Primal Fear (26 page)

“His fuckin’ Excellency, who else?” he snarled. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” He sighed and stared at the ceiling. “I’m talkin’ too much.”

“No you’re not. Tell me about the bishop.”

“C’mon, that’s Sonny’s story. Sonny says”—he raised his voice in a falsetto—“‘Oh he’s the devil, he’s evil. He must be eradicated.’ That’s the way he talks.
Eradi-fuckin’-cated.
Shit,
he was a dirty old man. The world needed to know he was a dirty old man.”

“Did you put the numbers back there, on the back of his head?”

He smiled. “B32.156. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ll figure it out, Doc. You got a clue.”

“A clue?”

Throwing his head back, he laughed very hard. “It’s on the tape,” he said with his head still back. He peered down across his cheek at her, wiggled his eyebrows and laughed again.

She decided to take a chance although she was not sure what his reaction might be. “You mean the altar boys tape?” she said, trying to sound casual.

He shook his head sharply as if he had been slapped. He was obviously stunned and he glared at her. His eyes sparked with incredulity and anger, jumped around the small room almost frantically before they settled back on her.

“You know about that?” he said, squinting.

“Yes.”

“Who told you that?”

“We found the tape.”

“Jesus!” he railed in his vicious whisper. “I told him, get that goddamn tape! But the door to the closet was locked so we had to run for it. Jesus! He can’t do
any
thing right.”

“Tell me about that night, Roy.”

“He never does. He never did.”

“Roy? Tell me about the night the bishop was executed.”

“But as usual Sonny let
me
plan it and do it, right? He stands in the corner and gets off on it and then he screws up and now we’re both in deep shit.”

“Did you really think you’d get away with it?”

He started pacing between the side walls of the room again, shaking his head. “We
would
have gotten away with it, wasn’t for that damn cop car in the alley. Would you believe that, a minute earlier, a minute later …” The veins stood out on his forehead and he began to sweat. “Can’t do anything right,” he said angrily. “Nothing! Never, never!” He slammed his hand into the wall.

“Roy!”

He whirled on her. “Leave me alone.”

She was losing him and she was desperate to establish some
method to communicate with him again—if, in fact, Roy was real.

“Roy, suppose I want to talk to you and Aaron’s out. How do I do that? How do I speak to you?”

“You figure that out, Dr. Bitch. How do you know I want to talk to you? You’re
his
friend, not mine. I know you, lady, you’re gonna tell him about me.”

“I’m your friend, too, Roy—”

“Gonna ruin it all, aren’t you!” He stood with his back to the wall, slapping his open palms against it. “God damn, I shoulda known better than this.”

“Ruin what, Roy?”

“
Everything!
” His head nodded and he seemed out of breath. He splayed both hands against the wall as if holding it up. He stood that way for a full minute before he looked back up.

“I lost time,” Aaron said fearfully. His features had softened and his eyes were scared rather than wrathful. He seemed to collapse within himself, to diminish physically.

“You had a little fugue attack,” Molly said calmly. “It didn’t last long.”

“How long?”

“Five or six minutes.”

“I were layin’ on thet cot. Next thing I was over hair. Wha’d I do?” He looked up sharply. “I din’t try to harm you, did I, Miss Molly?”

“No. It was kind of like a nap.”

“Why’d thet happen, you s’pose?”

“I don’t know yet,” Molly said. “Hopefully we’ll find out.” She realized she was breathing hard. “Aaron, do you know someone named Roy?”

“Roy who?”

“Just Roy?”

“Did he live at Savior House? Thet why he don’t have a last naim?”

“I’m not sure. It’s just a name that came up.”

“Well, if I think o’ someb’dy, I’ll tell yuh, Miss Molly.”

“Let’s call it quits for the morning, John,” she said. “Maybe we can talk again after lunch.”

“John?”

“What?”

“You called me John.” He laughed.

“My mind’s out to lunch,” she said. “Steady the tripod while I take this camera off.”

The first person she had ever seen with a dissociative personality disorder was John Neckerson. It was when she was a senior in college, studying abnormal psychology at the state institution. Neckerson. Bank manager. Age forty-five. Manic depressive. Two suicide attempts. Institutionalized after he took thirty-two hundred dollars out of the tellers’ drawers one morning, in full view of the three employees, walked out of the bank and up the street and made a thirty-two-hundred-dollar down payment on a new Cadillac.

One afternoon John Neckerson had suddenly changed before the eyes of the entire class. Everything changed: his demeanor, his appearance, his voice. Suddenly John Neckerson was a five-year-old
girl
! She was pleading with them to keep her father away from her. Sexually abused by his own father, Neckerson had invented a girl to assume his guilt and the abuse, and to rid himself of what he felt was the taint of homosexuality. She had seen many cases of multiple personality disorder since then.

