Little Girls Lost (8 page)

"We're just kidding," Jeannie said once she managed to get enough air into her lungs to speak.
 

"Though Joey has to be wondering," Katie added.

Pamela rolled her eyes. "Why are we even talking about this? He's not my boyfriend!"

"Well that explains why you keep blowing him off," Katie said.

"I'm not blowing him off."

"Oh, excuse me. You're not blowing him off. You just turn him down again and again."

"And again!" Jeannie chimed in, laughing.

"Screw you both. I like him. I just don't know if I like-like him."

Her two friends' eyes grew wider at the sight of something behind her, and Pamela thought to herself: speak of the devil and he will appear.

"Hey, Pamela," a gruff voice said behind her. She turned to see an athletic teenage boy with brown hair poking out from under a baseball cap worn backwards.

"Hi Joey," she replied.

"Ladies," he said dramatically to her friends, who replied with amused snorts.

"We were just talking about you," Pamela said.

"Oh yeah?" Joey looked interested, and also suddenly hopeful. "What were you saying?"

"I was saying that you're a friend," Pamela said quickly before one of her irresponsible friends could jump in with something embarrassing.

"I like you too, Pamela," Joey said with a smile. He cleared his voice, and then said with a slight quaver: "Which is why I was wondering if you wanted to go to the game with me on Friday? Well, I'll be playing, but if you want to watch that would be cool, and then afterward some of us are gonna go to Mike's house. His parents are in Hawaii. It could be pretty cool."

Pamela felt a twist of nervousness in her gut. Joey kept asking her out, and he was awfully sweet, but she just couldn't make up her mind about him. Sometimes she thought he was really good boyfriend material and there was no reason why she shouldn't go out with him. Other times, though, the whole thing just felt wrong somehow. She had been stuck in the middle, between yes and no, so long that she felt bad for him, but she honestly didn't know anything else to say.
 

"I'm sorry, I can't," she said in an apologetic tone. "I have to babysit this Friday."

"Oh," Joey said, the light going out of his face. "That's cool. Maybe some other time?"

"Sure," Pamela said unconvincingly.
 

Joey gave her half a smile and turned on his heel. "Spinster virgin," Pamela could hear, whispered behind her by one of her so-called friends, who in reality were total bitches who deserved a good beating.

Down the hallway, Joey rejoined his friends in their huddle by the drinking fountain.
 

"So, did you get shot down again?" asked a tall kid named Devin who played tight end on the football team. Joey was the quarterback.

"She's busy," he said.

His friends let out a series of snorts and guffaws. "She's such a cock tease," one of them said.

"She's not a cock tease, Tyrone," Joey protested. "She's babysitting that night."

"Yeah," Tyrone agreed. "And when she's not babysitting she's helping her parents, or feeding the poor, or whatever the fuck she comes up with whenever you ask her out. You ask me, she's probably fucking another guy."

"She's not like that," Joey protested.

"Yeah? How would you know? She doesn't give you the time of day. I heard she was fucking her math teacher."

Joey rolled his eyes. "Yeah, right."

The others picked it up, feeding off each others' energy. "Yeah, I heard that, too! She fucked him to turn a C into a B. He would have given her an A, but she wouldn't take it up the ass!"

They all laughed at that, all except Joey who knew there was no point in arguing with them. He'd done his part to defend her name, but now he had to make sure he didn't lose any standing among his friends.

"Yeah, well, she's saving that ass for me," he said with a smirk.

"Bullshit!" Devin hooted. "You are so full of shit! You've never been within ten miles of that ass!"

"Yeah, well, that may be so" Joey said with a confident smile. "But if she don't give it up to me soon, maybe I'll just take it."

Sam eased his weight down into the cushions of the leather couch and tried not to feel nervous.

Doctors offices had always made him uncomfortable, and his mind drew no distinctions between types of doctors. Whether they were medical doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, or even massage therapists, they all made parts of his body clench in anticipation of pain and ice-cold instruments inserted in places that Sam would rather they not go.

