The Girls He Adored

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Irene let out a startled laugh. “So you worked in that Jack Nicholson imitation after all.”

  “Pretty good, huh? Want to see my—”

  “No!” She cut him off sternly; time to get back to business. “When I asked you your name earlier, you told me to call you Max. Is Max your name?”

  “That depends,” he said pleasantly.

  “Depends on what?”

  “I can't tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can't tell you that, either.”

  Irene tried a different tack. “When you came into the room this morning, you told me your mood was appropriate to the circumstances. A young girl died horribly, apparently at your hands. How does that make you feel?”

  He had ducked down again; he came back up with the cigarette between his lips. His face was blue-tinged under the fluorescent lights.

  “Lost,” he said softly. Irene had the impression he'd switched personalities again, down where she couldn't see the eye roll. This was the third alter, the handsome, vulnerable young man. “Lost and frightened. And alone—at least until this morning.”

  “What happened this morning?”

  “I met you.”

  His cigarette had burned down almost to the filter. When Irene reached forward to take it out of his mouth for him, she felt his lips brush the back of her fingers as delicately as butterfly wings. So light and ephemeral was his touch that Irene wasn't entirely sure contact had even taken place, much less whether it had actually been a kiss.

  But in her heart she knew it had. She felt a pang of excitement, close to fear but so quick and sharp it was almost sexual—and decidedly inappropriate. It occurred to Irene that when she next saw her therapist, they would have something juicier to discuss than they'd had in weeks. Months. Years. She took a hard pull on her cigarette, and inhaled a mouthful of burning filter.

  5

  “PENDER, YOU GOT MORE BALLS than Hoover had high heels,” said Aurelio Bustamante. The longtime Monterey County sheriff was seated behind an enormous desk crowded with awards and mementos. “First you interrogate—”

  “Interview.” Pender slouched in his chair so as not to tower over the sheriff, a short round man in a brown western-cut suit and a sunny white Stetson. Pender had started to remove his own hat— he rarely wore it into a room—but changed his mind: when in California . . .

  “You interrogate one of my officers, an injured officer, let me add, without my knowledge or permission. Now you want to interrogate one of my prisoners, but you don't want to share what you got? Unh-unh, I don't think so. You gonna fuck me from behind, my frien', you goddamn well better give me a reach-around.”

  When dealing with local law enforcement officials, FBI agents could count on a range of reactions from hero worship to bitter resentment, depending on how much contact the locals had had with the bureau. The sixtyish Bustamante was clearly no virgin.

  Nor was Pender—he decided to see if he couldn't turn the sheriff's animosity to his own advantage.

  “Believe me, Sheriff, I sympathize completely with you. I started out as a sheriff's deputy in upstate New York. And if I'm fucking you, then it's a daisy chain, because I've got my boss so far up my ass he has to wear one of those coal miner hats with the little flashlight on top.”

  The crow's-feet at the corners of Bustamante's eyes deepened almost imperceptibly at the piquant image.

  Pender pressed on. “Sheriff Bustamante, if you think the FBI is piss-arrogant to you and yours, you should see how they treat their own—especially old-timers like me. I'm two years short of mandatory retirement, they're trying to force me out early, my last fitness report referred to me as the worst-dressed agent in the history of the bureau, my personnel file's been flagged for so many petty bureaucratic violations it reads like a rap sheet, and if I have to get a court order to interview your prisoner, his lawyer's gonna be on it like stink on shit, and I'm gonna go home with nothing.”

  “Now I'm suppose' to feel sorry for you because you're a fuckup?” scoffed Bustamante. “I let you in to see this guy without his lawyer present and he walks on account of it, it's gonna be my ass on the line, too.”

  “Sheriff, I give you my word I won't ask him a single question about the current case.”

  “Then you're not gonna get anything out of him anyway—he claims to have amneeesia.” Bustamante weighted the word with contempt.

  “Just give me a shot, that's all I ask.”

  “And if I do that for you, what do you do for me?” Bustamante spread his hands out, palms up, and waggled his fingers toward himself in the universal fork-it-over gesture.

  Pender picked up a foot-long brass nameplate—AURELIO BUSTAMANTE, SHERIFF—and placed it in the middle of the desk, facing the sheriff. Then, in a semicircle behind the nameplate, he arranged a Kiwanis Club man-of-the-year pen-and-pencil set in an engraved marble holder; a baseball autographed by the last roster of the now-defunct Salinas Peppers; a gold-framed photograph of the sheriff and Mrs. Bustamante, a smiling Hispanic-looking woman with upswept white hair, standing behind a passle of children and grandchildren; and a silver badge engraved with the words GRAND MARSHALL, SALINAS RODEO, mounted onto a fourinch-high wooden plaque with an angled base.

