Salter, Anna C (17 page)

She was also a better psychologist than me. She was right. A flashback was always a repeat of the past. Always. That was the point of a flashback. The brain regurgitated images of the trauma. It didn't make up new possibilities. And Camille had told me about this before. The voice had said it would be worse next time, but I hadn't thought about how unlike a flashback that statement was.

"And there's another thing," Camille went on. "He's just talking. I can't see him."

"What do you mean you can't see him?"

"In all the other flashbacks I saw him. I saw it happening all over again, over and over. This is just a voice out of the dark. He gets in. I don't know how, but he gets in." She sighed hopelessly. "I don't expect you to believe me."

But I was starting to wonder. Flashbacks aren't auditory. They may have voices in them, but they are mostly visual. Unless she was having a psychotic break. Psychotic hallucinations are usually auditory. There is no reason you can't have a psychotic break on top of PTSD. Except she was too old. Most psychotic breaks occur when people are younger than Camille. Not to mention that if this trauma was going to trigger psychosis, why hadn't the attack itself triggered it? Why now?

It occurred to me for the first time that her attacker might really be back. What if the same kind of thing was happening to her that was happening to me? What if she was being stalked by a sadist? I hadn't even thought about it because Camille had terrible PTSD and a long history of flashbacks. I just thought it was more of the same.

But a good percentage of sadists do come back. They call their victims or watch them. The only good data on this came from FBI studies of interviews with caught sadistic rapists and even serial killers —serial killers don't kill everybody they attack, particularly before they get into a killing pattern.

In the interviews they described frequently coming back after the rape. They'd stand outside their victims' houses and watch them or call them on the phone just to hear their voices. It's kind of a reverse form of PTSD. The perps get emotional flashbacks too, but they want to relive the memories. The reliving brings an aftertaste of the violent high all over again.

Too, some of them actually attack the same woman twice. The number of women who have been attacked more than once by the same stranger is larger than most people know.

I hadn't considered it partly because I was dealing with Willy, and it seemed too bizarre to have both of us stalked by a sadist at the same time. Yet two rare cancers might be unlikely for an internist to run across in the same week, but how unlikely is it for a specialist? And what was my specialty? Trauma.

But even if the perp really was back, how was he getting into her house? Why wasn't Keeter going bananas?

"Tell me about Keeter," I said. "How did you get her?"

"I met a guy who owned this string of protection dogs," she said. "He had a route. He dropped them off at service stations and department stores and stuff at night and then picked them up in the morning. I tried to get a dog through a regular trainer, but they wouldn't sell me one because they didn't think I could handle him."

Good thinking, I thought, but I didn't comment. Reputable dealers try not to sell dogs to people who are going to let them eat small children. And Camille had surely been in the kind of shape that would have told any vaguely responsible person she couldn't handle an attack dog. "So how did you meet this guy?"

"By accident," she said. "I told a guy I knew at a local service station that I was looking for a protection dog. I used to take my car there, and we were just talking one day while I had some work done on the car. I was getting ready to leave. I just couldn't stay in Boston anymore after the . . . Well, I kept thinking he knew where I lived and he'd come back. I hardly told anybody I was going. I was afraid he'd find out somehow."

"He," I knew, was always the perp. She never called him anything else. He was on her mind so much she always thought I knew whom she was talking about when she said "he."

"I had to have the car fixed. I didn't tell Chris what happened, but he probably figured something. I always took my car there so I knew him before, and afterward, I was a lot . . . different." Her eyes started filling up. There was always the ongoing grief for who she had been.

"You know," she said as the tears started, "I've lived alone since I was sixteen. I never had a problem. My mother was depressed all the time, and she drank. I could never get her to stop even though I tried all the time. I couldn't bring anybody home because Mom would be staggering around in her nightgown, and finally I just left. I put myself through school, and I did everything by myself. I told the other nurses it was ridiculous to need an escort to the parking lot. I just didn't know ... I never . . ."

