By Reason of Insanity

by Rachel Sinclair

  "So, it’s okay for me to hire Regina back?"

  She clasped her hands in front of her, and gave me a look that told me that she wasn’t happy about any of it, but she felt that she was going to have to do it anyways. "I suppose. I suppose if that’s what you need to do to understand that I am the woman for you, and you're the man for me, then I suppose that it's best that you go ahead and get her out of your system. So go ahead and hire her back. Do what you need to do. I’ll tell your boss, James, that I'm okay with her being on your payroll."

  And then she looked away.

  “There's one more thing "she said to me. She scratched her cheek, and pulled on her hair. She ran her fingers through her silky red hair, and then put her hair up on top of her head for a second with her fingers, and let it gently cascade back down to her shoulders.

  "What's that?"

  "I want you to try to find the real killer. I don't want to be called crazy to the court. I don't want to have to go to a mental institution for the rest of my life, or for any of my life. Unless you can show that if I did kill him, it was because of temporary insanity. Then maybe I wouldn't have to go to a mental institution. But, I'm beginning to think that I didn’t kill him. And I don't want to have to pay for it."

  Once again, I felt like I was on a Tilt a Whirl. It seemed like every other day she was changing her mind about exactly how it was that she wanted me to try this case. Plead her guilty, try to plead her insane, and now she was finally telling me that she wanted me to look for the real killer, because she was finally convinced that she didn’t do it?

  Why did I feel that she was covering for somebody?

  Or, maybe she was covering for somebody before, but she wasn't anymore?

  "Okay. Well, I thank you for allowing me to hire Regina back. I can guarantee that the investigation is going to go a lot faster now. At any rate, I know that you say that you don't want to take an insanity plea, but, at the moment, that's where we are. Unless I can figure out exactly who killed Lawrence, to the point where I'm convinced that you didn't actually do it, then we are at the insanity plea stage. Still."

  I waited for her to attack me, screaming like a Banshee, or rip me apart, telling me that she wanted me to do something else. I waited for her to change her mind, like she had been changing her mind all along.

  Instead she just smiled at me, and looked up at the window. And then looked back at me. "Whatever you want to do. That's fine with me." And then she got her purse and got up. "Just let me know. Just let me know how you're going to pursue this. In the meantime, you know where to find me. Tata."

  As I watched her leave, I was thinking about how strange it all was. But then again, her psychotherapist told me that that was the way she was. She was hot and cold, on and off, with a shifting sense of reality, and a shifting sense of self. Mood swings were just par for the course.

  I went ahead and called Regina. "Hey, Regina, we're good."

  "Cool. I'll meet you at your condo, and we’ll go to the airport together. Later."

  “Later."

  Chapter 26

  Marina

  Marina hoped that she told her attorney the right thing. She’d been in contact with her sister, well, she guessed that Oksana was considered to be her brother now. Brock insisted that she was no longer a she, but currently a he. Marina could never wrap her mind around that, so she still referred to her as a sister, and she still used the female pronoun, she.

  She had been convinced for the longest time that Brock was the one who actually killed Lawrence. She had no idea, really, who killed Lawrence, because she genuinely was in a dissociative state at that time. She found out some information that was disturbing to her, more disturbing than anything could possibly be. Information that made her want to vomit. She simply could not understand that somebody would do something like that to her.

  Who would leave a baby in an orphanage deliberately, just because that person wanted to see how the orphanage would affect her? That person wanted to see how different she would be from an identical twin who was given all the advantages of life. It was evil. That’s all that she could say about it. Evil.

  She had forgotten how it was that she found out what had happened. No, that wasn’t necessarily true. She remembered how it happened. She remembered how she found it out.

  Lawrence was careless. He had left his computer on a certain page, and she saw the information there. She saw what Lawrence had written to Dr. Weber, and she realized what had happened.

  She still remembered that day when she found out exactly why it was that she was in the orphanage all those years. Why she was not with a good family until the age of seven. By the time her adoptive family got to her, the Williams, it was too late. They tried to do all they could for her, but it was no use. She was so broken inside that there was just nothing that they could really do.

  She was broken because of what had happened to her in the orphanage, and what happened in the orphanage was directly the result of some evil, twisted thoughts in one man's head. Some evil twisted study. She didn't know that she had a sister, let alone an identical twin, until she saw that email that was sent from Lawrence to Dr. Weber.

  When she found that she had an identical twin, it was just a matter of doing some detective work on her own, hiring a private investigator to find out exactly what happened to her twin. Somehow, someway, she managed to track her down.

  She tried to help her. She tried to give her money, because it was obvious that she was more broken than even Marina was. Brock would never take the money. She told her that she was happy exactly where she was, living in a tiny apartment with rats all around. It was disgusting to Marina. What was more disgusting was that she would not actually take the money that she tried to give her.

  Marina was starting to think that maybe her mental health illness was something that was inherited, because it was obvious that her identical twin had severe mental illness as well. It was obvious that there was something that was very off about her. Not just the fact that she was addicted to meth, living in a slum, all of that. She just seemed very off.

