When She Was Bad: A Thriller (4 page)

“Results,” echoed Lilith doubtfully. “As in, cure?”

“In some cases, yes.”

“Then answer me this. Say, just for the sake of argument, the DID gets cured.”

“Yes?”

“What happens to me?—what happens to Lilith?” But the look on the doctor’s face was all the answer she needed. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” She stood up, muttering something about having to use the ladies’ room.

“I think I’ll join you.” Cogan gathered up the tape recorder, the photographs, and the brochure, and slung her purse over her shoulder.

“I figured that, too,” said Lilith. She already knew from Mama Rose’s furtive exit that there had to be a back way out, and had decided she could easily overpower the older woman once the two were alone. It was Pender she was worried about. But he made no move to follow—just smiled up at them as they passed his table, then turned back to his newspaper.

Short corridor, cinder-block walls. Restroom doors on the left, a door marked Office on the right, and at the end of the hallway, a heavy-looking door with a push bar and a warning: Emergency Exit Only.

Lilith opened the ladies’ room door, peeked in. Toilet in the corner, sink against the wall. One customer at a time. “After you,” she said, backing away.

“No, you first,” Dr. Cogan said firmly.

Lilith closed the door behind her, sat on the toilet long enough to warm it, flushed, washed her hands, splashed cold water on her face. Lily, my ass, she thought, staring at her reflection in the dingy mirror over the sink, then dried her hands with a coarse brown paper towel, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor, where Dr. Cogan had stationed herself between Lilith and the exit.

“Your turn,” said Lilith.

“Funny thing, I don’t seem to—”

Lilith charged, drove her lowered shoulder into the doctor’s midsection, knocking her backward and sending her purse flying. The girl hit the breaker bar with both hands, crashed through to daylight, and ran straight into what felt like a wall of meat.

“Going somewhere?” said the man called Pender, wrapping his arms around her and, in one impossibly smooth, tango-like move, grabbing her wrists, spinning her around, and forcing her arms behind her back. Lilith kicked backward at his shins; he wrenched her wrists upward, just high enough for the pain to immobilize her.

Squirming, almost weeping with frustration, she swore at him like a biker’s bitch as Dr. Cogan came stumbling out into the glare with her jacket twisted sideways and her blouse hiked out from her skirt. “Nice catch,” she told Pender grimly, fumbling around in her purse and taking out a hypodermic syringe.

“Just a—whoa there, easy honey—just a hunch. As Quasimodo once said.” Pender had of course circled the building as soon as they’d arrived, and mentally noted all the potential exits.

Lily watched in horror as the doctor held the syringe up to the sky and tapped it a few times with a tapered, reddish-orange fingernail. “What’s that for?”

“Just something to calm you down.”

She was behind Lilith now, pushing up the sleeve of Lilith’s T-shirt and swabbing her tricep with an antiseptic towelette. A pinch, a needle prick. The sky darkened and the macadam opened beneath Lilith. She felt herself falling, falling, through bottomless space like Alice through the rabbit hole, until the darkness closed in overhead and swallowed her up.

7

The room that housed Ulysses Maxwell seemed unremarkable at first glance. Pale blue walls; dark blue carpet; white acoustic ceiling; single bed with a cheerful yellow comforter, open-shelved dresser, bookcase and TV/VCR hutch of blond wood; and in the corner a computer station and a low-backed, ergonomic desk chair—it all looked normal enough to Lyssy, who had little basis for comparison.

But there were no sharp edges anywhere. The walls met each other in smoothly rounded curves, the closet and adjoining bathroom were doorless alcoves, the furniture was all rounded at the corners, and with the exception of the desk chair it was all bolted to the floor. The only lights were set behind opaque panels in the ceiling and the panes in the sealed window overlooking the arboretum were made of two sheets of unbreakable glass sandwiching a layer of fine steel mesh.

What really gave the game away, though, was the smooth-faced, Starship
Enterprise
–looking door. Made of padded reinforced steel, it opened with a pneumatic whoosh, sliding sideways into the wall when a valid security code had been entered into a keypad, then closed and locked automatically as soon as the doorway had been cleared.

