Twice Dying

by Neil Mcmahon

  “You’re feeling confident about the adjustment?”

  “I don’t see I have anything to be worried about, Doctor. I made mistakes, but that’s all done with.”

  “I assume Dr. Jephson has arranged for you to keep in touch?”

  His eyes widened in a quick, mock innocent flash. “Why? You want to get together?”

  She smiled and kept moving, slow pacing that took them farther into the garden.

  “Just in case you did feel trouble coming on. He’s told you to call him first, hasn’t he?”

  The wary look slid across Garlick’s eyes like a reptile’s membranes.

  “Nobody else will know,” she said. “Is that what he told you?”

  He looked past her toward the door. “What’s this to you?”

  “Professional interest.”

  He grimaced contemptuously and sidestepped, but she moved to block him.

  “When did you stop taking your meds, John?”

  “I take meds three rimes a day, lady.”

  “You realize I’m not going to be able to recommend your release.”

  That something other beyond human or animal flared in his eyes, its force and suddenness stopping her breath. Slowly, the rage receded, veneered over by thin tight control.

  “You don’t have any fucking thing to do with it,” Garlick said.

  “I have everything to do with it. Answer me. Did Dr. Jephson offer to keep in touch with you privately?”

  Very quietly, Garlick said, “When I’m released, I’ll report once a month to the outpatient clinic in Santa Rosa for decanoate treatment. Okay? Now I’d like to leave.”

  “Did he ever come on to you sexually, John? Is that what you’re so angry about?”

  “Out of my fucking way.”

  Her hand gripped the makeshift weapon in her pocket.

  “Did he ever use the name Naia?”

  The look was back in his eyes again, at the breaking point, the last instant to back off. She stared into the bristling menace that had killed one woman and injured several more, and raised the toothbrush into his view.

  “You know what this is?” she said. “Your ticket back to Atascadero. For assaulting me, right here, right now. Your word against mine.”

  His movement was like the strike of a snake, slapping the toothbrush down. His other hand went to her neck, fingers gripping the collar of her blouse, ripping it halfway open as she pulled away. He glided after her, crouched, simian, and she saw with disbelief the erection bulging the thin fabric of his scrubs. Those eyes from another world burned into her, his peeled back lips crooning the words:

  “Ohh, I can just hear the sounds you’re gonna make.”

  His fist shot toward her in a blur, knuckles catching the edge of her jaw and bringing a silent painless explosion in her brain. His fingers tore into her hair and incredible strength forced her to her knees, dragging her, with his voice panting sounds that might have been words. She twisted, fighting, flailing her arms behind. He wrenched her head back, poised to ram it into the raw concrete of the wall.

  In that instant she became aware of another noise blasting her senses: the half-second bursts of the assault alert, filling the building.

  Then Harold Henley was there, his blue-shirted body the size of an upended wheelbarrow.

  “You get hold yourself, Mister Garlick,” Harold said with venomous calm. “You try real hard.” The rest of the assault team was arriving now, in a group as if they had been somewhere hiding: attendants and aides, another PSO, the pair of gay psych techs known as Tom and Jerry, carrying a restraint belt. Garlick stayed rigid, hand twisted in her hair as if it were the mane of a rebellious horse, holding her tight against his legs.

  “Let her go, Garlick,” Harold said, and Garlick did, shoving her head forward. Harold stepped to her and pulled her to her feet. She stumbled to safety. Garlick was backing away, fingers rigid, lips skinned back to bare his teeth. The assault team was in action now, circling him. Jerry dropped to hands and knees behind him, the prop over which Garlick would be pushed and tripped.

  But Garlick had been through this before and he was waiting for it. He whirled and brought his foot up with vicious fury into the tech’s outstretched abdomen. The sound was something she could feel. Garlick was fast enough to get a knee to Jerry’s face before Harold piled into him. The others grabbed for his flailing limbs and the group went down, gasping and cursing. One wiry leg was still free, lashing like a calf’s in a branding chute. Alison fell on it, taking a knee to the chest with stunning force, hugging it with her face pressed against the sour-smelling scrubs while his kicks slid her back and forth like a dustmop.