She was starting to detach the video camera when the voice spoke again. She jumped. He was inches from her, staring intently into her eyes. “You want to hear about it, doncha?” Roy whispered.

He reached out and stroked her cheek. She did not move. She stared back at him. “Bet I know what you’d like. You’d like me to drop you right there on the floor and fuck your brains out, wouldn’t you? Shit, I know you women—you want it but all you do is talk, talk, talk.”

He moved closer again and flashed his Cheshire cat smile. When he spoke it was in a breathy whisper she had to strain to hear.

“You’d like me to talk, talk, talk, wouldn’t you? Maybe next time, Doc, huh? Maybe next time I’ll tell you what you wanna hear. About His Excellency?”

“You’re a real tease, aren’t you, Roy?”

“You oughta know.”

“I think you’re making it all up.”

His hand shot out before she could move and the fingers wrapped around her throat again. His lips pulled back from his teeth.

“I could kill you right now and stop you,” he said, his voice trembling. “You live lucky, Doc.”

He let go of her again and jabbed his forefinger at her.

“Don’t pull that shit on me, tryin’ to trick me into somethin’. Listen, lady, if I want to tell you somethin’, I’ll decide when.”

“I’m sorry,” she gasped.

“Hurt a little that time, din’t it? Huh?”

“Yes.”

“You remember that. You wanna get along with me, you watch your ass.”

“We should stop for now. Why don’t you come back out—”

“Tryin’ to get rid of me?”

“You hurt me,” she said firmly. “I don’t trust you.”

“You trust him but not me?”

“He’s never hurt me. Never wanted to hurt me. Roy, this is all your doing.”

“Okay …
okay
.” He smiled up at the camera. “Next time I’ll be a good boy … Dr. Camera.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Three
A.M.

Vail’s house was dark except for a single light that burned in his first-floor office. Anyone who might have passed the place at that ungodly hour could have seen him through the half-open blinds, pacing the room, stopping occasionally to jab a finger at an imaginary jury, like the childhood Vail addressing a command performance of his pals. Yellow legal pads covered with hand-scrawled notes, open legal books, medical journals, newspaper clippings, all littered his desk. Occasionally he would stop, move to the desk and root through the piles of information looking for some obscure reference and then scribbling it on a fresh page of a fresh yellow pad.

Strategy.

Instinct told Vail that, more than law, more than facts, more than truth, strategy and colloquy would win this case.

The tape changed everything. For weeks he had been developing his case, scrutinizing every report, every photograph, every detail he could find, searching for discrepancies no matter how minute, digging into the backgrounds and credentials of the
expert witnesses the prosecution would call. Now, in the space of a one-hour tape, everything had changed. Three weeks from the trial and he might have to start over.

The postscript on the end of Molly’s interview with Aaron and Roy had sent his mind tripping. She had returned to the chair and sat facing the camera, slightly out of focus and almost out of the frame. But her voice was clear and concise.

“Martin, I realize this tape will shock you just as the appearance of Roy shocked me,” she began. “So I want to pass some quick thoughts on to you while they’re fresh in my mind. I’ll try not to be too technical.

“This could be—and I say ‘could be’ because I can’t make a reasonable analysis on the basis of one interview—but this could be a classic case of multiple personality disorder. What lay people call split or dual personality. Very often, the initial reaction to this kind of exposure is disbelief and rejection, so it’s important for you to understand that this is a specific and recognized mental disease.

“It’s easy to understand how this could have happened, considering what we know about Aaron’s childhood and his teen years here. There are strong possibilities that he has been abused, sexually, physically and mentally, and that he could be sexually and religiously disoriented—which are the two main causes of mental illness.

“A simplified assumption is that Aaron created Roy to assume the guilt and responsibility for acts which he, Aaron, could not perform himself. In other words, Aaron transferred his guilt to Roy. As I said, this is an oversimplification of a very complex problem, but it is not psychiatric hocus-pocus or black magic or voodoo. One thing we can be sure of—if he’s faking or for real, this boy is very sick. And if Roy does exist, he’s very dangerous.”

She stopped for a moment and looked away from the camera, then added, “Either way, he is obviously suffering a serious mental disorder. It raises the question of whether he should stand trial.”

The tape went blank.

Nice.

Was he faking?

Was this other personality for real?

One thing he agreed with Molly about, Aaron was definitely
one sick boy. And if Aaron did have a separate personality, who the hell was he defending, Aaron or Roy?

