Riverview Psychiatric Hospital appeared even more ominous and disquieting at night than it did by day. Dim lights illuminated some of the rooms, but most of the windows were dark. There were a couple of streetlamps at the front gate, one over the main entrance door and one at the loading dock behind the mansion. The parking lot in front was empty.
North led the way through the woods to the rear of the mansion, aware of Sierra following close behind. He knew they were both still wired from the violent confrontation at Loring’s house, and there was a risk that Ralph and Joe might figure out they were headed to Riverview. A couple of sensible criminals would cut their losses and run.
But it was clear that Ralph and Joe were Puppets. They had bought whatever wild promises Loring had made to them. The lure of serious paranormal power was enough to cause even smart bad guys to make poor choices, and there was no indication that Ralph and Joe had ever been particularly intelligent to start with.
The worst of the storm had passed but the ground was soggy and, in places, treacherous. A couple of vehicles were parked outside the rear gate.
“The night staff,” North said. “With luck, just the other two orderlies. According to the people we talked to in town, there are only four and they all sleep here. Victor said Marge told him the lab was on the top floor at the end of the hall. The night she escaped she went down what she called the other stairs, the ones the clones used—not the main staircase.”
“An old set of service stairs?” Sierra suggested.
“Probably. We’ll try for those.”
Sierra studied the rear of the mansion through the bars of the gate. “There’s a door beside the loading dock,” she said.
“Ralph’s key fob will probably work on the gate and the door. Ready?”
“Sure. We’re about to break into an insane asylum. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Keep that positive attitude,” North said.
He left the cover of the trees. Sierra followed, moving in the light, nearly silent way that fascinated him.
The second fob on Ralph’s ring opened the gate. North eased inside, waited for Sierra and then closed the gate.
They made their way past a couple of industrial-sized trash bins and what looked like a gardening shed.
One of Ralph’s other fobs opened the service entrance door. North moved into a large, unlit room. Sierra followed. He closed the door behind her and waited a beat.
There were no warning pings from the security box on the wall. No red lights flashed. They were in.
It would have been convenient to call on his talent to help navigate the pitch-black space. There was a time when he had prowled the dark as effortlessly as any night predator. But those days were, if not quite gone, fading fast. Using his talent would just hasten the blindness that was setting in. And then there was the risk of getting trapped in the ghost world.
He switched on the penlight instead and did a quick scan of the room. It was cluttered with a jumble of large cardboard boxes containing supplies and canned goods. Various items of cleaning equipment were stored in a corner.
The storage room was unlit, but a bulb glowed dimly over the entrance to a narrow staircase.
They climbed the steps, trying to make as little noise as possible. The muffled chatter of late-night television could be heard from the first floor. North hoped that meant the night staff was occupied and would not notice any small unusual sounds that emanated from inside the stairwell.
The door at the top of the stairs on the third floor was locked. North looked through the narrow, wired window. He saw twin rows of closed doors on either side of the hall. Each door was set with a small window. Midway down the corridor there was a nurses’ station, but no one was around.
If Marge’s description of the layout was accurate, the door to Loring’s laboratory was at the far end of the hallway.
North looked at Sierra. “The patients could be a problem. If we disturb them there will probably be a lot of noise. It might attract the attention of the night staff.”
Sierra opened her locket. “If one of them becomes agitated I might be able to keep him calm.”
“All right, but be careful. I know you’re good at doing whatever it is you do with that mirror, but we don’t know anything about these patients. Some of the auras up here might be pretty badly damaged.”
“I understand. I’ll be careful. Meanwhile, don’t make eye contact with any of the patients. I think they would find that alarming, especially if they can see our auras.”
“Understood.”
“Whatever else comes out of this, we have to find a way to rescue these people.”
“Don’t worry, now that we know this place is not a legitimate hospital, Victor and Lucas will take care of things here.”
North opened the door with Ralph’s fob. Sierra followed him into the hallway. A couple of faces appeared at the windows in the doors. North avoided looking at the people inside the locked cells. He wondered if all of them had been grabbed off the streets or if some were actual patients.
He and Sierra made it past the unstaffed nurses’ station without creating a disturbance. And then they were at the end of the hall. This time Ralph’s fob did not work.
“Well, damn,” North said quietly.
Sierra looked at him. “What?”
“Old-fashioned security. This lock takes a key. What do you want to bet that the only person who has it is Loring?”
“Are you saying we can’t get inside?”
“No.” North took a high-tech lockpick out of one of the pockets of his black cargo trousers. “But it’s going to take me a minute.”
