The Girls He Adored elp-1

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Hauling Aletha around was a chore, so once Christopher got her up onto the bed, there she stayed. Even dressing and undressing her took a lot of energy; to save his strength, Christopher slit the outfits he wanted to dress her in up the back (or the front, depending) before putting them on her. He tried to persuade Terry to join in the fun, but it was no use-she was too far gone. Eventually he settled for undressing both women and arranging them en tableaux; the contrast between Aletha's massive, inert brown flesh and Terry's taut quivering pale skin was both aesthetically intriguing and sexually arousing.

  But all good things must come to an end. By daybreak Christopher was sated and Max was bored; then came Kinch's turn.

  Tuckered out and sweaty from the long, eventful night, Max helped himself to a long hot shower followed by a hearty breakfast. The phone rang while he was eating. He answered it in Terry's voice-raised pitch, clenched teeth.

  “ 'Lo?”

  “Oh-hi Terry. This is Mary Ann at El Sausal Middle. I have a fourth-grade teacher out. Does Aletha want to sub today?”

  “She's sick. She has a cold.”

  “Okay, on to the next victim.”

  You said it, sister, thought Max, hanging up the phone. Suddenly he understood that this put a different light on things. With neither woman expected anywhere, the Plymouth hidden safely in the garage, and no reason for anyone to look for him here, he could think of several reasons why he might be better off hiding out for a day or so.

  For one thing, it was already light out-there was a good chance one of the neighbors might see him driving away in the Volvo. For another, if the cops had thrown up roadblocks last night, they'd likely be down by tomorrow night.

  Then there was the necessity for a disguise. A layover would give him time to change his appearance. And though he wasn't sleepy yet, he knew he would be soon: at twenty-eight he could no longer pull all-nighters with impunity. Plus the next part of his plan might prove tricky to execute; surely a good rest now would make for sharper wits later.

  First, though, his hair. “We had ourselves a time, didn't we, girls?” he said to the two women as he passed through the bedroom on his way to the bathroom, where Terry kept her bleach, fixer, and hair coloring.

  No response-not that he'd been expecting one.

  26

  Roadblocks, helicopters, a mustering of off-duty officers in both the Sheriff's Department and the Salinas PD, door-to-door searches of the neighborhood surrounding the courthouse complex, a widely broadcast BOLO (Be On the Lookout For) describing both the fugitive and the Plymouth that had been stolen from the county lot: all for naught so far as the Ripper was concerned. By dawn on Thursday it had become apparent that although all but two of the other escapees had been recaptured, the man who'd sprung them had somehow slipped through the security cordon.

  The manhunt would of course continue-but from here on in the FBI, citing the likelihood that the escaped prisoner was an interstate fugitive, would have jurisdiction over the investigation. Which was fine with Sheriff Bustamante, who hadn't survived three contested elections by personally associating himself with the sort of disaster this business was turning out to be. One citizen disemboweled within sight of Deputy Jervis; Deputies Jervis and Knapp grievously injured, along with the FBI agent Bustamante had personally allowed into the prisoner's cell; Deputy Twombley dead. Worst of all from the standpoint of accountability, there had finally been a mass breakout from the old jail that a Monterey County grand jury had recommended be closed over a year ago.

  By ten o'clock on Thursday morning, the sheriff's deputies at Irene Cogan's front and back doors were replaced by a fully equipped, innocuous-looking FBI surveillance van from San Jose with “Coast Heating amp; Cooling” painted on the side. The FBI's lower profile was appreciated by Irene, who had two patients coming in that day; the presence of armed guards would not have been conducive to the atmosphere of trust and relaxation required for hypnotherapy sessions.

  Her first patient was a middle-aged civil engineer from Santa Cruz who'd awakened in Reno one morning with no idea how he'd gotten there. It was your classic dissociative fugue state, which often involved physical as well as mental and emotional flight (fuga in Latin) from an intolerable set of circumstances.

