Secrets Amoung The Shadows (4 page)

"Fine," he said determinedly. "Then let's do it. Whatever it takes to get to the bottom of things." His hand darted inside his jacket as though for a pack of cigarettes, and Leanne froze with the memory of his cigarette the night before.

But when he withdrew his hand, it was empty.

"Please feel free to smoke," she said tensely, unsure what the action might bring with it—perhaps a change in personality? "I need you to relax."

He shook his head, reached inside his jacket again and withdrew a pack of peppermint gum, proffering it to her. "I gave up smoking several months ago. This is my substitute addiction. Would you like a stick?"

She blinked twice rapidly, assessing this new information. Another point for the possibility of a multiple personality disorder. The different personas frequently exhibited different habits.

"No, thank you," she finally answered.

He returned the gum to his pocket without taking a stick for himself. "I haven't done that—reach for a cigarette—for some time now. Stress. Brings back old habits."

He sounded sincere, as though he really didn't remember smoking a cigarette just last night. "Yes," she agreed. "Stress can do that." She shuffled papers on her desk, giving herself a minute to regain her composure. "If you're ready to proceed with the hypnosis, you may loosen your tie or take off your jacket, whatever you need to get comfortable. The control that reclines the chair is located on the right side."

He leaned back stiffly but made no move to do anything further. She hadn't really expected him to. This wasn't going to be easy.

And maybe not safe.

Chapter 4

"All right," she began, "I want you to concentrate on the muscles in your feet. Right now they're tense, but you can consciously relax them as I tell you to. Begin now to relax the muscles in your feet. Feel them start to loosen. Now the muscles in your legs."

"The chair on which you're sitting is unusually soft, like a cloud. Feel that cloud wrap around you, warm and comforting. You're floating on that cloud. Relax and enjoy the sensation of floating." He wasn't stiff any longer. Obviously he desperately wanted this to work. If he'd chosen to resist her, she suspected he could have easily done so.

"Just relax and float as I count backward from twenty to one. By the time I reach
one
, you'll be in a state of total relaxation. You will still be able to hear my voice and to answer me, but other noises will fade into the background. They won't register or disturb you."

She began to count, and he responded well. "One," she concluded. "You are now in a hypnotic state and can respond easily to questions I will ask. Eliot, please raise your right index finger."

The slow, almost hesitant lifting of his finger told her he had at least achieved a light trance. It was all she'd hoped for this first time. His will to succeed seemed the only thing that sufficiently overcame his need to be in control.

He did. In an emotionless voice he described the actions of a man watching her, coming up to her room, putting his hands around her throat and squeezing the life from her. He reported the dream in the third person, always using the pronoun
he,
never
I
, as though repeating a gruesome tale he'd heard or read. "
He
climbed through a window." "
He
wrapped his hands around your throat." The Eliot persona had not been there.

"How did the man who choked me feel in your dream?"

"He felt excited and happy. When he takes someone else's life, he feels that life going inside him, making him more alive and more powerful." Eliot's detached recitation of those feelings made her cringe in spite of her training and experience. Even accustomed as she was to unexpected personality developments, she found it hard to reconcile such dissolute emotions with the man who'd come into her office.

Again silence. But that did not rule out the possibility of another identity. The personalities frequently chose their own times to reveal themselves.

"Have you dreamed of murdering another woman besides me?" She wanted to hear his description of the woman he feared he'd murdered.

"Yes."

"You're dreaming again about the woman, the last dream you had about her, the one that resulted in her death. Describe to me what you see in your dream."

His forehead creased. The words came slowly, reluctantly, as though he had to drag them forth. "He's sitting with her at her dining room table. They're eating. She made crab legs for him. He loves crab legs. Tonight they taste especially good because he's anticipating what he's going to do. He's been planning it for weeks. Every time he crushes a shell, he savors the sensation and thinks of how her throat will feel when it crumples beneath his fingers."

An involuntary shudder ran down her spine at his words. "What does the woman look like?" she asked, reminding herself that she had to maintain her distance, couldn't let herself get wrapped up in her patient's illness.