Camille cried for a few minutes, and we were both silent. I had never met the woman she was describing, although something about Camille had always shone through the jumble of fear and anxiety that surrounded her. There was some core of all that she used to be still there, but it was very far away.

"Chris introduced you to the trainer?" I said softly. A part of me wanted to keep talking about her life before the cyclone, and today she could. But my anxiety about the perp being back was growing, and if he really was back, she might not have a life to talk about if I didn't find out more about how he was getting into her house.

"Chris called him and called me back to say I should talk to him. He thought he'd sell me a dog if I really wanted one. He said he wasn't a regular dealer, just a guy who had some dogs he rented out to service stations and places like that."

It didn't surprise me that it had been that easy to get a dog. While dealers are attuned to ethical issues around guard dogs, there is a whole other-world out there of macho types who own guard dogs or breed a few and who think everybody should have one. Some are survivalists or military wannabees or whatever.

"Did Chris use the guy's dogs in his service station at night?"

"Sure," she said. "That's how he knew him."

"Did Chris know Keeter?"

"I don't know," she said. "Why?"

I ignored the question. "Why was the trainer willing to give up a dog?" I asked. "He didn't usually sell them, did he? I mean, you said he wasn't a regular dealer?"

"No, I don't think so, but, well, Keeter wasn't behaving too well. Wait a minute. Chris did know her, because I remember him telling me I should think twice about getting her. He said she wasn't too stable. I forgot all about that. But the other guy said she just needed somebody with her. He said there was a difference in being alone all night in an empty building and being with an owner all the time."

"What was she doing that was so bad?"

"I don't know for sure," she said. "I think she was maybe a little too aggressive or something. I think Chris said she gave the clerk a hard time when he tried to open the store in the morning. Chris said he didn't have any trouble with her, but he couldn't be there every day. I don't care what she did," she said defiantly. "I had to have a dog, and nobody else would sell me one."

"Was she already trained as a seizure dog?" I said doubtfully.

"No, I took her in for training right after I got her. There was a training center in Manchester. Actually," she said sheepishly, "she didn't do that well. She didn't really graduate, but I needed a guard dog more than a seizure dog, so I kept her. I just tell people she's a seizure dog," she said looking down, "so they'll let her come with me. Otherwise, there're a lot of places that won't let her in, but she didn't really get her papers.

"She might do the right thing, I mean if I had a seizure, but she might not. The guy said she was unreliable."

I looked at Keeter again. Great. She was an unreliable guard dog who'd had a little training in seizures and was unreliable there too. What the hell would she do in an emergency? Who knew?

So where did all that leave us? The guy who sold her the dog was out as the perp. She hadn't met him before the attack, and it would be too much of a coincidence for her to meet him afterward. But Chris wasn't out. Chris was somebody whom Keeter knew and who could walk into a building that Keeter was guarding without her taking his throat out. That had been their relationship. Keeter guarded the gas station until Chris got there.

And the fact that Chris knew Camille before the attack fit. A lot of attackers know their victims casually. That's how they target them. Camille wouldn't have recognized him. She had told me the perp had been wearing a ski mask, and somebody wouldn't recognize their grandmother if she were wearing one of those things.

But wouldn't Camille have recognized Chris's voice if she knew him? Maybe, maybe not. People who are abducted are so frightened they hardly recognize their own voices, and Camille had only known him slightly.

If Chris were the perp, what a stroke of luck he had. Camille comes in, and he gets to gloat over how horrible she looks. Then she tells him she wants a guard dog, and he puts her on to one who knows him and who won't react if he walks in on her turf.

But I didn't know Chris was the one. For one thing, he had warned her against Keeter. Still, whoever it was, one thing was for sure: Keeter wasn't perp-proof. There were people who could get into the house without her raising a fuss —her trainer and Chris, for starters. Not to mention that everybody who knew Keeter had rated her as unreliable.

"Did Chris know where you were going?" I asked.

