The Analyst (59 page)

This was different. It was savage. It was murder, specialized. He felt his own hands shake with an old man’s palsy. He fought hard against the overwhelming instinct to panic and run.

Ricky tried to organize his thoughts. The room was silent, and he could hear his own labored breathing, like a man at the top of a high mountain, sucking in cold air without significant relief. It seemed that every sinew inside of him had tightened, knotted, and that only fleeing would loosen the tension. He gripped the edge of the desk, trying to steady himself.

“What have you done to me, old man?” he said out loud. His voice seemed out of place, like a cough in the midst of a solemn church service.

Then he realized the answer to his own question: He’s tried to kill me. One bullet that can kill two people, because the old physician’s death was likely to be taken hard by three people on this earth who had no restrictions on how they would respond. And they would blame Ricky, regardless of what evidence of suicide stared them in the face.

Only it was even more complicated than that. Dr. Lewis wanted to do more than simply murder him. He’d had the gun leveled at Ricky’s face, and he could easily have pulled the trigger, even knowing that Ricky might return fire before dying. What the old man wanted was to endow all the people playing out the murderous game with a moral depravity that equaled his own. That was far more important than simply killing Ricky and himself. Ricky tried to breathe past the thoughts which flooded him. All along, he thought, this hasn’t only been about death. It’s been about the process. It’s been about how death was reached.

An appropriate game for a psychoanalyst to invent.

Again he sucked at the thin air of the study. Rumplestiltskin may have been the agent of revenge and the instigator, as well, Ricky thought. But the design of the game came from the man dead before him. Of that he was certain.

Which meant that when he spoke of knowledge, he was likely telling the truth. Or at least some perverted, twisted version of the same.

It took Ricky a second or two to realize that he still clutched the envelope that his onetime mentor had handed him. It was difficult for him to strip his eyes away from the body of the old man. It was as if the suicide was hypnotic. But he finally did, tearing open the flap and pulling a single sheet of paper from the envelope. He read rapidly:

The letter wasn’t signed.

Ricky sucked in a new and seemingly unique panic with every breath.

He lifted his eyes and began to search around the office. A wall clock clicked quietly with each passing second, the sound suddenly penetrating Ricky’s consciousness. He tried to do the travel math: When did the old man call and tell Merlin and Virgil and perhaps Rumplestiltskin that Ricky was on his way? From the city to the country home was two hours. Maybe a little less. Did he have seconds? Minutes? A quarter hour? He knew he had to get away, to distance himself from the death sitting in the seat before him, if only to gather his thoughts and try to determine what move he had left, if any. It was like being in a chess game with a grand master, he thought suddenly, moving pieces around a board haphazardly, all the time knowing that the opponent can see two, three, four, or more moves ahead.

His throat was dry and he felt flushed.

Right in front, he thought.

Sliding gingerly around the desk, trying to avoid even brushing up against the dead analyst’s body, he started to reach for the top drawer, then stopped. What am I leaving behind, he thought? Hair fibers? Fingerprints? DNA? Have I even committed a crime?

Then he thought: There are two kinds of crimes. The first brings out the police and prosecutors and the weight of the state demanding justice. The second strikes at the hearts of individuals. Sometimes the two blend together, he knew. But so much of what had happened was predominantly the second, and it was the judge, jury, and executioner who were heading his way that truly concerned him.

There was no way around these questions. He told himself to have confidence in the single fact that the man whose prints and other substances were being left in the dead man’s room was dead, too, and that might afford him some protection, if only from the police who would likely be there at some point that night. He put his hand on the drawer and pulled it open.

It was empty.

He moved swiftly to all the other drawers. They, too, were barren. Dr. Lewis had clearly taken the time to clean out anything that had been accumulated there. Ricky ran his fingers under the desk surface, thinking perhaps something was concealed there. He bent down and searched, but saw nothing. Then he turned his attention to the dead man. Breathing in sharply, he let his fingers travel inside the man’s pockets. They, too, were clear. Nothing on the body. Nothing in the desk. It was as if the old analyst had taken pains to wipe his world clean. Ricky nodded in agreement. A psychoanalyst, better than anyone, he thought, knows what speaks about who one is. And it follows that seeking to wipe that identity slate clear, he would know better than most how to eradicate the telltale signs of personality.

Again, Ricky swept his eyes over the office. He wondered whether there was a safe. He spotted the clock, and that gave him an idea. Dr. Lewis had spoken about time. Perhaps, Ricky thought, that was the clue. He jumped to the wall and searched behind the clock.

Nothing.

He wanted to bellow in rage. It’s here, he insisted.

Ricky took another deep breath. Perhaps it isn’t, he thought, and all the old man wanted me to do was to be here when his murderous adopted offspring arrive. Was that the game? Perhaps he wanted this to be the end, tonight. Ricky seized his own weapon and spun back toward the door.

Then he shook his head. No, that would be a simple lie, and Dr. Lewis’s lies were far more complex. There is something here.

Ricky turned to the bookcase. Rows of medical and psychiatric texts, collected writings of Freud and Jung, some modern studies and clinical trials in book form. Books on depression. Books on anxiety. Books on dreams. Dozens of books, filled with only a modest portion of the accumulated knowledge of man’s emotions. Including the book that housed Ricky’s bullet. He looked at the title, riding the spine:
The Encyclopedia of Abnormal Psychology
, only the
ology
of the last word had been shredded by his shot.

He stopped, staring forward.

