Projection (9 page)

"What do you think?"

She stared blankly at me.  Her voice became mechanical.  "I feel I can express my emotions more openly.  I'm sure I wouldn't hurt anyone again."

I wanted to tap into Kathy's grief over what had happened to her.  "Have
you
started to hurt?"

"You really are getting off on this little power trip, aren't you?"

"I'm not looking for power.  I brought you here to get well."

"You might be able to fool your friend Matt into believing that crap, but you and I should start being honest with each other, Frank.  You figured out a way to lock me
and
Trevor up, even though he didn't do anything wrong."

"He knew."  My teeth ground against each other.  "He let you go on killing."

"As if anyone could have stopped me."  She sounded proud and defiant.  "All he did was let me love him.  That's what really eats at you.  You'd never let anyone close enough for that to happen."  She shook her head.  "You almost got the system to straightjacket both of us forever.  But I guess Trevor's a lot harder to handle than you figured.  Lock
him
in a loony bin, and he ends up running the place."

My heart began to race.  I had no idea she had heard about Lynn State.

"The morning paper comes here, too, sweetheart.  They like us to stay in touch with reality."

"I didn't want any of that to happen."

"But you made it happen."

My skin turned to gooseflesh.

She got to her feet and took a step toward me.  "I'd do anything to save Trevor."  She unbuttoned her jeans.  "Let me go to Lynn State to see him.  He needs me."

Just the thought of Kathy joining forces with Trevor on the locked unit frightened me to my marrow.

"Please.  I could help that pregnant woman and her baby."

With the headlines obviously reaching Kathy so reliably, I hated to think who she would respond to hearing I had gone onto the locked unit myself.  I felt desperate to leave.  I got up and started toward the door.

Kathy blocked my path.  She unzipped her fly.  "They won't let me use a razor here, so I can't shave it the way Trevor likes it, but it's still pretty.  It still belongs to him."

I caught the eye of one of the nurses down the hall and motioned for her.

Kathy grabbed my other wrist and brought my hand to the perfect slopes of her abdomen, flesh I had caressed hungrily just six months before.  "Put it down my pants," she said.  "Take what you want.  Just let me be with him for a little while."

I jerked my hand away just before the nurse made it to the room.  She opened the door.  "Finished so soon?"

Kathy turned to face the wall.  "So soon?" she mimicked in a sickly sweet singsong.

I rushed out and headed for the locked door.

"Doctor," Kathy called after me.

I didn't look back.

"Will I be seeing you again?  You remind me so much of my father."

*            *            *

I wanted to get away from Kathy and Austin Grate as fast as I could, but I knew Hollander was waiting for me.  I started over to his house, steeling myself against the emotional hurricane inside me.  At his door I slammed down the bulbous brass knocker three or four times.  Several seconds passed before I felt the floor of the verandah start to vibrate with his footsteps.  He opened the door and looked into my eyes.  He pressed his lips together.  "I warned you," he said.  "Follow me."  He turned around and led me into his study.

Flames raged in the fireplace, occasionally jumping to lick the pair of griffins carved into the sides of the marble mantel.  Hollander poured himself into a huge tapestried armchair.  I took a seat on the couch.  I was shaking slightly and embarrassed for it.  "Take a moment to relax," He said.

I held my legs still, but the rest of me kept trembling.

He patted the air with his palms.

I looked away from him.

"A few deep breaths."

My fists were tight in my lap.  "Don't fucking play therapist with me, Matt."  I tried to settle myself down, but couldn't keep myself from saying what was on my mind.  "Why in God's name would you think she's any better?  I don't see any progress whatsoever."

"No.  You look like you saw something monstrous," Hollander deadpanned.  His piercing eyes were unblinking.

"She's as lost in her infatuation with Trevor Lucas as the day I dragged her here.  She begged me to get her to Lynn State, onto the locked unit."  I stared at him.  "And I don't think she feels a bit of remorse for murdering four people.  I think she's more venomous toward her victims now than she was six months ago."

"I'm not sure you're thinking at all," he said evenly.  "I would have expected more from you."

