“Hey, Rhi. There are a couple of guys here to see you.”
Rhiannon paused at her locker, head turning at the way Sheri said the word guys. Most of the time it was a word she uttered with relish; Sheri had just uttered guys the same way she might’ve uttered deep fried maggots. Rhiannon fished her cigarettes out of her purse, stuffed her stethoscope onto the top shelf, and closed the locker. “So what’s the deal?”
“I don’t know. They’re, like, lawyers or something. I told Diane I’d pass the message.”
“Diane knows I’m on my break.”
“Yeah, but she figured breaking the break rule was important enough. So why would a couple of lawyers want to see you?”
Rhiannon shrugged. “Dunno. I guess I’ll let you know.”
“All righty. You want me to send em out to the butt hut?”
“No. Did Diane tell you what she was going to do with them?”
“Park em in the lobby, I think.”
“Okay.”
Rhiannon took the elevator down to the lobby floor. There were two men hanging near the reception desk, and at first glimpse she could see where Sheri came by her disgusted tone; both were suited up and somber, with blank expressions. Both of them noticed her approach at the same time. They stood up straighter, even though their spines already put steel to shame. “Are you boys looking for me?”
“Are you Rhiannon Heath?”
Rhiannon held up her name tag and smiled a little. “Don’t you all have to read to get into law school?”
The older of the two pulled out an ID. “I’m SSA Aaron Hotchner with the FBI, and this is Dr. Spencer Reid. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Oh. Really. Um…why?”
Reid spoke up. “We’re wondering if maybe you’re still working as a piercer at the Pink Siamese?”
Rhiannon snorted. “Is this some kind of joke? I mean, are you guys strippers or something?” She looked around for the punch line. “Because if you all really were with the FBI, then you’d know the Pink closed its doors a year ago. I’m still piercing, but I’m doing it at Wicked Skins.” She lifted her chin at Reid. “Why? Looking to get a guiche?”
Reid blushed. “No.”
“But you know what the hell I’m talking about.” Rhiannon grinned. “Points for that.”
“We’re investigating a man who got pierced at the Pink Siamese about a year and a half ago.” Hotchner caught her gaze and held it. “He was about six-four, muscular build, maybe thirty years old. It was an unusual piercing.”
Reid rocked on the balls of his feet. “Does the name Carl Stargher ring any bells?”
“Look. I need to smoke.” Rhiannon pulled her cell phone out of her pants pocket. She checked the display. “You all can come outside with me if you like. If not, well…this line of questioning is going to have to wait. It’s a bit of a walk. You have to leave the damned state to have a cigarette these days. It’s regulation.”
“It’s very important that you tell us what you know about him,” said Hotchner. “Any memory at all would be significant.”
“You double-majored in anthropology and nursing,” mused Reid. “Is that how you became interested in body modification?”
Rhiannon relaxed a little. “I was always interested in it, but school put more of an academic spin on things. I learned that nothing is really new. I’m sure the records are still around, if you want to look them up.”
“The records aren’t important,“ said Hotchner. “We need to know what you remember. Anything.”
“So you know I pierced him. And you know where I went to school.”
“We know you studied with Fakir Musafar in 2004,” said Reid.
“Yeah. So what’s with all this cloak and dagger shit? Is something going on with Carl?”
“You know him?” Reid asked.
“I remember him,” Rhiannon shot back. “His was the only suspension piercing I’ve ever done. You don’t forget something like that.”
“What do you remember about him?”
“He was quiet. I don’t know. What the hell do you want from me?”
“There’s no need to get hostile, Ms. Heath,” said Hotchner. “If you like, we can go outside.”
“I like. Let’s go.”
The three of them walked out into the fragrant desert night.
“You have to drive off the property,” she said. “To smoke.”
“All right,” said Hotchner. “We’ll drive off the property, then.”
The three of them climbed into a dark blue sedan. Rhiannon rolled down the window in the back seat and watched the parking lot lights pass by. The car passed over the invisible property line and Rhiannon shook a cigarette from her pack. She tucked the butt into the corner of her mouth, striking a match. “There’s a bench over there.” She lit up. “If you want to pull over.”
Hotchner did. Rhiannon climbed out of the car and strode over to the stone bench. Hotchner stood a few feet away from her. “All right.” She sucked in smoke. “What is this shit?”
“Pardon me?”
“I said, what is this shit?”
“Mr. Stargher is in a coma.” Reid sat down beside her. “Prior to his incapacitation, Mr. Stargher was killing women in a very specific and very ritualized manner. He abducted a woman named Julia Hickson and stashed her in an undisclosed location. We need to find her.”
