The Girls He Adored (23 page)

It all came back to him when he switched on the bedside light, saw the cow-themed lamp, bedspread, statuettes, paintings, and knickknacks of the Klopfman guest room. Then he heard the tapping again.

“Yes?”

The door opened; a round, double-chinned, dark-eyed, darkhaired woman appeared in the doorway. “Agent Pender?”

“Dr. Klopfman?”

“May I come in?”

“Please.”

Barbara closed the door behind her and tiptoed into the room, wearing a too-tall man's bathrobe that trailed the floor, over a comfy-cozy thick cotton nightgown. “I couldn't sleep—Sam told me you were here and wanted to talk to me as soon as possible.”

“The sooner the better,” said Pender doubtfully, sitting up, pulling the covers to his waist. He was feeling warm, toasty, affectionate, and muzzy. As he glanced at the clock on the wall, noting with some amusement that the little cow was at one and the big cow at six, he remembered about the pain pills. One-thirty in the morning, stoned on Vicodin.

Fortunately, Dr. Klopfman was under the influence of her own medication and either didn't notice or didn't care. Before long they were calling each other Ed and Barbara, and flirting harmlessly as she told him her story.

Pender had never conducted an interview half stoned, sitting up in bed in his underwear, but it didn't seem to affect his prowess. Barbara found the big man's presence comforting. He prompted her gently, elicited details she didn't know she remembered, and even held her hand at the scariest parts.

When she had finished, Pender asked her if she thought there was any possibility that Casey was faking DID.

“I doubt it,” Barbara replied without hesitation. “He could fool me easily enough, but when it comes to dissociative disorders, Irene's the very best there is—it'd be hard to fool her. She ran a full battery of tests, did a clinical interview—she even put him under for a regression.”

“I wish to hell I'd been a fly on the wall for that.”

“You could always listen to the tape,” said Barbara.

Pender appeared startled. “She taped her sessions?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I'll be.” Upon learning that Dr. Cogan had been abducted, the FBI had broken into her office, but there was no sign of the notes she'd promised to type up for them. Case Agent Pastor had confiscated her PC and was having an FBI computer security expert sent down from San Jose to break her password, but it would take at least another day. Once again, Pender was one jump ahead of the investigative curve.

“Where would she keep the tapes?” he asked Barbara.

“Her office, I suppose. I know where she keeps the spare key—I could take you over first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning, hell,” said Pender, starting to throw back the covers, then remembering that he was in his underwear. “Didn't anybody ever tell you, the FBI never sleeps?”

“I sleep,” replied Barbara.

“Irene won't,” said Pender—that clinched the deal.

I
N ORDER TO HELP THE
system protect itself, Max, with Ish's help, had years earlier put in place what might be termed an emergency response reflex. If any alter but Max was ever asked his or her name, a switch would be executed instantaneously; only Max would be allowed to respond to such a question.

Unfortunately, Max had never anticipated a contingency in which the question was asked while another alter was driving a car at high speed along a fairly crowded highway. Though the driver's eyes were off the road for only a few seconds, the van veered sharply to the left again—apparently old Bill didn't believe in spending a lot of money on alignments. Then Max, seizing control, overcompensated, jerking the wheel to the right; the van lurched so sharply that it rocked briefly on two wheels.

Irene screamed and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the van was back in the center lane, horns were blaring, and her captor had drawn the snub-nosed revolver from his waist for the first time since he'd pulled it on the old man.

“Irene, Irene, Irene, what have I ever done to make you treat me with such disrespect?”

The voice was a husky whisper, the accent Italian or Spanish. A second wave of fear, colder, deeper, and somehow even more threatening than the pure physical terror of the near wreck, all but swamped Irene's reason. Was this the homicidal alter she had dreaded meeting? With her adrenaline pumping and a brassy taste in the back of her throat, Irene struggled for control over her runaway emotions. She knew her survival depended on her mind, on
her training. He's mentally ill, she told herself, and you're a psychiatrist. Use it, for God's sake: work it.

And when she had mastered her terror, or at least subdued it temporarily, the answer came to her—this wasn't an alter at all, but another of his impressions.
“The Godfather,
right?” she asked shakily.

Max nodded, and slipped the gun back into the waistband of the jeans. “I'd better explain before we end up running off the fucking road. Irene, when I first showed up on the scene, Ulysses Christopher Maxwell Jr. was an unholy mess. Chaos—absolute chaos. Alters popping up randomly at all the wrong moments, rarely communicating with each other. You said Lyssy told you about the first time he was molested. Hell, he doesn't even
know
about the first time—the abuse had been going on for years by then. And frankly, what happened that night was a walk in the park compared to the earlier abuse—by the time he was five, he'd split off half a dozen alters to deal with it.

“And Ulysses, the so-called host, was a joke—Useless, I call him. Completely powerless—he didn't even know he was part of a multiple. This system was heading straight for the funny farm, Irene— if it even survived long enough.

“Enter Max. I restored order, established communications, laid down a few simple rules of conduct, one of which is that I'm the only alter allowed to answer questions about our identity. So from now on, no more asking for names, no more peeping around until we're in a more or less formal therapeutic setting.”

