Projection (27 page)

I heard by back window crack.  A wall of hands pushed on my door.  The truck started to rock.  I have no doubt I would have been overturned, ripped from my shell like a soft crab and devoured, had a State Police helicopter not descended within twenty yards of the street, its blades whipping the air into a freezing windstorm, driving my would-be interviewers off the road in search of cover.

Two cruisers sped down the road toward me.  One turned around in front of my truck to lead, the other passed me on the shoulder of the road and circled back, taking up the rear.  They escorted me to the State Police trailer.  Even more military equipment was scattered around the hospital grounds.  Three sand-colored Desert Storm-style Hummer pickups with what looked like Gatling guns mounted on the cargo beds were parked in the semicircle out front.  In the far corner of the green sat an M-1 army tank.

I looked over at the shattered windows and bullet-riddled façade of the hospital.  SWAT teams crouched at the corners of the roof.

A state trooper I hadn't met before escorted me into the trailer.  Jack Rice sat solemnly behind his desk.  Lieutenant Patterson leaned against the opposite wall.  Rice motioned for me to take a seat.

I glanced at Patterson, then turned my back to him and took one of the two chairs in front of the desk.

"The Lynn Police Department told me they would notify you about Commissioner Hancock as soon as you got back," Rice said.

I couldn’t be absolutely certain Hancock hadn't told him about Kathy.  "They notified me."

"You and I both know this never should have happened," he deadpanned.  His eyes were full of anger.

I wasn't sure where he was headed.  I didn't respond.

"A solo practitioner of forensics and a local police department just don't have the horses to handle something as complex as that copycat investigation.  It should have been turned over to the state a long time ago."  He shook his head.  "Don't start blaming yourself."

So Hancock hadn't told him.  I nodded, even though I knew I
was
to blame.  I let several moments pass.  "Thanks for the help out there with the press," I said tentatively.  "How did you know I was in trouble?"

Rice pointed over my shoulder.  I turned and saw that a television monitor had been mounted to the far wall.  The volume was off.  On-screen, a reported was apparently giving his play-by-play at the edge of the hospital grounds.  The CNN
LIVE
  insignia glowed red at the bottom right-hand corner of the picture.  As I watched, the words
SKY EYE
flashed in the upper right-hand corner, and the video cut to an aerial replay of my truck being mobbed.  I tried to cover up the churning in my gut with a one-liner.  "Thank God for cable," I said.

"Absolutely.  You're a star," Patterson said.  He walked past me and perched himself on the corner of Rice's desk.  His upper lip quavered, and the muscles in his jaw tensed.  "If you can milk it long enough, maybe you can walk off the unit alone, the only one left standing.  Then you can have every camera focused on you."

Rice seemed uncomfortable with Patterson's remarks, as if he wasn't ready to stand completely with him, completely against me, but he said nothing in my defense.  "Did you find out anything in Baltimore?" he asked finally.

"Enough to make it worth going down there."

"What does that mean?" Rice said.  "What did you find out?"

"I found Trevor's brother, Michael."

Patterson shrugged off the news.

Rice leaned slightly forward.  A cautious interest showed in his face.

"I think I understand why Trevor believes he's fighting a war against Satan," I said.  "I think I know what made him snap."

"Are you going to let the rest of us in on it?" Rice asked.

"When Trevor and Michael were children they were playing a game of chase in the house.  Trevor ran by the stove, reached up and knocked a pan of boiling oil off a burner.  It nearly melted half of Michael's face.  He's been badly disfigured ever since."

"So what?" Patterson scoffed.

I kept my eyes on Rice.  "That tragedy is the root of Trevor's delusion about being taken over by Satan; he's never wanted to believe he was the one who maimed his brother.  I think he's suppressed the whole thing — utterly buried it in the furthest reaches of his mind."

"Then how does he think Michael ended up looking the way he does?" Rice asked.

"Trevor left the state and lived with his father after the accident.  He hasn't seen Michael since.  I doubt he remembers he has a brother at all.  But the burns on Michael's face are the unconscious reason Trevor became a plastic surgeon.  And they're the reason he disowned and then amputated his own right arm — the same arm that knocked that boiling oil off the stove.  He's projecting his destructiveness and self-hatred onto an outside force — Satan."