  In Donald Barber's case, he'd been served with divorce papers while at work. Up to that point a timid gambler and a faithful husband, he left his office without saying a word to his secretary and woke up three days later next to a hooker in a high-roller suite in the Silver Legacy.

  Even more surprising, he was up fifteen thousand dollars. Irene was thinking about using a humorous subtitle-“The Art of the Fugue”-for an article she planned to submit to the Journal of American Clinical Psychology.

  But there was nothing humorous about Irene's afternoon patient. Lily DeVries was a fifteen-year-old girl who'd been unspeakably abused by both parents as a toddler. And unlike most such cases, the abuse was amply documented-photographs of Lily's decade-old sex torture were still turning up on the Internet and in the archives of pedophiles.

  By the time Lily was placed in the custody of her paternal grandparents in Pebble Beach, her personality had long been fragmented-thus far Irene had identified thirty-seven distinct alters. Sessions with Lily were always interesting, if exhausting.

  After hypnotizing the girl, Irene began every session by speaking to Queenie, Lily's host alter. She would then let Queenie help her decide which alters to call up-an unconventional approach. But Irene believed that many therapists did more harm than good to the overly suggestible patients, either implanting false memories with overaggressive hypnotherapy or, like incompetent exorcists, reinforcing malign alters by calling them up too often. Letting the patient's host personality assist her was a way of avoiding those pitfalls.

  The subsequent parade of alters required Irene to be a jack-ofalltrades: some were children, some male, some bipolar, some schizo-affective. Whomever else she “saw” during a particular session, however, Irene tried to end every session by speaking with Lily, the original personality who had been so long buried. She was not always successful-Lily was a shy flower of a three-year-old-but on Thursday afternoon she came out, and for the first time as Lily, relived her earliest memories of abuse directly, without Irene having to resort to the split-screen distancing technique.

  It was a breakthrough for the patient, but the sheer accumulation of horrific detail left the therapist absolutely drained. After the session, Irene called Barbara Klopfman to invite herself to dinner that night for a little gemutlichkeit therapy with the Klopfman family.

  “You'll have to take pot luck-and no shop talk at the table,” Barbara had warned her.

  Small danger of that-as always, Barbara's husband and two teenage sons monopolized the conversation with baseball talk. Apparently the Giants were clinging to first place, a game ahead of a team called the Arizona Diamondbacks-which came as a surprise to Irene, who'd hadn't even known Arizona had a team. But the dinner-pot luck turned out to be pot roast-and the banal sanity of Sam Klopfman and the boys were just what Irene needed.

  After dinner Sam and Irene retired to the front porch while Barbara and the boys did the washing up. The evening fog had drifted in from the bay, blanketing the cozy little seaside town with a soft grayish-pink light. Sam Klopfman, bespectacled and round-bellied as a Teletubby, lit up a twenty-year-old Kaywoodie prime grain imported briar filled with a custom blend of vanilla and rumflavored tobacco from old Mr. Hellam's tobacco shop in Monterey.

  “That smells so good,” said Irene, rummaging in her purse for her cigarettes. “It reminds me of my grandfather.”

  Sam chuckled. “I've found women have a two-stage response to a man's pipe. The first stage, when you're dating, is ‘That smells wonderful.’ The second stage, after you're married, is ‘Not in my house, buster!’ ”

  Instead of her own Benson and Hedges, Irene came up with the pack of Camels she'd bought for the prisoner. Seeing them, she shook her head regretfully. “I still think
I could have helped him,” she said softly.

  “Really?” asked Sam, just to get her started. He was an attorney, but understood as surely as his psychiatrist wife that Irene needed to talk about some of the issues they'd avoided all through dinner.

  “Absolutely.” Irene absentmindedly fired up a Camel, then looked down at it in surprise when the toasty smoke lit up tastebuds long dormant after years of smoking Benson and Hedges Lights. “Maybe not an integration, but at least some fusion.”

  “What's the diff?”