  Tense hands pressed the snarling face down hard, distorting his flesh, and snaked the restraint belt around his waist inches at a time. At last it was secure, his wrists manacled, and Harold knelt beside her to grip the ankle she held. He locked the cuffs on, and she rolled away and lay with her eyes closed, fighting nausea.

  Someone gripped her arms and helped her stand. She steadied her breathing, holding the torn blouse together at her throat. Jerry was sitting pale and bloody-faced while his partner examined him tenderly. The aides had brought a gurney and were cautiously strapping Garlick onto it, while he snarled a litany of threat. The charge nurse, Airs. Guymon, had come from the Nurses’ Station and waited inquiringly. Everybody knew the drill but it had to be official.

  Alison said, “Five milligrams of droperidol, IM. Get Dr. Ghose to sign it off.”

  The aides wheeled Garlick past. His eyes locked with hers again, and she understood that never, for the rest of his life, would he forget being forced to surrender to her.

  Harold stood beside her, watching. His face, in profile, was grim.

  “That was fast,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “She make the punishment fit the crime.”

  Alison stared at Harold in astonishment, not sure she had heard right, but he was already following the gurney to Seclusion. “You should see someone,” Mrs. Guymon said to Alison. Both knew that it was not physical damage she was talking about.

  “I’m all right. There’ll need to be an assault team meeting.” This was another form of therapy, for the keepers: debriefing sessions designed to dissipate the fear and rage that might otherwise lead to time-honored forms of staff retaliation, beatings, starvation, psychosis-inducing medication overdoses, even hacked genitals.

  Mrs. Guymon left, too. The toothbrush was lying against the wall. Allison pocketed it unseen and walked to her office past a collage of patients’ stares, fearful, childlike, blank.

  Inside, she raised her fingers to explore the tenderness of her face and neck.

  But her fear vanished in sudden elation.

  You become a cobra hunter.

  There was not going to be any early release for John James Garlick now.

  She shrugged on her raincoat, buttoning it to the neck, and gathered her things. Harold was waiting at the main door.

  She said, “What did you mean earlier about the punishment fitting the crime?”

  “Alison.” He glanced up and down the hall. No one stood near. His face tightened into the expression of a concerned adult trying to explain a difficult concept to a child.

  “They a world out there. You come in here, you think you seeing that world, but you only seeing a little part of it.”

  The door closed behind her with a cold metallic clang.

  She walked to her car, quickly at first, then slowing down. She had left it unlocked.

  But today, there was no gift.

  Monks waited at Sproul Plaza, where Telegraph Avenue met the Berkeley campus: nursery of the sixties, where the SDS had preached a revolution that never came, where crowds had gathered to demonstrate, battle police, and put an end to a faraway war. He had first visited here on his way to that same war, feeling, with his short hair and civvies, like a sacrificial animal among pagans. Now most of the students looked more like he had then, clean-cut frat types or career-seekers. But Te
legraph seemed unchanged, with its sidewalk stalls of jewelry merchants, the same outfits and long hair.

  A group of skateboarders bullied their way through the crowd: aggressive, energetic, a little frightening. These were not boys, but in their late teens and even twenties. Monks recalled the gangfight only a couple of nights before, and wondered, not for the first time, how much of that war had been about old men wanting young men out of the way.

  Alison was late. As the minutes passed, his tension moved into concern, then worry. But then he spotted her, a slender figure in a tan raincoat. He strode toward her, raising his hand. When he embraced her, she leaned into him, but her body did not yield. Monks let her go.

  He said, “We found more pieces. They’re spinning around in the air, but they won’t click together.”

  “Pieces like?”

  He told her, keeping pace with her as she walked: noting that she moved toward the lights and crowds of the city rather than the sometimes isolated pathways of the campus.

  “Stover wondered if Jephson might have used Springkell, maybe even still does,” he finished. “Brainwashed him and controls him. Is that feasible?”

