“It’s all guessing, Turner. But it doesn’t have to be.”
Turner sighed. “Fine. I’ll see if I can look into it without raising any alarms. Now would you focus?”
Focus, Miss Stern. But Alex didn’t want to focus. All of it was too familiar. The white walls, the inoffensive art on them, the reception carpet giving way to cold tile. These were the places where she’d learned to lie, to pretend she was an ordinary kid who’d fallen in with a bad crowd, to tell kind social workers and curious shrinks that she liked to make up crazy stories, that she enjoyed the attention.
There had been truth mixed in too. She didn’t want to hurt her mom. She knew she was a source of headache, heartache, financial trouble, maternal
woe. She wanted to make friends, but she didn’t know how. Tears had come easily. The hardest thing had been hiding how desperate she was to get better, how much she wanted to be free of the things she saw. The single upside to psych wards was that Grays hated them even more than the living.
Only once had she given in and told the truth. She’d been fourteen years old, already hanging with Len’s crowd. She’d already let him fuck her in his narrow bed with the dirty sheets. They’d smoked before, after. She’d been disappointed by the mess of it, but tried to go along, made the noises that seemed to excite him. She’d stroked his narrow back and felt something that might have been love or just a desire to feel love.
Her mother had dragged her in for evaluation, and she’d gone along because Len had told her if she played her cards right, they’d prescribe her something good, and also because it was better than getting sent somewhere to be scared straight again. Guys in fatigues could shout at her and make her do push-ups and clean bathrooms, but she’d been scared her whole fucking life and she just kept getting more crooked.
Alex had actually liked the doctor she’d met with that day at Wellways.
Marcy Golder. She’d been younger than the others, funny. She had a pretty tattoo of a rose vine around her wrist. She’d offered Alex a cigarette, and they’d sat together, looking out at the distant ocean. Marcy had said, “I can’t pretend I understand everything in this world. It would be arrogant to say that. We think we understand and then boom! Galileo. Bam! Einstein. We have to stay open.”
So Alex had told her the things she saw, just a little about the Quiet Ones who were always with her, who only disappeared in a cloud of kush. Not everything, just a little, a test.
But it had still been too much. And she’d known it right away. She’d seen the understanding in Marcy’s eyes, the studied warmth, and, beneath it, the excitement that she couldn’t hide.
Alex had shut up quick, but the damage was done. Marcy Golder wanted to keep her at Wellways for a six-week program of electroshock treatment combined with talk therapy and hydrotherapy. Thankfully it had been out of Mira’s budget, and her mother had been too much of a hippie to say yes to clapping electrodes on her daughter’s skull.
Now Alex knew none of it would have worked for her because the Grays were real. No amount of medication or electricity could erase the dead. But at the time, she’d wondered.
Yale New Haven was at least trying to keep itself human. Plants in the corners. A big skylight above and pops of blue on the walls.
“You okay?” Turner asked as the elevator rose.
Alex nodded. “What’s bothering you about this guy?”
“I’m not sure. He confessed. He has details of the crimes, and the forensics all line up. But…”
“But?”
“Something’s off.”
“The prickle,” she said and Turner startled, then rubbed his jaw.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”
The prickle had never led Turner astray. He trusted his gut, and maybe he trusted her now too.
A doctor came out to meet them, middle-aged, with highlighted blond hair cut into fashionable bangs.
“Dr. Tarkenian is going to observe,” said Turner. “Alex knows Andy’s father.”
“You were one of his students?” the shrink asked.
Alex nodded and wished Turner had prepped her better.
“Andy and Ed were very close,” the doctor said. “Ed Lambton’s wife passed a little over two years ago. Andy came out for the funeral and encouraged his father to move out to Arizona with him.” “Lambton wasn’t interested?” Turner asked.
“His lab is here,” said Dr. Tarkenian. “I can understand that choice.”
“He should have taken his son up on the offer. By all accounts, his doctoral candidates had almost no oversight. His head just wasn’t in it.” Alex saw the way that assessment troubled Tarkenian.
“You knew him,” Alex said.
Tarkenian nodded. “I did my doctoral work with him years ago. I’m afraid you didn’t see him at his best.” Her expression hardened. “And I knew Dean Beekman too. He didn’t deserve that.”
She led them down the hall to a sunroom where a man in his thirties was seated, handcuffed to a wheelchair, his back to a spectacular view of New Haven. His lips were chapped, and his fingers flexed and unflexed on the armrests as if they knew a secret rhythm, but otherwise he looked fine.
Healthy. Normal. He had dark hair and a close-cropped beard streaked with gray. He looked like he worked at a microbrewery.
That could be me, she thought. That was me. She’d met Dean Sandow in a hospital. She’d been handcuffed to the bed, no one yet sure if she was a victim or a suspect. Some people were probably still trying to figure that out.
Behind Andy Lambton, gray clouds hung low over the city. She could see the gap of the New Haven Green, East Rock in the distance, the big Gothic spike of Harkness Tower, though she doubted anyone could hear the bells from here.
“That’s quite a view,” Alex said, and Andy shuddered.
They sat down across from him.
“How are you, Andy?” Turner asked.
“Tired.”
“Has he been sleeping?” Turner asked the doctor.
