Taylor Smith - Deadly Grace

Berglund turned to him and nodded at the bank of elevators on the opposite wall. “She says go to three, then follow the purple stripe.”

At the elevator doors, as they stood in silence watching the lights overhead dance down to one, Cruz thought about possible links between Grace Meade and the other victims. Mrs. Meade had been English by birth, so maybe the two female victims in Britain had been friends of hers, which might explain Jillian Meade’s calling on them. One of the women had been a semi-retired civil servant of some sort, his Scotland Yard contact had said. The other, a retired hospital “tea cart lady.” Both of them elderly, both of them living alone when they died, brutally attacked and killed in their homes, which had subsequently been torched. Why?

Both of them visited by Jillian Meade only a short time earlier. Why?

At the third floor, Cruz followed Berglund to a thick glass window under a plaque that read: “Reception—Please Sign In.” On the other side of the glass, a guy in green scrubs sat in a swivel chair with his back to the window, his white sneakers propped on a credenza behind. Coffee cup in one hand, he was reading a newspaper that he held awkwardly folded in his free hand, shaking it back open from time to time when it occasionally collapsed on itself. The comics page, Cruz noted, peering over his shoulder.

Berglund tapped on the window and he started, splashing coffee on his pants, the paper and his arm. A muffled curse sounded through the double-plate glass as his feet dropped to the floor. The chair pivoted and he looked up, peeved, but at the sight of the burly man in uniform bearing down on him, he prudently swallowed his protest.

“Help you?” he asked, shaking splattered coffee from his hands. His voice came out of a round, slatted steel disc in the glass sounding tinny and crackled, like every drive-in movie speaker Cruz had ever encountered in his misspent youth.

Berglund planted his hands on the counter. “I’m Deputy Chief of Police Berglund with the Havenwood Police Department. This is Federal Agent Cruz. We’re here to speak to Jillian Meade.”

“I’m just an orderly. I’m filling in while the head nurse is on her coffee break, but lemme see…” He slid a clipboard in front of him and ran a finger down the page. “Meade, Meade…nope. Can’t help you right now.”

“What do you mean? I just spoke to the front office by phone a couple of hours ago. I know she’s here.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s here all right, but she’s still being evaluated. No visitors.”

“This is official business.”

The orderly shrugged. “Her doctor would have to clear it.”

“Fine,” Berglund said, “we’d like to speak to him.”

The reply was a one-syllable pop.

“Pardon?” Berglund asked.

“Her,” the orderly replied. “The psychiatrist is a woman, Dr. Kandinsky.”

“Her, then. Could you get her, please?”

The speaker crackled once more. “I think she was on the ward a while back, but I’m not sure if she’s still there. Take a seat. I’ll page her.”

Cruz had already moved over to a window that overlooked the parking lot and the broad, frozen prairie beyond. The hospital stood at the very edge of the town of Montrose. Beyond was a flat expanse of open farmland broken only by a grid of shelterbelts, poplar and spruce mostly. The fields were dark and dead-looking, blackened by stubble burned off after the harvest, only occasional patches of snow here and there. What snow there was had piled up in drifts that littered the shade of the shelterbelts, like beach debris left behind after a receding tide. Cruz had seen places like this at the height of the growing season, though, when they were transformed into a vast, swaying sea of golden wheat. During those restless months after his first tour of duty in Vietnam, before he’d decided to re-up and go back, he’d ridden his old Harley down back roads from one end of the country to the other, drifting aimlessly, keeping mostly to himself. Trying to come to terms with what he’d seen and done over there. Trying to come to terms with himself.

Berglund’s massive frame moved beside him. The deputy gave the view out the window a glance, but it was probably as familiar to him as his own face in the bathroom mirror. He turned back to the waiting room, hooking his thumbs in his belt as he leaned against the window ledge, the typical stance of a brawny man unconsciously compensating for the unfortunate tendency of his arms to swing, gorilla-like, away from his overbuilt body.

“Let’s hope this lady shrink’s around, or we’ve made the drive for nothing,” Berglund said, his fingers drumming against his thick leather gun belt as they listened to the soft hum of the building, the ping of the elevators, and the singsong tone of pages going out over the hospital’s PA system. “Not much snow out there,” he added conversationally, giving the view behind them another glance. “Almanac says it’s going to be a hot, dry summer.”

“Guess the farmers won’t like that.”

“No. It’s typical, though. Feast or famine. Last spring, the fields were so saturated it was nearly June before we could get machinery out onto them. Finally get a crop in, and the next thing you know, summer drought sets in and the ground dries up harder than cement.”

Cruz gave him a sideways look. “You farm yourself?”

Berglund shrugged. “A little. Work my father-in-law’s old place. Got a few fields in barley and winter wheat.”

“Must keep you pretty busy, between that and the police work.”

“It can get hectic. Summertime’s when the town fills up with tourists and cottage people. Population jumps from a couple thousand to nearly ten.”

“You’re going to be really stretched this year if your chief’s still off the board.”

Berglund paused, as if that realization were just sinking in, and he passed a weary hand over his square, lined face—a man with too much to do and not enough to do it with. “I guess we will. What about you? You live in Washington?”

“These days, yeah, since I took this Bureau job.”

“Wouldn’t be my cup of tea, living in a big city like that. Where were you before the Bureau?”

“All over the place. Thailand, the Philippines, England, Germany. A tour in the Pentagon, a stint at Fort Gordon, Georgia.”

“Military, huh? Air force?”

“Army.”

“That a fact?”

They stopped, listening, as a page for Dr. Kandinsky finally went out over the PA system.

Berglund turned back to Cruz. “So where’s home?”

“Southern California. Santa Ana.”

“Oh, yeah. I know where that is. Near Disneyland, right? Wife and I took the kids there a couple of years ago. ‘Happiest Place on Earth.’”

Cruz nodded. “So they say. Haven’t lived there myself since the draft, back in ’65.”

Berglund glanced around, but the waiting room was empty. “Were you in ’Nam?” he asked quietly.

That was how vets talked amongst themselves these days, Cruz reflected grimly—in low voices and in safe places. Nobody spat at them and called them “baby-killers” anymore, but nobody wanted to hear about what happened to them, either. How kids got sent to fight an enemy they couldn’t see for a cause nobody believed in. How it messed with their heads, turning too many of them into burnout cases. “I did two tours,” he told Berglund.

“Two? Christ, one was enough for me. Why’d you go back?”

“Unfinished business. Then the Army turned into a career. What about you? Ex-grunt?”

“No, Navy man. Crazy, huh? Landlocked guy like me, ends up swabbing a deck? I didn’t even wait for my letter from the draft. Figured they were going to get me, anyway, so I volunteered to have my pick of services. Coming from a dust bowl like this, the idea of the ocean just appealed, you know?”