  “I think it might be possible to get somebody to kill that way,” Alison said. “But to expect him not to slip up, to stay stable and never reveal anything, would be very risky.”

  They reached Telegraph, stepping into the street to skirt vendors’ booths, with traffic edging alongside, sociopathic bicyclists careening through, fresh-faced upwardly mobile youths brushing shoulders with street people clad in outlandish combinations of garments, like primitives just touched by civilization.

  Back on the sidewalk, Alison stopped and shook loose a cigarette.

  “Worst city in the world to do this in. I won’t make it to the end of the block before somebody starts in on me.”

  Monks took her lighter. She leaned in against the wind. That was when he saw the carefully applied makeup over the swollen right side of her jaw. He touched it with his finger, and noticed now that her coat was buttoned all the way to her chin, with the collar turned up. He pulled it away and saw the bruises spreading down her neck, and the torn blouse.

  “It happened on the ward,” she said. “That man I told you about, Garlick. I’ve been threatened before. Never touched.”

  Monks became aware that the anger which was always in him was building to rare intensity. “Did it have anything to do with this?”

  “It will as soon as he talks to Jephson. I tried to get him to admit what’s going on. I used the name Naia.”

  “Come with me, right now,” Monks said. “My place is safe. We’ll go to the FBI, get you out of sight until she’s caught.”

  “What if she’s not?”

  Monks said, “I could go with you. We could find a place to stay, maybe out of the country. See how we get along.”

  “Oh, Rasp.” Her tone was exasperated, even amused by the absurdity of the idea. “That’s sweet,” she added quickly, and kissed him, a peck on the cheek. “I’ve arranged to stay with a girlfriend the next few nights. Don’t worry, I’ll be around people all the time.”

  Monks pulled away and stood with his back half-turned, as if to conceal the bitter wound.

  “You can’t just keep on as if nothing’s happened, Alison.”

  “She wants to get close to me. I’m going to find out who she is.”

  “Yeah? And then what?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s not going to hurt me. We have the same thing in us. The mirror, except we’re opposites. I’ve given into it, been passive. She’s fighting.”

  “That’s what you’re supplying. What we know is that she has killed and possibly tortured several people.”

  “Suppose you’d been terribly injured. Someone you loved was murdered. Maybe you even witnessed it. Can you imagine what that would do to you?”

  “Where the hell are you getting that?”

  “If I run, or get the police after her,” she said, “that’s what’s going to get me hurt.”

  She inhaled the last of the cigarette and dropped it in a street trash basket, its bottom sticky with residue, wire-mesh sides dented from vehicles or human feet expressing rage.

  “The strangest thing in all of this?” she said. “I’m starting to realize I might just have saved Garlick’s life.”

  She stepped into the street ahead of a car. Monks had to wait for it and several more. On the other side she turned to face him, touching in him a memory of a myth, lovers separated by a treacherous sea channel that the young man swam every night until he drowned in a storm.

  When Monks walked into his house, depression laid on him like a heavy blanket across his shoulders, the likes of which he had not experienced in years: the absurd vanity of a middle-aged man who had allowed himself to think that he might have been something to her besides useful.

  He started a fire, fed the cats, poured a drink, and punched the PLAY button on his answering machine.

  “Carroll, it’s Roman Kasmarek. I got the PM for Robby Vandenard. From what I can glean, the evidence for suicide is persuasive, but circumstantial. Robby left a suicide note and wandered away from the family estate. He wasn’t found for several months. There was bad decomposition and damage from animals and the wound itself, but he was carrying identification, and still holding his father’s shotgun.

  “Hope that helps. I’ll be at the hospital till five.”

  Monks found a legal pad and clipboard and sat on the couch, trying to recall information as it had come.

  Alison Chapley stumbles onto the false diagnoses and unjustified releases of several NGIs. It seems clear that this has been calculatingly arranged by Dr. Francis Jephson.

  She confronts Jephson obliquely. He claims ignorance, but soon afterward, a private investigator makes inquiries about Alison’s personal life, presumably with the aim of damaging her professionally. She assumes that Jephson is behind this.

