THERE WERE a couple of messages waiting for me when I got home that night. Annie had called to say she'd be working late and would catch up with me tomorrow. I played her message a second time, just to listen to her voice.
Chip had called, too, to let me know that Nick Babikian had been arraigned. They'd transferred him to Bridgewater State Hospital for a twenty-day evaluation. He'd instructed Nick to continue to refuse to talk to the state's psychiatrist until I'd finished with him.
In typical Chip fashion, he just assumed that I'd go beyond the preliminary evaluation I'd agreed to do. Atypical for me, I didn't even think twice about it. I'd gone beyond curious. Was Nick Babikian a psychopath, or did he have a conscience? Would he abandon his need to control, even in a crisis, and enter a dissociative state? I reminded myself not to underestimate him. After all, he'd bugged his own psychiatrist's office, presumably breaking in without leaving a trace.
Between patients, meetings, my regular duties on the unit, and a promised weekend drive to Brooklyn to visit relatives with my mother, I didn't get to Bridgewater until the following Tuesday.
That morning, I took out my rolling suitcase. I packed it with the test materials I needed. The IQ and the memory tests were standard. Then I pulled out the Thematic Apperception Testâthe TAT. There were about forty cards depicting scenes, each one pulling for a different theme. I'd be asking Nick to tell me the story that each picture told. The images on the cards are like searchlights, and personalities cast distinct shadows.
I flipped through. The one with the schoolgirl in the meadow would be an innocuous one to begin with. I clipped together a few others that I thought would be useful in getting at what I wanted to tease out.
It was overcast when I left the Pearce. I was heading south on 128 when the skies opened up in a downpour. I slowed the car and turned the defrost up to a roar.
By the time I turned off the highway, the rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. There was the small sign for the turnoff for the prison hospital. Then, it's about a half mile down a rural road until you're dumped out onto a huge field of asphalt. Bleak, multistory concrete prisons stand surrounded by steel fencing topped with razor wire. I drove to the low single-story hospital for the criminally insane. I parked the car and got out. I pulled the suitcase out of the trunk.
Anyone seeing me might have thought I was getting ready to check into a hotel for the weekend. But this was the last place I'd want to spend a day, never mind a weekend. Last time I'd come here, it had been to interview Stuart Jackson, a man accused of shooting his ex-wife in the head and killing her boyfriend. I remembered how hard it had been for me even to get out of the car. I'd sat in the parking lot, my heart pounding,
reliving the interview I'd had here with Ralston Bridges, the man who would pay me back for suggesting he was insane by murdering my wife.
Today I pulled out the suitcase handle and started across the parking lot. I glanced over at the barred windows that punctuated the hospital facade. I knew that behind them, inmates were probably watching me approach. I imagined Bridgesâwhose fair hair, sleepy blue eyes, and soft features could convince a jury that he wasn't a killerâstaring down at me. I told myself Bridges was locked up in the maximum security of Cedar Junction, more than ten miles away, but still I wanted to turn around and head home. Squinting into the sun, I felt like the yellow bull's-eye at the center of a target.
Was it ever going to be easy and automatic, the way it had once been, to drive to this place, haul my ass out of the car, and walk into the hospital thinking only about the present, what I had to do, and where I'd be going next?
I pressed the buzzer at the gate and looked at the video camera. “Dr. Peter Zak, here to evaluate Nick Babikian.” The gate clicked open and I passed into a small holding pen. The gate behind me closed and the lock clanged shut. I waited. I knew I was being checked out. That was the routine.
The door buzzed and clicked. I pushed it open. I stepped across a threshold into a barren lobby, a room with cinderblock walls painted yellow. It was furnished with about a half dozen folding chairs and pay phones. Along the far wall was a large tinted window. The shadows of two figures hovered on the other side. They could see me, but I couldn't see them. This business of nearly one-way glass gave every visitor a clear message: We're in control and you're not.
I approached the window and waved my letter of authorization and driver's license. A steel drawer slid out from beneath the window. I put the documents in and the drawer closed.
A few minutes later, a stout officer whose cap seemed a bit small for his round head pushed open a door alongside the window and ushered me into a small room. This room also had a tinted window bordering the guards' station.
I knew the drill. I put my suitcase on the table in the corner, stood back, and relaxed. This could take awhile, depending on how bored the guard was that day. This one took everything out and then went through every sheet of paper. When he got to the TAT cards, he flipped through them and gave me a look like I was some kind of pervert. Then he removed the paper clip and held it up as if he'd discovered a concealed weapon. “You can pick this up on your way out,” he said, handing me a claim check.
I reassembled the test materials and zipped the bag. The guard signaled to his partner through the glass. There was a heavy thunk as the next door unlocked. The guard pushed it open and ushered me into another vestibule. The only occupant was a metal detector. I took off anything that might set it off, including my suit jacket and shoes, and stepped through. It didn't make a peep.
I put myself back together, and a shape shifted behind the darkened glass as the guard in the control booth unlocked another door. I followed him down the hall to an examining room. I wondered whose idea it had been to paint everything in the prison yellow or orange.
The small room had a table and a couple of straight-back chairs. I opened my suitcase and started to arrange the test materials in the order I planned to use them. At least I knew this room wasn't bugged. Privacy here was a prisoner's right, and they'd endanger every single conviction if that got violated.
I thought I heard the door opening behind me. I turned and caught a glimpse of someone in the little window in the door.
