Fever Dream

by Dennis Palumbo

  Over time, I’ve come to believe that trauma victims live in a very different world than everybody else—a world where the tragic, the inconceivable, the horrifying can and does occur. They’re denied the complacency, the normal assumptions of daily life that most people walk around with. But I also believe that, with help and luck, they can learn to cope with the reality of what’s happened to them.

  All I can provide them is the help, to the best of my clinical ability. As for the luck part, I’m afraid that’s above my pay grade.

  But against the odds, and for reasons I’ll never fully understand, I’m still here.

  Chapter Three

  Mary’s appointment that day of the robbery had been coming to a close when my office phone rang. As usual, during a session, I let the answering machine pick up.

  It was almost one o’clock, and a fierce sun shone stubbornly through the window blinds. Even the Oakland traffic rumbling up from the street five floors below seemed strangely muted, as though sluggish in the heat.

  As had been the case for weeks, the suite’s AC was putting up a losing battle with another typical Pittsburgh summer.

  Mary was dabbing her forehead with a tissue.

  “At least today I’m just mopping up sweat,” she said ruefully. “Usually it’s tears. Does that mean I’m getting better?”

  Before I could reply, my cell phone rang. Unusual. My friends and colleagues knew not to call that number during office hours, unless there was an emergency.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” I said, reaching for where it beeped insistently on the side table.

  “Dr. Rinaldi?”

  It took me a few moments to recognize the throaty voice on the phone. Detective Eleanor Lowrey. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in almost a year, when she and her partner, Sgt. Harry Polk, had worked with me on the Wingfield case. Or, as Polk would probably put it, when I had gotten my lame-ass self mixed up in the Wingfield case.

  “This is Dan Rinaldi, Detective. But I’m in session with a patient and—”

  She briskly cut me off. “I need you to excuse yourself for a minute so we can talk. It’s important.”

  I didn’t hesitate. I remembered Eleanor Lowrey as a no-nonsense cop, with none of her partner’s angry swagger, owning instead a cool, somewhat guarded determination. I’d never heard this much intensity in her voice before.

  “Of course.” I asked Mary to excuse me, closed my office door behind me, and stood in the empty waiting room. Without a window facing the sun, the room was a full ten degrees cooler than my office. Almost immediately, I felt the sweat starting to dry on my shirt.

  “Sorry to bother you, Doctor,” Lowrey said. “But there’s a situation. Have you heard the news? The story just broke on TV.”

  “I’ve been with patients all morning. What’s going on?”

  “An armed robbery in progress. Midtown, the First Allegheny Bank. We’ve got uniforms, SWAT. Half the damn force. Looks like a couple perps. Somehow the thing went down wrong, shots were fired. Apparently somebody’s dead in there. Probably an employee.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Tell me about it. The pricks are still in the bank, holding the four remaining employees hostage. Demanding safe passage out of town. Your basic cluster fuck.”

  Her voice changed then, the urgent tones softening.

  “Look, Dan, we got our hostage negotiator trying to talk these mooks outta there, but so far nobody’s playing ball. Sergeant Chester, the SWAT leader—”

  “Let me guess. Chester wants to go in, guns blazing. Practically guarantees more dead hostages.”

  “Maybe, but the SWAT presence must’ve spooked the perps, because just five minutes ago they let one of the hostages go. Woman named Treva Williams. EMT guys are working on her now, but she’s in bad shape.”

  “Hurt? Wounded?”

  “Freaked out. She’s falling apart on us, Dan, and we need some intel about what’s going on in that bank. Stuff only she can tell us.”

  By now, I knew where this was going.

  “Any police shrinks on site?”

  “Yeah, one of the regulars.” Again, a shift in her voice. Softer still. “But he’s not you, Dan. I mean, Harry would kill me if he knew I was calling you, but we need you down here. We need your help with this woman.”

  “Does Biegler know you called me?”

  Lt. Stu Biegler was her division superior in robbery/homicide. Another cop I met during the Wingfield investigation. We hadn’t exactly hit it off, either.

