ONZE.
BACK AT HOME he made something to eat.
He hadn’t had breakfast that morning and he was starving. Two fried eggs over-medium with moist Jordanian zattar and thinly sliced tomato on pumpernickel did the trick. And coffee.
Once he’d put away his desire for food & caffeine, he dove in.
First readings of any text are for information. You have to see where it goes before you can see how the author got there. This is obvious.
During the first reading of the letters—cursory but intense—at least one thing relating to each case had jumped out at him. He hadn’t lingered long on any one thing in particular because he knew each item would take time. Never forget, he told himself, each murder is a case unto itself.
The discrepancies concerning each victim, in their broad strokes, were as follows——
Several black and white photographs were interspersed with the letters, as well as some drawings. These he found suspicious.
The killer was a writer, and thus his images had meaning. What was AFK trying to tell him?
The photos were of interiors, that is, the inside of a house, or houses, he didn’t know which exactly. If he was pressed to assign them a style, he would have called the photos ruin porn of some kind, if you can imagine that genre extended into interior decorating. They were vague closeups mostly, but once more it was about tone, not explanation.
The tone was what scared him.
The drawings were not much more than doodles.
Except for one, that looked like a draughtsman’s schematic for some sort of murphy bed situation in tight quarters. A chambre in someone’s attic?
It made him instantly think of the house he’d visited the previous day. Mr Hunter’s house. And what of the strange shenanigans with the maid?
He needed to find her.
“Mark Hunter,” he whispered, finding the page again with the schematic. He ran his fingers along the subtle grooves and indentations of the IRL original, while behind him on the computer screen the .img of the same sheet of paper was opened and full-screened, zoomed in to about 300%.
The thought came to him in the form of a question—
Is a house still empty if there is a dead body inside?
∆
Continuing on in chronological order (as he saw the murders), there was a curious side-note in a letter describing AFK’s work as a prostitute.
Unsettling subject matter already.
One of the clients described was an older woman whose deceased husband had been “in the cash register business”. It struck him that this might be an actual fact dropped into a sea of pseudonyms and dubious mythmaking. He attributed this letter to Rita’s case.
What about Zemarkis.
On cue, the chime of his inbox notified him that he had a new email. It was Vittoria, telling him his papers had cleared. “Holy shit,” he said, amazed. Bureaucracy never moved that fast. His login designation was C-001165, C for Consultant.
With wide eyes he logged onto the Office of the District Attorney’s Central Database (DAO-DB) and dredged up everything he could find on Nelson Zemarkis, Psy.D.
The credential after the victim’s name on several official documents was a good hint. Finding him was fairly easy.
So Nelson had indeed been a psychiatrist. Could he be the devious Dr M. described in the chilling “mendellsohn letter”?
He checked the deceased’s work history.
Piney Gates Camp for the Criminally Unsound, three years. Ironwrought Works, another aptly titled semi-public haven for the malpossessed, two more. Short stints. “Must be moving up the ladder,” Mitch muttered to himself, “else he was a total prick.”
He continued to scan the CV when something caught his eye.
Nelson’s last job, the one he had been working when he died, which he’d been at for 13 years by then, by far the longest he’d worked anywhere, was at The Markus P. Bradley Youthful Confinement College.
Not terribly far off from a “Juvenile Det(h) Sent(her).”
He went to their website, and well, it was all too natural to come as a surprise.
The way the windows looked in the picture on the landing page.
The building was a kind of dormitory, with its windows reflecting the unnaturally bright blue sky and the fake puffy clouds.
The image of the “college” from the outside looked abrasively cheerful, but if you leaned closer, like Mitch did, you might see the faintest of images behind the reflections, silhouettes of hands pressed up against the glass, a desperate expression in a veil of condensation, that of an inmate, trying to get your attention, begging for your help.
This was the lane.
Nelson’s employment at the college (as Head of Tactical Psychology) was theoretically long enough and recent enough to be Dr M. And if it was reliable information, it also put an estimate on the letter writer’s age.
Which was about his own age.
He scrubbed the records. Zemarkis had no criminal history, no complaints. From the outside he had had steady employment since leaving university.
The main thing was that Zemarkis matched the profession of Mendelssohn in the letters. That was a big deal in confirming Mitch’s theory (although, it was already fading in significance, already felt like less of a big deal, maybe since he believed the entirety of his theory inherently).
He needed to talk to Mr Barnes, the colleague who had identified Nelson’s body. Find him and talk to him. What was his rôle in the hit-and-run??? What was Nelson’s confirmed cause of death?
He did a search and spent a long time going through all of the people with the same name until he found someone who had also worked for a semi-private care facility.
He dug into this new profile.
And found something.
What the hell.
Mr Barnes, after confirming the positive ID to the police, had been himself enrolled in a semi-public/private mental health prison.
Calm Waters, it was called.
Barnes, like Zemarkis, worked as a psychologist. Now he was institutionalized? How often did the tables get turned like that?
How often in a hit-and-run does the driver know the victim?
Something struck our friend the detective as being not quite right. Something was definitely happening here.