  “Integration involves a complete and final psychic restructuring. Fusion is more of a consolidation-you map the alters, get them all communicating and working together, consolidate some of the subsystems, and with the help of the other alters, teach the more extreme personalities less extreme coping techniques. It's not a dramatic cure like you see in the movies, but as Dr. Caul, one of the pioneers in DID therapy, always said, what you want after treatment is a functional operation, never mind whether it's a big corporation, a limited partnership, or a one-owner business.”

  “So we get a more efficient homicidal maniac?” said Sam. “Swell. Seems to me this guy's functioning better than our sheriff's department already. By the way, let me know if you want to sue the bastards for last night. I'd take it on pro bono just for the fun of deposing old Bustamante.”

  Irene thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “Thanks anyway, Sam-I'd just as soon put this whole business behind me.”

  By Friday morning, it seemed that Irene was a little closer to her goal of putting the incident behind her. When she woke up, the FBI surveillance van outside her house was gone. Special Agent Thomas Pastor, who'd been brought down from the field office in San Francisco to take charge of the botched operation, had come to agree with Bustamante's conclusion that Irene was neither an accomplice nor a potential victim, despite the words Pender had written in his own blood on the floor of the cell. The injured agent's opinions were not currently held in high esteem by the powers-that-be.

  Pastor did, however, call Irene at ten o'clock to make an appointment for an interview later that afternoon. Pastor also asked Irene if she wouldn't mind typing up her case notes for him. Apparently he was unaware that the sessions had been taped-and she had no intention of telling him.

  Irene finished typing her notes into her PC around eleventhirty, but when she attempted to print them out, she discovered the print cartridge on her HP was bone-dry. There wasn't time to pick up another before her jogging date with Barbara, so she drove down to Lovers Point instead of walking, intending to swing by the Office Depot in Sand City after her jog.

  It was another gorgeous day in the Last Home Town. Soon enough the summer fog would be rolling in to blanket the town day and night, but for now it was still beach weather. Irene pulled the red convertible into the Lovers Point parking lot. The obsessively punctual Dr. Klopfman was waiting for Irene down by the seawall.

  Five minutes later, after completing their stretching exercises, Irene and Barbara set off down the jogging trail that wound through the shining lavender-pink iceplant carpeting the long curve of the downtown shoreline park.

  “This always reminds me of the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz,” said Irene. She was wearing an oversize tanktop over white running shorts. Barbara wore dark green shorts and a Friends of the Sea Otters T-shirt.

  “Iceplant is non-native,” said Barbara disapprovingly.

  “It sure is pretty, though.”

  “That I'll grant you. Did you see the paper today?”

  “Nope.”

  “Your boy Max was all over the front page. The FBI thinks he might be a serial killer they've been after for years.”

  “I'm not surprised,” said Irene. “But you know, I still believe what I told Sam last night. There was real promise there. Three of the alters had a genuine sweetness about them-little Lyssy, Christopher, and that poor host-type.”

  “Too bad there's no way to just lock up the evil alters.”

  “Evil? You know as well as I do that evil is no more a psychological concept than good. There's only healthy and unhealthy, and both of those are relative points on a continuum. It's a slippery slope-once you start labeling people with mental disorders as evil, it's like you're saying they don't deserve care or treatment.”

  “Just because something's not a psychological concept doesn't mean it doesn't exist, honey,” replied Barbara, falling in behind Irene as the jogging trail narrowed to a thin track hemmed in on both sides by iceplant.

  A moment later they came upon a sight so pitiful it was almost funny-a blond man in a pink nylon jogging suit and incongruous black wing tips, trying to jog despite a severe case of what appeared to be some form of either palsy or chorea. His feet were splayed, his knees were pressed together, his butt was pooched out, his head was tucked sideways into his right shoulder, his left arm was jammed into the elastic waistband of the pink pants, and his right arm waved feebly in the air, hand flapping like a drag queen's. He stepped, or rather lurched, aside as the two women trotted up behind him, so they wouldn't have to follow his pace until the path widened. They thanked him without turning to look as they jogged by.

