“You don’t need to go anywhere, dear. If what Lyssy just told us is true—and if Lilith was telling him the truth—then you haven’t committed any crime. Quite the opposite, in fact: Alison says you saved her life. So whatever Lyssy decides to do—keep running, turn himself in—there’s no reason you couldn’t stay on here with me.”
“And you won’t send me back to the Institute?”
Irene smiled ruefully. “I promise you, dear, that’s one mistake your uncle Rollie and I won’t be making again.” She turned to Lyssy. “As for you, Lyssy, I strongly recommend you give yourself up before anybody else gets hurt—including yourself. But if you do decide to keep running—”
Lyssy cut her off in mid-sentence. “Dr. Cogan?”
“What is it, Lyssy?”
“Could I talk to you alone for a second?”
She glanced around the tiny office. “Yes, of course. Lily, will you be all right by yourself for a few minutes?”
“I guess.”
Irene led Lyssy out into the hallway, leaving the office door open so she could keep an eye on Lily. “What is it?”
“What I told you before, about how Lilith said it was Max and Kinch who did all the killing back at the director’s residence?”
“Yes?”
“What if it wasn’t true? What if she told me she’d killed one of them herself? Like maybe the psych tech you found upstairs in the bathroom.”
Irene felt her hopes sinking. “Is that what she told you?”
“Just say she did—do you think there’s any way the police would be able to tell?”
“There’s something called forensics, Lyssy. Fingerprints, fibers, transfer evidence—they’ve got it down to a real science. So I’d say yes, if Lilith committed one of the murders, there’s a good chance they’d be able to figure it out.”
“And if they did, what would happen to her? Would they still let her stay here with you?”
Irene recalled her brave speech to Pender in the airport yesterday morning: I don’t care what she’s done or how involved she was, I won’t let them put her away again. “Probably not,” she said, sick with longing for the good old days—say, five minutes ago, when her options had seemed so straightforward and uncomplicated.
7
What to do, what to do, what to do? Pender’s initial instinct was to grab a phone and call 911—then he remembered what MacAlister had told him about Carson yesterday: dirty as can be, fingers in everything from meth to money laundering. And no doubt Mama Rose was up to both wrists in the same illicit pies. If he summoned help, the cops would be swarming all over the place in a matter of minutes—he pictured Mama Rose being led away in handcuffs.
But why, he asked himself, should that make a difference to him? So what if he’d grown fond of her? He’d been a lawman his entire adult life—he should have been jumping at the chance to help put her and what was left of her gang away. Besides, if he didn’t make the call, he’d be helping Maxwell escape, or at least extend his head start, which was already close to twelve hours and counting.
So why was he feeling so goddamn guilty, as if he were about to do something dishonorable? Which instinct should he turn his back on, the professional or the personal? Was it once a cop, always a cop, or did being retired give him some wiggle room, ethically speaking?
The answer, he already knew, was no, it didn’t. But having come to that conclusion, Pender found himself asking: Do I give a flying fuck? Then he realized he already knew the answer to that question as well.
Rather than use his own or one of the house phones, he knelt down next to MacAlister and went through his pockets—rigor mortis was just beginning to loosen its hold on the stiffened limbs—until he’d found Mick’s cell phone, which he used to dial the FBI tipline from memory.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “Ulysses Maxwell left Shasta County around eleven o’clock last night driving a red, late-model Cadillac convertible with white upholstery and California plates. The owner’s name is MacAlister, first name Michael or Mick. He’s not with Maxwell though. The DeVries girl is with him, but she’s a hostage, not an accomplice—she seems to be in some sort of trance state.”
“Sir?” said the tipline operator. “Sir, don’t—” Pender pressed the End Call button.
“Good choice,” said Mama Rose. “For a second there, you had me worried.”
Pender looked up, saw her holding a handsome nine-millimeter Colt with a blue-steel barrel and a fine-grained hickory grip. His eyes went from the gun to the phone in his hand, then back. “Likewise,” he said.
