When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “If you’d like, I could give you some medication to help you deal with any anxiety you might be experiencing.” Corder glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, Lyss, I have a new patient to meet. It’s almost lunchtime—do you want me to get you a psych tech to escort you down to the dining hall?”

  “I’m not very hungry,” said Lyssy through clenched teeth.

  “I understand. Look, Lyssy, it’s okay to be upset. This is a lousy rotten deal you’re getting, it’s okay to be upset about it.”

  But it wasn’t, thought Lyssy. Not for him. Because the more upset he got, the louder the muttering in the dark place. By now it was already loud enough that he could almost make out the words—and whoever it was in there, he didn’t sound happy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  “Basically, you had this couple living way the hell and gone on a ridgetop in Oregon,” explained retired FBI Special Agent E. L. Pender, sitting in the copilot seat of the air ambulance transporting himself, Dr. Cogan, and her sedated patient from Redding to Portland. The pilot, recognizing Pender from the book tour he’d taken to promote his ghostwritten autobiography a few years ago, had invited him up to the cockpit for a chat; as happened more often than not, the conversation had turned to the most notorious case of Pender’s career. “Maxwell, he was so crazy he thought he was ten different people, and his foster mother/lover/accomplice, she was so crazy she made him look sane.

  “Only in her case she had a pretty good excuse. The bad news was, about half the skin on her body had been burned off—the worse news was, it was the front half. A real horror show—not much face left to speak of, and no more hair than yours truly.”

  Pender lifted his brown Basque beret and rubbed a hand the size of an oven mitt across the barren expanse of his scalp by way of illustration. “Originally she was his elementary school teacher. Fourth, fifth grade, something like that. They say she was a gorgeous young strawberry blond—the kind of teacher every boy student gets a crush on and every girl student wants to grow up to be like. Then one day Maxwell shows up at school with both eyes swollen shut from a beating, and the whole story comes out. Turns out his parents were members of this twisted satanic cult whose leader was a flat-out pederast; they’d been abusing the kid since he was like, three, sexually, ritually, physically, you name it. Cowards to the end, the parents kill themselves—technically, it was a homicide/suicide—and the teacher gets custody of little Ulysses. But then for some equally twisted reasons of her own—probably because she’d been abused as a child—her idea of parenting included having sex with the kid on a regular basis.”

  “Oh, man.” The pilot—fit, tanned, with Ray-Ban sunglasses and close-cropped hair graying at the temples—winced.

  “It gets worse. The sex continued until Maxwell was around sixteen, then she told him it was all over, that part of the relationship, and that she was going to marry the high school shop teacher. He went ballistic, snuck into the bedroom while she and her fiancé were doing the nasty, stabbed him about fifty times with an icepick, and set the bedroom on fire. Burned the shit out of his hands, left her looking like something out of The House of Wax.

  “But she told the police that her fiancé was trying to rape her, and that the fire got started accidentally. Then when she got out of the hospital, she sprang him from the juvie farm and he moved in with her. Only from then on, around once a year or so she sent the lad out hunting, with orders to come back with a strawberry blond. That was about the only criteria—it had to be a woman and she had to have strawberry blond hair. To make wigs for the old horror.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’d been searching for Maxwell for close to ten years before he finally slipped up and ran a stop sign down in Monterey with a dead strawberry blond in the passenger seat. I was about ninety percent sure he was the one who’d killed all those other women, but just to be sure, I talked the sheriff into putting me into a cell with him for an undercover interview. Bad mistake.” Pender raised his beret again to show the pilot the livid, trident-shaped scar across his scalp. “By the time I woke up in the hospital he’d already busted out, killed three deputy sheriffs, a highway patrolman, and at least two civilians….

  “When I finally caught up to Maxwell, there were a dozen strawberry blond wigs in a glass case in his basement, plus two half-starved survivors who looked like concentration camp victims.” Plus Dr. Cogan, of course, but as always, Pender chose to protect her anonymity.

