by John Philpin
The flames illuminated the space immediately around me and cast dancing light shafts and shifting shadows the length of the room. As my eyes adjusted to the play of light and dark, I remembered the timered light. Before I could wonder why it had not switched on, I saw the woman’s form on the sofa at the far end of the room.
“It must be someday,” she said.
The bottle dropped from my hand and rolled in an arc, spewing amber foam across the floor.
“What do I call you?” she asked, her voice deeper than I remembered. “ ‘Father’ seems so formal. How about ‘Dad’?”
I studied the dark shape on the sofa surrounded by darts of light and moving shadows. I wanted to see her face, but I could not.
“You seem surprised.”
Her voice had a lilting cadence, as if she suppressed laughter.
“You had plenty of opportunity to kill me. You waited until now. What do you want?”
She hesitated. “To talk, to fill in the years.”
“I read your diary. Is there more?”
Seconds passed as Lily sat in silence. Finally she said, “You are going to die.”
“We’re all going to die. Whether I’m alive or dead, you get arrested.”
Was I a witness to craziness or cunning? I wondered. I decided on the latter. She would be armed, confident that she held the advantage. My task was to tip her into madness. My only weapon was my ability to crawl inside her mind.
“I want you to listen—”
“Not interested,” I said.
“You’re playing a head game. It won’t work.”
“I wouldn’t attempt to screw with your mind,” I lied. “I know that it would be a waste of time.”
She sat forward on the sofa, her forearms resting on her knees. Now I saw the outline of the gun in her left hand.
“I waited years,” she said.
“Terrible waste of time,” I said, testing to see how far I had to shove before I got a reaction. “Killing me kills you. The reason for you to be whole, to make your millions, to enjoy the hunt and the kill… dies with me.”
I crossed my legs, using that movement as an excuse to slide a few inches to my left. The firelight careened erratically through the room.
At random intervals, Dorman’s eyes glowed like embers across the black space, narrow mirrors of yellow-orange light. The room’s altered luminescence allowed glimpses of her expression, a study in sculpted facial lines devoid of feeling. She was not the woman I had seen in Jaworski’s interrogation room. Lily Dorman was the woman I knew as Gretchen Nash.
“Katrina said you were a kind man,” she said, her voice low-pitched and hard, with a barely noticeable tremor.
“She knew me before I chased killers like you.”
“Not like me.”
“That’s the one trait that all of you have in common. You think you’re unique. Markham thought he was the only one. Someone should get a bunch of you together in a room and make you listen to one another.”
“You are an insufferable, odious man.”
“I’ve been in Maine less than two weeks, and that’s the second time a woman has called me insufferable. I’ll yield on that one, but I might quibble about odious.”
To liberate the unreasoning rage deep within Lily Dorman, I had to represent a threat to her. When she was young, she was trapped. There was no escape from her father, the man who terrorized and tortured her. She retreated into her mind and found solace and power there. The police who arrived at the trailer when she burned her father, cornered her. I wanted Lily Dorman to feel trapped and taunted. I wanted pure rage.
“If you expected me to sit around and reminisce with you, you were wrong.”
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“Stuart Gilman told me the same thing. This trip has been one long déjà vu. Everything happens twice, or not at all.”
I noted her quick, involuntary eye movement to the right, the first hint of disorientation that I’d seen, the only indication I had that she was vulnerable. The non sequitur was a distraction technique that I often used in hypnotic work.
“I have to admit,” I said, “I am curious about Squires and Baker. Squires was obviously expendable.”
She stood unsteadily, the gun at her side.
I needed her standing within five feet of me before she raised the gun. Driving a person to flail, and not tripping them into an act of directed aggression, required precision. It was time to allow her some slack, before I snapped the line taut.
She shrugged. One knee bent slightly, so that her body weight was no longer evenly distributed. “Amanda was a reasonably good actor, but weak.”
“Where did you find her?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Her death won’t be ruled a suicide,” I said.
“The police will charge Edgar Heath. They won’t know what else to do. It was his gun.”
“They have Baker,” I reminded her.
“For now,” she said. “Janine is… devoted.”
“All the years that you were in Oregon, there wasn’t any trace of Janine…no traffic tickets, no charge accounts, nothing.”
A slight smile creased her mouth. “Her name is Melanie Martin.”
She took a step forward, the growing fireglow illuminating her face.
“How did you survive the House of Horrors?”
“I like to think that I got out of there alive because of my determination to avoid defeat by a machine, but you didn’t intend that I die there.”
“Astute.”
“Not terribly. You had the perfect opportunity to kill me two nights ago. Will you tell me about Markham?”
Dorman shifted her weight and moved a step forward. “I made a compartment for him, welcomed him in, and gazed into his mind’s eye. You remember his mind’s eye, don’t you?”
I did not care what she talked about; I wanted only that she talk.
“I never doubted that I could find him,” she said. “He was on the run, frightened, not wanting to die, not wanting to be caught. His sister was all he had left. I knew that he wouldn’t take a direct route. He never went anywhere in a straight line. I used a computer map program to track him. I plotted the least-direct roads, figured a range of driving times, and isolated one twelve-hour period and a ten-mile radius near Portsmouth. Then I used topographical maps to locate the campsites and vacation cottages in that area.”
