The Secret Friend Read online

  Walter put his hand inside his pocket and gripped the small statue. His Blessed Mother shrouded him with her love.

  ‘I’m not scared of monsters,’ the boy said. ‘My daddy reads me a book every night about the monsters that live inside my closet. They’re not scary. You just have to be nice to them.’

  The boy’s mother apologized and whisked him away. The man behind the counter smiled thinly as he wrapped the flowers. Walter thought of Hannah while he waited, remembered her skin, so warm and soft, pressed against his scarred body.

  When he arrived home, Walter immediately went downstairs. First he turned on the electricity for Hannah’s room. Then he placed the flowers inside the rolling food carrier, pushed them through and looked through the peephole. Hannah lay in her bed. Her back was to the door.

  ‘I brought you a gift,’ Walter said.

  Hannah didn’t answer, didn’t move.

  ‘Hannah, can you hear me?’

  She didn’t speak.

  ‘I was hoping we could talk.’

  No answer.

  ‘Hannah, please… say something.’

  No answer.

  ‘If you want to eat, you need to talk to me.’

  Walter waited. Minutes passed. She wouldn’t speak.

  Walter stormed upstairs and paced around the kitchen, hands shaking. When he’d calmed down, he went to the closet to pray to Mary for guidance.

  His Blessed Mother’s voice was faint; he could barely hear her. Mary’s voice grew fainter, as though she was dying, and finally she stopped talking.

  He needed to go to Sinclair. He needed to pray in front of Mary – the real, true Mary, the one who had saved him. He needed to get down on his knees, press his head against the chapel floor and with his hands clasped together and tucked against his stomach, pray until his Blessed Mother spoke and told him what to do.

  75

  ‘I don’t believe Sam Dingle killed Hale and Chen,’ Darby said in greeting.

  Commissioner Chadzynski sipped coffee from a fancy china cup. She was wearing a sharp Chanel suit. The lights in her office were dimmed. A radio set up on a bookcase played soft jazz music.

  Darby gripped the back of a chair and leaned forward as she spoke. ‘Dingle’s sister said he left New England after his release from Sinclair. Then he came back once to collect his portion of the sale of his parents’ estate, and while he was here he abducted Jennifer Sanders and brought her to that room next to the chapel, where he raped and eventually strangled her to death.

  ‘Now, twenty-something years later, Fletcher wants us to believe Dingle’s come back to his original hunting ground, only instead of strangling and raping women, Dingle is now abducting female college students, keeping them for weeks before shooting them in the back of the head and dumping their bodies with a statue of the Virgin Mary in their pockets. I’m not buying it.’

  ‘Tell me why,’ Chadzynski said.

  ‘Margaret Anderson and Paula Kelly were strangled and dumped along the road like trash. Jennifer Sanders was strangled, raped and tortured and left to die. Emma Hale was kept alive for six months. Judith Chen was kept alive for several weeks. We also know that at some point the killer went back into Emma Hale’s home to retrieve her necklace. In addition to being a considerable risk – he could have been easily caught – it shows a remarkable degree of empathy, even love.’

  ‘From my understanding, serial killers evolve. Isn’t it possible Dingle –’

  ‘Strangling someone is an intimate, sexual act,’ Darby said. ‘Hale and Chen weren’t strangled. They were shot in the back of the head. The first method is intimate, the second distant. Shooting the victims in the back of the head suggests the killer felt shame at having to kill them. A psychopath doesn’t evolve into a killer who develops empathy for his victims. Dingle may very well have murdered Anderson, Kelly, and Sanders, but I don’t believe he killed Hale and Chen. I believe we’re dealing with a distinctly different killer.’

  ‘I just got off the phone with the Saugus detective in charge of the Anderson and Kelly cases,’ Chadzynski said. ‘He’s retired now, but he remembers management brought in a profiler to help build the cases against Dingle – Malcolm Fletcher. He supposedly visited Dingle at Sinclair.’

  ‘Bryson believed that Fletcher was trying to throw us off the scent.’