That cut me to the quick.  Having been beaten down as a boy by my father, I had taken my nurturance as a man where I could find it.  And I had found a fair measure in Hollander.

His features softened.  Maybe he saw the hurt in my face.  He leaned forward in his chair.  His tone became gentle.  "Let's gather a few facts at hand.  How did Kathy make you feel?"

"Angry."

"That certainly comes through..."

"Sad."

He nodded, waiting me out.

"Helpless."  Putting that word to the havoc in my gut made me start to relax.  "Completely helpless."

"Never stop listening with the third ear, Frank."

The third ear.  I settled back into the worn leather cushion of the couch.  Everything became clearer.  I was so personally involved in Kathy's drama that I'd failed to monitor my emotions for clues to hers.  The way she had made me feel was likely a mirror of her own internal state.

"What could it mean that you feel utterly without power after sitting with Kathy?"

"She feels that way," I said immediately, remembering her protests about my putting her on the Secure Care Unit — what she called my ‘domain.’

"I'd guess she feels it times a hundred."  He held his hands up to frame the moment at hand.  "The two of you lived together.  On equal footing.  Now you're visiting her on a psychiatric ward.  No matter what's come before, now she's a mental patient, and you're a psychiatrist.  That leaves her exquisitely vulnerable."

"And very angry."  I thought more about my talk with her.  My scalp tightened as I remembered her last words.  "She told me I reminded her of her father," I said.

Hollander closed his eyes.  When he opened them he looked exhilarated, yet peaceful.  "That sounds like progress to me."

We sat in silence a little while, as if noting the presence of a force more powerful than either of us.  Psychiatrists call it empathy, but most people know it as God.

"The helplessness you made her feel is only a hint of how it must feel to be raped again and again and again by your father when you're nine and ten and eleven," Hollander went on.  "She can't bear to face that horror, so she projects it.  She makes you experience a measure of her grief and rage and helplessness — as gifts of soul, if you'll accept them.  And then she tells you where it all really came from — if you'll listen."

"She projected her ‘soul’ on other people more than on me.  I'm still walking around."

"Her violence is the most powerful data of all.  You know as well as I that leaving mutilated bodies to be found by the police means she was mutilated, at least psychologically.  Only people who have been spiritually murdered end up as killers.  Charlie Manson let us in on that.  He yelled it out to Bugliosi in the courtroom the moment he was sentenced to death.  ‘You can't kill me, I'm already dead.’  People thought he was ranting, but he was telling us his truth."

"You don't think there's any murderer whose acts are inexplicable.  Primary evil.  Out of the womb."

"No."

"No exception."

"None."  He smiled warmly.  "These are rhetorical questions, Frank.  You believe the same as I do.  What is it you really need to know?"

"Did I do the right thing bringing her here?"

"As opposed to what?"

"Should I have turned her over to the police?"

His eyes narrowed.  "And turned over your humanity?  Knowing what you knew about how she came to kill, having taken an oath to heal and do no harm, how could you let her be locked in a cage like an animal for the rest of her life?"  He leaned forward.  "She's
violently ill
.  You did what every parent or sister or brother or lover of a person sick with violence would do given the chance.  Given the courage.  You get her help."

"But look what's happened."

"Remember one of the primary laws of physics:  Every force begets an equal and opposite force.  You bucked the system, my friend.  You performed an act of grace.  When you do that, it's like throwing down the gauntlet to Satan.  All kinds of hell can come looking for you."

I sat silently for several seconds, remembering Lucas screaming about Satan in the courtroom.  I thought about the fact that he had asked first for the Cardinal, then for me.  Maybe vengeance had little to do with him calling me onto the locked unit.  Maybe, whether he knew it consciously or not, he was ready to confront the hell inside him.

"What are you thinking?" Hollander asked.

"The night I carried Kathy in here I told you I didn't think I could bring myself to help a man like Trevor Lucas, not after he'd stood by and let all the killing go on.  Not after what he let happen to Rachel."

"And..."

"Now I don't think anything will be right for me until I do help him."

