Blind Spot (27 page)

“I’m afraid to see,” Alexa mumbled. “Afraid.” She twisted herself into an even smaller space, although it didn’t seem possible. “If I see, it comes true.”

“Is that why you haven’t been sleeping?” Suki felt as if her heart were breaking. “So you won’t dream?”

“If I don’t see it, it won’t happen.” Tears squeezed through Alexa’s closed lids.

“Alexa,” Suki said, “honey, you know the world doesn’t work that way. Things don’t happen because you see them, things happen because things happen.”

Alexa shook her head furiously, her eyes still shut, her body still rigidly fetal. “I keep seeing this symbol,” she said into her chest. “It’s bad. Dangerous, I think.”

Suki was filled with a powerful apprehension, almost a premonition, that she shouldn’t ask what Alexa meant. But she had to know. “What kind of symbol?”

“It’s like a letter,” Alexa said. “But not an English letter, another alphabet. Different. Hebrew maybe. I think it might be a ring.”

Suki pressed her hands together. “Do you know whose ring it is?”

“No!” Alexa’s eyes flew open and she flung her arms outward; Suki rocked backward to avoid being hit. “I just know the ring and the symbol have something to do with Jonah and a fire and … and … you. It’s scary and it’s about you!” She burst into tears and lunged at Suki. “I can’t see it! I can’t see it! I won’t.”

“Just because you see a symbol doesn’t mean something bad is necessarily going to—”

“Yes it does!” Alexa cried. “If I see it, it’s going to happen!”

“If you don’t want to see it,” Suki said soothingly, “you don’t have to see it. I know how scary this whole thing is for you. What it must be like—”

Alexa flung herself away from her mother. “You have no idea what it’s like!” she screamed, jumping up and standing with her hands on her hips. “You don’t even believe me. You’ve never dreamt that someone would die and then they did. And it happened to me twice. Twice!”

Suki winced. One of the first lessons a therapist learns is never to tell a patient you know what it feels like to go through what she’s going through; she’s the only one who can know. Why was her training so useless when it came to Alexa? Why couldn’t she use what she knew, use her carefully honed skills to help the one she loved most? Suki pulled herself up slowly. “You’re right, honey. I don’t know. I can’t know, no one can. But I can try and empathize—”

Alexa suddenly stood completely still. Her tears stopped and her expression became more composed, as if she were tapping into a reservoir of strength. “Lindsey Kern knows.”

“I don’t think—”

“I’ll talk to Lindsey.”

Suki started to say no, then stopped herself. “Why do you think Lindsey can help you?” she asked.

“You heard her at the doctor’s office,” Alexa said. “She knew exactly what had happened to me. What’s happening to me. She’ll know how to keep the visions away.”

“Do you understand that Lindsey Kern is a convicted murderer?” Suki asked. “Do you know that she’s serving a life sentence at MCI-Watkins for killing her boyfriend?”

“She didn’t do it.”

“A jury of her peers said she did.”

Alexa would have none of it. “Well, they were wrong, and it’s irrelevant anyway. I need to talk to someone who understands. I have to be with someone who believes in me—not someone who thinks I’m crazy.”

Suki remembered her mother saying almost the exact same words to her father. She reached out to Alexa. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

Alexa turned away. “Or that I’m a murderer.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Suki said quickly. “I know you couldn’t kill anyone.” But if she was so sure of this fact, why hadn’t she told Mike about Jonah’s note or about Alexa’s dream of Charlie’s funeral?

“You don’t believe anything I’ve been telling you.” Alexa stared at Suki, her eyes gleaming with hatred. “You don’t believe in what I’ve seen, you don’t believe in me. Lindsey’s the only one. Only Lindsey can help me.”

There was something about Alexa’s words, about the look in her eye, that caused Suki to snap. “I’m doing the best I can here, Alexa,” she said sharply. “And I can’t imagine Lindsey Kern will be able to do any better. Lindsey’s in prison and Lindsey is most likely out of her mind.”

“Nice talk for a hotshot psychologist.”

“I don’t want you talking to Lindsey Kern.” Suki reached out and grabbed Alexa by the shoulders. She gripped her so hard she could feel the unyielding bones under fingers. “That’s all there is to it. Do you understand? Have you got that?”