“Are you going after him?”
In the past, Pender’s mind had always summoned up pictures of the victims to drive himself; now the first image that came to his mind was of himself, lying there helplessly while Maxwell trussed him up like a Thanksgiving turkey. “Oh, yes.”
“Here, you’ll probably need this.” She turned the gun around and handed it to him butt-first. Their eyes met in ironic recognition of all they’d been through, and of the mutual, and extremely unlikely, bond of trust that had been formed; then Mama Rose looked away, embarrassed. “I’m going to drive Dennie to the hospital in her car. You can take the pickup in the driveway—the keys are on the bureau there. I have to warn you, though—when you’re done with it, don’t keep it or try to sell it. Just park it someplace and walk away.”
“I understand,” said Pender. “And thanks—for everything. But there’s one more problem.”
“What’s that?”
He jerked a thumb in MacAlister’s direction. “He had a wife, too.”
8
The little office, scarcely large enough to contain Dr. Irene’s desk at one end and the couch at the other, held a world of memories for Lily. Here, fifty minutes at a time, two or three times a week, she’d spilled out her hopes and fears, her childhood nightmares and adolescent insecurities—in a sense, she’d grown up in this room.
But as she sat waiting on the couch while Lyssy and Dr. Irene conferred in the hallway, Lily felt far from nostalgic. Just knowing that Dr. Irene was out there discussing her future with a man she scarcely knew (as far as Lily was concerned, their entire acquaintance consisted of a twenty-minute stroll through the funny little park in the middle of the Institute) made her stiffen with resentment. People were always making decisions for Lily, and yet things could hardly have turned out any worse if she’d decided for herself—or flipped coins or consulted a Ouija board.
Of course, at the heart of her resentment, as always, was a white-hot hatred for what her parents had done to her, and for this abominable disease of hers—but not, oddly enough, for Lilith. Instead she found herself admiring what little she had learned about the alter, who seemed to be everything she wasn’t: fearless, remorseless, resourceful, and above all, capable of protecting herself.
“Lily? Lily, we need to talk.”
She looked up. Lyssy was limping toward her, looking smaller than ever in the oversize white T-shirt and the button-fly jeans with the cuffs turned up. Dr. Irene had just sat down at her desk on the other side of the room and was putting on a pair of old-fashioned acoustic headphones the size of earmuffs.
“Pump up the volume,” Lyssy told the doctor. “I need to hear the squeaking from here.” Then, to Lily, as he sat down next to her: “So she can’t listen in on us.”
“Why not just leave her out there and close the door?” They were both whispering; between whispers, they found themselves listening for the tiny, tinny music leaking out from the psychiatrist’s headphones.
“Because we can’t trust her not to turn us in.” He leaned in closer. “Lily, you have to decide whether you want to come with me or stay behind with her.” He saw her glance across the room. “Dr. Irene can’t help you with this one—it’s a decision only you can make.”
“Why would I want to go someplace with you?” said Lily without thinking. “I hardly even know you.”
He winced; there was a sadness in his gold-flecked eyes she regretted
having put there. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I keep forgetting you’re not Lilith. You see, me and her, we were kind of…you know, we were kind of in love. We were going to go away together as soon as we got hold of those bikers’ money. Only like I told you before, there was the accident with the radio in the hot tub, and you were like a zombie or something, so I brought you here instead so Dr. Cogan could fix you up.”
“I know, I know—you told us all that.” Except the part about Lyssy and Lilith being in love. Were they also lovers, in that other sense of the word? Lily wondered. Had that man had sex with her body? It was almost too weird, and definitely too uncomfortable, to contemplate.
“But there’s one thing I didn’t tell you the truth about,” Lyssy continued. “That part about how Lilith said Max and Kinch killed all four people at the Corders’? That’s what we want the cops to think. That way you could go free, while one victim more or less isn’t going to make much difference to me as far as my sentence goes.