Hotchner watched her face. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“How the fuck does someone react to this kind of information? Are you disappointed that I haven’t grabbed my chest and fallen to the ground? Fuck you, SSA Hotchner. Fuck you sideways with a long cactus.”
His face remained neutral. “Do you have any idea where she might be?”
“Why ask me?” Rhiannon held the cigarette near her face. “Why not ask his…mechanic, or I dunno, maybe his doctor? What makes you think I know anything?”
Reid cleared his throat. “Stephen Kowalski, your former co-worker? He seemed to think you and Mr. Stargher had some sort of personal relationship.”
Rhiannon flicked her cigarette butt into the darkness. “Stephen Kowalski couldn’t find his dick with a GPS.”
“And Ronald Delgado corroborated,” Reid continued.
“They’re both wrong.”
Hotchner peered into her face. “I don’t believe you.”
“That’s shocking.”
“So…what happened to the Pink Siamese?” Reid interjected.
Rhiannon’s eyes homed in on him. “Mike moved to San Diego. Took his shop with him.”
“I see,” said Reid. “So did you know each other? You and Carl?”
Rhiannon glanced at her phone display. “Look, fellas, I really need to get back to work, though this has been a lovely chat. Don’t bother with the ride. I’ll walk back.”
“Ms. Heath. If there’s anything.” Hotchner handed her a card. “I mean, anything at all. Please don’t hesitate to call.”
Rhiannon stuffed it into her pocket. “Yeah. Sure.”
“When did he lapse into the coma?”
Morgan glanced at a file. “Sometime yesterday morning.”
“Each tape is the same,” said Rossi. “He provides food, drinking water, a bench, and a toilet. Periodically, a shower starts. It's on some kind of timer”he's a real handyman, our guy. He wants them to think what’s happening to them is just a simple kidnapping. That there's a possibility of rescue, survival. But there isn’t. He’s torturing them. At forty hours, the drain shuts. The water starts and doesn't stop.”
“Reports show minimal activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And here, the anterior cingulate cortex. It's what helps distinguish between external and internal stimuli,” offered Reid.
Rossi leaned back in his chair. “So what the hell does that mean?”
“He's schizophrenic.”
“What about Thorazine? Can’t they just shoot him up full of something?”
Reid shook his head. “Nah, the normal psychotropic medicines don't work. Have you ever heard of Whalen's Infraction?”
“No,” said Hotchner. “What is it?”
“In any schizophrenic, the aforementioned areas are affected but with Whalen's, they're hit hard and they’re hit fast. Stargher’s neurological system was infected by a virus in utero that remained dormant for thirty years. He’s probably been showing signs for awhile, but with no one around to notice them…to, you know, point them out…well, anyway, the infraction”the actual breach”didn't happen until this morning.” Reid shrugged, moving hair out of his face. “The triggers vary, but the results don't.”
“He’s the only one who know where she is,” said Morgan.
Rossi cut in: “Any luck with the ex-girlfriend?”
“According to her, she was never his girlfriend,” said Hotchner. “And no. No luck.”
“No,” said Reid. “She was pretty uncooperative.”
“So we'll go back to his house,” said Prentiss. “There's still a lot to do: analyze the videos, track sales of the bleach, dig through his records. Maybe he’s got property somewhere.”
“Those women. He keeps them in that fucking thing for forty hours, man.” Morgan held up a videocassette. “We know he got Julia at seven-thirty. So how much time you think we have?”
“You know, this is kind of a long shot.” Reid trailed off, his voice unfocused and dreamy. “You guys…have any of you heard of the Campbell Center?”
“Why don’t you enlighten us,” said Rossi.
It’s always hard when they die. Diane, thinking that it was about poor old Diego Ortiz, who had been ninety anyway when he caught the cancer that stole the last of his pathetic withered life at exactly nine sixteen p.m.
Rhiannon’s rattled mind free-associated those numbers: September sixteenth, nine inch nails and a sweet sixteen one to fix the other down in some mythical time and nine plus one plus six equals sixteen, what’s so damned sweet about it anyway, sweet sixteen and never been kissed and what a fucking joke that was. It’s always hard when they die, except when it isn’t. Poor old Diego had come onto the unit on a respirator and stayed that way until his granddaughter came in and pulled the plug. She’d had hard eyes, that look of a girl who has seen way too many things buried in the darkness of her short life. Rhiannon bet dollars to doughnuts that Sonia Ortiz’s sixteen wasn’t sweet. No doughnuts, no sugar, nothing sticking to her cracked lips. The girl’s lean ragged body with its silver scarred elbows and her blurry schoolyard tats looked like maybe its sixteenth year had been spent on the streets, or scrounging in some junkie’s crash pad long before she cleaned up off the drugs but held on to her hard eyes, that long sleepless look carved out of obsidian. Diego’s departure was a blessing.