Her tone remained flat. She was not a proud daughter reporting her accomplishments to Dad. I had seen psychopathic indifference hundreds of times, but always in men.
“Markham never drove at night, so I did. From the time I arrived in Portsmouth, it was two hours until I walked up the rutted driveway to a hunting camp and saw the Pennsylvania license plate on the stolen truck. Perhaps the daughter is more skilled than the father.”
“You took a great risk,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said, moving a step closer. “I told him the story of his escape, how he found a car with keys in the ignition and money in the glove box. He never looked at the registration.”
“You registered the car in his name,” I said.
“He didn’t believe me,” she said. “The sound of the gun was loud and satisfying in the small cabin.”
She gazed around my living room. “Probably like it will be in here,” she said, her eyes settling again on mine. “He disappointed me. I expected more blood.”
“Blood used to sicken you.”
“People change,” she said. “I feared and hated violence, and pain, and blood. I don’t anymore.”
I spread my palms on the brick hearth as if I were supporting myself, and grasped the fireplace poker. It was time to yank her hard and fast.
“A smart psychopath wouldn’t have your perverse need to be present for the kill,” I said. “She wouldn’t take the unnecessary risks that you have. She’d hire someone, or she’d make sure that I didn’t walk out of the amusement park. I’d be dead. S
he’d be pleased as punch. This way, everything blows up in your face.”
“No one knows who I am,” she said. “By the time they figure it out, it won’t matter.”
I focused intently on Dorman’s eyes.
“The perfect psychopath doesn’t feel anything. Unwieldy, ugly emotion doesn’t enter into the homicide equation. You’re carrying emotional baggage that you can’t dump. The obsession that has driven you is based on an erroneous belief.”
Again, her eyes flicked to the right.
“You have your justification, I guess. Your father fucked you.”
Dorman winced.
“Others with your pathology have their rationales.”
“You are my father.”
“When I’m dead, I can’t acknowledge that, can I? Shit. I’m not going to acknowledge it now. That’s your erroneous belief. Katrina pitied you, so she lied. Harper was your father.”
She hesitated. “Katrina is dead. Tell me that you are my father.”
I shook my head. “Lily, I could hug you and comfort you and pat you on the head and tell you to call me Pop. I won’t. You’re not my daughter. You’re just another fucking killer.”
As her left foot moved forward and she raised the gun, I pushed myself from the hearth and swung the poker.
The cast iron hit her upper arm with a boneshattering crunch. Her gun discharged into the floor, then clattered across the wide pine boards to the wall.
I intended the blow to cripple her, to drop her. Dorman did not go down.
She emitted a deep, guttural, rumbling growl. Lily Dorman’s beast had freed itself.
Her left arm, useless, dangled at her side, but she charged. I swung again, cracking her across the face. Twisting from the blow’s force, she fell headlong into the fire.
I dropped the poker and grabbed the back of her pants, yanking her out of the fireplace and onto the floor. Flames shot from her hair. The room filled with the acrid, curdled-milk smell of burned flesh. I whipped off my sweatshirt and smothered the flames, careful to avoid her singed skin. The facial burns were not life-threatening, but had to be horribly painful.
As I pushed myself up, Dorman’s right hand shot out and grabbed my neck. Her eyes were closed, but the body continued to operate.
Her nails dug into my neck. When I could not disengage her grip, I punched her hard in the face. Dorman’s arm fell to her side.
Breathing heavily, my heart booming, I collapsed onto my back. After a moment, I rolled over, pressed my hand to the floor to push myself to a standing position, and flinched in pain. I’d broken bones in my hand when I hit her. I used my left hand, and twisted to push myself up.
The poker slammed the side of my head, and I crashed down. Blood slithered from below my ear and dripped onto the floor. The room spun like a merry-go-round run wild. I had to get up, at least to roll over, but I could not coordinate arms and legs.
I heard her move, listened as she inched across the floor. Then I felt her hand on my leg as she pulled herself over me on her way to the wall. She wanted the gun.
I grabbed her leg and tried to hold her. She kicked free from my grasp.
The spinning slowed, and I focused on Dorman. Her eyes were still closed. She was like a wolf caught in a leghold trap, using every bit of its remaining strength to survive, even if that meant gnawing off its leg.
Pain knifed from my shoulder to my side. My head and jaw throbbed. I hurled my weight in the direction that Dorman crawled and landed beside her, inches from her seared face. She groped forward, her right hand sweeping in arcs ahead of her, feeling for the gun. I extended my arm, gripped the pistol, and rolled away.
Dorman gave up her search and lay still.
I sat with my back against the hearth and stared at her motionless form.
“I won’t lose her again,” Katrina had said.
“She never came home,” I muttered as the door exploded open.
Jaworski aimed his gun at Dorman, then looked at me. “Jesus Christ. She alive?”
“Cuff her,” I told him. “Then call an ambulance.”
