Dantes' Inferno (4 page)

“Sylvia? Are you all right?”

She came to suddenly, knowing Leo had asked something.
She nudged her sunglasses to the bridge of her nose.

“I'm here.” She found the bottle in record time—cap off—and tossed a tiny blue pellet into her mouth. The tablet stuck to the back of her throat.

“ . . . go with a projective warm-up to establish rapport,” Leo was saying. “
Then
the MMPI.”

“I'm more comfortable starting with the objective inventories,” Sylvia said. What was she doing in this city of noise, glare, smog, and concrete? “The MMPI first, then the Millon.”

“I know it's time-consuming, but the Rorschach will give us a wealth of information.” After a brief silence, Leo said, “Just consider my suggestion.”

“Of course.”

“Extend today's session,” Leo added. “Push for whatever you can get. You may not have another opportunity.”

“Yes, Mother.” The jocularity fell flat.

“Dantes's oppositional as hell—don't think he'll give you any breaks just because he likes the way you look. He'll take control, try to bait you or just shut down altogether.”

“I'll bait him back. Piece of cake.”

“Remember, I want all the dirty details. Dinner at the Lobster, Santa Monica Pier. By the way, how was your flight?”

Mona—is the baby there with you? Is Nathan with you?

“The Lobster. I'll call you when I'm finished,” she managed. “The flight was turbulent.”

“Sylvia, I know I got you into this—I have no doubts you're the one for the job.” Leo's tone sobered abruptly. “Just don't forget who you're dealing with; Dantes is dangerous.”

She disconnected, nosing the Lincoln toward the right lane. Pressing down on the pedal, she gave its powerful engine gas. Horns blared, but she was already tearing east on the fourth street off-ramp.

I'll be back in New Mexico in four days, five at the most, she reminded herself—just do the work and get out. But no one had forced her to come to Los Angeles. No one had twisted her arm.

Leo Carreras had offered her the job because he needed her expertise; he was counting on her to connect with the world's most oppositional client. And she was here, even though she was off balance emotionally and professionally. She'd accepted because somewhere, buried beneath all the turbulent emotions, she felt the lure of the “important” profiling project—not to mention the draw of John Dantes.

Obsessions are enduring and deep rooted.

His centered on avenging the crimes of the powerful as perpetrated on the postmodern city and its less sophisticated inhabitants.

Hers happened to be a seemingly endless fascination with a brilliant mind turned pathological.

“Made for each other,” she mumbled as she released the brake, shifting gears.

The Lincoln covered ground, catching green lights all the way to Broadway. She turned north, then east again.

Passing an entrance to U.S. 101 south, Sylvia turned the wheel so sharply files flew off the passenger seat onto the floor, and the Lincoln left a black stripe of rubber along the curb.

As she passed MDC, the federal detention center that bordered the north edge of LA's Civic Center complex, a stat crossed her mind: downtown LA is home to twenty-five thousand inmates, the largest population behind bars in any American city.

You'd never know it. To the passerby, MDC's ten-story Hyatt facade, with its postmodern steel trellises and bridge-ways casting shadows over Immigration and Naturalization,
could easily be mistaken for a resort hotel instead of the largest prison to be built in any major urban center in recent history.

Beyond MDC, in the distance, City Hall's ziggurat trapped the sun, and just for an instant the pyramidal tower glowed like a sparking match before its flame dies out.

Civilization gone in a flash
.

Sylvia turned under a twenty-foot painted sign—PARQUEO—into the gaping mouth of the subterranean garage that serviced visitors to the detention center and the LAPD, as well as the adjacent Roybal Federal Building. After the vast spaces of New Mexico, she couldn't get used to this urban landscape where each vertical universe was perched over a massive burrow. Too much light, too much darkness.

Guiding the Lincoln through a fluorescent maze of parked vehicles and concrete pillars, she remembered a child's sneaker. Neon green. Ridiculously small. A tiny lizard crest on the tongue.

Jason Redding had been ten and a half years old when he died.

