CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  He turned and began piling snow atop the fur coat, speaking over his shoulder to her, to himself. She didn’t try to stop him anymore.

  “Your home is here, Jane,” he said, hoping he would believe it, too. “With me. We’re only… burying… Zyunsinth. See, you even picked a good tall tree to tell the site by. Maybe—someday—we can come back and… dig it up. When winter’s over and everything’s all right. Someday.”

  He wished he didn’t sound as if he were speaking to a child. God knew she wasn’t that. He wished he didn’t sound as if he were fooling himself. God knew he couldn’t afford to.

  “Come back.” Jane’s eyes lightened. She watched the bag disappear under his tireless hands. “Someday. Yes, I think so. Someday they will come back.”

  He stared at her, inferring her meaning, chilled by the obvious truth of it, frozen for the moment beyond snow and pain.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  He’s our best lead.”

  Turner threw a photograph of a bearded man to the Formica desktop. It was one of those bland, smiling black-and-whites used in professional journals.

  “It’s the woman we want,” Lindahl said, swiveling to study a gray January day. The office window was still dust-streaked with the past autumn’s crop of failing leaves and rain.

  Turner threw another image atop the man’s—the pen- and-ink sketch of an unsmiling female face.

  “We’ve got nothing in her file but this, and some medical reports. Blake’s notes are nonexistent, or hidden or destroyed, though I don’t think he’s—”

  “Smart enough to do it?”

  Turner hesitated and twisted in his chair. Here in the Cities he wore a suit and a warm, inner-lined London Fog. Somehow, after the expedition north and what they had found—and lost—his city slicker garb rubbed him the wrong way.

  “Oh, he’s smart enough,” Turner answered. “Harvard Med School, all those headline-grabbing cases. No, Dr. Blake is smart enough. He just isn’t sneaky enough.”

  “He was sneaky enough to elude you in Duluth and evade your two men on the highway. To… incinerate two more.”

  Turner shook a weary head. “It doesn’t track, Karl. I don’t know the first who, what, why—or even how—on those deaths up there.”

  “We’ve got an all-points out on the van?”

  “Sure. But we can’t alert the locals to our interest, so it’s just a phony moving violation offense we pumped into the computers. If the cops see it, they’ll stop it. If they’re looking hard enough. No, our best bet is still the people, not the vehicle.”

  Lindahl spun back, all bureaucratic melodrama, to face Turner. “Find them. Washington wants them bad.”

  “Washington.” Turner came as close to swearing as he allowed himself. “Why? All we’ve got here is a rogue shrink and his patient on the run—and some rumored psi abilities that may not pan out. Why the federal case?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to not know.”

  “Okay. Fine. Pull all that upper-level clearance…”

  If he’d been about to say “crap,” he didn’t give Lindahl the satisfaction.

  “… mumbo-jumbo on me. You know those security levels exist mainly to give a bunch of bureaucrats a sense of self-importance. You spy guys would be nowhere without domestic operatives like me who know our turf. But I want bloodhounds on this one; the trail’s too broad and too cold. You can’t expect me to hunt blind.”

  “Sure I can,” Lindahl said. “But what do you have in mind?”

  “You ever see an old Hitchcock movie, To Catch a Thief?”

  “Sure… I get it—”

  “To catch a shrink, use a shrink to find him.”

  Lindahl picked up the industrial-strength stapler on his desk. “You’re thinking of Nordstrom.”

  Turner nodded.

  “He’s been… useful, but—”

  “He’s a…”—Turner mentally deleted an expletive; it was a game he played, avoiding the obvious—“a cold fish,” he finished forcefully. “But we can use him.”

  “I wish we had more on her.” Lindahl indicated the sketch.

  “We will.” Turner rose and pulled his all-weather coat off the rack. “When we get him.”

  Lindahl’s fist hit the empty stapler hard—a gesture all sound and frustration connecting nothing.

  Outside, Turner paused to examine Fourth Street traffic. A day as innocuously gray as the granite five-story federal building itself swathed downtown Minneapolis. Two blocks down the street loomed the Victorian bulk of the Hennepin County Courthouse, its copper-roofed turrets poking green spearheads into the ragged winter clouds.

