Free Perfect Poison by M. William Phelps Page A

place.”
    â€œFine, then. I will.”
    For the next few days, Kristen lived the life of a single woman, seeing Perrault whenever and wherever she wanted to.
    Weeks later, without a fight, she changed her mind and moved out of the house.

CHAPTER 11
    Shaped like a horseshoe, with the open end facing Northampton Street (Route 10), the apartment complex James Perrault helped Kristen Gilbert move into on December 1, 1995, provided the perfect spot in town for divorcées, single mothers and newlyweds. Rent was cheap. Retail and grocery stores were nearby. And for some of those who worked in Springfield or Holyoke, it was the best of both worlds: community-oriented, small-town living with the benefits of big-city life just up the road.
    For Kristen Gilbert, Northampton Street was the perfect location. Not only was Glenn’s work just a two-minute ride down the road, but Perrault lived only two miles away.
    The kids stayed with Glenn. Kristen didn’t even make it an issue. She would see them every day, of course, because Glenn worked so close by. He would drop them off in the morning and pick them up after he got out of work.
    It appeared to be the perfect setup for everyone involved.
    Perrault and Gilbert’s relationship took on a new dimension now that they were free to come and go as they pleased. They went to the movies. Attended plays. Went bar-hopping and had romantic dinners.
    Perhaps it was love after all for James Perrault.

    By the end of 1995, codes on Ward C had become an outright problem. Nurses were beginning to mention to each other that there was a “marked increase” in the past few months, but now it seemed as though they were happening weekly. And for some reason, most of the codes were being called during the busiest times—say, for example, when they were understaffed—and, lo and behold, on Gilbert’s tour of duty.
    Here it was December, and already there had been about thirty-five codes for the year on Ward C alone during Gilbert’s 4:00 P.M. to midnight shift. Even more shocking was that Gilbert had found twenty of the codes herself. The closest nurse behind her had found only five. By comparison, during the previous year, 1994, there had been a total of fifteen codes, yet Gilbert had found half of those, too.
    But even more alarming was the number of deaths.
    By December 7, Ward C had lost thirty-seven patients on Gilbert’s shift alone. There was no comparison with the two other shifts: The day shift had lost only six patients and the overnight shift ten. But the most significant factor in the second-shift deaths was that Kristen Gilbert had found twenty, more than half of them, herself.
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    In 1995, Henry Hudon, from Westfield, Massachusetts, was a thirty-five-year-old schizophrenic who liked to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and, shortly after being admitted to the VAMC, run away from the hospital whenever the opportunity presented itself.
    â€œI’m going out for a smoke,” Hudon would say, never to return.
    A frequent visitor to the VAMC’s psychiatric ward, Hudon was an Air Force veteran who had “demonstrated excellent performance in all phases of his duties,” his sergeant, Thomas Harrington, wrote about him in 1980.
    Growing up in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Hudon lived the average life kids in Springfield’s most reclusive suburbs did during the seventies. He graduated from East Longmeadow High School in 1977, an above-average student. He took the postmaster’s daughter to his high school prom and the police chief’s daughter to the senior banquet, and was a member of the high school’s swim and golf teams.
    Born prematurely on February 5, 1960, in Holyoke, Hudon embodied the persona of an all-American military boy, created in the image of his father, a twenty-four-year Air Force vet who had fought in World War II.
    When it came time, deciding on a career in the military was an easy decision for Hudon,