P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“Dr. Seraphin,” Louis said, “why would he come back?”

She stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“Whoever killed these women at Hidden Lake. Why now? Why would he come back and commit his crimes there?”

She leveled her piercing eyes at him. “Because it’s his home.”

There was a soft tap on the glass of the door. Dr. Seraphin’s eyes went to the door and then to her wristwatch. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “but I have an appointment.”

Louis rose, picking up his jacket. The doctor got up and went to the door, opening it. A young woman, clutching some books, was waiting.

“Go on in, Mona, I’ll only be a moment,” Dr. Seraphin said. She led Louis out into the hall and closed the door behind her.

“I need your help,” Louis said.

“I don’t know what I can do,” Dr. Seraphin said.

“We need to find a suspect in those files still in E Building.”

“I don’t how much use I can be. As I told you, I was the assistant deputy superintendent. By 1956, I no longer had direct contact with any patients.”

“But you would know who to look for,” Louis said.

She shook her head.

Louis leaned forward. “Dr. Seraphin, this guy isn’t going to stop. We need some help.”

She was quiet, looking at him. “All right,” she said finally. “If you can get access to the files legally I could look at them and try to interpret the contents, perhaps tell you what symptoms to look for.”

“I need more than that,” Louis said. “I need you to give me some possible names.”

Dr. Seraphin’s chin tilted up in surprise. “That would be unethical,” she said.

“I know,” Louis said. “But isn’t there some ethic about alerting the authorities when a patient poses a danger to others?”

“In a manner of speaking, but you’re asking me to put dozens of people under the police spotlight simply because they once were patients, and for those who have managed to pull their lives together, it could be devastating.”

“Just give us some names to check out,” Louis said, hearing an urgency in his own voice. “I promise you if they don’t look to be a suspect we won’t even speak with them.”

Dr. Seraphin was quiet, and he could not tell if she was growing irritated or contemplating his request. He tried something else.

“Look,” he said, “right now, he’s attracted to Hidden Lake. That’s where he kills and that may be where he’s still living. But when the place closes, he’ll have no choice but to move on, and when that happens, we may never find him.”

She moved a manicured hand through her cropped gray hair and glanced down the hall. Then she sighed.

“I need your word,” Dr. Seraphin said, “that you will not contact any of these people until you are almost positive they could be your killer.”

“You have it.”

Dr. Seraphin sighed again. “I will have to refresh my memory,” she said. “You said the E Building files were still there?”

“Yes.”

“I will need to look through them.”

“You’ll come out there?”

Dr. Seraphin offered a half smile. “Unlike you, Mr. Kincaid, I have no qualms about E Building. It was my home for many years, too.”

“When can you come?”

“I have to go to Milwaukee tomorrow for a seminar, but I will be back Wednesday,” she said. “I have a place out on Wampler’s Lake and was planning on taking a few days’ rest there when I get back. I suppose I could meet you at Hidden Lake Thursday morning.”

“That would be great,” Louis said.

“I think it would be helpful if I were to see whatever information you have on the murders.”

“You want to profile him?”

She nodded. “Exactly. Whatever you can provide will be useful.”

“Thank you,” Louis said, extending a hand.

Dr. Seraphin shook his hand slowly. “Now I have a request of you, Mr. Kincaid.”

“Anything.”

“No one is to know I’m coming back to Hidden Lake. I will meet only with you.”

“I understand.”

Dr. Seraphin turned toward her office. “I hope so,” she said. Then she disappeared inside, the door closing softly behind her.

The house was quiet. Louis waited just inside the door for a moment, listening for movement, but there was none. Phillip’s second car, a small silver Ford, was not in the driveway and Louis had assumed either Phillip or Frances was out, but it seemed they both were. He was surprised. The last few times he had been in a room with both of them, they hadn’t been able to look at each other. So maybe this was good.

Upstairs in his room, he pulled off his jacket and shoes, thinking about Dr. Seraphin.

He knew that what she was going to do was unethical and Louis wasn’t sure that farther down the road their little trip back through those records wouldn’t end up destroying an entire case against this guy. And he felt bad that he couldn’t tell Dalum.

All the way home from Ann Arbor, Louis had thought about the Ardmore badge in his wallet, and he had to remind himself that some of the things he had grown used to doing as a P.I. couldn’t be done here. But then he remembered how Rebecca Gruber’s thighs had looked, and how her insides had been torn up by someone jamming a piece of metal up her, and he knew he would go through with it, and that he would let Dr. Seraphin go through with it, too.

When he came back downstairs to the kitchen, he noticed a note next to the phone. It was from Phillip, a message that Joe had called. Louis picked up the phone and dialed her Miami number. It rang eight times before he heard her voice. But it was the answering machine.

“Hey, Joe,” he said after the beep. “It’s me. Just got back and got your message you called. Listen, I’ve got a lot going here right now and I still don’t know when I’ll be home. I’ve gotten involved in a case. .”

He paused for a second, always struck with the weirdness of speaking into a machine.

“This case is a tough one,” he went on. “I wish you were here so I could bounce some things off you, like we do sometimes. But anyway, if I get a chance, I’ll call later.”

Again, he paused, thinking he should say something else, but he didn’t. He hung up the phone and went out to the living room, stretching out on the sofa, watching the shadows of an early darkness move across the ceiling. It occurred to him that he still might be here at Christmas. Joe would understand, because she knew how a case could crawl inside and eat at you until it was solved. But eleven-year old Ben would not. They had plans for the holidays.

Damn it. He wanted to wrap this up. And maybe with Dr. Seraphin’s help, they could find the killer soon. But what about Claudia?

He had deliberately avoided giving Phillip any more details beyond the suggestion that maybe Claudia had been cremated in error. He hadn’t told him about those cans of ashes. And he was thinking now that maybe it was better to bring him home an urn filled with the ashes of an unknown patient and let Phillip believe what he needed to so he could grieve in a way that wouldn’t destroy the rest of his life.

But that was just another lie on top of a case filled with them, and before he did that, there was something he needed to do. He wanted to give Claudia one more chance to tell him where she was.

Louis went upstairs and pulled out Claudia’s medical folder. He flipped it open. Her photo was right on top and he gave it a long look, hoping to see something new in her face that would help him know more about her. But there was nothing but those dark holes that were her eyes.

He took the folder back to the bed and spread it open, setting the picture up against the lamp on the nightstand. He started with dated treatment notes, hoping to find the periods of isolation Millie Reuben had told him about. But after Phillip had torn the file apart, Louis hadn’t put it back together in any kind of order. Things were hard to find and he had to sort each piece of paper, trying to match it up with papers that looked similar or had the same headings.