  Dirty snowbanks hunched along the hidden curbs, thrown there by city plows after every snowfall worth calling that. Passersby minced along the icy sidewalks, heads lowered to shelter their faces from the chapping wind.

  Turner kept his head erect as he walked to the dingy parking garage where his government-issue car sat on an upper level brutally open to the wind. It would be cold, but he was used to this godforsaken climate.

  Vaguely distasteful assignments, like tracking naive psychiatrists and their patients, were nothing new, either.

  Neither were distasteful deaths. Before this case was over, there would probably be more of them, Turner told himself.

  Monica Chapman shifted slightly on the austere black leather psychoanalyst’s couch, trying to pull her Perry Ellis wool skirt wrinkle-free beneath her.

  She heard the tap of his Mark Cross pen against the spiral binding of his leatherbound yellow legal pad and froze. He watched everything. And he always occupied the traditional Freudian position behind her. Out of sight. Invisible but all-seeing. Like God.

  Monica Chapman had long since stopped believing in God. Instead, she believed in—feared—her psychiatrist. (“For I am a jealous god and you will put no graven images before me.”)

  “You’re fidgeting, Monica. A bad sign. Are you considering lying to me again?” His disembodied voice was low, resonant, baritone enough for a disc jockey and oily enough for a spa salesman.

  She kept her eyes on all she could see from her supine point of view, on all he let her—or any other patient—see.

  There was a wall of soberly framed degrees attesting to his credentials in semi-illegible hand-lettering; bookcases furnished in suites of identically bound volumes, so they seemed linked in some unreadable conspiracy of disinformation; the expensive German tape recording system with its showy, slow-motion oversized reels, so the patient was exquisitely aware of every word being engraved in its original tone for instant replay, again and again.

  Why, why was she here? Why did it seem so impossible not to be here? The thoughts sank into a familiar track like a needle into an LP groove. Monica hardly felt the pain now, although she knew it must hurt—somewhere. She forced herself to look at things again, not thoughts. Things.

  There was one framed photograph on the wall—black and white—of a ballerina. Gelsey Kirkland in Swan Lake, Monica thought, although she had never asked and he had never said. Frozen, the tulle-dolloped figure looked brittle and puppetlike, not human at all. Monica ruminated on the fact that Degas, the exquisite chronicler of the danseuse’s fragile ultrafeminine beauty, had hated women.

  “You always fixate on my little dancer, Monica, why?”

  “She’s…” Afraid to irritate him, Monica lied, knowing it even as the word left her lips. “…beautiful.”

  “Yes. And you’re envious.”

  Her long body in the designer suit jolted on the couch as if electroshocked ever so slightly. In the ensuing pause, Monica read his satisfaction at striking a nerve so soon in session. She would have glanced at the slim gold watch on her equally slim wristbone, but knew from experience that any sign of restiveness irritated him, made him… more demanding.

  “I’m not envious—” she began.

  “Of course you are. You know your self-hatred manifests itself in your drive to succeed in your career. And the more su
ccessful you are, the more you loathe yourself. And then you gorge—secretly, in your chic, narrow esophagus of an alley kitchen with all those stainless steel gadgets.

  “Such things you gorge on, dear Monica, so tacky. Fish and chips, ice cream by the half gallon—and not even ice cream from some SoHo specialty shop, but common supermarket lard. You make quite a pig of yourself, Monica, in that high-rent apartment of yours. And then you come to me. For absolution.”

  She writhed under his expertly applied words, and ran her fingers nervously under the Perry Ellis waistband. Size six and already loosening… It wasn’t fair! She tried and tried until she was so tired and confused, until only an act of excess here, another there, would calm her, would ease the eternal inner ache.

