Projection (7 page)

I turned to her.  "I don't know."

"You look like you do."  Her voice was part kindness, part protest.

I am no stranger and no friend to denial.  I took a few seconds to rid myself of it.  "If I get out of there alive," I said, "I'll come find you."

Chapter 4

I left the Y at about 7:15
A.M.
  Cynthia walked me to my truck.  The morning was even colder than I had expected.  With the wind chill, it had to be five below — more than a match for my motorcycle jacket, worn through on the right elbow from a spill I'd taken one rainy night en route to Sturgis, South Dakota, for a Harley rally.  We kissed, our breath mingling and turning white in the winter air.

As I watched Cynthia walk away, a red Cutlass Supreme, probably a ’90, pulled up.

Calvin Sanger took the cigarette from his lips, leaned across the front seat and rolled down the passenger-side window.  "You're a little ways from home," he said.  He had on the same clothes he'd been wearing at Lynn State Hospital — beige, wide-wale corduroys, a red flannel shirt and a brown leather bomber jacket.  Everything hung loosely on his six-foot, rope-thin frame.  From what I'd heard about his habits hen he was working a big story, he'd probably caught an hour's sleep at his desk at the
Item
.  Be he didn't look tired.

"I ran out of steam on the Lynnway," I said.  "I stopped here for the night."

He looked over at the building.  "I hope you didn't pay more than fifty bucks."

"The rooms only run about twenty."

"I know that," he said, flicking ash out his window and blowing smoke.  "I also know her."

That comment made me wonder about being Cynthia's ‘fourth customer ever.’  "I guess it's your job to know things," I said.

"As much as I can."  He smiled the wide smile captured every year, front-page on the
Item
, as he finished the Boston Marathon.  He wasn't thirty-five yet, but his face was dominated by a prominent forehead, strong cheekbones and a square jaw that would probably keep him looking about the way he did right into his sixties.  His black skin made his pale blue eyes seem translucent.

"Nothing wrong with that," I said.  I was getting cold and I wasn't about to answer any of his questions.  "See you up at the hospital."  I turned to open my door.

"One question," he called out.  "If you have a second."

I turned back to him.  "Like Hancock said, I can't comment on the trial, or the hostage situation."

"Of course not.  That's understood.  I'm trying to get my head around something else."

I didn't respond.

"This copycat case," he went on.

My jaw tightened.

"The idea is that Trevor Lucas cut up the first two victims — Sarah Johnston and Monique Peletier — and that some other butcher did the last two — Michael Wembley and the dancer."

I didn't like Rachel going nameless.  "Michael Wembley and Rachel Lloyd."

"Yeah, the stripper."

"Go ahead."

"What I don't quite get is why Hancock dismisses the fact that
all four
victims knew Lucas."

"She doesn't dismiss it.  She investigated it.  So did the D.A.'s office."  I shrugged.  "They were obviously more impressed by the fact that the last two victims were killed after Lucas turned himself over to police."

"Sure.  And that does seem impressive, until you really let yourself wonder whether the good doctor did any of them.  The killer could have been connected to all four victims
and
Lucas."

I thought Sanger was studying me for my reaction.  Or maybe my guilt was making me paranoid.  "There were differences," I said.  "The first two bodies were found in Lynn.  They were both female.  Lucas’ prints were all over the place.  They were patients of his.  They were also his lovers."

"That doesn't mean he killed them."

"That's why there's a jury."

"Yeah, but Lucas’ plea is insanity, not that he didn't do it."

"You might want to take a cue from that."

"Even though he's ranting about not killing anybody."

"‘Ranting’ may be the operative word there.  But you're the journalist."

"What do
you
think?  I mean, doesn't it seem possible this copycat killer is actually the original?"

"Me?"  I bent over and rested my hands on the door frame.  "I think I'm a shrink, Calvin, and you're a reporter, and Emma Hancock's a seasoned cop.  The best I've met.  I think we know what she wants us to know.  Nothing more.  And you gotta believe that if she thought there was a chance somebody other than Trevor Lucas cut up her niece, she'd be digging so deep in the streets the whole city would shake."  My fingers had gone numb.  "That's what I think."