Still wearing his chinos and green corduroy shirt—he had half a dozen similar shirts, all in solid colors—Lyssy was at his computer playing chess when he heard the door slide open behind him. “Be right with you,” he said without turning around, then placed the cursor on his queen, clicked and held down the left button on the mouse, slid the queen up to KB-3, released the button, and sat back grinning as the word
CHECKMATE!
flashed across the screen, accompanied by an explosion of pixeled tickertape and a tinny fanfare.

“Better luck next time,” Lyssy said cheerfully as he logged off and swiveled his chair around. “Oh, hi, Dr. Al. Long time no see.” Humor: less than an hour had passed since the meeting with Dr. Trotman. “How about a game?”

“I’m not sure my, ah, ego can stand another butt-whipping this morning,” said Corder, who’d taught Lyssy how to play chess only a year ago. With an IQ that tested nearly off the charts, the pupil had quickly outstripped the teacher; it had been a little over six months since the psychiatrist had earned better than a draw against his patient.

“Another?” By now, Lyssy was almost preternaturally alert to his doctor’s every nuance, gesture, and mannerism; for him, as for a one-master dog, it was a survival skill.

“In a manner of speaking.” Corder sat down heavily on the edge of Lyssy’s bed. With his gingery hair and his round-lensed tortoise-shell eyeglasses, he reminded Lyssy of an orange cat named Garfield in a picture book Dr. Al had given him when he was a child—or, more accurately, when his mental age was still that of a child. “How do you feel the meeting with Dr. Trotman went?”

“I don’t think she likes me much.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure it’s nothing personal. Did she tell you by any chance
why
she wanted to meet with you?”

“She didn’t have to,” said Lyssy. “I’ve been around here long enough to know when somebody’s doing a psychiatric evaluation.”

“Right with Eversharp,” said Corder. “Dr. Trotman has been asked by the court to give an opinion as to whether you’re competent to stand trial for some of the, ah, the things that happened before you came here.”

“Oh, crum,” said Lyssy—swearing was not one of the skills he’d learned from his beloved psychiatrist/father figure.

“Come on over here.” Corder beckoned to Lyssy with a plump forefinger. Lyssy limped across the room and sat down next to him; the doctor draped his arm companionably around his patient’s shoulders. “I’ve been walking a narrow tightrope lately, Lyss, as far as how much to tell you about all the legal machinations going on behind the scenes. On the one hand, I didn’t want to worry you prematurely; on the other hand, I don’t want you to be blindsided, either.”

The arm tightened around Lyssy’s shoulders. He shrugged out from under it, crossed over to the small window, and put his nose against the glass so he could make out the arboretum through the steel mesh.

Not surprisingly, this little pocket park with its bright ground flowers and dramatic contrasts of light and shade had become Lyssy’s favorite place in his admittedly circumscribed world. Here he had practiced walking hour after hour, rain or shine—he’d have worn his stump raw if they’d have let him—until by now he knew every flower, bird, and squirrel, every meander of the gravel path, every sharp-scented, rough-barked pine, every board of the Japanese footbridge, and every stone in the cement-banked brook as well as he knew his own room. “How long do I have?” he asked eventually.

“Hard to say,” replied Corder. “I spoke to O’Hare this morning.” F. Frank O’Hare, slick, expensive, and media-savvy, was Lyssy’s defense attorney. “He says they’ll probably issue an arrest warrant in Umpqua County as soon as Dr. Trotman turns in her report.
If
she finds you competent to stand trial, of course, but nobody realistically sees her going any other way.

“Once that happens, some officers will arrive here to take you into custody and drive you down to Umpqua City. You’ll be held in the county jail before and during the trial. O’Hare says they’ll probably be housing you in a private cell, so that’s, ah, something, anyway.”

“If you’re trying to cheer me up, Dr. Al, that’s just not going to cut it.”

“Now don’t give up hope yet,” said Corder, partly to alleviate his own sense of guilt—on some level he must have known that he’d only been fattening the calf for slaughter these last few years. “O’Hare and his team are preparing a vigorous psychiatric defense—he thinks you stand an excellent chance of avoiding the death penalty.”

“At least in Oregon.” Lyssy understood perfectly well that if he didn’t get the death penalty here, they’d ship him down to California to try him for however many murders he was supposed to have committed there.