  “This is you at your next press conference.” Pender tapped the nameplate, then each of the other items in turn. “And here's your valiant Deputy Jervis, here's the mayor and the DA and whoever else in your department you'd like to reward with a little face time, here's your wife and family, and here's the FBI resident agent from Monterey in a dark suit and conservative tie.

  “Ladies and gentlemen . . .” Pender lifted the nameplate up and down with each syllable, manipulating it as if it were a hand puppet. “I'm Sheriff Aurelio Bustamante, and I've called this press conference to announce that the Monterey County Sheriff's Department has been responsible for the capture of one of the most dangerous and sought-after serial killers in the history of law enforcement.”

  Bustamante reached across the desk and tipped the Grand Marshall plaque representing the FBI over onto its face, then leaned back, his fingers tented over his round belly. “If it's him, I've already got him—what do I need you for?”

  “Because otherwise it goes like this. . . .” Pender tipped the nameplate over and moved the plaque up to the front of the grouping. “Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Special Agent Photo Op of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A few weeks ago a young woman was brutally stabbed to death within sight of a MONTEREY COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPUTY, who was in turn caught unawares and skewered like a fucking shish-ka-bob. Eventually the suspect was apprehended, but unfortunately, the MONTEREY COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT had absolutely no idea who the fuck they were holding. Fortunately, the FBI was able to determine through its own resources that—”

  Bustamante cut him off. “Put everything back where it was, then wait outside.”

  Hurriedly, Pender rearranged the desk; as he left the room, he saw the sheriff reaching for the telephone. He cooled his heels in a straight-backed wooden chair in the hallway for forty-five minutes. When the sheriff's secretary ushered him back into the office, Bustamante was tilted back in his leather chair, with his cowboybooted feet up on the desk.

  “I just got off the phone with the district attorney. Both our offices, we want to cooperate with the FBI in every way possible without compromising the investigation. However, he says there's absolutely no possibility of him allowing you to question our prisoner without his lawyer being present.”

  “That's—”

  “Let me finish. We can't let you question the man without his lawyer, but since the Supreme Court ruled that a prisoner in jail has no expectation of privacy, exclusive of conferences with his own attorney, there's nothing that says we can't put an undercover man in the cell with him in order to, and here I quote the district attorney, ‘further ongoing investigations into crimes unrelated to those for which the prisoner is currently charged.’ ”

  “It has to be me.” Pender
began to marshal his arguments. “It would take days to get one of your—”

  “It's you.”

  “—people up to sp— Oh. Great. Thanks. How soon?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. There's no way we're putting you in with him here. It's too dangerous, and besides, he's been single-housed for a month—he'd know something was up if we gave him a roommate. But he's due in court for a procedural hearing tomorrow. The old jail next to the courthouse has been closed down since 'seventy-one, but we still use the east wing to house prisoners between court appearances. We can put you in one of the holding cells with him without too much danger—he'll be in restraints. Of course, so will you, but that can't be helped. We'll get you in place, then bring him over a little early—that'll give you some time alone with him.”

  “I want you to know how much I appreciate—” Pender began.

  The sheriff cut him off. “Before you thank me, I have something I want you to read.”

  Bustamante took his booted feet off the desktop, leaned forward, and slid a photocopied document across the desk to Pender. It was a medical report detailing the injuries received by one Refugio Cortes, the prisoner's former cellmate, in the county jail, on the prisoner's first day in custody.

  Pender skimmed it: depressed fractures of the orbital bones surrounding both eyes, broken nose, broken ribs, crushed pelvis. The doctors had managed to save the penis, though it would never function again save as a conduit for urine; the testicles, however, were gone, along with the rest of the contents of the scrotal sac.

  “I wish I had some pictures to go along with that, my frien',” said Bustamante. “Just so you know what you're getting into.”

  6

  IRENE COGAN HAD SPENT the rest of the morning administering the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests, and the hundredquestion Dissociative Experiences Scale, saving the personality index for the afternoon session—it took most people a couple of hours to get through the 567 questions of the full MMPI-2. But the clinical interview had gone so poorly that after a lunch break—the prisoner was taken back to his cell; the psychiatrist picked at a dubious salad from a roach coach parked on Natividad Road near the jail—Irene decided to make another stab at it before moving on.

  “What's the last thing you remember before waking up in the car next to the—” She censored herself midsentence. The dead woman, she'd been about to say, but she didn't want to risk upsetting him with any charged words. “Before waking up in the car?”

  “Making love.” This appeared to be the third alter again, the vulnerable one.

  Making love. Irene wondered if those words had ever been spoken before in this lifeless room with its glaring fluorescent lights. “Go on.”

  “In the backseat. Parked in a redwood grove. Sunlight in long thin columns pouring through the trees. She's kneeling—” His eyes grew dreamy. “Kneeling on the backseat, leaning against the rear window ledge. I'm behind her. When she leans forward, a shaft of sunlight catches her hair. She has such beautiful strawberry blond hair. I part it at the back of her neck and kiss her nape every time I—” His eyes closed; his belly muscles tightened, and his pelvis thrust forward in a humping motion. “And every time I kiss her she says my name.”

