The Girls He Adored (12 page)

“Sure—just call my office.” She gave him the number; he jotted it down in his notebook. “If I'm not in, you can leave a number with my service—they'll know how to get in touch with me.”

“Great. Thanks again, Doctor Cogan.”

“No problem. Oh—one more thing, Agent Pender. If I were you, I would definitely take every precaution. Because the only thing I can tell you for sure about any of this individual's alters is that one of them is homicidal. At
least
one of them.”

T
HE BODY OF
U
LYSSES
M
AXWELL
lay motionless on its bunk in the county jail on Natividad Road, an icebag balanced on its forehead. The skin was unbroken, the swelling had gone down, and the nurse at the jail, in consultation with Dr. Cogan, had already determined that there was no concussion, else Maxwell would have been transferred to the county hospital just up the road. The reason the body lay as if unconscious was that for the moment, there was no one in charge.

Inside the head, though, things were anything but quiet. Max raged about traitors, traitors who should be burned, traitors who could be expelled or banished into the darkness of non-being forever, while Lyssy the Sissy whimpered that it wasn't his fault, that he hadn't wanted to come out, that the doctor had made him, and Ulysses, the deposed host alter, known to the others as Useless, pleaded for his very existence—when he could get a word in edgewise.

In the end it was Ish who brought peace to the system, pointing out that the debacle in the interview room was at least partly Max's fault, in that it was Max who, in the mistaken belief that he could control the situation, had given the psychiatrist permission to attempt to hypnotize them in the first place.

Ish was the only alter who was allowed to criticize Max, or at least call some of his actions or decisions into question. He pointed out, in a diplomatic fashion, that although their system represented a new and superior order of multiple personality, DID was still DID, and every one of the interlocking identities, even Max, an alter like no other, was by nature enormously suggestible.

I'm sure you'll take that into account in the future,
Ish suggested reassuringly.
For the moment, though, instead of blaming each other, our time might be better spent figuring out how to limit the damage.

Eat shit and die,
replied Max. He'd already figured out how to limit the damage.

A moment later the reanimated body drew a deep, calming breath, the long-lashed eyes fluttered open. Max took off the icebag and sat up slowly. He could hear a guard circling the pod; he waited until the footsteps had passed his cell before rolling up his sleeve and reaching into the urine-filled toilet beside the bunk. The toilet and sink were one stainless steel unit, sink above, toilet below. Max fished around in the bottom of the bowl, removed the inch-long handcuff key, washed it off in the sink, dried it on his jail-issue, postage-stamp washcloth, and slipped it into his mouth.

Max had been to court before—as Dr. Cogan would have said, he knew the drill. There was no metal detector for prisoners leaving the new jail on Natividad, no cavity search for prisoners being transported to and from the courthouse, and no metal detector at all at the old jail on West Alisal.

Prisoners returning to the new jail did have to pass through a sensitive, state-of-the-art metal detector on their way in, Max knew. He had no intention, however, of returning to Natividad Road, with or without Terry Jervis's handcuff key, which he planned to return to Deputy Jervis personally, at the earliest opportunity.

J
UST AFTER TWO O'CLOCK
on Wednesday afternoon, Lieutenant Rigoberto Gonzalez of the Monterey County Sheriff's Department— early forties, perfectly pressed uniform, carefully trimmed black mustache—met Pender in the alley next to the old jail, abandoned now except for the ground-floor cellblock in the east wing, and led him from the brightness of a sunny Salinas afternoon into the gloomy half-light of the jail. Directly ahead of them were sliding barred doors. Gonzalez turned right instead, and Pender followed him into a messy, crowded, claustrophobic little room that looked more like the office of an old-time two-pump country gas station than the command post for a metropolitan jail.

“You carrying?” asked Gonzalez, unholstering his own weapon, the sheriff's department standard-issue Glock .40. Pender handed his SIG Sauer to Gonzalez, butt first; the deputy checked it out. “I thought you guys carry Glocks now.”

“I'm more comfortable with the SIG.”

“Not as much stopping power with a nine as with a forty.”

“The dual action is faster, though. I figure I can always shoot 'em twice.” Pender hadn't actually fired a shot in anger since his days as a Cortland County sheriff's deputy, but he remained range-qualified with both pistol and shotgun.

After locking up the guns and introducing Pender to Frank Twombley and Deena Knapp, the two deputies on duty, Gonzalez led Pender through the office—they were now on the other side of the sliding barred doors—then to the left, down a narrow corridor to the jail's old visiting room, bare save for a single metal bench suspended like a shelf from the back wall. The windows that had
once separated the inmates from their loved ones were boarded up, the telephones gone, their torn wires sticking out from the wall at three-foot intervals.

“You can change in here.” Gonzalez handed Pender a paper bag containing an orange jumpsuit, a gray T-shirt, white socks, and rubber sandals.

Pender asked Gonzalez if there was any significance to the variety of jumpsuit colors he'd seen the inmates wearing.

“Orange is for your violent felons, red for nonviolent felons, green for misdemeanors.”

“So I'm a violent felon?”

