Psychopath (32 page)

"A psychiatrist?"

Their coffee arrived.

"I think that’s what he is," Pierce said, sipping the brew.  "He’s some kind of therapist, anyhow."  She shrugged.  "What he really is is a miracle worker."

"Pretty high marks."

"I wouldn’t have believed anybody could make any difference at a time like this.  But it was like he knew me, without ever meeting me.  Better than I know myself.  I ended up telling him things I’ve never told anyone."  She leaned a little closer and spoke more softly.  "He actually cried with me."

McCormick intentionally downplayed the feeling in her gut, the suspicion that she was hearing the story about Wrens for a reason.  She sipped her coffee.  "He cried with you?" she asked, placing her cup on the table.

"It sounds freaky, I know," Pierce said.  "But it wasn’t.  Not if you were there.  He cares that much about people.  He felt my pain.  It hurt him just like it hurt me.  And, somehow, that made me hurt less." 

"In one hour."

"The meeting was scheduled for an hour, but he spent almost three with me.  He had me tell him everything I could remember about my mother.  What I love about her.  What I hate about her.  The fights we had.  My favorite gift from her.  Her favorite song.  Perfume.  Food.  Holiday.  Movie.  Everything.  And that’s when everything came into focus."

"What changed?"

"I realized that those memories made me happy, not sad.  That she was still with me, like I’ve been saying.  That she always will be."  She smiled wistfully.  "It didn’t hurt that he was good-looking.  And he has this incredible voice.  It kind of puts you in kind of a trance."

"Oh?"

"He’s not gorgeous — no George Clooney or Bruce Willis.  Just real
nice-looking
.  A gentleman.  Something about him that’s very... tender."  Her cheeks and neck started to redden.  "Almost like a woman — not that I’m saying that’s what I’m into, ’cause I’m not, at all.  But..."  She collected herself.  "I must sound really crazy."

"He obviously helped you a great deal.  Did you make another appointment?"

"I wish I could," she said, shaking her head.  "He’s leaving in a week."

"Leaving?  Why?"

"He’s a ’rent-a-doc.’"  She smiled.  "That’s what he called it, anyway.  I didn’t even know there was such a thing.  The hospital hired him to help out for a little while.  Then he goes someplace else.  Could be two hours away.  Could be two thousand miles away."

"A locum tenens," McCormick said, mostly to herself.  And with those words, the feeling in her gut intensified.

"A what?"

"Locum tenens," McCormick said.  "They travel all over the country."

t w o

As Whitney McCormick and Marie Pierce sat at the Rock ’n’ Roll, Frank Clevenger was sitting in Sarah Ricciardelli’s office in Charlestown, Massachusetts, planning strategy to keep custody of Billy.

"They can just waltz in and change the rules of the game after an adoption goes through?" Clevenger asked her.

Ricciardelli was a thirty-three-year-old woman with a remarkably kind face, acorn brown eyes, long curls, and a lion’s heart.  "Only if they can prove you intended to deceive them," she said, lightly tapping a very sharp pencil on her blotter.

"Which I didn’t," Clevenger said.

Ricciardelli looked down at her copy of the adoption form.  "The courts aren’t in the mood to give leeway.  Not since O.J.   Not since Enron."

"They gave Bush Florida," Clevenger said.

Ricciardelli laughed.

"I didn’t lie on that form," Clevenger said.  "I sat right here and filled it out."

Ricciardelli leaned forward.  "I haven’t forgotten that, Frank.  We answered every question to the letter of the law.  And we’ll defend our responses in a court of law."  She sat back in her chair.  "I just wish you hadn’t said anything in front of that asshole O’Connor.  Or in the Times, for that matter."

Hearing that disclaimer worried Clevenger.  "You aren’t sure we can win."

Ricciardelli shook her head.  "All I’m saying is we may have to get creative if things don’t seem to be going our way."

"Creative..."

"You adopted Billy at age sixteen.  Now he’s seventeen."

"Ten and a half months shy of being an adult.  I know.  But the last thing he needs is to get thrown in some foster home until then.  It could ruin him."

Ricciardelli held up a hand.  "Who’s to say he’s seventeen?"

"What?"

"He was supposedly adopted by the Bishops at age six, right?"

Clevenger looked at her askance, pretty sure where she was headed.

