Twice Dying Read Online Free PDF Page A

claims he couldn’t back up. He kept changingjobs—moving down the ladder. A place like Clevinger’s the end of the line. Or it was, until he started working his miracles.”
    “He’s taking a hell of a risk.”
    “The real risk is to the public, Rasp. These men are out on the street after two years, with no parole and nobody keeping track of where they are. They’re supposed to report to outpatient clinics for medications, but there’s no way to make them. They can change areas, even identities, cover their tracks. They just don’t have any conscience, and there’s no therapy for that. Like John Garlick. He’ll be out in a few weeks and he’s going to kill more women, I know it.”
    Monks stepped away, clasping his hands behind his back. The night wind brought the scent of wet salt air, and with it came a touch of memory: standing on the bridge of a navy troop transport, starting west across the Pacific from Mare Island.
    He said, “Did you confront Jephson?”
    “I tried to spook him. I told him I’d found out that some of the released NGIs had stopped reporting for meds and named the men with the phony charts. He sat there like an iceberg: that fucking British reserve. He knows damned well that if I take him on, I’m the one who’s going to get hammered.”
    Monks smiled grimly. “Whistle-blowers tend to lose friends.” It was a lesson he had learned the hard way.
    “It finally started sinking in that was why heapproved my appointment. I was just what he wanted: junior, female, dumb.”
    Her eyes were wet and angry. Monks’s hand moved to touch her cheek, a gesture so instinctive it surprised him. He stopped himself, letting his hand fall back to his side.
    “Dumb enough to find out something nobody else suspects?” he said.
    “Dumb enough to shoot my mouth off and warn him. I’ll bet you anything that man Stryker, the one asking the questions about me, is a private detective. Jephson’s trying to find something to fire me. I’m good at my job, dammit. It’s nobody’s business what I do in my own rime.”
    A lot of people wouldn’t agree, Monks thought. Starting with the SFPD and the American Psychological Association.
    He said, “What makes me worth an antique razor?”
    She smiled, brushing her eyes with the back of her hand.
    “I want you to slice open Jephson’s rotten spot.”
    “Rotten spot?”
    “You know the name Vandenard?”
    He blinked. “I’ve seen it in the society pages. I don’t travel much in that part of the newspaper.”
    She held up the manila envelope again.
    “I’ve been doing my homework. Robert Vandenard, the family’s main heir, murdered a man back in ’84.”
    A vague recollection of the event tugged at Monks’s memory.
    “He committed suicide later, didn’t he?” Monks said. “The Vandenard boy?”
    “There was a lot that happened in between that wasn’t made public. Jephson got him pronounced NGI. Not long after that, the Clevinger program got funded big-time.”
    Monks said, “Let me guess. By Vandenard Foundation money.”
    “No surprise, huh?”
    “That sort of thing happens all the time,” Monks said. “I could see it as questionable ethics. But not illegal.”
    “How about what came next? Robby Vandenard was one of Jephson’s first admissions. Instead of life in Atascadero, he did twenty-four easy months in Clevinger, and he was out, free as a bird.”
    Monks’s gaze turned east, to the misted lights of the grand hotels on Nob Hill: the Mark Hopkins, the Sir Francis Drake, the Fairmont, holding themselves like wealthy dowagers in dated finery, looking coldly down on the upstart newer buildings of the city.
    The kind of money where the line between illegality and questionable ethics could be erased.
    “I need to find something on Jephson to protect myself, Rasp,” she said. “I don’t like fighting dirty. But I don’t have any choice.”
    “Blackmail isn’t in my line, Alison.”
    “I’m not talking blackmail. I’m talking