  “He drew down on me, I put one round through his shoulder, a second through his knee, and between you, me, and the lamppost, I gave some serious goddamn consideration to putting a third round right through there”—touching a forefinger the size of a ballpark frank to where his third eye would have been, if he’d been a Hindu deity—“and saving everybody a shitload of trouble. As it was, he narrowly missed bleeding to death before we could get him to a hospital—they had to amputate what was left of his leg.”

  But as Pender started to explain how the old woman had died in a fall shortly after the shootout, he realized the pilot was no longer really listening—just nodding politely at intervals as he checked gauges and flipped switches, preparing the plane for descent.

  Oh shit, oh dear, thought Pender, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. How bored he used to get, pretending to listen politely in cop bars as some over-the-hill agent blathered on about his adventures back in the day. Pender had sworn more than once that he’d eat his 9mm SIG Sauer P226 before he’d let that happen to him.

  The pilot pushed gently forward on the steering yoke, sending the plane nosing downward into the roiling cloud cover. “We’ll be touchin’ down in Portland in just a few minutes,” he told Pender in a standard issue, Right Stuff drawl. “Would you mind headin’ on back and makin’ sure everybody’s buckled in?”

  Pender nodded briskly—he decided he’d probably done enough talking for one fat old man, for one morning.

  2

  Irene Cogan had suffered two brutal blows in her lifetime. Six years earlier, stunned by the unexpected death of her husband, she had more or less shut down emotionally, while her kidnapping and subsequent ordeal at the scarred hands of the serial killer Ulysses Maxwell three years later seemed to have had precisely the opposite effect.

  With death imminent, Irene had promised herself that if she did by some miracle survive, she would spend less time working and more time smelling the roses. Unlike most such promises, that one had been kept—the second part, anyway. Her recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t exactly been a picnic—three years after her kidnapping she still suffered from the occasional PTSD flashback—but in general she had come through it with a renewed sense of possibilities, stronger where she was weak, less brittle where she was strong, a good deal kinder to herself, and an inveterate smeller of roses.

  “You’re just in time,” she greeted Pender upon his return to the cabin, which resembled a long, narrow hospital room. Lily lay strapped into the adjustable bed, fully clothed, tossing restlessly in her sleep. “I think she’s starting to come out of it.”

  “Which she would that be?” asked Pender.

  “Hard to say. Stress, trauma, periods of unconsciousness as opposed to natural sleep all tend to trigger alter switches. But as to which alter comes out the other side, that’s a crap shoot. Or I suppose I should say a game of roulette—you know, round and round she goes, and where she stops…“

  “…nobody knows,” Lily said sleepily, opening her eyes. “Oh, hi, Dr. Irene. Boy, am I glad to see you. I just had the strangest dream. I dreamed I was home alone, and the phone rang, and it was this policeman, and he, he said…“Her dark eyes widened as she took in her surroundings; she sat up, looking around dazedly. “Am I still dreaming?”

  “Not at all.” Irene took Lily’s hand in one of hers and patted it with her other hand to help Lily ground herself. “We’re in an airplane—it’s like a flying ambulance. You’ve had a rather severe dissociative episode—I’m afraid I had to sedate
you.”

  “Was it Lilah?”

  “No, a new alter—she called herself Lilith. She was quite a character—something like a biker moll in training.”

  “Speaking of flying.” Pender stepped to the foot of the bed. “Pilot says everybody needs to buckle up—we’ll be landing in just a few minutes.”

  Seeing Pender made Lily feel a little like smiling in spite of…well, in spite of everything. “Hello, Uncle Pen.”

  “Hi, doll.” He and the doctor helped her up and led her over to one of three swiveling chairs bolted to the starboard wall; Pender buckled her seat belt for her as the jet began a sharp leftward bank.

  Lily rubbed her palms against the soft upholstery, continuing the grounding process. So many questions crowded her mind: how much time had passed? What had this “Lilith” been up to with her body? Any harm done—to herself or others? And where were Grandma and Grandpa, how come they had sent Dr. Irene and Uncle Pen instead of—

  Suddenly she moaned.

