Sibs

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Okay," Mooney sighed. "But make sure you do it all legal like. Make sure all your paperwork is done. I don't want no harassment calls from this shrink."

  "Right, lieu. But I know you'll be behind me a hundred percent if he does call, right?"

  Mooney tossed the file across the desk.

  "Oh, yeah."

  Rob glanced at his watch. If he hurried his afternoon paper shuffle he could be down by Gates' office in time to start following him again. The guy had to go someplace besides his office and his home.

  ▼

  11:35 P.M.

  "Time to move," Ed thought, but he didn't move.

  He had the jitters now. It was one thing to pull a fast one on a receptionist. It was something else entirely to enter a locked building with a stolen key and rifle through the confidential files of a state licensed physician. We weren't talking fun and games, here. We were talking breaking and entering.

  Ed had already put himself through the man-or-mouse shit and had run the line about A-man's-got-to-do-what-a-man's-got-to-do through his head at least a thousand times by now. It didn't help. But he was going to goddamn do it or never be able to look at himself in the mirror again.

  Taking his coffee with him, he got up from his window seat at the all night Burger King on Twenty-third Street and headed for the door.

  B and E time.

  " He walked down Seventh Avenue. He was still dressed in his overalls, but beneath them he wore khaki slacks and a flannel shirt—in case he had to run and needed a quick change of appearance. He'd left his tool box at home. All the tools he needed were the keys in his right pocket and the flashlight in his left.

  He slowed as he passed Barney's, checking the window displays—he preferred Brooks Brothers—and stopped short of the Kramer building. What if someone spotted him going in, or questioned him? What would he do then?

  First off, he wouldn't worry about it. And if he was stopped, he'd just say he was Dr. Gates and hope whoever it was didn't know the doctor by sight.

  Ed glanced around. No one in sight. He hurried up to the lobby door with the key ready, hoping it was the right one, and thrust it into the lock. It fit. It turned. He pulled it open and scooted inside. He didn't bother with the elevator—that would mean standing where he was visible from the street—but went directly to the stairs. His mouth was dry as sand by the time he reached Dr. Gates' office door. He didn't allow himself to pause and think. He used the second key and opened the door. If anyone was inside he'd say he was part of the cleaning crew and would come back later.

  Dark inside except for the glow from the fishtank and the blip on the computer screen. And quiet. He closed the office door behind him, turned the bolt.

  Made it!

  He felt weak. He had to take a pee. He wanted to turn around and get out of here. But that would have been stupid after coming this far and taking all these risks. No turning back now. He pulled out his flashlight and began his search.

  The reception area he knew from this morning. He went into the consultation room. He dearly would have loved to turn on the lights but he was afraid lighted windows might draw attention from someone on the street. Maybe he was being overly cautious, but he was taking every precaution he could think of.

  Nothing in the consultation room, at least nothing he was looking for. He wanted the files. There was a flush oak door behind the desk. He opened it and was faced with three more doors. The middle turned out to be a small private bathroom.

  Thank God! he thought as he stepped in to relieve his aching bladder. Never should have had that third coffee.

  The room behind the left hand door was lined with file cabinets. And it was windowless. He flipped on the light and pulled on the handle of the nearest drawer. It wouldn't budge. Same with all the others. Every cabinet was locked.

  Ed spent a few moments cursing Dr. Gates with every four-, ten-, and twelve-letter word he knew. He'd never imagined he might run into locked files inside a locked office.

  As he turned to make his way back to the consultation room, he noticed that the third door was standing ajar. He pushed it open and shone his flashbeam inside.

  Another windowless room, only empty. But the walls… they were covered with fabric. Thick fabric. The floors and ceilings too. He stepped inside and checked the inner surface of the door. That was covered too. He touched it. Soft. Then he realized where he was.

  In a padded cell.

  February 21

  12:05 A.M.

  Kara hung up the phone. She was grateful that Rob cared enough to call and check on her, but was uncomfortable with the implication that she needed someone to watch over her. Or was she being too analytical?

  She lay back in bed and waited for the Halcion to work.

  No dreams tonight. Please, no dreams.

  She wasn't up to any sex tonight, real or imagined. Peace, that was all she wanted. And a reasonably normal life, one in which she would feel safe sleeping in the same house as her daughter.

  Actually, she was spending more time than usual with Jill these past five days. And Jill, with the adaptability of a nine year old, had been quite content to go to parks and places like the Museum of Natural History when her mother was around, and watch the VCR when she wasn't. Today Kara had tried to watch a Disney movie with Jill. But it was Freaky Friday, the one in which Jodie Foster switches bodies with her mother. It struck Kara as too much like that damn crazy note. She'd had to leave the room.

