by Sarah Lovett
She disconnected, nosing the Lincoln toward the right lane. Pressing down on the pedal, she gave its powerful engine gas. Horns blared, but she was already tearing east on the fourth street off-ramp.
I’ll be back in New Mexico in four days, five at the most, she reminded herself—just do the work and get out. But no one had forced her to come to Los Angeles. No one had twisted her arm.
Leo Carreras had offered her the job because he needed her expertise; he was counting on her to connect with the world’s most oppositional client. And she was here, even though she was off balance emotionally and professionally. She’d accepted because somewhere, buried beneath all the turbulent emotions, she felt the lure of the “important” profiling project—not to mention the draw of John Dantes.
Obsessions are enduring and deep rooted.
His centered on avenging the crimes of the powerful as perpetrated on the postmodern city and its less sophisticated inhabitants.
Hers happened to be a seemingly endless fascination with a brilliant mind turned pathological.
“Made for each other,” she mumbled as she released the brake, shifting gears.
The Lincoln covered ground, catching green lights all the way to Broadway. She turned north, then east again.
Passing an entrance to U.S. 101 south, Sylvia turned the wheel so sharply files flew off the passenger seat onto the floor, and the Lincoln left a black stripe of rubber along the curb.
As she passed MDC, the federal detention center that bordered the north edge of LA’s Civic Center complex, a stat crossed her mind: downtown LA is home to twenty-five thousand inmates, the largest population behind bars in any American city.
You’d never know it. To the passerby, MDC’s ten-story Hyatt facade, with its postmodern steel trellises and bridge-ways casting shadows over Immigration and Naturalization, could easily be mistaken for a resort hotel instead of the largest prison to be built in any major urban center in recent history.
Beyond MDC, in the distance, City Hall’s ziggurat trapped the sun, and just for an instant the pyramidal tower glowed like a sparking match before its flame dies out.
Civilization gone in a flash.
Sylvia turned under a twenty-foot painted sign—PARQUEO—into the gaping mouth of the subterranean garage that serviced visitors to the detention center and the LAPD, as well as the adjacent Roybal Federal Building. After the vast spaces of New Mexico, she couldn’t get used to this urban landscape where each vertical universe was perched over a massive burrow. Too much light, too much darkness.
Guiding the Lincoln through a fluorescent maze of parked vehicles and concrete pillars, she remembered a child’s sneaker. Neon green. Ridiculously small. A tiny lizard crest on the tongue.
Jason Redding had been ten and a half years old when he died.
The week following the Getty bombing, a photograph of that shoe had made the cover of Time and Newsweek; the haunting image had played on CNN around the world.
Molly Redding had delivered a message to her son’s convicted murderer as he left the courtroom—
Sylvia pulled into a slot, set the brake, and switched off the ignition. The engine in the sea green Lincoln quieted with an almost imperceptible sigh that matched her own.
“—John Dantes, I’ll wait for you in hell.”
8:23 A.M. Sylvia pushed her sunglasses back on her head and entered MDC’s air-conditioned glass and steel lobby, where the illusion of a resort hotel was maintained with the help of potted palms and soft lighting. Was it the subtly armored environment that made her feel more secure? Was it simply the familiarity of a prison work environment? She suspected something different—she felt safer locked up with the inmates than she did out in the urban canyons of LA.
At capacity, MDC held nine-hundred-plus prisoners, for the most part federal detainees awaiting trial: drug dealers, kidnappers, extortionists, counterfeit-change artists, terrorists. With that many bad guys in the neighborhood, it might be reassuring to find the U.S. marshals quartered right next door and LAPD across the street. Sylvia couldn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other.
Today, due to bomb threats and the fact they were eight days away from the one-year anniversary of the Getty bombing, security was heavy; at the control desk she passed through a metal detector while a female security officer urged an eighty-pound shepherd to stay cool. He growled anyway.
Can’t fool a smart dog, Sylvia thought, smiling coldly.