“But Dr. Cogan says the cops can probably tell from our fingerprints and stuff who killed which victim. So I figured that before you decided whether to come along with me or stay behind, you needed to know that it was Lilith who killed the woman in the bathroom—that’s what she told me, anyway. She said she—”
“No, don’t!” cried Lily, covering her ears with her hands. “I don’t want to hear about the details.” It wasn’t guilt—she felt precious little of that. Some shock, maybe, and a mounting sense of panic as the full import of Lyssy’s revelation began to sink in. Still, she couldn’t help feeling it was like one of those mystery movies where the main character has an identical twin who does all this stuff the other twin gets blamed for.
Only an alter is closer than a twin, Dr. Irene was always saying—it’s a part of you, a part of yourself that had broken off when your psyche was shattered. Lily glanced over at the psychiatrist, who was tapping her long, russet-brown fingernails on the desk in time to whatever music she was listening to, and suddenly it occurred to her how much easier it would be if she could just give up and let Lilith take over—and how much better for all concerned.
The thought was kind of scary (for Lily, not being in consciousness was a little like what she imagined being dead would be like: the world goes on, but you’re not there) but also tempting. She pictured herself waking up somewhere in the future, the way she’d awakened this morning, or in the airplane the other day, and looking around in confusion at palm trees and a white-sand beach, straw huts and turquoise reefs; on the patio table next to her there’d be a colorful drink with a tiny umbrella in it.
Where am I? she’d ask, and Lyssy would reply, A safe place. We made it, Lily—it’s all over but the happily ever after.
Then Lyssy’s voice yanked Lily back from her daydream. “Me, I’m already looking at life without parole, minimum,” he was saying. “If I’m lucky. Lethal injection if I’m not. So basically, I’ve got nothing to lose. I don’t know what they’d give you for just one murder, but if you want to take a chance on coming with me, I’m pretty sure it won’t make any difference to your sentence.”
“Do you think we really have a chance of getting away?” Lily asked him.
“More of a chance than we have if we don’t do anything, if we just sit around here waiting for a knock on the door.”
“What I still don’t get is why you want me to come with you. You’d probably stand a better chance alone. And it’s not like we were ever lovers—that was Lilith, not me.”
“But I fell in love with you first,” he blurted.
She thought she’d misunderstood him. “You what?”
“Fell in love with you—with this you—the second I laid eyes on you in the arboretum.”
“But—but why?”
“I don’t think love has any whys,” Lyssy told her. “It just—” He broke off, cupped a hand to his ear. “Hear that?”
Footsteps on the front porch, then a clanking sound.
“It’s all right,” said Dr. Cogan, who had taken off her earphones when she saw they were listening for something. “It’s just the mailman.”
The footsteps receded. “We’re almost done here,” Lyssy told the doctor. “Would you mind…?” He waited until she’d donned the headphones again, then turned back to Lily. “The sooner we get going, the better our chances.”
“But we can’t just drive away and leave Dr. Irene—she’ll call the police the second we’re gone.”
“Does that mean you’ve decided to come with me?” Lyssy tried to keep his voice casual, though his heart was in his throat.
“You said it yourself—what do I have to lose? But what about Dr. Irene?”
“Oh, I can handle that,” said Lyssy happily.
9
Driving south in the red GMC pickup, Pender didn’t even try to pretend he hadn’t crossed the line. Aiding and abetting, obstruction of justice, possession of a stolen vehicle—he’d broken enough state and federal laws to put him away for at least a couple years.
Of course, he could still put it all to rights with one call to the Shasta County sheriff. But in this new, topsy-turvy world Pender found himself in, he knew that if he did the right thing, dropped a dime on Mama Rose, he’d be ashamed of himself for the rest of his life. He knew his life had been in her hands back there. She could have killed him easily enough—should have killed him, from a strictly pragmatic point of view: it was the only option that would have guaranteed her safety. Instead, by trusting him, she had put her life in his hands—that had to count for something.