“If you’d like, I could give you some medication to help you deal with any anxiety you might be experiencing.” Corder glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, Lyss, I have a new patient to meet. It’s almost lunchtime—do you want me to get you a psych tech to escort you down to the dining hall?”

“I’m not very hungry,” said Lyssy through clenched teeth.

“I understand. Look, Lyssy, it’s okay to be upset. This is a lousy rotten deal you’re getting, it’s okay to be upset about it.”

But it wasn’t, thought Lyssy. Not for him. Because the more upset he got, the louder the muttering in the dark place. By now it was already loud enough that he could almost make out the words—and whoever it was in there, he didn’t sound happy.

1

“Basically, you had this couple living way the hell and gone on a ridgetop in Oregon,” explained retired FBI Special Agent E. L. Pender, sitting in the copilot seat of the air ambulance transporting himself, Dr. Cogan, and her sedated patient from Redding to Portland. The pilot, recognizing Pender from the book tour he’d taken to promote his ghostwritten autobiography a few years ago, had invited him up to the cockpit for a chat; as happened more often than not, the conversation had turned to the most notorious case of Pender’s career. “Maxwell, he was so crazy he thought he was ten different people, and his foster mother/lover/accomplice,
she
was so crazy she made
him
look sane.

“Only in her case she had a pretty good excuse. The bad news was, about half the skin on her body had been burned off—the worse news was, it was the front half. A real horror show—not much face left to speak of, and no more hair than yours truly.”

Pender lifted his brown Basque beret and rubbed a hand the size of an oven mitt across the barren expanse of his scalp by way of illustration. “Originally she was his elementary school teacher. Fourth, fifth grade, something like that. They say she was a gorgeous young strawberry blond—the kind of teacher every boy student gets a crush on and every girl student wants to grow up to be like. Then one day Maxwell shows up at school with both eyes swollen shut from a beating, and the whole story comes out. Turns out his parents were members of this twisted satanic cult whose leader was a flat-out pederast; they’d been abusing the kid since he was like, three, sexually, ritually, physically, you name it. Cowards to the end, the parents kill themselves—technically, it was a homicide/suicide—and the teacher gets custody of little Ulysses. But then for some equally twisted reasons of her own—probably because she’d been abused as a child—her idea of parenting included having sex with the kid on a regular basis.”

“Oh, man.” The pilot—fit, tanned, with Ray-Ban sunglasses and close-cropped hair graying at the temples—winced.

“It gets worse. The sex continued until Maxwell was around sixteen, then she told him it was all over, that part of the relationship, and that she was going to marry the high school shop teacher. He went ballistic, snuck into the bedroom while she and her fiancé were doing the nasty, stabbed him about fifty times with an icepick, and set the bedroom on fire. Burned the shit out of his hands, left her looking like something out of
The House of Wax.

“But she told the police that her fiancé was trying to rape her, and that the fire got started accidentally. Then when she got out of the hospital, she sprang him from the juvie farm and he moved in with her. Only from then on, around once a year or so she sent the lad out hunting, with orders to come back with a strawberry blond. That was about the only criteria—it had to be a woman and she had to have strawberry blond hair. To make wigs for the old horror.”

“Jesus.”

“I’d been searching for Maxwell for close to ten years before he finally slipped up and ran a stop sign down in Monterey with a dead strawberry blond in the passenger seat. I was about ninety percent sure he was the one who’d killed all those other women, but just to be sure, I talked the sheriff into putting me into a cell with him for an undercover interview. Bad mistake.” Pender raised his beret again to show the pilot the livid, trident-shaped scar across his scalp. “By the time I woke up in the hospital he’d already busted out, killed three deputy sheriffs, a highway patrolman, and at least two civilians….

“When I finally caught up to Maxwell, there were a dozen strawberry blond wigs in a glass case in his basement, plus two half-starved survivors who looked like concentration camp victims.” Plus Dr. Cogan, of course, but as always, Pender chose to protect her anonymity.

“He drew down on me, I put one round through his shoulder, a second through his knee, and between you, me, and the lamppost, I gave some serious goddamn consideration to putting a third round right through there”—touching a forefinger the size of a ballpark frank to where his third eye would have been, if he’d been a Hindu deity—“and saving everybody a shitload of trouble. As it was, he narrowly missed bleeding to death before we could get him to a hospital—they had to amputate what was left of his leg.”

