By Reason of Insanity (17 page)

Catherine arrived at her duplex and changed into shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt, then sat down to finish loading software onto her new computer. After an hour or so, she took a break and surfed a few of her favorite blogs. A thought hit her, and she googled the words
multiple personality disorder
, resulting in a number of interesting sites. An article from
Psychology Today
was particularly helpful.

The article said the phrase "multiple personality disorder" had been changed to "dissociative identity disorder," also known as DID, sometime in 1994 to reflect the fact that patients actually fragmented their personalities as opposed to "growing" multiple new ones. Most DID patients only had a couple of fragmented personalities, though some had as many as one hundred. Cat thought about that for a moment.
A hundred separate Catherines! How could anyone survive like that?

The disorder was frequently accompanied by memory loss, especially among the more passive personalities. In other words, a patient would create and live in two or more separate realities, and the passive personality wouldn't even know the more aggressive personality existed. Many times, the more aggressive personality could be very clever in covering up evidence of its existence. According to the article, transitions between personalities were normally triggered by psychosocial stress. One sentence in particular jumped out at Catherine:
"Visual or auditory hallucinations may occur."

Reading that sentence was like a slap in the face. She stared at the screen for several moments, considering the implications. Could she truly be sick? The part about psychosocial stress sure fit. And the article also said that the disorder was frequently accompanied by depression or anxiety.

She was definitely anxious now.

Cat rose from the computer and got a bottle of water. She started feeling a little light-headed, her skin perspiring as she turned the possibility over in her mind. It was ludicrous. She didn't even know the families whose babies had been kidnapped. She couldn't possibly be involved.

Could she?

She sipped the water and started pacing the duplex, rehearsing all the reasons the DID diagnosis couldn't apply to her. She tried to reason through it, but the whole thing seemed to defy rational analysis. Then she had a thought. One personality might forget events that transpired in the life of another personality, but physical evidence didn't just disappear.

Cat went back online and started researching the kidnappings one more time. What weapons did the Avenger use? What were the precise times and dates of the crimes?

She knew her calendar didn't show anything for the nights in question--the police had already asked her about that. So she focused on the Avenger's MO--a needle and, in one instance, a Taser. Where would she even get such a thing?

Methodically, Cat searched through every room in her small duplex, looking for a Taser or needles or research about the Carver kids or the Milburn baby or rubber gloves or a knife or gun. She looked for bloodstains on clothing or ripped fabric. Catherine ransacked her own place, looking for anything inconsistent with the Catherine she knew.

After two hours, she had found absolutely nothing.

When she finished, she lay down on the couch and closed her eyes. She was exhausted physically and emotionally. If she wasn't crazy yet, at this rate, she would be soon.

When the e-mail first arrived, Rex Archibald could hardly believe his luck. The Reverend Harold Pryor, a "person of interest" in the Carver and Milburn kidnappings, was assembling a dream team of lawyers. He wanted Rex to serve as one of his trial lawyers!

Rex played it cool, resisting the urge to report the good news to his assistant and slap her a high five. His legal career had fallen on hard times recently, dragged down by a long string of losses and lack of high-profile clients. But Rex knew he was only one big case away from the boom times. Seven years ago, after the headline-grabbing verdict Rex had engineered for Paul Donaldson, the phones had lit up for months. Winning a high-profile case was good; winning a high-profile case when everybody knew your client should have been convicted was golden.

Despite his eagerness to be part of the dream team, Rex played it by the book. He sent a reply to the Reverend Pryor and provided wiring instructions to the firm account.
As soon as you wire a twenty-five-thousand retainer, we'll talk.

Dream team lawyers didn't come cheap.

After some negotiations via e-mail, Rex agreed to a retainer of ten thousand. He didn't tell Pryor, but given all the publicity the case would be sure to generate, Rex would have done it for free. Pryor asked whether money orders would be okay, and Rex assured him that money orders would work just fine. Rex had been well schooled in the number-one rule for criminal defense lawyers--never question the source or the means of payment.

But nothing prevented defense lawyers from dreaming about how they would spend the money. In Rex's case, it was already spoken for. He and Crystal, his wife of thirteen years, had finally been successful in their fertility treatments. Rex was going to be a daddy! He was hoping for a daughter to spoil, though at times he imagined throwing a baseball or football with a rugged little son. In either case, the kid would go to college and then on to law school. It was never too early to put a little something away in a savings account.

Because Rex practiced law in Richmond and the Reverend Pryor was busy raising havoc in Virginia Beach, they agreed on a meeting place halfway between, just outside Williamsburg at a small church where Pryor knew the pastor. Rex's assistant took care of the meeting details and printed out a set of directions from MapQuest. Pryor would be bringing a Virginia Beach lawyer with him, the assistant told Rex.

Now, just fifteen minutes away from the church on Thursday night, Rex received a call on his cell phone. "I'm the custodian for the North Williamsburg Baptist Church," said the caller, "and I wanted you to know I'm unlocking the side door located on the right of the building as you face it from the parking lot. I just talked to Reverend Pryor and his lawyer, and they said they're running a few minutes late. You can just come on in when you get here and wait for them in the fellowship hall."

"No problem," said Rex, though he usually liked to stress his own importance by being the last one to a meeting, not the first. "I'm running a little late myself."

"I'll put on a pot of coffee in the fellowship hall," the caller said. "I may be working in another part of the church, so just make yourself at home."

"Okay. Thanks."