“You'd have to be, for us to put you in with the Ripper. We keep the prisoners strictly segregated in the holding cells.”

“You call him the Ripper?” asked Pender, unfolding the jumpsuit and checking it for size. XXL—close enough.

“Did you see what he did to that girl?”

“Unfortunately, yes—I saw the autopsy photos.”

Gonzalez left Pender in the visiting room, returning a few minutes later with a full set of handcuffs, leg irons, chains, and a padlocking belt to pull the ensemble together. When he finished securing Pender, he stepped back and nodded approvingly. Bald, scowling, immense, the FBI man might have been the enforcer for a gang of over-the-hill outlaw bikers.

“Agent Pender, you could give mean a bad name. What do you want to be in for?”

“What do I look like I'd be in for?”

Gonzalez narrowed his eyes, gave Pender an exaggerated onceover. “How about rape? No offense.”

“None taken. But with a face like mine, who'd ever believe
I
had trouble getting any?”

The deputy grinned. “With a face like yours,” he said, “we should probably make it serial rape.”

The holding cells were at the opposite end of the corridor. Gonzalez opened the metal cabinet containing the door control panel beside the entrance to the cell block. Inside the cabinet were four vertically sliding knobs above a solid steel wheel eighteen inches in diameter. All four knobs were down in the red, or closed, position; Gonzalez raised the fourth until it showed yellow, then cranked the big wheel clockwise.

Ready?
mouthed Gonzalez.

Pender nodded.

“THEN LET'S GO, PENDEJO!”

Gonzalez stepped behind Pender and shoved him through the portal into the darkness. Pender stumbled forward down the dim corridor. A high windowless wall loomed to his left. To the right, his peripheral vision picked up dozens of shadowy figures stirring restlessly behind floor-to-ceiling bars, visible only in silhouette and motion, like nocturnal animals in the zoo when the infrareds are turned off. Then, before Pender's eyes had a chance to become accustomed to the tenebrous light, Gonzalez slid the last door open, shoved Pender inside, and he was one of them.

F
ORTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER
the cell door clanged shut behind Pender, it slid open again. Max shuffled in and took a seat on the iron bunk suspended from the wall, as far from his temporary cellmate as possible. When his pupils had adjusted to the dim light— weak fluorescents flickering behind a dense mesh grille in the ceiling—he saw that the other man in the cell was another goddamn gorilla, every bit as large as the almost-late Refugio Cortes, and just as mean looking.

Max could feel Alicea pushing him to make a switch.
No fucking way,
Max told her.
We're not going through that again.

Ish would have concurred, had he been consulted. It was Ish who'd analyzed the vicious cycle after the first time around. Feeling sexually threatened by the brutal Cortes, Max had dispatched Alicea to deal with him. But Alicea's feminine charms only inflamed the passions of Cortes, who had been doing a threemonth stretch of county time for possession of methamphetamine. Whereupon Cortes had told Alicea, in his charmingly accented Pachuco, to “save up your spit,
puto,
or maybe you like a dry
verga
up your
culo?”

But when Cortes showed up after lights-out (actually, they only dimmed), it wasn't Alicea waiting for him, but Lee. Lee was the alter who'd studied both karate and kung-fu, wrestled in high school at a hundred and twenty-eight pounds, and boxed in Juvie. When Lee looked into a mirror, however, he saw, not a slender junior lightweight but a light-heavyweight with a twenty-inch neck and pectorals like Batman's breastplate. And since everybody on the outside saw him as a little guy, this actually provided him a formidable
advantage when he was picking on somebody his “own” size.

When he was up against a gorilla like Cortes, Lee's speed and agility were even more valuable than his strength. What gave him a real edge, however, was a trick his best friend Buckley had taught him to help him survive the no-holds-barred call-outs that were a primary source of evening entertainment at the Umpqua County Juvenile Ranch.

It was simple enough, the Buckley maneuver, but it took a fearful-amount of will and practice. Decide on your first offensive move, then start counting down from ten in the mind. The trick is to make the move any time before reaching one.

Three, five, even nine—the count doesn't matter, so long as it hasn't been predetermined. That way the opponent never sees any of the usual warning flickers, the tensing of muscles, the shifting of eyes, that normally precede an attack. This makes the maneuver especially effective against experienced fighters, men who have trained themselves to watch for precisely those clues.

So here comes Cortes with his rank smell, and his dick waving in the dark. And although such behavior was personally repugnant to Lee, he impersonated Alicea long enough to put the brute at ease . . .
ten
. . . kneeling before the big man . . .
nine
. . . fondling him until he was hard . . .
eight
. . . then giving him a twisting, twofisted hand job . . .
seven
. . . as if in preparation for oral sex to follow.
Six
. . .
five
. . .

At four he struck, bending Cortes's penile shaft in the middle like he was breaking a celery stalk in half. Cortes was momentarily paralyzed by what must have been excruciating pain, giving Lee enough time to straighten up, deliver a blow to Cortes's Adam's apple with the side of his left hand and another, with the heel of his right hand, to his nose.