In the end it took about fifteen seconds, not a minute. The lock was good but nothing extraordinary. It had been installed by a skilled locksmith, which meant that it could be broken by a skilled burglar or a reasonably proficient cleaner equipped with the proper tools.
He got the door open and they moved into an unlit room.
He closed the door and switched on his penlight. The light played over a couple of stainless steel workbenches laden with a variety of instruments and electronic gear. Much of the equipment looked new, but one device standing alone on a separate table appeared to be of an old-fashioned design.
Sierra headed straight toward it, stripped off a glove and touched it cautiously. She winced.
“Hot,” she said. She pulled on her glove. “Lab heat.”
North felt his pulse kick up. A thrill of excitement flashed through him. He moved across the room to get a closer look at the artifact.
The square black metal box measured about a foot on all sides. It was rusty in places. The cloudy display screen was dark. Instead of a computer keyboard, several rows of knobs and dials studded the front of the machine. Wires were attached to the top.
“Looks like it came from one of the lost labs, all right,” he said.
“I can tell you right now that, whatever it is, it’s worth a fortune on the underground market,” Sierra said. “I’m surprised Loring would leave it here.”
“It looks heavy,” North said. “Also, it’s awkward. Probably takes two hands just to carry it. Why not stash it here? Who’s going to look for a valuable artifact from the Bluestone Project in a locked lab inside an asylum?”
“Gee, I don’t know. How about you and me?”
“Right.” North felt a visceral tug on his senses. Experimentally he reached out to touch the metal box. Familiar energy whispered through him. He smiled. “I think I know why Loring left this behind.”
“Why?”
“It’s infused with Griffin Chastain’s psychic signature. Got a hunch Loring couldn’t make it function correctly, assuming he got it to work at all. If he did try to activate it, he would have run the risk of damaging his own aura in the process.”
“I assume we’re taking that thing with us when we leave?”
“Oh, yeah. But first we need to see what else we can find here.”
Sierra walked across the room and stopped near a wall. “How about a vintage radio?”
She stripped off a leather glove again and bent down to gingerly pick up an object from the floor. She winced a little and transferred the artifact to her gloved hand.
“Well?” North asked.
“It’s a radio that looks like it dates from the era of the lost labs,” she said. “There’s definitely some heat in it, but nothing spectacular.”
“The radio Dad bought from Gwendolyn Swan?” North asked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Sierra took a closer look. “The plastic is cracked and one of the knobs fell off. There’s some hot rage infused in it. Got a feeling Loring or someone hurled it against the wall in a fit of anger.”
“Because it wasn’t the artifact that he had been expecting,” North concluded. “Dad fooled him.”
“Do you want to take it with us?”
“No, it’s useless.” North got a familiar frisson of energy across the back of his neck. His intuition was warning him that it was time to leave. “Let’s go. I need both hands to carry Griffin Chastain’s machine. You’ll have to handle security until we get out of the building.”
“Right,” she said. “I’ll go first.”
She paused at the door long enough to check the view of the hallway through the small window. Then she cradled her locket in her ungloved hand.
“All clear,” she announced softly.
She opened the door and moved out into the hall. North followed with the machine. The ward was still relatively quiet but now there were more faces at the windows of the cells.
They made it past the nurses’ station before disaster struck. The door at the end of the ward slammed open. A massive figure loomed in the doorway. He was dressed in scrubs and, like Ralph’s and Joe’s, his arms were sheathed in tattoos.
He aimed a pistol at Sierra.
“Stop,” he roared.
The screaming started then. One patient howled. Within seconds the rest joined in. Some of the cries morphed into panicky shrieks. A terrible keening echoed from one room.
The chorus of the doomed grew to a thunderous roar.
“Sierra?” North said.
“I’ve got this,” Sierra said.
North felt energy charge the atmosphere. Sierra’s locket glowed like a white-hot mirror. The tattooed man staggered as though he had been struck with a blunt object, pitched forward and went down. There was a reverberating thud when his unconscious frame hit the floor.
“The gun,” North said.
She swooped down and picked up the pistol.
Together they ran toward the doors. Tattooed Man had not bothered to lock them.
Sierra plunged down the stairwell. North followed with the artifact, listening for the sound of footsteps from below. It was unlikely the tattooed orderly was the only person on duty.
Sierra was on the first-floor landing when the hall door slammed open.
Another big man in scrubs appeared.
“Walt? Is that you? Everything okay up there?”
Then he noticed Sierra. She showed him the pistol.
“Shit,” he yelped.
He retreated at full speed and slammed the door shut.
“Keep going,” North ordered.
