The Girls He Adored elp-1

by Jonathan Nasaw

  The Girls He Adored

  ( E. L. Pender - 1 )

  Jonathan Nasaw

  Jonathan Nasaw

  The Girls He Adored

  1

  “I'll save you some time,” said the prisoner, shuffling into the interview room in his orange jumpsuit, fettered and manacled, wrists cuffed to a padlocked belt around his waist, and a scowling sheriff's deputy at his elbow. “I'm oriented times three, my thought processes are clear, and my mood and affect are appropriate to my circumstances.”

  “I see you're familiar with the drill.” The psychiatrist, a slender blond woman in her early forties, looked up from behind a metal desk bare except for a Dictaphone, a notepad, and a manila folder. “Have a seat.”

  “Any chance of getting these things off?” The prisoner rattled his fetters dramatically. Slight, an inch or so below medium height, he appeared to be in his late twenties.

  The psychiatrist glanced up at the deputy, who shook his head. “Not if you want me to leave you alone with him.”

  “I do, for now,” said the psychiatrist. “He may need a hand free later for some of the standardized tests.”

  “I'll have to be here for that. Just pick up the phone when you're ready.” A black telephone was mounted on the wall behind the psychiatrist. Beside it was an inconspicuous alarm button; an identical button was concealed on the psychiatrist's side of the desk. “And you, siddown.”

  The prisoner shrugged and lowered himself into the unpadded wooden chair, tugging with manacled hands at the crotch of his jumpsuit, as if it had ridden up on him. His heart-shaped face was just this side of pretty, with long-lashed eyes and lips like a Botticelli angel. He seemed to be bothered by a lock of nut brown hair that had fallen boyishly across his forehead and over one eye, so as the guard left the room, the psychiatrist reached across the desk and brushed it back for him with her fingers.

  “Thank you,” said the prisoner, looking up at her through lowered eyelids. The glitter of mischievous, self-satisfied amusement had faded from his gold-flecked brown eyes-but only for a moment. “I appreciate the gesture. Are you a defense whore or a prosecution whore?”

  “Neither.” The psychiatrist ignored the insult. Testing behavior, she told herself. He was trying to control their interaction by provoking an aggressive response.

  “Come on, which is it? Either my lawyer hired you to say I'm insane, or the DA hired you to say I'm not. Or were you appointed by the court to see if I'm fit to stand trial? If so, let me assure you that I am perfectly capable of understanding the charges against me and assisting in my own defense. Those are the criteria, are they not?”

  “More or less.”

  “You still haven't answered my question. I'll rephrase it if you'd like. Have you been hired by the defense, the prosecution, or the court?”

  “Would it make a difference in how you respond to my questions?”

  The prisoner's demeanor changed dramatically. He lowered his shoulders, arched his neck, cocked his head to the side, and formed his next words carefully, almost primly, at the front of his mouth, speaking with just a trace of a lisp. “ Would it make a dif-fer-ence in how you respond to my questy-ons?”

  It was a remarkably effective imitation of her own bearing and manner of speaking, the psychiatrist realized. He had her nailed, right down to the hint of sibilence that was, after years of speech therapy, all that remained of a once ferocious, sputtering, Daffy Duck of a speech impediment. But the parody was more affectionate than cruel, as if he'd known and liked her for years.

  “Of course it would,” he went on in his own voice. “Don't be disingenuous.”

  “I suppose you're right.” The psychiatrist sat back in her chair, trying to maintain a professional demeanor despite the hot blush blooming in her cheeks. “That was an excellent imitation, by the way.”

  “Thank you!” Jail garb, fetters, and circumstances notwithstanding, the prisoner's grin lit up the bare room. “Want to see my Jack Nicholson?”

  “Perhaps some other time,” she replied, sounding to her annoyance every bit as prim as his imitation of her. She caught herself touching the top few buttons of her beige blouse with fluttering fingertips, like a schoolgirl who'd noticed her date glancing surreptitiously at her chest. “We have quite a bit of work ahead of us today.”