"Thank you for seeing me, doctor," he said to the middle-aged man who was looking at him with an expression that combined curiosity with something that looked like amusement. "You come highly recommended."

"Please, call me Warren," the doctor replied in a phrase Sam imagined he repeated to each of the patients who came through his doors. Warren Sundquist was, Sam had learned, a big name within a small field. Sam had heard from no fewer than three enthralled colleagues that Dr. Sundquist had "written the book" on sexual sadists. He couldn't decide whether he should be surprised that a man who worked with patients who were capable of such violence was himself quiet, mild, and so carefully controlled in his words and gestures.

"I'm hoping you can help me with a case. It's not going the way I anticipated."

The doctor gave him a slow smile. "That must be upsetting," he murmured.

"Excuse me?"

"You're a police officer. I'm sorry, you're a detective. Your professional skills are no doubt of the highest order, and your intuition has been honed through years of experience. Your anticipation, Detective, is what puts criminals behind bars. If your intuition is leading you astray, would that not be upsetting?"

Sam shrugged. He was feeling like a bug under glass. "I don't know that I'd go that far. I'm not upset so much as I'm uncertain."

The doctor folded his hands in his laps and crossed his legs. He inclined his head. "Please elaborate."

Sam considered, wondering how much it was safe to disclose to this man. Sam was not a man who surrendered information easily. He wasn't secretive by nature, but he never liked tipping his hand until he was sure how the game would play out. In this game, though, he was almost out of options. He decided to trust the expert.

"We have two murders. We're not certain that they're connected, but I'm pretty sure."

"And what makes you so certain?"

"I'm not sure. It just feels like they're part of something bigger."

Doctor Sundquist smiled. "Your intuition tells you so. Of course. Please continue."

"We had a suspect. The first body to be recovered bore wounds and mutilation that matched the pattern of what a convicted murderer had inflicted on his victims. When I looked into the case, it turned out that man had recently been paroled."

"It sounds like an open and shut case."

Sam grimaced. "It was, but then we recovered the second body. This time the victim had been mutilated in a very different way. Again, the mutilations matched those inflicted on other women, by a man who is now back on the streets."

The doctor offered him a half smile. "That's an interesting coincidence. So now you have two killers."

Sam shook his head. "It's the same guy."

"How can you be so sure?"

Sam paused, gathering his thoughts. In his deepest heart he knew that he wasn't sure, not completely. It could be that he had two victims of two murderers in two completely unrelated cases. Still, there was something about it that bugged him, and forced him toward a conclusion.

"First, I don't like coincidences."

Sundquist nodded. "Neither do I. Coincidences are what you find in bad movies. In life, every act is singular and uniquely meaningful. What else?"

"The victims were too similar. They were the same gender, roughly the same age, and they even kind of looked alike. They were the sort of victim who would appeal to the same sort of killer."

Sundquist gave him the half-smile that Sam was beginning to realize was the psychiatrist's signature expression. "And what does that tell you?"

"That there are certain possibilities. First, that we have two convicted murderers, returning to the game at the same time in the same town. "

"Which would be very coincidental."

"Which would be very coincidental, and so very unlikely. Second, that these same two murderers are working together for some reason."

The doctor gave a snort. "Unlikely. The sexual sadist almost never works with an accomplice. The same terrible forces that drive him to kill also force him apart from others. Have you ever asked yourself why the neighbors of an axe murderer always tell the reporters how quiet and shy he was? If a serial murderer was the sort of person to share his innermost thoughts with others, he would have been locked up long before he got around to killing anyone."

Sam nodded. "The third possibility is that there is one killer, who killed his first victim in one way and his second victim in a very different way."

Sundquist quirked his head to the side, considering the question. "Possible. It is certainly true that a killer's method evolves over time. He tries new methods, new places, new devices, looking for what feels right. Until he finds his own true method you will see him shifting through imperfect intermediate states. Do the markings on the second victim seem to you like a modification of the first?"