Diane didn’t know shit.
Rhiannon signed out and thought about Sonia’s eyes, how nervous and tight they were, wondered if maybe she’d inherited that obsidian glint from her dead grandfather. She finished with her charting and went into the locker room. She stripped out of her scrubs and dumped them into the laundry and walked in underpants to her locker. She hauled out her civilian clothes and when she slammed the locker door the clang made her jump out of her skin and her heartbeat pounded adrenaline though her system, making her fingers prickle and her eyes water. I need it tonight. She leaned her head into the cool metal and breathed, her blood twisting through the vessels on its way to her lungs. The canned air got to her and she started to shiver. I don’t care. She pulled on faded jeans and a white tube top, shoved her feet down into black rattlesnake boots. I need to forget. It’s always hard when they die, but it’s harder when they live.
She went into the bathroom and under its harsh light she put on some red lipstick. She adjusted her tube top, the sequins of the albino dragon design flat and lacking, chilled to sleep by the harsh fluorescent light. She rubbed her eyes and applied just a touch of blue mascara before pushing out the flesh-colored plugs and stringing heavy gauge spirals through her earlobes. How to tell the nice buttoned-up men from the FBI how Carl had pulled a ghost act the minute I went back to work, disappearing for months? At least I think it was months, I don’t know, I gave up after two, stopped going by his place and looking for lights on in the attic, stopped getting angry and horny and feeling hurt, wishing for some way to bleed the hot dreams out and soak them up and keep them or burn them or both. She rubbed a touch of Tenochtitlan between her wrists. You don’t. You don’t tell anyone, because there’s no way to do it. The words will not pull themselves into the right order. She pushed a studded belt through her belt loops and cinched the jeans around her hips. They won’t bend into linguistic proportions. Carl wasn’t right. He was never right. It doesn’t matter. She stashed the makeup in her purse and tossed the purse over one shoulder. A quick check to make sure she was alone before snapping off the light.
Rhiannon liked the hospital at night. It soothed her, the miles of tiles mocking the bustle of the day with their silence. The heels of her boots clicked and echoed and softened and died. In the evenings she shared the hallways with other nurses and custodial staff, folks on their silent way from one place to another, background people who were never lost. It was the most frequent question poised on the lips of visitors: can you point me here? Can you tell me where I am? Do you know where I’m going? Forget the maps on the walls, the red X announcing that you are here; ask that woman, she’s in scrubs, she’s part of the furniture and she’ll ask the walls if she doesn’t know and the knowledge will whisper up through the soles of her feet. Her stethoscope is a compass. In the overnight hours they were all alone together; they and the walls, they and the patients, they and the empty brooding furniture. The nurses and the janitors and the patients knew where they were, knew who they were; more often than not they cherished the silence.
But not this guy. Not this woman, either. The guy, sitting in one of mauve chairs and flipping through a magazine while the woman stood and held her elbows and looked anxious. Rhiannon had seen it before; anxiety in all its forms prowled the hospital corridors, day and night. Rhiannon studied them as she walked down the long hallway, and as she did she made up their story: similar dark coloring and an age difference, maybe an uncle and niece waiting together for word on someone in surgery, someone close to the niece on account of her fidgeting and its contrast to the calm of the uncle, sitting there at ease with one ankle propped up on the other knee while eyeballing some photo-spread of the Galapagos islands in an ancient dog-eared edition of National Geographic. She stood on trouser-clad legs in her good black shoes and moved her eyes over everything, the bad art the soft lighting the directories listing the contents of the various floors and the closed-down gift shop with its refrigerated display of sickbed flowers; oh yeah, he’s the support while she’s keeping the vigil. The woman glanced at Rhiannon. This close up, and Rhiannon noticed how attractive she was: large dark eyes, long nose, pretty burgundy mouth. She shifted her purse higher on her bare shoulder and flashed a brief smile as the automated doors whooshed apart. Behind her, a man’s voice spoke her name. She pivoted around in mid-step.
“Do I know you?”
It was the uncle, standing up. He still held the magazine in his hand. “I don’t think so.”
“Who are you?”
The woman flashed open her ID. “My name is Emily Prentiss. This is David Rossi. We’re with the FBI.”
Rhiannon flung up her hands. “Fuck, how many of you are there?”
Rossi cocked his head. “You wanna go for a ride?”
“With you?”
Prentiss walked into the vestibule. She paused at the outer doors and folded her arms, looking back. She waited. Rossi tossed the magazine onto an end table and approached Rhiannon. “Please.” He looked into her eyes. “This won’t take very much of your time.”
Rhiannon sighed. She rubbed her forehead with tented fingers. “All right.”