  “Oh! Well then, by all means, let's get on with it.” The prisoner flapped his manacled wrists, as if he were shooing pigeons away; his chains rattled musically.

  “Thank you.” She leaned forward and pressed the power button on the voice-activated Dictaphone. “I'm Dr. Cogan, by the way.”

  The psychiatrist had been hoping he would respond in kind- thus far the prisoner had refused to give his name to the authorities. But all she got from him was a cheerful “Pleased to meetcha,” and a cavalier, if truncated, wave of his cuffed right hand.

  She tried again, more directly. “And your name is…?”

  “Call me Max.”

  “I notice you haven't quite answered my question.”

  “I notice you haven't quite answered mine. Who hired you?”

  She'd been hoping he'd let it drop; now she had to answer, or risk losing his cooperation. “The court, indirectly: I was hired by a firm that contracts its services to the county.”

  He nodded, as if she'd confirmed something he already knew. She waited a moment, then prompted him. “And your name?”

  “Like I said, call me Max.” He looked up. Really, that's the best I can do, said his embarrassed grin; I win, said his eyes.

  The psychiatrist moved on. “Nice to meet you, Max. As you're probably aware, we have some standard tests we need to get through-”

  “MMPI, Rorschach, thematic apperception, maybe a sentence completion if you're really trying to pad your hours-”

  “-but first let's just chat for a few minutes.”

  “By chat, if you mean conduct a clinical interview, beginning with a question to be asked in an open-ended manner and designed to elicit the patient's own perception of the problem”- he had to stop for a breath-“or difficulty that has led him or her to seek treatment, let me save you some time: My diagnosis is dissociative amnesia, possibly a dissociative fugue state.”

  Then you're not really oriented times three, are you? thought Dr. Cogan, breaking off eye contact to look through the manila folder. “I'm curious, Max. You seem to be quite familiar with psychiatric terms and procedures. Might you have worked in the mental health field?”

  “Might have.” Then, thoughtfully: “Of course, I also might have been a patient in a locked facility. I mean, considering the circumstances under which I was found.”

  “That sounds like a good place to start. Tell me about the circumstances under which you were found.”

  “Well, Dr. Cogan, it's like this.” The prisoner leaned forward in his chair. His breathing had grown shallower, and the glitter in his eyes was darker and more pronounced. The psychiatrist had the impression that for the first time since he'd entered the room, his interest was fully engaged. “The first thing I remember is finding myself sitting in a car next to the body of a young woman who had recently been disemboweled.”

  Disemboweled. It struck Irene Cogan as odd how one simple word could be so much more evocative than a three-page coroner's report describing in clinical detail “a semicircular ventral incision beginning one and a half centimeters above the right iliac crest, extending downward to three centimeters above the pubic symphysis, then describing an upward arc to the top of the left iliac crest, with resulting extrusion of both large and small bowel…”

  She looked up from the manila folder. The prisoner was waiting for her next question with an eager grin, his gold-flecked eyes shining, looking for all
the world like a man enjoying a terrific first date. Momentarily jarred out of her professional detachment, Dr. Cogan switched onto automatic pilot, lobbing one of the interviewee's last words back at him in lieu of a real question. “Recently? How recently?”

  The prisoner shrugged easily-or as easily as the fetters would allow. “I dunno, thirty, forty seconds. She was still sitting up.”

  2

  The Bureau liked its agents to be young and fit, to wear conservative suits, and to carry regulation weapons in over-the-kidney holsters. At fifty-five, Special Agent E. L. Pender was two years from mandatory retirement, overweight and out of shape, and beneath a plaid sport coat his boss had once described as being loud enough to spook a blind horse, he carried a SIG Sauer P226 9mm semiautomatic in a soft calfskin shoulder holster.

  “Enjoy your stay in San Jose, Agent Pender,” said the young flight attendant, giving him the obligatory doorway send-off. What with all the forms that had to be filled out in order to carry a weapon on a commercial flight, it was impossible for an armed FBI agent to travel incognito these days. “Thank you for flying United.”