  “I won’t describe how disgustingly you neutralize your excesses,” he continued. “You would have made a fine Roman empress, Monica, purple-draped like some mountain grape, lying on your cushioned couch, waiting to have whole banquets delivered by some slave’s hand to your lascivious little mouth. Pheasant… gravies by the tureen… rich, thick puddings from ewers, all down, down your ravenous aristocratic maw. Then would follow the stately withdrawal to the vomitorium, where another slave would tickle your throat with the feather of a fresh-slaughtered emu and yet another slave would hold the golden bowl while you—”

  “No, please!” Her throat was dry, raw, as if she’d been retching for hours.

  “Instead you have your career and your privacy. Such has modern-day culture brought us. You have a white porcelain bowl to embrace—oh, pardon; I believe you told me your master bathroom has maroon fixtures. How decadent, Monica. How Roman of you.”

  “It’s a disease,” she said anxiously. “Bulimia is a disease.”

  “A most fashionable disease.”

  “And maybe I… retch… because of what my father and brothers did to me. I used to… throw up… every time, when they were done with me.”

  “But you stayed at home until you were eighteen. Why, Monica? You could have left, unless you had learned to like it.”

  “No!” But the accusation, like thousands of accusations rendered before: You always… you must… you need… you asked for it, drummed into her head until the voices echoed there of their own volition, accusing, accusing, until she would have crawled over shattered Baccarat to silence them. “No one would have wanted me,” she muttered, “helped me.”

  “But I’m here now. To help you. You know you depend on me now. Monica, stand up.”

  She stiffened.

  “I want to look at you.”

  “I haven’t cheated! I didn’t gorge all last week, honest, I didn’t—well, only once, maybe, and then only on half a bag of Pecan Sandies. Please, Doctor, please.”

  “I must see you. Stand up. Now!”

  Her slim calves slid together off the couch. Charles Jourdan heels hit the Berber carpeting in unison. Monica faced the windows now. Through the stiletto fence of open vertical blinds upper Manhattan drifted on the gray residue of a January afternoon.

  She stood without making him say it again. It always took her breath away, facing him for the first time after the ceremony of the couch. He was such a little man, in his gray Brooks Brothers suit, gray like the day. He always seemed so much bigger than he looked.

  Now he looked at her, through the rimless spectacles, studying her designer ensemble with perfect appreciation, although he himself could have been mistaken for an expensively clad ragpicker on the street. He had no style.

  Monica didn’t know what he saw, through those watery eyes of no color, through those thick glasses that refracted his expression into blank judgment. She had no image of herself at all. Except naked.

  “No,” she begged, her hands beginning to shake.

  “Have you gained weight this week, Monica, is that it?”

  “No!” she denied, telling the truth, the truth at last, as she could still glimpse it. She frowned her sudden confusion. “And I’m supposed to gain weight—the doctors say so.”

  “But you never do what you’re supposed to.” His voice, so in control, lowered and began to shake itself, with anger. “Take your clothes off, you silly cow, so I can see what a pig you’ve made of yourself.”

  “Can you… draw the blinds?”

  “This is the fifty-ninth floor, Monica,” he jeered openly, his voice lashing her, joining the voices in her head bursting into a chant of abuse. “No one can see you. No one would want to see you. Except me. Strip, you stupid bitch!”

  Her hands jerked to the buttons of her jacket, her blouse. The supple, hundred-percent natural fabrics separated from each other with luxurious ease. Monica Chapman had not had a lover since… oh, years before, when she had thought “normal” was still something that could be bought like candy, or pursued like a degree, or earned like a promotion, or deserved like love.

  All she had now was this, her psychiatrist, sitting there clothed and powerful, forcing her in ways even her brothers had not thought of. A dull spark of resistance flared from time to time in her brain, but the chorus in her head surged into a baroque mass of denial, and her own lone soprano always joined their blistering rhapsody of denigration.

  “You love it,” her psychiatrist said now, his baritone blending with the plainsong of her psyche. “Secret shame and guilt, my shabby empress, are your kingdom.”

  Her clothing lay at her feet, the peach silk French lingerie petaling around her ankles with her expensive panty hose.

  If he had looked at her with lust, even the most cartoonish leer, it wouldn’t have been so bad. His eyes held only contempt.

