The Girls He Adored

by Jonathan Nasaw

  * * *

  An hour, thought Maxwell. Not much time—for the dull normals. For a next-generation multiple, it was more than enough. He already knew what he was going to do. The old reliable had been working for him since Juvie, and he'd already beaten Pender with it once. No reason he wouldn't fall for it again.

  Still, a little more darkness wouldn't hurt. Not too much, though—Maxwell needed enough light to shoot by.

  “Pender!”

  Pender glanced at his watch. Half an hour had passed. The light was fading inside the barn. “What?”

  “No deal—I still don't trust you. But I'll make you a counteroffer.”

  “I'm listening.” Pender's stomach growled. He remembered for the first time that he hadn't eaten since breakfast. Odd he hadn't noticed it before—he was not a man accustomed to missing meals.

  “You and me, mano a mano. Gunfight at the OK Corral.”

  “How's that going to work?”

  “You come down here, we count down from ten and draw.”

  Oh-ho, thought Pender. Years ago, before the Reeford disgrace, he was sometimes called upon to give a lecture at the FBI Academy in Quantico, “The Art of Affective Interrogation,” in which he stressed to the recruits that often the key to cracking a case was not what you knew, or what you didn't know, but what you knew that the other fellow didn't know you knew.

  Still, it wouldn't do to give in too easily. “How do I know you're not going to shoot me on my way down?”

  “We both stand up at the same time with our guns at our sides, pointing down. Either of us makes a move prematurely, the other one'll see it.”

  “But I'll be at a disadvantage, climbing down a ladder onehanded.” Pender pretended to mull it over for another moment. “Tell you what, you hold your gun behind your back until I'm on the ground. Deal?”

  “Done,” said Maxwell.

  Done, thought Pender.

  Irene didn't know what to think, except that it would be over soon, one way or the other, and that the chances of her survival had increased from zero to fifty percent. Not a set of odds she'd have thought much of a week ago—apparently it was all a matter of where you were coming from. Like everything else in life.

  “Dr. Cogan?” called Pender.

  “Yes?”

  “Would you count to three, slowly?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  Irene looked at Maxwell. He nodded.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  On three Maxwell stood up, the pistol in his left hand, behind his back. Irene climbed unsteadily to her feet, peered over Maybelline's roof, but at a crouch, to keep the car between Pender and her nakedness, and saw the FBI man standing in the hayloft with his gun at his side. Slowly, he began to move toward the ladder.

  Irene watched Maxwell's hand—if it began to move, she was prepared to shout a warning, maybe even try to grab it. Pender started down the ladder, hanging on with his left hand, gun in his right, toes feeling for the rungs, head turned at a painful angle so he could keep his eyes on Maxwell.

  “So far, so good,” called Maxwell, slowly bringing his hand out from behind his back when Pender reached the ground. Then, without taking his eyes off Pender: “Irene, would you count down from ten to one—same cadence you just used.”

  “Wait,” said Pender calmly. “I just want to be clear on this—do we draw at one or after?”

  “What's your preference?” asked Maxwell, just as calmly.

  “Could be problematical either way. How about three, two, one, go, and we draw on the go.”

  “Okay by me. Got that, Irene?”

  “Got it.”

  “Then let's git it on,” said Maxwell, in a high, pinched voice. Irene didn't recognize it, but knew it was one of his impressions.

  He does that when he's nervous, she remembered. He was nervous that first day with me.

  “Ten,” she said, loudly and clearly, hearing her voice echo around the barn.

  Pender was still trying to decide what number to go on when she started her count. He'd thought about it all the way down the ladder. Going before the count began would have been risky— Maxwell was watching him too closely. But Maxwell had implicit faith in Buckley's trick. Once the countdown began, he'd start to relax, he'd be in familiar territory.

  “Nine.”

  Too soon.

  “Eight.”

  Not yet—nerves of steel.

  “Seven.”

  Pender cocked his wrist and fired from the hip. Seven sounded just about right to him.

