The Girls He Adored (7 page)

E
VERYBODY KNEW
“G
OODNIGHT
I
RENE.”
Irene Cogan's father, Ed McMullen (Easy Eddie, as he was known at the firehouse and the Hibernians) used to sing her to bed with it, when he wasn't working night shifts at the station.

So Irene wasn't particularly surprised when the prisoner told her he'd see her in his dreams. It was not until she had reached her car that it struck her: she'd never told him her first name. Shaken, she hurried back into the jail and told the deputy at the reception station that she had to speak to the prisoner again.

“Sorry—he's back in his cell.”

“It's important.”

“I'm sure it is. But we don't have the manpower to be fetching prisoners back and forth on request.”

“Let me in to see him, then. I'm doing a court-ordered evaluation, and—”

“Out of the question. They'd have to search you, you'd need an escort, we just don't have—”

“The manpower—I know.”

“Whatever it is, it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. Call in the morning.”

The deputy's tone of voice was final, dismissive; Irene bowed to the inevitable. But she couldn't shake a sense of unease. She worked the mystery in her mind as she drove home. First she took the Dictaphone out of her briefcase and rewound the tape to the beginning, then played back the first few minutes to be sure she hadn't used her first name when introducing herself. She hadn't.

She then pulled over to the side of Highway 68 and with the
briefcase in her lap went through everything he might have seen— the tests, the paperwork, the back of the Rorschach and TAT cards—to see if her first name appeared on anything. It did not.

Irene lived in a two-story board and batten house in Pacific Grove, a small town thirty miles west of Salinas, just below Monterey on California's central coast. Also known as Butterfly Town, USA, for the monarchs that wintered there, and the Last Home Town, for the ambience, it was the sort of place you either loved or hated. Irene both loved and hated it, for the same reason—too many memories—but she couldn't bring herself to leave the house where she and Frank Cogan had lived too happily for too short a time.

Irene parked her Mustang convertible under the carport. She'd originally bought the car as a present for Frank on the occasion of his fortieth birthday.

“Just jumping the gun on your midlife crisis,” she'd told him.

“Great,” he'd said. “And where's my nineteen-year-old blond to go with it?”

“Where's mine?” she'd replied.

The mailbox was full, but as Irene walked around the side of the house she shuffled through the ads and circulars in vain looking for a personal letter—Tuesday was junk mail day.

She tossed the mail into the garbage bin behind the house, then let herself into her office through the back door, draped her jacket over the back of her chair, booted up the Psychometrics Software program that would score and interpret the MMPIs, then scanned the prisoner's responses into her PC before heading into the kitchen.

Irene poured herself a glass of Chablis and sipped at it as she made a tomato and avocado salad to eat at her desk. While her computer scanned and scored the second MMPI, she reviewed the first.

“Well, I'll be . . . ,” she muttered, though the results were not altogether unexpected. While administering the Rorschach and the TAT, she had noted that the prisoner's responses were so sane and low-key as to border on the banal. He hadn't seen any monsters in the inkblots, nor had the stories he'd made up in response to the pictures on the thematic apperception cards shown any sign of disordered thinking.

But it would be easier for a patient with sociopathic tendencies to manipulate the projective tests than it would be for him to fool
the MMPI, which had several validity scales designed to detect dissemblance. Yet when she examined the dissemblance scales on the MMPI graph, there was no indication that he had fudged his answers in any way.

As for the diagnostic scales, none of them revealed any signs of mental disorder. The paranoia reading was low for someone with the prisoner's apparent intelligence, nor had he scored high in psychopathic deviation, schizophrenia, hypomania, depression, hysteria, masculinity/femininity, psychasthenia, or social introversion. He had a little spike in the hypochondriasis scale—but then, who didn't?

The problem was, the profile was largely incompatible not only with the standard DID profile (which typically showed an F scale so high as to render the results technically invalid, extreme depression, and a polysymptomatic reading with an elevated schizophrenia scale), and the prisoner's score of 90 on the DES, but also with what little she knew of the man's history. It seemed to Irene that someone who'd butchered a young woman and knifed a cop while in a dissociative fugue would show
some
evidence of mental illness, but according to this computer analysis, Max/Christopher was as sane a man as ever drew breath.

Before going over the results of the second MMPI, Irene booted up her RORSCAN program and uploaded the prisoner's responses to the Rorschach, carried her plate back to the kitchen and washed it, then went upstairs to take a shower. When she returned in her bathrobe, with a towel around her damp hair, she eagerly snatched the multipage RORSCAN printout off the printer tray, only to read that the unidentified murderer with whom she'd spent the day was by all accounts a well-adjusted individual with a great capacity for empathy and marked altruistic tendencies. No indication whatsoever of the diversified movement responses or the labile and conflicting color responses typical of DID patients.

In normal circumstances, Irene's work would have been all but over at this point. An open-and-shut case: yes, your honor, not only is the defendant perfectly capable of understanding the charges against him and assisting in his own defense, but with a little cramming, I suspect he could do a better job in court than the overworked public defender who's representing him. That'll be eighteen hundred dollars, nice doing business with you.