  ‘Tim also lied to us. I heard a copy of his confession. There may be some truth to it.’

  ‘Fletcher called me again.’ Darby told the commissioner about the phone call. ‘I think Dingle is a smoke screen.’

  ‘Do you think Fletcher will come after you?’ Chadzynski asked.

  ‘He’s had plenty of opportunity.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll harm you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he threaten you in any way?’

  ‘No,’ Darby said.

  ‘I’ll keep the traps on your phones, but at some point, we’ll have to pull your surveillance.’

  ‘I think you should put them on Jonathan Hale.’

  ‘Every expert I talked to says Malcolm Fletcher works alone.’

  ‘Your FBI contact said Fletcher murdered the killers he hunted,’ Darby said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Fletcher already found Dingle.’

  Chadzynski stared at the blinking lights on her phone for a long moment.

  ‘If you want to find Fletcher,’ Darby said, ‘you need to put people on Jonathan Hale.’

  There was a knock on the door. Chadzynski’s secretary came in and placed the court order on the edge of the desk.

  The commissioner waited until the door was shut before she spoke. ‘The Herald reporter has decided to run the story about the remains being found at Sinclair.’

  ‘Did you remind him it might cause Hannah’s abductor to panic and kill her?’

  ‘I did. The story will be on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.’

  Darby picked up the copies of the court order. ‘If there isn’t anything else, I’d like to get to work on this.’

  ‘Where are you going to start?’

  ‘The Shriners Burn Center,’ Darby said. ‘Coop and Woodbury are going to hit the dermatologists’ offices before they close for the day.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can locate Jonathan Hale,’ Chadzynski said, reaching for her phone.

  Malcolm Fletcher had traded his hotel room for a safe house in Wellesley, a suburb twenty minutes outside of Boston. Ali Karim had made all the arrangements.

  The place was fully furnished. Fletcher sat at a small antique desk reading a computer printout of Walter Smith’s patient file from Shriners. He had managed to hack his way past the hospital’s firewall and into the patient database. Once Walter’s file was printed, Fletcher deleted it from the hospital’s computer system.

  Walter’s last corrective surgery took place in 1987, when he was eighteen. The address listed in the file was an apartment building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Fletcher had checked the address earlier in the day. Walter had moved out in 1992. The forwarding address was a studio apartment in the Back Bay. The landlord had faxed Karim a copy of the rental agreement. Walter didn’t leave a forwarding address, but his social security number was listed on the application.

  The quickest way to find Walter’s current address would be through tax records. That meant hacking into the IRS’s computer network.

  At the moment, a UNIX program was running, quietly searching for a back door past the IRS firewall. To slip in and out without leaving a digital footprint or, worse, triggering an alarm, required a tremendous amount of patience and skill. One wrong move and federal agents would be standing on his doorstep.

  Malcolm Fletcher picked up the Virgin Mary statue he had removed from inside the cardboard box at the Sinclair chapel and moved it between his fingers as he reached for the phone.

  ‘Have you changed your mind about meeting Walter, Mr Hale?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Make sure your phone is charged,’ Fletcher said, watching the comp
uter screen. ‘I’ll have Walter’s address tonight, tomorrow at the latest.’

  76

  The hospital director for the Shriners Burn Center, Dr Tobias, sat behind his cluttered desk and watched Darby over his bifocals. He hadn’t read the court order. He had handed it off to the hospital’s legal counsel, who took his sweet goddamn time reviewing it. Jesus Christ, hurry up. Finally, the lawyer gave Tobias the go-ahead.

  Tobias, round and bowlegged, escorted her through gleaming white hallways. Behind the closed doors Darby heard the steady beep of machinery and murmured conversations. Some doors had small windows built into them. Most of the patients lying in the beds wore pressure-garments over their faces and arms. It was impossible to tell if they were male or female. Many of the burn patients were children.

  Some patients wandered through the hallways. Darby looked away from their mangled faces and limbs.

