The Room of White Fire Read online

  “Chestnut on the shoes,” said DeMaris. “And expensive. The Hickmans do not allow their son to dress down, even here on the funny farm. Hickman, by the way, is five-ten, one seventy. He’s fit from the gym, and running and biking around the grounds. Supervised, of course. We encourage exertion. Gain through pain for our insane. That’s my joke and don’t repeat it. I’ll take you out to the wire when you’re ready.”

  I looked at Dr. Hulet. “I’ll need the names and numbers for friends he’s made here. And all recent visitors—dates are important. I’d like access to any staff he trusted, or talked to. His family, of course.”

  “The family might be a problem,” she said. “Very private people. I’ll talk to them again. Anything else?”

  “Clay Hickman’s medical history.”

  “We can’t let you have that,” said DeMaris.

  “Of course we can,” said Dr. Hulet.

  “Paige, don’t be foolish.”

  “I’ve already cleared it with Dr. Spencer.”

  DeMaris sighed and stood and went to the window.

  I pocketed the money. Felt good. “Did you find a shovel?”

  “Negative,” said DeMaris.

  “I’d like to see his room.”

  Hickman’s room was 25, second floor, a yellow door that DeMaris unlocked with a key card. Inside it was decent-sized and set up like a hotel suite. A window looked west over the mountains and some of the trees were close enough you could ID the birds in them. The walls were bare. No kitchen. There was a desk by the window and a laptop computer on it. I thought he would have taken it with him. I nudged one corner of the laptop but it did not move. “We bolt them to the desks,” said DeMaris. “Had an incident.”

  “You can log on to it, see what he’s been doing online?”

  “Remotely or right here,” said DeMaris. “Care to take a peek?”

  “Later, from my office, if possible.”

  “Can’t let you do that,” said DeMaris. “Our network isn’t secure if we give out usernames and passwords.” He gave the doctor a preemptive look.

  In the small bedroom the bed was tightly made, as a former airman might do. There was a dresser against one wall with pictures on it—matted but no glass—long-ago shots of Clay Hickman as a boy with his family, mom and dad, two sisters, varying dogs through the years. A dock with a boat, a swimming pool, a tennis court. Clay was the baby. As a child he looked unhealthy and unhappy. Not like the sisters. The older he became the better he looked. “How often do they visit him?” I asked.

  “Once a year,” said Dr. Hulet.

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s difficult for all of them. Their visits bring great anxiety to Clay. Very destabilizing.”

  “Once a year when?”

  “Spring. Usually April. Their visit was scheduled for next week.”

  “Who all comes to see him?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hickman and the older sister, Kayla. Never the younger sister. I believe she is estranged from the family. Her name is Daphne.”

  “I want their numbers.”

  “Daphne’s, too?”

  “Hers especially.”

  A beat. Then, “Of course.”

  “Show me where he dug out.”

  “I’ll leave that to you two,” said the doctor.

  —

  DeMaris bucked the quad along a path through the trees to the property line, driving stupidly fast, as guys like DeMaris do. The chain-link fence was ten feet high and topped with strands of razor wire thoughtfully tilted inward toward a would-be escapee. A standard correctional setup, nonelectric. DeMaris’s security people had already filled in the escape hole, though its shape was plainly visible. I contemplated it. Big enough for a man to climb in, wriggle under the fence, then climb up and out again on the other side. Digging it had been a big job, done quickly enough to foil security. Which meant that another person was likely digging from the other side. Both of them feeling the pressure, with Arcadia staff soon to catch on to Clay’s absence.

  I toed through the top few inches of soil with my boot, found it typical for this part of the county—decomposed granite and scattered quartz. I saw bloodhound tracks and shoe prints around the hole, and bike or motorcycle tracks on the firebreak that paralleled the fence. The Arcadia property was sixty acres, according to DeMaris, and this section of fence stood some five hundred well-wooded yards from the main building.

