When She Was Bad: A Thriller (2 page)

1

There was a dark place inside Lyssy, where he was never to go. He pictured it as a room, though it had neither floor, ceiling, nor walls, and sometimes, especially when he was alone at night, Lyssy imagined he could hear a voice inside the room, muttering quietly to itself in the darkness.

But Lyssy knew better than to discuss the dark place with his doctor, or indeed with anyone at the Reed-Chase Institute, the private psychiatric care facility in Oregon where he had been confined for almost as long as he could remember.

“No, really, I can do it myself,” he protested as the nurse knelt in front of him to help him on with his prosthetic right leg. But he didn’t protest too hard—this was the nurse he secretly thought of as Miss Stockings, because that’s what she wore instead of the panty hose favored by the other nurses. And when she knelt, her white uniform skirt rode up with a faint whispering noise, offering Lyssy a glimpse of the shiny-smooth dark bands at the top of the stockings, a few inches of creamy gartered thighs, and even a peek at I-See-London-I-See-France.

“I just need to make sure,” she said. “If you get a pressure sore and can’t walk, it’s my heinie on the line.”

“Heinie?” Lyssy giggled.

“Oh, grow up.”

Wounded pause, then: “I’m trying, Nurse. I’m trying as hard as I can.” When he’d first arrived at the Institute, Lyssy had been basically a child in a man’s body, with almost no memory, and the affect and intellectual functioning of a three-year-old.

Miss Stockings colored. “I’m sorry, Lyssy, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No problem.” He flashed her the boyish grin that had made him a staff favorite, not just here in the locked ward, but all over the Institute. Especially with the females: Lyssy’s delicate, heart-shaped face, with its long-lashed brown eyes flecked with gold and its lips curved like a Cupid’s bow, still retained its youthful prettiness; a lock of nut-brown hair drooped across his unlined forehead.

Just as he’d finished tucking the tails of his forest-green corduroy shirt into his neatly pressed chinos, the door to the room slid open with a whoosh, admitting a massive young man with dark curly hair and a bodybuilder’s physique. He was dressed in the uniform worn by all the psych techs at the Institute: white duck trousers and a white polo shirt with the letters RCI encased in a diamond on the left breast. “There a Ulysses Maxwell in here?” he called cheerfully.

“That would be me.” Big, double-chinned Wally Smets was Lyssy’s favorite orderly—when Wally escorted Lyssy, somehow he made it seem as if they were just two buddies out for a stroll.

“Let’s go, li’l bro—there’s somebody wants to have a chat with you.”

“Really? Who?”

“Just be on your best behavior—that’s all I can tell you.”

“Best foot forward,” replied Lyssy. That was one of his and Dr. Al’s jokes. The reason it was a joke was because Lyssy only
had
one foot, Dr. Al had explained—humor was one of many things Lyssy’d had to learn from scratch.

The Institute was comprised of three two-story buildings of weathered brick that formed a U around a central arboretum; on the fourth side, a spike-topped brick wall overgrown with glistening ivy separated the hospital grounds from the director’s residence.

From Lyssy’s room on 2-West, the maximum security ward, Wally escorted Lyssy down the long corridor to the elevator lobby, all but dwarfing his five-foot, six-inch charge, and entered his security code into a keypad. When the elevator arrived, he peered inside before allowing Lyssy to enter; exiting, he reversed the procedure.

Another long corridor led to the two adjoining conference rooms on 1-South, which also housed the reception lobby, the cafeteria, and the administrative offices. Wally ushered Lyssy into the smaller room, which had apparently been pressed into service as a storage area. Lyssy limped over to a stack of molded plastic chairs—he found it aesthetically pleasing, the way the chairs fit together, nested seat upon seat, arms upon arms. Just for the fun of it, he asked Wally to help him up to the topmost chair. Lyssy stiffened his elbows and the psych tech lifted him as easily as if he were a child, then steadied the swaying stack.

“King of the world,” Lyssy exclaimed delightedly. But when he started waving his arms about, pretending the chairs were about to topple over, Wally glanced nervously at the long smoky mirror set into the side of the wall between the two conference rooms.

“Down you go,” he said, swinging Lyssy from his perch by the armpits.

