Roses Are Red (Alex Cross 6)

I figured I had to take a completely different tack if I was going to get anywhere with them. “Are Anectine or Marplan available at the hospital?” I asked the group.

Dr. Cioffi shrugged. “Of course. But why do you want to know about those drugs?”

“Anectine was used to murder people who worked with the killer. He knows a lot about poisons, and he seems to enjoy watching people die. One of the hold-up gangs has never been found, and it’s possible they were killed, too. Detective Sampson and I will need to look at the nursing reports and any case-conference reports for all patients. Then I’ll check the daily charts from our most promising leads. We’ll work the seven-to-three-thirty shift today.”

Colonel Schofield nodded politely. “I expect everyone’s full cooperation with these detectives. There could be a killer inside the hospital. It is possible, however unlikely.”

At seven o’clock, Sampson and I went on duty at Hazelwood. I was a mental health counselor and he was a porter. And the Mastermind? Who was he?

Chapter 99

THAT MORNING, somewhere on the fifth floor of Hazelwood, the Mastermind was incredibly pissed off at his doctor. The useless, worthless quack had taken away his privileges to go off the hospital grounds. The shrink wanted to know why he seemed different lately. What was going on? What was he holding back, holding inside?

He stewed in his pitiful little room on the fifth floor. He got angrier and angrier. Who was he really furious at? Besides the shrink? He thought about it, then he sat down and wrote a letter.

Mr. Patrick Lee

Owner

Dear Sir:

I don’t fucking understand you. I signed our lease with amendments we agreed upon in good faith. I’ve held up my end of the deal and you have not! You conduct yourself as if you are pu

rposely defying our lease.

Let me remind you, Mr. Lee, that while you may be the owner of this apartment, once you take my money, it is my home.

This letter will show, for the record, the illegal actions you have taken against me.

You must cease and desist posting eviction notices on my door I have paid the rent every month and on time!

You must stop calling me, rambling on in your loud Cantonese gibberish, and bothering me.

Stop harassing me!

I ask you one last time.

Stop harassing me!

Immediately.

Or I will harass you!!!

He stopped writing. Then he thought long and hard about the letter he’d just written. He was losing it, wasn’t he? He was going to blow.

He shut down his PC and went out into the hallway of the ward. He put on his usual passive and slightly out-of-it face. The nuts were out in all of their glory. Nuts in ratty bathrobes, nuts in squeaky wheelchairs, nuts in the nude.

Sometimes, more often than not, he found it impossible to believe that he was here. Of course, that was the point, wasn’t it? No one would guess that he was the Mastermind. No one would ever find him here. He was perfectly safe.

And then he saw Detective Alex Cross.

Chapter 100

SAMPSON AND I both worked the 7:00-to-3:30-P.M. shift that day. When I arrived on Five, I felt I could almost hear an audible stretching of the thin red line between the sane and the mad.

The ward pretty much had the standard institutional look: faded mauve and gray everything, occasional gashes in the walls, nurses carrying trays of little cups, strung-out men in drawstring hospital pants and stained robes. I had seen it all before, except for one thing. The mental health workers carried whistles to sound an alarm if they needed help. That probably meant staff members had been hurt here.

The fourth and fifth floors made up the ward for psychiatric patients. There were thirty-one veterans on Five, the ages ranging from twenty-three to seventy-five. The patients on Five were considered dangerous, either to others or to themselves.