  Marina was therefore convinced from the time that she found that her husband had been killed that her sister was behind it. No matter how many times Brock told her that she had nothing to do with it, Marina would never believe her.

  She would do anything to protect Brock, because she knew that if Brock was the one who killed Lawrence, she was doing it for her. She was doing it from some kind of misguided sense of loyalty to her.

  However, she finally started to believe that maybe Brock had nothing to do with it. She didn't know who killed her husband. She was recently sure that she didn't, although that she could never be sure of even that completely. She was also reasonably sure that it wasn’t Brock.

  So who did kill Lawrence? She didn't know, but she was confident that her attorney was going to find out.

  Marina knew that she wasn’t going to go to a mental institution for the rest of her life.

  She just had to hope that Aidan could find out who killed Lawrence, and he could find out on time. She knew that he had only 60 days to change her plea from an insanity plea to something else. Judge Watts had emphasized that if Aidan could not find the culprit, the person who killed Lawrence, it was safer just to go ahead with an insanity plea. A part of her knew that this was true.

  It would be horrible to go to a mental institution, possibly for the rest of her life. But, at the same time, she had walked down stays at various institutions her entire life.

  It would be a tragedy to go to prison.

  Chapter 27

  Regina came to my house on Friday afternoon, lugging a small suitcase behind her on wheels. I was impressed. I was used to women packing enormous suitcases for an overnight trip, because they had to have everything under the sun in these suitcases. All their makeup, hair products, flat irons, 18 changes of clothing, shoes, you name it.

  But not Regina. She was just as low-maintenance as she ever was. I could tell th
at because her suitcase was so tiny, even though we were going to be going away for the entire weekend. I made arrangements to see Sylvia and Harry the next day, Saturday.

  Harry had told me over the phone that Saturday was the best time to see him, because it was his day off. He seemed like a good dude, a warm person. I was anxious to find out how it was that they were able to adopt Oksana, and what relationship, if any, he had to Dr. Weber.

  "Okay, Aidan, I'm ready to go. So let's call the Uber, and let's get the show on the road."

  I brought up my Uber app, punched in my information, and the app informed me that an Alexander was going to be picking us up within the next five minutes. I knew that we had to get a move on soon.

  “An Uber is going to be picking us up, so let's go down and meet him."

  I got my own packed suitcase out of the closet and Regina and I made our way down to the parking lot right in front of my condo. Within a few minutes a black SUV pulled up, and I could see that the person inside the SUV was Alexander. He looked just like his picture.

  Alexander got out and helped put the bags into the back of his SUV, and we were off.

  An hour and a half later, we were on the flight to New York.

  "Now, tell me again, what exactly you hope to find out from these people?" Regina asked me after we took our seat and were in the air. I managed to get both of us First Class seats, which was a priority for me, considering the fact that this flight was going to be over 5 hours long. I had no desire to have my long legs scrunched up in the regular cabin for that long. I just wanted to stretch out and relax.

  "Well, I need to find out how it was that they were able to adopt Oksana. I'm also curious to find out if they knew that Oksana had an identical twin. I don't know. Even though the guy seemed very friendly over the phone, I wonder if he has something to hide."

  "Like what? What would he have to hide?"

  "I don't know. I just kind of wonder if he is hiding his relationship with Dr. Weber. There's something that is just not adding up in this entire scenario. I think if I can figure it out, I can probably solve the case. At least, I can solve it enough that I can withdraw my client’s insanity plea. But if I can't figure this out, all bets are off. She's safer going to a mental institution than prison."

  "The plot thickens, to say the very least. I still can't believe that that crazy doc would do that to those two girls. I mean, I've heard of this kind of thing happening. I saw this documentary called Three Identical Strangers, about these three identical boys who were all separated at birth, because some crazy researcher guy wanted to see how different they would be over the years, growing up in three different households. See, the mother, she was a teenage mom and she put them all up for adoption. All three of them were separated, and none of the adoptive parents knew that each boy had two other identical brothers. Each boy was given to a very different household. One boy was given to a blue-collar family, one was given to a middle-class family, and one was given to a rich family. This shrink guy, I think his name was Dr. Peter, and this woman, Viola, they wanted to study each of the boys to see how they reacted to the different environments. They didn't find each other until they went to college, and one of them actually killed himself."

  I wondered how people could do something like that to somebody. Separate identical triplets, not tell the adoptive parents that they were getting a child who had two other brothers. All that because he wanted to study them?

  But this. This was something else. This was far more evil than even that. This was deliberately leaving somebody in an orphanage, and taking her sister and placing her with an affluent family, just to see how different they would be.

  I sat next to Regina, quietly thinking about how I was going to broach the subject with her about how I felt about her. She had to have known. I mean, after all, we did sleep together.

  “Regina," I said to her. "I didn't just want you to come with me because I wanted to use your investigative skills with this family. I mean, that's part of the reason, of course. Because you’re the best investigator. Nobody can read people like you can. You’re the best with shaking people down. And I have to admit, that that's part of the reason why I wanted you to come with me. But it's only part."

