When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “Okay, I guess. Except sometimes I get phantom pains in my leg.” A shy Lyssy grin. “You know, the one that isn’t there?”

  “Do you remember how you lost that leg?” asked Trotman.

  Puzzled, Lyssy turned to Corder. “Is that a joke?”

  “What? Oh—no, it’s an idiomatic expression. She doesn’t mean did you lose it, she means do you remember how your leg came to be amputated?”

  “No, ma’am—that happened before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I can remember.”

  “What about your hands?”

  He looked down at the small, dreadfully scarred appendages hanging at his sides as though he’d never seen them before. The flesh had melted away from the inner surfaces of the fingers, leaving the hourglass shape of the bones distinguishable beneath the shiny scar tissue; livid white patches of unlined, grafted skin stretched tautly across both palms. Ultimately, though, the plastic surgeons had done their job well: those deformed hands not only functioned, but were as inexorable as claws or talons once they’d grabbed hold of something—it was letting go that they found difficult. “Also before.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I know what happened.”

  “But you just said you didn’t know.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Are you playing games with me, Mr. Maxwell?”

  Lyssy gave Dr. Al a helpless glance, as if to say, I’m doing my best here. Dr. Al nodded encouragingly. Lyssy turned back to Trotman. “You asked me if I remembered,” he explained earnestly. “I don’t remember much of anything that happened before I came here. But Dr. Al told me some of it. When I was sixteen, I guess I tried to put a fire out with my bare hands. Not the smartest move, hunh?”

  Trotman turned to Corder and gave him a raised-eyebrow What are you still doing here? glance. He nodded. “We’ll be next door if you need us.” Wally followed him into the adjoining conference room.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Maxwell,” said the psychiatrist. Two molded plastic chairs, identical to the ones stacked in the smaller room, faced each other at a forty-five-degree angle at the end of the conference table, the top of which was made of some black, unreflective space-age polymer, like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lyssy took the end chair; Dr. Trotman tucked the back of her skirt under her as she lowered herself into the other one. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Let’s begin with your name.”

  “Begin what?” Dr. Al would have smiled patiently at that; Dr. Trotman glanced up sharply from the notebook in her lap. “Sorry,” said Lyssy, mock-chastened. “My name is Lyssy.”

  “Full name?”

  “Ulysses Christopher Maxwell.”

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “Monday.”

  “Date, month, year?”

  He got that right, too, adding shyly, “My birthday’s on Wednesday—I’ll be thirty-two.”

  “Happy birthday in advance. Can you tell me where we are right now?”

  “1-South—the conference room.” She waited. “Oh, you mean the hospital? It’s the Reed-Chase Institute.”

  OX3, the psychiatrist noted on the pad—oriented times three. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Dial down the grin, ratchet up the earnest factor—it was very important to Lyssy that she understand. “When I was little, my parents abused me real bad—I mean, badly. And there are some people, I’m one of them, who when they’re little and bad things happen to them, their mind tries to protect itself by splitting up into all these different identities. And the different identities, they all think they’re separate people, and the real person doesn’t have any control over them. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what they’re doing.”

  “I see.”

  “And in my case, some of those alters were really psychologically disturbed because of what had happened, the abuse and all, and so they went on to abuse other people. Dr. Al says that happens a lot, that abuse gets passed along. And, and, and they—Well, they’re gone, now, the others—there’s just me. But lots of people, they don’t believe in such a thing as multiple personalities—they think I’m a bad person, and that if I get out, I’d do bad things. But I wouldn’t, I couldn’t—I don’t even like to think about bad things.”

  “I see,” she said again, then jotted down another note and looked up. “Do you ever hear voices, Mr. Maxwell?”

  “Sure, all the time,” he blurted cheerfully, and felt an immediate change in the atmosphere, as if the room had grown colder.

  “What do they say, these voices?”

  He furrowed his brow, bit his lower lip—he wanted to get this one exactly right. “The last one, it said…right, right: ‘What do they say, these voices?’”

