Roses Are Red

ratty bathrobes, nuts in squeaky wheelchairs, nuts in the nude.
    Sometimes, more often than not, he found it impossible to believe that he was here. Of course, that was the point, wasn’t it? No one would guess that he was the Mastermind. No one would ever find him here. He was perfectly safe.
    And then he saw Detective Alex Cross.

Chapter 100
    SAMPSON AND I both worked the 7:00-to-3:30- P.M. shift that day. When I arrived on Five, I felt I could almost hear an audible stretching of the thin red line between the sane and the mad.
    The ward pretty much had the standard institutional look: faded mauve and gray everything, occasional gashes in the walls, nurses carrying trays of little cups, strung-out men in drawstring hospital pants and stained robes. I had seen it all before, except for one thing. The mental health workers carried whistles to sound an alarm if they needed help. That probably meant staff members had been hurt here.
    The fourth and fifth floors made up the ward for psychiatric patients. There were thirty-one veterans on Five, the ages ranging from twenty-three to seventy-five. The patients on Five were considered dangerous, either to others or to themselves.
    I started my search on Five. Two of the patients on the floor were tall and burly. They somewhat matched the description of the man who’d been followed by detectives Crews and O’Malley. One of them, Cletus Anderson, had a salt-and-pepper beard and had been involved in police work in Denver and Salt Lake City after his discharge from the army.
    I found Anderson loitering in the day room on the first morning. It was past ten o’clock, but he was still wearing pajamas and a soiled robe. He was watching ESPN and he didn’t strike me as a mastermind criminal.
    The decor in the day room consisted of about a dozen brown vinyl chairs, a lopsided card table, and a TV mounted on one wall. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Anderson was smoking. I sat down in front of the TV nodded hello.
    He turned to me and blew an imperfect smoke ring. “You’re new, right? Play pool?” he asked.
    “I’ll give it a try.”
    “Give it a try,” he said, and smiled as if I’d made a joke. “Got keys to the pool room?”
    He stood up without waiting for an answer to his question. Or maybe he’d forgotten that he’d asked it. I knew from the nursing charts that he had a violent temper but that he was on a truckload of Valium now. Good thing. Anderson was six-foot-six and weighed over two hundred seventy pounds.
    The pool room was surprisingly cheery, with two large windows that looked out onto a walled exercise yard. The yard was bordered with red maples and elms, and birds twittered away in the trees.
    I was in there alone with Cletus Anderson. Could this very large man be the Mastermind? I couldn’t tell yet. Maybe if he brained me with a pool ball or a cue stick.
    Anderson and I played a game of eight ball. He wasn’t very good. I let him stay in the game by blowing a couple of chip shots, but he didn’t seem to notice. His blue-gray eyes were nearly glazed over.
    “Like to wring those fucking bluejays’ necks,” he muttered angrily after missing a bank shot that wasn’t even close to being his best opportunity on the table.
    “What did the bluejays do wrong?” I asked him.
    “They’re out there. I’m in here,” he said, and stared at me. “Don’t try to shrink-wrap me, okay? Mr. Big Shit Mental Health Worker. Play your shot.”
    I sank a striped ball in the corner, then I missed another long shot I could have made. Anderson took the cue from me and he stood over his next shot for a long time. Too long, I was thinking. He straightened up suddenly. All six-foot-six of him. He glared at me. His body was getting rigid; he was tensing his large arms.
    “Did you just
say
something to me, Mr. Mental Health?” he asked. His hands were large and held the pool cue tightly, wringing its neck. He had a lot of fat on him, but the fat was hard, like on football linemen and some professional wrestlers.
    “Nope. Not a peep.”
    “That s’posed to be funny? Little play on the
peeping
bluejays, which you know I fucking hate?”
    I shook my head. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
    Anderson stepped back from the pool table with the cue stick still clasped tightly in both hands. “I could have sworn I heard you call me a pussy under your breath. Little puss? Wuss? Something derogatory like that?”
    I made eye contact with him. “I think our