Sherry huffed and went back to check on his mother.
Henry slid the original photo of the four men in the stern of the fishing boat out of the envelope. He’d studied this image for countless hours, and he’d gleaned a lot from it. What most struck him was how profoundly Brody Royal dominated the group. Dr. Cage and Claude Devereux were highly intelligent men, even brilliant, while Presley possessed animal cleverness. Yet Royal’s eyes held an awareness of the other men, and of the camera, that the others’ eyes did not. And while Ray Presley was feared by all who knew him (and was known to be a killer), it was Royal who exuded the aura of a predator. The hawklike face with its gray eyes and proud beak of a nose made a statement, but there was more to his charisma than this. An invisible field seemed to surround the older man, creating a buffer zone that the others would not enter. This deference might have been due to Royal’s wealth, of course, but on balance Henry didn’t assign much weight to that. It was more that in any group of men, a natural hierarchy always established itself, and in this one—despite the presence of some very strong personalities—Brody Royal sat atop the ziggurat.
Henry slid the photo aside and rubbed his forehead. He’d revealed far more to Penn tonight than he’d originally intended, but he hadn’t told him everything. The rifle scope photo was one omission. Another was the story of Brody Royal’s daughter, Katy, the girl who’d triggered the deaths of Pooky Wilson and Albert Norris, by inviting Pooky to cross a line that meant death to him but not to her. Not to imply that the girl didn’t suffer, Henry thought. Because she had—terribly. After Pooky vanished, Katy Royal had gone a little crazy, by all reports, so crazy that her father had forcibly committed her to a private sanitarium in Texas. The Borgen Institute no longer existed, but after dozens of phone calls, Henry had managed to track down a nurse who’d worked there during the sixties and seventies.
He soon learned that electroshock therapy had been a staple of treatment for Dr. Wilhelm Borgen, who’d founded the hospital. Five minutes’ research told Henry that “electroshock therapy” could mean a lot of different things, so he’d called the nurse back with specific questions. All her answers were discouraging. By the 1960s ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, had begun to move away from the bilateral sine-wave method that caused so many terrible side effects, but when Katy Royal resided at the Borgen Institute, they had yet to embrace any of those advances. And while informed consent was today a prerequisite of ECT, at the Borgen Institute prior to 1971, patients were routinely administered electroshock therapy against their will. The side effects of such treatment ran the gamut from broken bones to long-term cognitive degradation and even amnesia.
Four days ago, Henry had seen the results firsthand. After years of fruitless attempts to get past Katy’s husband and interview her about Pooky Wilson, Henry had done something he almost never did: scheduled an interview under false pretenses. Under the pretext of doing a human interest story on breeding bichons frises (Katy’s main hobby), Henry had visited Mrs. Regan at home while her husband was at work. After making her comfortable with some puffball questions, he’d segued into her childhood in Ferriday. At first Katy spoke glowingly of those years, as most adults tended to do of rural childhoods. But when Henry brought up Albert Norris, a glaze had come over the woman’s face. When he pushed on and mentioned the name Pooky Wilson, Katy denied any knowledge about the boy. At first Henry had been sure she was hiding something. After all, following her return from Texas, her father had married Katy off to Randall Regan, the brutal roughneck who had chauffeured his boss away from the Albert Norris murder scene. One of Regan’s jobs had been to insulate Katy from reporters like himself. But when she insisted that she recalled nothing about either Pooky or Albert Norris, Henry began to wonder whether the doctors at the Borgen Institute had turned those sections of her memory to mush. When he left the house, Mrs. Regan had politely thanked him for coming and invited him to return anytime he wished. Henry felt so guilty about what he’d done that he actually went back to the office and wrote a story about Katy Regan and her dogs.
But later that night, lying in bed, the nagging thought had returned that she must remember something. As a young girl, Katy Royal had made love to Pooky Wilson many times, and she must have been as heartbroken by his disappearance as Henry had been by the realization that Swan Norris would never be his. How much had Katy known at the time? Surely some trace of the intense pain she’d felt as a young girl must remain in her cerebral cortex.
As the volume of the den television rose to compensate for his mother’s increasing deafness, Henry realized that with Viola and Morehouse dead, Katy Royal’s importance as a potential witness against her father had dramatically increased. Next time he got access to her, he decided, he would confide to Katy his love for Swan, and the heartache he’d suffered at losing her. Maybe that would summon an echo from the white space that supposedly lay in Katy Royal’s traumatized memory banks.
Without warning, Henry suddenly saw a vision of Glenn Morehouse fighting for his life in his sickbed, struggling against friends who saw him as a traitor. He knew he was going to die, Henry thought. He knew talking to me would cost him his life, and he still did it. Henry closed his eyes and said a silent prayer for the murderer who’d chosen him as confessor. When his cell phone rang, it took a few seconds to register that it was his, not Sherry’s. He didn’t recognize the number, and he almost decided not to answer. But in the end, he did.