The week following the Getty bombing, a photograph of that shoe had made the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek;
the haunting image had played on CNN around the world.

Molly Redding had delivered a message to her son's convicted murderer as he left the courtroom—

Sylvia pulled into a slot, set the brake, and switched off the ignition. The engine in the sea green Lincoln quieted with an almost imperceptible sigh that matched her own.

“—John Dantes, I'll wait for you in hell.”

8:23
A.M.
Sylvia pushed her sunglasses back on her head and entered MDC's air-conditioned glass and steel lobby, where the illusion of a resort hotel was maintained with
the help of potted palms and soft lighting. Was it the subtly armored environment that made her feel more secure? Was it simply the familiarity of a prison work environment? She suspected something different—she felt safer locked up with the inmates than she did out in the urban canyons of LA.

At capacity, MDC held nine-hundred-plus prisoners, for the most part federal detainees awaiting trial: drug dealers, kidnappers, extortionists, counterfeit-change artists, terrorists. With that many bad guys in the neighborhood, it might be reassuring to find the U.S. marshals quartered right next door and LAPD across the street. Sylvia couldn't seem to give a damn one way or the other.

Today, due to bomb threats and the fact they were eight days away from the one-year anniversary of the Getty bombing, security was heavy; at the control desk she passed through a metal detector while a female security officer urged an eighty-pound shepherd to stay cool. He growled anyway.

Can't fool a smart dog, Sylvia thought, smiling coldly.

She took the elevator. Embedded somewhere in the shaft, gears groaned. At the fourth floor, the doors opened to reveal two shackled prisoners waiting in the hallway; their eyes slid back and forth between the nervous officer who was their escort and Sylvia.

She found herself at yet another security checkpoint:
Look, Ma, no pipe bombs
.

The Bureau of Prisons security officer pulled a tape recorder from Sylvia's briefcase. He swabbed the palm-sized machine with a cotton ball, screening for any chemical reaction with explosive material residue. He examined the thick stack of test booklets, her personal items, then moved on to her spare tape cassettes, going through cotton balls left and right.

Just let me do my job, she thought impatiently. Over several days, that job would consist of the most systematic of tasks, administering the objective psychometric inventories—the MMPI-2, the MCMI-3, the WAIS-3, the Bender, the Halstead-Rëitan, or the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery. Each test booklet was several inches thick. Some contained endless questions: Do you . . . If you . . . Have you ever . . . Would you . . .? Some were multiple choice, or true or false, or tell a story, or finish the sentence. Some were visual—put the puzzle together, match the shapes, fit the round peg in the square hole.

And then they could be scored. There were scales to measure depression, hysteria, psychopathology, mania, hypochondriasis, schizophrenia, psychasthenia.

She was here precisely because psychological testing was the most analytical, standardized, measurable, and emotionally detached portion of the profiling project.

I can't offer judgment calls, intuition, or emotion. Not this month.

No clinical interviews, no therapy, no need for empathic connection.

No trespassing on the dangerous terrain of soul or psyche. Thanks anyway.

Electronic clamor caught her attention, cuffing it on the ear. The officer was nodding her through the yawning jaws of security.

She tripped on a fraying edge of rubber matting, abruptly unsteady, reminding herself she was about to be forty minutes late for a meeting with a killer named John Dantes.

8:41
A.M.
“You made it past the hounds of hell,” he said softly. At the moment, he was a disembodied presence, his face lost in shadow.

But Sylvia felt the sting of his eyes on her skin.

Fluorescent light abruptly flooded the small square room.

She blinked, off balance, only to find she was staring directly into his face.

It was heart shaped, capped with light brown hair gone prematurely gray at the temples and knotted into a rough ponytail. His cheekbones were prominent, his mouth wide, his chiseled features drawn together by a small, almost pointed chin. Fatigue and prison life had dulled his complexion, and it had been at least two days since his last shave. The fresh bruise bluing the skin of his left cheek added to the overall effect of eighteenth-century castaway mixed with contemporary street fighter.