  87

  THE HOLLOW-POINT CAUGHT Maxwell high in the left shoulder and spun him sideways. His balance and reflexes were superb. He kept his feet and even managed to squeeze off a round of his own that ricocheted off the cement floor and sent chips flying from one of the stanchions separating the stalls.

  Pender managed to get off a second shot within the space of a heartbeat, but yanked it high. A rookie mistake—second shots tend to pull high due to bad initial positioning caused by the upward kick of the gun on the first shot.

  You know better than that, Pender told himself. Everything but his mind was moving in slow motion. He found he had all the time in the world. Still he overcompensated downward on the third shot. The bullet smashed through Maxwell's knee as he struggled to switch the heavy Glock from his useless left hand to his right. The gun went flying, but somehow Maxwell managed to hop halfway out the barn door before falling, despite the fact that his right knee had all but disappeared in a spray of fine red mist.

  Maxwell lay on his back, half in and half out of the barn, staring up at a rosy sunset sky. Pender approached him cautiously, holding the SIG out in front of him, his finger half-tightened on the trigger. When he reached Maxwell, Pender saw that he was still conscious, and that neither of the wounds was necessarily fatal. What a goddamn shame. He knelt at Maxwell's side, placed the muzzle of the SIG against Maxwell's forehead so that Maxwell could see it and feel it.

  “Caz Buckley sends his regards,” Pender said softly. “By the way, he said to tell you he never really liked you.”

  * * *

  When the shooting began—she hadn't seen who started it—Irene had dropped to the floor and crawled under Maybelline. She was astonished at how calm she was. A week ago, she knew, she would have been either hysterical or catatonic. Instead, she waited for the gunfire to end, and didn't crawl out until she saw Pender's Hush Puppies crossing her line of vision.

  She stood up, saw Pender kneeling in the doorway at Maxwell's left side, holding the gun to Maxwell's forehead. “No!” she cried. “What are you doing?”

  “Just securing the prisoner,” he replied, hurriedly beginning to pat down the waistband and pockets of Maxwell's shorts with his free hand, searching him for another weapon while trying to avoid the blood spurting from the damaged knee. At that point Pender himself wasn't entirely sure whether he had intended to fire a third round into Maxwell's brain from point-blank range. Probably not: though he was pretty worked up, he hadn't forgotten that powder burns on Maxwell and blowback on himself would have been a dead giveaway.

  Irene approached them with a certain amount of dread, but when she saw Maxwell's wounds, her medical training kicked in.

  “Here, give me your bandanna.” She knelt beside Pender and pressed her thumb against Maxwell's spurting femoral artery.

  He glanced over at her, did a double take, though he had to have noticed that she was naked before then, then hurriedly stripped off his torn, sweaty, bullet-riddled, blood-spattered, scorched, threehundred-dollar jacket and draped it around her shoulders. It hung to the floor.

  “Your bandanna,” she said again.

  “What for?”

  “I have to make a tourniquet.”

  “What for?”

  “To stop the bleeding.”

  “Oh—right.” Reluctantly, almost resentfully, Pender stripped off his bandanna and handed it to Irene. For a disconnected moment, Pender couldn't imagine why she'd have
wanted to save Maxwell's life. But of course they had to keep him alive. How else would they learn the fate of all those strawberry blonds? Unless . . .

  “Dr. Cogan, while the two of you were together, did he tell you about any of the other strawberry blonds?”

  “He told me about all of them.”

  “Names and everything?”

  “Names and everything. I have them in my notebook. Hold your thumb here.” She had him press against the artery while she tied the knot. Only after the bleeding had stopped did she slip her arms through the sleeves of Pender's jacket and button it around her.

  “How many?”

  “Twelve altogether,” replied Irene.

  “Counting Wisniewski?”

  “Counting Wisniewski.” Irene stepped across Maxwell's supine body and knelt to examine his shoulder wound. It didn't look bad. But as she tore a strip of rayon from the bloody hula shirt and pressed it into the bullet hole, she remembered from her emergency medicine rotation in Palo Alto that the exit wounds were always worse. She had Pender lift Maxwell up so she could examine his back. There was no exit wound: that first bullet was still inside him somewhere.

