The Girls He Adored (41 page)

“Yes?”

“I'm here to see Caz Buckley.”

“Well, thank the good Lord,” said the nurse, her face softening as she reached out to take Pender's hand between both of hers. “Bless your heart, you're the first visitor he's had since he's been here. Come in, please.”

Encouraged but puzzled, Pender forgot to duck as he went through the doorway, and nearly knocked his hat off. He reached up to catch it, and was thankful for Alvin Ralphs' knowing tailoring— his old jacket would have revealed his shoulder hoster for sure.

Once he was inside, a glance at the entrance hall cleared everything up. On a side table was a display stand with brochures—Your Hospice and You; Patient's Bill of Rights; You Are Not Alone—and on the wall was a bulletin board listing various support groups and grief workshops.

Pender weighed his options briefly, and decided that when the law enforcement gods drop a gift like this into your lap, it would be bad luck to throw it back. “I'm glad I'm still in time. How long does he have?”

The nurse shrugged, her usual response to that particular question. “Why don't you wait in there?” she told Pender, indicating the parlor to his left. “I'll see if he's still awake.”

“I'd rather surprise him,” said Pender. “I can't wait to catch the look on old Caz's face when he sees me.”

“I really shouldn't, Mr . . . ?”

“Pender. Look, I give you my word of honor, if he's asleep, I'll tiptoe right on out.” Then he looked down at his boots. “Well,
maybe not tiptoe—I just bought these yesterday and they're not broke in yet.”

The confidence had two purposes. First, it
was
a confidence, and confidences always invite trust. Second, it was a good way to get the woman's sympathy. Like cops, nurses knew all about sore feet.

“Well, I suppose it would be all right, if you promise not to wake him. . . .”

“Word of honor. If he's asleep, I'll sit quietly by the bed.”

“It's room 302. I'll take you back to the elevator.”

Pender ducked through the low doorway and shut the door softly behind him. The room was tiny, with a downward-slanting roof. According to the printout, Buckley was a hundred-andeightypound African American, but the skin color of the man in the bed was a sickly yellowish gray, and he couldn't have weighed much over a hundred pounds.

His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. He appeared to be asleep, but Pender never for a moment considered keeping his promise to the nurse. There was a wooden chair next to the bed; Pender sat down with his hat in his lap, leaned over, and whispered into the dying man's slightly cauliflowered ear.

“Cazimir Buckley, do you believe in an afterlife?”

“Who wants to know?” whispered Buckley, without opening his eyes.

“Pender, FBI.”

With his left hand, the one that wasn't hooked up to the IV, Buckley reached for the buzzer to summon the nurse. Pender grabbed his wrist.

“I need some information about somebody you might have done time with in Juvie.”

“Fuck you,” said Buckley, with an effort.

“You're dying, Caz. You're gonna need all the good time you can get, when you're called to the Lord.”

Buckley didn't have another fuck you in him. He raised the middle finger of his right hand weakly instead.

“At the moment, he's averaging two murders a day.”

Finger.

“Black women.” One black woman, anyway.

But the finger stayed up. So much for appealing to the man's sense of religion, humanity, or racial identity. On to self-interest, which was where Pender would have started with any con but a dying one.

“Listen up, Caz. Here comes the deal, and it's only coming by once. This is a sweet setup you have here. I don't know how you wangled it, but it's a helluva nice place to die. Only maybe you don't deserve a nice place to die. I've already talked to Mr. Harris, and if I don't get full cooperation from you, starting with my very next question, I can have your parole revoked by tomorrow afternoon.”

The upraised finger wavered. Buckley's nostrils flared from the effort of breathing. Pender went on: “It's your choice, Caz. You get to decide whether you want to die here or in the hospital wing of the state penitentiary. Now, do you understand me?”

Slowly the gaunt gray man opened his eyes; the whites were yellow as egg yolks. “He killin' black women, you said?”

“The last one was named Aletha Winkle. I found her body. He fractured her skull, raped her repeatedly while she was dying, then hacked her to pieces with a butcher knife.”

“You got a pitcher of him?”

Pender showed him Casey's mug shot.

“I dunno. Juvie, you said? Thass goin
way
back, man.”

“He said you taught him some trick, some martial arts trick for getting the jump on somebody?”

Buckley looked at the picture again. He started to smile, then a spasm of pain wracked him.

“Leggo my hand,” he said. Pender unpinned the call button from the sheet and moved it out of reach, but that wasn't what Buckley was going for. He found the handset that controlled the morphine infuser and jabbed the button with his thumb.

Pender waited a full minute. He could afford to be generous. He now had an even surer way of guaranteeing Buckley's cooperation: he could take the morphine button away from him. Ends and means. “Feeling better now?”

“Hurt less. Shit don' get me high no more.”

