Hobbs was on the verge of losing it. How could this have happened? He glared across the light-filled office at Dr Felicia Morgan, Croton’s rail-thin medical director. Her phone hadn’t stopped ringing; she was on it now. Dressed in black, she seemed agitated and uncertain.
‘The FBI will be here within half an hour,’ she said, putting down the receiver and running a hand through her short-cropped hair. Three other lines were blinking red. She blew out a slow stream of breath and glanced at Hobbs. ‘One is the governor, two is my boss, the commissioner, and three is Channel Eight.’
‘Go with your boss if you have to and forget the other two.’ He knew she had priorities, knew that as an NYPD detective this wasn’t his jurisdiction, but right now he couldn’t care less. What mattered was Richard Glash kidnapping two women with Barrett in the back of his getaway vehicle over two hours ago, and as far as he could tell there wasn’t a fucking thing being done about it. He cracked his neck, feeling every muscle tense in his body.
His cell rang and for a brief moment hope surged. Was it Barrett?
‘Hobbs?’
It almost sounded like her. ‘Hey, Justine.’
‘Tell me she’s OK.’
‘How did you find out?’ he asked, the sound of her desperation fueling his.
‘I got this horrible message on my answering machine – I was in surgery so I couldn’t pick up. She was whispering and she sounded really scared … what the hell is happening?’
‘Your sister,’ Hobbs said, trying to keep the fury from his voice, ‘decided to throw her pregnant ass into the getaway car of a psychopath who’d just taken two hostages. When did she call?’
‘Just after eight.’
‘Nothing since?’ he asked, hopeful that there was still a chance she’d not been discovered.
‘No.’
‘Shit!’
‘What?’ Justine asked.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘Ed, please tell me. I’m about to lose my mind.’
‘It’s not good, none of this is good. I was having them use her cell phone to locate their position. It went dead twenty minutes ago. Not that far from here.’ He felt a burning rage. The delay in getting them to trace the call, the minutes it took to bring the state troopers up to speed, the criminal incompetence of the Croton guards – the fifty minutes it took him to drive from Manhattan, only to find the trail cold. He wanted to jump in his Crown Vic and chase after her. But where?
Justine sobbed. ‘We should have pushed harder. If we’d made her have that damned abortion, none of this would have happened.’
‘Sure, try getting your sister to do anything she doesn’t want to.’ He struggled to keep his tone light, but if Barrett had been there, he didn’t know which he’d do first, throttle her or kiss her. ‘Justine, I got to go. If you hear from her call me right away.’
‘Promise you’ll do the same.’
‘You got it,’ and he hung up. ‘So tell me about Glash,’ Hobbs said to Felicia, who’d just finished a rough call with her commissioner. Hobbs couldn’t yet figure if this intense-looking woman, with her dark clothes, trendy glasses and short hair, was friend or foe.
‘Barrett is pregnant?’ Felicia asked, having overheard Hobbs’s conversation. ‘I had no idea.’
‘You didn’t hear it from me,’ he said. ‘Please tell me everything you know about Glash.’
The door opened and a frail-looking older man dressed for a cool day or a Bogart movie in trenchcoat, gray fedora, black wool pants and pressed white shirt, entered without being asked. ‘I’d probably better do that.’ He looked at Hobbs through thick glasses that distorted his pale eyes, like a goldfish looking out of a bowl; he took off his hat, scanned the various surfaces in the room, and placed it carefully on a stack of journals by the door. ‘You must be Detective Edward Hobbs,’ he said, without extending his hand. ‘I’m George Houssman, I don’t know if Barrett has ever mentioned me.’
‘She has,’ Hobbs said, wondering what the semi-retired professor was doing here.
‘Good.’ Houssman looked at Felicia and nodded. ‘By your expression, I’m assuming he’s not yet been caught?’
‘No,’ she said, glancing down at the flashing red lights on her phone.
‘Leave that alone, then,’ Houssman instructed. He looked at Hobbs. ‘Have a seat, young man.’