DICKIE STEVENS LEANED BACK IN HIS CHAIR OUTSIDE Room 42 at the regional hospital. As I approached, he lowered his copy of the Ragged Harbor Review and said, “How come they never get this shit right? You tell em stuff, you give it to em printed out, and they still get it wrong.”
“Comics are good,” I told him. “Horoscopes aren’t bad.”
He smiled. “The docs get you fixed up?”
“Nothing that a few Band-Aids and ten pounds of adhesive couldn’t repair. The chief around?”
“He and Jasper are with Dorman’s doc at the nursing station.”
I glanced into a darkened Room 42.
“I’ve been sitting here since they put her in there last night,” Stevens said. “She ain’t said a word or made a sound. She ain’t even moved. From what I hear, the docs got her stabilized. She’s in fair condition.”
I nodded and walked down the hall.
Two federal officers huddled with a doctor. Jasper scribbled ferociously on her notepad. Jaworski sat with his hands clasped on his ample stomach and chewed gum.
“That tape holding you together?” the chief asked.
“Pretty much,” I said, bending painfully into a fiberglass chair beside Jasper.
“Three Boston lawyers showed up this morning,” Jaworski said. “Whenever Dorman decides to talk, we won’t hear what she has to say.”
“Who called the lawyers?”
Jaworski shrugged. “She has players all over the country. Who knows? We leaned on Edgar Heath again last night after we brought you here. I’m convinced he’s told us what he knows.”
Jaworski nodded at the two feds. “Their buddies are tracking money and not having much success. They’ve located a couple of million in local accounts, and they’re in court now to freeze all of MI’s real estate holdings, but That’s it.”
“The bottom line, Dr. Frank,” Jasper said, looking up from her notepad, “is that we have a case against Dorman for attempted murder. Her attorneys will point a finger at Janine Baker for the killings, Baker and Norton Weatherly for MI’s money-laundering activities and the missing millions, and probably have a good shot at an insanity defense on the attempted-murder charge.”
“What about her mother?”
“Lucas, she shot and killed a cop and a motel clerk, then beat her mother to death,” Jaworski said. “We have no witnesses, no weapons.”
“She beat Katrina to death,” I repeated dumbly, imagining Lily’s rage and her mother’s terror.
“A heavy, blunt instrument.”
“What about the Magnum she had last night?”
“Different weapon.”
“There is no physical evidence,” I said.
“Nothing,” Jasper said. “We tore apart the Monhegan house, her mother’s trailer, Eleanor McLean’s trailer, the Mellen and Danforth properties, and the MI facility. When we have secured the remainder of the company’s property holdings, we’ll go through them. The IRS might have some interest, but that’s about it.”
“Let me guess. She programmed the amusement park setup to erase itself.”
Jasper nodded. “The hard drive was blank.”
I ran my good hand through my hair, marveling at Lily Dorman’s throughness. Had she anticipated every possible pitfall?
“None of these assholes is perfect,” I said. “You’re not looking in the right place.”
“Dr. Frank, I’m doing my best to have a civil conversation with you. The FBI’s experts in Quantico have been on this since yesterday. Dorman does not fit any of the profiles of killers who keep souvenirs, trophies, or other records of their exploits.”
“So, if she goes down for attempted murder, with good time she walks in five to seven, disappears with her millions, and doesn’t surface until she decides it’s time to kill again. A good attorney won’t let her go the insanity route. A successful diminished-capacity defense and she walks out of court.”
/> “We have no evidence,” Jasper said.
I looked at Jaworski. “Give me your nine,” I said.
He sat up in his chair. “What for?”
“I’m gonna go blow Dorman’s brains out. Jasper just told me that’s the only way to close this case.”
“Dr. Frank—”
“Your experts are wrong,” I interrupted. “This was a kid who kept detailed, daily records on her fucking swamp snakes.”
Jasper talked, but I did not hear her. I heard Ellie McLean describe Lily Dorman as a child, emerging from the tidal wetland behind the trailer park.
Vanessa Stripe needs help taking care of the babies. Billy Brown-spot is overweight.
Most students of criminal behavior focus on the violent act, its behavioral precursors, and the offender’s subsequent actions. The organization of personality—the traits, quirks, and idiosyncracies—is ignored because it is considered irrelevant to the act.
“The swamp is where she buried Spike,” Ellie said. “That was her dog. She dragged him down there in a burlap sack, dug the hole all by herself.”
Personality traits transcend behavior. Whether Lily Dorman was in killing mode, painting-a-picture mode, or millionaire mode, she would always be meticulous. Crazy or sane, writing was her self-expression.
“At first I was afraid to walk on the dike,” Lily wrote in her journal, “so I sat in my favorite dry spot, listened to the breeze creep through the bayberry bushes, and wondered why my father, a doctor, after all, did not arrive, fix my mother, and send Harper away.”
When I had walked onto the dike, I had seen the small, weathered cross, fashioned by a child from lattice slats and roofing nails and hammered into the ground to mark the spot where she had buried her dog.
I covered my face with my left hand.
“You okay?” Jaworski asked.
“Herb, do you have to hang around here?”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Let’s take a ride,” I said.