Sierra didn’t pause. She switched on a penlight to guide them across the storage room and then they were through the rear gate. No one followed them.
They made it to the SUV. North dumped the metal box on the floor behind the front seat and leaped behind the wheel. Sierra scrambled up into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door closed.
North drove out of the trees and onto the narrow, winding road.
“Watch our tail,” he said.
Sierra twisted around in her seat to peer out the rear window.
“No one is following us,” she said.
“We had the element of surprise on our side this time. They were watching for us at Loring’s house but they didn’t expect us to go into the asylum. It will take them a while to figure out what happened and where we might be headed.”
“I assume we’re going back to Seattle?”
“Not until we have a chat with Garraway.”
“The director of the asylum?” she said. “When do you plan to do that?”
“The sooner the better. Now would be good.”
“I’m not sure that confronting Garraway tonight is a good idea,” she said. “We both burned a lot of energy in the past few hours, physical and paranormal. We need time to recover.”
“We’ll get some rest right after we talk to Garraway.”
Sierra did not argue. She understood, he thought. They were running out of time.
Earlier that evening he had obtained the directions to Garraway’s house from the same helpful local who had told them how to find Loring’s place. At the time Loring had been the priority, but now North’s intuition was raging at him, telling him he had to confront Garraway immediately. Too much was happening too fast. The situation was starting to spin out of control.
The house Garraway was renting was located at the end of a short drive about half a mile outside of town. The windows were dark. No lights burned over the front porch. A Porsche was parked at the foot of the steps.
North pulled up to the front of the house and brought the SUV to a halt. Sierra studied the dark windows.
“Does it strike you as strange that a guy like Garraway, a man who wears expensive jackets and ties and drives a Porsche, would accept a position as the director of a small private asylum located in a remote corner of the state?” she asked.
“Yes.” North opened the door of the SUV and got out. “A guy like Garraway should be working at a prestigious institution or a hospital located in a major city.”
“Maybe he went to Riverview because he felt a true calling.”
“I think it’s a hell of a lot more likely he took the job because someone convinced him that he stood to make a lot of money.”
“Loring?”
“Maybe.”
Sierra got out and joined him. Together they went up the steps. North tried the bell first. When there was no response he rapped sharply on the front door.
No one answered. Sierra watched him reach into a pocket of his cargo pants and pull out the lockpick.
“You know, if you keep this up we’re probably going to get arrested,” she said.
“No, we won’t,” he said. “I’ve got some solid government ID that will cover us if the local cops try to pull us in.”
“Government ID? Is it real?”
“I know this will come as a shock, but yes. It’s issued by the Agency for the Investigation of Atypical Phenomena.”
“Never heard of it.”
“The agency likes to keep a low profile.”
“No kidding.”
He was about to insert the pick into the lock but he paused long enough to try the doorknob.
It turned easily.
“Huh,” he said. He slipped his gun out of the shoulder holster. “Stand on the other side of the door.”
Sierra obediently moved out of what might become the line of fire. North flattened himself against the wall, opened the door and shoved it inward.
“Government agents,” he said in a loud, authoritative tone. “Come out with your hands up.”
Silence reverberated from deep inside the house. So did a sense of wrongness. You don’t have to be psychic to sense death, especially the violent kind. Humans have acute instincts for it.
“This is going to be bad,” North said quietly. “You’d better wait out here.”
He reached around the edge of the doorframe and flipped a light switch. Sierra pushed herself away from the wall of the house and looked through the doorway.
The hall light illuminated two suitcases.
Garraway’s body was sprawled on the floor. He had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the head.
North went through the ritual of checking for a pulse, but he didn’t expect to find one and he was proven right. After a moment he got to his feet and contemplated the suitcases.
“Garraway was trying to run,” he said. “He shouldn’t have stopped to pack.”
North crouched and opened one of the suitcases. Sierra watched him flip through some clothing. At the bottom of the case there was an envelope. He opened it. A flash drive and a sheaf of computer printouts fell out.
North flipped through the printouts. “Spreadsheets. Financial stuff. Looks like Garraway was the money guy.”
Sierra took off one glove and gingerly touched the doorknob. A shock of fury zapped across her senses. She jerked her fingers off the metal and shook her hand in a futile attempt to ease the burn.
North stood, envelope in hand. “Are you okay?”
“Hurts like hell but I’ll be all right. If it helps, I can tell you a few things about the killer.”
“Talk.”
“Whoever it was is unstable.”
“How unstable?”
“Without being able to see a reflection of the person’s aura in a mirror, I can’t give you a lot of details. All I know for sure is that the shooter’s aura is pretty messed up.”