Multiple Wounds

by Alan Russell

  Cheever interrupted: “In her wounds?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “When I go to a crime scene,” Cheever said, “I always look for what belongs or what doesn’t belong. I’m not afraid to listen to my gut. I’ll tell the evidence tech to go into a certain area even if I’m not sure why. I usually have a sense about what feels right and what doesn’t. When I saw the third stigma...”

  “Yes?”

  “Something told me it didn’t belong. Or maybe not so much that as...”

  “Go on.”

  “As I was looking at this human tableau of two different crime scenes: Bonnie Gill’s and somebody else’s.”

  “Is there anything that leads you to believe that?”

  “Nothing that makes sense to the head.”

  “I don’t have a professional answer,” she said, “but I do have a personal one: follow your instincts.”

  “If I did that, I’d be running the other way.” He sounded serious, even if he did throw in a little smile.

  The talk stopped for a few moments, but this time Cheever didn’t panic. Earlier in the evening the lulls in their conversation had scared Cheever. He had figured silence would give Rachel an excuse to leave, and he had struggled to find interesting things to say. For Cheever, remembering how to converse in a social situation was like trying to speak a foreign language he’d let rest too long. He kept reaching for words, stretching for the right thing to say. At work he spoke in code much of the time. Victims weren’t dead people—they were one-eighty-sevens, dispatch terminology for murder. And just as words were abbreviated, so were emotions. They worked with stiffs, not bodies. Most of the dead they investigated were scum and maggots. Everything was depersonalized.

  “Tell me about the name Caitlin,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the other names have obvious connections. Holly was the middle name of Helen’s mother, and we know about the Greek myths. But why Caitlin?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” Rachel said. “Helen says she doesn’t know where the name originated.”

  “Could she have had a childhood friend named Caitlin?”

  “Not unless she was a friend during her lost years. It might have just been a name she heard and liked. I don’t think it’s a name she’s very familiar with, or at least not a name she knows well enough to spell correctly.”

  “Explain that.”

  “Several times I’ve had Helen write the name down on paper and she’s ended up spelling it something like K-a-t-e-l-e-n, nothing even close to the traditional spelling. Even the personality of Caitlin usually misspells it. I know that very few five-year-olds can spell, but most of them at least know the spelling to their own name.”

  “How does she spell Caitlin?”

  “Different ways. But she usually finishes the name with an l-e-n. I’m beginning to think we should just change the spelling.”

  Instead of changing the question, thought Cheever, you change the solution to the answer. Maybe that’s what he needed to do.

  Cheever waved down their waiter and ordered a cheesecake with two forks. Rachel tried to demur, said it wasn’t part of her dietary regimen, but gave in. When they were down to licking their forks, Cheever asked, “You ever work with a multiple before?”

  She shook her head. “And probably never again. I doubt I would have treated Helen as a patient if she hadn’t already been seeing me for her other problems.”

  “Why?”

  “Accepting a client with DID is akin to singlehandedly taking on an intensive-care patient. Not too many mental health professionals are willing to assume such major work for what amounts to pro bono wages. They don’t want the hassles: the phone calls in the middle of the night, the excessive hours, and the potential for shortchanging their other patients.”

  What she didn’t tell him was that many therapists were also afraid of being devoured by the beast itself. They didn’t want to enter the multiple maze for fear of not getting out. Dealing with psyches is like treading around quicksand. The result was that psychiatrists have the highest suicide rate of all medical practitioners.

  “The catch-22 of being a therapist,” she said, “is that you have to maintain a strong inner core that is yours, but at the same time understand the thought processes of patients. Sometimes to do that you have to assume their mindsets, even embrace their madness.”

  And sometimes to succeed with a patient you have to be willing to change yourself, Rachel thought, something she resisted doing. There had been times when she had seen how easy it would be to misstep, to let the borders merge between the real and the imagined.

  “Does Helen have a red wig?”

  His question drew Rachel back from her view of the brink. “Yes,” she said after just a little thought. “Why?”

  “We have a potential witness who saw a woman with red hair in the garden the night of the murder. The way he describes it, she was a statue come to life. That’s a page out of Helen’s book, that, or her becoming a statue.”

  Rachel didn’t say anything.

  “According to our witness, this Galatea behaved very strangely, even for a statue come to life. She appeared to be drunk and at various times acted fearful, protective, and grief struck. She was staggering around lunging at some demon or demons. Then she collapsed and cried to God for forgiveness. A minute later she got up and walked away, showed no signs of being drunk. What’s your take on that?”

  “I’d need more information.”

  “Does it sound like Helen having a—what did you call it? Abreaction?”

  “It would be irresponsible for me to speculate.”

  “How about speculating on the inanimate then? Her statues. Did you go to her opening exhibit, her Garden of Stone?”

  “I did.”

  “Earlier you said Helen was telling us things in her art. What did you learn from her statues?”

  Rachel shrugged, made him keep talking.

  “You didn’t notice that death was on display? Anthor dying, Pentheus about to be hunted down, Dryope being transformed, and Hyacinthus struck down?”

