The Girls He Adored (17 page)

No rest for the wicked, though—before moving on to the fun part of the evening, Max still had to switch cars. He found a set of keys hanging from a nail in the kitchen. A door led directly from the living room into the garage, where he had his choice of two vehicles, an old black Honda Civic or an equally old Volvo station wagon painted an unlikely shade of avocado green. He opened the garage door, backed the Volvo out, drove the Plymouth into the garage, and locked the door behind him.

Back inside the house, Max turned out the kitchen light, then tiptoed down the hall toward the bedroom. The door was open; the room was dark. He flattened himself against the wall and held his breath, listening. He heard regular breathing, a nasal snort every few inhalations. He drew the can of pepper spray from his belt and peeked around the door frame. No movement from the bandaged figure lying on its back on the near side of the canopied double bed. Terry Jervis was either asleep, or one hell of an actress.

With a firm grip to prevent them from jingling, Max took Deputy Twombley's handcuffs out of his belt as he approached the bed. This was almost too easy. Max could feel Kinch yearning for her blood. But a fresh victim, her spirit not yet broken? This was too new and shiny a toy (Hours of Indoor Fun!, he thought) to let Kinch play with just yet.

Later,
Max told him.
You can have her at the end. As usual.
He flicked on the bedside lamp and jingled the handcuffs. “Wakey, wakey.”

Her eyes fluttered open, pale blue above the ghost-white bandages. Max waited for the shock of recognition to enter them. He drank in her terror. It was delicious, exquisite, intoxicating—Kinch could never have appreciated it. Then, as her hand went under the pillow for her gun, he sprayed her.

Over the course of the long night, they all had their turns. Max was a sadist and a bugger, Christopher a sensualist and a fantasist, and Kinch . . . well, Kinch was a hacker.

Christopher went first—he was already in place when Terry Jervis recovered from the pepper spray. Tenderly he bathed her eyes and unbandaged her jaw. He brought in pillar candles and aromatherapy oil lamps and scented oils from the bathroom, and by their soft flickering light he made tender love to her. He dressed and half dressed and undressed her in outfits from her lingerie
drawer and from the back of her closet; a whore in a Merry Widow, a farmer's daughter in overalls, a deputy sheriff wearing only her uniform shirt, somebody's wifey in a shorty nightgown, a teenage slut in a short teddy, a little girl in flannel pajamas. He positioned and repositioned her on her back, her side, her stomach, propped on pillows, kneeling by the side of the bed, lying on the carpet, leaning over a chair, bent over her pink and white vanity and pressed against the vanity mirror.

But however he posed her, at all times he handled her so gently and with such tenderness that gradually a glimmer of hope that he might let her live blossomed in her breast.

At which point Max took over. By design—terror wasn't half as tasty without hope to season it. The lighted candle and hot lamp oil were soon put to entirely different uses, the scented oils and lubricants employed for his ease of access rather than her comfort. Unlike the priapic Christopher, Max suffered from occasional erectile dysfunction as well as premature ejaculation, forcing him to make extensive use of the sex toys from Terry and Aletha's bedside drawer.

By the time Max was done with Terry she was still alive, but torn and trembling, a wide-eyed wreck of no damn use to either Max or Christopher. Aletha Winkle, however, though she had never regained consciousness, was also still alive, and save for the wound at the back of her head, unmarked.
She
was no damn use to Max— you can neither terrorize nor torture an unconscious victim—but Christopher wanted her, so Max let him have her.

Hauling Aletha around was a chore, so once Christopher got her up onto the bed, there she stayed. Even dressing and undressing her took a lot of energy; to save his strength, Christopher slit the outfits he wanted to dress her in up the back (or the front, depending) before putting them on her. He tried to persuade Terry to join in the fun, but it was no use—she was too far gone. Eventually he settled for undressing both women and arranging them
en tableaux
; the contrast between Aletha's massive, inert brown flesh and Terry's taut quivering pale skin was both aesthetically intriguing and sexually arousing.

But all good things must come to an end. By daybreak Christopher was sated and Max was bored; then came Kinch's turn.

Tuckered out and sweaty from the long, eventful night, Max helped himself to a long hot shower followed by a hearty breakfast.
The phone rang while he was eating. He answered it in Terry's voice—raised pitch, clenched teeth.

“ 'Lo?”

“Oh—hi Terry. This is Mary Ann at El Sausal Middle. I have a fourth-grade teacher out. Does Aletha want to sub today?”

“She's sick. She has a cold.”

“Okay, on to the next victim.”

You said it, sister, thought Max, hanging up the phone. Suddenly he understood that this put a different light on things. With neither woman expected anywhere, the Plymouth hidden safely in the garage, and no reason for anyone to look for him here, he could think of several reasons why he might be better off hiding out for a day or so.

For one thing, it was already light out—there was a good chance one of the neighbors might see him driving away in the Volvo. For another, if the cops had thrown up roadblocks last night, they'd likely be down by tomorrow night.

Then there was the necessity for a disguise. A layover would give him time to change his appearance. And though he wasn't sleepy yet, he knew he would be soon: at twenty-eight he could no longer pull all-nighters with impunity. Plus the next part of his plan might prove tricky to execute; surely a good rest now would make for sharper wits later.

First, though, his hair. “We had ourselves a time, didn't we, girls?” he said to the two women as he passed through the bedroom on his way to the bathroom, where Terry kept her bleach, fixer, and hair coloring.

No response—not that he'd been expecting one.