“I’ve got nothing,” Alexa spat. “Nothing, because I’ve got you for a mother. A mother who won’t see me, who can’t give me what I need. I’m going to talk to Lindsey and you can’t stop me!”

Suki dropped her hands; they were trembling. “Over my dead body,” she said softly.

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you see?” Alexa cried as she raced up the stairs. “That’s just what I’m afraid of!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

F
irst thing the next morning, Suki stopped at her office before going to Watkins for what she hoped would be her final meeting with Lindsey. She needed the fax machine to send Mike the alleged offense section of the evaluation—which she had finished somewhere in the dark hours between 3:00 and 4:00
A.M.
—and to receive the results of Alexa and Lindsey’s neurological tests, which Dr. Smith-Holt’s secretary had promised to fax. Suki needed Lindsey’s test results for their meeting, and she desperately wanted to see Alexa’s. As soon as she walked in, she checked the fax machine, then her mailbox. Nothing from Smith-Holt. She punched Mike’s fax number on the pad and fed her pages into the machine.

Jen was in their office with a patient, so Suki sat down at the receptionist’s desk to review her plan for Lindsey’s interview, sans the necessary test results. She hit her pen on the desk blotter. Damn. She had photocopied a symptom checklist for temporal lobe epilepsy, hoping to use Lindsey’s self-report, in conjunction with the MRI, to make a preliminary diagnosis. Now she would just have to go through the checklist with Lindsey and hope the test results were waiting for her when she returned. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do.

Just as she was preparing to leave for the prison, the phone at her elbow rang and a whiny voice informed her that Dr. Smith-Holt’s office was calling with patient test results. After giving Suki a cryptic summary, the whiny voice faxed over the reports, along with the phone number where the doctor could be reached if Suki had any questions.

Suki scanned the report on Alexa. Just as the secretary had said: completely and perfectly and beautifully normal. EEG, MRI, even the blood work and vitals they had measured. Although Alexa had appeared unconcerned about the tests, Suki guessed her nonchalance was feigned and called home to give her the results; Alexa didn’t pick up the phone, so Suki left the good news on the machine.

Suki was much relieved, although she knew that in some ways, a neurological diagnosis would have provided a simple and easy explanation for so much that was unexplainable. And she was even more heartened by the fact that Lindsey’s tests contrasted markedly from Alexa’s—anything that differentiated Alexa from Lindsey was welcome.

For while Lindsey’s results didn’t give Suki the definitive diagnostic tool she would have liked, they couldn’t be classified as normal. Yet they weren’t quite abnormal either. The tests looked just as inconclusive as the ones Lindsey had taken ten years ago. As was to be expected, despite the tremendous changes in her life over the past decade, Lindsey’s brain had remained stable.

Suki pulled Lindsey’s old test reports from the file and compared them to the ones she had just received. The EEG showed the same spiking in the temporal region of the brain, the same abnormal slowing in nonfocal areas. The MRI detected increased tissue density, a bit of atrophy and slightly enlarged ventricles. All possible indications of temporal lobe epilepsy. None conclusively so.

A clear-cut depiction of brain dysfunction would have been powerful evidence in support of an insanity defense. Especially with a multicolored MRI image. Juries just ate up that kind of thing. Suki compared Lindsey’s test results to Alexa’s with an eye to a slide presentation in court: normal brain on one side, Lindsey’s brain on the other. She could use a pointer to show the anomalies: density, atrophy, enlargement. There was no doubt about it, Lindsey’s brain
did
look odd. But was it odd enough to convince a jury? Odd enough to convince herself?

Stuffing the reports into her briefcase, Suki reminded herself that although this was a tough quandary to be in so late in an evaluation, at least Alexa’s brain was the one being used for comparison. It could be much worse. For, despite the fact that Alexa was still not eating or sleeping, and would speak only to Kendra, the entrance of Frank Maxwell into the investigation was clearly auspicious. After weeks of having everything go wrong for Alexa, something was going right. McKinna’s reach finally appeared to have been exceeded—as long as the police didn’t put together exactly how auspicious Frank Maxwell’s entrance might be.