  Trotman looked as though she might be suppressing a grin. “What I meant was, do you ever hear voices other than your own inside your head, or voices outside your head that no one else can hear?”

  Absolutely not, said a voice in Lyssy’s head.

  “Absolutely not,” said Lyssy.

  6

  Lily DeVries was four years old when her parents were arrested for sexually abusing her, Dr. Cogan explained to Lilith. Really awful stuff that had begun when she was still an infant.

  A strange, volatile child, Lily had been removed from her parents’ custody and placed with her grandparents. Withdrawn and depressed one moment, outgoing and flirtatious the next, now as winsome and girlish as Shirley Temple, now a tree-climbing tomboy or an autist devoid of affect, and plagued at intervals by fugue states and bouts of severe amnesia, she had already been misdiagnosed twice, once as bipolar and once as schizophrenic, by the time her grandparents brought her to Dr. Cogan.

  A psychiatrist specializing in dissociative disorders, Dr. Cogan had no trouble diagnosing a near textbook case of dissociative identity (formerly multiple personality) disorder. In the face of the abuse she’d suffered, Lily’s psyche had splintered off into several alternate identities—alters, for short.

  Over the next twelve years, Dr. Cogan continued, she had worked with Lily to help her face her traumatic past and reintegrate her psyche. They’d made some progress—extraordinary progress, given that DID was generally considered to be a treatment-resistant disorder. Sure, there were backward steps—puberty, for instance, had hit Lily like a ton of bricks, causing a new identity to split off, a sex-obsessed alter who called herself Lilah.

  But most of her childhood alters had ceased to manifest by the time Lily graduated from the local charter high school that had supervised her home-schooling, and as she approached her eighteenth birthday, even Lilah’s appearances had grown fewer and further between.

  All that had changed two weeks ago when Lily’s grandfather drove his SUV—and his wife—over a cliff on Highway 1. Unable to deal with the catastrophic turn of events, Lily had run away from home. “And from that point on,” Dr. Cogan concluded, “you certainly know more about what’s been happening to her than I do.”

  “Because I’m her,” said Lilith flatly.

  “Because you’re her.”

  “And I’m rich.”

  “By most standards.”

  “I have a big house in Pebble Beach.”

  Dr. Cogan nodded.

  “Any wheels?”

  “A Lexus, as I recall.”

  Lilith mulled it all over for a good three or four seconds, then: “Cool—let’s go.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that easy,” said Dr. Cogan.

  “Why the fuck not? I could use a little bling in my life—I’ve been living like a fucking pauper.”

  “For one thing, you’re underage. For another, you’re still suffering from a serious psychiatric—”

  “Oh, horseshit,” Lilith broke in. “I’m fine—I just forget stuff, that’s all.”

  “A serious psychiatric di
sorder,” Dr. Cogan insisted softly as she went spelunking through the depths of her purse again and emerged with a slick-looking full-color brochure. “Here, I’d like you to take a look at this.” She slid the brochure across the table to Lilith, who held it up dubiously between her thumb and forefinger, as if she’d just seen it fished out of a slime-covered pond.

  “The Reed-Chase Institute,” she read aloud from the cover, then slid the brochure back to the doctor. “That wouldn’t happen to be an insane asylum, would it? You know, as in nuthouse? Funny farm? Snake pit?”

  Cogan’s thin lips tightened. “It’s a hospital. One of the finest psychiatric hospitals in the country. And most important of all, it’s the only facility in the country with any kind of a track record when it comes to dissociative identity disorder. Dr. Corder, the director, treats the DID patients personally, and he does seem to be coming up with some surprising results.”

  “Results,” echoed Lilith doubtfully. “As in, cure?”

  “In some cases, yes.”

  “Then answer me this. Say, just for the sake of argument, the DID gets cured.”

  “Yes?”

  “What happens to me?—what happens to Lilith?” But the look on the doctor’s face was all the answer she needed. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” She stood up, muttering something about having to use the ladies’ room.

  “I think I’ll join you.” Cogan gathered up the tape recorder, the photographs, and the brochure, and slung her purse over her shoulder.

