The Laughterhouse A Thriller

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

My headache has gone and there are flecks of vomit on my shirt that I’ve tried to wipe off with my hands. It’s five-thirty before I see the first of the patrol cars that Schroder sent out to the neighborhood, which means I’ve been leaning against my car for thirty minutes. I flag it down. The guy behind the wheel looks pissed off and ready to arrest me until I show him and his partner my ID, at which point he then just looks pissed off. I’m pissed off too and ask what the hell took them so long, and he explains it in two words—boy-racers.

We drive around the neighborhood with him doing all the driving and me doing all the bleeding and his partner stretching his head in every direction as he points a spotlight out the window lighting up the shadows. None of us are talking. Emotions are running high. There is no sign of Cole. During that time five other vehicles help in the search. The streets are quiet. Cole has moved on. I had it within my power to stop him. I was close, so close to getting Stanton and his other two daughters back.

In the end I’m in enough pain and there’s enough blood in the backseat that we head for the hospital. Dog bites are not something I want to mess around with. It’s almost six o’clock when we hit the edge of town, and another half an hour to drive the final few miles thanks to the boy-racers and their cars and their desire to be accepted as part of what soon must be called a gang, or a cult, but for the moment is simply known to the rest of Christchurch as a f*cking huge headache. I’m angry at missing the appointment with Forster and Bridget. We pull up outside the emergency room entrance and neither of the cops walks me inside. The good thing about the bite is it’s keeping me awake. The bad thing is my shoe is full of blood. The waiting room is full of people who have messed up at some point during the day, they’ve hit themselves with hammers and tripped on power cords, school kids with broken arms from soccer, housewives who have walked into doors when dinner wasn’t ready on time. I show my badge. That and the holes in my leg give me priority to the annoyance of everybody in the room. I’m taken through the doors into a cubicle and told to take my pants off. A few minutes later a doctor comes in. He prods the wound with his finger and not a lot of sympathy.

“Looks bad,” the doctor says, and he looks bad too, with his comb-over and bloodshot eyes, his breath smelling of coffee. “You’ll have to stay off it for a few days, and you’re going to need some shots. I’ll get a nurse to come along and clean it up, then I’ll come back and stitch it. My advice is to stay away from dogs.”

The nurse is a heavyset woman with kind eyes and an even kinder smile. She tells me that I look like I’ve been through the wars. She tells me the wound is going to be okay, that the last dog bite victim she had to help had his nose, cheek, and ear removed. She tells me how sad that was, and still she keeps smiling as if she’s telling me how sweet her grandchildren are. She gives me two shots in my arm and both of them hurt. She finishes cleaning me up and I’m alone for ten minutes with a throbbing arm and throbbing leg before the doctor returns, other doctors and nurses passing in the hall, some looking fresh, others like they’ve been on their feet all day. He takes a look at the wound and nods. He injects it and waits a minute before poking a needle at it.

“You feel that?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Some of the holes are deeper than the others, some wider, all of them look about as mean as each other.

“I’ve been getting headaches,” I tell him.

He doesn’t look up from his work, just keeps on stitching. “What kind?”

“Bad ones,” I say, and I tell him about the attack that started them with the glass jar, and about what happened today.

“You need to see somebody,” he tells me.

“I’m seeing you.”

He shakes his head. “You know what I mean. Why haven’t you been to see anybody already?”

“I just figured they’d disappear.”

Finally he looks up in mid-stitch. “And how’s that been working out for you?”

“Not well,” I admit.

“You taking painkillers?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I have an addictive personality. I didn’t want to risk it.”

“Okay. So your plan was to never do anything about it, just a wait-and-see attitude, and now you mention it just because you happen to be here. Is that the same logic you put into your job, Detective?”

“No,” I say, breaking eye contact with him. I wish I’d never bought it up.

“No. Exactly. Just headaches?” he asks, putting down the thread and the hook-shaped needle. He reaches into his top pocket and pulls out a flashlight.

“Sometimes I get dizzy too. And earlier I couldn’t talk.”

“You were punched, right?”

“Yes.”

He shines the light into my eyes. “Both pupils are dilating normally,” he says. “What else?”

“Nothing.”

“Loss of time? Have you collapsed? Are you forgetting things? Loss of motor skills?”

“My arm wouldn’t work earlier after the attack, but only for a minute.”

“Okay,” he says, and he puts the flashlight back into his pocket.

“Okay?”

“Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to finish stitching you up, and then I’m going to have you admitted.”

“I don’t have time for that.”

“What do you have time for? For dying? Because that’s what might happen if we don’t take a better look at you. You’ve had trauma today to a preexisting trauma from an attack where a glass jar was broken against the side of your head. You obviously have some intracranial injury. When you were slugged in the head today that could have killed you. You hit your head against a wall tomorrow and that could kill you. You could just as easily die tonight lying down in bed.”

“Thanks for sugarcoating it for me. Listen, I’ll be careful, I promise, and when this case is over I’ll be right back. Can’t you just write me a script?”

