The Girls He Adored

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “Have your people found out anything more about the son of a bitch?”

  Pender shook his head. “Dead end. He wasn't carrying any ID— no wallet, just a roll of cash—and it was the victim's car. His prints are a mess, old grafts on the interior surfaces of both hands. No matches so far—the lab's working on a reconstruction.” Pender scraped his chair a little closer to the bed—a signal to the interviewee that it was time to get down to business. “Tell me about the bust—how'd you take him down?”

  “Routine traffic stop. Eastbound maroon Chevy Celebrity with California plates rolls through a red on Highway Sixty-eight, near Laguna Seca. Male driver, female passenger. I hit the lights, he hits the gas. I call in the pursuit; he pulls over a few seconds later. As I'm approaching the vehicle, I see the driver leaning over toward the female passenger—I figure he's fastening her seat belt for her. Then he turns toward me, big smile, what's the problem officer? At this point I haven't even unsnapped my holster. Routine traffic violation, maybe a warning on the seat belt.

  “But when I look in, I see this blond girl, couldn't have been more than eighteen, she's sitting straight up holding her stomach with both hands. She's wearing a white sweater that looks like it's dyed in overlapping bands of red at the bottom, and she has the strangest expression on her face. Just, you know, puzzled —I'll never forget that expression. I ask her if she's okay, she lifts up her sweater with both hands, and her guts spill out onto her lap.”

  Jervis closed her eyes, as if to shut out the memory. Pender wouldn't let her. “What happened next?”

  “He has the knife in his left hand—before I can react he brings it up so fast and hits me so hard I thought he shot me at first. It was like my mouth exploded—I'm falling backward, spitting out blood and teeth, trying to draw my weapon. He's on top of me before I hit the ground. I can't get my weapon out, but I'm hanging onto the holster for dear life.”

  Jervis winced again; her hand went to her jaw. “That's all I remember—they tell me he was trying to yank my belt off when the backup unit pulled up, and I was holding onto the holster so hard they had to pry my hands away.”

  “But you're down as the arresting officer.”

  A rueful chuckle. “Charity collar. It was a twelve-inch bowie knife—a souvenir from the Alamo, I heard. Busted out all the lower molars on the right side, all the uppers on the left. He just barely missed my tongue or I wouldn't be talking to you now.”

  Her pale complexion was turning chalky; her glance strayed toward the bottle of Vicodin on the white wicker bedside table.

  “And here I promised Miss Winkle I wouldn't wear you out,” said Pender. He knew he didn't have much longer; he cut to the question he most needed to ask the only person who'd seen the victim alive. “One more thing, then I'll leave you in peace. It's about the girl. You say she was blond?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you be a little more specific—was it platinum blond, ash blond, something like that?” Careful not to lead her where he hoped she'd take him.

  And she did: “No, sir, it was more of a reddish blond.”

  “Would that be the color people sometimes refer to as strawberry blond?”

  “Yes, sir, that's it exactly.” It was obvious that every word was causing her pain.

  Pender patted her pale freckled hand as it lay on the pink comforter. “That's okay. That's okay, dear. You've been a great help— you don't have to say another word.”

  Aletha Winkle gave Pender a dark look as she bustled into the room.

  “I'll let myself out,” Pender said.

  “And next time call first.”

  “Yes, ma'am, I'll be sure to do that,” replied Pender meekly.

  Pender's chagrin didn't last long. In fact, as he strode down the flower-lined front walk, he was tum-te-tumming “And the Band Played On,” a tune written by Charles B. Ward and John F. Palmer in 1899, but still familiar enough nearly a century later that at the 1997 inaugural meeting of the team charged with investigating the disappearances of nine females from nine widely separated locales over the past nine years, Steven P. McDougal, chief of the FBI's Liaison Support Unit, was able to recite the first few lines of the chorus by heart, confident that it would be recognized by every agent in the room:

  Casey would waltz with a strawberry blond

  And the band played on.