  Warmed by the sun, soothed by the sound of the waves, and with a renewed sense of gratitude at being able-bodied, Irene and Barbara jogged beyond Point Pinos, and were feeling the effects by the time they sighted the unfortunate man again on the return trip. He was not far from the point where they'd first seen him, but ten yards off the path, struggling through the ankle-high iceplant, heading toward the road that paralleled the shoreline trail, then falling, or rather sinking, exhausted, into a semi-squatting position as they passed him. Neither woman hesitated; they left the path and waded through the tangled pink groundcover that snatched at their socks and scratched their ankles. Barbara asked him if he needed a hand.

  “Thaaank yeeoo.” His voice was a tortured howl, his head was twisted down and to the side, half buried in his right armpit, and his left hand was still jammed into the elastic waistband, as if to keep it from jerking upward involuntarily. They each took an elbow, helped him to his feet, and walked him the last few yards.

  “Thiiis eeis myeee ca-err,” he said with great difficulty as they reached the green Volvo station wagon parked by the side of the road.

  “You drive?” said Irene in surprise. As soon as the ill-considered words were out of her mouth, she wished she could take them back, but before she could stammer out an apology, he straightened up and turned into Max. The transformation was that sudden, a Siegfried and Roy materialization. One moment Max wasn't there, and the next he was. There should have been a puff of smoke and a fanfare. Instead he drew a snub-nosed revolver from under his waistband and jammed it into Barbara's side.

  “Decision time, ladies,” he said, stepping close to Barbara and angling his body to block the gun from the view of the passersby. “Who wants to live?”.

  27

  “If you touch me there again, you're going to have to marry me. Or at least kiss me.”

  Nurse's aide Rosa Beltran, sponge-bathing the comatose patient in room 375, leaped back from the bed, spilling the basin of warm soapy water over the patient, the bed, and herself. “Muy gracioso,” she said-border slang for “very funny”-and hurried off to fetch the charge nurse, who immediately paged the resident on call.

  “What time is it?” was Pender's first question, as the resident, a Bengali woman half his age, checked his pupils while Rosa remade the bed.

  “One o'clock,” she said in a musical, singsong Indian accent.

  “I hate to ask this, but what day?”

  “Friday-you have been unconscious since Wednesday afternoon. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I just broke the Guinness World Record for hangovers.”

  “I'm not surprised-in addition to the concussion you sustained, it took twenty sutures to close up the scalp lacerations. Fortunately, there is no fracture.”

  “My ex always said I had a thick skull. Ho
w about something for the pain?”

  “Just a few minutes longer, please. The neurologist must examine you first.”

  By now Pender's mind had filled in the remaining memory gaps. “Did they get him?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Casey-did they get him?”

  “You can ask your friend all about that.”

  Pender couldn't tell whether the look the young doctor gave him on her way out of the room was one of pity or compassion. Either would have been appropriate: Special Agent Thomas Pastor, in a bureau-approved blue suit, conservative tie, and well-shined Florsheim wing tips, entered Pender's room wearing an expression that would have been more appropriate in a seafood store-a seafood store with insufficient refrigeration, thought Pender.

  “I just want to get a few things straight for the record,” he informed Pender after introducing himself. “My understanding is that you not only identified yourself as an FBI officer while still in the cell with the prisoner, thereby provoking the prisoner to attack you and resulting not only in the prisoner's escape, but in the death of one deputy, and the severe injury of another-”

  “What are you talking about? I never-”

  Pastor, standing over the bed, pulled out his notebook. “According to Deputy Knapp, you called out to Deputy Twombley to let you out of the cell, that you had everything you needed.”

  “I was already unconscious. It must have been Casey-he's a brilliant impersonator.”

  “I'm sure he is,” said Pastor drily. “It's a moot point anyway. According to Steve Maheu”-Maheu, known to Liaison Support staffers as Steve Too, was Steve McDougal's second in command- ”you weren't even authorized to be in that cell in the first place.”