“No fair,” whined the thirty-one-year-old Lyssy, sticking out his lower lip in a grotesque, if unintended, parody of a toddler’s pout. “I never get to have any fun.”

2

Okay boys, who’s next?

Ten days had passed since Lilith had spat out what was left of her attacker’s nose and issued her challenge to the circle of ogres in that reeking tent outside Sturgis, South Dakota. Nor would there have been any shortage of takers if a bosomy, leather-clad, middle-aged redhead carrying a double-barreled shotgun hadn’t stepped through the tent flap just then and announced that the party was over.

“Hey, c’mon, Mama Rose,” a squat, troll-faced biker had whined, as two of his buddies helped their mutilated colleague to his feet. “We bought her fair and square.” And so they had, from the biker who’d originally picked “Lilah” up in Seaside—to his surprise, three days of her constant sexual demands had been about as much as he could stand.

“I got rock salt in one barrel and triple-ought buckshot in the other,” the biker mama had replied calmly, cocking both hammers of the twelve-gauge side-by-side. “Fucking thing is, I’m not sure which is which.” Then, turning to Lilith: “Get your clothes on, honey.”

“Carson? How ’bout it, man?” Troll-face turned to a tall, lean man with a Viva Zapata mustache, a fringed buckskin jacket, and a leather cowboy hat, standing quietly in the shadows, leaning against a tent post. “You gonna let the cunt get away with that?”

Mama Rose had swung the shotgun around and trained both barrels on the speaker. “You best not be referring to me, Li’l T.,” she said.

“I meant the girl,” he’d replied quickly, without taking his eyes off Carson. “She bit Merv’s fucking nose off, man.”

Carson, who was obviously the alpha male of the pack, had narrowed his eyes; a hint of a smile lifted the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Good thing he don’t wear glasses.”

The Sturgis run had lasted another three days, during which the childless Mama Rose took the dazed, penniless amnesiac under her wing. She bought Lilith clothes to replace the tattered hooker outfit, taught her how to ride a motorcycle, loaned her a .22 pistol and taught her how to shoot it, and when it had become apparent that the girl had nowhere else to go, brought her back to Shasta County after the run.

To Lilith, saddle-sore after riding pillion for close to a thousand miles, the isolated, pink-sided ranch house on a scrubby hillside north of Redding had been a veritable paradise. For the next few days she’d done little but eat, sleep, take hot tubs, and sunbathe.

Then the biker known as Swervin’ Mervin had shown up at the front door in a surgical mask, demanding revenge on the girl who’d de-nosed him. Annoyed, but curious to see how it would all play out, as if Lilith were a fascinating new pet or toy, Carson invited him in, then called Lilith down from the attic dormer where she’d been napping.

“Man oh man, you just don’t know when to quit, do you?” Lilith had remarked dispassionately, upon seeing him. Then she’d produced Mama Rose’s Lady Beretta from behind her back and shot him in the face before he could rise from his chair.

They’d buried Swervin’ Mervin in the woods below the house that night. A Coleman lantern cast giant shadows between the pines. Mama Rose had recited the Twenty-third Psalm while Carson chunked dirt upon the uncovered corpse. When she got to the part about
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
Lilith broke into a triumphant grin.

“Who’s the meanest motherfucker in the valley now?” she’d asked the dead man, shining the lantern down onto his rude grave and laughing when she saw that his eyes were crossed comically above the bloodstained surgical mask, as if he were trying to sneak a peek at the neat little bullet hole that had blossomed between them.

3

I never get to have any fun….

On the other side of the surveillance mirror, Ruth Trotman shot Alan Corder a meaningful glance. A tough-minded, hawk-nosed forensic psychiatrist, originally from Great Britain and now working out of the Oregon Attorney General’s office, she was all too aware of what “having fun” used to entail for Ulysses Christopher Maxwell.

Corder, the Institute’s director, had wavy ginger hair combed straight back from a broad-cheeked, pleasant face; his characteristically placid expression often caused others to underestimate his resolve. Hastily he reached under the conference table and pushed a button: the green floor-to-ceiling curtains swept silently across the one-way glass. His mistake, he realized, was having expected Trotman to see Ulysses through his eyes: the Lyssy he had grown to love almost as a surrogate son (not surprisingly, as he had in effect raised him from a three-year-old) was a gentle, sweet-natured naif to whom violence of any kind was utterly abhorrent.