She took the elevator. Embedded somewhere in the shaft, gears groaned. At the fourth floor, the doors opened to reveal two shackled prisoners waiting in the hallway; their eyes slid back and forth between the nervous officer who was their escort and Sylvia.
She found herself at yet another security checkpoint: Look, Ma, no pipe bombs.
The Bureau of Prisons security officer pulled a tape recorder from Sylvia’s briefcase. He swabbed the palm-sized machine with a cotton ball, screening for any chemical reaction with explosive material residue. He examined the thick stack of test booklets, her personal items, then moved on to her spare tape cassettes, going through cotton balls left and right.
Just let me do my job, she thought impatiently. Over several days, that job would consist of the most systematic of tasks, administering the objective psychometric inventories—the MMPI-2, the MCMI-3, the WAIS-3, the Bender, the Halstead-Rëitan, or the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery. Each test booklet was several inches thick. Some contained endless questions: Do you . . . If you . . . Have you ever . . . Would you . . .? Some were multiple choice, or true or false, or tell a story, or finish the sentence. Some were visual—put the puzzle together, match the shapes, fit the round peg in the square hole.
And then they could be scored. There were scales to measure depression, hysteria, psychopathology, mania, hypochondriasis, schizophrenia, psychasthenia.
She was here precisely because psychological testing was the most analytical, standardized, measurable, and emotionally detached portion of the profiling project.
I can’t offer judgment calls, intuition, or emotion. Not this month.
No clinical interviews, no therapy, no need for empathic connection.
No trespassing on the dangerous terrain of soul or psyche. Thanks anyway.
Electronic clamor caught her attention, cuffing it on the ear. The officer was nodding her through the yawning jaws of security.
She tripped on a fraying edge of rubber matting, abruptly unsteady, reminding herself she was about to be forty minutes late for a meeting with a killer named John Dantes.
8:41 A.M. “You made it past the hounds of hell,” he said softly. At the moment, he was a disembodied presence, his face lost in shadow.
But Sylvia felt the sting of his eyes on her skin.
Fluorescent light abruptly flooded the small square room.
She blinked, off balance, only to find she was staring directly into his face.
It was heart shaped, capped with light brown hair gone prematurely gray at the temples and knotted into a rough ponytail. His cheekbones were prominent, his mouth wide, his chiseled features drawn together by a small, almost pointed chin. Fatigue and prison life had dulled his complexion, and it had been at least two days since his last shave. The fresh bruise bluing the skin of his left cheek added to the overall effect of eighteenth-century castaway mixed with contemporary street fighter.
But it was his eyes that threatened to penetrate her emotional perimeter; behind wire rims, they were green—no, gray—flecked with sparks of white and yellow, fringed with thick lashes. They were the eyes of a visionary. Or a psychopath.
She looked away, belatedly, hearing the echoing hiss of whispered words: “—last time—I can’t—” She registered another presence in the room: a female correctional officer. The Bureau of Prisons employee was young, lost inside a tan uniform with epaulettes and a black and white name tag identifying her as D. FLORETTE.
Sylvia had the feeling she’d interrupted some heated exchange between the guard an
d Dantes; her curiosity was aroused, but left unsatisfied when CO Florette ducked her head and launched into a seemingly endless rote speech covering rules and regulations.
While Florette droned on, Sylvia had the chance to study the man who—at age twenty-four—had been teaching postgraduate urban structural sociology at one of southern California’s most prestigious universities when he wasn’t busy blowing up the California aqueduct in retribution for historic sins. Now, at thirty-seven, he was serving his first year of a life sentence—for the Getty, the one bombing he claimed he didn’t commit.
Over the course of his outlaw career, the media had alternately exhibited Dantes as a mysterious and clever fugitive, an impassioned charismatic defendant, a stridently political prisoner. Sylvia thought he looked less functional than any of his public personas.