R
OADBLOCKS, HELICOPTERS,
a mustering of off-duty officers in both the Sheriff's Department and the Salinas PD, door-to-door searches of the neighborhood surrounding the courthouse complex, a widely broadcast BOLO (Be On the Lookout For) describing both the fugitive and the Plymouth that had been stolen from the county lot: all for naught so far as the Ripper was concerned. By dawn on Thursday it had become apparent that although all but two of the other escapees had been recaptured, the man who'd sprung them had somehow slipped through the security cordon.

The manhunt would of course continue—but from here on in the FBI, citing the likelihood that the escaped prisoner was an interstate fugitive, would have jurisdiction over the investigation. Which was fine with Sheriff Bustamante, who hadn't survived three contested elections by personally associating himself with the sort of disaster this business was turning out to be. One citizen disemboweled within sight of Deputy Jervis; Deputies Jervis and Knapp grievously injured, along with the FBI agent Bustamante had personally allowed into the prisoner's cell; Deputy Twombley dead. Worst of all from the standpoint of accountability, there had finally been a mass breakout from the old jail that a Monterey County grand jury had recommended be closed over a year ago.

By ten o'clock on Thursday morning, the sheriff's deputies at Irene Cogan's front and back doors were replaced by a fully equipped, innocuous-looking FBI surveillance van from San Jose with “Coast Heating & Cooling” painted on the side. The FBI's lower profile was appreciated by Irene, who had two patients coming in that day; the presence of armed guards would not have been
conducive to the atmosphere of trust and relaxation required for hypnotherapy sessions.

Her first patient was a middle-aged civil engineer from Santa Cruz who'd awakened in Reno one morning with no idea how he'd gotten there. It was your classic dissociative fugue state, which often involved physical as well as mental and emotional flight
(fuga
in Latin) from an intolerable set of circumstances.

In Donald Barber's case, he'd been served with divorce papers while at work. Up to that point a timid gambler and a faithful husband, he left his office without saying a word to his secretary and woke up three days later next to a hooker in a high-roller suite in the Silver Legacy.

Even more surprising, he was up fifteen thousand dollars. Irene was thinking about using a humorous subtitle—“The Art of the Fugue”—for an article she planned to submit to the
Journal of American Clinical Psychology.

But there was nothing humorous about Irene's afternoon patient. Lily DeVries was a fifteen-year-old girl who'd been unspeakably abused by both parents as a toddler. And unlike most such cases, the abuse was amply documented—photographs of Lily's decade-old sex torture were still turning up on the Internet and in the archives of pedophiles.

By the time Lily was placed in the custody of her paternal grandparents in Pebble Beach, her personality had long been fragmented—thus far Irene had identified thirty-seven distinct alters. Sessions with Lily were always interesting, if exhausting.

After hypnotizing the girl, Irene began every session by speaking to Queenie, Lily's host alter. She would then let Queenie help her decide which alters to call up—an unconventional approach. But Irene believed that many therapists did more harm than good to the overly suggestible patients, either implanting false memories with overaggressive hypnotherapy or, like incompetent exorcists, reinforcing malign alters by calling them up too often. Letting the patient's host personality assist her was a way of avoiding those pitfalls.

The subsequent parade of alters required Irene to be a jack-ofalltrades: some were children, some male, some bipolar, some schizo-affective. Whomever else she “saw” during a particular session, however, Irene tried to end every session by speaking with Lily, the original personality who had been so long buried. She was not always successful—Lily was a shy flower of a three-year-old—but
on Thursday afternoon she came out, and for the first time as Lily, relived her earliest memories of abuse directly, without Irene having to resort to the split-screen distancing technique.

It was a breakthrough for the patient, but the sheer accumulation of horrific detail left the therapist absolutely drained. After the session, Irene called Barbara Klopfman to invite herself to dinner that night for a little gemütlichkeit therapy with the Klopfman family.

“You'll have to take pot luck—and no shop talk at the table,” Barbara had warned her.

Small danger of that—as always, Barbara's husband and two teenage sons monopolized the conversation with baseball talk. Apparently the Giants were clinging to first place, a game ahead of a team called the Arizona Diamondbacks—which came as a surprise to Irene, who'd hadn't even known Arizona had a team. But the dinner—pot luck turned out to be pot roast—and the banal sanity of Sam Klopfman and the boys were just what Irene needed.

After dinner Sam and Irene retired to the front porch while Barbara and the boys did the washing up. The evening fog had drifted in from the bay, blanketing the cozy little seaside town with a soft grayish-pink light. Sam Klopfman, bespectacled and round-bellied as a Teletubby, lit up a twenty-year-old Kaywoodie prime grain imported briar filled with a custom blend of vanilla and rumflavored tobacco from old Mr. Hellam's tobacco shop in Monterey.

“That smells so good,” said Irene, rummaging in her purse for her cigarettes. “It reminds me of my grandfather.”

Sam chuckled. “I've found women have a two-stage response to a man's pipe. The first stage, when you're dating, is ‘That smells wonderful.’ The second stage, after you're married, is ‘Not in my house, buster!’ ”

Instead of her own Benson and Hedges, Irene came up with the pack of Camels she'd bought for the prisoner. Seeing them, she shook her head regretfully. “I still think I could have helped him,” she said softly.

“Really?” asked Sam, just to get her started. He was an attorney, but understood as surely as his psychiatrist wife that Irene needed to talk about some of the issues they'd avoided all through dinner.