Thursday, August 30
0800 hours
Albany, New York
They came down a long, echoing corridor marked with steel doors painted white. Into each door a little wired glass window was set. An enamel number plate identified the room. Under each number plate a clipboard hung suspended. Down at the far end of the long green hallway, a glassed-in enclosure showed John Keogh a group of white uniformed male nurses standing around drinking coffee and watching something on a black-and-white television.
Danziger led the way, massive in his blue pin-striped suit, shuffling a bit in his slip-ons, saying nothing to the detective trailing behind him. It was as if the doctor were trying to distance himself from this exercise in prurience.
They stopped outside a door marked 222. Someone had scrawled an “X” and a “3” under the numbers. The computer printout on the clipboard showed the name RENT MICHAEL D’ARCY.
Danziger lifted up the clipboard and began riffling through the printout. Keogh resisted the desire to look in through the thick glass porthole.
“Go on,” said Danziger, not looking up. “Or do you want to go in there with him?”
John Keogh didn’t answer. Like a man putting his hand into a black bag fall of razors, Keogh looked into the glass.
The room was empty.
Straining, he put his face close to the glass and tried to see into the corners of the grubby white room. There was nothing in it but a high slit window crosshatched in wired glass, through which a thin milky light that might have been the sun drifted in. And, bolted to the terrazzo floor, a cot with a tangle of dirty sheets. And panels of gray-white canvas covering—perhaps padding was the word—the walls. In the upper right-hand corner a small convex mirror showed the room. Wrist and chest restraints trailed on the floor beside the cot
Keogh was about to speak to Danziger when he caught a reflection in the convex mirror. A tiny figure like a spider was …
A wild red face hit the glass, contorting on the pane, dribbling spit across it, smearing it with reddened hands. A toothless mouth twisted and gaped an inch from Keogh’s face. He stepped back six paces and brought his hands up.
The face in the glass disappeared and a thin low howling came out of the door. Danziger looked into the room and then stepped away to face Keogh.
“Go on, detective. Take a better look at it. Look all you want. This is the thing you left us with.”
Keogh forced himself up to the glass again. The thing was on the cot now, grinding itself into the sheet, face turned up to watch the glass. Diapered, it fouled itself as Keogh watched, staring up at the glass, staring at Keogh without the slightest recognition. A bony furred skeleton of a man, almost transparent with sickness. The eyes were shaded and hunted and the mouth and cheeks jerked convulsively. The long tapered hands clutched the sheets and then sprang open again. A terrible low moaning came out of that wet red hole of a mouth.
Keogh stepped back.
“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus and Mary.”
Danziger said, “Is it him?”
John Keogh’s face seemed to burn. Under his tan the blood was racing. His hands fluttered in front of his shirt and for a moment it was clear to Danziger how old the man was.
John Keogh ran a hand across his face and seemed to gather himself. “Open it up. Please.”
“No. Flat no. That’s not going to happen.”
“Danziger, I have to.”
Danziger said nothing. Keogh let him think about it. Danziger was the kind of man who would do what he wanted no matter what you said. John looked at the numbers on the door.
Two two two. Under that, an “X” and a three.
Three times two two two.
Six Six Six. Sign of The Beast.
“No,” said Danziger, his face set. “You’ve seen him. That’s enough. Anything else is pornography.”
“I don’t know, Sam.… He looks wrong.”
“Looks wrong? That’s all you can say?”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“It’s not enough.”