  The hospital pharmacy had a computer system which allowed searches based on a patient’s name or the name of a particular medication. Darby searched for ‘Samuel Dingle.’ No one named Dingle was listed in the pharmacy database.

  The list of male patients using Lycoprime totalled 146.

  The man who had Hannah Givens would be young, white and probably in his late twenties to early thirties. Physically, he would have to look and appear young. A college student would be reluctant to climb inside the car of an older man, but they might be more inclined to do so if they believed the person appeared to be a college student too, possibly one who said he was attending the same college. Darby believed the killer was local. He wouldn’t want to live too far from Sinclair. She would pay close attention to those who had criminal records.

  For that she would have to rely on Neil Joseph, who was sitting at his desk waiting for her to call. Neil could easily find a criminal record provided it wasn’t a juvenile offence. Those records were sealed and couldn’t be accessed without a court order. Darby hoped that wouldn’t be the case.

  ‘Can you sort the Lycoprime list by the patient’s age?’ she asked Tobias. ‘I’d like to review the younger patients first.’

  ‘I can’t print out a single, definitive list starting with age – you’d have to examine each file to find that information. We could, however, print out the list of all male patients using Lycoprime.’

  ‘What about patients using Lycoprime in conjunction with Derma?’

  ‘The problem is you won’t get an accurate sampling. We stopped selling Derma, oh, I’d probably say at least four years ago. It’s no longer a prescription item.’

  ‘If a patient is using Derma, would it be listed in their file?’

  ‘In the older files, yes,’ Tobias said. ‘We recommend Derma to all of our patients. It’s an excellent product. We give out trial samples to our patients to see what colour best matches their skin tone, and then they can order the particular shade over the company website.’

  Meaning there’s no way to track recent Derma orders from the pharmacy records, Darby thought.

  ‘I know you’re anxious to get to this,’ Tobias said, ‘so in the interest of saving time, I’d recommend Craig – that would be the gentleman to your left, Craig Henderson, our pharmacist – I can have Craig send the Lycoprime patient files to my office printer. They’ll start alphabetically by the patient’s last name. You can use my office computer to access the actual patient files. You can’t access the patient database through the pharmacy’s computer. The patient files are on a separate system.’

  Tobias’ laser printer was dreadfully slow. Each pharmacy file contained the patient’s name, date of birth, address and health insurance information. The patient’s entire prescription history was listed.

  It took an hour to print Lycoprime patients A through H. The ages ranged from five to fifty.

  Dr Tobias helped her sort the patients into two piles – one for ages up to fifteen, the other pile for ages sixteen and older.

  Most of the patient records were of young male children or teenagers who had been burned in a house fire caused by a parent falling asleep with a lit cigarette. Some had been accidentally scalded by boiling water left on a stove. One boy, a ten-year-old, had decided for some ungodly reason to light firecrackers near a plastic gas jug in his parents’ garage. The fire was so severe he couldn’t breathe without the aid of a ventilator. He later died.

  And then there were the other files, the ones dealing with parents who had dumped their screaming infant or meddlesome toddler into a tub of scalding water; parents who, in a moment of anger or drunken rage, shoved their son into a fireplace or wood stove. Jesus, here was a file on a father who, wanting to teach his eleven-year-old a lesson about the dangers of fire, lit a match and held it to up to his son’s hand. The flame caught on the boy’s polyester pyjamas. They melted against his skin, covering him with permanent burn scars.

  One patient seemed promising: a twenty-nine-year-old white male named Frank Hayden. In 1996, at age seventeen, Hayden was jumping a faulty car battery when it exploded. The battery acid burned his face. His patient file listed the dozens of reconstruction surgeries Hayden had endured over the past decade.

  Hayden also had a criminal record. In 2003 he had been arrested for attempted rape. He served two years in Walpole. After his release, he went back to live with his mother in Dorchester.

  Coop called as Darby was examining another patient file. Coop was at a Cambridge dermatologist’s office who was the third largest supplier of Lycoprime.

