Compulsion (9 page)

"This should be fun," he said.

"Really.  Why?" I said.

"I’ve never seen a police psychiatrist before, just the regular ones."

"And what were they like?" I asked.

"Mossbergs.  Every one of them," he said, with a smile full of disdain — his father’s smile.  "Nice, soft people, who felt very powerful holding the keys to their little locked kingdoms.  I keep every one of their names right here."  He pointed at his head, made a mock gun of his fist, thumb, and forefinger, and pointed it at me.  He pretended to drop the hammer, then winked and let his hand drift to his side.

I hadn’t forgotten that Billy was a predator, whether or not he had murdered Brooke.  His firesetting and cruelty to animals showed he was intoxicated by his own power — the power to destroy.  I wanted him to know that I wouldn’t be scared off.  "Let’s not waste our time on threats," I said.  I stood up and walked toward the door, feeling Billy’s eyes on me.  I reached for the door, pushed it shut.  Then I turned around, facing him again.  "I know exactly who and what you are," I said.

He rolled his eyes.  "You’re clairvoyant
and
overeducated."

"I know about the feeling in your gut — the emptiness."

"Actually, I had a big breakfast this morning," he said.  "Courtesy the hospital cafeteria.  I’m full."

"Even when you joke about it, it’s there.  It’s always there, gnawing at you," I said.

He looked away, tilting his head.  "Let’s see... two eggs, sunny side, hash browns..."

"Some days are worse than others," I pressed.  "Some days, you feel so empty it actually hurts."

He flashed that Bishop smile again, but said nothing.

"Maybe you light up a joint and get yourself two, three hours of relief.  It never lasts.  You’ve tried cutting yourself, biting yourself, pulling out your hair, probably making yourself vomit now and then, to start feeling something. 
Anything
.  Nothing works."

Billy’s expression shifted a few degrees away from mockery, toward uneasiness.

I kept burrowing.  "There are times you feel so much dead space inside, such a cold, black hole, that you wonder whether you even exist.  You look around at other people and wonder if they’re real.  Maybe they’re just pretending to be alive, too."

He shook his head, squinted at me.  "How much is my father paying you for this crap?" he asked.

"He’s not paying me," I said.

"Then you’re an idiot," he said.

"Why’s that?"

"Because," he said, "you’re doing exactly what he wants you to do.  You may as well cash in."

"
He’s projecting
," the voice at the back of my mind interjected.  "
He’s the one who feels bought and paid for
."

I listened to that voice and decided to reflect Billy’s comment back onto whatever fragile part of his psyche it had come from.  "Your dad owns
you
, champ," I said, "not me."

His face lost every trace of gaminess.  "No one owns me," he said, a new loathing creeping into his tone.

I had struck a nerve.  I wanted to follow it toward its root.  "The way I understand it, you’re bought and paid for, buddy."

"Wrong, Sigmund."  His face flushed.

"F.O.B. Moscow," I said.

His upper lip started to twitch.

"And now," I said, "it looks like your dad’s finally convinced you’re damaged goods.  He’s cutting his losses."

Billy shrugged, but the movement looked weak and artificial.  He knew he couldn’t shrug me off.  "Leave," he said, his voice thin with rage.  "Get out."  He stood up.  He was nearly six feet tall.  The muscles in his arms were ropy and tight.  His hands were balled into fists.

I wasn’t about to back down.  Not when we were getting closer to the truth.  "I’m not ready to leave," I said.

He took a step toward me.

I instinctively focused on the point where I would plant the ball of my foot to drop him if he lunged at me — just where his ribs met, at the lowest point of his sternum.  "Why can’t you admit it?" I prodded.  "All you cost Win Bishop was a one-way ticket."

He took another step.  "I’ve cost him a lot more..." he sputtered, then stopped himself short.

A new quiet filled the room — the pure silence that heralds the arrival of the truth.

"Tell me," I said.  "Just how angry are you at your father?"

He stared at me for a few moments, as if he might answer, but then took a deep breath, spread his fingers wide, and stepped back toward his bed.

"You’re mad enough to take it out on a few cats, from what I heard."  I shook my head.  "I love cats, by the way."

