The Girls He Adored (4 page)

And sure enough, when the prisoner looked up, he was a different
man. His heart-shaped face had grown more oval as the set of his jaw relaxed. His eyes were wider, rounder, lighter. And his voice, when he apologized, was tremulous, and pitched an octave higher.

“I'm sowwy.”

So it was to be DID after all. Dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. And she had to admit, if he was faking it, he was good. Better than good, certainly better than the monstrous David Douglas Winslow.

But perhaps that was to be expected, with the prisoner's apparent background in psychology and his obvious talent for impersonation. He knew that eye movement was a classical marker for a switch between personalities, commonly referred to as “alters,” hence the roll and flutter. He knew that extreme facial and vocal changes between alters were to be expected, and that many alters were juveniles, so he'd raised the pitch of his voice, let his cheeks go slack, widened his eyes to take in more light.

If, on the other hand, he wasn't faking it, Irene understood that this might prove to be the most important case of her career. For the moment, she decided to proceed as if the DID was genuine. If he were faking, she might not get to the truth quite as quickly, but if he were not, this approach would do the least harm.

“Hello,” she said softly. “What's your name?”

Panic, confusion. The eyes rolled, the lids fluttered—and the child was gone.

“Excuse me?” The first alter again. A quick, wary glance around the room; the prisoner's manacled hands nervously patted his thighs. Both the glance and the self-touching Irene recognized as grounding behavior, orienting gestures commonly seen after a switch of personalities.

And indeed, the prisoner appeared to be unaware that his face was ashen beneath its olive complexion, and tear-streaked, with a bubble of snot in one nostril—he seemed surprised when Irene handed him a tissue from her purse.

He grasped the situation quickly, though. “Guess I kinda wimped out on you.”

He drew his knees up, hunched his shoulders under the orange jumpsuit, and ducked his head in order to blow his nose. When he came up his voice had changed yet again—this appeared to be yet a third alter, roughly the same age and appearance as the first, but more vulnerable, with less of an edge. “It's just so hard keeping up that front all the time.”

Irene waited, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“You can't let them see any weakness, you know. If they sense weakness, they'll tear you apart. Even the guards.” He let the tissue fall to his lap. “Especially the guards. Now what was it you asked?”

“I asked what your name was.”

This time the eye roll and flutter was so quick and short-lived only a therapist with extensive experience treating DID patients would have noticed it.

“How quickly they forget,” said the prisoner, in the voice he'd used originally. “You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette on you, would you?”

Irene knew better than to ask him his name again—this was clearly Call-me-Max. “I believe the entire building is nonsmoking.”

The prisoner laughed easily. “Realistically speaking, what's the worst they can do if they catch us? Hell, we're risking a death sentence every time we light up.”

“Good point.” Irene was intrigued—and encouraged. Whether he was faking the DID or not, the patient's—
prisoner's
—use of the first-person plural was a good sign, as was his evident warmth toward her. They seemed to be moving toward a rapport that usually took much longer to establish—she definitely wanted to encourage it.

And frankly, a cigarette right about now didn't sound like the worst idea in the world. Irene rummaged around in her purse for her pack of Benson and Hedges and her lighter, then went through the desk drawers looking for an ashtray. Finding none, she took an empty Sprite can out of the wastebasket, placed it on the desk in front of the prisoner, placed two cigarettes between her lips, lit both, and handed him one, aware as she did so that it was an inappropriately intimate gesture.

The prisoner inhaled deeply, squinting to keep the smoke out of his eyes. “I feel better already.”

So did Irene; she leaned back in her chair and took a deep drag of her cigarette, drawing the smoke luxuriously through her nostrils. It felt deliciously sinful and retro to be smoking with a patient again. When she leaned forward to tap her ash into the Sprite can, she caught the prisoner looking her over appreciatively.

Irene sat up, drawing the lapels of her suit jacket together over her chest and tugging her skirt down over her knees, though her legs were out of sight beneath the desk. It occurred to her that she was losing control of the interview.

“All right, I trusted you,” she said. The voice-activated Dictaphone began to whir again on the table between them. “Now will you trust me?”

“With what?” he replied, exhaling a thin blue stream of smoke along with the words.

“With the truth.”

“What do you want to know?”

“To start with, do you ever feel as if you were more than one person?”

“You say you want the truth?”

“Yes, of course.”

He ducked his head down to his hands to take the cigarette out of his mouth, then popped back up with a maniacal grin.“Well you caan't haandle the truth!” he declared in an exaggeratedly flat monotone, his eyebrows drawn up into devilish peaks.

Irene let out a startled laugh. “So you worked in that Jack Nicholson imitation after all.”

“Pretty good, huh? Want to see my—”

“No!” She cut him off sternly; time to get back to business. “When I asked you your name earlier, you told me to call you Max. Is Max your name?”

“That depends,” he said pleasantly.

“Depends on what?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I can't tell you that, either.”

Irene tried a different tack. “When you came into the room this morning, you told me your mood was appropriate to the circumstances. A young girl died horribly, apparently at your hands. How does that make you feel?”

