Read Dreams in the Key of Blue Online
Authors: John Philpin
“I’m working as a consultant to the Ragged Harbor police.”
“The three murdered students.”
“There are seven connected murders.”
“Jesus. You think Lily Dorman had something to do with them?”
“Her father is one of the victims.”
Westlake sat in her secretary’s chair. “Harper Dorman. When I read about the murder in the newspaper, I didn’t make the connection. Lily was terrified of him. She hated him. He sexually abused her for years. Lily was a disturbed kid, but when I knew her she was not nearly homicidal.”
“Will you tell me about her?”
“What I can remember. I don’t have her file. That would be at Maine Central, if they still have it. Lily was my first MPD case. She’d been there six months before I understood what was going on.”
I sat on the sofa opposite Westlake and listened as she recalled her early sessions with Lily Dorman. What began as straightforward psychotherapy with an adolescent soon became the complex, demanding tasks required with an MPD patient.
“I like to encourage journal work,” Westlake said. “Lily was young, but she was bright, and she was already writing in a notebook. At first, we talked about her adjustment to the ward, her schoolwork, other kids on her unit. I felt as if I was building trust, slowly developing a relationship with her. I saw her two or three evenings a week. I’ll never forget the session when she revealed that she was a multiple. She looked different, the way she talked changed, everything about her altered. I swear that her eyes were a different color. She told me to call her… oh, what the hell was it?”
“Lilith?” I prompted.
“That’s it. Lilith was tough, angry, sort of a protector. She was sarcastic, didn’t trust anyone, but Lily convinced her that I could be trusted. She was the one who told me there were others. I was so blown away, I couldn’t believe it. Angel was one of the alters. She was younger, always
needing to be hugged. Molly was older. There was a fussy one, too, kind of a caretaker. I don’t know how much help this is.”
“Anything you remember is enormously helpful,” I told her.
“It’s so long ago. I blamed myself when she took off. I should have known it was coming. She had only one close friend on the ward, a girl a few years younger than Lily who was a smart, tough, street kid. None of us had any success with her. She was there for in-patient evaluation because of an accumulation of the usual juvenile offenses. They used to call kids like that ‘unmanageable.’ Lily asked me if I would see the girl because she was talking about leaving the hospital. I had to say no.”
Westlake lit another cigarette. “Maybe I’ll take up smoking again,” she said. “Lily left with her friend. We heard later that Lily showed up at her mom’s, then took off again.”
“The incidents that led to her hospitalization confuse me,” I said. “She dumped hot oil on her father. That was an act of vengeance and rage… maybe impulsive, maybe calculated. She fought with the police, stabbed a couple of them. A few months later, you saw no potential for violence.”
“I didn’t say that,” Westlake interrupted. “I said she wasn’t homicidal. Lily Dorman was the genuine article. Each personality was discrete. Lilith had a nasty streak. Myra was the prissy one. A year after she ran off, Lily sent me a postcard from San Francisco. I remember thinking how troubled she was, and wondering whether she could survive in a real city.”
Westlake crushed out her cigarette. “The newspaper said the police were looking for a serial killer.”
“Stanley Markham. He’s dead, one of the seven victims.”
She stared at me. “Someone killed the killer. That’s poetic, if nothing else. How can you be certain that all these murders are related?”
“The same gun was used for all seven. Julia, is there anything more that you remember about Lily?”
“Let me get this straight. You think Lily Dorman tracked down and murdered a serial killer. Markham killed women, didn’t he? How the hell could she get near him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you think Lily Dorman killed any of these people?”
I outlined the case for her and described my involvement.
“That’s why your name was familiar,” she said. “Lily insisted that Harper Dorman was not her biological father. At first, she refused to tell me who was, but then she brought a magazine article to one of our sessions. The article was about you, and how you developed personality profiles that led police to killers.”
The Markham case had broken then, and media attention was nonstop. Only Boston’s “Strangler,” Albert DeSalvo, claimed more Boston headlines than Stanley Markham. A good friend, investigative reporter Anthony Michaels, wrote an in-depth story about my work.