  “How did he evade you guys?” I asked.

  “Used the after-breakfast transition,” said DeMaris. “Lots of patients on the move, too many for staff to monitor individually. At some point you really have to give these nutcases a little trust. So we didn’t catch on until the post-lunch head count.”

  “Did he sneak off often, try to lose you?”

  “Not until recently. He got away from us twice in the last month. Found him still on the grounds. He knew this property, and he was getting to know the security patterns. Some of our cameras are hidden pretty damned well. For exercise he liked to run the fence line around the property. We always sent someone with him. He ran fast, good endurance. Some of my day-shift guards brought running shoes to work, liked the workout.”

  I looked at the rough dirt road on the other side of the fence. Public but unmaintained looked about right. Ruts and rocks, coyote scat, more paw and footprints. There were vehicle tracks, too, difficult to make out on the hard, rough road. “Sounds like he was practicing up for a getaway.”

  “I think so,” said DeMaris.

  “You’re sure he doesn’t have a phone?”

  “Our body and room checks are thorough. But someone could have smuggled one in. It happens.”

  I pictured someone bringing Clay a shovel, and maybe one for himself, and them digging under the fence just enough for Clay to squeeze out. I saw them toss the shovels in the car and hit the road. I imagined them driving fast, laughing low and quietly. Clay smiling. You bet he’d be smiling—the airman flying his coop.

  “Just to clarify the obvious, Mr. Ford. When you locate Clay, you contact me. No one else. Here’s my card. Use the cell number.”

  We rode back. Through the trees rushing past I saw a pod of five patients on bikes on the concrete path, led and followed by white-clad Arcadia staffers. The bikes were big-tired beach cruisers with high, swept-back handlebars like I used to ride as a kid growing up on the California coast.

  —

  Back in the hospital, Dr. Paige Hulet gave me a folder containing Clay Hickman’s medical charts, USAF service record, arrest reports, and a list of friends and family and their numbers.

  She escorted me through the lobby and outside, into the bright early-afternoon sun. Mountain sunlight always seems stronger than sea-level sunlight, especially in spring. On a sunny patch of lawn, four partners had squared off for a game of horseshoes, plastic. Concentration, then laughter. Dr. Hulet waved to them as we walked toward the parking area, and two of them waved back, smiling.

  “I thank you again for helping us, Mr. Ford.”

  “Thank you for the work, Dr. Hulet.”

  We walked at a thoughtful pace. A warm and somehow promising day. Spring had arrived without resistance after another parching winter. Sixth year of the Great Drought. We came to my truck and stopped.

  “This would be more than mere work to you,” she said. “If you knew him. All my patients are important, but Clay is dear to me. I feel responsible for him.”

  “In the sense that he served your country and appears to have lost his mind for his trouble?”

  “Yes. Yes. I feel as if I personally sent him into all that.”

  “All what?”

  Dr. Hulet squinted up at me. “Iraq. Clay is very closed about what he did there. But I know that he was damaged.”

  “Where was he stationed?”

  “Ali Air Base. He was a mecha
nic. It’s in the file I gave you. Where were you, Mr. Ford, in that war?”

  “First Fallujah.”

  “The door-to-door campaign?”

  “Yes.”

  “A dark chapter.”

  “Dark book.”

  She peered at me. “How does it make you feel to see Fallujah in the news again?”

  Took me a minute to find the words. “Fooled. Pissed. A lot of good people suffered for nothing.”

  “Are you at peace with what you saw and did there?”

  “At peace because I surrendered,” I said.

  “To the facts of what you saw and did.”

  I let a moment pass, for some reason unsure of how to say yes.

  “I’ve never been to war,” she said. “Yet, I’ve become a student of what it does to the mind.”

  “There is nothing comparable.”

  “No. Mr. Ford, I want to ask a favor of you. When you locate Clay, call me first. Before you call anyone else. Do not call Alec DeMaris until you and I have talked.”

