Thr3e

by Ted Dekker

  Sam jerked her head toward Slater. “You’re sick . . . You didn’t need to do that!”

  “A hole in the foot, a hole in the head; we’ll see who ends up dead.”

  “I love you, Sam,” Kevin said softly, ignoring the pain. “No matter what happens, I want you to know how lost I am without you.”

  Jennifer paced. “I could strangle her!”

  “Call her,” Dr. Francis said.

  “And risk exposing her? She could be right outside his door and her cell goes off? Can’t do it.”

  He nodded. “Something doesn’t sit right.”

  She picked up her phone. “I had myself firmly convinced that Kevin was Slater.”

  “And he isn’t.”

  “Unless—”

  Her cell phone chirped. They both looked at it. Jennifer flipped it open.

  “Hello?”

  “We have the report from Riggs,” Galager said. But Jennifer already knew that Slater and Kevin weren’t the same person.

  “Bit late. We already know. Anything else?”

  “No. Just that.”

  She sighed. “We have a problem, Bill. What’s the mood over there?”

  “Gloomy. Frantic without direction. The director just called for you. He’s getting an earful from the governor. Expect a call any second. They want to know.”

  “Know what? We don’t know where he’s stashed Balinda. We’re down to a few minutes and we don’t have the faintest idea where he’s taken her. Tell them that.”

  Galager didn’t respond right away. “If it’s any consolation, Jennifer, I think he’s innocent. The man I talked to wasn’t a killer.”

  “Of course he isn’t a killer,” Jennifer snapped. “What do you mean? Of course . . .” She turned to the professor. His eyes were fixed on her. “What did the report say?”

  “I thought you said you knew. The voices on the recording are from the same person.”

  “The seismic tuner—”

  “No. The same person. In Riggs’s estimation, if the recording is Kevin and Slater, then Kevin is Slater. There’s an echo in the background that barely surfaces on the second tape. Both voices are from the same room. Riggs’s guess is he’s using two cell phones and the recording picks up a faint reproduction of what he’s saying on the other phone.”

  “But . . . that’s impossible!”

  “I thought it was the prevailing theory . . .”

  “But Sam’s with them, and she called us. Kevin isn’t Slater!”

  “And what makes you think you can trust Sam? If she’s with them, didn’t she tell you where they are? I’d bank on Riggs.”

  Jennifer stood frozen to the carpet. Was it possible? “I have to go.”

  “Jennifer, what do I—”

  “I’ll call you back.” She snapped the phone closed and stared at the professor, dumbstruck.

  “Unless Sam didn’t see them both.”

  “Did you ever meet with Sam?” Dr. Francis asked. “Actually see her with your own eyes?”

  Jennifer thought. “No, I didn’t. But . . . I talked to her. So many times.”

  “So did I. But her voice wasn’t so high that it sounded necessarily female.”

  “Could . . . he do that?” Jennifer scrambled for understanding, searched for something, anything Sam had done that might contradict the notion. None came immediately to mind. “Cases of many more than two personalities have been documented.”

  “What if Slater isn’t the only one who’s Kevin? What if Samantha is also Kevin?”

  “Three! Three personalities in one.”

  28

  SAMANTHA WATCHED THE SECOND HAND tick relentlessly through its slow arc. Kevin sat on the floor, head in hands, distraught. Balinda slumped in her chair five feet to his left, mouth taped gray, eyes flittering over Kevin. If Kevin’s aunt could talk now, what would she say? I’m so sorry, Kevin! I beg your forgiveness! Don’t be a coward, Kevin! Get up and kick that man where he’ll remember it!

  Balinda never looked at Slater. It was as if he didn’t exist. Or she couldn’t bear to look at him. For that matter, the woman didn’t look at Sam either. Her attention was consumed by Kevin and Kevin alone.

  Sam closed her eyes. Easy, girl. You can do this.

  But in all honesty she was no longer feeling like she could do this or anything. Slater had two guns and a big smile. She had only her cell phone.

  “Uh, uh, uh, hands where I can see, darling.”

  Jennifer ran her hands through her hair. “This is crazy!” Her head hurt and time was running out. Think!