He had ducked down again; he came back up with the cigarette between his lips. His face was blue-tinged under the fluorescent lights.

“Lost,” he said softly. Irene had the impression he'd switched personalities again, down where she couldn't see the eye roll. This was the third alter, the handsome, vulnerable young man. “Lost and frightened. And alone—at least until this morning.”

“What happened this morning?”

“I met you.”

His cigarette had burned down almost to the filter. When Irene reached forward to take it out of his mouth for him, she felt his lips
brush the back of her fingers as delicately as butterfly wings. So light and ephemeral was his touch that Irene wasn't entirely sure contact had even taken place, much less whether it had actually been a kiss.

But in her heart she knew it had. She felt a pang of excitement, close to fear but so quick and sharp it was almost sexual—and decidedly inappropriate. It occurred to Irene that when she next saw
her
therapist, they would have something juicier to discuss than they'd had in weeks. Months. Years. She took a hard pull on her cigarette, and inhaled a mouthful of burning filter.

“P
ENDER, YOU GOT MORE BALLS
than Hoover had high heels,” said Aurelio Bustamante. The longtime Monterey County sheriff was seated behind an enormous desk crowded with awards and mementos. “First you interrogate—”

“Interview.” Pender slouched in his chair so as not to tower over the sheriff, a short round man in a brown western-cut suit and a sunny white Stetson. Pender had started to remove his own hat— he rarely wore it into a room—but changed his mind: when in California . . .

“You
interrogate
one of my officers, an injured officer, let me add, without my knowledge or permission. Now you want to interrogate one of my prisoners, but you don't want to share what you got? Unh-unh, I don't think so. You gonna fuck me from behind, my frien', you goddamn well better give me a reach-around.”

When dealing with local law enforcement officials, FBI agents could count on a range of reactions from hero worship to bitter resentment, depending on how much contact the locals had had with the bureau. The sixtyish Bustamante was clearly no virgin.

Nor was Pender—he decided to see if he couldn't turn the sheriff's animosity to his own advantage.

“Believe me, Sheriff, I sympathize completely with you. I started out as a sheriff's deputy in upstate New York. And if
I'm
fucking
you,
then it's a daisy chain, because I've got my boss so far up my ass he has to wear one of those coal miner hats with the little flashlight on top.”

The crow's-feet at the corners of Bustamante's eyes deepened almost imperceptibly at the piquant image.

Pender pressed on. “Sheriff Bustamante, if you think the FBI is piss-arrogant to you and yours, you should see how they treat their own—especially old-timers like me. I'm two years short of mandatory retirement, they're trying to force me out early, my last fitness report referred to me as the worst-dressed agent in the history of the bureau, my personnel file's been flagged for so many petty bureaucratic violations it reads like a rap sheet, and if I have to get a court order to interview your prisoner, his lawyer's gonna be on it like stink on shit, and I'm gonna go home with nothing.”

“Now I'm suppose' to feel sorry for you because you're a fuckup?” scoffed Bustamante. “I let you in to see this guy without his lawyer present and he walks on account of it, it's gonna be my ass on the line, too.”

“Sheriff, I give you my word I won't ask him a single question about the current case.”

“Then you're not gonna get anything out of him anyway—he claims to have
amneeesia.”
Bustamante weighted the word with contempt.

“Just give me a shot, that's all I ask.”

“And if I do that for you, what do you do for me?” Bustamante spread his hands out, palms up, and waggled his fingers toward himself in the universal fork-it-over gesture.

Pender picked up a foot-long brass nameplate—AURELIO BUSTAMANTE, SHERIFF—and placed it in the middle of the desk, facing the sheriff. Then, in a semicircle behind the nameplate, he arranged a Kiwanis Club man-of-the-year pen-and-pencil set in an engraved marble holder; a baseball autographed by the last roster of the now-defunct Salinas Peppers; a gold-framed photograph of the sheriff and Mrs. Bustamante, a smiling Hispanic-looking woman with upswept white hair, standing behind a passle of children and grandchildren; and a silver badge engraved with the words GRAND MARSHALL, SALINAS RODEO, mounted onto a fourinch-high wooden plaque with an angled base.

“This is you at your next press conference.” Pender tapped the nameplate, then each of the other items in turn. “And here's your valiant Deputy Jervis, here's the mayor and the DA and whoever else in your department you'd like to reward with a little face time, here's your wife and family, and here's the FBI resident agent from Monterey in a dark suit and conservative tie.

“Ladies and gentlemen . . .” Pender lifted the nameplate up and down with each syllable, manipulating it as if it were a hand puppet.
“I'm Sheriff Aurelio Bustamante, and I've called this press conference to announce that the Monterey County Sheriff's Department has been responsible for the capture of one of the most dangerous and sought-after serial killers in the history of law enforcement.”

Bustamante reached across the desk and tipped the Grand Marshall plaque representing the FBI over onto its face, then leaned back, his fingers tented over his round belly. “If it's him, I've already got him—what do I need you for?”