  Lowrey drew a breath. “No, this is off the books. But, hell, you’re on the payroll. Makes sense I’d want to call you in.” A wry, mirthless chuckle. “Shows initiative, right? Or something?”

  “Shows balls.” I knew Biegler would have her head for pulling me into this. Not to mention the grief she’d get from Harry Polk. “So, what do you need?”

  “I need you on the scene. ASAP.”

  Chapter Four

  After apologizing to Mary Lewicki for cutting our session short, I saw her out of the office and started making phone calls. It took five minutes to cancel the rest of the day’s appointments and lock up the suite. Then another two minutes, tops, to get down to the parking garage, behind the wheel of my green reconditioned ’69 Mustang, and out onto Forbes Avenue.

  I’d promised Lowrey I’d be at the scene in twenty minutes. Optimistic, given the usual traffic snarl coming out of Oakland. But with most of the student body gone for the summer, I quickly passed William Pitt Union and the Cathedral of Learning, leaving Pitt’s urban campus behind. Soon enough I found myself cruising fairly smoothly down Fifth toward downtown.

  The gleaming spires of the “new” Pittsburgh—chrome and glass monuments to the city’s many software and financial giants—rose into view, interspersed with the venerable turn-of-the-century buildings I remembered from my youth. The Old County Building, the brown-bricked courthouse, the once-proud arches of Kaufmann’s Department Store where, as a child, I’d be dutifully taken at summer’s end to get new school clothes.

  As I headed toward Liberty Avenue, the fierce sun sheening my windshield with an eye-squinting glare, I thought about the tension between old and new that defined contemporary Pittsburgh. The beneficiary of huge endowments from the Mellons, Scaifes, and Carnegies, the home of world-renowned hospitals, universities, and museums, it was still a city whose foundations had been laid by the hands of working men and women. It was their sweat, their toil, that had kept the now-vanished steel mills going, the coal barges chugging the dark waters of the Three Rivers, the freight trains carrying the country’s manufacturing needs to points east, west, and south.

  Most of those folks—and the industries they worked for—are gone now. For one thing, their children have, with rare exceptions, exchanged blue collars for white ones. For another, the world itself has changed. And, after putting up a pretty good fight, the city finally had no choice but to change along with it.

  Now, as I crossed old Bigelow Boulevard, already aware of the traffic slowing as we neared the crime scene twelve blocks ahead, I realized how much I myself was like my home town. A kid who’d grown up in the old Pittsburgh of deafening steel mills and smoke-belching factories, now an adult in a city of MBA’s and CEO’s. The son of an Italian beat cop and an Irish homemaker, I was the first in my family to go to college, be in a profession, wear a jacket and tie.

  That same tension between old and new, between different worlds of experience, existed in me. Informed both my personal and professional lives. Helped explain, I guess, my quick temper, my stubbornness, what Barbara used to mockingly refer to as my old-fashioned sense of duty.

  Whatever. Maybe psychologist Alice Miller was right when she said that our childhood is the air we breathe. At least now, with the city’s industrial past a fading memory, that air is cleaner…

  I turned onto Grant Street, into another slow-moving line of cars. I’d dialed the radio to the all-news station, hoping to learn anything new about the hostage situation. They had
a reporter at the scene, but all she could do was re-cap the story so far.

  The station cut away then for a commercial, and I reached to lower the volume when I heard a familiar voice. District Attorney Leland Sinclair.

  The patrician, smoothly ambitious Sinclair was already well-known for his high prosecution rate when I first met him last year in connection with the same case that had introduced me to Harry Polk and Eleanor Lowrey. But that wasn’t the only reason I recognized his voice now.

  This was an election year, and—as almost every political pundit had predicted—Sinclair was running for governor of the state. For the past two months, his TV and radio campaign ads, extolling his record as a tough-as-nails prosecutor, had flooded the airwaves. Moreover, he’d hired some young tech geniuses who, following the model pioneered by Barack Obama, were building the candidate a huge Internet presence. His website had thousands of hits daily, and contributions from eager supporters had started rolling in almost immediately.