But it was his eyes that threatened to penetrate her emotional perimeter; behind wire rims, they were green—no, gray—flecked with sparks of white and yellow, fringed with thick lashes. They were the eyes of a visionary. Or a psychopath.

She looked away, belatedly, hearing the echoing hiss of whispered words:
“—last time—I can't—”
She registered another presence in the room: a female correctional officer. The Bureau of Prisons employee was young, lost inside a tan uniform with epaulettes and a black and white name tag identifying her as D. FLORETTE.

Sylvia had the feeling she'd interrupted some heated exchange between the guard and Dantes; her curiosity was aroused, but left unsatisfied when CO Florette ducked her head and launched into a seemingly endless rote speech covering rules and regulations.

While Florette droned on, Sylvia had the chance to study the man who—at age twenty-four—had been teaching postgraduate urban structural sociology at one of southern California's most prestigious universities when he wasn't busy blowing up the California aqueduct in retribution
for historic sins. Now, at thirty-seven, he was serving his first year of a life sentence—for the Getty, the
one
bombing he claimed he didn't commit.

Over the course of his outlaw career, the media had alternately exhibited Dantes as a mysterious and clever fugitive, an impassioned charismatic defendant, a stridently political prisoner. Sylvia thought he looked less functional than any of his public personas.

“Dr. Strange?” Florette's hard, unwelcoming voice snagged Sylvia's attention. “You can see for yourself he's manacled, ankles only—we freed his hands per your request. I'll step outside, that's regulation—and I'll do my visuals at random.”

“Thank you, Deborah,” Dantes said politely.

“Please remember to avoid all physical contact with the prisoner. Excuse me, ma'am.” Ignoring Dantes, she brushed past Sylvia; the door slammed shut behind her back.

The sound bounced around the angular space before it died at the feet of an artificial silence broken only by the ticking of a clock mounted on the wall.

“She's jealous.” John Dantes was the first to speak. “Even prisons have their stars.”

Sylvia didn't move. The air pumped into this concrete box tasted stale and delivered a federally mandated chill. “Are you proud of your celebrity status?”

“It offers some advantages.”

She gestured to a bruise near his left eye. “One of the perks?”

“You're not what I imagined.” He studied her intently for several moments, then said, “You're not one of Leo's
suits
. And you're not a Fed . . . or I'd have smelled you a mile away.” But suspicion etched his face.

“I'm Dr. Strange, Mr. Dantes. I work with Dr. Carreras, who arranged this meeting to conduct some psychological
inventories. As part of this criminal profiling project, all participants undergo a standard evaluation.”

She shifted her briefcase from right hand to left before adding quietly, “But I think you're aware of why I'm here, because you and I have already spoken by telephone—and you also signed a release form.”

The echo of a slamming door intruded faintly into the room.

Dantes' eyes cut toward the security window, which offered a view of the hallway, where the top of CO Florette's dark head was just visible. “Standard evaluation . . . that makes the project sound very common, doesn't it?”

“I don't think so, no.”

“But it's a bombers' profiling project.”

“It's classified as a
criminal
profiling project,” she said flatly. Although, like Dantes, the participants were certain to speculate, they would not be given confirmation that the profiling project was limited to bombers; that knowledge would only serve to puff up their egos and skew their responses.

“Sit down, Dr. Strange. You're making me nervous. I'm beginning to regret the fact I agreed to
this
.”

She lurched into motion, crossing the room, placing her briefcase next to the chair. Sliding her sunglasses from her hair, she caught the faint scent of him—a basic blend of soap and sweat.

As she placed her tape recorder on the table—pressing
record
—he studied her openly. She had the sensation of being touched.

“Look at you.” Dantes' eyes slid from her head to her toes. “All dressed up in your Sunday best.” His voice had softened, and his lips curled in an expectant smile.

She didn't react.

This seemed to bother him, and he said, “Before we
begin this common criminal's
standard
evaluation, tell me something about Dr. Strange. You're a forensic psychologist, licensed to practice in New Mexico and California—