He took a long drag on his cigarette and swallowed the smoke, letting it out through his nose.  "Probably true."

I felt as if I had shown more emotion than I ought to have.  I turned to open the door to my truck, then turned back.  "Anyone ever mention those things can kill you."

"Nobody who's watched me run."  He winked.  "See you at the hospital."

"Sure."  I climbed into my truck as he drove off.  I started the engine, lighted my own cigarette, then snaked my way through side streets to the Lynnway, checking my rearview mirror to make sure Sanger hadn't doubled back to follow me.

By 7:40 I was headed north on Route 95.  The sun was blinding.  A light drizzle kept icing my windshield.

After forty-three years on the planet there was only one person I had to see before stepping to the edge.  I picked up the phone and dialed Matt Hollander at the Austin Grate Clinic twenty miles north in Rowley.

Hollander and I had trained together in psychiatry at Tufts.  He had been a year ahead of me and was assigned as my mentor when I started the residency.  It was a good match.  I had a stronger tendency then toward arrogance (a synonym for low esteem), but Hollander's remarkable ability to understand even the most bizarre emotions and behaviors convinced me immediately that I had a lot to learn about human nature and that I was in the right place to learn it.  I started to talk less and listen more, a way of being that American Indians and Buddhists may come to naturally, but the rest of us have to strive for.  Woody Allen once said that 90 percent of life is about showing up.  Ninety percent of healing people in psychological pain is shutting up — at least long enough to let them bleed the truth.  That sounds easy, but it isn't.

Since residency, while I'd opened and closed my psychotherapy practice and started chasing forensic cases, Hollander had used his family fortune to acquire a string of premier psychiatric hospitals.

Neither of us could have predicted when we met at Tufts that, fifteen years later, I would have asked him for a favor that had put us both at odds with our professional ethics and with the law.

The attendant answered.  I gave my name, asked for Hollander and waited.

"It's been a long time," Hollander said.

"I wondered whether I could come by."

"Where can I meet you?  How about the Agawam?  Right down the street from here, on 1A."

I figured he might not want me on hospital grounds, not after what we'd done together.  "I know the place.  I'll be there in twenty-five minutes."

"No rush."  He hung up.

*            *            *

The Agawam is a diner in the old tradition, with acceptable food, loud help and a mystical resonance that draws customers two and three deep at the counter.  Hollander was already waiting for me in a six-man booth toward the back.  He waved me over.

I sat down.  A half-finished plate of corned beef hash and boiled potatoes was still steaming in front of him.  "I'm glad to see you, Matt," I said.  "You look..."

"I look big."  He shrugged his meaty shoulders and smiled, swallowing my hand in both of his.  He was dressed in an oversized white button-down shirt and khakis, but I could tell he was all of the three hundred pounds he'd been the last time I'd seen him, about six months before.  His hair, prematurely gray, was wet and combed neatly back.  His sapphire blue eyes gleamed.  "I keep getting bigger and bigger, and I feel better and better."

I nodded.  During residency Hollander had shared with me his theory that fat molecules grease the ‘wheels’ of the mind.  He had defended it by citing examples of great large men, like Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, ‘Minnesota Fats,’ and H. L. Mencken and Luciano Pavarotti.  Bums, thieves and killers, he had argued, are almost always thin as a rail.  "I needed to touch base."

"You could have gotten in contact sooner.  I think I told you to let things cool down for a month or so."

"I figured the longer the better."

"Why?"

"Just safer."

He dug into his hash, swallowed a forkful, then nodded.  "I can buy that — if you mean emotionally."

"Huh?"

"You didn't want to go near your feelings."

"C’mon.  Save it for the paying clients."

"You weren't scared of the police.  You were scared of your heart."

I leaned toward him and dropped my voice.  "Matt, what we did could get us twenty to life.  That's what I was afraid of.  I didn't want my heart — and the rest of me — locked up at MCI Concord."

"Bullshit."  He flagged down the waitress.

"I don't need to eat."

"I do."

I looked and saw that most of the hash was gone.

