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 2
Summer tried to return with a burst of heat that steamed the tarmac and pushed through the gray clouds. It lasted about two days, the time it took Laurelton General to feel confident Jane Doe was fit to be discharged. Claire was eyeing the weather and snatching up her jacket on the way out of her house when she got the call from Leesha.
“I’m on my way to work,” Claire told her without waiting for Leesha to speak. “Don’t worry. I’ll meet the transport car. She won’t be alone.”
“No hurry. Your Dr. Freeson’s meeting her,” Leesha said.
“She’s his patient.”
Leesha humphed. “You look out for her, Claire. Don’t let this become some political bullshit.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
Claire’s bungalow sat on a knoll in a small neighborhood of homes that had been built on a sloping hillside above the town of Deception Bay. Through her pane windows she had a peekaboo view of the Pacific Ocean, and now she glanced out angrily, blind to the sunbursts arrowing through the silvery cloud cover, shimmering on the ruffling waves.
Damn Freeson and the whole Marsdon family. They all wanted to keep her under their thumbs. They wanted her capitulation. They wanted her to write a favorable report on Heyward III and get him moved to the less restricted side of Halo Valley. Their money was grease to the axle that ran the hospital, and therefore they had a certain amount of control on who was a patient and who wasn’t. The Marsdons wanted Heyward’s case reviewed and Claire’s testimony would go a long way to the good, and Freeson and Avanti were more than willing to help.
Locking