  “You didn’t mention Polyxena,” Rachel said, “or Jason’s children, just before their deaths.”

  Her response was a nice way of showing her powers of observation, Cheever thought, and a good way of chastening him at the same time.

  “So what are we to assume from Helen’s art?” Cheever asked. “A preoccupation with death?”

  “To some degree. But she’s also interested in what happens after death, the, if not resurrection, at least metamorphosis. Look at Hyacinthus. He isn’t dead; he keeps returning as a flower. And Dryope was turned into a tree.”

  And Graciela Fernandez, Cheever thought, showing herself on a billboard.

  “There was a statue of a little girl crying,” Cheever said. “It seems that small girls keep popping up in her art. One of her paintings hanging at the gallery showed Graciela Fernandez with a beatific expression staring out from a billboard. Why do you think Helen identifies so with a little girl who was kidnapped and murdered?”

  “Maybe she thinks of Graciela as a metaphor for her own childhood, consciously or unconsciously.”

  Cheever shook his head. The explanation wasn’t enough. “The idea that Graciela is in heaven, and that she’s now happy, seems very important to Helen.”

  “Yes it does,” Rachel said. She looked at Cheever and wondered: Is that one of your demons as well? Do you need to know the same thing?

  “You worked that case,” she said.

  “I’m still working it,” he corrected.

  “It’s been...?”

  “Over two years.”

  “It means more to you than other cases?”

  Cheever took a few seconds to answer. “When children are victims,” he said, “we’re all victims.”

  She nodded. “It’s obvious that Helen identifies with Graciela,” Rachel said, “but I don’t think she consciously knows the reason for this identifi
cation.”

  “More than identifies,” Cheever said, remembering her bloody tears. “She empathizes.”

  “Yes.”

  “In some ways I envy Helen,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “She has multiple lives. Sometimes I’m not even sure I have one.”

  He was glad the waiter came along then, interrupting their talk. Their conversation was getting too personal. “Coffee?” the waiter asked.

  Cheever put his hand over his coffee cup, and Rachel shook her head. Their empty dessert plate was taken away, and the bill reappeared in front of them. Cheever drew it over to his side and Rachel didn’t object.

  “What motivates Hygeia to bleed?” he asked.

  “Freud said that only two things motivate people,” Rachel said. “Love and pain.”

  “What’s the difference?” Cheever asked.

  “Darned if I know,” she said.

  Both of them wondered at the same time whether they were flirting. They were too out of practice to know for sure.

  RACHEL ALWAYS PERFORMED her breast examinations in front of a mirror. She didn’t know why. Maybe it was because she could be the doctor and the image could be the patient. Maybe she liked scrutinizing herself through a reflection. Or maybe she had foreseen a moment like this when she would need to look at herself in the mirror just to get a grip, to see a white, anguished face a breath away from a scream. The reflection shocked her. She wasn’t that frenzied woman. She couldn’t be.

  Deep breath. Control and reevaluation. She told herself the lump wasn’t really there and that she didn’t feel it. But the more she probed, the larger the mass seemed to get. It was the Princess and the Pea on a more personal level. It felt like there was a water-melon in her breast. No, a bomb that was ticking, ticking. A bomb that hadn’t been there the day before.

  It was probably just a cyst. Nothing to worry about. The vast majority disappeared on their own. And those that didn’t were benign in most cases. Almost all.

  Déjà vu. She remembered how much denial she had gone through five years earlier. She had kept repeating sweet medical truths, none of which eventually applied in her case. The reality of cancer had stripped away her Pollyanna palliatives. In the end, she had survived, whereas every year more than thirty-five thousand American women don’t. But Rachel had already played that troubled, horrible lottery. It wasn’t fair that her number had been called again. She had already faced up to the disease once and given her right breast. And so much more.

  The lump was in her left breast this time. The one that had been spared before. They checked me just two months ago, Rachel thought, gave me a clean bill of health. Liars. They lulled me into complacency. They let me think I was better.

  Do I hate myself so much? Is that what this is? Is that why my body has turned against me? The same angst, she remembered. You’d think over time I would have at least gotten more creative.

  Rachel recalled a women’s grieving workshop she had conducted the year before. Many of the participants had found themselves in a loop, unable to get beyond their sorrow. Some mourned for their departed parents or unborn children or dead loved ones. Some were stuck over what they perceived as their own failed lives and grieved for lost dreams. There was one woman who lamented over her lost breast. But it wasn’t only her missing gland the woman mourned. The lost breast signified a loss of innocence, the symbol for all the vulnerability she was feeling. Things, she said, could never be the same.

  It would have been a good time and place for Rachel to have talked about her own modified radical mastectomy, but she never said a word to the group. She offered advice to the woman, said it was necessary for her to think of herself as a person and not as a collection of parts, and suggested that she work on her inner scars. A healing from within, she said, was more important than any physical transformation. Rachel’s words sounded so rich and full, so sage. How easy it was to advise someone else.

  Physician, heal thy own damn self.