  And her book… her book was going nowhere while the deadline kept creeping up. She didn't want to blow this. She was counting on that second payment on the advance. But more than that, she believed in her book, knew it would be an important contribution to the women's movement. If only she could get back to work on it.

  Tomorrow… she'd force herself to work on it tomorrow…

  Right now she felt sleep creeping over her. She blanked her mind and welcomed it.

  ▼

  Rob sat in his car, smoking and sipping Dunkin' Donuts coffee as he watched Gates' townhouse. He was waiting for the lights to go out so he could call it a night.

  Rob had been asking around about Gates. Nobody knew too much about him. Seemed to be a real homebody. Took vacations from his practice but never left town. No social life that anyone knew of. His world seemed to consist of his home and his office, and occasionally a trip to the hospital. Gates could walk to all three: a few blocks downtown on Seventh Avenue and he was at his office. A few blocks further down and he was at St. Vincent's on Eleventh Street in the village. That was his world. Family dead, no friends, no close ties to the medical community. The guy lived in a vacuum.

  Actually, he lived in a Victorian townhouse. Rob knew the type well: four floors and a basement. Once upon a time, before the recent regentrification of Chelsea, he had lived in one of these townhouses, two blocks down on Nineteenth. He had been a rookie then and had been rooming with Tony Morano, a friend from the Academy. But they had shared one of seven apartments in a subdivided building just like Gates'. Two apartments per floor and one in the basement.

  Gates had a whole townhouse to himself. That took bucks. Big bucks.

  Rob flipped the cigarette butt out the window.

  Come on, Lazlo Gati. Lock up your castle and go to bed.

  Just then the front door opened and Gates came down the steps. He started toward Seventh Avenue, just as he had last night. He was heading back to his office.

  Muttering under his breath, Rob started his car and prepared to follow.

  ▼

  Ed flipped the light switch in the padded cell. A fluorescent tube flickered to life behind a metal grille in the ceiling. There was no furniture, just the door, four walls, floor and ceiling, all padded.

  It was the damnedest thing. Whoever heard of a padded cell in a psychiatrist's office? What for? In case someone went berserk during a session? Ed smiled. Maybe it was for after they got the doc's bill.

  Seriously, though, what kind of people did this Dr. Gates treat that
he needed a padded cell?

  And who cared, anyway? This wasn't helping him help Kara.

  As Ed turned to go, he noticed a row of buttons on the inside of the door. He recognized it immediately as an electronic combination lock. Six push-button numbers, and a "Lock" button.

  It struck him as odd that there would be a "Lock" button on the inside. He could see providing a way to let yourself out should you get locked in accidentally, but why would you want to lock yourself in here? Weirder and weirder.

  But again, this wasn't what he had come here for. He turned off the light and returned to the consultation room, making sure to leave the door closed behind him, just as he had found it.

  It was time to get out of here.

  He entered the waiting area and closed the consultation room door behind him. As he started toward the outer door, the glowing blip on the computer screen caught his eye.

  I wonder…

  He slipped behind the desk and looked at the screen. One word glowed in the upper left next to the blinking cursor.

  READY?

  Ed typed in YES and hit the Return key.

  The screen beeped and replied with: CODE?

  Oh, sure. Didn't that figure. Everything else was locked up tight, so why shouldn't Gates have access codes for his computer files.

  For the hell of it, Ed typed in GATES and hit Return. He was rewarded with:

  INELIGIBLE COMMAND

  CODE?

  Ed tried again with LAWRENCE, LARRY, MD, NUTS and made a final stab with SHIT. Each was answered with the same message as the first. He was about to give up when he remembered that reference book in the library, the one used by all shrinks to code their diagnoses. The DSM-III-R. He racked his brain trying to remember the code for Multiple Personality Disorder. He'd read it so many times he could almost picture it in his mind. In fact, he could picture it. And the code number was 300.14. He punched that in.

  The screen beeped and a list of names popped up.

  Now we're cookin!

  He hit the Scroll button and searched for "Wade" as the list of names slid up the screen.

  ▼

  Rob pulled into the curb half a block down from the Kramer building and waited for Gates to catch up. The only way this sort of move could backfire was if Rob had guessed wrong and Gates was not going to his office.

  Nope. There he came. Striding along like he was out for his morning constitutional.

  Crap. Another long night.

  ▼

  Ed was flabbergasted. He hadn't actually counted, but a big part of Gates' practice was diagnosed as Multiple Personality Disorder. All were women, and most were in their twenties and thirties. The books Ed had reviewed had said the disorder was rare. If that was true, Dr. Gates had tapped into a rich vein of multiple personalities.