Again, the scourge of coincidence blistered my mind. Markham’s escape was too convenient.
“She told you that I was her father.”
Westlake nodded. “Lily said that she had your ‘fine mind.’ Does she?”
“I’m not Lily Dorman’s father,” I said.
HERB JAWORSKI WAS NOT REGISTERED AT THE HOLIDAY
Inn. I checked in, found my room, and thumbed through Lily’s journal until I discovered the relevant entry.
I have my father’s good mind.
Mom told me that. She gave me an article that said Lucas Frank has an instinctive grasp of the criminal mind. The story was about how he made images of killers in his mind and helped the police catch them.
I studied his photograph. My father had a neat beard and trimmed dark hair. He also had a serious expression, intense.
I read the article, but I did not understand it.
Mom said that I would understand it soon because I have my father’s good mind.
She allowed me to keep the magazine. She liked that I stared at my father’s photograph. I reread the article dozens of times and studied the words until they made sense.
First, I learned how the killers thought, how they reasoned about the world, and how they made decisions. A few months later, I knew how my father could retreat from his own habits of thought and make room for another person’s way of looking at life.
Father was like daughter; he created mind boxes.
He did not describe the people he hunted only at the moments that they committed their murders. He absorbed everything—every habit, every quirk, every belief. He told the police that one man they wanted was afraid of the dark. He did not drive at night.
I was mystified. How could he identify someone else’s fear?
Lily knew about Stanley Markham from the time Katrina told her that I was her father.
You arranged Markham’s escape, didn’t you? You set him free, then you went after him.
I remembered the Michaels article and my reconstruction of Markham’s crimes. After three failed, lateafternoon abduction attempts, each one a twohour drive from Boston, there were victims in those same areas the next day. Markham killed within nine, eleven, and seventeen miles of each failed abduction, after police had swarmed into those towns and surrounding communities.
The pairings of those attempts and kills were so close, so risky, and so far from where I believed he lived, I decided that the killer feared something more than being apprehended. He was afraid of the dark.
Following an attempted abduction in western Massachusetts, police there had a good description of the suspect. They knew he drove a red Econoline van. Maybe he was sleeping in it, maybe he was sitting in a movie theater but, after dusk, he was not driving it.
They caught Markham sitting in his van at the Holyoke Mall, reading
Shadow of Death.
Lily Dorman’s attention to detail was remarkable. She was disturbed, as Dr. Westlake said, intelligent, as Dr. Penniweather reported, and emotionally starved for a father’s attention. Harper Dorman was a sadist, so Katrina indulged her own fantasies and gave her daughter a new father. Lily devoured every scrap of information that she could get her hands on.
When he was fifteen, Markham’s school sent him for psychological testing. I don’t remember all the words, but the article said he was aggressive, and that he had no interest in having relationships. What I didn’t understand, I looked up in my dictionary, then found books about personality disorders in the school library. Now I wonder if he had to take the same tests that I did.
When he was sixteen, Markham quit school and lived with his sister. Police arrested him for burglary. A psychiatrist told the court that the most remarkable aspect of the B&Es was Markham’s choice of loot: a can of dog food, a used Gillette razor, an identification bracelet imprinted with the name Henrietta.
My father said that the doctor missed the most important fact: all the victims were women who lived alone.
When he was eighteen, Markham approached a woman walking alone on a dark Boston street. He held up a knife, but didn’t say anything. The woman thought she was being robbed, so she gave Markham her money. He stood there looking confused, so the woman ran.
Markham said, “I saw everything in my mind’s eye.”
He said he always knew what would happen ahead of time, and insisted that the women never gave him money.
Much later, my father said that the words “in my mind’s eye” were the most important to understand Markham. He was able to split away from the moment while continuing to be in the moment.
I wanted to know what I was doing when my head thought its thoughts and my body did something entirely different. Dad gave an excellent example: A man mows a lawn. Afterward he knows he cut the grass, but he has no memory of it, no proof except that he can see the cut grass, and he’s gripping the lawn mower. He did a good job on the yard, didn’t destroy any flowers or shrubs, trimmed neatly around the bushes, but he can’t tell you about it. He has been “in his mind’s eye.”
