Michael Baden - Remains Silent

Manny stood. “When?”

“This morning.” He cowered like a frightened puppy. “Don’t tell me I did another thing wrong. First I release bodies to the wrong funeral homes, and now bones are missing.”

Calm down. Deep breath. “You were on duty when the four skeletons were released?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I need to know about the man who picked them up.”

“Wasn’t no man. It was a lady.” He sounded victorious, as though he’d won a game of gin rummy.

“Okay, a lady. Describe her.”

“Old.”

“How old?”

“Fortyish.” Manny chuckled to herself. “Don’t know what color hair. Wore a scarf.” His brow creased in concentration. “Wore one of those shapeless dresses, sounds like a cow.”

“A muumuu?”

“That’s it. I didn’t pay much attention to her. She had the release papers with her.”

Dyson proffered a few sheets of bright yellow paper. “This was a proper transfer,” he said. “Look. Tommy did just right.”

Manny glanced at the first page. “The bones were transferred to the New York City morgue? And the X-rays? And the files? Care of Dr. Jacob Rosen?”

“Yup. The woman said she was from his office. Dr. Rosen himself called me later around noon, but it was about something different. About a body, not bones. Doc Harrigan had the bones laid out in the drawers. I put them in body bags and gave them to the lady.”

Manny felt a wash of relief, pissed as she was that Jake hadn’t told her. The New York City morgue was probably the safest place in the world for the bones to be. I’ll call him. Give him a hard time about wasted effort. He can tell me about the body. Maybe we should meet, discuss the advantages of teamwork. She smiled to herself. That would be nice.

She turned to Dyson. “Can I have a photocopy of this release?”

He barely glanced at her. “Of course. My secretary will make one for you on your way out.”

Jake had just gotten off the phone with Paula Koros, who took the news about her mother’s body with a defeated resignation that would, he guessed, later turn to rage. A new client for Manny, he thought.

His phone rang: the lawyer herself. “Want to hear the Italian word for jackass?” she asked.

“Not particularly. In what context?”

“In the context that Kenneth and I killed ourselves to convince a judge to preserve the Turner skeletons. Mission accomplished. Why didn’t you tell me you were transferring them to New York?”

He felt a stab of pain in his eyes. “I wasn’t.”

“I’m talking Skeletons One, Two, Three, and Four and all the other ‘stuff,’ to use Judge Bradford’s elegant terminology.”

“I didn’t have them transferred.” He heard her gasp.

“You must have. I’m holding a transfer order with your signature on it.”

“It can’t be my signature because I never signed a transfer. Whoever authorized those remains to be picked up, it wasn’t me. And the bones aren’t in the city morgue, that I can guarantee you.”

Despair engulfed her. Without the bones, she couldn’t use them as evidence against whoever killed Harrigan and Mrs. Alessis, help Patrice, team up with Jake. She felt empty, drained of spirit, spent.

“We’re being outthought, outmaneuvered,” she said.

“There’s more to it than that,” he agreed. “The bones and the poison are part of a single puzzle. We’re up against someone who’ll kill to keep it from being put together.”

THERE WAS ONE more place to look. Slowly, methodically, Manny drove with Kenneth to the Turner Psychiatric Institute.

They arrived at five o’clock. She insisted that Kenneth wait in the Porsche. She’d need him as a getaway driver, she said, if she had to leave in a hurry- she was, after all, planning on breaking and entering. She reached into the glove compartment for a flashlight.

“But the hospital’s defunct,” Kenneth said. “Died like its patients. You won’t find anything here.”

“There may still be records, stuff that was overlooked. We’ve lost all the evidence, Kenneth. If I don’t find anything, this case is defunct.”

He settled back in the seat. “This may be a bad way of putting it, sister. But it’s your funeral.”

Now Manny stood before a huge dilapidated gray building that stood at the crest of a hill like a medieval castle. Its lights were out, its door locked. She’d studied the architectural plans and knew this was Serenity Hall, once the hospital’s only structure, with offices on the ground floor and patients’ rooms above. Manny counted six stories. She noted that the windows on the higher floors were exceedingly narrow, probably so that suicidal patients couldn’t hurl themselves out. ADMINISTRATION read a sign on the front door. This must be where they kept their files, even when the hospital expanded. If they wanted to hide a file, not send it to Poughkeepsie, it’d still be here. She tried the door. Locked. A side door was also locked, as was another at the back. The windows were shut, and when she peered through the filthy panes, she saw they fronted wire mesh; she’d have to break the glass and cut the wires if she wanted to get inside.

She was suddenly struck by the futility of her task. Break in and search through six floors and a basement? Are you out of your mind?

She stepped back. They had driven up a steep road to get to the virtually deserted parking lot by the entrance; in the distance she could see the field in which the bones had been found. The sun was low in the sky, casting shadows of outlying buildings across grass that seemed almost black, and the air was rapidly growing colder. Maybe there’s somebody somewhere. She could make out a light down the hill, and though she had no idea whether the building was even on the hospital grounds, she started for it. Another building, completely dark, loomed to her right, appearing suddenly in the gloom as though it had just arrived. Startled, Manny approached it. A barely legible sign over the door read PROMISE HOUSE. She recognized the name. When Turner Psychiatric was in operation, this was the residence of patients who needed the least care. It too was locked. She rubbed a hole in the coating of grime on a corner window, shone her flashlight, and was rewarded with a view of a rusty bed frame tipped over onto a mattress covered in green mold, walls stained with water damage, the shredded pages of old magazines, and the body of a dead rat. The promise had been broken.

Jesus God! A squirrel dashed between her legs, raising gooseflesh on every part of her body. She let out a yelp, then stifled it, not wanting to be discovered. Some sign of human life would be nice, though. Gathering clouds and a chill wind promised rain.

To her left stood a brick building, the front of which was a glass sunroom. Most of the panes had been smashed; inside was a shambles of rocks, bricks, broken beer bottles, glass shards, dead pigeons. The dining hall, Manny knew; patients would eat in the sunlight in summer. She began to see the facility as she had seen it in photographs of its heyday: an elegant manicured home to women with “nervous conditions” and men with drinking problems who could afford the prices. In later years it had faced the same obstacles as any large mental institution: inadequate staff, patients drugged out of their gourds, only enough money to feed them gruel and Jell-O. There’s something terrible about a place that used to house so many people, even crazy people, broken down like this. It feels wrong, like a summer camp in winter. Or like a prison. She felt a wave of pity for Lieutenant James A. Lyons.

She moved on, though she realized the light she was heading for was still too far away to be part of the property. A little farther down the path was a small squat building, maybe eight feet long and ten feet high, its one small window almost at the top. With a stab of anguish, Manny knew what it was: the Seclusion Room, where the most troubled patients were sent. “It is a spiritual sanctuary,” a brochure for the Turner Mental Hospital had proclaimed, “a place where the troubled can regain peace.” Bullshit, had been Manny’s reaction when she’d read that, and bullshit was her reaction now. It was a confinement cell, not a sanctuary. If you wanted to use it to discipline a patient or break his will, you could do it here, away from the attention of other patients and nonessential staff.