  “Thank you, dear.” Pender tipped his trademark hat, a narrowbrimmed green-and-black houndstooth check with a tiny feather stuck into the band. Beneath it, he was bald as a melon. “You know, the time was when I'd have asked a pretty gal such as yourself for her phone number.”

  “I'll bet.” The stewardess smiled politely.

  “Would I have gotten it?”

  The smile never wavered. “My parents didn't let me date much when I was seven, Agent Pender.”

  Pender's luck wasn't much better at the rent-a-car counter. The clerk knew nothing about the midsize sedan that was to have been reserved for him, so he was forced to squeeze his six-four, twohundredand-fifty-pound frame behind the wheel of a Toyota Corolla.

  At least the car had AC and a respectable sound system. Pender set the temperature control to blue and the volume control to high, found an oldies station on the FM band, and sang along in a sweet, surprisingly soulful tenor as he drove. A full hour passed before they played a song to which he didn't know all the words.

  Strictly speaking, from the standpoint of professional courtesy, Pender should have notified the local FBI resident agency before showing up in Salinas to interview a murder suspect currently being held in the county jail. But according to the grapevine, the RA's collective nose was still out of joint from the previous summer, when the bureau had brought down agents from the San Francisco field office to take over a high-profile kidnapping investigation-they wouldn't be likely to welcome an interloper like Pender with open arms.

  Also strictly speaking, Pender should have checked in immediately with the Monterey County Sheriff's Department. But before he requested an interview with the prisoner, he first wanted to speak to the arresting officer, and local cops tended to be overly protective of their own.

  According to Pender's information, obtained for him by one of Liaison Support's overworked clerks, Deputy Terry Jervis lived in a town called Prunedale. They'd had a few chuckles over that back in Washington. “Prunedale, home of regular folks,” and so on.

  He found the place without any difficulty-one thing about working for the government, you could always get hold of a decent map. The house was a small, well-tended ranch with sprayedstucco walls and a few rounded arches thrown in so they could call it mission style, perched on a hillside in the sort of semirural neighborhood where half the houses were trailers, and half the trailers were probably meth labs. A spindly lemon tree was tied to a stake in the middle of a rocky but carefully trimmed front lawn; tidy flower beds lined the short walk from the driveway to the front door.

  Pender rang the bell, then backed down from the low doorstep so his height wouldn't be intimidating. The woman who opened the door as far as the chain permitted was black, solid, broad in the beam, and low to the ground. It occurred to Pender that this might be Jervis-she had a cop's wide ass, and the arrest report hadn't been gender-specific.

  “Yes?”

  “Special Agent Pender, FBI. I'm here to see Deputy Jervis.”

  “Terry's resting. Could I see your shield, please?”

  If not the cop, then the cop's wife-only a cop's wife would say “shield” instead of “badge.” Pender tinned her, flipping his wallet open to show her his old Department of Justice badge with the eagle on the top and the blindfolded figure in the pageboy haircut holding the scales of justice in one hand and a sword in the other.

  “You have a photo ID?”

  “Here you go.”

  She glanced from the picture on the laminated card to his face and back again, then closed the door. The chain rattled; the door opened wider. “Come on in.”

  Pender took off his hat as he stepped through the doorway. “Thank you, Mrs. Jervis.”

  The woman frowned. “I'm Aletha Winkle.”

  Pender winced exaggeratedly. “Sorry. That's my job-stumbling to conclusions.”

  She ignored the apology. “Hey, Terry,” she called over her shoulder. “There's an FBI man here to see you.”

  The response was a muffled “Okay.” Pender followed Winkle down a short hallway, past a small living room furnished largely in wicker, and into a white-and-pink bedroom-everything from the bedclothes to the bureau, the rug to the ceiling fixture, was either white or pink.

  Pender froze in the doorway-the pale woman sitting up in bed was pointing a semiautomatic pistol at his midsection. He threw up his hands. “FBI-take it easy there, Deputy.”

  “Sorry,” Terry Jervis hissed through clenched teeth, lowering the gun. “They tell me the guy was making threats-we were worried he might send somebody to carry them out.”

