Salter, Anna C (20 page)

I had to go past Melissa's desk on my way to Toby's office, and she flagged me down. "Michael," Melissa said with relief in her voice, "you're back. Chief Bowman has called twice. He wants you to call him back right away." My life was back to Zeno's paradox. I could only get halfway to wherever I was trying to go.

I almost decided to ignore the call. Getting halfway was costing me. After all, if I hadn't gotten sidetracked on Friday when I was heading in to see Marv, I wouldn't have nearly shot Ginger.

On the other hand, maybe my mistake was in not returning urgent phone calls. This was an urgent phone call, and I was about not to return it.

I sighed. I didn't mind paying my dues and learning my lessons in life. It was just that it wasn't always easy to figure out which lesson you were supposed to learn.

I looked at the relief on Melissa's face and decided to call Adam back. She took it personally when someone was upset because they couldn't reach one of us. Easy for me to say I'll call him later, but she'd be the one on the phone when Adam called back annoyed. Melissa's sole failing was that she was a sponge for stress.

I went to my office and called Adam. He was all business when he came on the line, and I knew from the tone of his voice he had something. "I called Boston and got lucky," he said. "I reached the detective who handled Camille Robbin's case. He's a supervisor now, but he remembers that case clearly.

"There's no question the original incident was genuine. She was a nurse who worked at Mass General. She was abducted from the parking lot and found the next day in a dog kennel in Concord. She had scaled a fence to get in. The owner found her when he came out to see why all the dogs were barking.

"She was nude and had cigarette burns on her breasts and labia. She'd been tortured extensively. She still had duct tape on most of her face. She had torn off just enough to see.

"Not surprisingly, she wasn't in very good shape to talk about it. In fact, she curled up in a fetal position when they tried. The only thing they ever really got out of her was that she had gotten in her car to go home. Her car was found a few days later at a rest area on I-93.

"They never got any more out of her. She was hospitalized at MacClean's, and they went out a couple of times to talk to her, but she went into flashbacks whenever she tried. They tried to follow up after she was released, but she disappeared, and nobody knew where she'd gone. They called the hospital, the neighbors . . . nobody knew where she was."

Nobody, I thought, except Chris.

"The detective was pretty happy to hear from me. They still want to talk to her."

"Why?" I said, surprised. "Are they still working the case?"

It was an awful case, but it was five years ago, and Boston cops are pretty busy.

"It's not so much her case they worried about," Adam said slowly. "It's the two murders they had within a year and a half after that with the same MO."

I tried to get my breathing restarted. Clearly, Camille's attacker had been sadistic, but my worst fear was that he was more than that: a full-blown serial killer. "The first was about eight months later," Adam went on. "A woman was found handcuffed spread-eagled to trees in the woods near Bolton. She had duct tape all over her head and cigarette burns all over her body. Death was by suffocation."

"From the duct tape?" I asked. "Can duct tape do that?"

"Sure," Adam said. "He just finally sealed the nose off after he'd had his fun. Raped, of course. Objects forced up the anus."

"There was another?" I said weakly. Jesus, if this guy was back, Camille was in some serious trouble.

"Same MO," Adam said. "Same cause of death. And then nothing. That's been maybe three and a half years. Nothing's happened since then. They thought either he'd moved on or he was incarcerated for something else, but they sure would like to find him. If he's back, they're thinking he'll start up again."

And maybe Camille was scheduled to be the first this time just like she was last time. "Did they talk to Chris?" I asked.

"Nope. They didn't know anything about him. Camille wasn't coherent, and I doubt she would have mentioned a guy she knew slightly who worked at a local gas station. She wouldn't have had any reason to.

"There's another thing, Michael. They brought Quantico in on this." Which was smart. The FBI profilers at the Behavioral Sciences Unit were very good at profiling offenders. "They pegged the guy as a white male between twenty-five and thirty-one, a local who knew her. He would have finished high school but probably not gone beyond it. He'd have a late model car and work in a trade."