  “What is it, dear—are you all right?” asked Irene, lowering herself into the chair to Lily’s left. “Do you need anything? A glass of water or something?”

  Lily turned her head. Her eyes swam with tears, blurring and brightening the silvery glare filtering in through the oval windows. “The phone call from the policeman—that wasn’t something I dreamed, was it, Dr. Irene?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “How—how long has it been?” The plane straightened out again; Lily felt the pressure of the descent in her ears.

  “Not quite three weeks.”

  “Did I miss the funeral?”

  Thud—the cabin trembled briefly as the landing gear let down. “The memorial service, yes, I’m afraid so. But your uncle Rollie said to tell you that he’s saving the ashes until you get home so the two of you can scatter them in the bay.”

  Ashes, thought Lily. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. “Dr. Irene?”

  “Yes?”

  “When we get home, can I stay at your house for a while? I don’t think I could handle being alone in the hacienda.”

  Thwwwwt—it was as if all the air had been sucked out of the cabin, replaced by a shivery silence. The white-striped black tarmac rushed by on either side of the plane. Then, as the wheels hit the tarmac at the shallowest of angles, rebounded into the air, and skipped along the runway for a few dozen yards like a stone skimming across a pond, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  “We’re not going home, are we?” she called, over the whine of the braking engines.

  “I’m—No, no we’re not.” I’m afraid not, Irene had started to say, before it occurred to her how frequently she’d used the word afraid in the last few minutes.

  Now why is that? she asked herself, as the plane taxied toward the terminal. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that in about twenty minutes she’d be in the same building as Ulysses Maxwell, could it?

  Well, yes, actually it could. But there was nothing to be afraid of, the psychiatrist reminded herself, unconsciously rubbing her forefinger over the burn scar on the back of her hand where the alter known as Max had held a cigarette lighter to her flesh. Because he can’t hurt you anymore, she told herself firmly. He can’t hurt you ever again.

  3

  Fighting panic during the last leg of the journey to the Reed-Chase Institute—Is this really happening? Oh God, is this really happening?—afterward Lily would remember the ride only in disconnected flashes. The anonymous-looking white van that met them at the Portland airport; Uncle Pen in his ridiculous hula shirt standing at the curb waving good-bye; the subaqueous light through the van’s dark-tinted windows; a girdered bridge over a shining river; a rolling, landscaped parkway; Dr. Irene reminding her to breathe, dear, don’t forget to breathe.

  As soon as she left the van, her perception tunneled. She took in the suburban-looking sidewalk beneath her feet, the cement walkway bordered with bright petunias and ranunculuses, and the sliding glass doors with the RCI diamond, but as if in a nightmare, she would not, could not raise her eyes to the stern-fronted, two-story brick building, and would later recall it only as a brooding presence looming before her.

  To ease the apprehension of patients and allay the misgivings of the family members responsible for committing them, the reception area at Reed-Chase was designed to look more like a hotel lobby than a hospital waiting room. Instead of linoleum, a plush gray wall-to-wall carpet; instead of the usual rows of hard-backed chairs, upholstered furniture in separate groupings, each with its own floor or table lamp; tall rubber plants in urns or tubs furthered the resemblance to an old-fashioned hotel lobby.

  “Irene, so good to see you.” A plump, shirt-sleeved man bustled across the lobby and hugged Dr. Cogan warmly. “And you must be Lily,” he added, holding out a pudgy pink hand that was well-scrubbed even by Lily’s demanding standards. “Hi, I’m Dr. Corder.”

  Lily shook hands reluctantly, then she and Dr. Cogan followed Corder through another set of sliding glass doors behind and to the right of the reception desk, and down a short corridor to a high-ceilinged office with walnut bookshelves and arched windows covered with dark valanced curtains.

  Corder ushered the women into chairs drawn up in front of his imposing desk, then walked around behind the desk and sat down in a high-backed leather chair. “Welcome to the Institute. How was your flight?”

