She took a quick look around. The reception area had two doors. The one behind the desk had a security card scanner. Presumably, it was locked. A door to the left had a regular-looking handle.
She turned back to the orderly. “Do you have a public restroom?”
He nodded at the left-hand door. “Through there, third door on the right.”
“Thank you.”
She was in. Now, she just had to make her way through the maze to the secure section. She tried every door, hoping she’d stumble upon a forgotten back entrance that didn’t require a key card. Instead, she found classrooms, offices, the bathroom, and a janitor’s closet. She snooped for spare key cards lying around. No luck. But in one classroom, she found an open window looking out on an inner courtyard, hemmed in by tall gray walls. And across the courtyard was another open window.
The windows were aluminum framed, the old-fashioned kind that swiveled inward, leaving a gap at the top. Thank God she was thin. She stood on the inside sill, stepped through the opening to the outside sill, held her breath, and slid. These kinds of windows were designed to keep elementary-school children from escaping their classrooms. It was definitely a tight fit. Her shirt scooted up; she tried to hold it in place, but she had to hold her arms up to give her torso enough room to slip through. After a bit of contorting, she let her feet drop to the ground and slid the rest of the way through the window.
She stood on a narrow strip of lawn and tugged her clothes back into place.
A couple of people in bathrobes were staring at her.
A young, thin man sat on a park bench near a security-locked doorway. The other, an older man, had presumably been walking a circuit around the courtyard. He’d stopped and, like the young man, watched her, his mouth open. Patients, presumably. The low-risk kind, out for some fresh air.
This could be interesting.
She ignored them and hoped for the best, striding across the lawn like she belonged there, reaching the next open window, and hoisting herself onto the sill. Reversing the process, poking her head in through the window, she squirmed her way into the next room. Her witnesses didn’t say a word.
Once again, she straightened her clothes. This new room was a lab, long and narrow, with a workbench holding lots of microscopes and other equipment running along one side of it, cabinets and refrigerators on the other side. Fortunately, the place wasn’t currently in use. She didn’t know how long that would last, though.
She paused long enough to consult a fire-escape floor plan on the back of the door. It even had a helpful YOU ARE HERE star. A label marked the high-security section.
She borrowed a white lab coat off the back of a chair and a clipboard and pen off a desk.
The high-security section had an on-duty guard at a desk station. He monitored the wing via a half-dozen televisions connected to closed-circuit cameras, which flipped between scenes inside patients’ rooms. The patients showed the whole range of reactions to their institutionalization: some seemed entirely normal; some huddled in corners, catatonic; others ranted, screaming at the security cameras, their voices unheard; some paced; one, wearing a safety helmet, banged his head against a padded wall, over and over and over again. Celia didn’t recognize Sito among them.
“Can I help you?” the guard asked.
Celia hoped she could brazen this through. “I’m here to check on Simon Sito for Doctor Steinberg.” She remembered the supervising doctor’s name from the trial.
Inhale normally, no holding her breath, no sweating.
The guard held a clipboard out to her. “Sign in here.” He pointed to a line with boxes marked DATE, TIME, and NAME. She filled them out, signed Celia West, and handed it back.
The guard didn’t even look at the name.
“He’s in four-eighty. Six doors down.” He pressed a button and the lock on the door clicked open.
“Thank you.”
The corridor beyond the secure door echoed with her footsteps. The rooms were soundproofed. She didn’t hear anything from inside them, no screams, no insane muttering. But she heard something muffled and distant that might have been human voices in torment. Or she imag
ined she heard it.
She reached 480. Sito’s name was handwritten on a dry-erase nameplate under a small, round window.
Simon Sito was on suicide watch. His room was small, square, padded. There were no furnishings, no objects, nothing that could be picked up, thrown, or manipulated. He wore a T-shirt and sweatpants, and went barefoot. He sat cross-legged in a corner, his hands resting loosely in his lap, staring straight ahead at nothing. He’d always been small, but now he seemed shriveled, like he hadn’t been eating. His hair seemed translucent.
She pressed a black intercom button under the speaker by the door. Close to the intercom’s grill, she said, “Dr. Sito?”
“Who is it?”
“It’s Celia West.”
Sito looked over at the less than face-size window and a faint smile dawned.