  He'd glide 'cross the floor with the girl he adored

  And the band played on.

  Thus McDougal dubbed the phantom kidnapper Casey, after the only characteristic the missing females had in common: the color of their hair. But it was Ed Pender who sang the next two lines of the song in his sweet tenor:

  His brain was so loaded it nearly exploded

  The poor girl would shake with alarm.

  The room went dead quiet; McDougal broke the silence.

  “Ed has a bad feeling about this one, boys and girls,” he announced, leaning back in the leather chair at the head of the conference table, peering professorially over his half glasses. “Let's help him make it go away.”

  Since that initial meeting, two more strawberry blonds had been reported missing under suspicious circumstances, but the FBI still hadn't gone public with the investigation, largely because not a single body had come to light. Then in June 1999, Monterey County sheriff's deputy Terry Jervis made what she thought would be a routine traffic stop, and everything changed.

  Casey, you son of a bitch, thought Pender as he squeezed himself back into the blue Corolla. You son of a bitch, we've got you now.

  3

  ON A RIDGETOP HIGH IN the Cascade Mountains of southern Oregon, a strawberry blond in her early fifties, wearing a highnecked green silk gown and matching surgical mask, stands in the middle of a chicken yard, scattering feed to a flock of goldenplumed Buff Orpingtons.

  Her movements are awkward—she bends and turns stiffly from the waist—and the hands emerging from the long sleeves of the gown are freakishly skeletal, smooth shiny skin stretched tightly over fleshless bone. She spills nearly as much feed as she sows. As the birds crowd around her ankles and dart under her gown to peck at the fallen seed, she scolds them mildly.

  “Now, children, there's plenty for everyone.” Her voice is muffled behind the green silk mask and has a peculiar timbre, thin and unresonant—the converse of nasal. “Vivian, mind your manners— no shoving. And you, Freddie—try to show a little self-control. Remember your position.”

  Freddie Mercury is the lone rooster in the hen yard, a strutting dandy with flowing plumage of antique gold and a proudly erect crimson comb. When the woman ducks into the dark coop, he follows her, clucking soothingly to the brooding hen inside to reassure her that her egg will be safe.

  And indeed, the woman's bony fingers pluck only the unattended eggs, all brown, some still warm, from the dirty straw of the roosts, and deposit them gently, carefully, into the shallow basket hanging from her forearm. When she has finished, the rooster accompanies her to the gate and stands guard, facing his flock, to prevent any of his plump golden wives or buff chicks from escaping with her.

  From the hen yard it is a hike of a few hundred yards through a shady wood of old-growth Douglas fir to the kennels next to the embowered, double-gated sally port, where half a dozen ambereyed, black-and-brindle Rottweilers with barrel-like bodies, powerful, wide-skulled, flattened heads, and massive jaws capable of crushing a sheep's skull or a bicycle with equal ease greet her noiselessly, wagging their stubby tails and wiggling their broad behinds.

  Eerily silent, eerily patient, the dogs stand at quivering attention while the woman opens a wooden bin containing a fifty-pound bag of dog chow, scoops the dry kibble into six individual bowls, each labeled with its owner's name—Jack, Lizzie, Bundy, Piper, Kiss, and Dr. Cream—and breaks a fresh egg into each bowl. Not until she has finished breaking the last egg into the last bowl, and given them a verbal command accompanied by a hand signal, do they rush forward to begin eating.

  When they are finished, t
he woman lets the dogs out through the front gate via the sally port. They split up in six different directions to do their business as far from the kennels and each other as possible, and return within minutes without having to be summoned.

  “Good dogs,” says the woman, locking the front gate behind them and leading them back into the kennel, leaving the door between the kennel and the sally port open. “Now give me my lovies.”

  As she drops stiffly to her knees, the dogs line up before her like obedient schoolchildren and present themselves one at a time to be petted by those skeletal fingers and kissed through that silken mask until the woman's heart is eased and her fear of abandonment temporarily assuaged.