  “Very comfortable,” replied Dr. Cogan. “From now on, I’m going to fly by ambulance.”

  Corder chuckled. “How about you, Lily?”

  “Well, for once I didn’t get airsick.” She wasn’t sure why that was funny, but both doctors chuckled. “Is that your family?” Nodding toward a triptych picture frame on the desk: blond woman on the left, blond teenage girl on the right, and in the center a snapshot of a younger, thinner Corder in a green smock, his surgical mask dangling from his neck as he cradled a newborn baby in his arms.

  “My wife, Cheryl; my daughter, Alison; I, ah, don’t know who that cute devil in the middle is.”

  Suddenly it was all too much for Lily—the picture of the helpless baby in its father’s arms had sent the old sadness stealing over her. Where other people had childhoods, happier or unhappier by degree, Lily had a great dark hole inside her from which her childhood had been violently torn. And as if that weren’t bad enough, now her grandparents were both dead and she was being institutionalized. Ashes, ashes, she thought. All…fall…

  “Lily, no!” Dr. Cogan leapt from her chair as the girl buried her face in her hands; she grabbed Lily’s wrists and forced them apart. “Stay with us, honey, you need to stay with us.”

  Corder had jumped to his feet. “Alter switch?”

  Cogan nodded; Lily struggled halfheartedly to free her hands.

  “No, let her,” said Corder softly.

  But it was too late. Still herself, Lily glanced up, embarrassed, as the psychiatrists sat down again. “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be,” said Corder. “Before we’re done, you and I, I’m going to want to meet all your alters. I have something very important to teach them.”

  “What’s that?” Lily wanted to know; so did Irene Cogan.

  “That they’re not welcome here—that their, ah, time is up.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to like that,” said Lily, almost inaudibly.

  “Makes no never mind what they like or don’t like,” said Corder folksily. “Around here we’re much more concerned with reinforcing the original personality—that’s you, young lady.”

  “I know that,” said Lily; the doctors chuckled pleasantly, pointlessly again, as though she’d been cracking jokes left and right.

  “The way we do that is by making you as happy and comfortable as possible. Gourmet cuisine or comfort food, as you prefer—I warn you, you may put on a few pounds; I certainly have.” He patted his belly. “Walks in the arboretum, swimming in the lap pool, movies in our own little theater—basically anything that will help you avoid
stress, since stress is the number-one trigger for alter switches.”

  “No kidding,” said Lily, to another round of forced chuckles.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Corder. “Now, if you’re both ready, I’d like to show you around. And if you don’t mind, Irene, there’s someone I’d like Lily to meet. Someone who’s, ah, been through what she’s been through, and come out the other side.”

  It took Irene another few seconds to realize what Corder had in mind; when it dawned on her, she felt a sudden chill, followed by a churning in her lower bowel, as if she’d just polished off a plateful of bad mussels.

  4

  No matter how badly Lyssy’s day was going, he always felt better in the arboretum. His senses started coming alive the moment he passed through the entrance arch, two red-lacquered vertical timbers supporting a slanting, overlapping red lintel beam, which together, according to Dr. Corder, formed an oriental character symbolizing tranquillity. Lyssy drank in the dappled light, the satisfying crunch of the blue-gray pea gravel underfoot, the dry biting scent of the evergreens, the harsh chatter of the jays.

  Sitting with Dr. Al on a marble bench at the end of a short allée of pine trees were an older woman with helmet-shaped, reddish-blond hair, and a dark-haired girl in jeans and an oversize leather bomber jacket, huddled with her knees together and her elbows pressed against her sides, as if she were waiting for a bus in the cold. Lyssy’s heart went out to her—he would, he thought, have recognized her as a new patient even if Wally the psych tech hadn’t already clued him in in the elevator on their way down.

  Dr. Al performed the introductions. Lyssy stuck out his hand, palm down to hide the scars, shook hands with each woman in turn, and asked them how they were. They both said they were fine; the girl asked him how he was in return.