The Girls He Adored (18 page)

“Absolutely.” Irene absentmindedly fired up a Camel, then looked down at it in surprise when the toasty smoke lit up tastebuds long dormant after years of smoking Benson and Hedges Lights. “Maybe not an integration, but at least some fusion.”

“What's the diff?”

“Integration involves a complete and final psychic restructuring. Fusion is more of a consolidation—you map the alters, get them all communicating and working together, consolidate some of the subsystems, and with the help of the other alters, teach the more extreme personalities less extreme coping techniques. It's not a dramatic cure like you see in the movies, but as Dr. Caul, one of the pioneers in DID therapy, always said, what you want after treatment is a functional operation, never mind whether it's a big corporation, a limited partnership, or a one-owner business.”

“So we get a more efficient homicidal maniac?” said Sam. “Swell. Seems to me this guy's functioning better than our sheriff's department already. By the way, let me know if you want to sue the bastards for last night. I'd take it on pro bono just for the fun of deposing old Bustamante.”

Irene thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “Thanks anyway, Sam—I'd just as soon put this whole business behind me.”

By Friday morning, it seemed that Irene was a little closer to her goal of putting the incident behind her. When she woke up, the FBI surveillance van outside her house was gone. Special Agent Thomas Pastor, who'd been brought down from the field office in San Francisco to take charge of the botched operation, had come to agree with Bustamante's conclusion that Irene was neither an accomplice nor a potential victim, despite the words Pender had written in his own blood on the floor of the cell. The injured agent's opinions were not currently held in high esteem by the powers-that-be.

Pastor did, however, call Irene at ten o'clock to make an appointment for an interview later that afternoon. Pastor also asked Irene if she wouldn't mind typing up her case notes for him. Apparently he was unaware that the sessions had been taped—and she had no intention of telling him.

Irene finished typing her notes into her PC around eleventhirty, but when she attempted to print them out, she discovered the print cartridge on her HP was bone-dry. There wasn't time to pick up another before her jogging date with Barbara, so she drove down to Lovers Point instead of walking, intending to swing by the Office Depot in Sand City after her jog.

It was another gorgeous day in the Last Home Town. Soon
enough the summer fog would be rolling in to blanket the town day and night, but for now it was still beach weather. Irene pulled the red convertible into the Lovers Point parking lot. The obsessively punctual Dr. Klopfman was waiting for Irene down by the seawall.

Five minutes later, after completing their stretching exercises, Irene and Barbara set off down the jogging trail that wound through the shining lavender-pink iceplant carpeting the long curve of the downtown shoreline park.

“This always reminds me of the field of poppies in the
Wizard of Oz,”
said Irene. She was wearing an oversize tanktop over white running shorts. Barbara wore dark green shorts and a Friends of the Sea Otters T-shirt.

“Iceplant is non-native,” said Barbara disapprovingly.

“It sure is pretty, though.”

“That I'll grant you. Did you see the paper today?”

“Nope.”

“Your boy Max was all over the front page. The FBI thinks he might be a serial killer they've been after for years.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Irene. “But you know, I still believe what I told Sam last night. There was real promise there. Three of the alters had a genuine sweetness about them—little Lyssy, Christopher, and that poor host-type.”

“Too bad there's no way to just lock up the evil alters.”

“Evil? You know as well as I do that evil is no more a psychological concept than good. There's only healthy and unhealthy, and both of those are relative points on a continuum. It's a slippery slope—once you start labeling people with mental disorders as evil, it's like you're saying they don't deserve care or treatment.”

“Just because something's not a psychological concept doesn't mean it doesn't exist, honey,” replied Barbara, falling in behind Irene as the jogging trail narrowed to a thin track hemmed in on both sides by iceplant.

A moment later they came upon a sight so pitiful it was almost funny—a blond man in a pink nylon jogging suit and incongruous black wing tips, trying to jog despite a severe case of what appeared to be some form of either palsy or chorea. His feet were splayed, his knees were pressed together, his butt was pooched out, his head was tucked sideways into his right shoulder, his left arm was jammed into the elastic waistband of the pink pants, and his right arm waved feebly in the air, hand flapping like a drag queen's. He
stepped, or rather lurched, aside as the two women trotted up behind him, so they wouldn't have to follow his pace until the path widened. They thanked him without turning to look as they jogged by.

Warmed by the sun, soothed by the sound of the waves, and with a renewed sense of gratitude at being able-bodied, Irene and Barbara jogged beyond Point Pinos, and were feeling the effects by the time they sighted the unfortunate man again on the return trip. He was not far from the point where they'd first seen him, but ten yards off the path, struggling through the ankle-high iceplant, heading toward the road that paralleled the shoreline trail, then falling, or rather sinking, exhausted, into a semi-squatting position as they passed him. Neither woman hesitated; they left the path and waded through the tangled pink groundcover that snatched at their socks and scratched their ankles. Barbara asked him if he needed a hand.

“Thaaank yeeoo.” His voice was a tortured howl, his head was twisted down and to the side, half buried in his right armpit, and his left hand was still jammed into the elastic waistband, as if to keep it from jerking upward involuntarily. They each took an elbow, helped him to his feet, and walked him the last few yards.