Hobbs was about to argue, but something in the old guy’s manner – authority and something maybe more vulnerable – made him pull up a metal-framed armchair.
‘You have no idea,’ Houssman began, not sitting, ‘of how I hoped this day would never come. And now Barrett … He’ll come after me, too.’ He looked out of a barred window at the grounds below. In front of Croton’s main entrance yellow crime-scene tape ringed the transport vehicle that had carried Glash. The bodies of the two Marshals were only now being covered in white oilcloth bags.
‘Why would he go after you?’ Hobbs blurted, struggling to stay in his seat.
Houssman paused, still looking out of the window. He nodded his head. ‘At least my wife is dead.’
‘Please spit it out,’ Hobbs said, not caring if he sounded rude, ‘if you know anything about this Glash.’
Houssman turned and looked at Ed. There was something appraising in the way he examined the tall detective with his scarred face. ‘She’s like a daughter to me,’ Houssman said. ‘I understand your urgency, but what I have to say is something I’ve kept secret for nearly forty years. Now I have no choice. Richard Glash, if he’s not stopped, will come after me, my two daughters and my grandchildren. He will systematically kill everyone he believes has ever done him wrong. You see, for a very brief period, Delia – my wife – and I took in Richard Glash as a foster child, with the hope of one day adopting him.’
Felicia, in awe of the esteemed pioneer in forensics, was about to speak and then stopped herself.
Houssman glanced at her. ‘This is no time for niceties, Felicia. You wanted to ask why none of this is mentioned in Glash’s records.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I didn’t want it to be there, and this all happened long enough ago when it wasn’t so difficult to eliminate an uncomfortable detail or two from a medical record. Glash’s juvenile records are still sealed. On the list of things that must be done immediately is getting them and scouring them for every name and address connected with his early life. All those people, like me and my family, are in mortal danger. No more interruptions. I’ll go though the facts quickly’ – he looked at Hobbs – ‘because the last thing you want are the reminiscences of an old man.’
‘Thank you,’ Hobbs said. He looked intently at Houssman, his heart bounding in his chest.
‘Delia, and I couldn’t have children,’ he began.
Hobbs groaned to himself, sensing a long and pointless story.
‘So we took in two foster children, the offspring of a woman who had killed her husband and was sentenced to serve thirty to fifty years. She had no other family, the children were young and it seemed a good option. It worked out well and a year later we adopted the two girls, our daughters – Stephanie and Alice.’ Houssman caught Hobbs’s eye. ‘I will go fast,’ he assured him. ‘Our two girls were well adjusted; we’d taken them in when they were three and five. So when I came upon the case of Peter Glash and realized that this four-year-old would be a ward of the state and needed a foster family, I thought that this might be the final addition to our family. I was cocky in those days, convinced that sociopathy was far more nurture than nature. Richard was a good-looking boy, although we knew right off he was also special.’
‘As in retarded?’ Hobbs asked.
‘Hardly, on standard IQ tests Richard scored high in the genius range. He was aloof and quiet and from the time he was old enough to hold a crayon or marker, he’d exhibited savant-like artistic abilities. His strangeness I put down to his intelligence and his early home life. I rationalized that if my wife and I pulled him from a bad environment, we could alter the course of his life for the better. I was horribly wrong, of course.’
‘What happened?’ Hobbs asked.
Houssman blinked three times; he grimaced, the edges of his thin lips drew up as though he’d just tasted something bad. ‘My wife was sewing when Richard knocked on the Sullivan’s door. Their young daughter – Richard’s playmate – answered it. He attacked her. Delia, to her dying day, never recovered from the shock of that child’s screams and what she found. Richard Glash had taken a meat cleaver from the kitchen and tried to remove Mary’s scalp. Later, we’d discover that his inspiration had been a Western. It looked interesting to him, so he wanted to try it. It’s a miracle he didn’t succeed in killing that little girl. Delia got slashed trying to pull him off. She described it like he was some sort of animal.’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ Felicia said.
