We had been directed to Jonnie Peal, a fortyish woman who held her head sideways as she talked, looking away every few seconds, like someone was whispering in her ear a half-dozen words at a time.
“Dora worked in the office all day. A mid-level administrator. Assignments, mainly, coordinating the schedules of our contact staff. I recall her having her realtor’s license back then. A part-time thing, weekends. One day she went for it full time. Guess she got tired of scheduling. Pay was better. Couldn’t be worse.”
“No contact with clients?” I asked.
Ms Peal nodded to a row of wide cubicles separated by tall gray dividers. “She worked in cubicle fourteen. Sat there all day long.”
I looked at Waltz. Desk-bound workers rarely made enemies that mutilated your body. It was the caseworkers, the folks on the street who were avoided, jeered, cursed, spat on, and sometimes harmed as they thrust themselves into situations where they were neither understood nor wanted. Cohabitational situations were bad, toss in kids and things got worse. Though parents might allow an infant to wallow in filth for days, let a social worker suggest inadequate care and things could explode into violence. But Ms Anderson had been insulated from those situations.
“That’s wrong,” said a voice. “Dora wasn’t always at that desk.”
We turned to see a petite, sharp-dressed Hispanic woman a dozen feet away. She stood up from a desk where she’d been on the telephone. Her phone rang. I figured it rang all day.
“Excuse me?” I said.
She punched a button on the phone and walked over. “I’m Celia Ramirez. Been here twenty years. Dora started in Social Services as a caseworker when she was fresh from college. It didn’t work out, I guess. She was put in filing, worked her way to scheduling.”
“She worked out of here? This office?”
Ms Ramirez pointed to an adjoining annex. “Back then she worked in Children’s Services. You know what kind of nastiness they see over there?”
“Yes,” I told her. “Unfortunately, I do.”
We followed Ms Ramirez’s directions to the Child Welfare section of the department. It mirrored government offices everywhere: cubes, chairs, desks with piled-high in-baskets, cabinets. But I knew horrors lurked in the cabinets and case files, the seeds of serial murderers. Psychopathic killers are created in childhood. They come from backgrounds of physical and psychological abuse on a scale almost inconceivable to the normal American mind.
No matter how childhood is stripped away, by sex or pain or perverse and relentlessly inventive combinations of the two, it leaves, or never begins. Many children endure these cauldrons of despair to create what we call productive lives. But endurance is a skill, not a foundation. Many are wounded in some way, unable to form normal relationships, or know anything akin to inner peace. Others have all vestiges of personality destroyed, as if an angry fire had seared away their soul. Nothing remains to hold evil at bay, and everything becomes a possibility.
Waltz noted my silence, said, “Are you all right, Detective Ryder?”
“I’ve been in too many of these places, Shelly.”
“Don’t I know it. Listen, two of us might seem heavy handed. Want to keep it one-on-one again, you being the one?”
I nodded. “Sounds right.”
He squeezed my shoulder, then stood on tiptoe and scanned the floor. “I’ve got to find a restroom. I drank two cans of diet fudge goo this morning.”
I wandered until I found the director, Eugenie Brickle, a slender and handsome black woman in her fifties with searching eyes. They searched me from toes to hat before deciding I was on the side of the angels.
“How long was she a caseworker?” I asked as we strolled the sidewalk in front of the building so Ms Brickle could have a cigarette. She didn’t really smoke, just sort of touched the cigarette to her lips and inhaled as she pulled it away, puffing out nothing. I figured her for a long-time smoker who’d found a way to get the motion without the potion.
“Dora worked with us for two years. Then she was moved to clerical. It was that or be let go.”
I paused, waited for a loud bus to pass. “Dora wasn’t good at her job?”
“Maybe too good, too sensitive. She didn’t know how to compartmentalize. Every child was Dora’s child, every situation could have a happy ending. If it didn’t, the failure was Dora’s. It was tearing her up. It wasn’t doing the staff a lot of good either, finding her weeping in the washroom three times a week.”
“It seems strange she left the field completely.”
We came to the end of the block, turned around. Ms Brickle had not-smoked the cigarette almost to the filter.
“Her mother lived with Dora and had been ill for several years. It’s why Dora did real estate on weekends, to help with the bills. Her mom took a turn for the worse and the bills piled higher …”
“Dora jumped for the added pay.”
“I imagine she was a super realtor, working to give every buyer a happy ending, find the dream home. Maybe that’s what she threw herself into. But she never let go of her social-work days completely.”
“Why do you say that?”
We stopped at the door. Ms Brickle pressed the cigarette into the sand of a receptacle, tapping it deep, so all that remained was a tan circle the circumference of a .32 shell.
“I was over in the city, saw her about a month back. She was clicking down the street in high heels and print dress flapping in the breeze, looking bright and happy and about to jump straight up into the blue sky. I asked if she’d just sold Donald Trump a building. She laughed and said she’d crossed paths with a client from her Child Welfare days, and he had made it through hell; not just survived, but was building a good life for himself.”
“She say who it was?”
She shrugged. “We see so many kids I probably wouldn’t have recalled the name. Just someone she’d seen in the course of her job.”
“A success story.”
“Even Dora had figured him for a lost child, too broken to ever be made right. But there he was, a responsible adult, working a good job and making a difference in the world. That day it wasn’t the real estate work lighting her face up, Detective. It was a case from years and years ago. Dora got her a happy ending.”
“Could you please stop pacing, Doc?” Harry Nautilus said. “It’s driving me nuts.”
Nautilus rolled a chair behind Dr Alan Traynor, bumping the back of Traynor’s knees. The psychiatrist half sat, half fell, into the chair.
“I’m trying to stay calm,” the acting head of the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior mumbled. He ran pink fingers through thinning white hair, tiny blue eyes twitching behind wire-framed bifocals. “It’s all so mystifying. What would make Dr Prowse do such a thing?”
Nautilus sat another chair in the book-filled office that had belonged to Dr Evangeline Prowse. He rolled toward Traynor until their knees touched, hoping to lock the nervous shrink in place.
“I need to understand Dr Prowse’s last