  Max groaned as they lowered him back down—his extraordinary mind was still clicking away, though he could feel his will ebbing, floating off into the peaceful, rose-pink sky.

  “Take it easy,” said Irene, as they lowered him back down. “It's okay—just relax now.” A blond lock had fallen across Maxwell's forehead and into his eye; she brushed it back gently with her fingers. “We have to get him to a hospital,” she told Pender.

  “You sure you want to do that?” he whispered. “Keep him alive, take a chance on him getting free some day?”

  She stared at him blankly.

  Still whispering: “Do you know how you were going to die? Number thirteen?”

  “What—” She started to ask him what difference it would make, but something in his expression stopped her. “No, I don't.”

  Pender's eyes filled with sorrow for what he was about to do. Over the years, he had made a habit, almost a religion, of keeping the horrors he had seen to himself, at least where civilians, including his then-wife, were concerned. It helped cost him his marriage. But most people couldn't live in the world Pender inhabited. And now he had to take poor Dr. Cogan, who looked like a forlorn waif in his enormous, bedraggled jacket, with her hair all cropped to stubble, and drag her through it. Rub her nose in it.

  “To start with, he would have raped you, repeatedly, in every conceivable orifice and every conceivable position. He would have tied you, posed you, costumed you, beat you, tortured you, penetrated you, and inserted foreign objects into you, over and over and over, in a growing frenzy that would have ended only in your death. If you were one of the lucky ones, you'd have lost consciousness early on—not that that would have stopped him until he was ready to stop—or died accidentally, from a skull fracture, say, or internal bleeding, or asphyxiation.”

  If that's lucky, thought Irene, I don't want to know about unlucky. But she made no attempt to stop him. She liked having him this close—he was shelter, he was safety. She knew that nothing he was telling her should have made any difference to her Hippocratic oath. She also knew she had to hear him out.

  “But if you were unfortunate enough to be born with a strong constitution, or a fierce desire to live, it would have ended with a knife.”

  Pender's mind drifted back to the bedroom of the little ranch house in Prunedale. Harriet Weldon pulls back the sheet that Maxwell had drawn up to the dead women's waists. One of the investigators gasps, another moans. The photographer snaps a flash picture; the sudden glaring whiteness sears the image into Pender's memory. How many knife blows would it take to obliterate a woman's private parts, reduce them to this unrecognizable state, he wonders. A hundred? A thousand?

  “Agent Pender?”

  Pender was vaguely startled to find himself standing over Maxwell's body. “Sorry. Drifting. Must be more beat than I thought. Where was I?”

  “A knife?”

  “Oh, yes. A knife. A good strong butcher knife—sturdy enough to survive being driven through bone—pelvic bone—again, and again, and again, until there's nothing but a bloody—”

  “No more. Please.” Irene's head was spinning. She was afraid for a moment that she was about to pitch forward across Maxwell's body. Pender slipped his arm around her.

  “Kinch,” she said as he eased her back into a sitting position a few feet from the body.

  “What?”

  “Kinch—that's the name of the alter who carves the women up.”

  “Then you'll let me do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Loosen the tourniquet.”

  Irene thought about it. She thought about it longer and harder than she'd ever care to admit, even to herself. In the end it wasn't her Hippocratic oath that swung the balance, it was the fact that in more than ten years of specializing in dissociative disorders, Irene had never heard of, much less treated, a multiple even remotely like Maxwell. He was sui generis. The chance to study him, to learn from him, might in the long run lead to breakthroughs in the treatment and understanding of DID that could benefit victims like Lily DeVries. Against that, her own fear, and a vaguely defined urge for revenge, didn't measure up. She shook her head no.

  Pender climbed wearily to his feet. “Is there a telephone back at the house? My cell phone doesn't work out here.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I'm going to hotwire one of these vehicles then. Will you be all right here if I go for help, or do you want to come with me?”

