Roses Are Red

against that particular bank,
and
he wanted his money.”
    “Sounds like him, doesn’t it? He’s thorough
and
efficient. Doesn’t miss a trick. He’d want it all.”
    Betsey opened her eyes again. She stared at me. Pursed her shiny red lips. “There’s just one thing, though. It’s important.”
    I lightly kissed her lips. “What’s that?” I asked.
    “I still want to go back to the room with you.
Then
we can go through all the dusty, musty files on the banks.”
    I laughed. “That sounds like a very wise plan. Especially the first part.”

Chapter 109
    WE WERE BACK at the FBI field office by three that afternoon. Betsey had called ahead, and the First Union files were waiting in her office. We dug into the files. And dug, and dug. We ordered sandwiches and iced tea from the deli on the corner.
    Twice.
    “Why are the two of us so driven to do this?” Betsey finally looked over and asked me.
    “He probably killed Walsh, and maybe Mike Doud. He’s a really sick puppy and he’s out there somewhere and that’s
scary as hell.
”
    She nodded solemnly. “
We’re
sick puppies, and look where it got us. Pass me that stack, will you? God, it was so nice and restful and
sunny
at the Four Seasons.”
    Around eleven o’clock I held up a small black-and-white photo. I was deep into the personnel files from First Union.
    “Betsey?” I called out.
    “Mmmm?” She was deep into her own stack of files.
    “This guy was a security executive at the bank. Betsey, he’s a patient on Five at Hazelwood. I know who he is. I’ve talked to him this week. There’s no record at the hospital that he ever worked at First Union.
This is our guy.
He has to be.” passed her the picture.
    We quickly agreed that Sampson and I would return to Hazelwood in the morning. In the meantime, she tried to gather all the information she could on a patient named Frederic Szabo. Goddamn nerdy Frederic Szabo!
    It was possible that Szabo wasn’t connected, but it didn’t seem likely. Szabo had been the head of security at First Union Bank. He was a
tall, bearded
patient at Hazelwood. He fit Brian Macdougall’s description. His psychiatric profile included recurring paranoid fantasies against many prominent authority figures, including several Fortune 500 companies. He’d just seemed too withdrawn and helpless to be the Mastermind.
    The most telling evidence was that the hospital’s records
didn’t show that he had worked at First Union.
Supposedly, Szabo had been an out-of-work drifter since Vietnam. Of course, we now knew that he’d been lying about those years.
    According to his psychiatric profile, Szabo had a paranoid personality disorder. He had a severe distrust of people, especially businesspeople, and believed that they were exploiting and trying to deceive him. He was sure that if he confided in someone, the information would be used against him. During a two-year marriage, from ’70 through ’71, Szabo had been pathologically hypersensitive and jealous of his wife. When the marriage broke up, he supposedly hit the road. He eventually showed up at Hazelwood, seeking help three years before the robberies and a year after he’d been let go at First Union. During his frequent stays at Hazelwood he was always cold and aloof. He cut himself off from everyone at the hospital, both patients and staff. He never made a friend, but he basically seemed harmless to others; and
he had grounds and town privileges most of the time.
    After I read the profile again, it struck me that Szabo’s job at the bank had been a perfect fit for his disorder. Like a lot of functioning paranoids, Szabo had sought out work in which he could operate in a punitive and moralistic style that would be socially acceptable. As head of security at the bank, he could focus on his need to prevent attacks from anyone at any time. By protecting the perimeters of the banks, he was unconsciously protecting himself.
    It was ironic that by setting up a series of successful bank robberies he had proven, at least symbolically, that there was no way to protect himself from attack by others. Maybe that was his point.
    His mistrustfulness made treatment at the hospital difficult, if not impossible. He had been in and out of Hazelwood four times in the past eighteen months. Had the veterans hospital been a front for his other activities? Had he chosen Hazelwood as his hideout?
    And, most puzzling of all, why was he still there?

Chapter 110
    ON MONDAY MORNING I went