Why did a psychoanalyst need a text on abnormal psychology? Their profession dealt almost exclusively with the modestly displaced emotions. Not the truly dark and twisted ones. Of all the books lined up on the shelves, it was the only one slightly out of place, but this was a distinction only another analyst would notice.

The man had laughed. He’d turned and saw the place the bullet landed and laughed and said it was appropriate.

Ricky jumped to the bookcase and grasped the text from the shelf. It was heavy and thick, bound in black with vibrant gold writing on the jacket. He opened the book to the title page.

Written in thick red with a Flair pen right across the title were the words
: Good choice, Ricky. Now can you find the right entries?

He looked up and heard the clock ticking. He did not think he had time to answer that question at that moment.

He took a step away from the bookcase, almost starting to run, and then stopped. He turned back and carefully took another text from a different shelf and placed it into the open space of the book he had removed, covering the textbook’s absence.

Ricky took another quick look around, but saw nothing that spoke loudly to him. He took a final glance at the old analyst’s body, which seemed to have grayed in the few moments that death had been there with him. He thought he should say or feel something, but no longer was sure what that could be, so instead, Ricky ran.

The deep onyx of night blanketed him as he slid from Dr. Lewis’s country home. Within a few strides he was away from the front door, the light that seeped from the study, swallowed by the summer darkness. Standing in the black shadows, Ricky was able to look back quickly. The benign sounds of the rural area played the usual midnight music, no discordant tones to indicate that violent death was a part of the landscape. For a second he stopped and tried to assess how every piece of himself had been systematically erased over the past year. Identity is a quilt of experience, but it seemed to Ricky that so little existed of what he’d come to believe was himself. What he had left was his childhood. His adult life was in tatters. But both halves of his existence were cut away from him, with no apparent access. He thought this understanding left him part dizzy, part nauseous.

He turned and continued to flee.

Settling into a comfortable jog, footsteps mingling with the night sounds, Ricky headed back toward his car. He carried the abnormal psychology encyclopedia in one hand, his weapon in the other. He had traveled only half the distance, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a vehicle moving fast on a country road, heading in his direction. He looked up and saw the glow of headlights sweeping around a distant corner, mingling with the deep throaty sound of a large engine accelerating.

He did not hesitate. He knew immediately who was heading in that direction in such a hurry. Ricky pitched himself to the earth and scrambled behind a stand of trees. He ducked down, but lifted his head as a large, black Mercedes roared past. The tires sharpened the noise at the next corner.

When he raised himself up, he was already sprinting. This was flight in earnest, muscles complaining, lungs red-hot with exertion, moving as fast as he could through the night. Getting away was the only importance, the only concern. With an ear cocked behind him, listening for the telltale sound of the huge car, he raced forward. He told himself to find distance. They will not stay long at the country house, he said to himself, urging his feet forward. A few moments only to measure the death in the study and to search for signs that he was still there. Or close by. They will know that only moments elapsed between the self-murder and their arrival, and they will want to close the gap.

Within minutes, he’d reached the rental car. He fumbled for the keys, dropping them once, but seizing them from the ground, gasping with tension. He threw himself behind the wheel and started the engine. Every instinct he had told him to accelerate. To escape. To run away. But he fought against these urges, trying hard to keep his wits about him.

Ricky made himself think. I cannot outrun them in this car. There are two routes back to New York City, the thruway on the western side of the Hudson and the Taconic Parkway on the eastern side. They will have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right, and spotting me in the car. The out-of-state New Hampshire plate on the tail of the cheap rental car was a telltale sign indicating who was behind the wheel. They might have acquired a description of the vehicle and the license plate number from the rental agency in Durham. In fact, he thought this likely.

What he understood was in that moment he had to do something unexpected.

Something that defied what the three in the car would anticipate.

He thought his hands were shaking as he decided what to do. He wondered whether it was easier to gamble with his life now that he’d died once already.

He put the car in gear and slowly began to drive back in the direction of the old analyst’s house. He scrunched himself down as low in the seat as he could get, without being obvious. He forced himself to maintain the speed limit, heading north on the old country road, when the relative safety of the city was to the south.

He was closing on the driveway to the place he’d just been, when he saw the headlights of the Mercedes sweeping down toward the roadway. He could hear the crunch of the big tires against the gravel. He slowed slightly-he did not want to pass directly in the big car’s lights-giving them time to swing out onto the road, and head toward him, accelerating quickly. He had his high beams on, and as the Mercedes closed the space, he dimmed his lights, as one is supposed to, then just as they closed, blinked them on high again, like any motorist signaling with irritation at the approaching car. The effect was that both vehicles narrowly swept past each other with high beams on. Just as Ricky knew that he was blinded momentarily, so were they. He punched the accelerator as he passed, slinking rapidly around a corner. Too fast, he hoped, for someone in the other car to turn and make the license plate on the back.

He took the first side road he spotted, turning to his right, immediately switching off the car lights. He made a U-turn in the black, his way lit only by the moonlight. He reminded himself to keep his foot off the brake pedal, so that the red lights wouldn’t light in the rear. Then he waited to see if he was followed.

The road remained empty. He made himself wait five, then ten minutes. Long enough for the occupants of the Mercedes to decide on one of the two alternative routes, and rachet the big car up to a hundred miles per hour, trying to catch up with him.

Ricky put the car back in gear, and continued to drive north almost aimlessly, on side roads and streets. Heading nowhere special. After nearly an hour, he finally turned the car around and changed direction again, finally steering back to the city. It was deep into the night and few other vehicles were around. Ricky drove steadily, thinking how close his world had become, and how dark, and trying to devise a way to restore light to it.