She thought a minute. 'T don't think he knew exactly. I told him I was going to New England. No, wait, I remember him saying he used to live in Vermont, and we started talking about it, so I think I did tell him the general area. Why do you ask?"

Uh-oh. I needed to talk to Adam right away. This might not be a job for a therapist after all. If there was a perp outside her head and not inside it, it was strictly a job for the police. I had zero expertise in catching perps.

But that, of course, was what Adam had been telling me all along about Willy. Willy was surely outside my head as well as inside it. But this was different, I reasoned. It made sense for me to turn Camille's case over to Adam and not mine. Unfortunately, the voice in my head failed me when I tried to think why.

Well, shit, just face it. This was different because it wasn't me. This was about Camille. And she didn't sleep with Adam, and she didn't have a crazy, prickly, porcupine thing about her boundaries, and most of all, maybe, she wasn't Mama's child.

There was that other thing too. I knew I couldn't tolerate Adam's rescuing me twice. I'd resent hell out of him for it. Mama's child. Unfortunately, I was truly Mama's child.

I got some paper from Camille and wrote out a couple of permission forms. Camille had had a so-so experience with the Boston police after the attack. One officer had been pretty sensitive to her confused state, and the other had pushed her to give all the details. When she couldn't—she dissociated when she tried to talk about it—he had been impatient with her and finally left.

Some progress has been made in twenty years of feminists harping about the way rape victims are treated. Cops no longer routinely hook victims up to lie detector tests, and some places even have women cops do much of the interviewing. But the truth is, there are far more rapes than women cops available to interview victims, and old attitudes still die hard. Camille's experience with the police had been better than that of most rape victims in a big city environment.

And, in all fairness, Camille would have been impossible to interview. She was found nude, in a dog kennel. She was dissociative and couldn't talk about what happened without losing it and becoming completely incoherent. Cops are oriented toward catching perps, and Camille wouldn't have been any help at all. They would have had a nasty crime on their hands with an eyewitness who was useless to them. I could see a cop getting frustrated with that.

I told Camille what I had in mind and she agreed. She still saw the police as a help, and she didn't mind my bringing Adam in or contacting the two police who had investigated the attack before. But she never would have called them on her own. The perp loomed too large in her mind. She didn't think anybody could stop him.

I left uneasily. If Camille was in danger, I didn't like to leave her there, not even with Keeter, since Keeter wasn't proving to be too helpful on this one. But even if Keeter did know Chris, I reminded myself, and Chris was the perp, that didn't mean she would let him attack Camille. Camille was her owner now, and Chris had never been. She had been trained to let Chris into a building she was guarding, but she had never been trained to let him attack her handler.

And all training aside, there was the business of Keeter's genes. A Rottweiler had protect-your-owner written into its DNA.

For once I used the car phone. I have a prejudice against car phones, but I had finally bought one when Adam threatened to give me one if I didn't. I had explained my prejudice to him—buy a car phone, and the next step is a phone in the shower, and soon there is no time you aren't connected to the world. I didn't like being connected to it as much as I was, and I surely wasn't looking for more—but he hadn't been impressed.

He just said he had a prejudice too, a thing about friends of his who routinely confronted sex offenders riding around alone without car phones, not thinking for one second about whom they were dealing with. What was I going to do, he had asked, if I were followed and run off the road —look for a pa^^ phone?

I didn't like using it, but I wanted to be able to say enough alarming stuff to the dispatcher that she would track Adam down if he wasn't there, and I didn't want to do that in front of Camille. But I was in luck. He was there and free, and she put me through to him. I told him I had a client with a problem that might be outside her head rather than inside, and I needed to talk to him about it. He said to come on in.

He was writing something when I walked through the open door of his office. "Hi," I said softly.

He looked up and smiled. "Come on in," he said and pulled up a chair for me. The smile didn't go away when he sat back down, and for a moment I remembered how I loved to touch the smile creases in the corners of his eyes with my fingertips. I knew all the planes and creases of his face by touch.