Patterson shook his head.  "You're saying this psycho burning his brother explains everything that's gone on here."

"There's more.  Trevor's mother kept him in a cage after the accident."  I looked down, picturing the heavy wire mesh, the dirt floor.  "In the basement.  It's the kind of thing you'd keep a rabid Rottweiler in."

"A cage?" Rice asked, squinting at me.  "For how long?"

"Months.  She made him pray day and night for his salvation."

"Lord God," Rice said.

"How is this supposed to explain Lucas murdering two people?" Patterson said.  "Or did you forget that's why he was locked up in the first place?"

"I'm not sure how this figures into his prior charges," I said.  "But I think being locked up awaiting trial brought Lucas much too close to the horror of scalding his brother and being tortured by his mother.  He felt himself being dragged back to that boiling oil, to that cage in the basement.  A terrified, fractured child.  His mind fled, all the way into psychosis."

Patterson chuckled.  "What crap."

Rice let out a long breath.  "Let's say your psychological theory about Lucas is true," he said skeptically.  "That doesn't mean he's going to accept it and surrender."

"No, it doesn't," I admitted.  "But I think it's our best shot."

"Our best shot is with a fucking thirty-eight," Patterson exploded.  He turned to Rice.  "I can't believe you'd even consider letting this whack job deliver psychotherapy to a goddamn killer."

"I wouldn't call Lucas the picture of mental health, would you?" I said.

"I'd call him a piece of human garbage," Patterson sputtered.  "And you're not much better.  If it weren't for you and the bullshit you’ve been spreading around here, Lucas would be in the morgue right now, and the hostages would be home — including Calvin Sanger and that lady doctor.  Singleman, Single... whatever."

Chills blanketed me.  I stared at Rice.  "You let someone else onto the unit?"

"Katherine Singleton," he said.  "She's an obstetrician.  Apparently, she used to work with Lucas.  She read about the pregnant woman in the
Item
and got word to us that she'd be willing to go up and help.  She's been there over an hour."

The room swayed.  "Why would you agree to that?"

"Every media outlet from here to L.A. has been focused on that baby," Rice said.  "Saving the child equals victory here, at least as far as the public is concerned."

Kathy's pathologic jealousy had led her to kill Lucas’ lovers before.  If she intuited that Nurse Vawn had slept with him, that she was carrying his child... I thought of telling Rice about Kathy's history of violence, but I knew that would end all negotiation and trigger an assault on the building.  "You shouldn't have let her go up there," was all I said.

"Don't worry," Patterson said gamely.  "I doubt you'll have to share the limelight.  Ten-to-one she's already dead.  We keep feeding this maniac victims."

Maybe it was my own guilt that left me without control, that ignited my pent-up rage at my father, at my mother, at every neighborhood bully I had bloodied myself standing up to, at life's bogus balance sheet of what is due each of us and what each of us must pay.  Maybe I'd used up every ounce of my self-control on Michael Lucas.  Or Cynthia.  Or maybe I'd sucked up a little too much cocaine, or not enough heroin.  Whatever the reason, I looked down at the floor, summoned a mental picture of where I stood in the room and where Patterson sat, and rushed him.

He was no pushover.  Before I reached him he was up on his feet, fists cocked martial arts style at his sides.  He landed a jackhammer right to my shoulder, but I managed to use the force of the blow to transfer all my weight onto my right leg.  I channeled every ounce of strength I could summon into a karate kick that found the sweet spot of his abdomen.  He doubled over.  I grabbed him by the belt and rammed him headfirst into the wall of the trailer.  He went down on both knees.  I yanked his head back and would have slammed it against the wall even harder had Patterson not reached behind him and wrapped one of his arms around both my legs, pushing off the wall at the same time and dropping me onto my back.  In an instant he was straddling my chest, his torso twisted like a discus thrower, his huge fist held aloft.

"Don't do it!" Rice yelled.  He leapt up.

