by Adam Mitzner
When I arrive at my office, I literally throw my coat and purse onto my desk. My purse hits the target, but my coat falls to the floor. I leave it there rather than make Drake McKenney wait another second longer.
Before I make my way upstairs to the eighth floor, his domain, I walk by Lauren’s office, even though it’s the opposite way from the elevators. Her door is shut, as it usually is before she arrives—but also any time she’s in a meeting. Rita is attending to something on her iPhone.
“Is Lauren in yet?” I ask.
“Haven’t seen her,” Rita says, barely looking up from her texting.
“I got called into a meeting on eight. Any idea what that’s about?”
Rita shakes her head.
“Do you know if Lauren was invited?”
“I don’t. But maybe that’s where she is now.”
To get to the office of the District Attorney, I have to navigate a separate set of security guards. After clearing that checkpoint, I finally arrive in front of McKenney’s assistant. She’s the last gatekeeper.
“I got an e-mail that Mr. McKenney wanted to see me,” I say. “My name is Dana Goodwin.”
“He’s in there,” she says. “Go right on in.”
I take a deep breath and then push open the doors.
The District Attorney sits behind his mammoth desk, looking as if he’s posing for a portrait. For a man in his early fifties, McKenney could pass for ten years younger. The floppy hairstyle—Robert Kennedy on the campaign trail—has something to do with his youthful appearance, but the fact that he’s tall and trim doesn’t hurt either. He’s bookended by the American and the New York State flags. Sitting in his guest chair is his deputy, Larry Kassak, a shorter, more swarthy individual I’ve never particularly cared for, although we haven’t had enough encounters for me to have an informed opinion about the man.
“Good. You’re here,” McKenney says.
“I’m sorry for being a little late,” I stammer. “I was . . . delayed on the train.”
McKenney doesn’t respond to my excuse. Instead, he gets up from his desk and walks over to his closet, out of which he pulls his overcoat.
We’re leaving the building, apparently. I notice that Kassak is wearing his topcoat too.
“Are we going somewhere?”
“Yeah, grab your coat. We’ve got a car waiting to take us over to One PP.”
One PP—One Police Plaza—is the address of police headquarters.
“Can I ask what this is about?”
“We’ll brief you when we get there,” Kassak says.
7.
ELLA BRODEN
On Thursdays at nine, I see Allison. Also on Wednesdays.
She’s a psychiatrist.
Her office is located in a townhouse on Jane Street. There’s a narrow staircase leading from the street directly to the third floor. I suspect Allison owns the entire house, either because she inherited the property or because her husband is a banker or an art dealer or something. It must be worth at least $10 million, and you don’t amass that kind of fortune charging by the hour, even if it’s in $400 increments.
The bills are sent to my father—the only bit of his charity I rely upon. I assuage my sense of entitlement with the thought that I’m doing it more for him than for myself. He insisted I see someone, emphasizing that it was necessary after the trauma I’d suffered. I might still have resisted, finding nothing wrong with sleeping all day and self-medicating with junk food, but for the fact that Gabriel echoed the sentiment.
Allison’s office reveals a woman’s touch. Lots of florals and pastels, with furnishings that tend toward the Victorian. My seat is a case in point—a long sofa upholstered in a mauve-colored velvet. It’s a piece that might have been referred to in another age as a “fainting couch.” Allison’s chair is midcentury modern and black leather, which doesn’t fit at all with the rest of the décor. So much so that I wonder if its presence isn’t some type of Rorschach test.
At the start of our first session, Allison asked me why was I there.
“Because everyone said I should talk to a professional,” was my answer.
“Do you always do what people tell you to do?”
I thought for a moment and gave her the truthful answer. “Yes. Pretty much.”
She smiled. The way she did it reminded me a bit of my mother, which I quickly surmised was either a very good thing or a very bad thing in a therapist. “Good. At least honesty won’t be a sticking point between us. So tell me, why does everyone think you need to be in analysis?”
“Because I killed a man,” I said, knowing well that by phrasing it in that way I was baiting her. “I was sleeping with him, and he killed my sister. So there’s that too.”
She didn’t let on that she already knew those things, although I’m sure she did. Even if there’s some AMA prohibition about googling your patients, unless Allison had been living under a rock, she’d have heard about Charlotte Broden’s disappearance and subsequent murder, as well as how I stabbed my sister’s murderer to death. She probably even came across the articles published by lower forms of media, which speculated that the entire thing might have been a love triangle gone wrong.
“Then it does sound like we have a lot to talk about,” Allison said.
The night after my first session, I had a very vivid nightmare. Oddly, until then, I was convinced that my subconscious had already been unfettered by Charlotte’s murder and my role in avenging it. But, like clockwork, as soon as I opened up the Pandora’s box of my psyche, I was bombarded by suppressed thoughts that I wished had stayed secreted.
In the dream, I was back in the townhouse that I lived in as a kid. Charlotte was alive. She was twelve, even though I was my current thirty-two years. My sister is terrified, her hands visibly shaking.
“What’s wrong, Char-bar?” I ask.
“Oh my God, Ella. I’m so sorry,” she says, crying.