  Deputy Jervis had spiked blond hair and washed-out blue eyes. The lower half of her face was heavily bandaged, and her jaw was wired shut. Her pajamas were pin-striped, black on pink.

  “I understand.” Pender lowered his hands. “Does it hurt to talk?”

  “Some.”

  “I apologize in advance-I wouldn't be here if it weren't important. I'd be grateful for anything you can tell me.”

  “This is where I get off,” said Aletha Winkle. “Call me if you need me, honey.” She stooped, plumped the smaller woman's pillows, kissed her high on the forehead. On her way out of the room she waggled her forefinger in Pender's direction. “Don't you tire her out, now!”

  “Scout's honor,” replied Pender.

  Jervis smiled weakly. “Aletha's a little overprotective.”

  “I noticed-and God bless her for it.” In Pender's experience, some lesbians, like most minorities, tended to regard even a pleasantly neutral tone as barely disguised disapproval. But Pender was a proponent of what was known as the affective interview, so he made sure to add an extra dollop of warmth to his voice as he returned the grin.

  “Take a load off.” Deputy Jervis pointed to the small, pinkcushioned chair in front of the pink-and-white mirrored vanity, then set the pistol down carefully on the bedside table, next to a framed photo of herself and Winkle, posed in front of the house with their arms around each other's waists. It had probably been taken on the day they moved in-a yellow Drive-Yr-Self moving van was parked next to a green Volvo station wagon in the driveway.

  “You really need that?” asked Pender, nodding toward the gun. He knew the model well-Glock. 40s were now standard issue for recruits at the FBI Academy.

  Jervis nodded sheepishly. “I know it's dumb, I know he's behind bars, but he's still got me spooked. If you never saw the fucker, then you can't imagine how fast the fucker can move.”

  “Probably not.” Pender picked up the delicate-looking chair, positioned it a few feet from the side of the bed at a forty-fivedegree angle-the recommended interviewing position-and sat down carefully with his hat in his lap.

  “Have your people found out anything more about the son of a bitch?”

  Pender shook his head. “Dead end. He wasn't carrying any ID- no wallet, just a roll of cash-and it was the vic
tim's car. His prints are a mess, old grafts on the interior surfaces of both hands. No matches so far-the lab's working on a reconstruction.” Pender scraped his chair a little closer to the bed-a signal to the interviewee that it was time to get down to business. “Tell me about the bust-how'd you take him down?”

  “Routine traffic stop. Eastbound maroon Chevy Celebrity with California plates rolls through a red on Highway Sixty-eight, near Laguna Seca. Male driver, female passenger. I hit the lights, he hits the gas. I call in the pursuit; he pulls over a few seconds later. As I'm approaching the vehicle, I see the driver leaning over toward the female passenger-I figure he's fastening her seat belt for her. Then he turns toward me, big smile, what's the problem officer? At this point I haven't even unsnapped my holster. Routine traffic violation, maybe a warning on the seat belt.

  “But when I look in, I see this blond girl, couldn't have been more than eighteen, she's sitting straight up holding her stomach with both hands. She's wearing a white sweater that looks like it's dyed in overlapping bands of red at the bottom, and she has the strangest expression on her face. Just, you know, puzzled — I'll never forget that expression. I ask her if she's okay, she lifts up her sweater with both hands, and her guts spill out onto her lap.”

  Jervis closed her eyes, as if to shut out the memory. Pender wouldn't let her. “What happened next?”

  “He has the knife in his left hand-before I can react he brings it up so fast and hits me so hard I thought he shot me at first. It was like my mouth exploded-I'm falling backward, spitting out blood and teeth, trying to draw my weapon. He's on top of me before I hit the ground. I can't get my weapon out, but I'm hanging onto the holster for dear life.”

  Jervis winced again; her hand went to her jaw. “That's all I remember-they tell me he was trying to yank my belt off when the backup unit pulled up, and I was holding onto the holster so hard they had to pry my hands away.”