No more screwups, Corder told himself firmly—Lyssy’s future was on the line here. “If you don’t mind, I’d, ah, like to give you a little background before we bring Ulysses in.”

“I think I have all the background I need right here,” said Trotman, untying the string of the two-inch-thick manila folder in her lap and removing at random a badly photostatted coroner’s report. “Paula Ann Wisniewski. She was victim number twelve, I believe. He disemboweled her. Which made her one of the lucky ones—some of the others took years to die.” She slipped the document back into the folder, selected another at random. “And this would be—”

“I’ve
seen
the goddamn—” Corder caught himself, lowered his voice. “I’ve seen all that, Ruth. But what you have to understand is that for the time period during which those crimes were committed, we have an unimpeachable diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder from Irene Cogan, whom you have to agree is tops in the field and had, shall we say, unprecedented access to the patient.”

Trotman looked as though she’d just bitten down on a rotten pistachio. “As far as I’m concerned,
Dr.
Corder, there’s no such thing as an ‘unimpeachable’ diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. And if by unprecedented access, you’re referring to the fact that he kidnapped and tortured Dr. Cogan, attempted to rape her, and was preparing to kill her when she was rescued, I must say I consider your choice of terminology somewhat flippant, if not outright offensive.”

“I apologize. That wasn’t my intention. I was just trying to get you to see that for all intents and purposes, the man who committed those acts—terrible as they are,” he added hurriedly, “that man
no longer exists.”

“Either that, or he’s sitting on the other side of that mirror having a jolly great laugh at our expense.”

“But—”

“My job, Dr. Corder, is to determine whether Mr. Maxwell is competent to understand the charges against him, and to assist in his own defense. A judge and jury will sort out the rest.”

“But how can he assist in his own defense if he doesn’t remember a single, solitary—”

“Spare me, oh spare me. If amnesia were a bar to trial, every criminal in the world would suffer an immediate loss of memory.” Trotman leaned forward, resting her forearms on the desk. “You have to understand, the pressure is on the attorney general from every direction. The media, the governor, Maxwell’s surviving victims and the families of the ones who didn’t, district attorneys and federal prosecutors all across the nation—they’re all clamoring to know why he hasn’t been brought to trial yet. Now are you going to let me do my job, or must I go back to the AG and tell him you refused to permit a court-ordered examination?”

“No, of course not.” Corder reached under the desk, pressed another button. “Walter, we’re, ah, ready for Ulysses now.”

4

In the days that followed Mervin’s death, Lilith’s conscience never troubled her—she had no more conscience than a cat, and a good deal less curiosity. In a way, it was as if she came alive only when threatened; in the absence of danger she was content to spend her time soaking in the hot tub or basking like a lizard on the sun-warmed patio behind the pink house.

Then one morning Mama Rose announced at breakfast that she had to go into town to take care of some errands, and all but insisted that Lilith come along. Wearing an oversize leather bomber jacket, the girl rode pillion on Mama Rose’s baby-blue Sportster with her cheek pressed against the other woman’s broad back, the wind in her hair, and the scent of greasy leather in her nostrils.

But instead of traveling into Redding or Mt. Shasta, which was usually what was meant by going into town, Mama Rose drove Lilith to a generic-looking motel coffee shop in Weed—padded vinyl banquettes, Formica tables, travel posters depicting a matador, the Matterhorn, and the Eiffel tower. There were only three other customers: a middle-aged couple at the counter, and a guy with a gray ponytail who slipped out as soon as Lilith and Mama Rose arrived.

Lilith asked for a latte, though how she knew she preferred lattes when she didn’t know her last name or where she came from was another of the questions she had steadfastly declined to ask herself. Mama Rose ordered an espresso, installed Lilith in a booth over by the plate-glass window, then excused herself to visit the ladies’ room.

Mama Rose still hadn’t returned by the time the coffees arrived. Lilith, wearing a T-shirt and low-cut jeans under the borrowed bomber jacket, was thinking about popping into the ladies’ room to check on her friend when the middle-aged couple approached her booth.