“Just tell me what happened.”
She can’t stop crying. It makes me want to cry too.
Finally, she says, “Hannibal Lecter is upstairs. In Mom and Dad’s room.”
For some reason, the thought that Hannibal Lecter wasn’t real didn’t come into play in the dream. Instead, I ask a logistical question.
“How’d he get in?”
“It’s all my fault,” Charlotte sobs. “I’m so sorry, Ella. Please forgive me.”
“It’s okay,” I say to comfort her. I take her into my arms, but she pushes me away.
“No! No, it’s not okay! We’re all going to die!”
In the dream, I know I have to do something or else Charlotte will be proven correct and we’ll all die, but my solution is as ridiculous as the dream’s premise.
“I’ll . . . I’ll go upstairs and kill him,” I say.
“No!” she screams, even louder than before. “Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone.”
She holds me tightly, physically restraining me from carrying out my plan. I break our embrace.
“Stay here,” I say sternly, then turn toward the stairs and slowly begin to ascend. I’m petrified, my knees shaking with each step.
On the second floor, I come to the kitchen—even though in our actual home the kitchen was on the ground floor. I step off the stairs and grab a large knife out of the butcher block. Then I continue to the third floor, to my parents’ bedroom.
By now my heart is beating so loudly that my chest hurts. I am certain Lecter’s going to kill me. But I don’t even think to stop. Instead, I open the door to my parents’ bedroom.
The room is pitch-black. I can’t even see my hand. But I know from the way the hair rises on the back of my neck that I’m not alone. In desperation, I begin to stab the darkness, the way Anthony Perkins killed Janet Leigh in Psycho.
The knife plunges into someone’s body. Hannibal? My mother? My father?
I’ll never know, because that’s when I woke up with a jolt.
I told Allison about the dream at our next
session, which was the following morning. Her reaction wasn’t at all what I had expected. I obviously saw the parallels between my action in the dream and my killing Charlotte’s murderer, right down to using a knife in both instances. But the questions she posed suggested she believed that more was going on than just an imaginative reenactment of how I murdered a deadly sociopath.
“How would you describe your reaction when Charlotte told you that Hannibal Lecter was in your home?” she asked.
“Terrified,” I said.
“Of course, but it seemed in the dream that Charlotte had let him into your house. Were you angry too? I mean, she let the world’s foremost cannibal and serial killer into your family’s home, right?”
“It wasn’t her fault, though.”
“Oh? Why do you say that?”
Truthfully, I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember the dream any longer, at least not in enough detail to probe my thought process during it.
“I don’t know. I just don’t think I felt that way.”
“Okay. So you protected your sister in the dream.”
There was no question posed, but I knew she was asking me to contrast my dream with what happened in real life. Even though the thought that I failed my sister was nothing new to me, it still had the power to move me to tears. I expected Allison to comfort me, maybe even to apologize for upsetting me. Instead, she silently handed me a box of tissues.
As I was drying my eyes she asked, “What do you think of when you think of Hannibal Lecter?”
“I don’t know . . . Anthony Hopkins, I guess.”
“No. Not the actor, but the character. Who is he?”
“A cannibal.”
“Do you know what he does for a living?”
“Eats people?”
“No, I think that’s more of a hobby,” she said, with a chuckle at her own wit. “If you remember the movie, Jodie Foster always calls him ‘doctor.’”
“Okay . . .”
She didn’t follow up. Psychiatrists are like prosecutors and cops in that way, using silence to draw out an admission.
“I don’t think I remembered that,” I said to end the quiet.
“Do you know what kind of doctor he is?”
I thought for a moment, then realized I did know.
“He’s a psychiatrist.”
She nodded. “Maybe your dream is a way of telling you that what you’re truly terrified of is what you might end up revealing in here. In therapy. Maybe the monster that your sister let in is the psychiatrist on the third floor of the brownstone.”
Today, though, I have nothing as revelatory to share with Allison as the dream in which I stab to death the stand-in for my psychiatrist using the same weapon as I used to kill my sister’s murderer. Instead, I move in an entirely different direction.
“So I had a pretty good set the other night,” I begin brightly. “And Gabriel was there.”
“Good,” she says in that noncommittal tone that I suspect all therapists use.
“Gabriel asked about my song, though. ‘Never Goodbye.’ Whether I actually feel the things I say in the lyrics.”
We’ve discussed the song before. In fact, I sang it for her once. I wanted her to say that it was beautiful, but instead she used the word torturous.
“And what did you tell him?”
“The truth, like always.”
She smiles. “And what is the truth?”
“That sometimes I feel like that, but not all the time?”
“And by ‘like that,’ to what are you referring?”
I find this to be a bit cruel. She knows what I mean but wants me to say it aloud. I suspect it’s some type of therapist thing. If you articulate your desires, you’re less likely to act on them maybe. Something akin to keeping a food journal so you don’t overeat. Or perhaps Allison is simply a sadist.
“That sometimes I feel like I want to die.”
8.
