Iris Johansen - Bonnie

“What is it?”

“Thorazine. I remember that drug. Hu Chang used it occasionally as a base for some of his potions.”

“Your resident Hong Kong witch doctor?”

“That’s not funny. Hu Chang is brilliant.”

“And lethal.”

“Sometimes.” More often than not. She and Hu Chang had worked together when she was a teenager in Hong Kong on less-than-legal endeavors. He was amazingly creative when a poison or drug was needed. “But he’s my friend, so keep quiet, Joe. Thorazine, dammit.” She was checking the other medications. She recognized a few, and they were all leading in one direction. She flipped back to the beginning of Danner’s file. It was the letter of recommendation from a Dr. Herbert Nils from the VA hospital in Milwaukee. She started to read.

She inhaled sharply. “My God…”

“I WANT TO TALK TO GALLO,”Catherine said when she called Eve ten minutes later. “You listen, too, Eve. Put me on speaker.”

“You found out something?”

“Yeah, something I should have suspected. Are you there, Gallo?”

“He’s here.” Eve turned to Gallo and handed him her phone. “Talk to her.”

“Yes, talk to me, Gallo,” Catherine said. “I’m a bit pissed about your trying to avoid me. I didn’t deserve it, and you’re an ass for doing it. Though I don’t know why I should care.”

“Neither do I, Catherine.” He paused. “What do you want to say to me?”

“I don’t want to say anything to you. I want to ask you a question. What do you know about a Dr. Herbert Nils?”

“Nothing.” He frowned. “What should I know?”

“He was your uncle’s doctor at the VA hospital in Milwaukee. You were with him when he was undergoing treatment up there, right? You and your uncle shared an apartment?”

“That’s right. But for the last year before we moved down here, I was traveling the country with a couple buddies. When I came back, he told me that his doctor had recommended he go to a specialist in Atlanta.”

“Dr. Nils suggested it?”

Gallo frowned. “I think that was the name.”

“And did you ever meet him? Did he ask you to come in to discuss your uncle’s condition?”

“No. My uncle was always intensely private. Particularly when he came back after his discharge. He’d always been so strong, and I think it embarrassed him that he wasn’t the man he once was.”

“And did you meet his doctor in Atlanta?”

“I was only in Atlanta about six weeks before I went to basic training.”

“And you were obviously suffering a pretty intense distraction when you got down there.”

Gallo glanced at Eve. “You could say that.”

“Why are you asking these questions, Catherine?” Eve asked impatiently. “What difference does it make whether Gallo knew his doctor?”

“It makes a difference to me,” Catherine said. “I had to know if Gallo knew about Danner. Gallo’s not stupid. I couldn’t see why he would be so damned shocked, and I didn’t want to think he was a liar and pretending.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Gallo asked roughly. “I don’t lie, Catherine.”

“I couldn’t be sure. You’ve been behaving pretty weird since your uncle showed up on the scene.”

“Why would I lie about knowing Nils?”

“Thorazine.”

“What?”

“It’s one of the meds your uncle was taking. You told me once that he was once addicted to prescription drugs. It doesn’t surprise me. The amount of drugs he was given at the hospital in Atlanta was staggering. I imagine they kept him pretty well out of it in that VA hospital in Milwaukee, too.”

“He was in pain.”

“Maybe. But that wasn’t the main reason he was given drugs.”

“What is this Thorazine? And why would that have made you think I was lying to you?”

“Thorazine is a very powerful drug, and it was prescribed by both Nils and your uncle’s doctor in Atlanta. I recognized it because Hu Chang used it as one of the ingredients when he concocted a knockout potion that could also cause severe disorientation.”

“I imagine most pain medication can be used to do that.”

“Yes, but Thorazine was better than the majority of drugs.” She paused. “Because it was used in psychiatric treatments for schizophrenia. It was also useful in cases of split or multipersonality when combined with other drugs.”

“What?”

“Dr. Nils was a psychiatrist. The honorable discharge Ted Danner received from the Army was on the condition that he seek help and have regular therapy from an accredited psychiatrist.”

“No, he had a back injury.”

“Yes, but that was minor. He would have been able to return to active duty after his operation except for his mental problems.”

“It’s not true,” Gallo said harshly. “He was as sane as you are. And he wouldn’t have lied to me.”

“He did lie to you. It was all in that letter from Dr. Nils.” She paused. “Something happened on that last tour of duty in the Middle East. According to Nils’s letter, Danner’s superiors said that he was behaving irrationally and had fits of violence. They had noticed it before, but it became more pronounced, and they couldn’t overlook it. Then there was an incident.”

“What kind of an incident?”

“Nils didn’t know. Perhaps the military didn’t want to crucify Danner after his years of valiant and loyal service to the Army. Or maybe they just didn’t want to cause a situation that might be awkward for them. Anyway, the doctor who recommended the discharge merely said that Danner had done something that made it impossible to keep him with his unit, and they discharged him. Nils tried to treat your uncle, but he wasn’t having any luck. Danner wouldn’t talk to him, so he referred him to a specialist in Atlanta who was supposed to be the best psychiatrist in the Veterans Administration. Dr. Kevin Donnelly.”

“He would have told me. He wouldn’t have lied.”

“He loved you. You had a case of king-size hero worship. Do you think that wasn’t important to him? Mental problems carry a certain stigma in our society.”

“I wouldn’t have cared. I would have helped him.”

“But he’d always been your savior. He couldn’t stand to have the situation reversed.”

Gallo was silent, and Eve could see the conflicting emotions struggling in his expression. He finally said, “And you think he was so sick in the head that he could have killed Bonnie?”

“I’m not saying that. It’s a possibility. But maybe he only knew about her death and the people who killed her. Why would he kill Jacobs? All I’m saying is that the ugliness we saw in Danner in that bayou may have been growing in him for years. We have to find out the rest.”

“How, dammit? You said he wasn’t talking to Nils, and Temple hadn’t even seen him before he signed that death certificate.”

“The psychiatrist who treated him in Atlanta may be the key. Dr. Donnelly’s records show that he was treating him at least twice a week for years. There were a couple periods when he saw him every day for weeks. I’d judge by that that Danner was cooperating with Donnelly. He must have thought he was making progress, or he would have recommended alternate treatment.”

“You mean put him in an asylum. He’s not crazy. No one can tell me he is.”

“She’s not trying to tell you he’s crazy, John,” Eve said quietly. “Start thinking with your head instead of your emotions. He had a problem, and it might have caused him to do something that he wouldn’t have done if he’d been well. We have to find out if that happened.”

“So that you can kill him?” Gallo’s eyes were glittering in his taut face. “That’s where this is leading, isn’t it? You told me once that you’d kill the monster who murdered Bonnie without a second thought.”