I can’t decide whether I am more like my father or the people he chases. I have a mind’s eye. What I see and hear there are my blue dreams. Sometimes the dreams are sad. They are always violent. Perhaps if I were evil, Dad would have to find me.
“I always think of this piece as music written in the key of blue.”
Amanda Squires played the piano. In the seminar, she discussed murder.
“Sydny Clanton dreamed the blue dream that never ends,” Squires said, attributing the remark to “a friend.”
Shit. Something was wrong. I left the notebook on the desk and walked the length of the room.
“I think there’s a confusion about what
Lustmord
means,” she said.
I stood at the door and read about room rates, occupancy rules, and emergency exits.
“Every time Clanton killed, she placed a small stone in the pouch. She was keeping score.”
Clanton’s psychiatrist had told me that. There had been nothing in the media about the pouch, or the fact that her pocket had contained 31 small stones awaiting transfer to the pouch. It was 1967; stranger-stranger killings had yet to become a national plague. Little more than a year had passed since Albert DeSalvo had introduced himself to the American public. Besides, Sydny Clanton was a woman.
How would Amanda Squires know about the pouch and the pebbles?
Squires had presented me with a gift purchased two years earlier by Melanie Martin.
“The Wreck of the
Lily D.”
“And the lady in the limo,” I muttered, returning to the desk.
Something whole emerged from the fragments of Lily Dorman’s shattered personality. An entity, a complete and lethal being, evolved from her primal storm.
Every day, my father saw people in his office. He talked with them, studied them, absorbed everything he could about them. He knew what went on in their minds, why they did the strange or hurtful things they did, and he helped them to understand and to change. He knew what debris lay behind them because his patients told him.
When the police asked for his help to track Stanley Markham, there was no patient to study. He could only sit in his office and stare at an empty chair. All he had was the litter left in a killer’s wake.
It was nearly ten
P
.
M
. when Jaworski rapped on my door.
“You look like you’ve been through the wringer,” I said. “That and more.”
Jaworski sighed. “Jasper knew I’d be seeing you, said I should bring you in. She’s got the feds pretty worked up.”
“Markham’s dead. Whatever assistance I might have offered is no longer needed.”
“She’s convinced you know more than you’re saying. I know your reputation. I’m inclined to agree with her.”
“Herb, I don’t
know
anything. I have some ideas, possibilities. Shall I fax Jasper a list? It’ll give her something to file.”
Jaworski ignored my sarcasm. “This business about a woman killing all these people…it doesn’t make any sense.”
I dropped Lily’s notebook in his lap. “It’s the scenario that makes the most sense to me,” I told him. “Squires
connects to Dorman, and Dorman is probably our limo lady.”
“Lucas…”
“What else can you tell me about Markham’s escape?”
Jaworski looked from the notebook to me. “You know, I have a hell of a time following your train of thought.”
“My daughter Lane says the same thing. That’s Lily Dorman’s journal. What about Markham?”
Jaworski’s eyes darted from Lily’s notebook to his own, then back to me. “Markham had a twenty-minute jump on the guards. As soon as they realized he was gone, they put out an APB. The state police stopped everything moving, including the laundry truck. No Markham. Also, no stolen vehicles, no home intrusions. They figure he had help outside, but they don’t know who.”
“Where did police find him?”
“It was like you said. He was holed up in a fishing camp outside portsmouth. Couple of kids found him. Investigators are still working the scene.”
“I have a couple of stops to make. Check with the U.S. Marshals. Ask them about Markham’s correspondence, any phone calls, visitors.”
I walked to the door. “Anything from the Volvo?”
“Nothing. Wiped clean.”
“What about Weld’s house, Beckerman’s car?”
Jaworski shook his head. “What do I tell Jasper?”
“The truth. I blindsided you with a train of thought that doesn’t slow down at crossings. Herb, read the diary. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”