"You heard what you heard," he said.

"Mad enough to try burning his house down."

"If I had wanted to burn his house down," he said, "it would be gone."

"But none of that was enough," I continued.  "So you moved on to your baby sister, Brooke.  You had to cost him a child.  One of his
real
children."

He looked away from me, toward the room’s single, grated window.  With the light falling on his face, he suddenly looked more like a lost boy than a violent young man.

"I think I get it," I said, not letting up.  "It’s the old cliché:  ‘Misery loves company.’  You’re so dead inside that you feel a little better watching the life drain out of something else.  And you’re not brave enough to go after your father — who you’d really like to kill — so you pick on things that can’t fight back.  Kittens, babies, real brave stuff like that."  I got up.  "I don’t need to hear anything else."  I walked to the door and opened it.

"You don’t know the first thing about me," he seethed.  "Or my father."

"
Let him tell you the first thing
," the voice at the back of my mind said.

My skin turned to gooseflesh.  A crown of shivers made my scalp tingle.  Billy seemed about to invite me into his suffering.  And I have never felt closer to God than when journeying into a damaged heart.  I pushed the door to the room closed again and slowly turned to face him.

"I’ll let you in on a little secret," Billy deadpanned.  He pulled his shirt off, tossed it on his bed, and stood there, the taut muscles of his chest and abdomen twitching.

I wondered if he was baiting me while he gathered the courage to rush me.  I shifted most of my weight to my left side, freeing up my right foot in case I needed to deliver the blow I had planned.  But all Billy did was turn around.  And that was enough to nearly make me lose my balance.  Because I saw that his back was covered with welts, from his shoulder blades to his waist, as if he had been savaged with a strap.  Some were raw and open.  Others had healed into thick scars.

"If you want to figure out what happened to little Brooke," Billy said, "maybe you should figure out why good old Win gets off on doing this to me."

My head was spinning.  I tried to picture Darwin Bishop wielding a strap as Billy cowered in a corner of the family’s Nantucket mansion, but my mind kept serving up my father, in the tenement house we called home.  His belt was black, two inches wide, thirty-eight inches long, with a square, brushed silver buckle.  He wore it every day, whether he was drunk or not, which left me with a tinge of terror even when he was sober and kind and picking me off my feet with a bear hug, telling me how much he loved me.  Standing there with Billy, I could actually smell the stench of alcohol that came off my father’s skin.  I could feel the mixture of nausea and fear that I lived with until I had lived long enough to get myself out of that house and out of his way.

"You father did that?" I quietly asked Billy.

He didn’t respond.  But his scarred shoulders seemed to sag under the weight of his revelation.

I walked closer to him and reached out, almost touching his back.  I let my hand fall.  "Why?" I said.

He turned around, the fake smile back on his face.  "Whenever he feels like it," he said.  "When I got to this country, I tried being good, because I thought I might get sent back to the orphanage, but he seemed to like punishing me, anyhow, especially when he’d had a little bit to drink, so I figured, Why try to please him?  Why give a fuck — about anyone?"  He shrugged.  "Then something strange happened," he said.

"What was that?" I asked.

"It stopped hurting," he said, simply.  "He could whip me as hard as he wanted, and it didn’t get to me."

"Is that when you started hurting yourself?  The biting?"

He turned his arms over, revealing more arc-shaped scars here and there on the undersides of his forearms.  "It felt good for a while," he said.

"It felt good?"

"Well, I could
feel
it.  And that was good.  You know?"

I did know.  "The cats?  The house?" I said.  "Talk to me about those."

He sat on the edge of his mattress, looking away.  "I don’t know why I did that stuff," he said.  "Maybe it was what you were saying before, how I wanted to hurt something or destroy something because I was feeling destroyed myself.  Maybe I wanted to see
them
suffer.  Maybe because I couldn’t, anymore.  I don’t know.  I’m all mixed up about it."  He looked at me.  His eyes were filled with worry.  "I’m not right in the head.  I’m not... normal.  I never will be."

I didn’t want to get distracted about how badly I felt for Billy.  I needed more information.  "What about Brooke?" I said.  "Be straight with me.  I’ll try to help you either way.  Are you the one who killed her, or not?"

