Lisa Gardner - Hide

"The older guys, the 'experienced' ANs who hung around for decades… hell, some of those guys grew loonier than the patients. They got institutionalized themselves, forgot what life was beyond the hospital walls. When I first started in reception, there was a patient with a filthy bandage on his leg. First night, I asked the Charge Attendant what was with the bandage. He had no idea. Hadn't even noticed the patient had a bandage on his leg. So I enter the patient's room, ask him if I can check out his leg. Minute I remove the bandage, a stream of pus shoots across the room. And then, right in front of my eyes, maggots pour out of the wound.

"Turns out, the poor guy got an ulceration on his leg two months before. Doctor bandaged it up. No one ever checked it again. Not a single AN. They'd been looking at the patient for months without ever seeing him.

"Well, that was bad enough. Neglectful. But sometimes things got a little worse."

Charlie broke off, looking uncomfortable again. Both Warren and Dodge were listening intently now. From my vantage point, slouched low in Dodge's car, I could tell both investigators were hanging on Charlie's every word. I know I was.

The retired minister took a deep breath. "So, one night I get a call from the nurse at the residence for female patients. Keri Stracke. She asks me if so-and-so is on duty. I say yes. Keri asks me where he is. Well, I do a little walkabout of the I-Building but don't see him. I tell her he's out, maybe gone for dinner. There's a long pause. Keri tells me, in a very peculiar voice, that I need to come over right now.

"Now, I'm the only one around. I can't just leave I-Building. I try to explain this, but she tells me again, in that funny little voice, that I don't have a choice. She means right now ! What can I do? Now I'm really concerned. I go over. Keri meets me out front and without a word escorts me upstairs. She stops in front of the closed door of a patient's room. I look through the window, and there's my fellow AN, in bed with a patient. She's seventeen years old, real pretty, and catatonic. I've never wanted to hurt a fellow human being so badly in my life."

"What did you do?" Detective Dodge asked quietly.

"I opened the door. Minute Adam heard the noise, he looked up. You could see on his face he knew it was over. He climbed off her, zipped up, walked out of the room. I escorted him back to the I-Building, to the office, where I called our supervisor. Adam was fired on the spot, of course. I don't care what stories you hear about patient abuse, that kind of behavior was never condoned. Adam was done; he knew it, too."

Adam's last name?" Dodge asked.

"Schmidt," Charlie sighed.

"They file a police report?" Sergeant Warren asked, more sharply

Charlie shook his head. "No, management wanted to keep things quiet."

Warren raised a brow at that. "You know what happened to Adam?"

"Not really. But…" That hesitation again. "I saw him several more times. On the grounds. Twice from a distance, but I was pretty sure it was him. Third time, I caught up to him, asked him what the hell he was doing. He said he'd had to take care of some paperwork. Given it was nearly ten p.m., that didn't make much sense to me. Next day, I followed up with Jill Cochran. She didn't know anything about it. We kept an eye on the female patients for a bit. No one talked about it, but we were on guard. I didn't see Adam again, but this is a big property"

Dodge frowned. "You guys patrol the grounds, make any attempts at better securing the property?"

"We locked the gates at night, staffed the facility twenty-four/seven. But… in the odd hours of the morning, ANs like me were hardly wandering the grounds. We had patients to tend, we stayed in our offices." Charlie shrugged. "It's possible someone could've been coming and going, and we wouldn't have seen a thing. It had happened before, you know."

"Before?" Warren asked sharply.

"We had a murder on the grounds, a female nurse in the mid-seventies. I understand one of the ANs looked out a window of the admitting building and spotted the body first thing in the morning. Ingrid, Inga… Inge. Inge Lovell, I think it was. She'd been raped and beaten to death. Terrible, terrible tragedy. The police were called, but didn't have any witnesses-none of the other attendants had seen a thing."

Warren was nodding now, Charlie's story apparently having sparked her own memory of the event. "No arrest was ever made," she said.

"Rumor mill was that a patient had done it," Charlie supplied. "In fact, most folks thought Christopher Eola did it. Wouldn't surprise me. Eola was admitted after my days as an AN. I ran into him once or twice, however, when I came in on Sundays. Scary customer, Mr. Eola. The cold side of crazy."

Dodge was flipping through his pages. "Eola, Eola, Eola."

"The hotline," Warren murmured.

Both of them snapped to attention.

"What can you tell us about Eola?" Warren asked Charlie now.

Charlie tilted his head to the side. "You want the straight story or the version with the gossip mingled in?"

"We'd like to hear it all," Warren said.

"Eola came to us a young man. Admitted by his parents, that's what I was told. They dropped him off and hightailed it back to their mansion, never to return. Rumor was, Eola had had an inappropriate relationship with his younger sister. His parents discovered them together, and that was that. Bye-bye, Christopher.

"Eola was a good-looking kid. Light brown hair, bright blue eyes. Not big. Maybe six feet, but slender, refined. Maybe even a tad effeminate, which is why most of the ANs didn't consider him a threat right away.

"He was also smart. Very social. You'd think someone with his privileged upbringing would hold himself apart. Instead, he liked to hang out in the Day Room, playing music for his fellow patients, holding a reading hour. More important, he'd roll cigarettes-I know that's all considered evil now, but back in those days, everyone smoked, the doctors, the nurses, the patients. In fact, one of the best ways to guarantee cooperation from a patient was to give him a cigarette. It's simply how things were done.

"Well, most of the cigarettes were roll-your-own, and some of the patients whose motor skills were impaired by various medications had a hard time getting it done. So Christopher would help them. That's what he was doing the first time I saw him. Sitting in the Sunroom, cheerfully rolling cigarettes for a line of patients. It's funny, but first time he looked up and saw me, I knew I didn't like him. I knew he was trouble. It was his eyes. Shark eyes."

"What did Eola do?" Dodge interrupted. "Why was he considered such a menace?"

"He learned the system."

I perked up. I couldn't help myself. Sitting in the nearby car, my ear glued to the cracked open window, I had a sense of deja vu, of my father talking, of a shadowy man named Christopher Eola taking the same notes I once did. It gave me a chill.

"The system?" Dodge was asking.

"Hours, shift changes, dinner breaks. And, more important, medications. No one put it together until after poor Inge's murder. But as management started asking more questions, it came out that some of the ANs had been falling asleep on their shifts. Except it wasn't just one guy or one time. It was everyone, all the time. Well, this got the head nurse's goat. So one night Jill did a surprise inspection of admitting. She found Eola in the office, mixing something into the AN's brown-bag dinner. He looked up, spotted her, and, quite suddenly, smiled.

"Moment she saw that look, Jill knew she was dead. She grabbed the door and slammed it shut, trapping Eola inside. Eola tried to reason with her. Told her she was overreacting, swore he could explain everything. Jill dug in her heels. Next thing she knew, Eola was throwing himself at the door, snarling like an animal. A large man probably could've busted himself out, but like I said, Eola was all brains, not brawn. Jill kept Eola trapped for fifteen minutes, until another attendant arrived and they'd loaded up some sodium amytal.