Sam shook his head. "Completely different," he said.

"Then that, too, is unlikely," the doctor concluded. "That would be like an artist executing two works, one in watercolors and the other in crayon. It is far more likely that you are looking at the work of two artists."

"Fourth," Sam interjected, "there is one killer who's learned from other killers. He's a copycat and has adopted their methods as his own."

The doctor weighed the possibility. "That would not be unknown, but you should still expect convergence in future victims. A killer's method is a very personal thing. Your murderer will be searching for a signature technique."

A final possibility occurred to Sam, one he hadn't considered before. "Fifth, the killer might be a student of killing, one who knows that people like me hunt him by looking for patterns. But he likes what he does, and he doesn't want to get caught, so what he does is get a book on serial killers and he copies one killer's method with one victim, and another killer's method with another victim."

Sundquist considered him for a long, silent moment. "In that case, Detective, you might have your ultimate adversary. Because you hope to find him through a pattern that, if you're right, does not exist."

"It's possible, though?"

He shrugged. "It's possible. Mind you, this hypothetical killer would have his own reasons for killing—he's not doing it just for the joy of confounding the police, there's something much deeper driving him. But it's possible that, if he's exceptionally self-aware, he might do as you suggest and hide the true pattern guiding his efforts beneath the false pattern of those other killers' methods."

"So it's possible."

"It's possible, but is it helpful? How does it aid your investigation to know that, even after two murders, you still know next to nothing about the person who is responsible?"

Sam got up to go. "The lack of pattern is a pattern, Doctor. This bastard is covering his tracks very carefully, and if I know how he's doing it, I can use that to catch him."

Sundquist looked up at him placidly. "Is there anything else I can do for you, Detective?"

Sam paused, then asked the question that had been bugging him all day, since he first formed the plan to visit this man's office. "You specialize in sexual sadists, right?"

"I do."

"Does it do any good?"

The doctor cocked his head. "What do you mean?"

"They're sadists. They're animals who prey on women. Is there a cure for something like that?"

"Speaking of a 'cure' is a little simplistic..."

"Well, call it whatever you like," Sam snarled. "The fact is that an insanity plea is sometimes the only way these guys avoid the death penalty. If you've got a rabid dog and you have a cure for rabies, I say go for it: cure the dog. But if there is no cure, you put it down—you don't put it in an institution and talk to it about its feelings."

Sundquist smiled tolerantly. "I believe we are all in pain, Detective. And the purpose of psychoanalysis is to provide the patient with a story that makes their pain meaningful and shows them the way out. I admit that this is not a cure in the same sense as penicillin can cure an infection, but it's better than nothing, is it not?"

Sam considered that. "So you give your patients a story. Does it matter if the story is true?"

Sundquist shrugged. "Is there any story that's true in the end, aside from the ones in which the hero dies?"

Sam shook his head. He honestly couldn't tell if the doctor was brilliant or more full of shit than anyone he had ever met.

"What I do is not so unfamiliar to you, Detective," the doctor continued. "For instance, there's a very powerful story attached to the medallion you carry in your pocket."

Sam's stomach gave a lurch, and he gave the doctor a long, hard look before his hand snaked into his pocket and took out the slim disk of metal. He'd received it at an AA meeting, to mark one year's sobriety. "How did you know?" he asked, somewhat unsteadily.

The doctor scanned him up and down, assessing the elements that constructed his person. "It was an educated guess. You have a Twelve Step look about you, Detective, just as I imagine a Knight Templar would have looked: regular, disciplined, and drawing strength from your observance of a set of very strict rules."

"I'm not sure if that's a compliment or an insult."

"It was intended as neither. Tell me, Detective: who was your higher power?"

"I was," Sam answered curtly.

"How self-reliant of you. I knew already that it wouldn't be God, but I thought that maybe it would be your wife."