"No," he said emphatically.  He sat down on his bed.  "I would never do that.  You’ve got to believe me."

"You know that’s why you’re here," I said.  "You know that your father believes you’re guilty."

"I’m here because of my father," Billy said, flipping his hair out of his eyes again, "but he doesn’t believe I hurt Brooke."

"Then why would he send you?" I asked.

"Why?  Probably because he’s the one who did it.  And he isn’t about to take the blame.  He never does."

"Why would your father kill your sister?" I asked.

"He never wanted one baby girl, let alone twins," Billy said.  "He wanted my mother to have an abortion."

"How do you know that?"

"He was always screaming at her to get one," Billy squinted at me, as if remembering.  "I’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear him yelling, ‘Get rid of them!  Stop thinking about yourself all the time!  Get rid of them or get out!’  Mom would cry and curse him and say she’d do it.  I think she even went to an appointment once at one of those family planning places.  But she never went through with it."

I remembered Laura Mossberg’s comment that Billy’s extraordinary intelligence might just make him a more cunning liar.  "Why tell me all this?" I said.  "Why didn’t you tell Dr. Mossberg or the police?"

"You’re the only one who asked," he said.  He swallowed hard.  "I got to take a chance, sometime, on somebody."  Our eyes locked.  "Also, I figure I got just about nothing left to lose."

*            *            *

I found Laura Mossberg back at her office.  She invited me in.  I took the seat near her desk.

"Well," she asked.  "Any breakthroughs?"

"Only one, if you want to call it a breakthrough," I said.  "He insists he didn’t hurt his sister."

"He answered you directly about that?"

"Yes," I said.  "He did."

"Did he point a finger at someone else?"

I couldn’t be sure whether what I told Mossberg would stay with her or be passed on to Darwin Bishop.  Billy was a minor, after all.  His medical records were officially the property of his parents.  And Darwin Bishop probably had an even more immediate pipeline to the goings-on at Payne Whitney, through his friend, the medical center’s CEO.  "No," I said.  "He didn’t have any theory about Brooke’s murder."

She nodded.  "So, let me ask you the same question you put to me:  Do you believe him?  Could someone else be responsible?"  She toyed with the pearls around her neck.

"I have no reason to believe him right now," I said.  "His psychological profile, his prior history of violence, his lying on the standardized tests you administered here — all of it puts whatever he says in grave doubt.  I suppose the shocking thing would be if he admitted the crime."

"Agreed," she said.  "But you seem troubled.  What’s on your mind?"

I knew I was sitting with someone trained to listen to the music between spoken words.  "I feel for him," I said, hoping that would be a sufficient explanation.  "Like his father told me, Billy isn’t evil, he’s ill."

"And on that score, could you be helpful to him in court?  Does he meet the criteria for an insanity plea?" Mossberg asked.

"He certainly has a history of terrible trauma," I said, "going all the way back to his childhood in Russia, witnessing the murder of his parents.  A case could be made that he lost the emotional ties that bind the rest of us.  Without empathy, without conscience, he might not have any brake on his primal feelings — including being pathologically jealous of new children in the family.  He may have lashed out as a reflex, rather than a premeditated act.  To put it in legal terms, he may ‘lack the substantial capacity to conform his behavior to the requirements of the law.’"

"That rings true," she said.  "His psychological testing would support that."

I looked into Blue Dog’s golden eyes.  "Just out of curiosity," I asked, "did Billy have a physical examination when he was admitted?"

"He refused," Mossberg said.  "We didn’t see a reason to press him on it.  He’s been quite healthy — from a medical standpoint — according to his father."  She paused.  "Is there anything in particular you’re concerned about?"

"Billy has quite a few welts on his back," I said, looking at Mossberg.  "Some are scarred over.  Others are fresh."

She nodded.  "That would be consistent with what Mr. Bishop told me," she said. "Apparently, Billy has the habit of whipping himself with a belt — along with his cutting, biting, and hair-pulling.  I’ve understood all of that as an outgrowth of his self-hatred.  He makes attempts to channel his violence inward, but it inevitably spills over, and he strikes out at others."