Meanwhile, he’d done all he could for Mick—or rather, Mick’s wife, whom he’d never met. At least this way, all the widows would get to bury their husbands, was Pender’s thinking. And he’d get another shot at rectifying the worst mistake of his career—not finishing off Maxwell when he had the chance.
The late morning sun glinted off the hood of the pickup. Pender flipped the sun visor down and found a pair of Men in Black-looking shades clipped behind it. The fit was a little tight around the ears. Carson must have had a much narrower head, thought Pender—but then, who didn’t? He tilted the rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of his three-quarter profile. Pretty sharp for a fat old bald man, he told himself.
And there was no denying that it felt awfully exhilarating to be the Lone Ranger at long, long last. No Bureau-cracy to hem him in, no higher-ups to thwart him, and only one imperative to follow: find Ulysses Maxwell and take the sonofabitch down.
10
“Dr. Irene?”
Irene took off the headphones, paused Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” in the middle of the pizzicato winter ice storm. “Yes, dear?”
“I’ve made up my mind—I’m going with Lyssy.”
“Are you absolutely sure that’s what you want to do?”
“Um, excuse me? Isn’t that what ‘I made up my mind’ usually means?” said Lily, her voice dripping with adolescent sarcasm. In other circumstances, thought Irene, that would have been a healthy sign—in our culture, it was one of the primary tools used by teenagers to effect the inevitable separation from the parent. “Only there’s something you have to do for me first,” Lily added.
“What’s that?”
“I want you to put me under again and bring Lilith back instead.”
“What?” Lyssy yelped. He looked as surprised as Irene felt—obviously this was something they hadn’t discussed beforehand.
“It’s the best thing,” Lily explained to him. “She’ll be a lot more use than I would—and I couldn’t stand it if we got captured again. And maybe Dr. Irene could put in some kind of posthypnotic suggestion, so if we made it to someplace safe…” In her mind’s eye she saw the beach again, the white sand and the palm trees. “…if you still wanted to, you could, you know, bring me back like?”
Lyssy tried to picture how that scenario might play itself out. It sounded like the rescue fantasy of all rescue fantasies, only for real. And of course he did miss Lilith: the memory of their lovemaking
was never far from his thoughts. But when he looked over at Dr. Cogan, she was shaking her head.
“Absolutely not. Even if I thought it could work, which is far from likely, reinforcing an alter identity at the expense of the original personality could have far-reaching, potentially disastrous consequences for the system. And it’s unnecessary besides—remember what I’ve been telling you all these years: Lilith is not a separate magical being, Lily—she’s part of you. There’s nothing Lilith is capable of that you’re not: when you’ve finally internalized that, you’ll have come a long way toward integrating.”
Then Irene stood up—she was still wearing Frank’s pajamas—came around from behind the desk, dragged the side chair over to the couch again. “Speaking of alters, there’s one crucial point neither of you seem to have taken into consideration,” she said, sitting opposite the two seated on the couch, her gaze traveling from one to the other, finally resting on Lyssy. “What if Max or Kinch comes back?”
It should have been the clincher; instead, Lyssy grinned.
“What’s so funny?” asked Irene.
“Max already tried,” said Lyssy. “I kicked his butt right back to the dark place.” He put his hand on Lily’s knee, gave it an encouraging squeeze. “What do you say, kiddo? You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said. “C’mon, let’s get this show on the road.”
Part Three
La Guarida
CHAPTER NINE
1
A Ferris wheel turned slowly against the hazy Santa Cruz sky. An old-fashioned wooden roller coaster roared and rattled overhead, trailing shrieks and laughter. On the carousel, painted horses and other, more fantastical creatures bobbed to the cheerful piping of a calliope. The familiar scent of popcorn, cotton candy, and corn dogs packed a Proustian wallop, sending Pender back in time to the county fairs of his boyhood in upstate New York.
When She Was Bad: A Thriller Page 19
