The Girls He Adored (10 page)

Shaking his head sadly—the place was a disaster waiting to happen—Pender reentered the west wing of the courthouse and took the elevator up to the snack bar on the second floor.

There was an embarrassing delay at the cash register—it took Pender a moment to realize that the cashier was stone blind.

“I have a tuna fish sandwich and a cup of coffee,” he said, handing the man a five-dollar bill. Another pause. “It's a five.”

“You must be from back east,” said the cashier as he made change.

“Upstate New York,” replied Pender, wondering how many customers in the course of a day handed the man a single and told him it was a five—or a ten, or a twenty. “How could you tell?”

“You said tuna
fish.
Out here, we just assume if it's a tuna, it's a fish.”

Pender sat alone at a corner table. He felt surprisingly calm, for a man who was preparing himself to be locked into a cell with a murderer. It had been years since Pender had conducted an undercover interview—as he sipped at his black coffee, looking out over the pleasant courtyard, he mulled over his approach.

It would be best, he knew, if the subject initiated a conversation. If not, Pender planned to start out either by bitching about his lawyer—every con in every cell in America had a beef with his attorney—or by talking about his travels: nothing suspicious in chatting about places you'd been to. He'd drop a lot of place names, sprinkling in mentions of one or two relevant towns— Plano, Texas; Sandusky, Ohio; San Antonio, where the knife had been purchased—and seeing if any of those elicited a response.

Once he had the subject at ease, Pender planned to work the conversation around to sex, admit to a rape or a little rough stuff himself, and see if he couldn't draw the man out. He wouldn't be expecting a confession at this point, or much in the way of
specifics, but a good round of jailhouse bragging could be remarkably instructive, and Casey, if it were Casey, might well drop an incriminating detail here or there.

Suddenly it occurred to Pender that he hadn't prepared himself for the interview as thoroughly as he might have, that he'd failed to interview the one person who'd had more contact with the subject than anyone since the unfortunate Refugio Cortes: the psychiatrist who'd been evaluating him.

But how to contact her? He didn't even know her name. He moved his chair closer to the window—Pender never really trusted cell phones—and called Lieutenant Gonzalez, who was not in his office. He had Gonzalez's voice mail kick him back out to the operator, who connected him with Visitor Reception at the jail on Natividad Road.

“This is Special Agent Pender of the FBI. I'm trying to find out the name of the psychiatrist who visited—” He started to say Casey, but stopped himself. “your John Doe—prisoner number . . .” He flipped open his notebook and read it off.

“I'm sorry, I can't give out that information over the telephone,” replied the female deputy who'd answered. Then, to Pender's surprise, as he was gearing up for a little bluff and bluster: “But according to the log, she's inside interviewing the prisoner. She'll have to log out when she's done—I could give her your number and ask her to call you.”

“Ohhhhkey-doke.” Though not a superstitious man, Pender had learned from experience that luck, bad or good, came in waves—perhaps he'd caught a good one.

“A
LL RIGHT,
sweetheart, we're going back further. It's your birthday again—do you have a cake?”

They were ten minutes into the age regression. The hypnosis had gone smoothly—like most multiples, Max/Christopher had proved eminently suggestible. After a short relaxation technique (not easy, with the prisoner seated, fettered and manacled, in a cold, relatively bare, brightly lit room with nothing but hard surfaces and right angles—but she pulled it off), Irene had him concentrate on a black dot she'd drawn on a sheet of blank notepaper, explained in a calm, low-pitched voice that he was getting sleepier and his eyelids heavier, and sent him to his safest place. She'd then implanted a code word to use as a cue for waking him up. That was pretty much all it took—Hypnosis 101, no bells, no whistles.

When he was deeply under, she began regressing him, walking him backward through his birthdays. When she reached five she observed his eyes rolling upward beneath the closed, fluttering lids—it was his first switch of the session.

“Choc'lit cake. Choc'lit icing. I like choc'lit.” His voice was chirpy, his body language fidgety.

“Does it have candles?”

“A course—it's a
birthday
cake, you silly.”

“Can you count the candles?”

“Five candles, one two three four five.”

“Can you read the writing?”

“My name—that's my name—Lyssy, el why ess ess why.”

“Happy birthday, Lyssy. Five years old, isn't that something. Did you open your presents yet?”

“After the cake—doncha know you can't open presents until after the cake?”

“How about your presents from your mommy and daddy?”

“I got a two-wheeler. In my room when I woke up in the morning. It's a red Schwinn, just like Walter cross the street, only red. Daddy said I was way too old for my Big Wheels. And no training wheels—Daddy says only, you know,
sissies
use training wheels.”

“Tell me about your mommy and daddy. Do they ever do things you don't like? Hurt you or touch you?” Leading question, right on the border of suggestion. But Irene's time with the patient was limited, this was diagnosis, not treatment, and every verified DID patient in the literature had a history of early, horrendous abuse— not just your passing pat on the fanny, but really egregious stuff.

“Daddy sometimes—but maybe I was dreaming. Mommy says I only dream it.”