Roy was easy to pin it all on. He appeared bereft of compassion, sensitivity, response—everything but passion. Hate seemed to be his passion, his fire and fuel, the brain that focused the energy, the muscle that propelled the knife.

The question was, whose hate was it?

Did Roy draw his passion from Aaron? Or did Roy invent his own enmity? How detached were Aaron and Roy? Were they umbilically bonded like brothers, or were they enemies at heart? Did they share the same id, the same headaches, the same desires? Did Roy want to rule their singular universe, ascend to host? Or was he simply an errant clone?

Who really killed Archbishop Rushman? Aaron? Roy? Both of them?

Strategy, not truth, would keep them alive, because it didn’t matter who killed the bishop. If one of them died, they both died.

He sat on the edge of his table, hands poised pyramid-fashion in front of his lips, staring into the fireplace. Then finally he stood up and started pacing around the room.

“When I was a child my best friend was Beanie McGlaughlin,” he said aloud, addressing the fireplace as if it were a jury box. “He had three brothers and two sisters and they were always in trouble. And when one of them did something wrong, his mother would swat them all. ‘That way I’m sure to get the right one,’ she used to say. It was effective, but it wasn’t equitable.

“Justice is equitable. Justice is fair, impartial, and unbiased. Justice is truth. That’s why we’re here today, ladies and gentlemen. To seek the truth.”

He stopped and shook his head. “Shit,” he muttered.

“Sounded pretty good to me,” Molly said from the office doorway. She had been standing in the shadows watching him, listening to him developing a case through oration. Vail was startled. Shaken from his reverie, he seemed at first annoyed, but that quickly changed to empathy.

“Hey,” he said, smiling, “how’s the head?”

“Worst hangover I’ve ever had.” She sat on the overstuffed sofa. “And my knees are made of rubber. But I think I’ll survive.”

She was huddled in a long satin bathrobe. Her hair was loose
and flowed down over her shoulders. He was stunned at how vulnerable, how young, how naturally beautiful she was. Stripped of her professional veneer, she sat like an injured bird, and there was about her a softness she had not revealed before. He felt suddenly protective of her. She seemed a different person than the tough professional who had faced down this shadow killer in a small room—a killer who had threatened her verbally and physically—and beaten him at his own game. He went over, draped a blanket over her knees and inspected the knot on her head.

“You got a tomato growing out of your head,” he said.

“Don’t make me laugh,” she groaned.

“How about a cup of coffee?”

“Actually, I’m starving to death.”

“And well you should be,” he said. “You’ve been out of it for almost twenty-four hours. How about eggs and bacon? I make a mean poached egg.”

“You cook?”

“I suppose you can call it cooking,” he said, heading for the kitchen.

“What do you think of the tape?” she asked.

He stopped at the kitchen door and looked back at her. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

“I don’t think many people have, unless they’re in the business.”

“I’ve heard of it, of course, seen some movies, but I never really thought much about it. That’s the way it happens, huh? He just changes, pop, like that, almost in the middle of a sentence?”

She nodded. “I’ve actually seen cases where personalities switched in the middle of a sentence.”

“Do you believe him?”

“That’s a tough question on the basis of a one-hour interview. Let’s just say I can’t discount it.”

“He could be faking it, right?”

She nodded. “I’ve dealt with at least thirty cases of dissociative behavior in the last six years. If this is not a real case of dissociative multiple personality disorder, I’ll find out.”

He dropped the eggs in small containers in a fry pan half filled with boiling water and turned the bacon over with a spatula.

“How long will that take?”

“I can’t tell you that. It could take a few weeks or a few months. It will depend on how often he comes out, whether I can trip him up in analysis. We’ll do tests …”

“
You’ll
do the tests,” Vail said quietly. “I don’t want the state’s people to know anything about this yet.”

“All right…”

“This is a specific disease, right?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s described quite explicitly in DSM3. It’s no different in my business than measles and heart disease are to a medical doctor.”

“To you, maybe. And other doctors, but it might not fly with a jury of people whose average IQ is probably one-ten, one-fifteen.” He buttered toast and put the eggs and bacon on plates. He lit two candles and put them on the dining room table.

“Breakfast is served, madam,” he said, and offered his arm as she wobbled to the table.

“If this Roy character is for real, can he switch in and out whenever he wants?”

“Possibly.”

“Can you bring him out when you want to?”

She shook her head. “Not at this point. If he is for real, I don’t know what brings him out yet. It’s going to take time.”