"
Supposedly
," she repeated.

"You’re saying he could have been seven, that he could be eighteen right now."

"For all we know — or DSS, or the courts — he might have been eight," she said.  "The Bishops adopted him from an orphanage in Russia.  You know as well as I do, foreign agencies lie about the ages of their kids.  The younger they are, the more marketable they are.  So let’s get Billy over to Mass General and get an orthopedist to estimate his age using biometrics."

Clevenger nodded halfheartedly.  "But if we successfully argue he’s eighteen, he can blow out of detox or blow off outpatient treatment.  I lose my leverage with him."

"You lose
legal
leverage," she said.  "I’m not sure that’s the authority you want to rely on as his father."

"Don’t kid yourself," Clevenger said.  "I’ll take any kind of authority I can get."  His phone rang.  With North Anderson out of the office tracking McCormick, all calls were being forwarded.  The Caller ID read
Blocked
.  He wanted to let the service pick up, but thought better of it.  "Excuse me a moment," he told Ricciardelli.

"Frank Clevenger," he said, answering the phone on his way into the corridor.

"Oh," Ally Bartlett said, taken aback.  "I didn’t think I would reach you directly."

"Is there something I can help you with?"

"I kind of called to help
you
," she said, "even though I don’t know if I can.  I mean, I don’t know if what I have to say is important.  I just..."

"Try me."

"I know you’re probably getting millions of these calls.  But I’ve been reading your letters in the
Times
.  And they made me think of someone — especially your last letter.  I called the FBI and asked for you, but I got transferred to about fifteen different people.  So I just called and got your number from directory assistance in Boston.  You’re listed, like a regular person."

The
New York Times
and FBI had both been deluged with tips.  They couldn’t keep up.  And none of the thousand or so leads they had managed to check out had led anywhere.  Clevenger didn’t have much hope this one would, either.  He glanced at Ricciardelli behind her desk.  He was anxious to get back to their meeting.

"Trust me, I’m pretty regular," he said.  "May I ask where you’re calling from?"

"Frills Corners, Pennsylvania."

"Could I get your name and number and call you right back?"

A pause.  "I need to tell you something that happened to me.  But I can’t give you my name or my number.  I don’t want to be involved."

Something in the woman’s voice got Clevenger’s attention.  A dramatic edge and a bit of awe, mixed with very real fear.  It was the same tone he had heard in the voices of people he had met who had brushed up against killers.  Neighbors of Jeffrey Dahmer.  Friends of Richard Ramirez.  Two former girlfriends of Ted Bundy.

"Okay," he said, "Take your time.  I’m listening."

She let out her breath, cleared her throat.  "It’s like what you wrote about in your letter — someone I’ve never forgotten," she said.  "I only met him once, like six, seven years ago, totally by accident.  But I still think about him — every day."

"How did you meet him?"

"At a bus stop.  Out of the blue.  I was pretty upset that day.  My dad was sick, in the hospital.  Dying."

"I’m sorry to hear that."

"Anyhow, this man just showed up and somehow got me to talk about my whole life with him.  I felt like I could tell him absolutely anything.  And I did.  I mean, I invited him out for a drink — which I would never, ever do — and I opened up about my dad, my mom, even... sex.  He had this incredible voice.  Not sexy, really, just... I don’t know. 
Inviting
.  Totally comforting.  I’ve never met anyone like him."

"Did he tell you his name?"

"Yes and no.  He told me his name was Phillip Keane.  He said he was a doctor — a psychiatrist — at Venango Regional Medical Center."

"A psychiatrist..."

"I believed him," Bartlett went on.  "I mean, he was incredibly insightful.  It really
felt
like I was talking to a therapist.  And not just a regular one.  I’ve had a couple and, honestly, they were no big deal.  He was the kind you’d dream about.  A perfect listener."

"You have any idea where he is?"

"I couldn’t even find him back then.  I called the hospital the next day, but the operator said there was no Dr. Phillip Keane working there.  So I had her transfer me to the psychiatry unit.  And then things got really strange."

"How so?" Clevenger asked.

"I gave the secretary his name, and she pretty much seemed to think I wanted to speak with a patient.  It’s a unit for disturbed children.  She asked me whether I was Phillip’s mother.  So I just hung up.  I figured if the guy hadn’t even given me his real name, he wasn’t interested in seeing me again."