Hollander looked into the flames, obviously deep in thought, then looked back at me.  "Lucas may have layer upon layer of defenses keeping him from his inner truth.  If that truth is a grim as we think, projecting it in your direction could make you feel things you've never experienced before.  Very ugly things.  And if you're wildly successful and actually get past Lucas’ defenses to the core of his pathology, he may have to kill you just because you've seen it.  He may not even realize why."

"But there's a chance my seeing it and feeling it would defuse it."

"That's the power of empathy."  He shook his head.  "I wouldn't be betting on you."

"It's not like the hostages are looking at great odds right now."

He took a deep breath, let it out.  "There's a chance.  A sliver of a chance."

"Then I've got to take it."

We sat for a while without saying a word.  Hollander broke the silence.  "What I said before — about expecting more from you...," he started.

I nodded.

"No one could."

Chapter 5

I started racing back toward Lynn just before 11:00
A.M.
  Within a few miles my mind was turning on itself like a hung jury.  Was Hollander right?  Had bringing Kathy to Austin Grate been an act of grace?  Or was Kathy's verdict closer to the truth — that I only paid lip service to believing that Trevor would get a lawyer and go free, that I was fooling myself into thinking I was getting her help, that I unconsciously wanted to put
both
of them away?

I thought back to the night I had pried Kathy's confession from her twisted mind.  I had convinced her to meet me at Walton's Ocean Front, a secluded inn on Plum Island, a crooked finger of land off Newburyport, most of the way to New Hampshire from Boston.  Under the influence of a dose of sodium amytal, she had confessed not only to the four murders but also to setting the house fire than had killed her little sister.  She had been consumed by jealousy and hate when her father began having sex with the younger girl, just as she was consumed by those raw emotions when Trevor and I took other lovers.

I had thought of killing Kathy that night, of avenging Rachel's death.  I had beaten back the impulse.  I knew then as I did now, without any doubt, that no child asks to be broken psychologically, that no human decides to become a killer.  Kathy had tried to run away from her pathology, becoming an obstetrician, delivering new life into the world, living in a fine home with perfect furnishings.  But the past is a tireless adversary.  The race from one's truth is an endless, unwinnable folly.

Under cover of that night's black rain, I had carried Kathy, a woman I had lived with and had thought that I loved, to Hollander's door.

"No," I said aloud.  I had not contrived to destroy her or Lucas.  I had done what I thought was right.  I had done it despite society's rules, for which I have a great deal of respect and what I consider a healthy measure of contempt.  Now being a man, being a healer, meant facing them head on.

My pager beeped again.  I didn't recognize the number on the display, but when I dialed it on my car phone Emma Hancock answered.  "Where are you?" I asked her.

"Carlos’ place.  I'm glad you didn't know the number," she said.  "In the old days you might have."

"Who the hell is Carlos?"

"Lynn's finest.  A Dominican entrepreneur on Union Street.  We just raided his humble abode on a tip from a very frightened fourteen-year-old who got caught snorting cocaine in the boy's room at the Caldwell Middle School.  Turns out Carlos gave it to him as a gift for running some packages to his other customers.  We found an ounce, maybe an ounce and a half stashed everywhere from the radiators to the toilet tank over here."  She paused.  "I paged you because it sounds like Lucas is taking the bait.  He asked for an extra hour before releasing the first of the three hostages we demanded in exchange for you and the chopper."

"Why?  Why did he want the hour?

"I don't know.  Lucky he did, though.  It gives us more breathing room."

I doubted Lucas was helping us out, but didn't see any reason to guess with Hancock at the bizarre plans he might be making.  "Did Rice give in on the helicopter idea?" I asked.

"It landed in front of Lynn State about five minutes ago.  The question is where we ultimately go with all this.  If Lucas actually comes through on his end of the bargain he'll be pretty upset when we don't deliver.  We need a plan to stall him — maybe even get a few more people out of there before Rice moves in with the troops at four o'clock.  He's already got three armored assault vehicles and twenty ambulances lined up on Jessup Road.  And I  hear the chopper is decked out for combat."