  “She was always disappearing! She—he could have made it all up. The CBI, the task force, the interview with the Pakistani, all of it! They were all things she could have created in her mind based on information Kevin already knew.”

  “Or that Kevin simply fabricated,” Dr. Francis said. “Kevin concludes that Slater can’t be the Riddle Killer because deep in his subconscious he knows that he is Slater. Sam, his alter ego, concludes the same. She’s working to free Kevin without knowing that she is him.”

  “She kept suggesting that there was someone on the inside! There was—Kevin! He was on the inside. And she was the one who first concluded that Kevin was Slater!”

  “And to Kevin, both Slater and Samantha are as real as you and me.”

  They were running over each other with their words now, connecting dots that formed a perfect picture.

  Or did they?

  Jennifer shook her head. “But I just talked to Sam and she saw Kevin and Slater while she was outside the door. You’re saying that I was actually talking to Kevin, and that he was simply imagining himself as Samantha, sneaking up on him and Slater?”

  “It’s possible,” the professor said, excitedly. “You’ve read the case studies. If Kevin is truly split, Sam would have her own personality. Everything she’s done has been done completely in Kevin’s mind, but to both of them, it has been completely real.”

  “So it was Kevin I just talked to.”

  “No, it was Sam. Sam is distinct from Kevin in his mind.”

  “But physically, it was Kevin.”

  “Assuming she is him, yes.”

  “And why didn’t Slater stop him? If Slater was there as well? Kevin picks up the phone and calls me, and in his mind he’s really Samantha, outside the door. Makes sense. But Slater’s there too. Why doesn’t he stop the phone call?”

  “I don’t know,” the professor said, turning with hand on chin. “You’d think he’d stop Kevin. So we could be wrong.”

  Jennifer massaged her temples. “But if they are all Kevin, it would mean he never even had a childhood friend named Samantha. He created her as an escape to fill the void in his life. Then he created Slater, and when he discovered that Slater hated Sam, he tried to kill Slater. Now Slater’s come back and so has Sam.” She turned. “But her father was a cop! He lived in the house three down from Kevin’s.”

  “Kevin could have known that a cop named Sheer lived in that house and simply built Samantha’s reality on that. Do you know whether Officer Sheer even had a daughter named Samantha?”

  “Never checked.” Jennifer paced, sorting through the tide of thoughts. “It does make sense, doesn’t it? Balinda wouldn’t let Kevin have a best friend, so he fabricated one. He role-played her.”

  “This is what Kevin could have meant when he told me he had a new model for the natures of man,” Dr. Francis said. “The three natures of man. Good, evil, and the man struggling between! ‘The good that I would, that I do not, but that which I would not, that I do.’ There are really three natures in there! One, the good. Two, that which I would not. And, three, I!”

  “The struggle between good and evil, embodied in a man who is role-playing both good and evil and yet is still himself as well. Kevin Parson.”

  “The noble child. Every man.”

  They stared at each other, transfixed by the enormity of it all.

  “It’s a possibility,” the professor said.

&nbs
p; “It almost makes perfect sense.” Jennifer glanced at her watch. “And we’re almost out of time.”

  “Then we have to tell her,” Dr. Francis said, walking for the kitchen. He turned back. “If Sam is Kevin, then she has to be told! He has to be told! He can’t deal with this on his own. No one can deal with evil on their own!”

  “Call Sam and tell her that she’s Kevin?”

  “Yes! Sam’s the only one who can save him now! But she’s powerless without you.”

  Jennifer took a deep breath. “What if we’re wrong? How do I tell her without sounding like an idiot? Excuse me, Sam, but you’re not a real person. You’re just part of Kevin?”

  “Yes. Tell her as if we know it’s a fact, and tell her quickly. Slater may try to stop the call. How much time?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “This is going to be delightful, Samantha,” Slater said, clicking the barrels of the two pistols together like drumsticks. He squirmed. “It’s starting to give me shivers all over.”