Therapeutic setting, thought Irene. So she'd been right when she told Barbara that what he wanted was help. But her relief at having been right on that score was tempered by a troubling thought: he'd told her his name. Which meant he had no intention of ever letting her go.

She could feel that cold wave of terror threatening to swamp her again. Of course he had no intention of letting her go—she told herself that on some level she'd known that all along. But it still didn't equal a death sentence. Escape, rescue—those were very real possibilities. As long as she managed to remain alive. By using her mind. Her training. Work it, she reminded herself. Listen.

“Now, once we start our therapy, I have no objection to your speaking to whomever you please,” Max was saying. “As long as you don't try to take advantage of the situation, that is. Keep in mind—I'll
be
there, I'll be listening, I'll know everything any of them tells you, and hear everything you tell any of them.”

Not any, thought Irene, remembering Max's confusion after the hypnotherapy session. Not Lyssy.

“And if you try to persuade any of them to do anything against the system's best interest, I will terminate the therapy with extreme prejudice. Are you familiar with that term?”

“Not exactly.”

“I got it out of
Apocalypse Now
. It's a euphemism. A termination with extreme prejudice is invariably fatal.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” said Irene. “But may I speak frankly?”

“Always.”

“If in your opinion you have the system operating so smoothly, why are you seeking therapy?”

He looked over at her sharply, then turned back to the road unspooling ahead of them. Traffic had begun to clear. They were cruising at fifty miles an hour, the van's maximum speed. That was why he'd stayed on 101 instead of cutting over to the interstate: doing fifty on Route 5 could get you pulled over for obstructing traffic.

“You're not being sarcastic by any chance, are you Irene?”

“No—I think it's a legitimate question.”

“Then I'll give you a legitimate answer. It's no goddamn picnic being a multiple. You're always one slip away from humiliation. Hard to hold down a job. And as for a relationship, forget it— who'd want a relationship with a whole theatrical troupe? You'd never know whom you're making love to.”

Irene decided not to point out that the DID literature was rife with examples of multiples' spouses (usually male spouses of female multiples) who actively subverted therapy because being married to a multiple was like having your own imaginary harem.

“I'm still a little confused,” she told him instead. “You said you've restored order to the system. Why not just stay in control yourself?”

“I wish to hell I could. But it doesn't work like that. The only way I can stay in control is by letting the others all have their turns. If I don't, they're apt to force their way out. Sometimes they do anyway—that's how you met Useless the other day.”

Irene thought back to what the hapless host alter had said—that Max wouldn't allow any therapy. Now she was beginning to understand. “So what you're telling me is that you want to go into therapy not to achieve integration, but to maintain more effective control over the other alters. I don't know how much progress we can make under those ground rules.”

“A little fine-tuning, for a more efficiently functioning system? That's just textbook fusion, Irene—a textbook therapeutic resolution. I think it's doable, and I think it's worth a shot. How about you?”

Irene knew better than to ask him what her alternatives were. Suppressing a shudder, she turned her thoughts to the work ahead of her. Fusion was difficult enough to achieve in the best of circumstances—and time-consuming: three years at a minimum. But who could say for sure? This multiple was different from any of the others she'd treated—perhaps with a powerful alter like Max in charge, instead of the usual ineffective host, the possibility of an early resolution might not be all that far-fetched.

In any event, it would surely beat termination with extreme prejudice. So: start therapy, keep Max happy, keep your eyes open for any crack or weakness in the system that might be exploitable—and most important, stay alive.

“I suppose I'm game if you are,” she told him. Then she turned to her left, reached across the space separating them, and gently pushed that unruly comma of hair, blond now, back from his forehead, and tucked it under his watchcap for him.

E
D
P
ENDER HAD TOSSED
his share of houses in his time, and one of the conclusions he'd come to was that it was often easier to find something that had been deliberately hidden than something that hadn't. Cops, like burglars, knew all the hiding places—mattresses and drawer bottoms, freezers and toilet tanks, wall safes and crawl spaces.

But Irene Cogan hadn't been trying to conceal her Dictaphone, which meant it might be anywhere. After a thorough search first of her office, then her living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, Pender had learned almost as much about Dr. Cogan as he would have from meeting her face to face—certainly more than she would have volunteered.

He knew her late husband had been named Frank, that he'd been a builder and a golfer and an amateur painter. He knew that either she and Frank hadn't been able to have children or didn't want any—although there was obviously no shortage of money, they'd purchased a small home with only one bedroom.

He saw that she was neat, but not a fastidious housekeeper, that she was a conservative dresser who preferred department stores to couturiers. He knew she was slender, small in the top and long in the legs, and that she had her hair dyed at the hairdressers but touched it up occasionally with L'Oreal. Her scent was Rain, her favorite color was blue, and she was probably proud of those long legs—she had more dresses than pantsuits, more skirts and shorts than slacks, and although she wore plain white cotton panties from Olga, she wasn't averse to shelling out the big bucks for high-end pantyhose and stockings, and understood the value of high heels.