DANA GOODWIN
District Attorney Drake McKenney and Police Commissioner Calhoun Johnson usually only occupy the same space when television crews are filming. It’s a not very well-kept secret that the two men don’t like each other. The source of their enmity is a bit less clear, but it could be any one of half a dozen things, ranging from Johnson’s animus toward politicians and those born with a silver spoon in their mouths—both of which apply to Drake McKenney—to McKenney’s distrust of anyone he can’t control, which pretty much sums up Calhoun Johnson. Yet despite their well-known hostility toward one another, as soon as we arrive in the Commissioner’s office the two shake hands like old friends.
Like McKenney’s domain, Johnson’s office is a shrine to his greatness. The two workspaces share prominent displays of American flags, desks the size of compact cars, and photographs of luminaries shaking the occupant’s hand. Johnson even manages to one-up McKenney: he’s actually framed his medals and hung them on the wall.
McKenney introduces me to the Commissioner, and then Johnson does the honor of telling me that the short, balding guy with the mustache to his right is John Calimano, the Chief of Detectives, and the tall, wiry African American on his left is Henry Lucian, a police captain.
I nod at each of them, trying to act like being in the company of the highest-ranking officials in New York City law enforcement is something I do on a daily basis. I know better than to say anything, so I stand mute. Fortunately, the others are quiet too, although it creates an eerie silence in the room.
It’s broken a minute later when the door swings open and a small woman, probably near seventy, enters. A step behind her is a handsome man, tall, dark-complexioned, close-cropped black hair, dressed in gray pants and a slightly darker gray shirt. He looks as startled by the VIP guest list as I was when I arrived.
“Everyone, this is Lieutenant Gabriel Velasquez,” Lucian announces. “We can do the handshaking later.”
The District Attorney finally explains why we’ve all assembled here.
“I have some very sad news to report. Lauren Wright, the head of the Special Victims Bureau, was found murdered this morning. Her body was discovered a few blocks from her home, in Central Park. Two gunshots to the head. At close range, we believe.”
The others wear stoic expressions, as if this is merely another crime and not a personal tragedy. They didn’t know Lauren. Not like me, anyway. Then again, few people did. I don’t want to reveal any emotion, however. It’s best to play this like they are and remain calm.
“I was just with them last night,” Detective Velasquez says.
It seems like a non sequitur at first. Then I make the connection: Gabriel Velasquez must be Ella Broden’s boyfriend. I’d heard she was dating the cop who handled the investigation into her sister’s murder, and I remember Richard mentioning last night that they were meeting Ella and her boyfriend for dinner.
One of the cops, the taller, African American guy, Lucian, looks at Gabriel like a priest who’s just heard blasphemy. “What did you say?”
Gabriel quickly explains. “My girlfriend is Ella Broden. She used to work for Lauren Wright, as her deputy. They’re still friends, and last night the four of us . . . Ella, me, Lauren, and her husband, Richard Trofino . . . we all had dinner together.”
“Jesus,” Johnson says.
The Chief of Detectives, Calimano, asks, “What time did you leave the restaurant?”
Gabriel considers this for a moment. “Dinner was at seven, so I imagine we left by nine thirty, nine forty-five.”
“Anything happen at dinner?” McKenney asks.
His tone is sharp. Like he’s cross-examining a hostile witness.
“No, not anything of any consequence. Some marital bickering. Lauren thought her husband was drinking too much. There was some eye-rolling, that kind of thing.”
“How much did he drink?” McKenney asks.
“I honestly wasn’t counting, but he had a scotch before we ordered a bottle of wine. Maybe two, come to think of it. My guess is that he had two glasses of w
ine, and then an after-dinner drink.”
“So, at least five,” McKenney says, as if no one else in the room can do the math.
“Was he drunk?” asks Calimano.
“Not that I could tell. The restaurant was near their apartment. They walked home after dinner, so I wasn’t that focused on his level of inebriation.”
“He could have had a few more pops once they got home,” says Lucian.
“Has anyone spoken to Richard?”
I startle myself with the sound of my own voice. Sometimes when I’m the only woman in a situation—which isn’t infrequent—I end up being merely a spectator.
“The man’s in shock,” Calimano answers. “He’s in Interrogation Two right now. Keeps saying that he didn’t even know his wife wasn’t in bed with him until we called.”
There’s a momentary lull. It’s broken when Lucian asks, “Does Gabriel’s personal connection change anyone’s view that he ride point on this?” He looks over at Calimano for the answer, which reminds me of their ranks—Calimano is the Chief of D’s, Lucian’s boss.
“Your case, your assignment,” Calimano says.
“Thank you, sir,” Lucian says. “I hesitate to say this in his presence, but Gabriel is the best we have. So if there aren’t any other objections, I want him on it.”
The Commissioner nods. All eyes turn to the DA.
“That’s fine by me,” says McKenney. “I’d like Dana to work with him. If it’s not Trofino, the odds are it’s going to be work related. She knows the most about Lauren’s caseload.”
Gabriel makes eye contact with me and smiles. It makes me feel like a teenage girl being spied across the room. I nod but don’t smile back at him.
“What about that?” Johnson says in my direction. “Was there anything out of the ordinary in the department? Threats by defendants, that kind of thing?”