  The phone was her only hope, but Slater kept insisting that her hands remain where he could see them. If he knew about the phone, he would have insisted she give it up. Either way, it sat like a useless lump in the folds of her slacks. She’d thought through a dozen other possibilities, but none presented themselves as viable. There would be a way—there was always a way for good to triumph over evil. Even if Slater did kill her . . .

  A high chirping sound cut through the silence. Her cell!

  Slater spun, glaring. She acted quickly, before he could respond. She snatched it from her pocket and flipped it open.

  “Hello?”

  “Sam, listen to me. I know this may sound impossible to you, but you’re one of Kevin’s personalities. Both you and Slater, do you hear me? That’s why you can see them both. You—we—have to save Kevin. Tell me where you are, please, Sam.”

  Her mind rocked crazily. What had Jennifer said? She was one of Kevin’s . . .

  “What . . . what do you think you’re doing?” Slater demanded.

  “Please, Sam, you have to believe me!”

  “You saw me in the car at the bus explosion,” Sam said. “You waved.”

  “The bus? I saw Kevin. I waved to Kevin. You . . . you’d already left for the airport. Listen to me . . .”

  Sam didn’t hear any more. Slater had recovered from his shock and bounded for her.

  “Below the screw,” Sam said.

  Slater’s hand crashed against the side of her head. The cell phone dug into her ear and clattered to the concrete. She instinctively reached for it, but Slater was too quick. He slapped her arm away, scooped up the cell phone, and threw it across the room. It skipped off the floor and shattered against the wall.

  He faced her and shoved a pistol under her chin. “Below the screw? What does that mean, you filthy little traitor?”

  Sam’s mind hurt. You are one of his personalities, isn’t that what Jennifer had said? I am one of Kevin’s personalities? That’s impossible!

  “Tell me!” Slater yelled. “Tell me or I swear I’ll put the hole in your head myself.”

  “And forgo the pleasure of seeing Kevin do it?” Sam asked.

  Slater looked at her for a moment, eyes working over her face. He jerked the pistol back and grinned. “You’re right. Doesn’t matter anyway; they’re out of time.”

  “It was her?” Dr. Francis asked.

  “Sam. Call was terminated. Sure didn’t sound like Kevin to me. She said she saw me at the bus, but I never saw her.” Jennifer swallowed. “I hope we didn’t just put a bullet in Sam’s head.”

  Dr. Francis sat slowly.

  “She told me they were below the screw,” Jennifer said.

  “The screw?”

  Jennifer whirled to him. “The screw that held Kevin’s window closed. Below the window, below the house. There’s . . .” Could it be so close, right under their noses? “There’s a stairwell in the house, clogged with piles of newsprint now, but it leads to a basement.”

  “Below the house.”

  “Kevin has Balinda in the basement of their house! There has to be another way in!” Jennifer ran for the door. “Come on!”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you! You know him better than anyone else.”

  He grabbed his coat and ran after her. “Even if we find them, what can we do?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m done waiting. You said he can’t do this without help. God, give us help.”

  “How much time?”

  “Nine minutes.”

  “My car! I’ll drive,” the professor said and veered for the Porsche in the driveway.

  Samantha had never felt more distracted from the mission at hand than now. What was the mission at hand? Saving Kevin from Slater.

  She thought back to her years in college, to her law enforcement training, to New York. It was all fuzzy. Broad sweeps of reality without detail. Not the kind of detail that immediately surfaced when her mind wandered to the past, as a child, sneaking around with Kevin. Not the specifics that flooded her mind when she considered these past four days. Even her investigation of the Riddle Killer now seemed distant, like something she had read, not actually engaged in.

  If Jennifer was right, she was really Kevin. But that was impossible because Kevin sat on the floor ten feet away, rocking, deeply withdrawn, holding a red foot, bleeding from his left ear.

  Bleeding from his ear. She took a step around for a better view of Kevin’s ear. Her cell phone lay in several pieces twenty feet away on the concrete where Slater had hurled it. That was real enough. Was it possible that Kevin had made her up? She looked at her hands—they seemed real, but she also knew how the mind worked. She also knew that Kevin was a prime candidate for multiple personalities. Balinda had taught him how to dissociate from the beginning. If Kevin was Slater, as Jennifer insisted, then why couldn’t she be as well? And Sam could see Slater because she was there, in Kevin’s mind where Slater lived. But Balinda was real . . .

