The Coast-to-Coast Murders

by J. D. Barker

  “What did you read yesterday?”

  Jeffery Longtin remained silent.

  “From ten in the morning yesterday until noon, what did you read?”

  His eyes brightened then. “The Collector, by John Fowles. I’ve read it seven times. It’s fantastic. Many people believe it’s the book that inspired Thomas Harris to write Red Dragon.”

  “Do you actually recall reading that particular book yesterday, or did the contents of your note just come back to you when I offered the time you had written at the top?”

  Longtin went quiet again.

  “Have you ever been told you have trouble with contextual memory?”

  Longtin eyed him but didn’t respond.

  Vela continued, “You recall certain autobiographical data, facts you’ve picked up throughout your life, but you have trouble with time. Your memories drift. Events from thirty years ago sometimes feel like they just happened, while recent events sometimes feel extraordinarily old.”

  Longtin finally nodded.

  Vela took one of the notes from the table. “‘Pick up laundry from Morgan,’” he read aloud. “‘Six o’clock on September twentieth.’” He set the note back on the table, upside down. “I’m going to ask you another question, and I want you to be completely honest with me. Do you remember dropping off your laundry?”

  Again, Longtin nodded.

  “When was that?”

  Longtin’s eyes jumped around the room, going from note to note. The answer wasn’t there. Finally, he shook his head. “I’m not sure. The memories get jumbled, like you said. Sometimes I black out too.”

  “Are you seeing someone to help with that?”

  Longtin’s body stiffened; his eyes went wide. “No way. I’m fine with the notes. I get by just fine.”

  Vela pulled the paperback copy of Fractured from his back pocket and set it on the table. Longtin glared at it.

  “This book is about you, isn’t it?”

  Longtin looked from the book to his shotgun standing against the wall, then back to the book again. “I don’t think I want you people here. I can take care of myself.”

  “Fitzgerald treated you for dissociative identity disorder. Multiple personalities. Did he cure you?”

  At this, Longtin snorted, leaned back. “Cure me? Doc Fitzgerald didn’t want to cure me. He wanted to understand how it happened, what made me that way…he wanted to re-create it.”

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Dr. Rose

  In the master bedroom, Dr. Rose Fitzgerald pulled the curtain aside, only an inch or so, just enough to see out.

  Four cars now.

  No, wait—five. She could see the back of a van at the far end of their driveway, near the bend. At least a dozen or more people. It was hard to tell exactly how many—they kept coming and going, ducking into this vehicle and climbing out of that one. People in cheap suits with their discount haircuts, chain-store jewelry, and state-school educations paid for with debt and grants probably funded by the exorbitant taxes she and Barton paid. By the various trusts and scholarships she and Barton had created over the years.

  They paced the driveway like rats caught in a maze, twitchy noses and beady eyes looking up at her, cell phones pressed to their ears.

  Who could all of them possibly be talking to?

  So wrapped up in their little lives.

  A television droned behind her, the volume low. The local CBS affiliate. When last she’d looked, the image on the screen was of her home, some young thing with perfect blond hair standing in her street talking some nonsense.

  From the driveway, a man pointed up at the window, at her.

  Dr. Rose dropped the edge of the curtain.

  This man had arrived a few hours ago and immediately started in on her doorbell. She didn’t open the door, though; she would not. Bickley, Barkley, Begley—yes, that was it, Begley. Special Agent Waylon Begley. Poor man, to be saddled with a name like Waylon. No doubt he was down there working on a warrant just as he’d promised.

  He’d get one. Dr. Rose was certain of that. The only real question was when. Judging by the growing crowd, it wouldn’t be long.

  She didn’t have much time.

  She crossed the room, picked up the phone, and dialed Lawrence Patchen again.

  Four rings.

  Six rings.

  Ten.

  Twenty.

  She hung up.

  Damn him.

  He had always been such a weasel of a man. Barton said if he was ever backed into a corner, he would just hang his head and cry rather than face his responsibilities. How they’d ever trusted him, even in the slightest, she’d never know. She could only hope he was busy doing what was necessary, as she was.