“Thiiis eeis myeee ca-err,” he said with great difficulty as they reached the green Volvo station wagon parked by the side of the road.

“You drive?” said Irene in surprise. As soon as the ill-considered words were out of her mouth, she wished she could take them back, but before she could stammer out an apology, he straightened up and turned into Max. The transformation was that sudden, a Siegfried and Roy materialization. One moment Max wasn't there, and the next he was. There should have been a puff of smoke and a fanfare. Instead he drew a snub-nosed revolver from under his waistband and jammed it into Barbara's side.

“Decision time, ladies,” he said, stepping close to Barbara and angling his body to block the gun from the view of the passersby. “Who wants to live?”

.

“I
F YOU TOUCH ME THERE AGAIN,
you're going to have to marry me. Or at least kiss me.”

Nurse's aide Rosa Beltran, sponge-bathing the comatose patient in room 375, leaped back from the bed, spilling the basin of warm soapy water over the patient, the bed, and herself. “Muy gracioso,” she said—border slang for “very funny”—and hurried off to fetch the charge nurse, who immediately paged the resident on call.

“What time is it?” was Pender's first question, as the resident, a Bengali woman half his age, checked his pupils while Rosa remade the bed.

“One o'clock,” she said in a musical, singsong Indian accent.

“I hate to ask this, but what day?”

“Friday—you have been unconscious since Wednesday afternoon. How are you feeling?”

“Like I just broke the Guinness World Record for hangovers.”

“I'm not surprised—in addition to the concussion you sustained, it took twenty sutures to close up the scalp lacerations. Fortunately, there is no fracture.”

“My ex always said I had a thick skull. How about something for the pain?”

“Just a few minutes longer, please. The neurologist must examine you first.”

By now Pender's mind had filled in the remaining memory gaps. “Did they get him?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Casey—did they get him?”

“You can ask your friend all about that.”

Pender couldn't tell whether the look the young doctor gave him on her way out of the room was one of pity or compassion. Either would have been appropriate: Special Agent Thomas Pastor, in a bureau-approved blue suit, conservative tie, and well-shined Florsheim wing tips, entered Pender's room wearing an expression that would have been more appropriate in a seafood store—a seafood store with insufficient refrigeration, thought Pender.

“I just want to get a few things straight for the record,” he informed Pender after introducing himself. “My understanding is that you not only identified yourself as an FBI officer while still in the cell with the prisoner, thereby provoking the prisoner to attack you and resulting not only in the prisoner's escape, but in the death of one deputy, and the severe injury of another—”

“What are you talking about? I never—”

Pastor, standing over the bed, pulled out his notebook. “According to Deputy Knapp, you called out to Deputy Twombley to let you out of the cell, that you had everything you needed.”

“I was already unconscious. It must have been Casey—he's a brilliant impersonator.”

“I'm sure he is,” said Pastor drily. “It's a moot point anyway. According to Steve Maheu”—Maheu, known to Liaison Support staffers as Steve Too, was Steve McDougal's second in command— ”you weren't even authorized to be in that cell in the first place.”

“Bullshit. Sheriff Bustamante told me—”

“I don't give a fuck
what
Sheriff Bustamante told you—no one in the bureau ever authorized a known fuckup like E. L. Pender to go undercover for a jailhouse interview. So if you want to blow smoke up somebody's butt, save it for the OPR boys—they have filters up their ass. All
I
want to hear from you is what you learned from Casey, if anything, that might help us get him into custody— to get him
back
into custody.”

A wave of dizziness washed over Pender. He closed his eyes and fought against the debilitating throbbing in his head. Muzzy as he still was, he understood now which way the wind was blowing. The FBI rarely admitted to a mistake—when it did, you could bet it already had a scapegoat saddled up and ready to ride.

Which meant, Pender knew, that the best outcome he could hope for was to be offered his pension in exchange for his badge. In other circumstances, the deal would have been acceptable, even welcome—at last he'd have a chance to work on his golf game, see if he couldn't whittle his handicap down into the respectable teens.
But everything had changed in the last forty-eight hours. Now more than ever, Casey was his responsibility—and when, inevitably, the monster waltzed with another strawberry blond, she would be his responsibility too. And so would the next, and the next, and the next.

Suddenly Pender realized that there was nothing he wouldn't do, nothing he wouldn't risk, including his pension. Besides, he thought, gingerly fingering his bandaged head, this thing was personal now.

“Pastor,” he said miserably, opening his eyes, letting the tears well helplessly.

“What?”

“He wouldn't tell me a fucking thing.”

“Now why doesn't that surprise me?” Pastor pocketed his notebook, handed Pender his business card. “Write it up anyway, mail the report to me. Preferably from another state.”

The worst-dressed agent in the history of the FBI left Natividad Hospital against his doctor's orders, but with a smaller bandage on his head and a bottle of Vicodin in his pocket. He was wearing the same loud sport coat, brown Sansabelt slacks, iridescent gray Banlon polo shirt, and stingy-brim herringbone hat he'd worn to the jail Wednesday afternoon. Two days in a paper sack had not improved the drape of the clothes; the hat sat crookedly on his rebandaged crown.