“Sorry to hear that. You have a name to give me?”

“Might have.”

“Well then, I
might
let you have that magic button back next time you need it. Now who are we talking about?”

“Max. We talkin' 'bout little Max. And you know what's really fucked up?”

“What?”

“I made up all that shit about countin' backwards and all. Flat made it up.”

I
RENE, THOUGH SHE WAS
still flirting, letting Christopher rattle on about how lovely she was, how her hair set off the earrings, could feel herself starting to lose her nerve. How tempting it seemed, how easy it would be, to sit here and let him talk himself out. Then a nice lunch, maybe a swim, and another travesty of a session. A nice dinner. Maybe a video—there was quite a collection in the parlor. Her room was comfortable enough. And if he insisted on sex, as long as he remained Christopher, it wouldn't be so bad. He was gentle—he even smelled good. It wouldn't be giving up, she told herself—she'd just be staying alive, waiting to be rescued.

But for how long? This was a highly unstable multiple, living in an unstable relationship with . . . Irene made a differential diagnosis of Miss Miller on the fly: a pedophiliac with either narcissistic, avoidant, or dependent personality disorders, or all of the above, exacerbated by post-traumatic stress disorder to the level of psychosis.

So why are you still futzing around? she asked herself. Futzing— that was one of Barbara's expressions. And it was the thought of Barbara—please Jesus let her be alive—that gave Irene the strength to push on.

“What do you say we get back to work here, Christopher? I think the best way I can express my appreciation for these lovely earrings is by moving ahead with your therapy.”

“Okay by me.”

“Yesterday you said something I found interesting. You said that when you were in love with Mary, you were able to resist Max's control.”

“Right.”

“But on Sunday you told me that what was good for Max was good for the system. Is that something you really believe?”

“No, but he does.” Suddenly Maxwell sat up, swung his legs over the side of the chaise, took the pen from Irene, and set it down on the arm of her chair, then pressed her hand between his two hands. “Tell me that you love me, Irene—tell me quick if you want to keep talking to me.”

Was it a trick? Was it even Christopher? Irene felt an immense weariness coming over her, like someone lost in a snowstorm, who only wants to sleep, yet knows that sleep is death. The thought of saying those three little words to this man was equally repellent to her both as a therapist and as a woman. But if this was Christopher, she had to do everything in her power to help him maintain dominance over the system, over Max.

“I love you.” Her voice rang strangely in her ears.

“Kiss me like you mean it.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. She allowed him to press his lips lightly to hers.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now I'm going to tell you a story. But I need you to hold my hand the whole time, and look into my eyes.”

“All right.”

“When I was fourteen I started keeping a diary. Every day that I was in control of the body, I'd make an entry. When Miss Miller and I were going good, it'd have three, four daily entries in a row. When we were fighting, there might be one a week. Then one night I discovered I had run out of pages—filled the diary up. I was looking around my room for something else to write in, and in the back of the closet I found an old composition book—you know, the kind with the black-and-white marbled cardboard covers?

“But when I opened it up, I saw that someone else had already started a diary in it. A boy by the name of Martin. A boy who'd lived in that very room. Went to my middle school. Had the same teachers I did. Slept with Miss Miller. I was so jealous I could have spit.”

“So you weren't the first?” Irene said softly.

“That's what I thought, too. Then I checked the dates. February nineteen eighty-two through June of eighty-three.”

“He was an alter?”

“One of us. One of us. But I'd never heard of him. So I started reading his diary. He'd been there almost from the beginning—he
was one of the first split-offs. And he hated Max, he despised him. Called him an outsider. He wrote down that he was writing the diary for the rest of us to find. He wrote that Max was the devil incarnate, and was trying to destroy him. That eventually Max would destroy us all. But if only we'd work together we could fight Max, take away his power over the system.

“Ten pages in, the last entry ended in the middle of a sentence. Below it, in a different handwriting, Max's handwriting, were the words
Sic Semper Traditor
.”

“Thus always . . . ?” That was as far as Irene's medical Latin would take her.

“Thus always to traitors. If it's possible for an alter to die, Martin was dead. Worse than dead—at least dead people leave memories behind. There was nothing left of Martin but that notebook.”

He fell silent, but his eyes, only inches from Irene's, were eloquent: they spoke of fear, they begged for help.

“I understand what you're trying to tell me,” she said. “You're afraid that what happened to Martin will happen to you if you try to resist Max—even though you know that that would be the best thing you could do for the system. But I need you to know that there's one big difference between yourself and Martin.”

What?
His lips moved soundlessly.

“You have me.” But in her heart of hearts she was every bit as terrified as Christopher appeared to be.

“W
HEN
I
COME UP FROM
Compton to live with my auntie, I already done Juvie time down south.”