Read Online The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted: A Psychological Thriller by Andrew E. Kaufman - Free Book Online Page A

business or not, don’t you think?”
    I nodded, but inside, I wanted to scream.

Chapter Fifteen

    The Kingsleys were from Black Lake. Warren was Nathan’s godfather.
    How the hell did I miss that?
    I’d found the missing thread—or at least one of them—but it only seemed to raise more questions, the biggest one being, how did Warren and my mother get tangled up in the kidnapping and murder of a three-year-old boy? Maybe even worse, how could I not have known? I’d lived around the two of them my whole life.
    There was no doubt my mother was evil. I’d seen it first-hand, lived it, knew she was capable of horrendous abuse. But was she capable of kidnapping and murdering a child?
    As for Warren, the risks would have been astronomical, the implications nothing short of staggering. He was on his way up the ladder at the time, a congressman with even bigger political aspirations. What could be important enough to risk losing that? I came up with only one answer: money. It was all he ever seemed to care about, apart from his career. Could that have been enough to lure him to the dark side?
    Then there was Ronald Lee Lucas. I still hadn’t figured out his role in all this, or how Warren and my mother would have even associated with the likes of him. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense.
    Or did it?
    I allowed my mind to run free. A hired thug? A sexual predator who got carried away, then had to kill the boy to keep him quiet? But why would my mother and Warren hire him to take Nathan in the first place? What were they planning on doing with him?
    Talking to Dennis only seemed to widen the mystery surrounding Jean, the relationship with Warren putting her in my crosshairs. Might she be the final link I needed to complete the picture? I couldn’t ask her, but I could go where she spent her final days and took her last breath.

    ***

    Glenview Psychiatric Hospital looked like it could drive a person insane if they weren’t already. Chain link and razor wire surrounded the perimeter, and beyond that, ivy snaked its way up dirty red brick walls. I let my gaze follow it to a bar-covered window where an elderly woman looked down on me, her face as white as the long, stringy hair that framed it. She nodded with a vacant, fish-eyed expression, then flashed a menacing, toothless grin that sent chills up my spine. I turned my attention away quickly, headed for the front door.
    Glenview had once been a private facility, but the state had taken it over several years before. From the looks of things, they hadn’t done much to improve it. I moved down a dimly-lit, claustrophobic hallway so narrow that I doubted two people could walk it side by side. The asylum-green walls were cracked and chipped, the floors covered in nondescript, skid-infested tile. The overall theme: dismal and cold.
    I came to the gatekeeper for this palace of darkness: a receptionist behind a Plexiglas partition blurred with fingerprints, grime, and other slimy things I was afraid to think about. Her expression told me she was sick of her job. Couldn’t say I blamed her. Then I heard static and a speaker going live.
    “Can I help you,” she said. It sounded more like a statement than a question.
    I leaned in toward a metal-covered hole in the glass. “Patrick Bannister, for Doctor Faraday.”
    No verbal response, just a loud buzzer and a simultaneous click as the lock disengaged; I pulled the door open and found her waiting on the other side behind a service counter.
    After signing in with my I.D., I handed over my cell phone. Then a security guard arrived to escort me through a sally port that looked more like a cave. Smelled like one, too. Next stop, a service elevator: high stink-factor there as well, like a nasty old gym locker.
    Stepping off onto the fifth floor, I fell into sensory overload. The stench was so wicked and fierce that it burned through my sinuses—excrement, sweat, and cleaning agents all blended into one nasty funk that kicked my gag