  Now only one chore remains, her least favorite: a visit to the drying shed. She decides to put it off until after lunch.

  4

  DR. IRENE COGAN HAD ONLY interviewed a patient under full restraints twice before. The first, Paul Silberman, was a nineteenyearold who'd murdered his mother up in Woodside. Hacked her to pieces in the tub. The papers had called it the Psycho murder, though in fact Mrs. Silberman had been bathing, not showering. Paul claimed he hadn't known it was really happening, that everything seemed so strange and distorted that he thought he was dreaming. Claimed he was as powerless to stop himself as he would have been in a dream.

  Irene, a specialist in dissociative disorders, had been called in by the defense to testify that Paul suffered from a depersonalization/ derealization disorder. Her testimony had been effective—the boy had been found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was now receiving treatment in a private, locked facility in Palo Alto.

  But Irene Cogan was neither a patsy nor a defense whore. When a murdering pedophile named David Douglas Winslow claimed to be suffering from dissociative identity disorder, Irene had testified for the prosecution that the similarity of optical functioning among Winslow's alleged alter personalities, along with their nearly identical GSRs—galvanic skin responses—indicated that he was feigning DID.

  Winslow's current address was death row, San Quentin. Dr. Cogan, though she opposed the death penalty, would shed no tears for him when his appeals finally ran out—she'd already cried herself out for his tiny victims.

  Dr. Cogan was not a forensic psychiatrist, however—she had been called into the current case because the prisoner was claiming dissociative amnesia. It was too early to say for sure whether he was feigning, but she suspected he was. The victims of dissociative amnesia she'd treated had presented very different affects than this prisoner; you didn't need a medical degree to read the abject confusion and uncertainty in their eyes.

  But why fake amnesia? For a man as intelligent and well versed in psychology as the prisoner appeared to be, paranoid schizophrenia, for instance, would be a much easier symptomology to feign— and a more viable defense as well.

  Suddenly she realized that the prisoner had asked her something. “Excuse me?”

  “Spaced out, eh?” The prisoner chuckled. “I asked if you'd brush my hair back the way you did before.”

  “Why? It's not in your eyes.”

  He met her gaze boldly—Irene wondered if those mildly amused gold-flecked eyes had been that poor eviscerated girl's last sight on earth. “Just for the touch.”

  She was momentarily jarred. His use of the word touch was somehow striking in its intimacy. “I'm sorry, I don't think that's appropriate,” she managed, after a moment.

  “Please. It's important.”

  “Why? Why is it important?”

  “It just is. Please, trust me. I won't hurt you—I give you my word.”

  Tough call. It was a small enough request, but there was the physical danger to be considered, as well as a potential skewing of the doctor-patient relationship. On the other hand, by asking for her trust he was, in effect, offering her his. And his trust was something she was going to need if she hoped to make an accurate evaluation.

  Or so she told herself as she leaned across the desk. Gingerly she brushed the comma of hair back from his brow, then quickly drew her hand back as his eyes rolled up and to the right, and his eyelids began to flutter. By the time Irene had settled back in her chair, the prisoner's cockiness, his certainty, the gleam in his eye and the set of his jaw, had all disappeared, leaving behind a small pathetic figure slumped over and sobbing like a child, knees drawn up, shoulders heaving, chains rattling.

  Here it comes, thought Irene. He is going to change his symptomology. But not to schizophrenia. She composed her features to hide her suspicion, and waited patiently for the weeping to end.

  And sure enough, when the prisoner looked up, he was a different man. His heart-shaped face had grown more oval as the set of his jaw relaxed. His eyes were wider, rounder, lighter. And his voice, when he apologized, was tremulous, and pitched an octave higher.

  “I'm sowwy.”

  So it was to be DID after all. Dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. And she had to admit, if he was faking it, he was good. Better than good, certainly better than the monstrous David Douglas Winslow.