  ‘Nothing on Sam Dingle, but I found six male patients who use Lycoprime,’ he said. ‘The oldest is twenty-eight. Ten years ago, this guy’s father was in massive debt and took out insurance policies on his family. The asshole lit the house on fire, tried to make it look like they were victims of arson. The whole house went up in flames, and when the fire department arrived, they managed to save this kid. His parents and four other siblings burned to death.’ Sighing, he added, ‘I think I need to find another profession.’

  ‘What about a criminal record?’

  ‘Drug offences,’ Coop said. ‘Kid’s both a user and a dealer. The other five patients are clean. No criminal records.’

  ‘Who’s next on your list?’

  ‘I was thinking of tackling Mass General’s Burn Center.’

  Massachusetts General Hospital was the second largest supplier of Lycoprime in New England.

  ‘Head over,’ Darby said. ‘Depending on what time I finish up here, I’ll either join you at Mass General or we’ll head over together to Beth Israel.’

  An hour later her phone rang again.

  ‘I think you can scratch Frank Hayden off your list,’ Neil Joseph said. ‘I just got off the phone with the guy’s mother. Hayden’s been living in Montana for the past year. He’s an auto mechanic.’

  ‘Hold on.’ Darby shuffled through her papers, found Hayden’s pharmacy records. ‘He refilled his Lycoprime prescription two months ago.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. The mother says she goes to the hospital, picks it up and mails it out to him. He can’t get his hands on it down there.’

  ‘What about Derma?’

  ‘She didn’t mention it. I have people looking into Hayden just to be sure. Do you have any more names?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The hum of the printer filled the room. It was after eight and the windows were dark.

  Darby picked up the fresh stack of patient files and started reading. Please God, give me something.

  77

  Walter parked his car in the back lot of the Sleepy Time Motel on Route One. He never drove into the hospital campus. Security trucks patrolled the area day and night. Walking through the woods behind the motel was long and hard, especially in the snow, but he always made the journey because he never wanted to do anything to put his Blessed Mother at risk.

  The access tunnel was on the south side of the Sinclair campus, an ancient water duct built sometime after the turn of the twentieth century. Walter reached it after a long hike up a steep, snow-covered hill
.

  When the hospital officially closed in 1983, the security staff in charge of monitoring the property installed a metal gate with a lock across the tunnel’s opening. Walter came back with a pair of bolt-cutters and a lock of his own – the same make, model and size. Security never found out about the replacement lock because they never came out this way.

  Walter shook the snow off his boots. He turned on his flashlight and unlocked the gate.

  During his stay at Sinclair, Walter had become very well acquainted with the hospital. Danvers City Hall had a copy of the original architectural blueprints on file. For a cost of only twenty dollars, they printed out the several colour pages detailing each floor.

  The problem was the amount of decay and ruin. Many of the basement hallways had collapsed. It had taken Walter several weeks to chart the best route to the chapel.

  As he walked down the tunnel, his thoughts drifted back in time to his stay at Sinclair, the nights he had spent alone inside his room rocking back and forth on his bed, sweating, the medicine burning inside his veins. He would look to his drawings of the Blessed Mother holding his hand and sometimes the pain became manageable. Sometimes Nurse Jenny took him to the chapel.

  It was during his first visit to the chapel that Mary revealed herself to him.

  Mary’s dead son, the saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, was sprawled across her lap. Mary’s sorrowful expression pierced Walter’s heart. He felt the weight of Mary’s unbearable loss.

  Kneeling, Walter closed his eyes and prayed to his mother.

  I know I wasn’t a good boy. You were good to me and I know you did the best you could. I forgive you. I love you, Momma.

  A new voice spoke to him: Your mother is safe. She’s here with me in heaven.

  Walter opened his eyes. Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, was looking directly at him.

  I know how much you love your mother, Walter. She wants me to look after you. Come here.

  The Blessed Mother stood. Jesus tumbled from her lap, dropping to the floor, and Mary stood there in her flowing blue and white robes, arms wide open, ready to accept him, to bring him closer to the secret world held inside the red-painted heart glowing in the centre of her chest.