It’s women sobbing at Garth’s concerts and teens puking at Aerosmith’s.

And a little of it, very little, is Grant Avenue.

This is Doctors’ and Lawyers’ Row. Little Taras, Civil War mansions complete with columns and detached barns for garages, surrounded by expansive landscaped yards. It was to the biggest of these houses—a rambling white Colonial on four acres—that Tate Collier now drove.

“Who lives here?” Bett asked, cautiously eyeing the house.

“The man who knows where Megan is.”

“Call Konnie,” she said.

“No time,” he muttered and he rolled up the drive, past the two Mercedeses—neither of them gray, he noticed—and skidded to a stop about five feet from
the front door, nearly knocking a limestone lion off its perch beside the walk.

“Tate!”

But he ignored her and leapt from the car.

“Wait here.”

The anger swelled inside him even more powerfully, boiling, and he found himself pounding fiercely on the door with his left hand, his right gripped around the handle of the pistol.

A large man opened the door. He was in his thirties, muscular, wearing chinos and an Izod shirt.

“I want to see him,” Tate growled.

“Who are you?”

“I want to see Sharpe and I want to see him now.”

Pull the gun now? Or wait for a more dramatic moment?

“Mr. Sharpe’s busy right at the—”

Tate lifted the gun out of his pocket. He displayed it, more than brandished it, to the assistant or bodyguard or whatever he was. The man lifted his hands and backed up, alarm on his face. “Jesus Christ!”

“Where is he?”

“Hold on there, mister, I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here but—”

“Jimmy, what’s going on?” a voice called from the top of the stairs.

“Got a problem here, Mr. Sharpe.”

“Tate Collier come a-calling,” Jack Sharpe sang out. He glanced at the gun as if Tate were holding a butterfly net. “Collier, whatcha got yourself there?” He laughed. Cautious, sure. But it was still a laugh.

“Was he driving the white van?” Tate pointed the
gun at the man in the chinos, who lifted his hands. “Careful, sir, please!” he implored.

“It’s okay, Jimmy,” Sharpe called. “Just let him be. He’ll calm down. What van, Collier?”

“You know what van,” Tate said, turning back to Sharpe. “Was he the asshole driving?”

“Why’n’t you put that thing away so’s nobody gets hurt. And we’ll talk . . . No, Jimmy, it’s okay, really.”

“I can shoot him if you want, Mr. Sharpe.”

Tate glanced back and found himself looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, chrome plated, held steadily in Jimmy’s hand. It was an automatic, he noticed—with clips and safeties and all the rest of that
stuff.

“No, don’t do that,” Sharpe said. “He’s not going to hurt anybody. Collier, put it away. Be better for everybody.”

Jimmy kept the gun pointed steadily at Tate’s head.

Tate put his own pistol back into his pocket with a shaking hand.

“Come on upstairs.”

“Should I come too, Mr. Sharpe?”

“No, I don’t think we’ll needya, Jimmy. Will we, Collier?”

“I don’t think so,” Tate said. “No.”

“Come on up.”

Tate, breathless after the adrenaline rush, climbed the stairs. He followed Jack Sharpe into a sunlit den. He glanced back and saw that Jimmy was still holding the shiny pistol pointed vaguely in Tate’s direction.

Sharpe—wearing navy-blue polyester slacks and a
red golfing shirt—was now all business. No longer jokey.

“What the fuck’s this all about, Collier?”