  “I can beat the politicians and special interests in Harrisburg at their own game.” His voice on the radio was earnest, yet self-assured. With just a trace of the Ivy League education he rarely alluded to in public.

  It was a voice I remembered well from our heated exchanges, the fierce rivalry that had quickly turned personal, during that crazy time last year. How could I not? For a while, he’d actually considered me a suspect in the murder of one of my own patients.

  I pushed those thoughts from my mind and focused on the campaign ad. He’d added something new at the end of this one. Something that made me sit up straighter.

  “And if you send me to Harrisburg, my first order of business will be to get some tougher judges on the bench. Judges who won’t listen to the appeals of monsters like Troy David Dowd and their high-priced lawyers. Dowd doesn’t deserve to sit on Death Row, fed and clothed by your taxes. You and I know what this killer deserves.”

  Then the now-familiar swelling music, and Sinclair’s clear voice once more. “I’m Leland Sinclair, and I approve this message.”

  I bet he did. Troy David Dowd, the notorious serial killer dubbed “the Handyman” by the media, had been sitting on death row for years, his execution stayed repeatedly by appeals. Over an eighteen-month period, Dowd had killed and dismembered twelve people throughout rural Pennsylvania, using handsaws, pliers and other tools, before his eventual capture and conviction. Since then, his lawyer’s repeated success in keeping his client alive had fueled a fiery public uproar.

  I felt my jaw tighten. Leland Sinclair was as coldly calculating as he was ambitious. By jumping on the Dowd bandwagon with this latest campaign ad, he was pandering to the state’s most conservative, blue-collar constituents. Though, given the heinous nature of Dowd’s crimes, there were also plenty of liberal, white-collar voters who’d be just as happy seeing his death sentence carried out.

  Sinclair knew this. Just as he knew that, with a mere three points separating him and his closest rival in the polls, he couldn’t afford to lose a single vote.

  Traffic had long since ground to a standstill, and I could see past the horn-honking semis and exhaust-spewing buses to where two patrol cars, lights flashing, were blocking the intersection up ahead.

  Screw this. I pulled out of the line of cars and parked at the curb. I’d get there faster on foot.

  Or so I thought.

  Chapter Five

  The uniformed cop had one huge hand on my forearm, the other gripping the head of his holstered nightstick. He’d come running over, shouting, when he saw me step across the intersection and between the two parked black-and-whites.

  “What the fuck?—” He was about six-two, 280 pounds of third-generation Irish street cop. And sincerely pissed.

  “Look,” I began, raising my free hand in surrender, “I’m Doctor—”

  “I don’t give a shit who you are. See them patrol units blocking the street? See them flashing lights?”

  I reached inside my jacket pocket. “Listen, officer, I’m Daniel Rinaldi, and I work with—”

  He tightened his grip on my arm. “This whole area’s cordoned off, asshole. Ya think that don’t apply to you?”

  Before I could respond, another voice—gruff, a hard-drinker’s rasp—called out.

  “No, he probably don’t.”

  The cop and I turned at the same time to find Sgt. Harry Polk, burly and unkempt, lumbering toward us across the strip of lawn stitching the sidewalk to the edge of Liberty Avenue. Red-faced and sweating, Polk came up to where we stood and swatted the other cop’s hand off my arm.

  “Let him go, Haney.”

  “You know this guy, Sarge?”

  Polk grunted. “Only too goddam well.”

  I swear, Polk was wearing the same wrinkled blue suit as the last time I saw him. And the same sour, world-weary expression. Which he now aimed at me.

  “What the hell are you doin’ here?”

  I smiled. “I’ve missed you too, Harry.”

  Polk ignored me and turned to Haney. “I got this. Doc Rinaldi here is sorta on the job. Sorta.”

  Haney gave me a suspicious look, then shrugged and trotted back to where another uniform stood listening to his two-way radio.

  Watching Haney take up his position again at the corner, I had my first good look at the crime scene. The entire intersection had been blocked off and evacuated, the streets in all directions cleared of traffic. Every store, coffee shop and street vendor cart stood empty and ignored, except for the towering First Allegheny Bank building.