  She stepped over to the far corner of the room and tugged the corner of the Aguirrechu watercolor; the magnets disengaged and the painting flipped aside on hidden hinges. The safe was open a moment later and she began carrying the contents over to the king-size bed and dropping them into a red Bosca duffel—the files, cassettes, videotapes, thumb drives. At the back of the safe were neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills, banded and crisp, fresh from the bank. Twenty-six in total—two hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Their rainy-day money. Their emergency fund. She carried the money over to the bed and dropped the bundles into the bag along with everything else.

  When finished in the master bedroom, she went to Megan’s room. She’d handle the offices next. She’d call Patchen again when she got downstairs—the bastard had better pick up.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Gimble

  He wanted to re-create it?” Vela repeated, giving Gimble a quick look.

  Longtin nodded. “Not at first. At first, I think he genuinely wanted to help me. We spent over a year identifying all of my personalities, their individual traits and mannerisms, their characteristics.” He looked down at the book. “The stuff in there.” He twisted his fingers together, quickly pulled them apart, rested his hands at his side, then moved them to his lap, not sure what to do with them. “Without him, I might be locked up somewhere now or, more likely, dead. You gotta understand, I was completely lost when he found me. I had this sickness, but I wasn’t aware of it. I blacked out constantly, lost time. I couldn’t hold down a job. I’d black out on the bus on my way to work and wake up again hours or sometimes days later, either back home or in some strange place. I remember once back in 1980, I was working for a pest-control company, spraying houses, in Buffalo. I carried my gear into this little duplex, and then I was in Chicago. Just like that. Three days gone. My clothes all muddy. I woke up on a bench with no memory of how I got there. My wallet was empty. I knew I’d had sixty-three dollars in there. I didn’t know if I spent the money or it got stolen. That kind of thing happened to me a lot. It happened so often, the blackouts became my normal. When I’d wake up, I’d just try to pick up where I’d left off. When Doc Fitzgerald found me, I’d been arrested for breaking and entering. I’d woken up in a house outside of Scranton, and the owner came home and found me in her bed. She nearly shot me. She didn’t know who I was, and I had no memory of how I got there. I tried to get out, but she had already called the police. I blacked out again in the car on the way to the station, and when I woke up, Doc Fitzgerald was there. Two more days were missing. Apparently I kept giving the police different names when they tried to interview me. They said my accent kept changing, from Boston to New York to Irish. Said I pretended to be a woman at some point. The court-appointed attorney called Doc Fitzgerald for a consult, figured I’d had some kind of crack-up.”

  Longtin looked Vela dead in the eye for a moment, then turned away again. “That was lucky for me. Like I said, I’d probably be dead if it weren’t for him. If someone in prison didn’t kill me, I might have done it myself. I was very suicidal back then.”

  “You weren’t aware of the other personalities,” Vela said.

  Longtin shook his head. “Nope. No idea. That came later, after Doc Fitzgerald identified the
m all. He convinced the courts I wasn’t fit for trial and got me transferred to a facility in upstate New York, near the school where he taught.”

  “Do you recall the name of the facility?”

  He studied the notes again, his eyes drifting around the living room. The answer wasn’t there, though. “Something British—Essex House, Lennox House…”

  Gimble said, “Was it Windham Hall?”

  Longtin considered this, then shook his head. “No, I think it was Essex. I was heavily medicated back then, especially when he first brought me in. Prior to that, I had been self-medicating with pot, alcohol, LSD, painkillers, anything I could get my hands on. It seems stupid looking back on it, but at the time I felt that if I drugged myself to the point of passing out, I wasn’t losing time. I was in control. I’d wake up in the same place.” He waved a hand through the air. “They had to get all that crap out of my system, detox me, before Doc Fitzgerald could start a proper medication regimen.”

  Gimble found it odd that the man could piece together such a cohesive history yet had to refer to notes to figure out what he’d done a few hours ago. His gaze bounced all over the room. He couldn’t maintain eye contact.

