Blind Spot. Nancy Bush
The need to release pent-up aggression? You bet. With an effort he turned his eyes forward, set his jaw, thought about Dr. Claire Norris, and wondered if he could have just one meeting with her. He’d been advised against it by a passel of lawyers. He was too personally involved. It wouldn’t do any good. She wasn’t completely responsible. Marsdon had killed Melody, not anyone from the hospital. He wasn’t thinking clearly.
The Ferrari jumped ahead, then screeched to a halt at a light where a gaggle of teenage girls were trying to cross the street. They stared at him in collective horror, then broke into the filthiest language and gestures Lang had ever seen from a group their age. Lang pulled up on the driver’s left again and smiled over at him. He could practically see the steam pouring from the guy’s ears. The girls became truly obnoxious. Standing directly in front of his car and not moving, dangerously, until Lang worried for them as the light was about to turn green.
But they sauntered away, arms crossed behind their backs, middle fingers sticking up for the Ferrari asshole’s uninhibited view.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Lang wasn’t much for religion, but a few key phrases sometimes popped into his head from time to time, a gift from his sister, who’d flitted from religion to religion like a butterfly to a flower.
His sister. Beautiful. Fresh. Intelligent. Deeply flawed.
Lang shook his head. Couldn’t think of her. Instead he concentrated on the other woman who haunted his thoughts: Dr. Claire Norris. The reason Heyward Marsdon III had been outside hospital walls looking for whatever his sick, twisted brain considered its next need. Dr. Claire Norris. She’d probably been the conduit for Melody and Heyward to meet. The good doctor, introducing one homicidal sicko to a sweet but slightly twisted woman with delusions and hallucinations of her own, probably putting them together in some kind of therapy class.
Claire Norris. Lang had seen her from afar, a slim, dark-haired, prettier-than-average woman with a strained look on her face. She had witnessed something horrific; he could give her that. His own mind shied away from what must have happened in that room. But Dr. Norris was the one who had okayed Marsdon’s release into society. It was her name on the form. She was the one with the ultimate responsibility for Melody’s death. She was the one who allowed Marsdon to cut his sister’s throat.
He’d said as much a number of times, to anyone who would listen. He’d been told his thinking was convoluted. He was just looking for someone to blame. He needed antidepressants and therapy. He needed help.
Drugs? That kind of help? From the psychiatric community? Like he was going to listen to anything those headshrinkers from Halo Valley had to say. Quacks, every one. Self-serving quacks.
He was driving out Sunset Highway through a misting rain, leaving the Portland skyline in his rearview mirror, passing through the tunnel and headed west into the sunset. Except today the horizon was all gray and dreary. No sun in sight. Two weeks ago it had been blazing hot. Early September. Not much change from August. Then bam. They’d been hit with an early storm and now this rain.
Well, the rain suited his mood.
He exited the freeway on the outskirts of Laurelton, still within the western edge of the Portland city limits. He’d bought the property as soon as he’d scratched up enough money for a down payment, and after their parents died in a fiery crash on I-5, he had Melody move in with him. She’d been seventeen and he’d been twenty-three. Now he was thirty-seven and she would have been thirty-one this past May if not for Heyward Marsdon.
She’d been in and out of rehab more times than he liked to recall. She was crazy without medication. She hated taking medication. She took the wrong kind of medication. She crashed. She went to rehab. Got clean. Got crazy again.
But…she was such a sweet, funny person when everything was in line. Slightly ironic, slightly off-kilter, slightly acerbic. He loved her. And now she was gone.
He’d quit the force shortly after Melody’s death, though Drano had told him the job was open whenever he felt like stepping back in. Lang supposed he should have felt grateful, but all his energies were directed somewhere else and he didn’t honestly give a damn.
Now when he walked into his house, he had the peculiar notion that Melody was there. Something in the air. A leftover scent. But it was an illusion. He’d identified her body in the morgue. There was no question it was her. No question she was dead. No question where the responsibility lay. It was just sometimes—rarely—Lang wanted her back so badly that he almost made himself believe it could happen.
Nutty behavior. Grief taking over the sane part of his mind from time to time.
Walking onto the small back deck outside the kitchen, he was impervious to the shivering drizzle that seemed to have gripped the area in a firm hand. The deck was about three feet off the ground and he’d been building steps to it from the backyard, more for something to do than any serious interest in home improvement. Now he tested the wooden rail and wondered if he should change them out to wrought iron. He could do the work himself.
Trying to come up with something to fill your time?
Back inside, he poured cold coffee from the pot into a mug and heated it in the microwave. He thought about Claire Norris some more. He’d seen her on television, mostly; in person he’d had to keep his distance and he didn’t want to be too near her anyway. Self-preservation. He didn’t want to do anything rash.
So, he’d watched her on television with an intensity that was undoubtedly obsessive. He’d DVR’d her only interview with the press and kept it still. She was about five-eight with sexy legs and small feet encased in sensible black pumps. She wore a lab coat over a skirt or dress, mostly. Her hair was chin length, and she had a tendency to tuck it behind her ears when she was speaking, an unconscious focusing act. She was good-looking, her teeth white, her waist slim, her chin slightly pointy. She appeared…honest, he could admit. But then, that was Halo Valley’s prime disguise.
Now Lang threw himself in a chair in front of the television. Clicking around, he found nothing but game shows, talk shows, and daytime dramas. He stared out the sliding glass door to the rain-soaked cedar boards of his deck. Then, like an addict, he accessed his DVR interview of Claire Norris. Dr. Claire Norris.
She only said a few words, and Lang knew them by heart.
Pauline Kirby: Would you have done things differently, knowing what you do now?
Claire: Heyward Marsdon the Third is under continuing psychiatric care.
Pauline: But shouldn’t he have been locked up? Shouldn’t you have known?
Claire seemed to struggle a bit when a man with a goatee jumped forward and practically shoved her aside.
Dr. Freeson: I’m Dr. James Freeson with Halo Valley Security Hospital. We always strive to give each of our patients individual care. Dr. Norris has been Mr. Marsdon’s primary psychiatric physician for several years and is highly competent.
Blah, blah, blah.
Lang rewound and watched it again. Funny, how Freeson initially sounded like he was defending Claire Norris, but after hearing his tone a thousand times and seeing his face, Lang suspected the man was trying to distance himself from the woman who’d brought this destruction to the hospital.
He watched it again and then froze the picture on Claire Norris’s face.
“You’re obsessed,” he said a few minutes later, never taking his eyes from the screen. “It’s dangerous.”
I got a job for you. Something I want you to look into.
Curtis was worried about him. Maybe he was right. Maybe Lang was starting down that nutty lane his sister had traversed most of her adult life.
With a feeling of inevitability, he picked up the phone and asked for the Winslow County Sheriff’s Department.
Maybe it was time to talk to Sheriff Nunce and see if there was something he could do.
Chapter