  Like the hub of a wheel, it was the focus of the entire operation. A roiling sea of cops, SWAT teams, media vans. With all eyes, weapons and cameras aimed at the white-bricked bank’s shuttered double doors and steel-reinforced windows.

  Even from this distance, I could hear the constant, dissonant chorus of angry voices. Reporters shouting questions to the cops on scene. Cops shouting curses back.

  “I gotta get through there, Harry,” I said.

  Polk pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow. “No shit? Mind if I ask why?”

  “Lowrey called me. She’s with the hostage they released. Wants me to give her a hand.”

  Polk stopped in mid-wipe. “Lowrey called you?”

  “That’s right. Seems you guys can’t get anything out of the hostage and—”

  “Bullshit. You don’t go in the field, Doc. You sit in your nice cushy office and head-shrink the vics that Villanova sends to you. That’s all. That’s it.”

  “If you think that’s true, Harry, you’ve got a short memory.”

  He scowled. “Don’t remind me. And fuck Lowrey. We got a situation here. Christ, wait’ll I get a hold of her.”

  I felt my own anger rising. There wasn’t time for this. I got in his face.

  “Damn right, you’ve got a situation. One hostage dead already. The only witness you’ve got falling apart. So why the hell are we standing here arguing? Get me in there.”

  Polk bristled, and turned away from me. I could see the back of his neck reddening, as much from rage as from the punishing sun.

  Then, abruptly, he started walking toward the outer row of patrol cars, calling over his shoulder at me. “So, Sigmund. You comin’ or what?”

  ***

  With Polk shouldering a path for us through the maze of uniforms and plainclothes, we soon arrived at a side street just off of Liberty. There, next to where a young woman sat bundled in a blanket on the curb, stood Detective Eleanor Lowrey. She gave a brief smile and came over to meet us, taking off her dark glasses.

  She was as striking as I remembered. Tall, graceful. Sleeveless t-shirt and jeans accentuating her firm, ample curves. Lips and nails painted the same shade of burnt red. The only difference was her softly-ringed, blue-black hair, which she’d let grow out since the last time I’d seen her.

  Meanwhile, Polk barely looked at her. “Doc here says you reached out to him.” His voice held an edge.

  Lowrey nodded carefu
lly, her eyes on his.

  “We got nothin’, Harry. I called an audible.”

  “Uh-huh.” He sniffed, loudly. “Just don’t make it a habit, okay? Biegler hears about this, we’re fucked. You know what he thinks of this guy.”

  “Biegler’s a dickless bastard. With all due respect.”

  Polk shrugged. “I’m just sayin’…”

  He squinted past Lowrey to where the young woman sat, oblivious. Shivering in the blanket. “That her?”

  Lowrey nodded again.

  Polk stared at Lowrey for a long moment. Then he turned to me: “Okay, Doc. I guess she’s all yours.”

  Without another word to his partner, Polk strode off.

  Lowrey let her violet eyes narrow for a moment, before a rueful smile played on her face. Then, touching my elbow, she took me over and introduced me to Treva Williams.

  Chapter Six

  Which is how I ended up, ten minutes later, with my hands on Treva’s slumping shoulders, keeping her upright. Her eyes vacant, staring at nothing. Unmindful of the damp blotches on her blanket, wet from the spilled tea.

  Lowrey crouched in front of her again.

  “What just happened, Dan?”

  I lifted each of Treva’s eyelids, felt her pulse.

  “She keeps going in and out of shock,” I said. “She can’t deal with what she saw, keeps shutting down…”

  Lowrey rubbed her forehead. “Jesus, you’ve gotta do something for her…”

  Suddenly, Treva blinked and made a strangled noise. Against the dark weave of the EMT blanket, her skin was chalk-white, glazed as porcelain.

  I took her hand. So small. Almost weightless.

  “Treva, are you all right? Can you talk to us?”

  Lowrey straightened again, flipped open her two-way. “Shit, I’m getting the EMT cart back over here.”

  “Good idea. She could use more fluids.”

  I didn’t take my eyes from Treva’s ashen, panicked face. Though I noticed that her breathing had become more regular, measured. She focused.