  “Do you take anything now?” Vela asked.

  “Not for nearly twenty years,” Longtin told him. “Not even a drink. The notes keep me straight, and I try to live a clean life, keep to myself.” He looked down at the book. “Early on, Doc Fitzgerald discovered my shifts in personality were triggered by stress or changes in my environment. Each person living inside me was unique, manufactured by my mind to handle a particular type of situation. Mary handled love, Joey was a fighter, Kevin was good at math, solving problems…thirteen different people all living in this one body. Each would come forward when I needed them, then retreat and rest when I didn’t. They’d take turns.”

  “They’d step to the mark,” Vela said.

  Longtin nodded, scratching at his thinning hair. “Yeah.”

  Vela glanced over at Gimble, then back at the man in the chair. “Who is on the mark right now?”

  For the first time, Longtin smiled. “That question isn’t as easy to answer as it used to be.”

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Written Statement,

  Megan Fitzgerald

  Michael picked up one of the cassettes and fidgeted with the tape, absentmindedly winding it with the tip of his little finger. “I don’t remember almost any of the conversations on these tapes. I don’t remember what happened in that motel room when I was a kid. Same with the notes for all my sessions with Dr. Bart—according to these files, we spoke at least three times each week, sometimes more. I remember a few of our sessions, but once he started medicating me, everything got blurry. There are hundreds of hours accounted for here, and I barely remember any of it. How can I be missing so much?”

  I squeezed his hand in mine again.

  Michael’s voice dropped low, and for the first time, he sounded like the kid on those tapes. “Megan, my missing time, the headaches, the blackouts…does that mean it worked?”

  I was shaking my head before he even got the entire question out. “No way. That’s not possible. You can’t just mind-fuck someone and create multiple personalities.”

  Michael dug Jeffery Longtin’s file out of the pile at his feet and opened it next to his own. “Our histories are nearly identical—both of us lost our fathers at a very young age. Neither of us was in a stable home. My mother was a drug addict. From what it says here, Jeffery was removed from his home twice as a child when his mother was arrested for prostitution and heroin use. Both our mothers were with dirtbags. Both of us were abused. Jeffery only learned he was abused after Dr. Bart found a personality within him, this Kevin, who was able to talk about it—Jeffery himself had no memory of the things his stepfather did to him.”

  Michael was quiet for nearly a minute, then forced himself to go on, but he covered his face with both hands, muffling the words. “Megan, I don’t remember the things Max did to me. Not one. I didn’t know those things happened until Dr. Bart told me. He assured me they happened. He gave me graphic details and reminded me of it nearly every time we talked.”

  “Maybe you weren’t abused at all. He might have just made it up,” I offered. “Dr. Bart was deranged. I can see him doing that just to observe how you’d react.”

  Michael sighed and shook his head. “I pulled the police reports a few years ago. It wasn’t easy, but they had to release them to me. The reports said there were clear indications of sexual abuse. There was evidence of scarring, repetitive abuses over an extended period. There were photographs. Just like Dr. Bart said on that tape. He might have made up some of the things he told me, but there’s no way he faked a police report. Or the court orders. Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I was abused. I blocked it out. But what happened to me during those blackouts?” His palm fell on the Longtin file. “We know what happened to Jeffery Longtin.”

  “You’re saying you’re Mitchell. You’re really saying that? You’re willing to accept that?” I wasn’t buying it. No way. I’d known Michael my entire life; I would have seen it. I would have seen something. “Even if I were willing to believe that, what are the odds you would be placed…” As I said the words, it clicked. “You went to Windham Hall first.”

  “Windham Hall placed me with Dr. Bart. Maybe that wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “You think he had someone there watching out for a case like Jeffery’s?”

  “Roland Eads worked at Windham Hall.” He reached into the back seat and pulled a sheaf of paper from his bag. “I found these at Roland’s house. They’re visitation logs. According to the time stamps, Dr. Bart went back to that place several times a month for years. His last visit was only three weeks ago.”