But then she picked up the printout for the second MMPI, and
boom,
everything changed. The spike in the graph for the Pd scale
measuring psychopathic deviation towered over the foothills of the other scales like a lonely Everest. “Poor impulse control . . . aggressive . . . angry . . . violent . . . feels put upon . . . demands immediate gratification . . . unable to learn from experience . . . psychopathic characteristics will surface under stress. . . .”

In other words, a classic Cluster B sociopath. Not only did the results of the two MMPIs appear to have been taken by two different individuals, but the two individuals had about as much in common as Mother Teresa and Jack the Ripper.

DID? Very possibly. But if it was, it was a new manifestation of the disorder, one in which the dissociation of identity was severe enough, and the break clean enough, that at least one personality tested within the normal range, while one or more of the split-off identities, the alters, harbored the entire psychopathology.

Irene's heart began to pound. She was already nationally known in her field, but only by her peers in her subspecialty. To be in at the beginning of such an unusual, and potentially highly publicized, case might be the sort of break that could launch a psychiatrist into the next stratum.

Irene stopped herself, embarrassed at letting her daydreams get the better of her. There was still a long way to go before she could even be sure of her diagnosis. And she needed to be sure: in recent years there had been far too many cases of iatrogenic DID, misdiagnosed or implanted in patients by charlatans and incompetents, creating a virtual epidemic of false memory syndrome and giving legitimate dissociative disorder specialists such as herself a bad name.

In any event, the prisoner had been right about two things: Dr. Cogan had never seen anything like him, and she would indeed be visiting him again soon.

And as she poured herself another glass of wine and lit up a Benson and Hedges, it occurred to Irene that somehow this case, this man, represented a watershed moment in her life. She knew, without knowing how she knew, that one way or another, when their business together was completed, nothing would ever be the same for either of them.

L
YING IN THE ISOLATION CELL
that night, Max was distinctly pleased with his day's work. Except for a minor glitch, during which that whining infant known as Lyssy had briefly seized control of the body, everything had gone Max's way.

Christopher had initiated a flirtation with the psychiatrist. And by taking the Dissociative Experiences test himself, having Ish take the next three tests, then sending Kinch out to take the second MMPI, Max was sure he had successfully pointed Dr. Cogan toward a diagnosis of DID—a diagnosis she would think she'd arrived at on her own.

And if he cared to, he knew, he could just as easily manipulate her into declaring him temporarily unfit to stand trial, permanently unfit to stand trial, or fit to stand trial but not guilty by reason of insanity.

But the system of identities known collectively as Ulysses Christopher Maxwell Jr. had no intention of hanging around Monterey County long enough for a trial. Too many pressing responsibilities back at Scorned Ridge. Still, until Max could engineer an escape, he would take advantage of the opportunity to be seen by an eminent and attractive psychiatrist, who was probably still trying to figure out how the hell he knew her first name.

Not that he held it against her, her not wanting to be on a first-name basis with a prisoner. He wouldn't either, were he the semifamous Dr. Irene Cogan, specialist in dissociative disorders and author of “Derealization Disorders in Post-Adolescent Males,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
1993; “Speaking in Tongues: Dissociative Trance Disorder and Pentecostal Christianity,”
Psychology
Today,
1995; “Dissociative Identity Disorder, Real or Feigned?”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases,
1997. To name just a few.

Mose, the system's MTP—Memory Trace Personality, or mnemonics expert—hadn't recognized her right off the bat (she'd changed quite a bit from that little black-and-white picture in the Contributors column of
Psychology Today
), but Max had put two and two together immediately after she introduced herself.

A little older, hair a little longer, still a looker. Who'd have thought she'd be passionate, too, under that cool blond exterior— Max had sent her fumbling for her buttons without dropping his eyes below her neck, while a kiss on the hand from Christopher had her all but dripping.

But the frost job! No, no, no—Miss Miller would never have approved. That Princess Di shade was all wrong for her complexion. Max would have been willing to bet her original color was something closer to a strawberry blond. All she'd need to get it back would be a splash more red to put a little blush in her cheeks, until her natural color grew in. She could still carry it off, at least as successfully as Donna Hughes had.

At forty-five, Donna, whom Christopher had seduced away from a wealthy and unfaithful husband in Plano, Texas, a year before, had been the oldest of the strawberry blonds. Paula Ann Wisniewski had been one of the youngest.

Max sighed, thinking back. Paula Ann Wisniewski. Dumb as dirt, ugly as sin—except of course for that hair. It had gone well at first. He'd picked her up easily enough—she was a waitress at a Carrow's in Santa Barbara. Lonely, homely, ready to be swept off her feet. Not a virgin, but she'd never had her body worshiped sexually the way Christopher could, and certainly never had a man fall head over heels for her the way Christopher had.

But it was Max who'd come up with a new story about why the relationship had to remain a secret—he was a “Mystery Diner” for the Carrow's chain, and if it was learned he was dating a waitress, they'd both lose their jobs.

Within three days Paula Ann was willing to follow Christopher anywhere—not a personal record, but damn good. As usual, Maxwell had left a month's worth of supplies back at Scorned Ridge, so he decided to enjoy a little honeymoon on the way up, take the coastal route the whole way.