Psychopath (34 page)

"It was very much a therapeutic intervention," Jonah said.  "I wasn’t conducting an interrogation."

McCormick didn’t miss the edge in his voice.  She wanted to push him a little bit.  "I can handle that part," she said.  "It’s my specialty.  Is trauma work yours?"

Wrens didn’t respond.  He finished filling the box, closed the top.  Then he finally turned to face her.  "I’m afraid your timing is poor," he said. "A patient of mine was murdered by his mother today.  I’m not in the mood to swap resumes."

McCormick was taken aback.  "I had no idea you lost a patient.  I’m..."  Her cell phone started to ring.  She fumbled around in her jacket pocket to turn it off.

"Did you want to get that?" Wrens asked, sarcastically.

McCormick shook her head.  "How old?"

"Nine," Wrens said.  He cleared his throat.  "I discharged him back home.  I thought he would be safe.  That was a very big mistake.  An unforgiveable mistake."  He placed his hands flat on his desk and spread out his fingers, as if to steady himself.

McCormick suddenly realized the office was completely barren.  Wrens had tossed everything into the box on his desk.  "Are you leaving the hospital today?" she asked him.  "I thought Marie said you would be here another week."

"I’m not feeling terribly confident about my skills right now.  I wouldn’t be much help to anyone."

McCormick wanted to know more about Wrens, but she wasn’t sure how to engage him.  "I do have a few more questions," she said.

"About?"

"Your impressions of Ms. Pierce," was all she could think to say.

"Do you suspect her in the murder of her mother?"

McCormick shook her head.  "Of course not.  I’m just trying to be thorough."

"You want to be thorough," Jonah said.  He stared into her eyes.  "My patient died today, Dr. McCormick.  He was murdered.  You may be immune to hearing that sort of thing, but I’m not.  I feel very deeply for my patients."  He walked past her, pulled open the door.  "I need for you to leave now."

*            *            *

Clevenger got through to Communicare just as the office was closing.  It took a little convincing, but the owner recognized his name from the
Times
and looked up Jonah Wrens in her files.  She read off each of his placements for the last thirty-six months.

He hadn’t worked near any of the locations where bodies had been found.

"Where is he working now?" Clevenger asked.

"He’s not — at least not for us," the woman said.

"He works for other agencies?"

"Like just about everybody, these days.  I wish we had an exclusive on him.  He’s the most well-regarded psychiatrist we’ve ever had.  Every hospital that hires him begs to have him back.  But he doesn’t do repeats.  He wants to see new places, fresh faces."

"I guess that’s not so unusual," Clevenger said, feeling deflated.  "Why else would you work as a locum?"

"Honestly?  These people would never last in an organization."

"They last in yours."

"With lots of hand-holding, believe me.  Lots of troubleshooting.  Don’t get me wrong, some of them are very talented.  Even gifted.  But they’re gypsies at heart.  They don’t like routine.  And they don’t want people getting too close to them."

"Do they choose where they’re placed?" Clevenger asked.

"It’s a discussion," the woman said.  "When we get a referral, we call whoever’s next on the list.  If that person turns it down, we move on.  No hard feelings.  We’ve got lots of doctors.  But every agency is different.  Some of them will cut a doc loose if he refuses two or three placements in a row."

"I see."

"Why exactly are you looking for Dr. Wrens?" she asked.

"Just following up on a lead."  He realized that that statement didn’t clear Wrens the way he deserved to be cleared.  He borrowed an idea from Dr. LeShan at Venango Regional.  "I thought he might have treated the man we’re looking for.  But it doesn’t look like they crossed paths, after all."

"You mean, the Highway Killer?" the woman said.

"Yes, right."

"Do me a favor.  When you catch that animal, you slice his throat before he has a chance to spout any more of that nonsense he writes in the
Times
.  All that crap about empathy when he’s going around killing people.  I’m a grandmother, for Christ’s sake, but I’d be happy to cut his fucking head off myself.  See how much psychobabble comes out of his mouth then."

"A lot of people would be in line for that job," Clevenger said.  Enough people, he thought, to keep the death penalty alive in most states.