“Which we’re running out of…”

“I know,” she said. “But I have to deal with the situation very carefully. Aaron is either a very sensitive young man with an alternate personality or a psychopathic faker. If he is a split, the shock of finding out could have disastrous results. We could lose Aaron and Roy could become the dominant personality, and he is apparently an extremely volatile, amoral psychopath.”

“What are the chances he’s faking it?”

“I’ve seen a couple of feeble stabs at faking split personality but they’re usually amateurish. We discount them very quickly,” Molly said. “I’m sure it’s been done, everything in the world’s been done, but it would take someone with an explicit understanding of the disease and tremendous powers of concentration.”

“Why?”

“Because the faker can’t just
act
like somebody else, he or she literally would have to adopt the psyche of the host
and
the alternate. Sustaining the charade would be the toughest part of it—and the body changes that frequently accompany it are hard
to fake. Actually, it’s more of an attitude change than a physical one. I don’t think that’s really the problem.”

“Then what is?”

“He is definitely suffering from some form of psychosis or none of this would’ve happened.”

“So now we’re into an insanity plea for sure?”

“That’s your call, Counselor. But he definitely has a mental problem of some kind.”

“Give me a quick profile of a psychopath,” Vail said.

“I hate to stereotype it with quick brush strokes,” she said.

“It’ll never leave the room,” he assured her with a smile.

“Well, psychopaths are totally amoral, usually paranoid, harbor great rage—which they successfully hide. Remember the boy in the Texas tower? Nobody knew how angry he was. They also tend to consider others inferior, have contempt for their peers. They’re antisocial, pathological liars, often homicidal. Laws don’t count to them.”

“Real charmers,” Vail said.

“Well, they can also be charming, intelligent, witty, socially desirable.”

“I really don’t know anything about this,” Vail said. “How about legal cases? Are you familiar with any?”

She nodded. “Very recently. A mentally disturbed man over in Ohio named Billy Milligan. The last time I heard he had over thirty different alternates.”

“Thirty!”

“And counting. Men, women, children. One’s a very talented artist.”

“You saying Aaron could have several personalities?”

“Yes. But it could be months before all of them come out.”

“Let’s just stick with two for the time being, that’s all the clients I need for now. What happened in the Milligan case?”

“He was tried for rape and used multiple personality disorder as his defense. He’s in a mental institution instead of prison.”

“You know, according to Roy, Aaron had an orgasm when Roy killed the bishop. Where does one stop and the other begin?”

“We don’t know at this point how disjunctive they are. The complexities are enormous. I’m sure they both lie to me at times, which doesn’t help.”

“Is there any way to figure it out?”

She thought about the question as she ate. “I don’t know.
Certainly we have to study the tapes. Maybe there’s a clue there. Once I establish a strong rapport with him, I might be able to bring him out by simply mentioning his name. That’s usually what happens in cases like this. But right now, it’s up to Roy to come out on his own.”

“If there is a Roy.”

“Yes. If…”

They finished breakfast and moved back into the office. He poured them each a fresh cup of coffee.

“I have to admit, these cases are absolutely fascinating,” she said. “There’s no telling what we can learn from this relationship.”

“Maybe we can have him classified as a valuable scientific experiment.”

“Very funny.”

“As I understand this, Aaron doesn’t know about Roy, right?”

“Right.”

“He still thinks he blacks out from time to time when he’s under stress?”

“Yes.”

“Then who does he think killed the bishop?”

“I don’t think he knows. He thinks somebody else was in the room and he fears whoever it was.”

“But he understands what a fugue state is?”

“Yes. He calls it ‘losing time.’ It’s a common term in the business, particularly among those who suffer from it. I had a case once, a woman who was obese. She was in therapy, Weight Watchers, everything, but she kept gaining weight. Then one day her husband found dozens of Big Mac wrappers stuffed in the back of a cupboard. That’s when I got her. She swore she didn’t put them there. Turns out she would leave work, and on the way home she would get an eating attack and lose time, stop at the hamburger place, get a dozen burgers and fries, eat them all, and then hide the wrappers.”

“All this while she was in this fugue state?”

She nodded. “Usually a fugue event is quite short. One or two minutes. Even the victim doesn’t realize it happened unless it’s obvious. You’re watching a football game on television and suddenly in the snap of a finger ‘60 Minutes’ is on. You
know
you lost time.”

“What would happen if you showed him the tape? If he saw Roy in the flesh?”

“It’s hard to say,” she answered. “It would certainly be traumatic. There’s a chance Roy could come out and become the host personality and Aaron would withdraw into his own world. There’s no way to predict what might happen.”

“So you don’t want to take a chance?”

“No, not yet. Although he has to face the truth sooner or later.”

“We’re running out of time, Molly.”