  “No, I think I should stay with Donna and Dolores.”

  It didn't register for a moment—then, for the second time that day, Pender's universe underwent a paradigm shift. “Say again?”

  “Donna and Dolores—I should stay with them until the ambulance comes.”

  “Donna Hughes and Dolores Moon? They're alive?”

  “You didn't know?”

  No, Pender started to say. Then he realized that he had—that somehow or other he'd known all along. He just hadn't always believed it.

  88

  HUDDLED BY THE VENTILATION shaft next to the faucet after Maxwell dragged the psychiatrist out of the drying shed, Donna and Dolores held hands. An eternity passed.

  “It'll be over soon,” said Dolores.

  “One way or the other,” Donna replied.

  It was the very phrase that had been going through Dolores's mind, though she'd chosen not to voice it. “Know what I keep thinking about?” she asked Donna.

  Again their thoughts were in synch. “Tammy?” After going five days without a meal during the last week of Max's absence, Tammy Brown had drowned herself under the cold-water tap while the other two slept. It couldn't have been an easy thing to do. They'd found her lying on her back on the grate the next morning, her body cold, her skin slick and pebbly as a dolphin's, her parted lips blue. And after Donna shut off the faucet, they saw that Tammy's open mouth was full to the brim with clear dark water, like a fathomless lake about to overflow its thin blue banks.

  “If she'd only held on a little bit longer.” Maxwell had arrived that very night, dumped her body into the privy, and shoveled a bucket of lime over it.

  Another eternity passed. It was nearly dark—then it was dark. They'd left off holding hands. Dolores had her back to the wall, facing the door. They heard the outer hatch sliding open. The eternity that passed between the opening of the outer hatch and the inner door, though it contained only footsteps and the tinkling of keys, was the longest eternity of all. Dolores felt her heart pounding at her ribs and thought it was about to burst.

  Then the door opened and a huge blood-spattered bald man stood there holding a battery-powered lantern. Beside him, the psychiatrist had her arms full of clothes.

  The alter or entity known as Max had never been entirely sure about his own nature, or origins. The fact that the other alters looked upon him as some sort o
f demon was of course convenient, and had helped him wrest dominance over the system from Useless and Christopher. But for himself, the possibility that he might be an incarnation of Carnivean was only conjecture based upon the circumstances of his first appearance, the perverse delight he'd always taken in activities that others saw as shameful or evil, and the system's undeniably superior level of functioning, compared not only to other multiples but to the human race in general.

  It might be coincidence, it might be random mutation, but the possibility that an evolutionary leap such as he represented might also be the result of demonic possession could never be entirely discounted.

  So as he found himself slipping into the darkness, once again Max managed to convince himself that it wasn't all bad. At least he didn't have to worry about hell. If it existed, he told himself, he was on the board of directors; if not, oblivion, and an end to the agonizing pain he now found himself in. And in either event, the riddle of his origins would be solved soon enough.

  But no sooner had Max arrived at this state of inner peace than it was shattered by the sound of Miss Miller's voice. She had somehow managed to hump her way across the loft on her uninjured back, though her arms and legs were still securely—and painfully—bound, then work the gag out of her mouth.

  “Ulysses?” she called.

  Max opened his eyes, saw that night had fallen. What a sky, what a sky! “Down here. He shot me.”

  “I heard.”

  “I think I'm dying.”

  “Oh, you think you're dying every time you stub your toe. Remember when you were twelve and you had the flu? I've pulled you through worse scrapes than this, young man. Now get up here and untie me.”

  “You're safe now,” Irene said soothingly, though she had to wonder whether any of them, including herself, could ever feel truly safe again. At the moment, she understood, they were all suffering from acute stress disorder, a precursor of post-traumatic stress disorder that included all the PTSD symptoms, plus severe dissociative symptoms like selective amnesia, affective numbing, and derealization. But Irene shrugged off her own problems—not only was she the least affected of the three, she was a psychiatrist, for crying out loud. “It's over—you're free. He can't hurt you anymore.”