“Dream what? Tell me about one of the times Daddy did something and Mommy said it was a dream.”

“Okay, the first time I was all tucked in, I was lyin' in bed lookin' at the wallpaper. I have party balloon wallpaper in my room—pink and blue party balloons, on account a they didn't know if I would be a boy or a girl. And alla sudden I can see right through the wall into their room, Mommy's and Daddy's room. They're sitting up in bed watching TV like usual, Mommy in her nightgown, Daddy in his T-shirt.

“Only their faces are different: they look like the monsters in
Where the Wild Things Are
. Daddy has a lion face, Mommy's face is all scary and furry and pointed like a fox. And their regular faces, their people faces, are lying next to them on the bed, all empty and rubbery and wrinkly, like these monster faces are their real faces, and the regular faces are just masks they put on in the daytime.”

“That
does
sound like a dream, doesn't it?”

“I know. I even dreamed I woke up. And I was staring at the wallpaper again, I couldn' see through
any
more. I'm still scared. I wanna call Mommy. But that's scary too. 'Cause what if what I saw was real? All they'd have to do is put on their people masks—how would I know?

“So I climb out a bed, ssh, real quiet, and open my door. The house is all dark for the night, except for the night-light in the hall, you know, for when I have to get up to go peepee. Tippy-toe down the hall. I can see light through the bottom a their door. I'm pos' to knock, always knock before you come in Mommy and Daddy's
room, only then I think about how quick they could put their people masks on. So I try and turn the doorknob. But it's locked. But I know how to open it, cause one time Walter locked hisself in the baffroom and Mommy got the ice pick outta the drawer and stuck it in the little hole in the doorknob and it opened up.

“So I go into the kitchen and I get the ice pick outa the drawer and go back to Mommy and Daddy's room and stick it in and it goes pop and then the knob turns and I open the door and there's Mommy and Daddy with their regular faces on. Only they're not watching TV. Mommy is sitting in a chair all bare naked and she's all tied up and Daddy is standing over her, he's bare naked too and his peepee is all red and sticking out and he's holding this red candle, and he's dripping hot drips, I see the red drips on her boobies.

“Then she sees me, she says, ‘Oh fuck, honey, it's the kid.’ So he turns around—his peepee's pointing at me and I can't move and I can't scream, just like in a dream only I know it's real. Then he's standing over me. He pulls the ice pick outa the doorknob and looks down at it in his hand, and I know, I just
know
he's gonna,
wham
, stick it right down through the top a my head, only instead he picks me up and carries me over to the bed and tosses me on the bed and pulls down my pajama pants and I don' wanna talk about it anymore and you can't make me.”

Irene had no intention of forcing him. Even using hypnosis so early in DID therapy was unconventional—pressuring him at this point could be disastrous.

“Lyssy, honey,” she said soothingly. “I need you to know you never have to talk about anything until you're ready. But when you
are
ready, I need you to know you're safe telling me anything at all—nothing you tell me can ever come back to hurt you. Now, you said your mommy told you it was all only a dream?”

“A nightmare—next morning she said I had a nightmare. I axed her how do
you
know, she says I yelled in my sleep. Then she axed me to tell her about my nightmare. She says I hafta or it will never go away.

“So I say I saw through the wall, and you and Daddy took your faces off and you were both monsters and I woke up and I went into your room to see if it was true and he was hurting you, and then he pulled down my pants and he hurted me.

“And she says that proves it's only a bad dream because Daddy would never hurt us. She crosses her heart and hopes to die. But my butt still hurted, so you know what I think?”

“What, Lyssy?”

“I think either both dreams hafta to be real, the one where I see the animal faces through the wall and the one where I go into their bedroom, or both a them hafta be dreams. And sometimes I think what if everybody wears a people mask? What if everybody has a animal face under their skin. And sometimes in the bathroom I stand on my old potty stairs from when I was little, and I look into the mirror real hard, and I try to see what kind a animal I have under
my
skin.”

He was starting to grow agitated again. Irene glanced at her watch. It was just past twelve-forty. She only had until one o'clock with the prisoner, and it was important to leave at least fifteen minutes at the end of a hypnotherapy session to bring the patient back and give him time to reorient.

“All right, Lyssy. I understand. Thank you for sharing with me.”

“Sharing's good. You're 'pos to share.”

“Yes you are, honey. You did a wonderful job. Now I want you to think about your safest place, the place in the world, it doesn't have to be real, you can make it up, where you feel the best and the safest, and I want you to go there for me. . . . Safest place . . . You there yet . . . ? Attaboy. Okay, here we go. Five, four, three, two, one . . .
applesauce!”

Once again, Irene observed a radical alteration in the prisoner's body language. The fidgeting and squirming ceased. There was a tense stillness about him. His neck stiffened. His scarred hands, which as Lyssy he'd used expressively, within the range of the manacles, now curled into protective fists. When he opened his eyes, they darted nervously around the room, then fixed suspiciously on Irene.

“What happened?” He was acting out his grounding behavior again, rubbing his fists against the coarse orange fabric of his jumpsuit.

“It's all right, you just came out of hypnosis.”