Griggs took a stride into the center of the room, then hesitated. Lucy pointed toward a chair, putting him in a position where Francis and Mister Evil could both watch the man's responses to her questions. He was a wiry, muscled man, middle-aged and balding, with long fingers and a sunken chest, and an asthmatic wheeze that accompanied much of what he said. His eyes darted about the room furtively, giving him the appearance of a squirrel lifting its head to some distant danger. A squirrel with yellowed, uneven teeth and an unsettled disposition. He eyed Lucy with a single, penetrating glance, then relaxed, sticking his legs out with a look of irritation.

"Why am I here?" he asked.

Lucy responded rapidly. "As you may be aware, there have been some questions raised about the killing of the nurse-trainee in this building in the past weeks. I was hoping that you might shed some light on that incident." Her voice seemed routine, matter-of-fact, but Francis could see in her posture, and in the way her eyes locked onto the patient, that there was a reason this man had been selected first. Something in his file had given her an edgy kind of hope.

"I don't know anything," he answered. He shifted about, and waved his hand in the air. "Can I leave now?"

On the file placed in front of her, Lucy could see words like bipolar and depression coupled with antisocial tendencies and anger management issues. Griggs was a potpourri of problems, she thought. He also had slashed a woman with a razor blade in a bar after buying her a series of drinks and getting turned down when he propositioned her. Then he fought hard against the police that had arrested him, and within days of his arrival at the hospital, had threatened Short Blond and several other female nurses at the hospital with uncertain and unspecified, but undeniably dire punishments whenever they attempted to force him to take medication at night, change the television channel in the dayroom, or stop harassing other patients, which he did on a near daily basis. Each of these incidents had been dutifully documented on his case file. There was also a notation that he had insisted to his public defender that unspecified voices had demanded that he cut the woman in question, a claim that had delivered him to Western State instead of the local jail. An additional entry, in Gulptilil's handwriting, questioned the veracity of the claim. He was, in short, a man filled with rage and lies, which, in Lucy's mind, made him into a prime candidate.

Lucy smiled. "Of course," she said. "So on the night of the homicide "

Griggs cut her off. "I was asleep upstairs. Tucked in for the night. Zonked out on whatever the shit they give us."

Pausing, Lucy glanced at the yellow pad in front of her, before raising her eyes and fixing them on the patient. "You refused medication that night. There's a note in your file."

He opened his mouth, started to say one thing, then stopped. "You ought ' ta know," he said, "just because you say you won't take it, it don't mean you get a pass. All it means is that some goon like this one" he waved at Big Black, and Francis had the distinct impression that Griggs would have used some other epithet, if he hadn't been scared of the massive black man "forces you to take it. So I did. Few minutes later, I was off in dreamland."

"You didn't like the nurse-trainee, did you?"

Griggs grinned. "Don't like any of 'em. No secret in that."

"Why is that?"

"They like to lord it over us. Make us do stuff. Like we don't mean anything."

Griggs used us and we but Francis didn't think he had any plurality in mind, other than himself.

"Fighting women is easier, isn't it?" Lucy asked.

The patient shrugged. "You think I could fight him?" he replied, again indicating Big Black.

Lucy didn't answer the man's question, instead, she bent forward slightly. "You don't like women, do you?"

Griggs snarled, slightly, and spoke in a low-pitched, fierce voice. "Don't like you much."

"You like to hurt women, don't you?" Lucy asked.

He burst out in a wheezing laugh, but didn't answer.

Keeping her own voice steady and cold, Lucy then suddenly shifted direction. "Where were you in November," she asked abruptly. "About sixteen months ago."

"Huh?"

"You heard me."

"I'm supposed to remember back that far?"

"Is that a problem for you? Because I sure as hell can find out fast enough."

Griggs shifted about in his seat, gaining a little time. Francis could see the man's mind working hard, as if trying to see some danger through a fog. "I was working on a construction site in Springfield," he said. "Road crew. Bridge repair. Nasty job."

"Ever been in Concord?" she asked.

"Concord?"

"You heard me."

"No, I never been in Concord. That's in the whole other part of the state."

"Your boss on that construction crew, when I call him up, he's not going to tell me that you had access to a company truck, is he? And he's not going to tell me that he sent you on trips to the Boston area?"

Griggs looked a little scared and confused, a momentary flight of doubt. "No," he said. "Other guys got those easy jobs. I worked in the pits."

Lucy suddenly had one of the crime scene photographs in her hand. Francis saw that it was the body of the second victim. She rose up and leaned across the table and thrust it under Griggs's nose. "You remember this?" she demanded. "You remember doing this?"

"No," he said, his voice losing some more of its bravado. "Who's that?"

"You tell me."

"Never seen her before."

"I think you have."

"No."

"You know that road crew you worked on, there's records that show where everyone was each and every day. So proving that you were in Concord's gonna be easy for me. Just like that notation that you didn't get any medication the night the nurse was killed right here. It's just a matter of paperwork, filling in the blanks. Now, try again: Did you do this?"

Griggs shook his head.

"If you could, you would, wouldn't you?"

He shook his head again.

"You're lying to me."

Griggs seemed to breath in slowly, wheezing, getting a deep, lungful of air. When he did speak, it was with a high-pitched, barely restrained anger. "I didn't do that to no girl I never seen, and you're lying to me if you think I did."

"What do you do to women you don't like?"

He smiled sickly. "I cut 'em."

Lucy sat back and nodded. "Like the nurse-trainee?"

Griggs again shook his head. Then he looked across the room, eyeing first Evans, then over at Francis. "Not going to answer no more questions," he said. "You want to charge me with something, then you go ahead and do it."

"Okay," Lucy said. "Then you're finished for now. But maybe we'll talk again."

Griggs didn't say anything else. He simply rose. He worked some saliva around his mouth, and for a moment Francis thought he was going to spit on Lucy Jones. Big Black must have thought the same, because Griggs took a step forward, only to have the huge attendant's hand descend like a vise grip on his shoulder.

"You finished here, now," Big Black said calmly. "Don't do nothing that makes me any angrier than I might already be."

Griggs shrugged out of the attendant's grasp, and turned. Francis thought he clearly wanted to say something else, but instead, exited after pushing the chair a little, so that it scraped a small ways across the floor. A minor display of defiance.

Lucy ignored this, and started to write some notes down on the yellow legal pad. Mister Evans, too, was writing something down on a small notebook page. Lucy spotted this and said, "Well, he didn't precisely rule himself out, did he? What are you writing?"

Francis kept quiet, as Evans looked up. He wore a slightly self-satisfied look on his face. "What am I writing?" he asked. "Well, for starters, a note to myself to adjust Griggs's medications over the next few days. He seemed significantly agitated by your questions, and I would say is likely to act out aggressively, probably toward one of the more vulnerable patients around here. One of the old women, for example. Or perhaps one of the staff. That's equally possible. I can increase some doses over the short term, preventing that anger from manifesting itself."