Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“Maybe you should call some of those psychics back that were calling Schroder.”

“You think there’s a term for a collective of psychics?” she asks. “You know, like a herd of cows, a murder of crows?”

“I’m sure there is,” I say, and I look for a one-liner, something clever, but my brain is too busy being clever by holding the headache at bay.

She says nothing for a few seconds and I get the feeling she’s building up to something.

“There a problem?”

“The psychics,” she says. “The thing is we started calling them back, you know, just because we have to be doing something, right?”

“Right. .”

“Well, they weren’t ringing because they were having visions or speaking to the dead. They were ringing because they were all witnesses. Caleb Cole has been visiting them. He’s been trying to talk to his wife and daughter.”

“Jesus,” I say, wincing at the information.

“If we’d called them earlier. .” she says, but adds nothing.

The problem is it was Schroder’s job to call them, or his job to have somebody else call them. The thing with psychics is that as soon as they call whoever is talking to them just switches off, they don’t hear what’s being said and barely make the effort to even take down a name and phone number. These people were probably saying they were seeing Caleb Cole and whoever was on the other end of the phone all thought they meant they were having “visions” of Caleb Cole. But no, that wasn’t it- they all wanted some credit, I remember Schroder saying that.

“Is that something we can use?” I ask.

“We’re contacting other psychics. We’re on it. And we’ll keep an eye on Jonas in case he’s a target. What do you think is going to happen to Schroder?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, and right now I’m just way too tired to look that far into the future. Maybe she should ask Jonas Jones.

“You think he’ll lose his job?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“I hope not,” she says.

“I gotta go,” I tell her.

“Listen,” she says, and in that moment she sounds like Schroder, good ol’ Schroder, who starts half of his sentences with either a look or a listen. “He wanted me to give you a message when you called. He said nobody was going to hold it against you if you didn’t show up here for a few days. He said with what you’ve done, Stevens is impressed. He’s not going to renege on his offer of letting you back on the force because you’re staying with your wife, and he doubts Stevens will hold it against you for lying earlier to protect him.”

“Okay. Thanks, Detective.”

“Rebecca,” she says. “And I’m glad your wife is okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I pace the room a few more times until my sore leg suggests sitting is the way to go. I hold my head in my hands and stare down at the floor until my head suggests looking down isn’t the best of angles because it makes my brain feel like it’s pressing against the back of my eyes. On the other side of the door Bridget is fighting for her life. Or the doctors are fighting for it. A nurse comes by and offers me some coffee and I tell her that would be great, but she never shows up with it. After an hour a doctor walks out of the operating room. He walks toward me and I stand up and wobble for a few seconds in front of him, and in those seconds are a world of possibilities. This is the moment where my life changes, just like it has done for all the others who have stood here before me.

“Your wife is fine,” he tells me, and everything is okay in the world. I almost hug him. I cry. And then I do hug him. He pats me on the back and pushes me away after a few seconds.

“We’ve stabilized her,” he says. “We’ll have to keep her for a few days, and I know Dr. Forster will want to run some tests and try to figure out what happened.”

“What did happen?” I ask.

He gives a small shake of the head. “Honestly, we don’t know. All we know is that her vitals crashed and for a while there it was touch and go.”

“And the coma?”

He holds my gaze and doesn’t flinch. “She’s unconscious,” he says, “but when she was with us she was unresponsive. I’m sorry,” he says, “but I can’t tell you anything more than that.”

“But it has to be a good thing, right? Her waking up like that?”

“Brain injuries are tricky things,” he says. “I’ve seen plenty of them over the years and in some ways they’re like fingerprints-no two are identical.”

“Can I see her?”

“We’ll move her into a room soon, and you can see her then for a few minutes,” he says. “We should know more tomorrow.”

He turns and heads back into the room, and I collapse into the chair. Bridget is fine. Everything that’s gone on, she’s going to be fine. I lean back and my head touches the wall and immediately the room starts to sway. I’m hit with an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. The ceiling gets blurry, it swims in and out of focus for the next fifteen minutes until a nurse comes and gets me and takes me through to my wife.

Caleb Cole stares at the ceiling, then closes his eyes for a few seconds and stares at the ceiling again. The view between the two doesn’t change much. He thinks about Jonas Jones. Whether or not the psychic is a fraud it doesn’t matter. Jones is in custody. He’s as impossible to get to as Mrs. Whitby.

He thinks about Mrs. Whitby, about how satisfying it would be to cut her into a thousand pieces. It’s an idea he often falls asleep having.

Most of all he’s thinking about the man from the cemetery-Theodore Tate. An idea is starting to come to him. An exciting idea that came from his conversation with Tabitha earlier when he suggested that she kill Mrs. Whitby for him.

He gets off the bed and walks to the kitchen, this end of the house getting some of the street light so he can see better. He fills a glass of water and sits in the living room and uses his cell phone to quickly go online. If the police didn’t have his number before, they will have it after he phoned in for the pizzas. It’s amazing how much technology can fit into one small phone, but it is a pain to use.

He looks up Theodore Tate. They were in prison at the same time-four months they were in the same complex, but Caleb doesn’t remember ever seeing him. They must have been in different wings. An ex-cop, he would have been put into a section of jail where he didn’t have the life kicked out of him every day. It would have been a good gig for him. At least comparatively. It meant he never would have had the real prison experience. Caleb is envious of that.

Three years ago Tate lost his daughter in an accident. A drunk driver ran her down, along with her mother, when they were walking out of a movie theater through a public parking lot. The mother survived, if that’s what you could call it. The man who hit them was released on bail and went missing. He skipped the country, so the articles say.

Caleb keeps reading. There’s the Burial Killer case from last year, where a psychopath was replacing interred corpses in a cemetery with fresh victims. Then there’s the case from earlier this year where some whack job was kidnapping people and taking them to Grover Hills, the same institution James Whitby was taken to, only Grover Hills closed down a few years ago.

Theodore Tate. Ex-policeman turned private investigator, turned inmate, turned private investigator again, turned police consultant, and somewhere in there a killer of bad men.

The more he reads, the more he begins to relate, and the more he relates, the more his excitement builds. This is working out better than he hoped. Theodore Tate-husband and father, but so much more, perhaps even a man with his very own monster who hunted down the man who killed his daughter.