"You take care of yourself, doc.  And good luck.  God bless."

"Yes, well, right."  He hung up.  His heart sank.  He was at a dead end.

He dialed Anderson’s cell phone and got him in his car outside the Rock Springs Medical Center, waiting for McCormick to come out.  "I’m batting zero here," he said.  "Anything on your end?"

"I got the list from Murph," Anderson said.  "I’ve called five agencies.  No go.  Two refused to talk to me.  None of the other three assigned a doc to the towns this guy has killed in."  He paused.  "I don’t know.  Maybe he doesn’t mix business with pleasure."

That cliché made something click in Clevenger’s mind:  matching the killer’s work assignments to the places where bodies had been found was all wrong.  It flew in the face of the profile Clevenger had developed with the FBI — that of a man who needed to get very close to others, who killed when he couldn’t feed himself intimacy in any other way.

"You still there?" Anderson asked.

"You’re absolutely right," Clevenger said.

"Of course I am.  About what?"

"He doesn’t kill on the job.  He doesn’t need to," Clevenger said.  "Getting close to patients satisfies his thirst for intense human connections.  People bare their souls to him.  He kills between assignments.  That’s when he feels most isolated, most alone.  That’s when he has nothing to distract him from his own pain.  Every childhood trauma he’s tried to bury threatens to break through into consciousness."

"But your letters might have made him break stride.  Maybe this time, in Wyoming, the patients weren’t enough."

Clevenger was right with him.  The most likely location where the killer would have struck ‘on the job’ was Bitter Creek.  Unraveling, unable to soothe himself even through his work, he could have spun out of control.  And if that was true, he couldn’t flee.  He couldn’t risk raising suspicion.  He had to stay focused, finish his month or two as though nothing had happened.  Whitney McCormick’s instincts in that regard had been right on.  "It’s possible," Clevenger said.  "It’s still a huge reach, but he could be close by."

"I’ll start calling every hospital around here and lean on them to tell me whether they have a locum tenens psychiatrist working there."

"The operators might even know.  If not, ask for the locked psychiatry unit directly."

Just then, Anderson saw McCormick leave the hospital and walk quickly to her rental car.  "Whitney just finished her rounds," he told Clevenger.  "Safe and sound.  She doubled back here — Rock Springs Medical Center — but she didn’t stay long."

"I doubt she was looking for a locum," Clevenger said.

"I’ll double-check each place she visited."

"Call me with anything you find."

"You know I will."

Clevenger hung up and dialed Whitney McCormick’s cell phone.  It rang just once before her recorded message came on.  She had the thing turned off.  "Call me right away," Clevenger said.  "It’s important."

f o u r

McCormick watched the hospital exit from inside her car.  She wasn’t sure what to make of Dr. Jonah Wrens.  On the one hand, he fit the profile of the Highway Killer — a middle-aged white man with appealing looks who could get very close to people very fast.  He traveled the country.  His voice did indeed have the hypnotic effect Marie Pierce had spoken of.  On the other hand, he was clearly suffering over the loss of his young patient.  He didn’t lack empathy.  He felt guilt.  There was nothing that seemed calculating about him; he hadn’t tried to implicate Marie Pierce — or anyone else — in Sally Pierce’s death.

It also strained her imagination to think there was any chance she would find the Highway Killer so serendipitously, one step from the murder victim’s daughter.  Yet she knew that didn’t mean she hadn’t found him.  The Psychosniper case had turned on one tip called to the FBI.  Other killers had been apprehended after running a red light, wearing a victim’s shirt on one occasion ten years after the murder, or making mention of a killing to one acquaintance in a drug rehab center, twenty years later.

Wouldn’t the Highway Killer have relished the chance to talk to Marie Pierce?  Would he not warm to the bloodline of his victim?

She thought of calling Kane Warner for backup, but realized how amateurish she would look if Jonah Wrens turned out to be innocent — a good doctor trying to do his job.  She was on a quest to redeem herself; expending Agency resources on a decent man wracked with grief over losing his nine-year-old patient wouldn’t win her any points.

Bottom line, she couldn’t tell Warner she was still working the case until she was pretty sure she had solved it.