Clevenger had started thinking of all the psychological reasoning in the Highway Killer’s letters, the quote from Jung, the way he layed out his personal history, the arrogant assertion that he could heal Clevenger.  Could it be? he wondered.  Could the Highway Killer be a psychiatrist, like him?  "What did he look like?" he asked.

Another pause.  "Handsome in a middle-aged way, I guess," Bartlett said.  "But that wasn’t why I talked to him.  It wasn’t about him being, like, hot or anything."  A couple seconds went by.  "He just looked like the nicest guy in the world.  And he really seemed to care about me.  I know it sounds crazy, but I think he really did."

*            *            *

Clevenger had to work hard to focus during the twenty minutes it took to finish up with Sarah Ricciardelli.  His mind kept wandering to lines from the Highway Killer’s letters:

You adopted a troubled boy? Are you that boy?

Do you work to understand murderers in order to understand yourself?

How does it feel to fall in love?  Is it the pure bliss they say it is to feel one’s ego boundaries melt away?

They were probing questions, potentially healing questions.  Deeply psychological questions.  The killer being a psychiatrist not only explained them, it explained everything.  He would be an expert at getting people to reveal themselves, getting very close, very fast.  He would seem trustworthy, with a real bedside manner.  And he would remember how to draw blood from his years as a medical student and intern.

He called North Anderson from the street the instant he left Ricciardelli’s office, got him on his mobile.

"What’s up?" Anderson asked.

"He could be a shrink," Clevenger said, bracing against an icy gust.

"Who?  What are you talking about?"

"The killer.  He might be a psychiatrist."

"A psychiatrist?"

Clevenger leaned into the wind as he walked toward his car.  "I got a call from a woman in Pennsylvania.  She met a guy years ago who fits the profile of our man to a T.  He told her he was a psychiatrist, that he worked at the local hospital.

He seemed like a psychiatrist to her.  And he used an alias that turned out to be the name of a kid being treated on the locked unit there."

"This guy’s left bodies all over the country," Anderson said.  "He overnighted letters from three states in the last six months.  What sort of psychiatrist crisscrosses the country?"

"A
locum
," Clevenger said automatically, pulling himself into the driver’s seat of his car.  He sat back and stared straight ahead, amazed the word had come so quickly, after so long, and that it seemed so right.

"A locum.  Great.  What the hell is that?"

"Locum tenens.  A traveling psychiatrist.  A rent-a-doc from an agency.  They fill in for a month or two at hospitals with a shortage of staff psychiatrists, usually in rural areas or isolated locales, places that can’t recruit docs.

Wide-open places our man would like."

"It fits," Anderson agreed. "But the chances of this woman meeting him, reading the
Times
years later, remembering him, deciding to call you..."

"I know," Clevenger said.  He had to be realistic.  The odds of the hook he had set in the
Times
catching exactly where he needed it to were vanishingly slim.  But they weren’t zero.  Otherwise, he would never have set the hook in the first place.  "Maybe she didn’t meet the killer.  But she got me to think of him as a psychiatrist — a locum tenens psychiatrist.  And that turns out to make sense, whether she ever laid eyes on him or not."

"What can I do to help?"

"I’m guessing there are only a couple dozen locum tenens agencies with enough reach to place psychiatrists across the country.  We’ve got to get to all of them."

"What about the FBI?"

"Warner probably won’t listen to what I have to say, but I’ll call him."

"I’m betting Murph — you remember Joe Murphy, Murphy and Associates in Marblehead — can get me a list of the bigger outfits within a couple hours," Anderson said.  "I’ll start calling as soon as I get my hands on it.  It’s pretty clear what we need to know:  whether they assigned any one of their docs to all the sites where bodies have been found."

"With the most recent assignment being Wyoming," Clevenger said.

"Got it."

Clevenger thought of McCormick.  "What’s Whitney up to?"

"Making the rounds of hospitals and clinics," Anderson said.  "I’m two cars behind her right now, on 80 West.  I tailed her out of the parking lot of a coffee shop in Rock Springs a few minutes ago.  She met up with a woman about thirty, thirty-five.  Hugged her when they said goodbye.  Maybe an old friend, maybe a relative of the victim."