Slowly the scowl eased. "They're sitting on the sofa now. It's a small sofa with big flowers. They're drinking wine. He reaches over and takes her glass from her. He sets both glasses on the coffee table then turns to her and smiles. He puts his hand on her throat and feels her pulse beating. He's very excited thinking about how he has the power to stop that beating. He kisses her, and he knows she thinks he's going to make love to her, but tonight he's going to satisfy his passion, not hers."

Leanne involuntarily raised a hand to her lips as if she could feel the treacherous kiss. With an effort she forced her hand back down to her desk and tried to listen objectively.

"He squeezes her throat tighter and pulls back so he can watch. Her eyes come open now, and he likes that. He likes to see her fear. She pushes against him, but it's no use. He's much stronger than she is. Two of the red tips break off her nails and then she stops pushing. He lets her fall onto the sofa. He can feel the energy from her, and he wants it all for himself. This is only the beginning. When he leaves her, he thinks how she has to stay behind and he's free."

Eliot stopped talking then, the story at an end, and Leanne realized she was clutching her own throat protectively.

The murder, related in a detached monotone, had the same strong effect as his description of his dream of her. She supplied the emotion that was missing from his voice.

She lowered her hands to her desk, spreading her fingers and taking in the familiar, cool solidity of the polished wood.

Across from her Eliot Kane sat, square jaw eased, long fingers draped over the ends of the chair arms, thigh muscles delineated by the soft material of his slacks. He looked astonishingly inflexible in spite of his relaxed state. He also looked astonishingly normal for someone who had just related such a bizarre tale.

Though, she reminded herself, one of her case studies in school had been of a woman with the face of an angel who'd calmly hacked up her husband and children when they tracked mud across her newly-mopped kitchen floor.

"If you've never met her, how did you know her name?" He could have garnered that information from the news, but she waited to hear how he would answer.

"I don't know her. He does."

"Who is
he
?"

"The one who killed her."

"What is his name?"

He hesitated, his brow furrowed as he apparently searched for the answer. She held her breath, waiting. Would Mr. Hyde emerge? "I don't know," he finally said.

"I'm going to count to three," she finally told him, "and you'll be wide awake. You'll remember everything we talked about. One...coming to the surface, waking up. Two...almost there, almost fully awake. Three."

He opened his eyes, sat erect in the chair, compressed his lips and squared his jaw, actions that belied the torment in his gaze.

She should be frightened of this man. He could be a murderer, could be lying to her, could be planning her murder. Yet in spite of that, his sturdy determination against overwhelming odds touched something deep inside her, made her heart ache for him, made her want desperately to help him.

He shook his head slowly and ran a hand through his hair. "I don't understand what's going on. I've always been in complete control of my life. I've always known exactly who I am, where I'm going, what I'm going to do, what I did yesterday and the day before that and the year before that. How could something like this happen?"

"We don't really know what's happening at this point," she temporized.

"I couldn't have murdered that woman." He straightened his shoulders and met her gaze dead on. "If there's a part of me that's capable of murder, that actually did what I saw in my dream, I want rid of it. That's why I'm here. Tell me what I need to do next."

She liked that, liked his obstinacy, his positive attitude.

"There are a lot of things we can do next," she answered. "If—and I emphasize the word
if
because we have a lot further to go before we make a definite diagnosis of multiple personality disorder.
If
we want to investigate that possibility, the first thing we do is search for the source. When a personality splits off, the split usually occurs in childhood as a result of abuse or some traumatic incident. The person can't stand the pain, so he or she dissociates into another self."

He waved a hand impatiently. "I understand the basic premise. The only traumatic incident I can think of was the automobile accident that killed both my parents and injured me when I was three. But that was over thirty years ago, and these problems only began recently."

"The personalities can remain dormant for years, until they're needed again. That could also be the source of your claustrophobia. Were you trapped inside the car for a long time?"

"I was too young to remember, but according to Mom—my adopted mother—I was in the car several hours before somebody driving by saw us and stopped to help. Yeah," he admitted, "I guess that could be the source of my claustrophobia."

As well as the source of a personality fragmentation.
But she didn't express her thought aloud. They had a lot more work to do before she could make even that tentative diagnosis.

"Has anything upsetting happened to you recently, anything that might dredge up the feelings of being trapped inside that car with your parents dying?"