She needed to know more about Wrens.  And she had no choice when to start digging.  If Wrens was the killer, he knew she was closing in.  He could leave town at any moment, escape into the mountains for months — or forever.

She waited in the hospital parking lot twenty-five minutes before Wrens walked out the sliding glass doors, carrying his briefcase and the box he had packed.  He climbed into his BMW, started it up, and drove off.

She started her car and followed him.

*            *            *

Jonah glanced at McCormick’s headlights in his rearview mirror.  He was trying to divine God’s plan for him, to understand why He would send him a woman teeming with evil on the very same day as he had taken away a boy as innocent as Sam.

Ultimately the only message he could take from such symmetry was that good and evil were in constant flux, that Armageddon was not a single battle but a constant campaign, that the death of an angel might be balanced for all eternity by the death of a devil.

Was it possible that McCormick’s demise had been Jonah’s task from the outset?  Had he reached out to Clevenger knowing he would ultimately reach McCormick?  Was his resurrection as an innocent possible only upon the destruction of the huntress?  Was she the one who had truly incurred God’s wrath? 

The poetry was plain:  he would be forgiven once he removed from the planet one like her, utterly unable to forgive. 

He felt a wave of calm blanket him, as if his long and tortuous journey might be nearing an end.  The final mile of his road to redemption could well be the mile he was j traveling that very moment.

*            *            *

McCormick followed Wrens to the Ambassador Motor Inn, saw him park in front of Room 105.  She took a space twenty yards away.  He got out of the X5, disappeared into the room.

She reached down to her calf, adjusted her gun in its holster.  Then she got out of the car.  As she did, she saw North Anderson pull in five spaces away, look at her, then look quickly away.  That confirmed what she had suspected on the highway:  she was being followed.

Only Clevenger knew she was in Wyoming.  She had never met his partner, but she knew he was a black man.  She glanced at his license plate, saw the car was a rental.

She walked over to him, knocked on his window.

He rolled it down.  "Can I help you with something?" he asked, as offhandedly as he could.

"You would be North Anderson," she said.

Anderson didn’t see any use in protesting.

"Tell Frank I’m a big girl.  He doesn’t need to watch my back."

"I think he figured you might be right about the killer still being around here.  If you are, you might
like
the backup."

She thought fleetingly of filling Anderson in on Jonah Wrens, but she just wasn’t willing to look foolish in front of him, or Clevenger.  She wanted to be left alone to do her job.  "I mean, if he really wants me to," she said, "I’ll call him and give him a blow-by-blow of what happens in that motel room." She smiled.  "But I’m not here on business.  So how about you get lost?  It kind of ruins the moment, thinking of you out here."

Anderson nodded, taken aback by McCormick’s directness.

She walked to Room 105, knocked on the door.

Wrens opened the door just a few seconds later.  He was barefooted, his hair tousled, his shoulders slumped.  His shirt was unbuttoned, showing his washboard abdomen.  His sleeves were rolled up.  His socks and his belt were in his hand.  He looked like he was on empty, anything but dangerous.  "I really need to sleep," he said.  "Surely, this can wait until the morning."

"I understand," McCormick said.  "I won’t take more than a few minutes.  I promise."

He seemed reticent.

"It’s important."

Wrens closed his eyes and took a deep breath as an image appeared before his eyes — his knife at McCormick’s neck, her hair in his fist.  He opened his eyes and looked at her standing there.  The devil at his door.  "I apologize for being curt with you at the hospital.  Please, come in."

Now McCormick was the one hesitating.  Because she saw something that bothered her — a series of faded, horizontal scars on Wrens’s forearms.

She knew there could be innocent explanations for those scars.  The barbs at the top of a fence could have caused them when Wrens was a boy.  A hot grill.  And even if Wrens had intentionally cut himself in childhood or adolescence, he certainly wouldn’t be the first psychiatrist with a history of psychological trauma.

Still, if the scars were from cutting, it meant Wrens had suffered severe emotional trauma.  And the only way he had achieved a sense of control over his pain was by inflicting his own wounds.  Then he could calmly watch himself bleed, detached completely from his own suffering — and from his underlying rage at others.