  “I figured that, too,” said Lilith. She already knew from Mama Rose’s furtive exit that there had to be a back way out, and had decided she could easily overpower the older woman once the two were alone. It was Pender she was worried about. But he made no move to follow—just smiled up at them as they passed his table, then turned back to his newspaper.

  Short corridor, cinder-block walls. Restroom doors on the left, a door marked Office on the right, and at the end of the hallway, a heavy-looking door with a push bar and a warning: Emergency Exit Only.

  Lilith opened the ladies’ room door, peeked in. Toilet in the corner, sink against the wall. One customer at a time. “After you,” she said, backing away.

  “No, you first,” Dr. Cogan said firmly.

  Lilith closed the door behind her, sat on the toilet long enough to warm it, flushed, washed her hands, splashed cold water on her face. Lily, my ass, she thought, staring at her reflection in the dingy mirror over the sink, then dried her hands with a coarse brown paper towel, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor, where Dr. Cogan had stationed herself between Lilith and the exit.

  “Your turn,” said Lilith.

  “Funny thing, I don’t seem to—”

  Lilith charged, drove her lowered shoulder into the doctor’s midsection, knocking her backward and sending her purse flying. The girl hit the breaker bar with both hands, crashed through to daylight, and ran straight into what felt like a wall of meat.

  “Going somewhere?” said the man called Pender, wrapping his arms around her and, in one impossibly smooth, tango-like move, grabbing her wrists, spinning her around, and forcing her arms behind her back. Lilith kicked backward at his shins; he wrenched her wrists upward, just high enough for the pain to immobilize her.

  Squirming, almost weeping with frustration, she swore at him like a biker’s bitch as Dr. Cogan came stumbling out into the glare with her jacket twisted sideways and her blouse hiked out from her skirt. “Nice catch,” she told Pender grimly, fumbling around in her purse and taking out a hypodermic syringe.

  “Just a—whoa there, easy honey—just a hunch. As Quasimodo once said.” Pender had of course circled the building as soon as they’d arrived, and mentally noted all the potential exits.

  Lily watched in horror as the doctor held the syringe up to the sky and tapped it a few times with a tapered, reddish-orange fingernail. “What’s that for?”

  “Just something to calm you down.”

  She was behind Lilith now, pushing up the sleeve of Lilith’s T-shirt and swabbing her tricep with an antiseptic towelette. A pinch, a needle prick. The sky darkened and the macadam opened beneath Lilith. She felt herself falling, falling, through bottomless space like Alice through the rabbit hole, until the darkness closed in overhead and swallowed her up.

  7

  The room that housed Ulysses Maxwell seemed unremarkable at first glance. Pale blue walls; dark blue carpet; white acoustic ceiling; single bed with a cheerful yellow comforter, open-shelved dresser, bookcase and TV/VCR hutch of blond wood; and in the corner a computer station and a low-backed, ergonomic desk chair—it all looked normal enough to Lyssy, who had little basis for comparison.

  But there were no sharp edges anywhere. The walls met each other in smoothly rounded curves, the closet and adjoining bathroom were doorless alcoves, the furniture was all rounded at the corners, and with the exception of the desk chair it was all bolted to the floor. The only lights were set behind opaque panels in the ceiling and the panes in the sealed window overlooking the arboretum were made of two sheets of unbreakable glass sandwiching a layer of fine steel mesh.

  What really gave the game away, though, was the smooth-faced, Starship Enterprise–looking door. Made of padded reinforced steel, it opened with a pneumatic whoosh, sliding sideways into the wall when a valid security code had been entered into a keypad, then closed and locked automatically as soon as the doorway had been cleared.

  Still wearing his chinos and green corduroy shirt—he had half a dozen similar shirts, all in solid colors—Lyssy was at his computer playing chess when he heard the door slide open behind him. “Be right with you,” he said without turning around, then placed the cursor on his queen, clicked and held down the left button on the mouse, slid the queen up to KB-3, released the button, and sat back grinning as the word CHECKMATE! flashed across the screen, accompanied by an explosion of pixeled tickertape and a tinny fanfare.