  But perhaps that was to be expected, with the prisoner's apparent background in psychology and his obvious talent for impersonation. He knew that eye movement was a classical marker for a switch between personalities, commonly referred to as “alters,” hence the roll and flutter. He knew that extreme facial and vocal changes between alters were to be expected, and that many alters were juveniles, so he'd raised the pitch of his voice, let his cheeks go slack, widened his eyes to take in more light.

  If, on the other hand, he wasn't faking it, Irene understood that this might prove to be the most important case of her career. For the moment, she decided to proceed as if the DID was genuine. If he were faking, she might not get to the truth quite as quickly, but if he were not, this approach would do the least harm.

  “Hello,” she said softly. “What's your name?”

  Panic, confusion. The eyes rolled, the lids fluttered—and the child was gone.

  “Excuse me?” The first alter again. A quick, wary glance around the room; the prisoner's manacled hands nervously patted his thighs. Both the glance and the self-touching Irene recognized as grounding behavior, orienting gestures commonly seen after a switch of personalities.

  And indeed, the prisoner appeared to be unaware that his face was ashen beneath its olive complexion, and tear-streaked, with a bubble of snot in one nostril—he seemed surprised when Irene handed him a tissue from her purse.

  He grasped the situation quickly, though. “Guess I kinda wimped out on you.”

  He drew his knees up, hunched his shoulders under the orange jumpsuit, and ducked his head in order to blow his nose. When he came up his voice had changed yet again—this appeared to be yet a third alter, roughly the same age and appearance as the first, but more vulnerable, with less of an edge. “It's just so hard keeping up that front all the time.”

  Irene waited, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

  “You can't let them see any weakness, you know. If they sense weakness, they'll tear you apart. Even the guards.” He let the tissue fall to his lap. “Especially the guards. Now what was it you asked?”

  “I asked what your name was.”

  This time the eye roll and flutter was so quick and short-lived only a therapist with extensive experience treating DID patients would have noticed it.

  “How quickly they forget,” said the prisoner, in the voice he'd used originally. “You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette on you, would you?”

  Irene knew better than to ask him his name again—this was clearly Call-me-Max. “I believe the entire building is nonsmoking.”

  The prisoner laughed easily. “Realistically speaking, what's the worst they can do if they catch us? Hell, we're risking a death sentence every time we light up.”

  “Good point.” Irene was intrigued—and encouraged. Whether he was faking the DID or not, the patient's— prisoner's —use of the first-person plural was a good sign, as was his e
vident warmth toward her. They seemed to be moving toward a rapport that usually took much longer to establish—she definitely wanted to encourage it.

  And frankly, a cigarette right about now didn't sound like the worst idea in the world. Irene rummaged around in her purse for her pack of Benson and Hedges and her lighter, then went through the desk drawers looking for an ashtray. Finding none, she took an empty Sprite can out of the wastebasket, placed it on the desk in front of the prisoner, placed two cigarettes between her lips, lit both, and handed him one, aware as she did so that it was an inappropriately intimate gesture.

  The prisoner inhaled deeply, squinting to keep the smoke out of his eyes. “I feel better already.”

  So did Irene; she leaned back in her chair and took a deep drag of her cigarette, drawing the smoke luxuriously through her nostrils. It felt deliciously sinful and retro to be smoking with a patient again. When she leaned forward to tap her ash into the Sprite can, she caught the prisoner looking her over appreciatively.

  Irene sat up, drawing the lapels of her suit jacket together over her chest and tugging her skirt down over her knees, though her legs were out of sight beneath the desk. It occurred to her that she was losing control of the interview.

  “All right, I trusted you,” she said. The voice-activated Dictaphone began to whir again on the table between them. “Now will you trust me?”

  “With what?” he replied, exhaling a thin blue stream of smoke along with the words.

  “With the truth.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “To start with, do you ever feel as if you were more than one person?”

  “You say you want the truth?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He ducked his head down to his hands to take the cigarette out of his mouth, then popped back up with a maniacal grin.“Well you caan't haandle the truth!” he declared in an exaggeratedly flat monotone, his eyebrows drawn up into devilish peaks.