“Dr. Strange?” Florette’s hard, unwelcoming voice snagged Sylvia’s attention. “You can see for yourself he’s manacled, ankles only—we freed his hands per your request. I’ll step outside, that’s regulation—and I’ll do my visuals at random.”
“Thank you, Deborah,” Dantes said politely.
“Please remember to avoid all physical contact with the prisoner. Excuse me, ma’am.” Ignoring Dantes, she brushed past Sylvia; the door slammed shut behind her back.
The sound bounced around the angular space before it died at the feet of an artificial silence broken only by the ticking of a clock mounted on the wall.
“She’s jealous.” John Dantes was the first to speak. “Even prisons have their stars.”
Sylvia didn’t move. The air pumped into this concrete box tasted stale and delivered a federally mandated chill. “Are you proud of your celebrity status?”
“It offers some advantages.”
She gestured to a bruise near his left eye. “One of the perks?”
“You’re not what I imagined.” He studied her intently for several moments, then said, “You’re not one of Leo’s suits. And you’re not a Fed . . . or I’d have smelled you a mile away.” But suspicion etched his face.
“I’m Dr. Strange, Mr. Dantes. I work with Dr. Carreras, who arranged this meeting to conduct some psychological inventories. As part of this criminal profiling project, all participants undergo a standard evaluation.”
She shifted her briefcase from right hand to left before adding quietly, “But I think you’re aware of why I’m here, because you and I have already spoken by telephone—and you also signed a release form.”
The echo of a slamming door intruded faintly into the room.
Dantes’ eyes cut toward the security window, which offered a view of the hallway, where the top of CO Florette’s dark head was just visible. “Standard evaluation . . . that makes the project sound very common, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“But it’s a bombers’ profiling project.”
“It’s classified as a criminal profiling project,” she said flatly. Although, like Dantes, the participants were certain to speculate, they would not be given confirmation that the profiling project was limited to bombers; that knowledge would only serve to puff up their egos and skew their responses.
“Sit down, Dr. Strange. You’re making me nervous. I’m beginning to regret the fact I agreed to this.”
She lurched into motion, crossing the room, placing her briefcase next to the chair. Sliding her sunglasses from her hair, she caught the faint scent of him—a basic blend of soap and sweat.
As she placed her tape recorder on the table—pressing record—he studied her openly. She had the sensation of being touched.
“Look at you.” Dantes’ eyes slid from her head to her toes. “All dressed up in your Sunday best.” His voice had softened, and his lips curled in an expectant smile.
She didn’t react.
This seemed to bother him, and he said, “Before we begin this common criminal’s standard evaluation, tell me something about Dr. Strange. You’re a forensic psychologist, licensed to practice in New Mexico and California—
“You’re board certified, you have a Ph.D., and a diplomate in forensic psychology. University of New Mexico, Case Western Reserve, not to mention UCLA—our shared alma mater.”
“You did your research,” she said, moving slowly.
“I know some facts about your life—my attorney provides me with résumés—but that’s not the same as hearing your side of the story.” He appeared as internally contained as the dark eye at the center of a raging hurricane. “I even managed to read a dozen of your published papers.” He studied her. “Don’t look now but your clinical bias is showing. You might even believe in redemption.”
She shifted in the hard chair, and its metal legs scraped loudly over the concrete floor.
“All the way from New Mexico,” he said, dismissing her effortlessly. “Did you travel such a distance for the honor of sharing a few hours with me?”
“I often travel for my work,” she said, not quite biting back her own impatience. Now she retrieved a packet of pencils from one pocket of her briefcase. She ran her thumbnail along the plastic wrapping without making a dent.
“But it’s not every day you travel for the FBI, ATF, all those VIP Feds.”
“I already told you, I’m working with Dr. Carreras.” The plastic wrap suddenly split, spilling pencils onto Formica; one rolled off the edge and Dantes caught it in midair.
“Just like your predecessors?” He shrugged. “You’re not the first to arrive with your psychometric inventories.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“Is it?” He laced his fingers across his chest, glancing again briefly at the room’s only window, a twelve-by-twelve-inch square cut in the door. “Have you seen the new exhibit at the County?” he asked, slowly returning his focus to her face.
