‘She escaped late in the afternoon, on a Tuesday,’ I said.
‘That’s correct.’ Her eyes got harder.
‘And what about the deliveryperson?’ I then asked. ‘Has anybody bothered to see if he or she might have had anything to do with this?’
‘The deliveryperson was a he,’ Blaustein said with no emotion. ‘No one has been able to locate him. He was a substitute for the usual person, who apparently was out sick.’
‘A substitute? Right. Carrie was interested in more than potato chips!’ My voice rose. ‘Let me guess. The delivery people wear uniforms and drive a van. Carrie puts on a uniform and walks right out with her deliveryman. Gets in the van and is out of here.’
‘Speculation. We don’t know how she got out.’
‘Oh, I think you do, Ms Blaustein. And I’m wondering if you didn’t help Carrie with money, too, since she was so special to you.’
She got to her feet and pointed her finger at me again.
‘If you’re accusing me of helping her escape . . .’
‘You helped her in one way or another,’ I cut her off.
I fought back tears as I thought of Carrie free on the streets, as I thought about Benton.
‘You monster,’ I said, and my eyes were hot on hers. ‘I’d like you to spend just one day with the victims. Just one goddamn day, putting your hands in their blood and touching their wounds. The innocent people the Carries of the world butcher for sport. I think there would be some people who would not be too happy to know about Carrie, her privileges, and unaccounted source of income,’ I said. ‘Others besides me.’
We were interrupted by a knock on her door, and Dr Ensor walked in.
‘I thought I might take you on your tour,’ she said to me. ‘Susan seems busy. Are you finished up here?’ she asked the legal aid attorney.
‘Quite.’
‘Very good,’ she said with a chilly smile.
I knew then that the director was perfectly clear on how much Susan Blaustein had abused power, trust, and common decency. In the end, Blaustein had manipulated the hospital as much as Carrie had.
‘Thank you,’ I said to the director.
I left, turning my back on Carrie’s defender.
May you rot in hell, I thought.
I followed Dr Ensor again, this time to a large stainless steel elevator that opened onto barren beige hallways closed off with heavy red doors that required codes for entry. Everything was monitored by closed circuit TV. Apparently Carrie had enjoyed working in the pet program, which entailed daily visits to the eleventh floor, where animals were kept in cages inside a small room with a view of razor wire.
The menagerie was dimly lit and moist with the musky smells of animals and wood chips, and the skittering of claws. There were parakeets, guinea pigs, and a Russian dwarf hamster. On a table was a box of rich soil thick with tender shoots.
‘We grow our own birdseed here,’ Dr Ensor explained. ‘The patients are encouraged to raise and sell it. Of course, we’re not talking mass production here. There’s barely enough for our own birds, and as you can see by what’s in some of the cages and on the floor, the patients tend to be fond of feeding their pets cheese puffs and potato chips.’
‘Carrie was up here every day?’ I asked.
‘So I’ve been told, now that I’ve been looking into everything she did while she was here.’ She paused, looking around the cages as small animals with pink noses twitched and scratched.
‘Obviously I didn’t know everything at the time. For example, coincidentally, during the six months Carrie supervised the pet program, we had an unusual number of fatalities and inexplicable escapes. A parakeet here, a hamster there. Patients would come in and find their wards dead in their cages, or a cage door open and a bird nowhere to be found.’
She walked back out into the hallway, her lips firmly pressed.
‘It’s too bad you weren’t here on those occasions,’ she said wryly. ‘Perhaps you could have told me what they were dying from. Or who.’