After he hung up, Rex decided to pull over at a convenience store and grab a soda. At this pace, he would arrive a good fifteen minutes late, minimizing the possibility that he would be the first one there.

A half hour later, at twenty minutes after eight, he pulled into the gravel parking lot in front of the small box church with vinyl siding and a cross that served as a steeple. There was a sign out front, the kind with interchangeable black magnetic letters. As his headlights flashed across the sign, Rex noted that it contained a reference to a single verse:
Ezekiel 18:20
. Rex had seen a number of these types of signs before, usually containing pithy sayings that tried too hard to be cute--
God: "Don't make me come down there."
--but never one with just a single verse, especially when there was no indication what the verse actually said.

The sun was low in an overcast sky, throwing long shadows across the church property. Rex parked the car, picked up his file folder, and headed toward the right-hand side of the building. Unfortunately, even with his slow-down tactics, Rex had apparently beaten the others to the meeting.

To his surprise, the side door was locked. He knocked--loud enough to demonstrate his confidence. Hearing nothing, he knocked again.

Without warning, two darts hit him in the back, followed immediately by debilitating pain. He winced and shouted, crumbling to the ground, his muscles contracting. An electrical current snaked through every nerve ending in his body, setting him on fire, causing him to groan in agony. He tried to cry out, tried to beg for mercy, but could no longer control his tongue.

He writhed in pain on the cement, glancing toward his attacker with pleading eyes. His thoughts flashed to Crystal and the baby. They needed him! He had to survive! But when the pain became unbearable, his body ignored his will, and Rex Archibald passed out.

Archibald's unrelenting attacker continued the flow of crippling electricity into Archibald's unconscious body for another sixty seconds, causing the lawyer to spasm and jerk like a fish flopping on the deck of a hot fishing boat.

Later, Archibald would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to die by lethal injection. But rather than use the trio of drugs that most states had employed for the past twenty years--sodium thiopental as an anesthetic, pancuronium bromide as a paralyzing agent, and potassium chloride to stop the heart--the Avenger would use only potassium chloride. The Avenger wanted Archibald to be fully conscious and able to squirm when the potassium chloride triggered its fatal heart attack.

32

The phone woke Catherine at 6:30 a.m. She was still on the couch, still dressed in her clothes from the evening before. She shook her head clear and tried to remember where she had left the phone. The insistent ringing drew her to the kitchen table.

"Good morning, Cat." It was Ed Shaftner.
Editor
Ed Shaftner.

She grunted. She meant to say, "Hi, Ed," but it came out sounding more like a groan.

"Were you sleeping?"

She double-checked the clock. "No, no, I'm awake."

"Good. Have you checked the papers yet?"

"No, Ed. Not yet." He could only be asking for one reason. Cat had been through this drill before--an early morning call. Another paper had scooped them.

"
Richmond Times.
Front page. The Avenger struck again and sent a note to the editor of the
Richmond Times
."

The statement hit Cat like a bolt of java, jolting her awake.
The Avenger struck again?
"What did he do? What's the note say?"

"You can read the whole thing online and give me a call back. We'll need something from your source. We can't let this story get away from us."

Cat was standing now, running her free hand through her hair, starting to pace. She felt like the whole world was off and running a race while she was mired at the starting line, tying her sneakers. Then another thought hit--what had
she
been doing last night?

"Was it last night, Ed? Did the Avenger strike last night?"

"No. A few nights ago. The
Times
just got the note yesterday and turned it over to police. They sat on the article until this morning."

A few nights ago.
Cat thought about her nightmare a few nights ago, the way she woke up tired. She flashed to the nightmare and asked a question without thinking. "Did the victim die from a head wound?"

Ed paused, and Cat realized how random the question must have sounded. "They haven't recovered the body yet, Cat. Are you sure you're awake?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." A few minutes later, Cat was off the phone and on her computer, digesting every detail of the article. She called Jamarcus and left a message. Another hour passed before he returned the call.

He began by confirming the
Times
article. Paul Donaldson had disappeared. In a note to the
Times,
the Avenger claimed credit for Donaldson's apparent death and included a lock of Donaldson's hair. Before telling Cat anything else, Jamarcus extracted a promise of confidentiality and a promise not to run a story without independent verification. Then he dropped the bombshell: "We found a different hair fragment stuck to the seal of the envelope," Jamarcus said. "Donaldson's hair is blond. This piece of hair was dark."

Cat felt a rush of excitement--the killer's first mistake. She knew that the Avenger had been careful, using gloves, leaving no traces of DNA or fingerprints or footprints. But now, a single piece of hair.

"How long before the DNA comes back?" Cat asked.

"Forty-eight hours. We'll check it against our data bank. With any luck, we'll have something by Sunday."

Cat felt like she could take her first full breath in a week. She had never been so swallowed up by a story, had never felt her life being sucked into a nightmare like this as the story progressed. Now she could finally eliminate all shadows of doubt.

"We're trying to figure out how the Carvers play into all this," Jamarcus continued. "Paul Donaldson and Clarence Milburn both beat rape charges, but the Carvers didn't represent either one of them."

"Did the Carvers represent other rapists who beat the rap?"

"They're defense attorneys, Cat. That's what they do."

"Maybe this guy's going after rapists and their attorneys."

"That's our working theory," Jamarcus said, though he didn't sound convinced. "Or at least he's going after the innocent children of defense attorneys." He paused, apparently trying to decide whether he should open a fresh wound. "And our forensic psychiatrists are not at all sure that the Avenger is a man, Cat. The fact that the Avenger is targeting rapists might indicate a female."