But as Pender started to explain how the old woman had died in a fall shortly after the shootout, he realized the pilot was no longer really listening—just nodding politely at intervals as he checked gauges and flipped switches, preparing the plane for descent.

Oh shit, oh dear, thought Pender, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. How bored he used to get, pretending to listen politely in cop bars as some over-the-hill agent blathered on about his adventures back in the day. Pender had sworn more than once that he’d eat his 9mm SIG Sauer P226 before he’d let that happen to him.

The pilot pushed gently forward on the steering yoke, sending the plane nosing downward into the roiling cloud cover. “We’ll be touchin’ down in Portland in just a few minutes,” he told Pender in a standard issue,
Right Stuff
drawl. “Would you mind headin’ on back and makin’ sure everybody’s buckled in?”

Pender nodded briskly—he decided he’d probably done enough talking for one fat old man, for one morning.

2

Irene Cogan had suffered two brutal blows in her lifetime. Six years earlier, stunned by the unexpected death of her husband, she had more or less shut down emotionally, while her kidnapping and subsequent ordeal at the scarred hands of the serial killer Ulysses Maxwell three years later seemed to have had precisely the opposite effect.

With death imminent, Irene had promised herself that if she did by some miracle survive, she would spend less time working and more time smelling the roses. Unlike most such promises, that one had been kept—the second part, anyway. Her recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t exactly been a picnic—three years after her kidnapping she still suffered from the occasional PTSD flashback—but in general she had come through it with a renewed sense of possibilities, stronger where she was weak, less brittle where she was strong, a good deal kinder to herself, and an inveterate smeller of roses.

“You’re just in time,” she greeted Pender upon his return to the cabin, which resembled a long, narrow hospital room. Lily lay strapped into the adjustable bed, fully clothed, tossing restlessly in her sleep. “I think she’s starting to come out of it.”

“Which
she
would that be?” asked Pender.

“Hard to say. Stress, trauma, periods of unconsciousness as opposed to natural sleep all tend to trigger alter switches. But as to which alter comes out the other side, that’s a crap shoot. Or I suppose I should say a game of roulette—you know, round and round she goes, and where she stops…“

“…nobody knows,” Lily said sleepily, opening her eyes. “Oh, hi, Dr. Irene. Boy, am I glad to see
you.
I just had the strangest dream. I dreamed I was home alone, and the phone rang, and it was this policeman, and he, he said…“Her dark eyes widened as she took in her surroundings; she sat up, looking around dazedly. “Am I still dreaming?”

“Not at all.” Irene took Lily’s hand in one of hers and patted it with her other hand to help Lily ground herself. “We’re in an airplane—it’s like a flying ambulance. You’ve had a rather severe dissociative episode—I’m afraid I had to sedate you.”

“Was it Lilah?”

“No, a new alter—she called herself Lilith. She was quite a character—something like a biker moll in training.”

“Speaking of flying.” Pender stepped to the foot of the bed. “Pilot says everybody needs to buckle up—we’ll be landing in just a few minutes.”

Seeing Pender made Lily feel a little like smiling in spite of…well, in spite of everything. “Hello, Uncle Pen.”

“Hi, doll.” He and the doctor helped her up and led her over to one of three swiveling chairs bolted to the starboard wall; Pender buckled her seat belt for her as the jet began a sharp leftward bank.

Lily rubbed her palms against the soft upholstery, continuing the grounding process. So many questions crowded her mind: how much time had passed? What had this “Lilith” been up to with
her
body? Any harm done—to herself or others? And where were Grandma and Grandpa, how come they had sent Dr. Irene and Uncle Pen instead of—

Suddenly she moaned.

“What is it, dear—are you all right?” asked Irene, lowering herself into the chair to Lily’s left. “Do you need anything? A glass of water or something?”

Lily turned her head. Her eyes swam with tears, blurring and brightening the silvery glare filtering in through the oval windows. “The phone call from the policeman—that wasn’t something I dreamed, was it, Dr. Irene?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“How—how long has it been?” The plane straightened out again; Lily felt the pressure of the descent in her ears.

“Not quite three weeks.”

“Did I miss the funeral?”

Thud
—the cabin trembled briefly as the landing gear let down. “The memorial service, yes, I’m afraid so. But your uncle Rollie said to tell you that he’s saving the ashes until you get home so the two of you can scatter them in the bay.”