He sighs, then slowly nods. “Fine,” he says. He pulls out a prescription pad. He scrawls across it and hands me the top sheet. He’s written “Walking out of here might kill you.” He’s underlined it. I fold it up and slip it into my pocket.

It takes over thirty stitches and twenty minutes to close all of the wounds. When he’s done the nurse comes back and bandages me up. Then she insists on taking me into another room in a wheelchair. It’s a smooth ride. The office she wheels me into has pictures of brains on the wall, illustrated cross sections of it, and a model brain on the desk.

“Wait here,” she says.

“Honestly, I feel fine now,” I tell her.

“Good. Then what I’m saying should make sense to you.”

It does make sense. She steps out of the room and I sit in the silence listening to my body, and it’s telling me that for now it’s okay. It’s telling me there are more important things to be doing. It makes a convincing argument, so convincing in fact that I climb out of the wheelchair and step into the corridor. I take the opposite direction from the way I came, loop around the halls until I find an exit, then leave. I do all of that with perfect balance. There are taxis parked outside and I climb into the one at the front and take a ride to the police station.

The boy-racers must be blocking the other side of town or have gone home to jerk off to The Fast and the Furious. The car I used before has been driven back for me. My leg hurts when I walk, and hurts when I don’t walk, though not as much. I call Dr. Forster on the way into the police building and have to leave another message.

I start to feel a bit dizzy walking into the police station, and I feel sick when the elevator takes me up to the fourth floor—it feels like the world is dropping out from under me—but for the most part I feel pretty good. I lean against the wall to keep the weight off my leg. If my next assignment involves infiltrating a line-dancing ring I’m going to lose my job. The doors open and reveal every detective in a state of information gathering, they’re on phones and on computers and reading files. Schroder comes over from the coffee machine and takes a look at me.

“They don’t have to cut it off?” he asks.

“You look like shit,” I tell him.

“Funny, I was going to tell you the same thing.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“In my office,” he says. “We need to interview her, but first we have to clear something up. We’re looking for Ariel Chancellor. So far there’s no word on her whereabouts, but to be clear you got there and found her door already open, saw drugs on the table, and that gave you reason to enter. That how it played out?” he asks me, but he’s not really asking, he’s telling me the scenario.

“Exactly.”

“That’s what I thought. Run through it for me.”

We walk to his office, the dizziness from the elevator gone. I run though it for him, changing the details from breaking in to walking in an open door and calling out hello.

“Well, nobody in the area saw a thing,” he says, “but we did get a complaint from one of the neighbors. They said you kicked their dog in the head.”

I tighten my jaw and hold onto a sudden burst of anger. “They let it loose on me. They were telling the damn thing to attack!”

“Well, they’re making a complaint. They’re going to push it, no doubt to see if they can get a settlement. They’re saying you trespassed and abused them and assaulted their pet.”

My hand curls into a fist and I look at the wall wanting to punch it, and there are already other fist-shaped holes in it. Most of those holes have been signed and dated, a wall of fame of sorts, smiley faces drawn next to some. I relax my fist. “Are you shitting me?”

He shrugs. “I wish I was. I got a sketch artist coming upstairs to talk with you—just to get a more current description of Cole.”

“Unbelievable,” I say.

“Let it go, Tate, we’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“Like interviewing the girl.”

“About that,” he says. “You remember Benson Barlow?” he asks.

Barlow is a psychiatrist I met six weeks ago out at Grover Hills, the now abandoned mental institution where an ex—mental patient was holed up with a collection of dead bodies and an even bigger collection of really bad ideas.

“What about him?”

“He’s on his way to talk to the girl. I figure it can’t hurt. She’s pretty traumatized. She’s not talking much, but she’s shaking and crying a hell of a lot. We’ve got a female officer in there with her now trying to comfort her, but it’s not going great. Poor kid was initially found covered in fake blood. Probably came from the same shop the fake knife came from.”

“Fake knife?”

“Yeah, one of those types where the blade goes into the handle.”

“So he pretended to kill her?”

“Looks that way,” Schroder says. “Plus the only thing she’s really said is the same thing a few times, which is she was the one chosen.”

“Chosen?”

Schroder shrugs. “Hopefully Barlow can find out for sure, but I’m guessing she was the one chosen to be killed. Or fake killed, as it turned out.”

“For the doctor’s benefit?”

“What other reason is there?” he asks. “Like I said, that’s all she’s said because she’s so damn scared. My guess is he sedated her first. I mean, not much point in pretending to have stabbed her if she’s lying on the floor moving around okay.”

“He asked me what kind of monster I thought he was,” I say, picturing him standing over me after he’d kicked me in the stomach. Caleb Cole with his scarred face and clenched fists. “I don’t think he’s capable of killing children, but he must want Stanton to think otherwise.”

“Well, he’s still a monster, and he still has the two younger ones. As for Melanie, he left her out there with a bag of food, drink, and a bunch of blankets. She could have lived out there for a few days as long as she didn’t wander off looking for help and dying in those woods. Anything could have happened to her out there.”

“Maybe he was planning on phoning in her location.”

