After the Golden Age (Golden Age 1)

SEVERAL mornings after Sito’s preliminary hearing, Celia entered the maddeningly serene lobby of the Greenbriar Convalescent Home, a long-term mental health care facility. The carpet was plush, sound-absorbing, and the walls were a calming shade of blue. Soft, inoffensive music played. The place was aggressively calm. She hurried to the receptionist’s desk.

“Hi, I’m Celia West. I have an appointment with Ian Miller in accounting.”

The receptionist was a young woman with a gentle demeanor and a voice that could talk people down from rooftops. “Yes, he’s expecting you. His office is just around the corner.”

Celia followed the directions and soon found herself seated before the desk of Ian Miller, Greenbriar’s head of accounts receivable. He sat rigid in his chair, leaning toward the desk, picking up one item after another and rearranging them: stapler, penc

il, file folder.

“You’re here about the Sito case?” he said.

She considered him a moment, then nodded.

“You know our records don’t go back that far. Not the accounting records, at any rate.”

One might think she was investigating him directly.

Before donning his criminal persona as the Destructor and beginning his reign of terror, Simon Sito had spent over a decade at the Greenbriar mental hospital. By all accounts he had suffered a severe nervous breakdown as a result of his job as a research scientist. The records during this time were hazy, as if he suddenly appeared at the hospital one day. All her leads into his past ended there. The rest had been lost, or buried.

“I’m trying to find out how he paid for his stay here,” she said. “Did he have insurance? Who was the insurance with? Is there anyone alive from that time who might be able to help me?”

“I really don’t know. Our personnel files don’t even go back that far.”

“Do you have anything that does go back that far?”

He nodded, quick and birdlike. “The medical records. Our doctors use them for research data. Anonymously, of course.”

It was something. “Could I take a look at those, do you think?”

“Do you have a warrant?”

The people who asked that watched too much television.

She pulled a business-size envelope from her attaché case and handed it over. DA Bronson had written it up and had it approved especially for her.

Most of the trails she followed in her line of work were very well hidden, but recent. Phony bank accounts, fraudulent expense reports, laundered income—the records showing the truth about where the money came from and where it went still existed.

Thirty years was a long time for such records to stick around. She couldn’t hope to be lucky enough to find a canceled check showing the account number that held Sito’s original fortune. But if she was lucky, she’d find some thread to follow, however tenuous.

Miller let her into a musty basement room that held the hospital’s archives: rows and rows of shelves crammed with medical records in brown pasteboard folders. The place was lit by bare bulbs clipped to the ceiling’s naked boards, and smelled of fermented dust.

After fifteen minutes of searching the Ss, Miller pulled Sito’s thick and yellowed file off the shelf. He left her alone with it at a desk in a cubbyhole of a room off the main accounting office.

Nothing to do but start at the front and work her way back.

Sito had been released from the hospital, declared fully recovered and capable of resuming a place as a productive member of society. An experimental treatment involving electroshock therapy had been declared a resounding success. On the contrary, it had been what pushed Sito over the edge—unhinged the part of his mind that held any sort of conscience or moral scruples. He’d fooled them all, told the doctors what they wanted to hear, and behaved how they needed him to behave in order to declare him sane. Who could tell? Maybe he really had been sane when he left. Maybe he hadn’t been planning his campaign of destruction while still under the care of the hospital’s psychiatrists. No one would ever know. The doctor who signed his release had died in the first onslaught, the inelegant but effective firebombing of a medical conference at the university.

Every page under that top one was a catalog of treatments, medications, lengthy reports, and professional musings about this man and what had triggered his debilitating depression. Sito became something of a pet project among the hospital’s doctors. The nurses and orderlies reported that he never gave them any trouble.

With growing anticipation, Celia neared the beginning of the file, the pages that would, she hoped, tell her why Sito had ended up here in the first place, who had admitted him, and how the bills got paid. An insurance ID number, that was all she wanted.

A knock sounded on the frame of the door, which Celia had left open. Startled, she looked up and avoided heaving a frustrated sigh.

A young man in a white lab coat leaned on the door frame. He wore a vaguely predatory expression, staring at her like he might leap at her. She contemplated retreating into a corner.

“Are you Celia West?” he said. His eyes gleamed.

“Yes. And you are—”