Ashes, thought Lily. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. “Dr. Irene?”

“Yes?”

“When we get home, can I stay at your house for a while? I don’t think I could handle being alone in the hacienda.”

Thwwwwt
—it was as if all the air had been sucked out of the cabin, replaced by a shivery silence. The white-striped black tarmac rushed by on either side of the plane. Then, as the wheels hit the tarmac at the shallowest of angles, rebounded into the air, and skipped along the runway for a few dozen yards like a stone skimming across a pond, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

“We’re not
going
home, are we?” she called, over the whine of the braking engines.

“I’m—No, no we’re not.” I’m afraid not, Irene had started to say, before it occurred to her how frequently she’d used the word
afraid
in the last few minutes.

Now why is that? she asked herself, as the plane taxied toward the terminal. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that in about twenty minutes she’d be in the same building as Ulysses Maxwell, could it?

Well, yes, actually it could. But there was nothing to be afraid
of,
the psychiatrist reminded herself, unconsciously rubbing her forefinger over the burn scar on the back of her hand where the alter known as Max had held a cigarette lighter to her flesh. Because he can’t hurt you anymore, she told herself firmly. He can’t hurt you ever again.

3

Fighting panic during the last leg of the journey to the Reed-Chase Institute—
Is this really happening? Oh God, is this really happening?
—afterward Lily would remember the ride only in disconnected flashes. The anonymous-looking white van that met them at the Portland airport; Uncle Pen in his ridiculous hula shirt standing at the curb waving good-bye; the subaqueous light through the van’s dark-tinted windows; a girdered bridge over a shining river; a rolling, landscaped parkway; Dr. Irene reminding her to breathe, dear, don’t forget to breathe.

As soon as she left the van, her perception tunneled. She took in the suburban-looking sidewalk beneath her feet, the cement walkway bordered with bright petunias and ranunculuses, and the sliding glass doors with the RCI diamond, but as if in a nightmare, she would not, could not raise her eyes to the stern-fronted, two-story brick building, and would later recall it only as a brooding presence looming before her.

To ease the apprehension of patients and allay the misgivings of the family members responsible for committing them, the reception area at Reed-Chase was designed to look more like a hotel lobby than a hospital waiting room. Instead of linoleum, a plush gray wall-to-wall carpet; instead of the usual rows of hard-backed chairs, upholstered furniture in separate groupings, each with its own floor or table lamp; tall rubber plants in urns or tubs furthered the resemblance to an old-fashioned hotel lobby.

“Irene, so good to see you.” A plump, shirt-sleeved man bustled across the lobby and hugged Dr. Cogan warmly. “And you must be Lily,” he added, holding out a pudgy pink hand that was well-scrubbed even by Lily’s demanding standards. “Hi, I’m Dr. Corder.”

Lily shook hands reluctantly, then she and Dr. Cogan followed Corder through another set of sliding glass doors behind and to the right of the reception desk, and down a short corridor to a high-ceilinged office with walnut bookshelves and arched windows covered with dark valanced curtains.

Corder ushered the women into chairs drawn up in front of his imposing desk, then walked around behind the desk and sat down in a high-backed leather chair. “Welcome to the Institute. How was your flight?”

“Very comfortable,” replied Dr. Cogan. “From now on, I’m going to fly by ambulance.”

Corder chuckled. “How about you, Lily?”

“Well, for once I didn’t get airsick.” She wasn’t sure why that was funny, but both doctors chuckled. “Is that your family?” Nodding toward a triptych picture frame on the desk: blond woman on the left, blond teenage girl on the right, and in the center a snapshot of a younger, thinner Corder in a green smock, his surgical mask dangling from his neck as he cradled a newborn baby in his arms.

“My wife, Cheryl; my daughter, Alison; I, ah, don’t know who that cute devil in the middle is.”

Suddenly it was all too much for Lily—the picture of the helpless baby in its father’s arms had sent the old sadness stealing over her. Where other people had childhoods, happier or unhappier by degree, Lily had a great dark hole inside her from which her childhood had been violently torn. And as if that weren’t bad enough, now her grandparents were both dead and she was being institutionalized. Ashes, ashes, she thought. All…fall…