  “Why would Roland have them? He busted you out of jail, remember? If he was part of some conspiracy, working with Dr. Bart to somehow cover it up, why would he help you?”

  “‘This is what you paid me to do,’” Michael muttered.

  “What?”

  “That’s what Roland Eads said when I asked him why he was helping me. Right before…”

  “Before? Before what? Before someone shot him? You said someone shot him.” I slowed the car as we came to a stoplight. Rain began to pelt the windshield. I found the switch for the wipers and turned them on.

  Michael had gone silent again; he was looking down at the footwell and fidgeting with his watch.

  I turned and glared at him. “Michael, you said someone shot him,” I repeated. “Someone else.”

  His voice was thin again. Childlike. “I see things sometimes, Meg, things that aren’t always real.”

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Gimble

  We’re all on the mark now,” Longtin said. “I guess that’s the simplest way to look at it. When Doc Fitzgerald started treating me, I wasn’t aware of the different people living inside my body. Many of them weren’t aware of each other. He described all my personalities as living in this giant room, a room so big that even if they shouted, they couldn’t hear each other. A room too dark to see. In the center was a single spotlight. Whoever was on the mark stood there. If they left, someone else would take their place. Only one personality talked to everybody, and that was Kevin. A few months into treatment, Doc Fitzgerald found Kevin. He eventually convinced him to bring some of the other personalities forward. And over time, they all got to know each other. Then he began a process he called fusion. As he identified each personality, he’d fuse them with my core. Over time, Mary became part of Jeffery, then Joey…all thirteen, one at a time. He told me it was like the pieces of a puzzle slowly coming together to create one image, one core personality. Jeffery’s.”

  “You’re speaking about yourself in the third person, do you realize that?” Vela asked.

  “I am?”

  “Yes.”

  Longtin glanced at Gimble, offered an uncomfortable smile, then turned back to Vela. “I
do that sometimes.”

  Gimble understood. The look on Vela’s face said it all.

  This man wasn’t cured at all.

  Outside, heavy raindrops began to beat on the window and the metal roof of the house.

  Vela leaned in closer. “Jeffery, you said Dr. Fitzgerald never meant to cure you, that he only wanted to understand what made you this way. Did he figure that out?”

  Longtin nodded.

  “Did he share that with you?”

  Longtin bit his lower lip. “Kevin told him.”

  “The dominant personality? The one who spoke to all the others?”

  He nodded again. “I didn’t remember it. I couldn’t. Or I didn’t want to. I suppose that was the real reason.” He peeled a blank note from the Post-it pad on the table and began to fold it and unfold it. “My father died when I was two, car accident. And my mother remarried about two years later. My stepfather did things to me. He’d take me to this abandoned barn on the property next to our house. I like to think she didn’t know, but looking back on it, I don’t understand how she couldn’t. I…I didn’t remember any of it, not until Kevin. Kevin told Doc Fitzgerald all about it. He hadn’t forgotten anything. Then Doc Fitzgerald told me. My mind would just shut down, and I’d black out, or at least I thought that’s what happened. Kevin said I wasn’t blacking out at all—he just stepped in to take the abuse because I couldn’t. When it was over, he’d go away again.”

  Longtin wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. “My mother couldn’t have known, right? Who would…she just couldn’t…”

  “Probably not,” Vela said, although he didn’t sound very convincing.

  Longtin shook it off and went on. “Once Doc Fitzgerald figured out what had caused my personalities to split, his treatment shifted. I didn’t see this at the time. I couldn’t. Between the medications and the blackouts, I still had trouble focusing. He became fixated. He told me it was important I remembered every moment of that abuse, every horrific thing my stepfather did, and Doc Fitzgerald would push for it. The work he had done, the fusion, all began to unravel. Kevin got protective, told the others not to trust the doctor, said none of us should. He even told me—and Kevin rarely spoke directly to me. Mary suggested we all stop taking the medications, so we did that. That only made Doc Fitzgerald angry. He instructed the nurses to inject my medications rather than administer them in pill form. I was confined to my room…”