Mitch got up from his chair at the computer, leaving half a cup of cold coffee on the table and a half-burned cigarette in the tray. He went to the table by the door and grabbed his keys.
Calm Waters it is.
Δ
He parked and walked up a cement path lined with lime trees to the main guest entrance of Calm Waters MHP.
The architecture of the facility was the same as the surrounding neighborhoods and office buildings. From the outside it could have been anything. The trees and the fresh cut grass of the small lawns might have softened the appearance but for the feeling of certainty that no one enjoyed them.
Inside he walked into a small space before another set of double doors. This one you had to be buzzed through. The clerk behind the window didn’t move until he spoke through the circular voice transmitter.
“Excuse me.”
The clerk looked up.
“When are visiting hours?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you guys have visiting hours, to see the, uh,” he tried to think of a euphemism for inmate, and settled on, “guests?”
“No,” was the unqualified response from the clerk.
Huh. No visitors. That’s odd.
“How about volunteers?”
“Volunteers?”
“To visit with the guests.”
“Right, this way.”
Bzzzzz.
Well alright then, Mitch thought, as he walked inside.
The clerk didn’t ask questions and showed him through a tiled mess hall into a decent-sized living room area where guests sat in their wheelchairs watching TV, or on the couch doing the same, or walked about staring blankly talking to ghosts.
The clerk made a gesture like “here ya go” and shuffled away.
Mitch knew what Mr Barnes looked like and he wasn’t there. In the meantime the guests began to take notice and as they did they suctioned closer to him till he was surrounded by a small crowd of unknown people in his personal space.
A moment of anxiety tensed up his body until he thought, Nah, let it go, these people need some help, they need some attention, like we all do.
He felt the aversion dissipate and it was a wonderful feeling.
He figured he’d stick around until Barnes showed up or the aversion accumulated once again, whichever came first.
He didn’t keep time as he visited with this person, now that, sometimes holding multiple conversations simultaneously as people talked at him from all directions. Some screwed up their brows and talked with real determination, which reminded him of his impression of Mr Hunter, from the letters, while others were really easygoing and sweet.
He didn’t have any expectation or goal, and knew he couldn’t help anyone, so he just let them talk, and it did seem like some of the weight of the room lifted, a sense complimented by the angles of midday sun that lit the barred windows.
When Mr Barnes was escorted into the living room, however, he did have to interrupt the people jabbering at him and excuse himself a minute.
There was an initial shock on the part of the guests who would have gone on for some time yet, but it passed and presumably they went on carrying the conversation each with themselves.
He went over to where the attendant had settled Mr Barnes, at a table facing a window so that his back was to him.
“Would it be alright if I visited with him for a while?” he asked the attendant.
The attendant just looked at him and frowned and walked away.
Uh oh. He probably didn’t have much time. He took a seat beside Mr Barnes, who barely acknowledged him.
“Excuse me,” said the young detective, “are you David Barnes?”
Barnes turned his head sharply at his name—an instant affirmative—but turned away. His eyes began to dart side to side.
“I don’t mean to bug you,” said Mitch, “if you want I’ll leave you be.”
Barnes was thinking in his head but said nothing.
“I wanted to ask you something, but I don’t want to disturb you. So if it makes you feel uncomfortable just shake your head and I’ll go right away. Is that alright?”
Barnes didn’t say anything.
“It’s about Nelson. Nelson Zemarkis.”
The physical reaction the name had on Barnes was undeniable.
It made Mitch feel horrible immediately, but it made Barnes feel even worse.
The sound of the name had squeezed Mr Barnes’ intestines in a vice.
“Shake your head if you don’t want to talk about it and I’ll go, I promise.”
But Barnes couldn’t shake his head. Not just his head. He was trembling all over. Something had taken over.
“How—H-How--…”
Mitch leaned closer to hear.
“How did you—…”
“How do I know about Nelson?”
Barnes swallowed hard and looked at Mitch with the utmost pleading in his eyes. He nodded his head slowly up and down.
“I’m looking into what happened to him,” said Mitch.
This was not the greatest response in Mr Barnes’ opinion. He became openly paranoid and this had consequences.
In rooms like these the perception of mood is heightened to a supernatural level. Emotions run thick, enough that one can feel them physically. So when the fear came over Mr Barnes the entire room felt it. The guests began to get agitated.
Fear spreads.
“I’m sorry to’ve upset you,” was all Mitch had time to say before two attendants, who looked more like guards, were at the table.
“Who’re you?”
Mitch stood, unwilling to fight or try to pester Barnes further.
“If there’s a manager, I’ll explain,” he replied.
The attendants were leading him away when Barnes, who was in his mid-40s but had taken on the bearing of a senile octogenarian—grabbed the end of Mitch’s polo shirt and made him stay.
“You’re—with—her…”
Mitch and he locked eyes.
“Who.”
“Sir,” said one of the guards.
“You’re with her!” Barnes gasped. He was choking on his spit, choking with fear.
“Who?!” Mitch gasped back.
“Sir! This way, now!”
“Who?” Mitch pleaded one more time, but the guards were already once more leading him away.
He looked back and saw Barnes haloed in a silvery blue light from the window.
“You’re with Delphine!”