Suki placed a quick call to the testing service where she had sent Lindsey’s MMPI to be scored. After a long wait on hold, the clerk, who sounded all of twelve years old, informed her that the results had been mailed out yesterday. No, she was told, the clerk was not authorized to divulge test scores over the phone. She would just have to wait. Again, not such bad news. With any luck, the scores would arrive tomorrow. Time enough to integrate the results into the section of the evaluation that still remained to be written: the all-important Discussion-and-Conclusions, the section that linked the data to her opinion and outlined the logic behind that linkage.

Suki planned to get the last of the necessary information from Lindsey today and then begin to write up the discussion, which included a summary of the first two sections of the report. Often, the process of synthesizing and condensing helped her sort out her thoughts, and she hoped that would be the case now. “The law’s black and white,” one of her favorite professors used to say. “Unfortunately, people are many shades of gray.” And Lindsey was more shades than most.

As Suki left the office and climbed into her car, she was well aware of the clock ticking down to Lindsey’s trial. She threw the car into gear and drove, too fast, toward the prison, trying to sort through the evidence and begin to formulate an opinion. But hard as she tried, she couldn’t keep her mind on Lindsey; it kept straying to Alexa. When she tried to conjure up a picture of Lindsey’s brain, she saw Alexa’s healthy one instead. When she ran through the series of questions necessary to derive a valid conclusion on Lindsey, she found herself asking these questions of Alexa.

Suki pulled into the Watkins parking lot and climbed from her car. The building’s massive concrete walls, topped by observation towers and electrically charged wire, rose into the sky. She heard the angry barking of guard dogs and the clanking of leg irons as a line of inmates filed out a steel door and into a white van. She was here to see Lindsey Kern, but she couldn’t stop seeing Alexa.

“Do you remember if you had any head injuries as a child?” Suki asked Lindsey when they were once again seated in the interrogation room. “Falls? Car accidents?”

“Got the MRI results, huh?” Lindsey appeared especially chipper this morning, bright-eyed and connected. “Same thing Naomi asked me.”

“And you answered …”

“No head injuries. No accidents. No falls.” Lindsey smiled disarmingly. “But you know the Tegretol didn’t work.”

The effectiveness of Tegretol was known to be erratic, and the fact that it hadn’t reduced Lindsey’s symptoms was yet another inconclusive bit of evidence to add to the growing body of inconclusive evidence. “So you think that means you don’t have TLE?” Suki asked.

“Well, apparently, my right temporal lobe is kind of screwy, and, if you want to look at it that way, I do have lots of the symptoms. Isabel could just be one of those pesky little ‘Lilliputian hallucinoses.’ And I guess nightmares, headaches and memory lapses are all pretty common.”

“I see you’ve done your homework.” Suki wasn’t surprised by Lindsey’s grasp of the implications of her symptoms. There was no doubt the woman was very bright. Unfortunately, high intelligence often made cases more difficult to diagnosis. A smart person is much more capable of effective manipulation than a dumb one. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

Lindsey shrugged. “And I guess the MRI didn’t either.”

Suki pulled the TLE symptom checklist from her briefcase. She wanted to get through it before Lindsey closed up—and some of the signs were already evident. Suki quickly scanned the list: headaches, sleep disturbances, memory problems, aggression, violence, hallucinations, hypergraphia, hypersexuality, compulsiveness, head turning, stuttering, inability to take a full breath, transient weakness in the limbs …

“Although precognition and clairvoyance aren’t abilities neurologists usually associate with TLE,” Lindsey broke into Suki’s thoughts, “some of the historical figures who had it were also known to have these skills.” Lindsey lifted her hands palm-up. “What’s a great prophet, but one who can predict the future?”

Suki noticed that whenever Lindsey spoke about the paranormal, her diction and language changed. She became more precise, more academic, as if she were lecturing to a class, rather than talking to just one other person—or as if she were speaking lines she had memorized rather than believed. “Who do they think had TLE?”

“Moses and Mohammed, for two,” Lindsey said. “And did you know that Julius Caesar’s epileptic seizures were one of the reasons his men followed him into battle? They thought it meant he was ‘touched by the divine.’”

Under other circumstances, Suki would have loved the opportunity to discuss historical notions of epilepsy with someone so knowledgeable on the subject, but she just didn’t have the time now. She looked down at the symptom checklist and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Lindsey, but I’m really under a time crunch here, and we’ve got to get through these questions today,” she said. “Can you tell me how long you took Tegretol?”