  The phone rang. Rachel’s first impulse was to let the service get it, but she picked up the receiver anyway.

  It had taken all of Cheever’s nerve to call her. He was afraid to call, but more afraid of not connecting with her. He had practiced his first few sentences and trusted to God for the rest.

  Cheever said, “Hello, Rachel” (they were on a first-name basis now, or at least she had told him to call her by her first name, and he had told her to call him by his last). “I called to thank you for your time this evening.”

  When he had planned out his call he had liked that phrasing. It kept their meal on a professional basis.

  “There were some other matters potentially pertinent to the case that we didn’t get around to discussing,” he said. “Maybe if you had time tomorrow we could go over them.”

  That was all he had practiced. There was no more to his script. He had hoped she would interject at that point and suggest they get together for lunch, or dinner, or drinks. Cheever listened to the silence on the other line.

  Rachel felt so many things at once. She wanted to scream. She wanted to explain. She had this urge to laugh and the inclination to cry. She wanted to tell him to come over and hold her. She wanted to curse him for interrupting her introspection. She took a deep breath and then managed to say, “You were right about Trojan horses.”

  “What?”

  “What you said yesterday. How they’re in all of us.”

  “Is something wrong, Rachel?”

  “No matter how high you build your fort, and how secure you reinforce your walls, there are still those Trojan horses.”

  “What happened?”

  “Tomorrow’s not going to be good for me. Why don’t you try me the day after tomorrow?”

  By her tone, Cheever wondered if she wasn’t really telling him to try her in another lifetime. Reluctantly, he said, “Okay.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Cheever threw away the retirement home information that had been left on his desk. Cops considered ball-busting their fellow cops a part of the job. Balding officers could count on getting literature on follicle growth treatments, toupees, and hair implants; cops with guts got diet books and whatever Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and Ultra Slim-Fast had to offer; older cops received the geriatric treatment. For his last birthday the team had enrolled Cheever in AARP. The support system was touching.

  Team IV’s work area was deserted. Most of the detectives had been working late on the victim stakeout and wouldn’t be dragging themselves in for another hour or two. Cheever listened to his messages and didn’t hear anything that needed acting on. Falconi had left Bonnie Gill’s autopsy report out, and Cheever thumbed through it. There wasn’t anything that surprised him. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and there were no other areas of bodily trauma besides the two knife wounds.

  Cheever thought about the knife and how it had been used. Knives were often the weapons of choice in crimes of passion. A knife wasn’t anonymous like a gun. You had to get close to the victim. But there wasn’t anything passionate about this murder. The body hadn’t been riddled with entry wounds. There had even been a certain clinical proficiency to the killing. Perhaps the murderer had been worried about noise, but if that had been the overriding concern there were other ways to kill that wouldn’t have been so—intimate.

  Periodically, detectives from other teams drifted over and asked Cheever how the case was going. They didn’t hear anything that kept them very long. Cheever made it clear he was preoccupied, his concentration directed to a yellow legal pad that he was filling with questions and observations. Under the heading THIRD STIGMA he noted: It’s almost like a scarlet letter in physical form. Check into Helen’s romances. A little further down the page he wrote: Is there a mythological significance to the third wound? And then, at the bottom of the page he scribbled: Helen said, “If I accept their pain, she won’t hurt anymore.” By saying “their” she implied at least two people were hurting. Coul
d that have something to do with the third wound?

  His phone rang, and he put aside the pad. “Detective Cheever, homicide.”

  “I like a man who’s working early, ’specially when he’s working for me.”

  “I aims to please,” Cheever said.

  “You any closer to getting me my money?” Dr. Denton asked.

  “You got any hot new tips?”

  “Nothing that’s gonna help me. I heard the Slasher’s one of them supernatural forces, a devil.”

  “Devil’s always getting too much credit.”

  “Also heard that the beaners and slant eyes are nervous. Slasher’s got a color thing going. He’s got black and white in his mosaic, and now he’s going for brown and red.”

  “Doubt it. Even the Slasher knows all blood’s red.”

  “Thass the word on the street.”

  “Some imaginative minds out there, I’ll give them that. Did you know Willie Lamont?”

  “If I did, I didn’t know it.”

  “I need another recap of what you saw.”

  “Shee-it.”

  “Not from the top. Tell me about the part where our mystery woman started acting like the protector.”

  Dr. Denton thought for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally said. “She was yelling things, saying stuff like, ‘son of a bitch,’ then she shout, ‘Girls, get behind me.’”

  “Girls? More than one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how many times did she say that?”

  “Coupla times.”

  Little girls again, thought Cheever. They kept entering the equation.

  “You given any more consideration to being the city’s guest for a few days?”

  “Got a La Jolla mansion for me with a butler and cook?”

  Cheever had an alliterative answer: “Motel and McDonald’s in Mira Mesa, maybe.”

  “I can live without that. Got an investment to watch. And listen out for.”

  “Hope you hear more than vampire and rainbow murder theories.”

  “You want me to keep calling you?”

  “You know it.”

  “Telephone change is getting low.”