  She nodded her head. "I know, Aidan. Believe me, I know." She took a deep breath. "Aidan, I'm 33 years old," she began.

  “I don't care about the age difference," I blurted out. "I really don't care about it. I know that I'm 25, and you’re 33, but it doesn’t make a difference to me that you’re older."

  "Will you let me finish?" she asked in a very stern voice. "Geez. Let me finish. I don't care about the age difference either. It's only eight years, who gives a crap about that? That's not what I’m trying to say. I was just trying to tell you that I'm 33 years old, and I've never had a relationship with anybody. Any man. Or woman, for that matter. Unless, of course, you count Michael, my boyfriend/pimp back in the day. You know, I went to live with him when I was only 13 years old, because, quite frankly, I needed somebody to take care of me at that time. And he did. In more ways than one. But that was the only guy I’ve been involved with in my entire life. I guess what I'm trying to say is, there's a reason for that. There's a reason why I don't get involved with anybody."

  I knew what she was going to say before she said it. It was written on her face. But I went ahead and let her tell me whatever it was that she had to say to me.

  "See, I just have never had a good experience with a man. Aside from Michael, the only sexual encounters I've had have been with men who raped me when I was young, and my johns from the days that I worked the streets. The reason why I became a prostitute was because I felt like that's all I was for men. Just somebody who they wanted to play with. I mean, they took it from me, whether I wanted them to or not, so I figured that I might as well get paid for it."

  I put my hand on her hand, and rubbed it gently. She was shaking. This was more emotion than I'd ever gotten out of her. But, at the same time, it was also very discouraging. She was telling me exactly why she wouldn't be able to be with me the way I wanted to be with her.

  "Anyhow,” she continued, “When I went to prison for popping Michael, I really learned how to stand on my own two feet. I met some amazing women behind bars. Most of them have stories like mine. Tragic stories, but we had a kind of sisterhood behind bars. And you know, I went to all these classes in prison, too, about building my self-esteem and all that. I thought these classes would be bullshit. You know, I thought that I had to go to these classes, they were mandatory and all that, and I thought that I would go in there and just go to sleep. But, I was really surprised when I actually kind of took to those lessons. I don't know, I would have to say that prison was probably the best thing for me. If I never served time, I know that I would be dead."

  “Have you thought about seeing somebody about your issues with men?” I asked.

  She just shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. I’ve been afraid of seeing a shrink. A shrink would make me bring up stuff that I don't want brought up. It's better to just keep it hidden, keep pretending it's not even there. So, that's it. I'm sorry about the other night. I'm sorry that I got so drunk that you and I ended up where we ended up. You have to understand, that's the closest I've gotten with anybody in years."

  She started to laugh. "So I guess it tells you something about me. The only way I can get naked with some guy is if I'm three sheets to the wind. No offense. If I was actually somebody who was halfway normal, I would love to go out with you. I mean, look at you, you're gorgeous. And, you’re probably the coolest guy I’ve ever known. Trust me when I tell you, there are women out there with much less baggage than me, who can treat you the way you need to be treated."

  Unfortunately, the things that she was saying to me was not making me not want to go out with her anymore. In fact, I felt myself growing even closer to her. She had confided in me, and that meant a lot.

  "Anyhow,” Regina said, changing the subject. “Let's talk about wh
at we're going to ask Sylvia and Harry Jacobs. What are we going to going to get out of this visit?"

  I took the cue that it was time to move on from the earlier subject, as much as I didn't want to. I so wanted to talk to her about my feelings for her. But, at the same time, I didn't want to push her.

  "Well, I just need to find out more about Oksana, and I'm really interested in finding out exactly how it was they were able to get in touch with her. I wonder if they’re somehow related to Dr. Weber."

  "You think they’re going to tell you about that?” Regina asked, incredulous. “I mean, if they were in on this whole thing, do you actually think that they would come right out and say, ‘yeah, I'm a willing participant in a cruel and evil experiment. I'm proud of it.’ The answer to that is no. I don't think you're going to get what you want to out of these people.”

  “I wanted to ask you about Brock. Were you at all aware that Brock was actually a female? And, did you think that he resembled Marina at all?"

  Regina shook her head. "I'm embarrassed about that entire thing. I guess I probably should've figured it out. But, you have to understand, that kid, I mean, he's not a kid, he's in his early 30s, but he has been ravaged by drugs. Have you ever seen pictures of people who have a severe meth addiction? I see them on the Internet. Pictures that show the same person before an addiction, during it, and after they were fully addicted. Do you ever see those websites?"

  "I know what you're talking about." It was amazing how much an addiction like meth can transform your looks. It makes you unrecognizable. I remembered seeing pictures of an actress by the name of Amanda Peterson. She was really pretty back in the 80s, freshfaced, starred in a teen movie with Patrick Dempsey. By the time she died from a drug overdose, you could not tell that she was the same person at all. I had seen other pictures of people who suffered from a meth addiction, and the transformation in their looks was beyond belief.