  In an attempt to protect herself, she goes looking for information that might compromise Jephson in return. She learns that Robby Vandenard, heir to a wealthy San Francisco family, killed a man in 1984, and Jephson was instrumental in getting Robby the NGI verdict. Not long afterward, Jephson’s prestigious JCOG program was founded—with Vandenard money—and Robby was one of the first admissions, thus being guaranteed release after an easy two years instead of a much longer term in a maximum security institution.

  But Robby committed suicide not long after his release. Or did Jephson engineer his murder, fearing exposure?

  Monks and Larrabee call on Darla Lutey, wife of the hired hand Robby Vandenard shot. She gives them reason to think that Robby was also falsely diagnosed by Jephson, was in fact a sociopath. But the real shock: suspicion that at age eleven, Robby had murdered his fourteen-year-old sister Katherine.

  Alison is called in by Francis Jephson and offered a promotion, in what clearly seems to be a bribe for silence. She refuses. That afternoon, she finds a photograph of child killer Caymas Schulte in her car, with the suggestion that someone wants to give her information.

  Monks and Larrabee learn from Dennis O’Dwyer that Jephson’s connection with Robby Vandenard goes far back: Jephson treated Robby at the time of his sisters murder.

  In Mendocino, Monks and Alison meet Caymas’s frightened and abused younger brother, Tanager. He tells them about a woman named Naia, who said she was from “the hospital” Caymas had supposedly been taken to, and who paid for a motorcycle in return for showing her Caymas’s hideout. It seemed that Naia had enlisted Caymas to damage or murder someone, but that he had blackmailed her instead. Caymas was now presumed dead.

  Tanager leads them, too, to Caymas’s hideout. They find the gift that Naia left for. Alison: a death mask of Caymas Schulte, together with his baseball cap—and a mirror painted so as to ring Alison’s eyes with blood.

  Bernard Capaldi obliquely admits string-pulling to get Robby Vandenard the NGI verdict. He confirms and emphasizes the closeness between Robby and Jephson. He does
not deny that Jephson may even have influenced Robby to murder.

  Monks gets autopsy reports from Roman Kasmarek indicating that two of the four other NGIs may have been killed, too—disabled and brutalized first.

  The spotlight, by now, is clearly on Francis Jephson. He is certainly culpable of unethical behavior. Robby Vandenard was in a position to compromise him, even have him sent to prison, thus giving Jephson an excellent motive to kill Robby—and perhaps to continue on, to eliminate a similar risk with other NGIs.

  Monks and Larrabee check out a missing NGI file: Thomas Springkell, who was a friend of Robby Vandenard. Robby reneged on the friendship after his release; Tommy got depressed and disappeared. Larrabee brings up the possibility that Jephson has used Tommy to kill.

  And now, Alison is convinced that she is safe. Naia will reveal herself to Alison soon. To start a law enforcement search or try to hide could be disastrous.

  Monks got up and poured another drink, admitting in the confessional of his heart that if Naia was only killing men like those NGIs, it would not be hard to look the other way.

  Inside her house, Alison poured a glass of chilled chardonnay and ran a hath. Her fingers traced the dark bruises on her face, neck and between her breasts where she had taken Garlick’s knee. The thought came that they were stigmata, tangible signs of an unseen power marking her.

  She had lied to a man who had treated her with nothing but kindness—hurt him deliberately. In part, she had done it to protect him.

  But, mostly she had done it to keep him from interfering. The lifetime of dammed-up emotion that she had only acted out in tawdry, cowardly games, was finally breaking free. This afternoon, with the takedown of John James Garlick, she had sent her own message back to Naia: she was ready.

  The quail was growing teeth.

  She dried and walked to her bedroom, to where she had hidden the gifts under a pile of unused clothes in a trunk. She took the mask back to the living room, turned down the lights, and sat by the phone like a schoolgirl, gazing into the mirror with the blood-red rings around her own eyes, waiting for a reply.