Houssman glanced at her; his jaw was tight. ‘Of course not, and then again … I had evaluated his father. I should have been more careful.’
‘What was the father like?’ Hobbs asked, realizing that in a few seconds Houssman had given him more useful information than anyone else in the past two hours.
‘Not what I’d expected,’ Houssman continued, pleased that Hobbs was asking the right questions. ‘I went into his evaluation believing it to be a straightforward crime of passion. An older husband discovers his younger wife has been cheating and in a fit of fury bludgeons her to death. His attorney decides that it has the makings of a not-guilty-by-reason-of-mental-defect plea and the case gets sent my way for an expert opinion.’
‘And?’ Hobbs prompted, wanting to speed the old man up.
‘Peter Glash could not have done anything in passion. He was cold, and his every action was carefully considered. A man incapable of blind rage. I remember thinking that he embodied the age-old truth: revenge is a meal best served cold. The murder of his wife was deliberate. It occurred weeks after he’d discovered her affair with a purveyor who made deliveries to their candy business. There was no evidence of psychosis. He told his story repeatedly without changing a detail. No psychiatric diagnosis fit. He was not schizophrenic or manic depressive. In hindsight, his diagnosis was likely the same as his son’s.’
‘Which is?’ Hobbs asked.
‘Asperger’s.’
‘What the hell is that?’
‘Look,’ Houssman said, ‘I promised not to bog you down in details so let me give you what’s useful. It’s a form of autism that does not include mental retardation. It’s far more common in boys and frequently travels through the men in a family. No one knows where it comes from – there are many theories. The core defect is an inability to comprehend social interaction. People with Asperger’s are typically very obsessional; things need to be done in a specific way, at a specific time. If they’re prone to violence – and the vast majority are not – their anger is often triggered by a variation in routine or by being told “no”. To an outsider it could be as trivial as putting the pillows on their bed in a different manner, or leaving a window open a hair’s breadth more than usual. Peter Glash’s reason for killing his wife was that women are supposed to be faithful to their husbands. She strayed from his rigidly held belief, and because of that she needed to die at his hand. He had some biblical quotes he’d spout. I recall something about stoning harlots.’
‘What happened?’
‘He went to prison, of course. That would have been nearly forty years ago.’
‘Is he still in?’ Hobbs asked.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Houssman replied, ‘but it’s easy to check.’
‘Any more about Richard Glash?’ Hobbs pressed.
‘Felicia, I assume you have his records on hand?’
‘Just the prison and arrest records. I need a court order for everything before his eighteenth birthday. I did get these,’ she said, pushing a large sealed cardboard box marked ‘inmate belongings’ to the edge of her desk. ‘It came ahead of the transport wagon.’ She looked up at Hobbs and then at Houssman. ‘I didn’t open it for fear of contaminating any potential evidence.’
Hobbs had no such qualms and flicked open the red Swiss Army knife he used as a key chain and ripped through the red-and-black striped tape. Houssman looked on as Hobbs rapidly unpacked the contents and laid them out on Felicia’s desk. First a stack of artist’s spiral-bound sketchpads. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered as he flipped through page after page of nightmarish murder scenes. ‘I know this one,’ he said, looking at a charcoal sketch that depicted the excavation of the crawl space beneath John Wayne Gacy’s house. Partially exhumed corpses and skeletons broke through the surface of their shallow graves. A sweat-covered Gacy was caught in half-profile, stooped over, a young man’s naked body off to the side.
‘Before his mother’s murder,’ Houssman commented, ‘Richard drew animals. I have sketchpads filled with them. Anyone seeing them assumes they were done by a skilled adult artist and not a three- or four-year-old. He drew the family cat and without being taught he’d switch styles from realism to cubism, to Japanese line drawing. I can only assume he’d seen examples on advertisements or maybe his parents took him to museums. Some you’d swear had been drawn by Picasso or Matisse. That all changed after his mother’s murder.’
