Inside the morgue, Dr. Baldwin and Detective Nolan stood in front of the storage vault with their backs to the entrance. A third man in a white coat opened a vault door and slid out a sheet-covered body on a steel slab. When Nolan turned and motioned her inside, Sergeant Clark pushed the door open and held it, waiting for her to go through. Suddenly she couldn’t move. Everyone waited in silence. They probably thought she was rude or crazy, but she couldn’t help it. Seeing Rosemary’s mutilated corpse had been bad enough the first and second times.
“I’m sorry about this,” Nolan said. “But we need an official identification.”
“I cleaned her up as much as I could,” said the man in the white coat.
“Just think of it as something you’re doing for her,” Detective Nolan said. “One last service. You just need to look at her long enough to know it’s her. It’ll be over in a second.”
Dr. Baldwin stared at Sage with miserable eyes but said nothing.
Finally, she took a deep breath, put a hand over her nose and mouth, and entered the cold room.
“Are you ready?” Nolan said.
She nodded, still holding her breath.
The man in the white coat lifted the sheet and stepped aside. Sage’s knees went weak and she instinctively grabbed the detective’s arm to keep from falling.
He put his hand over hers. “Are you okay?”
She nodded again, not at all sure she was okay.
Despite further signs of decay, there was no mistaking the jagged strawberry-blond hair, just inches long, and the slender, pale face of her twin sister. Rosemary’s once impossibly long eyelashes were gone, and without the caked-on clown lipstick, her lips looked like they’d been chewed on by a rat. Under the fluorescent lights of the morgue, the dark remnants of blood on her neck and the black rot on her paper-thin skin leapt out like ink on snow. It was almost more than Sage could take. She turned away, the gorge rising in her throat.
“It’s her,” she managed. “It’s my sister, Rosemary.” A band of hot sorrow tightened around her chest again and she buried her face in her hands. Detective Nolan put a hand on her back and led her out of the morgue.
Nolan glanced over his shoulder to address Dr. Baldwin, who was following them. “Looks like you’ve got some phone calls to make,” he said, his voice flat.
* * *
Dr. Baldwin sat down hard at his desk, his forehead creased with tension, his upper lip shiny with sweat. He looked like he’d aged ten years. Detective Nolan sat on the other side opposite Sage, taking notes and asking questions, while Sergeant Clark stood next to the door, one hand on his holster as if worried someone might try something. After identifying Rosemary in the morgue, Sage had shown them the tunnel where she and Eddie found her body sitting on the stone ledge, but after a quick sweep of the area with powerful flashlights, they found nothing—no dropped knives or lost hairs, no cigarette butts or distinguishable footprints. Afterward, on the way to Baldwin’s office, Nolan assured Sage he’d send in a forensics team to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.
Now, Nolan regarded Dr. Baldwin with more than a hint of irritation and contempt. “Tell me again why you didn’t report Rosemary missing?” he said.
“Because it wasn’t the first time she’d run off and gotten lost on campus. The last time it took us two days to figure out she was in the wrong ward. Unfortunately, due to budget cuts we’re at half staff, which means we don’t have enough manpower to keep track of every resident as closely as we’d like. This has happened before, multiple times, and we’ve been able to handle it on our own.”
Nolan raised his eyebrows. “You’ve found dead girls in the tunnels before?”
Dr. Baldwin shook his head, more miserable than ever. “Of course not,” he said. “That’s not what I meant at all. I meant we’ve had patients wander off before. But we’ve always found them and returned them safely to their wards. We didn’t know where Miss Winters was for three days this time, so who knows what she was up to. And it had been a while between my last evaluation of Rosemary and the day when I first saw Miss . . . her sister, Sage, so I automatically assumed she’d returned, as did several of my other colleagues. Like I said, we’re understaffed. The governor and medical director are always pressuring us to make room for more residents, then they make more budget cuts because they think sending bullets and guns to Vietnam is more important than—”
“Let’s stay on track, shall we?”
“Yes, yes. Of course.” Trying to hide his anxiety, Baldwin took a sip from the cup he’d been drinking from earlier, then grimaced when he discovered it was cold. He put the cup down, picked up a pen, and opened the center drawer to put it away. Sergeant Clark put his hand on the gun in his holster.
“Please don’t reach into your desk, sir,” he said.
Dr. Baldwin nodded shakily, set the pen down, and placed both hands on the blotter.
“I’ll need the name of your colleagues who thought Sage was Rosemary,” Nolan said.
“Initially it was Dr. Whitehall, Nurse Moore, and several attendants. But Nurse Vic, Marla, and Wayne saw Rosemary every day and they all thought the same thing. More importantly, neither Rosemary’s mother nor her stepfather ever mentioned the existence of a sister. I was under the impression she was an only child. So clearly you can’t fault any of us for not knowing the Winters girls were identical twins.”
“Uh-huh,” Nolan said, writing down the names. “I’ll need to speak to all of them.” He turned his attention to Sage. “When you found out your sister was missing, you immediately came here looking for her, is that right?”
She nodded. “I came on the bus the next morning, after I overheard my stepfather talking about it.”
“And how long ago was that?”
Sage tried to think. It felt like she’d been trapped in this nightmare for a hundred years. “I’m not sure what day it is now, but I arrived on December 27th.”
“So fourteen days.” Nolan wrote it down, then looked at Baldwin again. “And why did you move the body instead of calling the police?”
Dr. Baldwin went white. “I did no such thing.”
“Then who did?”
“I can assure you I have no idea.”
“And you have no idea who would want to harm Rosemary Winters or Evie Carter?”
“Of course not.”
Nolan looked at Sage again. “What about you? Do you have any idea who would want to harm your sister?”
“Like I said before, the only person I can think of is Wayne. I’m pretty sure he was having sex with her against her will. I also found out he’s been having sex with one of the other residents from Ward D. Her name is Norma. And who knows how many others. He has plenty of opportunities to do whatever he wants. He’s alone with the residents all the time.”
“Do you have proof that he’s having sex with a resident?”
“No, but I can show you a hidden room in the seclusion area. Norma took me there and told me what he was doing to her.”
Nolan eyed Dr. Baldwin. “Did you know about this?”
“Miss Winters mentioned it, but I thought she was either lying or making it up.”