Thriller (29 page)

“The great minister who won the war.”

“I could not have done it.”

“No, you could not have done it, and I could not have done

it, and the peddler, whoever he really is, could not have done it.

Only Paul could have done it,” Greta said. She studied the patterns drawn in the dust by the minister. Ancient patterns like the

sun and moon of cavemen, hieroglyphics. “He knew he was the

only way.”

Below, among the orange trees, two young boys ran and

shouted, played soldier.

John Lescroart is a bestselling writer of legal thrillers. M. J.

Rose is an international bestselling writer of thrillers about

a sex therapist and her patients. Intersecting those two variations seemed like a difficult challenge, but that’s exactly

what
The Portal
does. Via e-mail from one coast to another,

Lescroart and Rose explored the psyche and actions of Lucy

Delrey, a young, disturbed woman who, at different points

displayed facets that surprised both authors. For Rose,

Lucy’s therapy is the portal itself: a door that opens into a

darkened room, which is all Dr. Morgan Snow (from Rose’s

thriller
The Halo Effect
) can see. Consequently, the therapist’s advice, which Lucy takes to heart and which propels

the story forward, is based on elusive shadows. For Lescroart, the story represented an opportunity to revisit the

legal world from which he drew his bestselling thriller
Guilt
.

Lucy’s trip to exorcize her demons takes her straight to San

Francisco (Lescroart’s main stomping grounds), where sophisticated professionals eat in fine restaurants, stay in fine

hotels and mingle within a society that, for all its surface

appeal, hides many a dark secret.

“I think there is something wrong with me, emotionally.”

I nodded. She’d said this before. In almost every session. Lucy

Delrey had been in therapy with me for two months. Every Tuesday evening at 6:00 p.m. she arrived at my office on Manhattan’s

Upper East Side, sat opposite me, and we chipped away at her

defenses.

“Why do you feel there’s something wrong?” I asked her.

“I just don’t feel anything, Dr. Snow. Not even in the most extreme circumstances.”

“What are the most extreme circumstances?” The conversation we were having was almost identical to the conversation

we’d had last week, and every week before that. We always got

to this point when Lucy would shut down, sit silently for a few

minutes, and then change the subject and talk about how as a

child she’d wanted to be an artist and about the man who had

inspired her.

Tonight she answered me, for the first time.

“When I destroy someone. Even then, Dr. Snow. I don’t feel

anything.”

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She paused. Looked at me. Waited. Tried to read my face. But

I was sure I hadn’t shown any shock or surprise. I was used to

confessions. Even overly dramatic ones, like this.

I persevered. “What do you mean, destroy someone?”

In the few seconds it took until she answered, I anticipated

she meant that she was speaking of destruction metaphorically.

I waited, curious.

“Destroy. You know. Assassinate.” Her voice started out as a

whisper and became softer with each additional word. “Annihilate.”

And softer still so that the last word, “Kill,” was barely audible.

There was no change of expression while she spoke, but as

soon as she finished, a look of exhaustion settled on her face. As

if just saying the words had been tiring.

It was this expression that made me wonder for a brief second if it was actually possible that she was—no. In all the time

she had been in therapy, nothing she had ever said suggested she

was capable of killing anyone. She was using these words as a

metaphor for the psychological destruction of people she loved.

“I should feel something. I should be upset.” Her voice was

back to its usual timbre.

This was the longest Lucy had ever gone without mentioning

Frank Millay—the artist she had known when she was a child—

who had painted watercolors on the boardwalk in Brooklyn

Heights.

Some sessions she described the paintings: how they captured

the essence of the river and the cityscape, how they moved her

and made her want to learn how to use the brush and the pigments to create washes that would mean something. Other nights

she told me about the painter himself and how it had taken her,

a girl of seven, months to get him to talk to her and then finally

to show her how to use the brush on the thick paper that had a

texture created to capture the merest hint of color.

During all those sessions I had become aware of my patient’s

attention to detail. Her obsession with color. Her memory that

retained every nuance of those days.

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But even after all those months I did not know why Lucy had

come to me.

Oh, I knew she was troubled by what she perceived about her

lack of emotion. But we never got further than the fact of it. The

only real emotion she ever exhibited was when she spoke about

the painter and the paintings and her impression of them.

Now, finally, she had broken the repetition of her childhood

memories with a revelation that caught me off guard.

“What do you think about when you are—while you are destroying someone?”

“Just that it’s a job. I’m concentrating on the steps. On the work.”

I still didn’t believe that she was serious. Nothing in her character suggested it. I had worked with men and women in prison.

I’d listened to descriptions of cold-blooded murders and crimes

of passion. I’d watched patients’ faces contort with anguish as

they described breaking out of a fugue state and finding a knife

or a gun in their hand or their fingers around someone’s throat,

the skin a milky blue-white streaked with finger burns.

“I’m sorry, Lucy. I’m not sure I understand. ‘It’s a job’? Do you

mean that literally? I thought you were a photographer.”

“I am. But in addition…people hire me…” Lucy’s words

trailed off.

I nodded, encouraging her to go on.

“It’s not something I talk about in polite society. I’m not used

to talking about it. But I think you need to know so that you understand me better. So that you can help me figure out why I don’t

even care about how I fuck up people’s lives. Destroy them.”

I put my right foot out in front of me instinctively.

To press down on the panic button.