  He got up and walked to his desk where the cold white daylight fell. The huge mahogany expanse was topped by a half-inch slab of crystal that shone green along the edge.

  He swept the few items atop the desk aside and gestured to its glittering empty surface, so like his eyes. “Come here. I want to play the Game today.”

  She shivered, a painfully thin naked woman with painfully naked eyes.

  “It’s so cold,” she protested, one last excuse for a life that itself seemed to have no excuse.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he promised carelessly. “Haven’t I proved again and again that you can get used to anything?”

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  They slept beside each other fully dressed, like Hansel and Gretel in the woods.

  Maybe part of that was Kevin’s fear that they might have to move fast, have to flee the dinky motel outside the dinky town on the badly plowed county road.

  Maybe it was part shyness, the awkwardness of the new selves he and Jane presented each other, dressed so atypically.

  Maybe it was partly that they’d holed up so early, at five P.M.

  Most of it was the cold. Despite the heating unit’s hissing bravado, nothing much resembling warmth seeped across the mean indoor-outdoor carpeting to the old-fashioned double bed they lay in.

  Jane had pressed herself into Kevin, showing a new dependence since the loss of Zyunsinth. He couldn’t complain. Who, he had often thought, wants to compete with a satin-lined length of dead mammal skins?

  He held Jane’s sleeping form, feeling her breath collect against his chest and gradually swathe his naked throat with welcome warmth, and told himself that this was the woman he loved. She was and he did, but it wasn’t as simple as that, if it had ever been as simple as that.

  Why her? Why him? Why couldn’t they be back at the University of Minnesota Hospitals, in his homely little office, playing doctor and patient, shrink and shrinkee? The campus would look desolate now, on the dirty selvage edge of winter, but students would bustle between the lordly buildings and cars would spatter down Sixteenth Avenue and the ice-caught river would look like a faraway road through the stark trees…

  Bridget would brew her morning coffee strong for the Probe crew, then spike it with the Irish tease in her voice when Kevin passed her desk. Norbert Cross would hem and haw and crack the whip at the daily meetings, and Roger M
atthews would evade and Carolyn Swanson would be her priggish, academic self and, God, he missed the security of everything he had once felt so free to despise…

  Jane burrowed against him, murmured.

  “How can I love you?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t know you. You have no history; you don’t even have a pretense of personality. You’re an enigma, an empty slate, an experimental memory blank—”

  She murmured again in her sleep. For lost Zyunsinth? Kevin clutched her closer. Jane murmuring, Jane burrowing, Jane acting downright human. Was that what he wanted, wanted to love? Was that Jane, even? He didn’t know.

  No bedside clock, not even a phone occupied the nightstand. Kevin had never traveled in such shabby circles, had never shorn himself so free of normal society. If he shifted to pull up his wrist and read the time on his solid gold Swiss watch—talk about something telltale he should have buried with Zyunsinth—he might wake Jane.

  While he debated, she woke anyway.

  There was no preliminary, no words, just her fingers pushing his clothes aside searching for his skin, her warm lips seeking the chill of his. Desire flared so suddenly that they both grappled like desperate teenagers overcoming a bundling board, exposing each other to the cold in inches.

  Another man might have wondered if she’d been dreaming and wakened to take him in someone else’s stead. Kevin had the luxury of knowing he was the first and only man to love her, for all her hungry skill. That ironclad certainty alone made a potent aphrodisiac, a love potion, even in an icy motel room in Waukenabo, Minnesota.

  Kevin needed it. For him, making love with Jane usually evolved into a ménage à trois, the everpresent ghost of his guilt joining in. Kevin had always been an ethically vainglorious shrink; he despised doctors who, sworn to help, exploited a patient’s vulnerability.

  That Jane was not victim, but partner; that he had fallen victim to love, not lust—the love he had admitted to a distraught Jane on the incriminating tape Dr. Cross had held over him—made it even worse. The only thing that pains a shrink more than being caught with your professional pants down is being nailed with your own renegade emotions in plain view.