Patterson was powerful enough to kill me with a single blow, certainly with two or three.  His whole arm —
his right arm
— shook as he wrestled with the killer inside him, with the potential violence he had transmuted into a job hunting criminals.  At a lever deeper than my fear, seeing that primal struggle satisfied me and actually made me smile, because I knew in my marrow that Patterson was in touch with Trevor Lucas’ soul, even if he could not see it and would never admit it.  And that perfect psychological symmetry is the voice of my God.  At that moment I knew he was still with me.  I closed my eyes.  The distinctive, metal-on-metal sound of a barrel being pulled back registered in my head.

"Get off," Rice said.

I opened my eyes and saw that Rice had drawn his Glock semiautomatic.  The nose of the barrel was pressed against Patterson's right shoulder.

"Three, two..." he counted.

Patterson sprang to his feet.  He stood over me, looking down with disgust as my chest heaved to get air to my lungs.  "I'll do everything I can to get you off the unit alive," he said.  "Then you're mine."  He marched out of the trailer.

I turned on my side, crowing my neck and arching my back to get more air, faster.

Rice stood watching me for a few moments.  "You shouldn’t start things you can't finish," he said.  He knelt beside me, then helped me to my seat.  It took nearly a minute before my breathing slowed toward normal.  Another half-minute passed before my vocal cords started working again.  "I need to go back in there," I said.

He glanced out the trailer window at the hospital.  It was growing dark outside, and a row of lights had begun burning across the fifth floor.  "I told Dr. Singleton exactly what I'll tell you," he said.  "I won't hesitate to use lethal force if Lucas harms anyone else.  PR problem, or not."

I nodded.

"And if it comes to that, and you play human shield again, you won't be left standing."

"How long do I have in there?" I asked.

"Until midnight."  The animosity in his voice was mostly gone.

"Guaranteed?"

"It is on my end.  I can't speak for Lucas."

Chapter 14

I took my first steps toward the hospital as the sun closed its eyes at 6:20
P.M.
  The light from the street lamps lining the parking lot, along with an array of halogen beams emanating from the army of reporters massed at the perimeter road, threw my shadow thirty yards across the green.  Patterson had deployed dozens of state troopers who knelt behind concrete barriers to either side of the hospital entrance, along the roof of the building and around the helicopter, tank and Hummers.  When I was halfway from the trailer to the sliding glass doors of the hospital I glanced up at the fifth floor and saw several figures that seemed to be watching me from behind the shattered windows.

I was frightened to my core, but I kept moving, on a collision course with Kathy Singleton and Trevor Lucas, who I now recognized as blood relations of the crippled parts of myself.  I had lived with Kathy, a tortured child who grew into a serial killer, probably because she unconsciously reminded me of the attempted murder of my soul by my father.  And I had treated Lucas savagely, letting him stay imprisoned for murders he did not commit, probably because I had yet to overcome my rage at having been a kind of prisoner in my own childhood home.

Human beings sick with violence look like monsters only when we refuse to acknowledge our own terror and hatred and fury.  Then it becomes easy to disown them, even to execute them, with the same sense of certainty and relief Lucas must have felt severing his own arm, believing it to be that of Satan.  We fail to see, as he did, that the cutting off leaves us less than we were, not more.  For our souls to be truly saved, we have to do what we can to save theirs.

For the first time since I had closed my psychotherapy practice I felt confident I was working as a healer.  I knew that fact was no insurance against any misery that might await me, but I also knew that pain and adversity are sign-posts on the road to every cure.  Pilgrims make a drama of this fact when they travel miles on bent knee to pray at holy shrines.  A fire walker understands that crossing the red-hot coals before him — not leaping over them or darting around them — is the only route to a higher spiritual plane.  And surgeons show similar faith whenever they cut the body in order to restore it.  Whatever separated Lucas, Kathy and me, I felt I could count on at least that much common ground.

I crossed the metal threshold into the lobby and stopped, checking for the Harpy.  The fact that Lucas had invoked the memory of that mythological creature, half-bird and half-woman, bent on eating its young, made perfect sense to me now:  His mother had psychologically devoured him, almost certainly beginning her feast long before locking him away in the basement.  A woman capable of caging her young son is capable of many things.