The orange fiber with its peculiar three-leaf clover shape drifted through my mind, as did Beryl’s manuscript, Sparacino, Jeb Price, Senator Partin’s Hollywood son, Mrs. McTigue, and Mark. They were limbs and ligaments of a body I could not piece together. In some inexplicable way, they were the alchemy by which seemingly unrelated people and events had been fashioned into Frankie.
Marino was right. One thing always leads to another. Murder never emerges full blown from a vacuum. Nothing evil ever does.
“Do you have any theories as to just what exactly this link might be?”
I asked Marino.
“Nope, not a goddamn one,” he replied with a yawn at the exact moment Dr. Masterson walked into the office and shut the door.
I noticed with satisfaction that he had a stack of case files in hand.
“Now then,” he said coolly and without looking at either of us, “I found no one with the name Frankie, which I’m assuming may be a nickname. Therefore, I pulled cases by date of treatment, age, and race. What I have here are the records of six white males, excluding Al Hunt, who were patients at Valhalla during the interval you’re interested in. All of them are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four.”
“How about you just let us go through them while you sit back and smoke your pipe.”
Marino was a little less combative, but not much.
“I would prefer to give you only their histories, for confidentiality reasons, Lieutenant. If one is of keen interest, we’ll go through his record in detail. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” I said before Marino could argue.
“The first case,” Dr. Masterson began, opening the top file, “is a nineteen-year-old from Highland Park, Illinois, admitted in December of 1978 with a history of substance abuse–heroin, specifically.”
He flipped a page. “He was five-foot-eight, weighed one-seventy, brown eyes, brown hair. His treatment was three months in duration.”
“Al Hunt wasn’t admitted until that following April,” I reminded the psychiatrist. “They wouldn’t have been patients at the same time.”
“Yes, I believe you’re right. An oversight on my part. So we can strike him.”
He set the file on his ink blotter as I gave Marino a warning glance. I knew he was about to explode, his face as red as Christmas.
Opening a second file, Dr. Masterson resumed, “Next we have a fourteen-year-old male, blond, blue-eyed, five-foot-three, one-fifteen pounds. He was admitted in February 1979, discharged six months later. He had a history of withdrawal and fragmentary delusions, and was diagnosed as schizophrenic of the disorganized or hebephrenic type.”
“You mind explaining what the hell that means?” Marino asked.
“It presented as incoherence, bizarre mannerisms, extreme social withdrawal, and other oddities of behavior. For example”–he paused to look over a page–“he would leave for the bus stop in the morning but fail to show up at school, and on one occasion was found sitting under a tree drawing peculiar, nonsensical designs in his notebook.”
“Yeah. And now he’s a famous artist living in New York,” Marino mumbled sardonically. “His name Frank, Franklin, or begin with an F?”
“No. Nothing close.”
“So, who’s next?”
“Next is a twenty-two-year-old male from Delaware. Red hair, gray eyes, uhhhh, five-foot-ten, one-fifty pounds. He was admitted in March of 1979, discharged in June. He was diagnosed as suffering from organic delusional syndrome. Contributing factors were temporal lobe epilepsy and a history of cannabis abuse. Complications included dysphoric mood and his attempting to castrate himself while reacting to a delusion.”
“What’s dysphoric mean?” Marino asked.
“Anxious, restless, depressed.”
“This before or after he tried to turn himself into a soprano?”
Dr. Masterson was beginning to register annoyance, and I really couldn’t blame him.
“Next,” Marino said like a drill sergeant.
“The fourth case is an eighteen-year-old male, black hair, brown eyes, five-foot-nine, one-forty-two pounds. He was admitted in May of 1979, was diagnosed as schizophrenic of the paranoid type. His history”–he flipped a page, then reached for his pipe–“includes unfocused anger and anxiety, with doubts about gender identity and a marked fear of being thought of as homosexual. The onset of his psychosis apparently was related to his being approached by a homosexual in a men’s room–“