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Freddy stared through the Nikon's viewfinder, the image magnified by the zoom lens until it seemed that he could reach out and touch it. The gothic-style mansion looked as out of place in Podunk, California, as an igloo in Miami.
Built by a New Yorker named Winston Archibald, who had struck it rich selling dry goods to miners during the California gold rush, the place looked like he hadn't been able to decide whether to build a cathedral or an English castle. Desirous of seclusion, Mr. Archibald had chosen a location near the rural community of Porterville for his monstrosity.
Once completed, the mansion occupied the center of 120 acres of lawns, hedges, and gardens, the entire compound surrounded by a ten-foot-tall wrought-iron fence. After his death, the estate had passed to the State of California, which had converted it to an asylum for the criminally insane.
Unfortunately for Porterville, an extremely violent inmate had escape from the compound on Christmas Eve, 1949. His subsequent atrocities had caused an uproar in the horrified community that had forced the state to close Archibald Mansion and transfer the inmates to more secure facilities elsewhere in the state.
In the years that followed, Archibald Mansion fell into disrepair. Then, in 1986 the property had been purchased by the Henderson Foundation, the old buildings and grounds restored. Renamed Henderson House, the estate now provided round-the-clock care for patients suffering from severe mental and physical handicaps.
As a private foundation, Henderson House received its funding from a combination of private charities and from the fees it charged for the care of its wards. From what Freddy had discovered in three weeks of snooping, many of the patients were the unwanted retarded spawn of the super-rich. For others at the facility, there was no background information at all, but somebody was paying the bills.
The deeper Freddy dug, the more the Henderson House creeped him out. He hadn't been sleeping a lot, but the creepiness wasn’t the cause. For one thing, he’d been following a convoluted money trail. He’d been able to call in a few favors from sources in the banking industry and at the treasury department, but the data they had provided was raw and unfiltered. And, as with all unfiltered data, someone had to do the filtering. While there was plenty here to keep an investigator busy for years, Freddy's interest was limited to recent arrivals at the facility.
He had been lucky to pick up the trail that had led him here. After he had uncovered the empty coffin of Billy Randall and the subsequent murder of Dr. Callow, the Barstow medical examiner, Freddy had tracked down Callow’s secretary. Mary O’Reilly had been at work on the day the bodies of Billy Randall and his family had been picked up from the Barstow morgue. A night at the bingo hall had netted a description of the two men who had come to collect the bodies for transport to the LaGrone funeral home in Wickenburg, Arizona.
Mrs. O’Reilly, a talkative Irish woman in her mid-forties, had remembered that the men had seemed out of place for funeral home employees. But when she had asked for identification, both men had supplied the proper credentials, which were promptly verified by Dr. Callow.
Except for the uncomfortable feeling that she had gotten from the two men, Mary could only remember one other oddity. As one of the men had removed his identification card from his wallet, a second card had fallen onto the desk. Mary had reached out to hand it back to him, but the man had scooped the ID card up fast, as if he didn’t want her to see it. Even though she hadn't been able to see much, she remembered a stylized logo, the letters HH connected in flowing golden script.
Freddy leaned forward as the auto-winder on the Nikon buzzed, directing the camera at the massive gates that blocked the entrance to the old Archibald Mansion grounds. There in flowing golden letters, the twin Hs of Henderson House filled his lens.