"Don't wear your TCU uniform," our nursing instructor told us. "When you go into Lock Ward C. You may come to the unit dressed in scrubs like the staff and don't wear your badges."
She didn't have to tell us why. We knew. Lock Ward C was where Frankie Dearborn was housed. The law says people are innocent until proven guilty, but the police found Dearborn smearing the blood of the man he murdered on his face like war paint. Dearborn had already slaughtered two others--an ex-girlfriend and his landlady--before stabbing Dr. Joe Hayden, a tenured professor of Mathematics at Texas Christian University, to death with a buck knife for flunking him out of his class.
We were told not to make eye contact or talk with Dearborn. Not a problem. I could barely breathe from the first minute I saw him, much less speak.
He looked much like you'd expect a psychotic murderer to look. He was scarecrow thin with greasy black hair that curled past his shoulders. In profile his nose was pitched like an A-frame roof, high, straight and thin. Dressed in prison stripes, he prowled up and down the narrow corridor behind a set of black metal bars, his shoulders pulled forward. He had Maxwell's equation tattooed on his left forearm. There was a smell about him. Dank and musky. Like rotten mushrooms or rancid beef jerky. He mumbled constantly and if you listened closely enough you could hear him spilling out mathematical formulas at a dizzying clip. An insane Pythagoras. Something dark was crusted under his long, ragged fingernails.
Could it be dried blood?