But there was no such button in my office—it was in the small

room where I used to conduct therapy sessions at the prison. Lucy

was so convincing that she actually was a killer that I’d responded

the way I would with a criminal in prison and extended my foot

to call for help. This prickling realization—that Lucy might indeed be a killer and not just speaking in metaphor—chilled me.

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But I didn’t have the luxury of focusing on how I was feeling.

I had to say something. To get Lucy to keep talking. To get more

information from her. To figure out what I was going to do because the one time a therapist can break a client’s confidentiality is if a life is in imminent danger.

The one time.

“I don’t believe that you don’t have feelings about what you

do,” I offered. “Usually when we don’t feel it’s because we are

blocking our emotions.”

“Why would I do that? It’s how I make my living. I’m not

ashamed of it. I kill them with their own passions.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know that if you offer a man sex he won’t pay a

whole lot of attention to who you are? The same man who would

run a Dun & Bradstreet before he’d take your business call will

take a woman to bed without even knowing her last name. It’s

that lust that I count on. That hard-cock need that makes what

I do so easy. Too easy really. I don’t think that a man should be

that easy to murder. He should fight. He should be scared. He

should know his life is in danger—not just be lying there bareassed and spread-eagled with a blonde giving him head. They

don’t even know…” Lucy stopped here to take a sip from the coffee cup she’d brought in with her.

My own hand was shaking slightly. I hoped Lucy didn’t notice.

Yes, I’d heard confessions like this before, but always before

in the prison, with guards watching. Not here in my office.

“Does it give you pleasure?”

She nodded. “If I know enough about the man. And if he’s

enough of a scum. Yes. You could say I’m some sort of avenging

angel. I only kill men who deserve it. Who have done the unforgivable. Who need to be punished.”

I was watching for any sign of psychosis, still trying to tell if

this was fantasy or reality. But her pupils were not dilated. Her

breathing was regular. There was no sweat on her upper lip or

forehead. No sheen to her skin. Her fingers did not twitch in her

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lap. Her feet did not tap. She spoke in the same even voice I’d

heard for a long time. She seemed in full control and connected,

very much in the present moment.

“The painter,” she said. I nodded. “When I was a kid, he made

me realize that anything could be made into something else. He’d

look at that water that I just saw as some stretch of muddy blue

and he’d find a hundred colors in it. Some of them brilliant.”

“Did the painter die?”

“I don’t know. He moved away. He didn’t tell me. One day, he

was just gone. I went looking for him. But no one knew what

happened. I look in galleries when I can. He’d be about fifty now.

Fifty-year-old men are easier to fool than thirty-year-old men.

The younger men aren’t always sure. They succumb but they can

be a little suspicious at first. Like, why is she coming on to me?

To me?
But the older guys are so damn flattered you can see their

eyes getting erections. They are too damn easy.”

I nodded. “Maybe the painter died. Maybe he didn’t move away.”

She didn’t say anything. But suddenly her eyes filled with

tears. One rolled down her cheek and she reached out to brush

it away. Her surprise at her tears was clear.

“I never thought about him dying.”

“Why not? Why did you assume he moved without saying

goodbye?”

She shook her head as if she were getting rid of the question

I’d raised. And then she changed the subject. “I should be upset

about what I do. I know I should. But it’s like these guys deserve

it. I mean most of them are doing something to someone. They

are abusing someone somehow. It’s not like they are all nice

guys. But I give all of them a chance. Before I take them back to

the room, I give them a chance to turn me down. I ask them if

they are married or if they have a girlfriend. And then ask them

if they really want to do this. If they really want to hurt the

women they are with.”

“Some of them must say no.”

“Not very many. Maybe two.”

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I wanted to ask her out of how many. But I didn’t want to

stop her.

“One man stroked my skin. His fingertips were as soft as a

woman’s. He had blue eyes. I remember his eyes. Because of those

damn fingers that ran up and down my arm making me shiver.

Usually, I don’t feel anything. That’s what I meant. Before. I don’t

feel anything when they touch me. Or when I pull the trigger.”

“You use a gun?”

I hadn’t meant to ask that bluntly—as if I doubted her. It was

unprofessional. I’d wanted to ask her how she killed them, not

blurt out the worse-case scenario I could imagine.

She looked at me as if I were the one who was crazy and

needed help. “A gun?”

“When you kill them?”

“Dr. Snow, I set them up. I pump them up. I am a hired assassin.

I expose them and ruin them. My whole apartment is a camera. I

destroy them by taking pictures of them and then turning them over

to cops or detectives or the tabloids. Character assassin.” She smiled.

And for a few seconds there was no question in my mind that

a man would go with her and not think twice.

“Do you think I should try to find him? Find Frank Millay, finally?”

It was the end of the session, but I didn’t stand as I often did

to signify that Lucy’s time was up. She had arrived at a crucial

point in her therapy and I didn’t want to cut her short.

“I think you want to find him. And that’s what’s important.”

Typically, I preferred to ask, not to answer, questions. In fact,

I’d told Lucy, the same way I told all my patients at some point,

that only by answering one’s own questions could one come to

terms with personal truths. But she had finally expressed a need,

a desire. And that was a breakthrough for her. From everything

she’d described, she hadn’t given in to any real emotion since that

last time she was with him. She called him the portal. After he

was gone, her emotional life effectively stopped.

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“There’s one thing, Lucy. We need to make sure that if you do

go find him it’s to understand. Not to act out.”

She smiled, slyly, seductively, slipping into the pose she used

when she needed to hide from me. From anyone, I guessed. I’d

witnessed her do this in almost every session. We’d get close to