She shook her head, letting him lead the dance, feeling she’d missed a step.
“Francisco Goya, the eyes of the Enlightenment,” Dantes prodded. His long, wiry body overwhelmed the pitted plastic chair, and yet he wore the state-issue jumpsuit, bullet-proof vest, and ankle manacles like a three-piece suit.
“I’ve seen his work in other museums.” She snapped open the center compartment of her briefcase.
“A true democrat. Equally offended by corruption in state or church.” Glancing toward the door for the third time in minutes, Dantes carried on his conversation as if he were hosting a social occasion. “And like Dürer and Dante Alighieri, Goya refused to keep his eyes or his mouth shut. Always a dangerous choice. He was betrayed by spies, by cowards.”
Sylvia set the first booklet on the table, adjusting the corners, setting one pencil on top. “Are you comparing yourself to Dürer, or Dante, or both?”
“Are you pissed you aren’t the first to offer me your standard measurements?” he countered. “Isn’t that what they’re called in the deconstructing biz?”
“Whether I’m first or tenth, the important thing is to complete the standardized inventories.” Her throat felt so dry she could barely swallow. “My participation in the profiling project is highly circumscribed.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t strike me as the type.”
“What type is that?”
“The highly circumscribed type.”
They were leading each other in circles, like dogs guarding a bone.
“The FBI sent a tedious suit,” Dantes said. His fingers drummed the table: a-rat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat. “Rand sent a redhead with a bad attitude.”
“Do you have any intention of completing the inventories with me?” She shifted in the chair, and the thick test booklet slid from the table, hitting the floor with a slap.
“Which of Goya’s images stayed with you?” Dantes asked.
Without breathing, she stared back at him, lured by his intensity. “The devils.”
“Not the lunatics?” He tipped his head forward, eyelids lowering, as if without looking he clearly sensed her vulnerability. “Oh, c’mon, admit it, Dr. Strange. You feel a kin
ship with the lunatics.”
Dark lashes fringed her deep-set eyes, shading a restless acuity, lending her face an ordinary prettiness. She almost shook her head—this was what she wanted, wasn’t it, to maintain contact, to keep him engaged? She flashed on an image: her father and a young girl fishing from a dinghy in Heron Lake. You’ve got to give the fish some slack, Sylvie. Play out the line until it’s time to set the hook.
She said, “Goya was chronicling the bigotry and superstition of his time.”
“Goya chronicles our time.” Dantes tapped out a few more hyperkinetic beats, marking double time on the fake wood grain. His gaze was arrogant and cold, but the ember of some passion was sparking deep in those eyes.
Rage, hatred . . . fear? She couldn’t quite catch it.
He frowned, the muscles around his bruised eye ticcing ever so faintly. “Those in power, the members of the privileged class, should not abuse their position or their duties of stewardship, neither by commission or omission. If they do, they’re common criminals—or worse, they’re cowards.” He pulled back suddenly, shrugging off the brief excursion into rhetoric.
“You don’t think much of cowards.”
“Do you?”
“You’ve made reference to them twice in a matter of minutes.”
“I don’t like psychoanalysis, either.” He smiled.
Sylvia reached out, her fingers sliding over molded plastic, to tear open the seal on the test booklet. The first two inventories she planned to administer—the Millon Clinical Multiaxial and the Minnesota Multiphasic—would total at least five hours.
She glanced at her watch.
“Hot date?”
She met his eyes, saw the mockery there, and reached for her briefcase. “Mr. Dantes, either I’m not doing any better than my colleagues or you’re not interested in completing these inventories or both.” She stood. “Let’s not waste any more time.”
Immediately, he held his palms out; it was a gesture of surrender, the action of a lonely man. “You win,” he said, reaching for the booklet, sliding it to his side of the table. He picked up the pencil, gesturing for her to be seated again.