How did they do that? How? I understood where they got the white male from. Ninety-nine percent of serial killers are white males, and killers tend to attack their own race, so since Camille was Caucasian the odds were overwhelming he was a white male. I even knew where they got the age from. Killers tend to attack people within a few years of their age. Camille was probably twenty-eight or so at the time, so they added three on each side. But where did the car come from?

When you asked Quantico questions like that, they just said they did the profiles based on info from interviews with caught killers. But their chief honcho had once looked at a murder scene and said that the killer had a stutter—which it turned out he had. How did he get that out of his interviews with previous killers? I'd be willing to bet he had never interviewed a serial killer in his life who stuttered.

"This is looking very grim," I said.

"I'd say so," Adam said. "As far as they know, she's the only person who's survived an attack. It may be the killer is thinking what they are — if she gets better she may remember something. Or it may be he just has a compulsion to finish the job. They were pretty excited to hear about Chris. He fits their profile, and he knew where she went."

"So what now?"

"Well," he said, "on this end I have an officer watching the house from the park behind it, but I'd like to talk to Camille. I need you with me," he went on. "I don't expect she'd take well to a strange man knocking on her door."

No, I thought, she wouldn't, and neither would Keeter.

"Can we meet at your office?" Adam asked. "I don't want to go to her house in case our perp is watching it somehow."

"No," I said quickly. Too quickly. Adam was silent, and I tried to think of a reason fast. I couldn't. "Uh, that'll be fine," I said. It killed me to put Adam in a situation where there was even a remote chance Willy might be listening in. But the truth was, if Willy was listening in, what did it matter if it were Adam or a client? It wasn't any better to have Willy listening in on clients.

"I have an appointment with her later today. I'll talk to her then about it. Okay? I'd rather talk to her in person than call her. You're sure you can keep her safe?"

"Sure. I've got somebody practically sitting on her doorstep."

"Who?"

"Jonathan." This was good. Jonathan was an ex-Boston cop who used to work organized crime. He had had a whole lot more experience with violence than most of the local officers.

"Jesus Christ, Adam. It sure is a dicey world out there."

"Take it to heart, sweetheart," Adam replied. "You skirt around the edges of it all the time."

I hung up the phone and just looked at it for a minute. Adam was right. I got over my head more often than I knew. Probably the main difference was this time I knew it.

I turned back toward Toby's office. My head was spinning. One thing at a time. Camille was all right for now, and I still had to get Ginger out of the middle of this thing with Willy. If Ginger ran into Willy, she'd look like Camille did after the abduction. Come to think of it, so would I.

I stopped in the hall. I was upset by what Adam had told me. Camille's perp was an active serial killer who had hung around the area and had every reason in the world to want Camille dead. She was, after all, the only living witness. But I didn't want to convey any upset to Toby. What I was trying to do with him was not all that easy to pull off I wanted Toby to take exactly the kind of case he screened out.

Toby's caseload —not that he had much of one —was full of the walking wounded. He took celebrity cases, cases referred by other chairmen. He took cases where children of wealthy donors worried about which medical school they'd get into. He took cases where surgeons were tired of medicine and considering a career change. He did not take indigent women who cut their vaginas and would come in on emergency three times a week and make his life hell with one crisis after another. It had been a long time since Toby got up in the middle of the night.

All of which was a terrible shame. Because for all Toby's faults, he was actually a gifted therapist. Clients didn't seem to threaten him in the same way that colleagues outside therapy did, and he lost that narcissistic, need-to-be-a-big-guy edge he carried elsewhere. Without it, he was surprisingly astute and compassionate.

I had heard Toby present cases and had seen clients whom he had treated in a previous counseling. They were clearly the better for the time with him. It angered me all the more that Toby had a gift and wasted it on people so functional they would get better talking to a rock.

I waited a minute and tried to get myself together, then walked up to Toby's secretary. She looked surprised to see me; I was not a frequent visitor to Toby's office —as in, usually I had to be dragged there.