"You were afraid of facing the facts of your life:  You lived with someone for over a year.  You thought you loved her.  Part of you — a very dark part — probably did.  And you say you didn't know her from Adam."

"Fine.  Maybe you're right.  But that's not why I'm here."

He pointed his fork at me.  "Don't ‘maybe’ me, or I'll take a chunk out of your cheek."  He soaked up some grease with a piece of bread that disappeared, as if by magic, into his mouth and down his throat.  "You've got work to do figuring out why you'd rather live with a stranger."

"After living with my parents, I guess I thought it was safer."

"Well, now you know better.  Or you should.  Strangers don't necessarily have fewer demons.  They just haven’t introduced you to them."

I though about how much I had confided in Cynthia.  I stayed silent.

Hollander patted his mouth with a napkin.  "The real issue here is that you don't have the balls to get introduced to yourself."

"Huh?"

"You're a beaten little boy, Frank.  All that helplessness and rage is still inside you.  The need for vengeance.  You didn't pick up booze and cocaine for no reason.  And you didn't pick a killer to live with by accident."

"You're saying I chose her
because
she was violent?"

"Yes.  I am."  A forkful of potato and another piece of bread disappeared.  "Because, unconsciously, my friend, violence reaches to the core of your being like nothing else.  And it always will — until you open yourself up and take the risk of letting someone get close enough to hurt you, who loves you, instead."

The waitress, a fiftyish woman with a man's build and voice, stepped to our table.  "Hit you again, doc?"

Hollander pointed at his plate.  His eyes stayed on me.

"I guess that's a ‘yes.’  What'll you have, honey?"

"Coffee, that's all."

"Cream and sugar?"

"Neither."

"Mutt and Jeff," she chuckled, then left.

"I know none of this is easy, Frank.  I'm just getting around to embracing my own fragile, foolish, miserable, magnificent soul."

"Congratulations."

"It's been one long, wretched courtship.  And it's not over by a long shot.  But it's well worth the effort."  He winked.  "So tell me:  Why did you pick today to call?"

"I may not be around for a while."

"Where you headed?"

"I've got to get some things straightened out with my family.  I don't know if I ever told you about the trouble my aunt..."  I stopped.  I couldn’t lie to him.  "I'm going onto the locked unit to negotiate with Trevor Lucas."

Hollander's lip curled.  "Don't be a goddamned fool.  If you go in there, you may never come out."

"He's got seven hostages.  Two other people are already dead."

"And you want to be the third?"

"One of the hostages is a nurse who's pregnant."

He kept staring at me.  The anger slowly left his face.  "I heard everything on the tube," he said.  "All three networks ran it as the lead story.  I worried you'd blame yourself."

"I let Lucas sit in jail.  I let him go to trial, even though I knew the truth.  Why wouldn't I blame myself?"

"I don't know, Frank.  I'm not in the business of assessing blame.  Neither were you, last I remember."  He glanced over my shoulder to make sure he couldn’t be overheard, then stared directly into my eyes.  His voice grew kind.  "Unless I was hallucinating, you snuck a murderess into my home in the middle of the night six months ago, almost to the day, and begged me to hide her on my Secure Care Unit.  You were horrified by the idea that a woman who became a killer because she was tortured as a child, ruined before she had a chance, would end up behind bars for life, never mind electrocuted by the state.  And I'm dead certain you told me that your Rachel — who may just have been what you really needed in a woman — would have wanted her killer treated, not destroyed.  I remember I was struck by that.  I thought it spoke volumes about her."

My throat tightened.

The waitress stepped to our table with my coffee and Hollander's second helping of hash.

"Thanks," I managed.

She looked at me with sympathy as she put the cup and plate down.  She probably thought I was one  of Hollander's patients.  "I won't bother the two of you.  Just wave me down if you need more coffee."  She headed back behind the counter.

Hollander leaned toward me, absorbing four, five inches of the table into his gut.  "Maybe you ought to give yourself a break, instead of a death sentence at Lucas’ hands.  You didn't ask to get caught up in all this, and nobody could have predicted things going the way they did.  We both figured some shyster lawyer would spring Lucas in a heartbeat."