  Sam walked up to Balinda. If Jennifer was right, there were only two bodies here—Kevin’s and Balinda’s. She and Slater were only personalities in Kevin’s imagination.

  “What’s with you?” Slater snapped. “Back off!”

  Sam turned to face the man. He had the barrel of his weapon trained on her knee. Did he really have the gun if he was just in her mind? Or was that Kevin, and he only looked like Slater to her?

  Slater grinned wickedly. Sweat wet his face. He glanced at the clock behind her. “Four minutes, Samantha. You have four minutes to live. If Kevin chooses to kill his mother instead of you, then I’m going to waste you myself. I just decided that, and it feels pretty good. How does it feel for you?”

  “Why is Kevin bleeding from the ear, Slater? You hit me in the ear, but did you hit him in his ear?”

  Slater’s eyes shifted to Kevin and then back. “I love it. This is the part where the clever agent begins to play mind tricks in a last-ditch effort to confuse the nasty assailant. I really do love it. Back away from the bait, precious.”

  Sam ignored him. Instead she reached out and pinched Balinda on the cheek. The woman clenched her eyes and made a squeak. Thunder crashed through the chamber; white-hot pain seared through Sam’s thigh. Slater had shot her.

  Sam gasped and grabbed her thigh. Blood spread through her black capris. Her head swam. The pain was real enough. If she and Slater weren’t real, then who was shooting whom?

  Kevin jumped to his feet. “Sam!”

  “Stay!” Slater said.

  Sam’s mind climbed from the pain. Kevin was shooting himself? Any normal person viewing this would see that he’d just shot himself in the thigh.

  The details began to fall into order, like dominoes slowly toppling in a long line. So then if Kevin shot Sam in the head, he’d really kill whom? Himself? He was going to kill either Balinda or himself! And even if Slater killed Sam, he would really be pulling the trigger on Kevin, because all three of them occupied the same body. No matter
who shot whom, Kevin’s body would receive the bullet!

  Sam felt a swarm of panic. Tell Kevin, Jennifer had said.

  “When I say back off, I mean back off—not pinch her, not lick her, not spit on her,” Slater said. “Back off really does mean back off. So . . . back off!”

  Sam took a side step away from Balinda. Hurry, Jennifer, please hurry! Beneath the screw. That means the basement; you know about the basement, don’t you? Dear God, help them.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” Slater’s eyes danced around. “Don’t worry, a bullet to the head does wonders for the odd surface wound. Pow! Works every time.”

  “He’s bleeding in the ear because you hit me in the ear,” Sam said. “He’s bleeding in the leg too, isn’t he?” She followed Slater’s glance. Kevin stood, weaving on his feet, stricken with empathy. Blood soaked both his shoe and his right pant leg. He didn’t feel the pain because in his mind it hadn’t happened to him. Their personalities were completely fragmented. And what about Slater? She dropped her eyes to his thigh—a red spot was spreading on his tan slacks. Slater had shot Sam, but the wound appeared on both Kevin and Slater. She looked at Slater’s ear. Then at his shoe. Blood there too.

  “I’m so sorry, Sam,” Kevin said. “This isn’t your fault. I’m sorry I got you into this. I . . . I shouldn’t have called you.”

  “You called her because I told you to call her, you idiot!” Slater said. “And now you’re going to kill her because I’m telling you to kill her. Don’t slip into Mommy’s land of Froot Loops on me, Kevin. I swear I’ll kill every one of you if you don’t play nicely.”

  The truth of the matter struck Sam as she watched the deepening lines of sorrow in Kevin’s face. This was the confession that Kevin had to make. The whole game was really Kevin’s, a desperate attempt to flush his evil nature out of its hiding place. He was trying to expose the Slater in him. He’d reached out to her, the Samantha in him, the good in him. He was exposing the good and the bad in him to the world, in a desperate attempt to be rid of Slater. Slater thought he was winning, but in the end Kevin would be the victor.

  If he survived. He’d already shot himself twice, once in the foot and once in the thigh.