I had the impression of blond hair, a baby face. It couldn't be. I gave an involuntary shiver.
I crossed the room and opened the door. The hallway was empty.
I went back to work, trying to ignore the tension that had built up in my chest and back. I was ready when the door opened. It was Nick, accompanied by a prison guard.
Nick cautiously eyed the walls and ceiling before easing himself into one of the chairs. Then his eyes came to rest on the materials I'd arranged on the table. The guard removed his wrist shackles.
“More tests?” he asked. I nodded. He looked at me appraisingly. “I've been reading up on you. You're the shrink whose wife was killed, aren't you?”
The pen I was holding dropped to the floor. I took my time picking it up, giving myself a few moments to respond. Maybe he thought my wife's murder gave us some kind of bond.
“I'm a psychologist,” I said.
“I know. Like I said, I've been reading up on you.”
I tried to keep my face neutral. I grabbed the test materials for the IQ battery and sat across from him.
“I bet you've interviewed a lot of people here,” Nick said.
It struck me how Nick's attitude toward me had changed. He seemed relaxed, trusting even. I wondered why. “You're the first one in a while,” I said.
“Hmm.” There was a pause. Then, “You talk to Teitlebaum yet?”
“Last night. He seems like a nice man,” I said blandly.
“My wife certainly thought so.” He didn't say this as if it were a ringing endorsement.
“He seemed quite upset about your wife's death,” I said.
“More than you'd expect?” he said.
We'd all had to deal with losing patients. Suicide. Illness.
Fortunately, it was rarely murder. I'd have been pretty upset, too, if Lisa Babikian had been my patient. “You sound like you think Dr. Teitlebaum had more than a doctor-patient relationship with your wife.”
“What did you think, Doctor?” he asked, behind a knowing look.
I let it go. I was here to evaluate, not to play mind games.
The IQ test went quickly. Nick's verbal IQ was high at 135; his performance IQ was even higher. Then I did a memory test. Sometimes people who dissociate have trouble remembering.
I set out a card with eight yellow circles arrayed randomly on it. I pointed to two and asked him to point to the same two, in the same order. Then three, then four, and so on. This is a difficult test, and the average person maxes out at five. Nick could do a sequence of eight. Then I showed him a similar card with eight purple dots. I pointed to the dots again, and this time I asked him to point to the same dots but in reverse order. Most people can do three or four. Nick could do seven and made only one error on eight.
Then I took out the TAT cards, selecting the ones I'd set aside before the guard mixed them up and confiscated my paper clip.
“I've got some cards to show you,” I told Nick. “Each one has a picture on it. What I want you to do is to make up a story to go with the picture. The story should include what's happening in the picture, what led up to it, and what will happen in the future. Also tell me what the people in the picture are feeling.”
We started with a fairly neutral cardâa girl dressed in what looks like parochial school clothing, standing in a field of wheat. Nick started off with a fairly neutral interpretation. “There's a girl, going off to school. Her family wants her to work at the
farm, but she has dreams. Maybe she wants to be a ballet dancer.”
“What happens to her?”
Nick stared at the card and smiled. “She meets someone at school, gets married, and they return to the farm to live happily ever after.”
Was this Nick's fairytale version of his wife's life? I noted his response and showed him the next cardâa drawing of a woman huddled by an open door, her back to the viewer. Something that resembles a rifle was leaning up against a wall at the edge of the picture.
Nick crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the image. This one wasn't going to be so easy. “A story.”
“Whatever your impression is of what's happening here.”
“Maybe she's sad. Something bad has happened.” He chewed on his lower lip. “She's hiding something. They're going to come and take her away. I don't know what it is, maybe she's stolen something.”
“Who's going to take her away?”
He eyed me suspiciously. “You tell me.”
“It's your story. Who's she hiding them from?”
“I don't know. The police.” He thrust the card back at me.
This wasn't the kind of story most people tell. The card pulls for depression. Nick's story, thin as it was, expressed foreboding instead. I wasn't surprised. I also noted that he hadn't commented on the gun. People often gloss over it. Some don't even see it. But it wasn't the kind of detail I'd expected Nick to miss. What I didn't know was whether it was a deliberate oversight, or a function of his pathology. Personality tests are informed as much by what people don't say as by what they do.
The next card was a drawing of a man reaching for a bag that was resting on a table. The man looks over his shoulder at someone's arms reaching in from behind him. Some people say it's
a guy being helped with a bag of groceries. To others, it looks as if someone is sneaking up behind him, trying to steal his parcel. I was pretty sure which way Nick would go.
“This guy's scared,” Nick said. “He knows they're there. They're grabbing his stuff.”
“They?”
He thought for a moment. “Bookies. He owes a lot of money and he knows they're out to get him. See, he's almost smiling. He's relieved that they're finally here.”
Odd, though, that for the gambler, getting caught brought relief. As I was about to ask him to tell me more, I caught a blur of movement in the window in the doorâsomething blocked the glass, then disappeared. Adrenaline shot through me as I leaped up and yanked the door open. There was condensation on the outside of the glass.
I stepped out into the corridor. “Someone's been out here in the hall. Looking in through the glass.” The hallway was empty.
Nick got up and stepped to the door. He looked up the hall and down. “Maybe it was someone going by.”
“It was someone looking in through the glass,” I said. “Look, there's even moistureâ” Of course, by then it had dried up.
Nick gave me a long look. “This isn't part of some test, is it?”