  “Better luck next time,” Lyssy said cheerfully as he logged off and swiveled his chair around. “Oh, hi, Dr. Al. Long time no see.” Humor: less than an hour had passed since the meeting with Dr. Trotman. “How about a game?”

  “I’m not sure my, ah, ego can stand another butt-whipping this morning,” said Corder, who’d taught Lyssy how to play chess only a year ago. With an IQ that tested nearly off the charts, the pupil had quickly outstripped the teacher; it had been a little over six months since the psychiatrist had earned better than a draw against his patient.

  “Another?” By now, Lyssy was almost preternaturally alert to his doctor’s every nuance, gesture, and mannerism; for him, as for a one-master dog, it was a survival skill.

  “In a manner of speaking.” Corder sat down heavily on the edge of Lyssy’s bed. With his gingery hair and his round-lensed tortoise-shell eyeglasses, he reminded Lyssy of an orange cat named Garfield in a picture book Dr. Al had given him when he was a child—or, more accurately, when his mental age was still that of a child. “How do you feel the meeting with Dr. Trotman went?”

  “I don’t think she likes me much.”

  “Yes, well, I’m sure it’s nothing personal. Did she tell you by any chance why she wanted to meet with you?”

  “She didn’t have to,” said Lyssy. “I’ve been around here long enough to know when somebody’s doing a psychiatric evaluation.”

  “Right with Eversharp,” said Corder. “Dr. Trotman has been asked by the court to give an opinion as to whether you’re competent to stand trial for some of the, ah, the things that happened before you came here.”

  “Oh, crum,” said Lyssy—swearing was not one of the skills he’d learned from his beloved psychiatrist/father figure.

  “Come on over here.” Corder beckoned to Lyssy with a plump forefinger. Lyssy limped across the room and sat down next to him; the doctor draped his arm companionably around his patient’s shoulders. “I’ve been walking a narrow tightrope lately, Lyss, as far as how much to tell you about all the legal machinations going on behind th
e scenes. On the one hand, I didn’t want to worry you prematurely; on the other hand, I don’t want you to be blindsided, either.”

  The arm tightened around Lyssy’s shoulders. He shrugged out from under it, crossed over to the small window, and put his nose against the glass so he could make out the arboretum through the steel mesh.

  Not surprisingly, this little pocket park with its bright ground flowers and dramatic contrasts of light and shade had become Lyssy’s favorite place in his admittedly circumscribed world. Here he had practiced walking hour after hour, rain or shine—he’d have worn his stump raw if they’d have let him—until by now he knew every flower, bird, and squirrel, every meander of the gravel path, every sharp-scented, rough-barked pine, every board of the Japanese footbridge, and every stone in the cement-banked brook as well as he knew his own room. “How long do I have?” he asked eventually.

  “Hard to say,” replied Corder. “I spoke to O’Hare this morning.” F. Frank O’Hare, slick, expensive, and media-savvy, was Lyssy’s defense attorney. “He says they’ll probably issue an arrest warrant in Umpqua County as soon as Dr. Trotman turns in her report. If she finds you competent to stand trial, of course, but nobody realistically sees her going any other way.

  “Once that happens, some officers will arrive here to take you into custody and drive you down to Umpqua City. You’ll be held in the county jail before and during the trial. O’Hare says they’ll probably be housing you in a private cell, so that’s, ah, something, anyway.”

  “If you’re trying to cheer me up, Dr. Al, that’s just not going to cut it.”

  “Now don’t give up hope yet,” said Corder, partly to alleviate his own sense of guilt—on some level he must have known that he’d only been fattening the calf for slaughter these last few years. “O’Hare and his team are preparing a vigorous psychiatric defense—he thinks you stand an excellent chance of avoiding the death penalty.”

  “At least in Oregon.” Lyssy understood perfectly well that if he didn’t get the death penalty here, they’d ship him down to California to try him for however many murders he was supposed to have committed there.