“Maybe. We’ll ask when we drag him in here,” Schroder says.

The elevator doors open and we can see Barlow from across the floor. It must be comb-over Tuesday, because Barlow comes in with the same haircut my doctor had and looking just as tired. He looks to his right first, then left, but doesn’t spot us.

“He pulled me over the fence,” I tell Schroder.

“What?”

“The dog. It had a good hold of me and was pulling me back down. I’m telling you, that stupid thing was going to rip me apart, and those bastards in that house, they were going to let it. Cole, he reached up and pulled me free. He saved my ass.”

Schroder gives me a cold stare. “Look, Tate, do we have a problem here?”

“What? What kind of problem?”

“With you and Cole. Are we in danger here of you sympathizing with him?”

“No, of course not.”

“Are you sure? I know you and him both went through similar things when you lost your daughters, and I know part of you probably doesn’t hate Cole for killing those he thinks is responsible, but he’s a bad guy and he’s hurting innocent people.”

I throw my hands up in the air. “Jesus, Carl, I know that, okay?”

He sticks with the cold stare. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” I say.

“Good,” he says, and gives a slow nod of acceptance. “I just had to be sure, because it would be a major f*ckup, Tate, to be on his side.” He gives it a second to sink in, then carries on. “The evidence and case files have arrived from both Whitby cases,” Schroder says, “from where he hurt both girls.” Barlow sees us and his forehead raises up and he says or mouths the word ah to nobody in particular and heads in our direction. “They’re in the conference room,” Schroder says. “I haven’t had a chance to go through anything yet. And, just quickly, we have another problem.”

“We do?”

“At least you do. What the hell happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard a recording of your call for help. You sounded like you had a tennis ball jammed in your mouth.”

“Caleb hit me pretty good.”

“He must have. Are you sure you’re okay? You look a little unsteady.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. Well, next time I tell you to take somebody with you, how about you listen to me?”

Barlow reaches us. We swap how’s it goings with each other as we shake hands with him. He’s wearing a turtlenecked sweater and plaid pants. He’s looking exactly how you’d imagine a psychiatrist who’s about to head out for eighteen holes to look.

“I’ve read Whitby’s psychiatric file,” he says, and he puts on his grave face as his voice drops an octave, “and I can assure you that a man like that would never have been let out of my custody. He was a ticking time bomb,” he says, with all the accuracy that comes with hindsight and confirming my belief that psychology is a science that has evolved from many, many mistakes. “Now, tell me, how was Melanie Stanton found?”

Schroder spells it out. Melanie was found wrapped in a blanket and her clothes were covered in fake blood. She had been drugged. She woke up saying she was the one who’d been chosen. Across her forehead Caleb Cole had written I’m sorry. She was taken to the hospital and checked over, cleaned up, and put into a fresh change of clothes, where she woke up. Then she was brought to the station. So far she has been unresponsive to any questions.

“You don’t have a healthier environment?” Barlow asks.

“Like what?”

“Well, a room with pictures and crayons and toys would be a great start. Somewhere children can feel more comfortable.”

“This is a police station,” Schroder says.

“But you must interview children here, right?”

“We had a room like that,” he says, “but we had to extend the conference room. Look, the office is the best we can do,” Schroder says, and I can tell he’s trying not to sound pissed off, “and we don’t have time to mess around.”

“Detective, we’re going to need to make time. I can’t just . . .”

“I know,” Schroder says, “but there are other lives on the line here, Doctor. That’s why I’ve called you. I have faith that you’ll do the best you can in the time we have.”

Barlow nods. “Well said, Detective,” he says, smiling. “So, what about her mother? What’s the situation there?”

“She’s on her way. She was out of the country with her boyfriend. Mother and father separated six months ago. She left him,” he says, and explains the situation.

“We should wait for her,” he says. “It may help.”

Schroder shakes his head while I do the talking. “We waited for you,” I say, “and we’re all out of waiting.”

“If time is what you’re worried about, then I need to go in alone,” Barlow says, “and when her mother arrives, don’t send her in—let me finish first. If she walked out on her family, then her showing up now may only make Melanie more prone to shutting down.”

“I need to go with you,” Schroder says.

“No, absolutely not,” he says, shaking his head. “Two grown men both trying to talk to an eleven-year-old girl? It will only frighten and stress her even more, especially when one of those men is desperate for answers. She isn’t a suspect here, she’s a witness, but more than a witness she’s a young girl who’s scared and who doesn’t know where her family is. Trust me, if I go in alone there’s a chance I can bring her out of her shell, and if you come in with me, she might not talk for a week. If at all. And I know what you want me to ask, Detective. You want to know what the man who took her said. You want to know what he did to them, and you want to know if she heard where he’s going next. He left her alive, Detectives, so I very much doubt he did that with the risk she can be of any help.”

“Or maybe whatever he has planned will be over before anything she says can be of any help,” I offer.

Barlow nods. “Good point,” he says. “Now, gentlemen, you called me because you know I can help. How about you let me go ahead and do my job?”