  “He told me just about the opposite.”

  “I expected that.”

  “Why?”

  Still squinting up at me, she raised a hand to shade her eyes. A small tear had formed in the corner of one.

  “I beg your pardon, Dr. Hulet,” I said, taking her shoulders gently. I turned us away from the frontal sun and released her. She stood still, then took my shoulders and reversed us back into the piercing light, raising a hand to shade her eyes again.

  “Because it would be in Clay’s best interest,” she said. “To call me first, when you locate him, and not Alec and not Dr. Spencer.”

  “Just take your word for it?”

  “I’m asking you to, yes.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. I’d dealt with multiple masters before and no good had ever come of it.

  “What we just did made me realize something,” she said. “Moving in and out of the sun like that? I haven’t danced in five years.”

  “I’m a good dancer. Let me take you sometime.” The words came out as I thought them. I regretted them instantly. Professionally perilous, just for starters. The whiff of need. Not very Roland Ford.

  She studied me for a long beat. “I’ll think about that, too.” Then she turned and strode back toward the lobby, heels brisk on the asphalt and a glint of spring sunlight off her neatly packaged hair.

  I watched her. Pretended to wonder what had gotten into me. I looked for clues in the truck window reflection. Same old face. Some dings and a faint forehead scar from the ring. There’s a story behind that scar, a story about Roland “Rolling Thunder” Ford. For what little it’s worth, I am a good dancer. I took it up after boxing. For a big man, it turns out, I have good balance, and when I dance I feel light and graceful. Temporarily. But then, everything is temporary. The trick is letting temporary be enough.

  I knew damn well what had gotten into me. Just surprised by the intensity of it. I hadn’t asked a woman to dance in two years. Gave myself fifty-fifty odds on the invite.

  3

  I stashed the papers with the gun, put the phone in my pocket, and locked up the heavy toolbox again.

  Under the gaze of two orderlies, I strolled past the Iceland poppies and followed the path across the big lawn. Then into the trees. The spring afternoon had gone cool in the shadows and soon I felt free of the men and women in white.

  Ten minutes later I came to the perimeter fence and the freshly filled escape hole. From under a big oak tree I looked at the fence and the hole and the rough dirt road on which Clay Hickman and at least one confederate had driven away. I lit a cigarette and gave it a good deep draw.

  A beaten black economy car popped along the road, picking through the ruts. Bad muffler. The girl driving waved out the window and kept on going. I took a knee under the oak, considered calling in my own bloodhound man, whose dogs I had seen work near-miracles. I wished Clay had a cell phone so I could get an old sheriff’s deputy friend to ping it for me, but no such luck. I watched a pair of mountain quail hustle along the road, topknots upright and feet just little blurs. Soon they’d have chicks, then late in summer they’d covey up with other families. Safety in numbers. Sometimes that worked. I stood and ground out the butt nice and deep, swept some dirt over it like a cat.

  The noisy black car came back in the opposite direction, which made me think of the bloodhound going up and down that road, faithful to his best sense, as far as it could take him. The car stopped not thirty feet from me and the girl left the engine running, got out and came to the fence. I walked over.

  She was skinny and orange-haired and didn’t look twenty. Denim shorts with frays and holes, a red plaid flannel shirt with the tails knotted at her navel and the sleeves rolled up, hiking boots. “Are you one of the crazies?” she asked.

  “I just look that way.”

  “You can’t tell by looking. Security?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re camped out by that hole wondering where so-called Jason got to.”

  “So-called Jason. Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to help him. But I have to find him first.”

  “You don’t look like a doctor.”

  I shrugged. A shrug to a human is a shiny object to a crow.

  “Jason is a sweet guy. He said he’d be my friend if I brought him a shovel so he could dig out. I wasn’t looking for a friend. But I sensed something good in him. So I brought two shovels and helped. That was Monday.” She held up her small white hands, each palm with a big blister, one of the bandages hanging half off. “When we got back to my place I went to use the bathroom and he took sixty bucks out of my purse and went off in my truck and I haven’t seen him since. This here’s my sister’s car, which I’m borrowing.”

