“Huh? Yeah, yeah. The grass is so high. Difficult to maneuver but good to hide. She’ll be fine.”
“You know it’s a she?”
“Full of eggs.”
For a moment they both stared at the grass blades where the spider had vanished. Then George remembered his other blind passengers.
“Where did you say the ants were?”
After they had successfully gotten rid of all the uninvited passengers—there had been a short discussion about whether it was merciful to kill the ants quickly or let them die slowly without their nest—they drove up to House Cusabo. Killing the ants had won because even six-legged intruders in his precious car deserved mercy. This time they didn’t go to see the director but asked directly for Thomas LeClerk. According to the schedule they had gotten, he would be starting work in fifteen minutes. The ever-friendly man at reception sent them to the locker room for employees, where they found LeClerk changing into his scrubs. His dark hair was in a messy bun with some strands dangling out. The quick glimpse George got before the man pulled on his shirt was enough to confirm he was probably strong enough to haul a victim down the stairs of the bunker. George didn’t know much about work in a mental facility, but he assumed strength was an advantage in an environment where people weren’t at their best.
“Detectives. Can I help you?”
Andi was standing slightly to George’s left, his gaze absent, his posture relaxed. Whatever he was picking up, it wasn’t alarming. Then again, he probably had to get attuned to the distorted images he was getting. After their first visit in House Cusabo, Andi had explained to him that dealing with an environment where so many drugs and physical instabilities mixed was like listening to an orchestra playing the same song but in different tempi, with some of the notes just off enough to grate on one’s nerves. Intent on giving his partner the time he needed to adjust, George focused on Thomas LeClerk.
“Yes, actually, we think you can.” He looked around. Two other people had entered the locker room, glancing at them curiously in passing. “Is there anywhere we can talk in private?”
“Of course. The weather is nice. Why don’t we go into the garden?”
He led the way out of the locker room and down another long hallway. House Cusabo was like a labyrinth or a termite hill. Out in the garden, they strolled along a path laid with stone squares. LeClerk looked at him expectantly.
“Mr. LeClerk, we got the coroner’s report on Kesha’s death, and the math about her leaving House Cusabo, the missing person report on her, as well as her time of death, don’t add up.”
LeClerk stiffened a bit at that. If George hadn’t been waiting for a reaction, he wouldn’t have seen it. Andi remained relaxed. “According to the files we got from Dr. Blackton, Kesha left House Cusabo in January 2018 and was then reported missing in March of the same year. That report came from House Cusabo, or more precisely, you, because why should the clinic bother with somebody who wasn’t a patient anymore? And we know somebody had kept her medicated because if she had gone cold turkey from the cocktail she was on, it would have been noticeable. Our IT specialist found slight discrepancies in the files documenting the incoming and outgoing medication. All this leads to the conclusion that somebody was helping her, and we think that somebody was you.” George let the words hang in the air for a few moments, watching LeClerk’s facial expression like a hawk. The man didn’t look guilty or nervous. More resigned. He had been waiting for this.
“I loved her.” It was a simple statement. One George had heard many times before, far too often from people who had just hurt or killed the person they supposedly loved. In fact, he had heard these words so often as an excuse for the most vicious and heinous crimes, he thought he would never be able to speak them in innocence to anybody. Or hear them said to him without being deeply suspicious. Sometimes his job really sucked.
“And?” He wanted the man to tell his story. With any luck, there would be holes in it they could use to convict him of mass murder.
LeClerk bent down to rip out a blade of fresh green grass. He started tying it into knots. “I assume you are well aware that patient/caretaker relationships are strictly forbidden?”
George nodded. Andi was staring in the direction where George thought the garden with the beehives was. He didn’t pay LeClerk any attention, which meant the man probably wasn’t their culprit. They were back to square one. Though perhaps LeClerk could shed some light on the case, possibly leading them to the killer.
“In the beginning, we tried to resist. Kesha was such a straight shooter. Going against any kind of rule was pretty much unthinkable for her. That’s the military for you.” A single tear rolled down LeClerk’s cheek. If the man wasn’t the world’s greatest actor, he was off their list. His emotions rang true.
“Is that the reason she checked herself out of House Cusabo?”
“No, even though she had thought about it. But I convinced her to stay. I was even willing to put our relationship on hold. She was doing so well. She could have gone into outpatient care by the end of the year. That wasn’t too long. She agreed to stay, and she refused to halt our relationship. Said it was the main reason she was doing so well. Which was BS, of course. It was her iron will and her stubbornness.” He smiled bittersweetly. “We tried to keep it on the down-low, and things were looking good. Then suddenly, shortly after Christmas, she was getting anxious. I first thought there was a problem with her medication. It happens, you know, even if people are seemingly well-balanced.”
“The medication wasn’t the problem?”
“No. I kept a very close eye on her, discussed it openly. She knew her own body very well. After two weeks, she had me convinced. The main problem was that she couldn’t tell me what was setting her off. A general feeling of unease, she called it. And of course, she investigated, because that’s what a member of the Air Force does—grab the bull by the horns.”
“What did she find out?”
LeClerk’s shoulders sagged. “She never told me. In the middle of January, she was back to normal, well, not anxious anymore. She said she had her suspicions and that I was safe. Kesha was big about protecting me. Because of my job.”
Looking at the deep lines around LeClerk’s eyes and with the general air of exhaustion he radiated, George could easily understand why Kesha would have wanted to protect him. It reminded George too much of his own desire to take care of Andi to look at it too closely.
“And then she left.”
“Then she left. We discussed it several times, heatedly, as you can imagine. In the end, I trusted her instincts. She was a trained fighter, a warrior. And in my job, the first thing you learn is how vast this world truly is, in a metaphysical way. I kept her medicated—cheating our computer system is way too easy—and everything seemed to calm down. She spent most of her time at my place, focusing on her therapy as if she were still in House Cusabo.”
“Keeping up a schedule helps under stress.” That George had learned from Daniel. The military was all about schedules and repetitive patterns. There was safety in dependency.
“It does.” LeClerk threw the knotted grass blade away. “Second week of March, she grew restless again, said something was brewing. I believed her, but it was like watching a tornado sweep over a village. There’s nothing you can do. I begged her to either leave the city or at least stay inside my apartment until things calmed down, whatever ‘things’ were, because she still didn’t tell me. ‘I refuse to live in fear,’ she told me. And I get it, I do and I did.” More tears were streaming down LeClerk’s face now. He wiped at them halfheartedly. His grief was too great to care about appearances. “When she didn’t come home the second day, I knew something had gone wrong. I reported her missing immediately and logged it in through House Cusabo, hoping that would force the police to be more thorough in their search. But it was already too late, wasn’t it?”
George held LeClerk’s gaze. The pain flaring behind the sheen of his tears forced him to be honest with this deeply wounded man. “It was. The killer doesn’t seem to keep them for any length of time. He catches and kills them in quick succession. If it’s any consolation, she didn’t suffer. The traces of tranquilizer we found in the latest victim’s blood suggest he drugs them out of their minds before he kills them. There is no pain involved as far as we can tell.”
