CRIMINAL INTENTIONS: Season One, Episode Seven: CULT OF PERSONALITY by Cole McCade

Author:Cole McCade [McCade, Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2019-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

[6: TO THE DEAD]

MALCOLM KHALAJI WAS RUBBING OFF on Seong-Jae far too much.

That was the only reason he could explain why he was standing outside Johns Hopkins and about to badge his way into the psychiatry ward for entirely personal reasons.

Reasons he had lied to Malcolm about…but it had been necessary.

If he was careful, Malcolm need never know the truth.

And Seong-Jae could keep him safe.

Yet he did not know which was more morally questionable: lying to Malcolm about where he was, or lying to Sarah Sutterly’s parents so they would call ahead to the hospital staff and grant him visitor’s access as an investigating detective on a case still in progress.

When his reasons for visiting Sarah were entirely personal, and might well uncover things he did not want to know.

Getting inside, at least, was surprisingly easy. A flash of his badge, a check of his name against the allowed visitors logged by Sutterly’s parents, his name in the register, and he was being shepherded through gated, sterile hallways with automatically locking doors, yet décor that said they were still trying to pretend this place was half rehabilitation center, half prison, with the same cold white lights that brought back far too many memories of curling up on a cot and shivering while he lost half his body weight in cold, painful sweats.

He pushed the memory away.

That, right now, he did not need.

That wound could stay sealed, while he picked at another old scar until it bled.

If he were honest with himself, he should have done this long ago. But engineering access was one thing; facing the fucking PTSD flashbacks was something entirely different. But Anne Newton, silent and motionless as she was, was giving him no choice.

She demanded with those blank, unblinking eyes.

Those eyes that had looked at Adam, and been drawn in by the same superficial charm and subtle offer of control, of abandonment of free will, that had once worked so well on Seong-Jae that just seeing it again, reflected in someone like Adam, had nearly made him sick on the spot when he had stood in that church gymnasium and met those cold, knowing gray eyes.

And so here he was.

Standing in the psychiatric ward, while a bulky orderly in white scrubs unlocked the door to Sarah’s room and gave him a mistrustful look.

“Thirty minutes,” the orderly grunted. “That’s the time limit. Knock when you’re ready to leave.”

Seong-Jae answered with a nod. “I understand,” he said, and stepped inside.

The door swung closed behind him, latched, and locked with a dark finality.

The room he stood in was sizable, clean, but modest, simple furniture in soft-sided, rounded molded white plastic with no sharp edges or breakable, detachable bits, a desk and a chair and a little dining table, a bookshelf lined with paperbacks, the bed made of rounded, inoffensive white-painted piping with a thin institutional mattress. Familiar; far too familiar, except he remembered walls painted seafoam green, while these were a sort of bland, inoffensive muted sky blue.

Sarah Sutterly huddled

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