"What's Toby's schedule like today?" I asked. "I need to see him about a client who's in crisis."

She looked at her schedule book. The door to Toby's office was partly ajar, not enough for a visitor to see Toby's desk but enough that Toby could hear whoever was at his secretary's desk. I heard his desk chair scrape on the floor, and then he said, "Michael, come on in."

It occurred to me that maybe Toby wasn't as busy as I thought. Maybe he sat there eating bonbons while the rest of us ran around like little worker bees. It made me feel better for what I was about to do.

Toby opened the door wide, but his smile was even wider. It made me realize just how unhappy he usually was to see me. I had never gotten a smile anywhere near that wattage out of Toby before.

"I spoke to Lucy," he said as he ushered me to a seat. "She is terribly relieved at that young man's confession. She says it's made all the difference."

"Tell her to forget the apology bit," I said. "It won't mean a damn thing."

"Oh, I don't think she's still considering that," Toby said, laughing. "The confession was enough. That and the fact that it looks like he's going to be thrown out of school. I wouldn't worry about her asking for an apology."

"Good." And it was good. Fake apologies just muddy the water. They put pressure on the victim to say, "That's all right," as though the guy had accidentally stepped on her toe instead of brutally raping her.

"What can I do for you?" he said, and for once I think he meant it.

"Actually," I said, "I need help on a case."

Toby looked surprised and immediately a little pleased. If he could help me out on a case, he wouldn't owe me. And that meant he wouldn't end up in the embarrassing position of having to back me some day when the press was down his throat about me —as had happened before.

"I screwed up a case," I said bluntly. "You know, Toby, I am not that big a fan of analytic theory, but I think there are times when those of us who have moved away from it miss the boat."

Toby nodded vigorously and started to say something, but I started up again quickly. I didn't want Toby to get off on a diatribe about how analytic theory had been maligned.

"I had a case where I was focusing mainly on the abuse issues," I went on. "And I ignored an increasingly symbiotic transference reaction that eventually reached psychotic proportions."

I hadn't talked that way in a long time, and I just hoped I could remember the language. It was like trying to speak Greek that you learned in high school. Marv would have done a better job on the lingo, but he wasn't manipulative enough to pull this off.

"That's very unfortunate," Toby replied gravely.

"Yes," I agreed. "I became a complete part object, and the client lost all reality testing. Her superego only functioned in a sadistic way, and her ego functioning—never strong at the best of times—became overwhelmed with id impulses." I realized I couldn't remember which particular analytic school Toby belonged to. Was he part of the ego-analytic folks? If so, I'd better cool it on the id. The id was out of favor with those guys.

I looked up. Toby was still nodding, and he had leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. Whatever school he was, I must be close enough.

"The client—Ginger—began to cross boundaries. Essentially she stalked me — although I didn't know the full extent of it at the time. I did know she was crossing boundaries enough that I transferred her to Marv in hopes that she might find more stability with a father figure rather than a mother figure." Toby raised his eyebrows. It was unusual to transfer a client.

"But I did not confront her about the boundary crossing— which I now think was an error." This was actually the only thing I'd said thus far that was wholly true. "She transferred readily to Marv —after all, I was only a part object to her—but it turned out the sex of the therapist was insignificant."

Toby gave a slight smile as if to say, "Obviously, dummy," although he wouldn't have phrased it that way. He would have taken ten minutes to say it, but it would have come down to the same thing.

"The client—Ginger—simply put Marv and me together as mother and father figures and is now crossing boundaries with both of us. She has us allied in her mind and feels abandoned and rejected by our so-called alliance."

Toby sighed as if to say, "Amateurs should not mess with these difficult cases." It was okay by me if he said it, except I didn't want to spend the time for him to get it out, so I kept going.

"I really think she needs a more experienced therapist than either of us. I think she needs someone who will set the strictest possible limits on any boundary crossing, and, of course, that's something analytic therapists have always excelled at."