‘That’s when he started drawing murder scenes?’ Hobbs asked, coming to an image that fueled his spiraling anxiety.
‘That’s Barrett,’ Felicia gasped, stating the obvious. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ The picture, drawn in rust-colored pencil, showed Barrett’s high cheekbones and almond eyes, but her complexion was marked with open pustules and oozing sores that dripped blood. The whites of her eyes were shot through with angry veins; her full lips were cracked and bleeding.‘What else is in there?’ Houssman asked quickly, wanting Hobbs to flip past the accursed drawing. What followed wasn’t much better: other faces, some they recognized, others they didn’t, all similarly pocked and diseased.
Hobbs felt sick. His head spun and at first he didn’t recognize the buzzing of his cell. He flipped it open on the second ring. ‘Yes?’ his mouth felt parched. It was a buddy of his, Carl Briggs – a State Trooper.
‘Ed, you’re not going to like this.’
Hobbs braced for the worst.
‘We found your lady friend’s cell smashed to bits in the woods outside the Titicus Reservoir … and we’ve got a homicide.’
Hobbs could barely speak. ‘Is it her? Is it Barrett?’
‘I don’t think it’s her,’ Briggs said, ‘not from what you described. It’s a young, female Caucasian, long blonde hair – or at least she used to have. Our perp decided to play cowboys and Indians with her. Identification tag has her as a Lucinda Peters – state employee with some department I’ve never heard of.’
‘Where are you?’ Hobbs asked. ‘I’ll be there as fast as I can.’
‘Wouldn’t bother,’ Briggs added.
‘Why?’
‘’Cause I just got the call that we got homicide number two not ten minutes from here in Katonah. And Ed, whatever this guy’s up to it’s clear he wants publicity and he’s moving fast, ’cause both here and with the stiff in Katonah the first call he made was to the press. They beat the feds, and they beat us. It’s a fucking zoo! We’re all going to be TV stars.’
‘They have an ID on stiff number two?’ Hobbs asked, feeling a sick tingle in his fingers and toes.
‘Yeah, kind of a semi-celebrity, name of John J. Saunders. His wife’s the one who killed the kids a few years back.’
‘You got the address?’ Hobbs wrote it down. ‘Thanks, man.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Ed hung up, took a look back at the cardboard box of Glash’s belongings, and headed toward the door. Glash still had her; she was still alive; she had to be.
‘I’m coming with you,’ Houssman said, grabbing his hat and following Hobbs out into the corridor.
‘Are you insane?’ Hobbs replied, picking up his pace, not wanting to be saddled with the eighty-four-year-old psychiatrist.
‘Be reasonable,’ Houssman answered, catching up with him. ‘We’ve just scratched the surface on Glash. I have more to tell you and I can do it while you drive. And unlike Barrett, I know not to put myself in the line of fire. What was she thinking? She’s a fucking psychiatrist, for God’s sake! And did I hear correctly, that Glash killed Jane Saunders’ husband?’
‘What?’ Hobbs asked, slowing slightly. ‘What does she have to do with this?’
‘Quite a lot, I’m afraid,’ he said, pushing past Hobbs as the skirts of his long gray trenchcoat flew out around his ankles. ‘I’m definitely coming with you. We don’t have much time. Everyone I care about has been placed in mortal danger, so keep moving.’
‘You got it,’ Hobbs said. ‘So what’s the deal with John and Jane Saunders?’
‘Possibly our first break,’ Houssman said, not slowing. ‘Glash was one of four prisoners getting transferred, Jane Saunders, Dr Clarence Albert and Allison Tessavian are the other three … oh my God!’
‘What is it?’ Hobbs asked, finding himself having to step up his pace.
‘The pictures he drew of disease. Clarence Albert …’
Before he could get out the words Hobbs made the connection. ‘He was the scientist who mailed anthrax. Oh, shit!’
‘Let’s just get there,’ Houssman said. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know.’