  But that wasn't all that had disturbed Ed. He had scrolled through Kara's file and then Kelly's. They'd been very similar. That was to be expected, he guessed, what with their being twins with the same disorder, but a number of paragraphs appeared word for word in both files. That bothered him. He picked a few other names at random from the list.

  They all had the same psychiatric history. Classic Multiple Personality Disorder. Their histories were described each time in almost the exact same wording. It was almost as if Dr. Gates were using a computer boilerplate method for his medical charts, the way Ed's legal department used computers to piece together the paragraphs of various contracts.

  The more Ed read, the more he became convinced that the psychiatrist was doing just that.

  And then he heard the key slipping into the lock on the outer door and turning.

  Oh, Jesus!

  Ed slid from the chair and ducked behind the desk, so terrified that he was sure he was going to wet his pants. What was he going to—?

  The flashlight!

  He popped his head up, saw it, grabbed it, and dropped back down just as the lights went on. He crouched there, holding his breath and praying, promising God that he'd start going back to church every Sunday instead of just Christmas, Palm Sunday and Easter as he did now. He was in the middle of promising to receive communion every Sunday for the rest of his life, and trying to think of something else to promise, when whoever it was who had come in walked straight through the waiting area and into the consultation room, closing the door behind him.

  Ed gave him thirty seconds. He watched his Movado count them off one by one, then he rose to his feet and tiptoed to the door. He unlocked it, slipped out into the hall, and eased it closed behind him. He debated half a second about relocking it, then decided to hell with it. He headed for the stairs at a brisk walk. It was all he could do to keep from sprinting.

  ▼

  Rob was slipping into a doze when his beeper went off. "What the hell—?" He got out of the car and went to the booth on the corner. He called the precinct house and learned that Tommy Doyle was looking for him.

  "Been trying to reach you all night, Harris. You on a plant or somethin'?"

  "What is it, Tommy?" Rob said, yawning.

  "The print report you were waiting for on that electric bill came in. They made a match on the third set of prints."

  Rob was suddenly wide awake.

  "Anyone we know?"

  "No name, but it matched the partials they found in the hotel room on that Kelly Wade case you've been hauling around."

  Rob's insides tightened. He thought he had been blowing the threat in the letter out of proportion to keep Kelly's case open. But now there was a direct link to Kelly on the night she died. So maybe this wasn't from a harmless kook. Maybe there was real danger to Kara.

  "Thanks for finding me, Tom. I—damn!"

  Someone in coveralls had just come out of the Kramer building and had taken off down the street at a run. It hadn't been Gates—too short, hair too dark.

  Rob hung up and started after him, but he was already out of sight, up one of the side streets. He was tempted to follow, but that would leave Gates unattended. And Gates was the one he was really interested in.

  Rob returned to his car and settled back with his eyes fixed on the entrance to the Kramer building.

  ▼

  Ed ducked into the first alley he found and shucked his coverall. The February night air cut through his flannel shirt but he didn't care. He wanted to be rid of that thing.

  He hurried up to Sixth Avenue and looked for a bar. A place called Edwin's beckoned from across the street. He hurried over. It was dark and smoky and almost full. Perfect. He ordered a double Absolut on the rocks. They didn't carry Citron, so he told the bartender to squeeze a lime in it.

  Sweet Jesus, what a night!

  Who'd have thought that Gates—he assumed that had been Gates who'd come in—would return to his office after midnight?

  I could have been caught!

  But he hadn't been caught. In and out with no one the wiser. He'd done it. His own Mission Impossible.

  He sipped the drink and wondered what to do with what he had learned. But what had he learned?

  Why would a psychiatrist be manufacturing medical histories for his patients? It didn't make sense, and he didn't know what he could or should do about it. But one thing was for sure: He had to tell Kara. And soon.

  Why not now? She might be asleep, but he had to unburden himself. He had to share what he had done and learned with somebody else. He went to the pay phone and called her.

  Her voice when she answered was cautious but alert.

  "It's me. Ed."

  "Ed?" She almost sounded as if she didn't know who he was.

  "Yes. Look, I know it's late, but I've just come across some really important things that I've got to tell you about."

  "Tonight? Now?"

  "Yes. Can I come over?"

  "I'm very tired, Ed. I don't think—"

  "It's about Dr. Gates."

  There was a long pause on the other end, then:

  "What about Dr. Gates?"

  "I've just learned something abou
t him. I think there's something funny going on."

  "I'd very much like to hear about this, Ed. Where are you?"

  "In a dive on Sixth, but you don't want to come here."

  "Can I meet you someplace convenient for both of us?"