  “So you’d talked to him before Monday.”

  “Twice. First time we met was right here at this fence. I’d stopped to look at a snake on the road and he was running. For exercise, I mean. I asked him where he was going and he said, ‘Crazy, wanna come?’ I said maybe, and came back the next day, same time and place.”

  “After you dug him out, did he say where he was headed?”

  She squinted at me, then tried to push the bandage flap back onto her skin. “No. He did call a couple of hours later, though—from a pay phone. Didn’t think they had ’em anymore.”

  “You’re just the young lady I’ve been looking for.”

  “That’s what he said, too.”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “I sell plush toys at the Wild Animal Park. In the Primate Palace.”

  “Can we talk?”

  —

  Her name was Sequoia Blain and her home was a leaf-littered Airstream trailer in a park about a mile down the mountain. The trailer park was called Lazy Daze.

  “Small but cheap, and they pay the propane,” she said, climbing the steps of a wooden deck. “I’m from eastern Oregon. I hate cities and can barely tolerate a town. Let’s sit outside.”

  She tried to brush off the seat of a resin patio chair for me to sit in but flinched and waved her hand in the air as if to cool it. “Nothing worse than a blister you keep hittin’. Except for maybe a drunk boyfriend that keeps hitting you. Which I’ve had the last of.”

  I swiped off the seat with the photo envelope and Sequoia went inside, screen door slamming. There were eight other trailers scattered in the oaks, all facing west, downslope, which gave way to chaparral and eventually the ocean, and probably some killer sunsets.

  The screen door slammed again and Sequoia handed me a can of root beer. She set her phone on a small pine-needle-littered table and popped open her can. “I first saw him about a month ago. This lousy road is actually a shortcut to the highway from where I live. He was running along the nuthouse fence with one of the whit
e nurse guys behind him. But he was a good-looking guy and he ran really fast and muscular. The nurse was huffing away. I didn’t know he was Jason then, of course. ‘Jason Bourne is my full name,’ he told me later, ‘exact same as the movie hero,’ and I just said, ‘Oh, crap—how dumb do you think I am?’ But he was all ‘No, no, no—that’s my real name, swear to Christ in heaven it is.’”

  “Well, it’s not,” I said.

  “Duh.”

  “Try Clay Hickman.”

  She nodded and took a sip of root beer. “Well, that’s a cool name, too. He didn’t seem that crazy.”

  I handed her the envelope and she looked at the pictures. “These make him look kind of stoned. In real life he’s happier, but pretty random, too.”

  “Random how?”

  “His mind won’t stop for long. The spider monkeys at my work have more focus than him. Really. But he’s upbeat. Maybe he’s always that way. I mean, I only spent a few hours with him.”

  I told her what I could about him, which wasn’t much. Prosperous family, military service, a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, sometimes delusional and violent.

  “Jeez, for reals?”

  “Really. When did you next talk to him after the ‘Crazy, wanna come’ line?”

  “The very next day. I was curious, you know. So I drove back at the same time and waited a while, and there he came, running again. I got out of the car and yelled out, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ He came over, breathing hard, pretty sweaty. He asked if I had any water in my truck and I did. So I got a bottle and tossed it over the fence and he drank it half down. He said his name was Jason. He asked me if I lived around here. Then he finished off the bottle and tossed it back. One of the guys in white came running out of the trees about then, way behind. Jason asked if I could meet him the next day, same place and time. So we did. And that’s when he told me how he needed to get out of the hospital but they were keeping him prisoner and he’d pay me a lot of money for a shovel. I said I’d bring him the shovel but not for money. I had a good feeling about him from the very start. I’ve always been an excellent judge of character. Except once, actually, when I was a really bad judge.”