  “What does she say?” Irene couldn't pass up the opportunity. “What does she call you?”

  The prisoner's eyes opened; the dreamy look had faded, replaced by a cold, glittering intelligence. “Tell me,” said the alter who called himself Max. “I haven't looked in a mirror for a while— do I have ‘stupid’ tattooed across my forehead or something?”

  Rats. “I'm sorry—please go on.”

  “Thank you, I'll pass.”

  “No, really. I apologize—I shouldn't have interrupted you.”

  “Too late for that now,” he said coldly. But just as Irene was telling herself that perhaps she was the one who should have stupid tattooed across her forehead, the prisoner changed his mind.

  “Christopher,” he whispered, leaning toward her as far as the shackles would permit. “She called me Christopher.”

  “I see. Is that your name, then?”

  “That's for me to know and you to find out.” Common enough childhood repartee, but there was something in the careful way he said it, in the steady, amused look in his eyes, that suggested something more to Irene. A challenge perhaps—or an offer, or an opportunity.

  In order to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Max/Christopher would need a hand free to hold a pencil. The deputy reluctantly agreed to unhook the cuffs from the chain around the waist, but left the wrists cuffed together, and insisted on remaining in the room with his can of pepper spray and his short-handled riot stick at the ready.

  “There are five hundred and sixty-seven statements in this test,” Irene explained. “I want you to—”

  “Like you said earlier, I know the drill,” he interrupted.

  “I need to be sure that—”

  “Don't insult my intelligence, Doctor,” he said, each word carefully measured. “Don't ever insult my intelligence.”

  Irene handed him the blunt, soft-leaded pencil, and saw for the first time that the inside surfaces of his manacled hands were badly scarred. When he caught her looking at his hands, he started to clench them into fists, then changed his mind and opened them for her, palms up. She managed not to wince. His fingertips were bony, nearly skeletal—she could make out the shallow hourglass shape of the distal phalanges beneath the shiny scar tissue, and there were livid white patches of unlined skin stretched tightly across his palms.

  “What happened?” she asked him.

  “I had the bright idea I could put out a fire with my bare hands.”

  “Those are grafts?”

  “From the buttocks.” He laughed bitterly. “I suppose I should be grateful I don't have a hairy ass.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Old enough to know better.”

  “It must have been terribly painful.”

  “The pain was welcome.”

  “Oh?”

  “Guilt, you know. Burns hotter than fire.” Then, seeing Irene's eager expression: “And that's all I have to say on that subject.” He took the pencil in his left hand. “Ready when you are, Doctor.”

  “All right. . . . Begin.”

  Irene checked her watch and made a note of the time—1:04 P.M.She also noted another eye roll and flutter—apparently one of the other alters was going to take the test. Or at least that was what he wanted her to think.

  She'd brought along several journals to read, under the assumption that the MMPI would take at least two hours, but she'd scarcely finished the latest edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry when the prisoner announced that he was done.

  Again Irene checked the time—2:02—and shook her head disbelievingly. “You do understand that if you answered randomly, it'll show up on the results.”

  “The F scale, I believe.” He grinned proudly. “Give me another one.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Let me take another MMPI—did you bring another?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Let me do it again.”

  “But why?”

  He leaned forward; the deputy, seated behind and to the side of the prisoner, half rose from his chair.

  “You'll find out,” whispered the prisoner. Then, in case she hadn't made the connection, he whispered the words again. “You'll . . . find . . . out.”

  As in: That's for me to know and you to find out. Irene reached into her suitcase and brought out another answer sheet.

  The prisoner finished the second MMPI in just over an hour. He had again switched alters both before and after the test, but kept his head down diligently during it, so Irene couldn't read him.

  “How long will it take you to get the results back?” he asked, as the deputy once again fastened the prisoner's wrists to the chain around his waist, then left the room carrying his folding chair.

  “Back?”


  “Yes, back. You do send them out, don't you? To get them scored? Or do you do them yourself?”

  Irene sidestepped the question. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering how long until our next session.”

  “At this point, I can't even tell you whether there'll be a next session. I may not need to see you again to perform my evaluation—it depends in large part on the test results.”

  “I'm not worried about that,” he replied confidently. “Once you get the results back, you'll want to interview me again—I guarantee it.”

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “Because you've never seen anything like me.”

  “In that case,” said Irene, “I'll be sure to pay particular attention.”

  “I'll be sure to pay par-tic-u-lar atten-shee-un.” Again, the devastatingly accurate imitation, this time with a petulant twist. Then, in his own voice: “Don't patronize me, Dr. Cogan. I haven't done anything to deserve that tone from you.”

  “You're right, and I apologize,” said Irene promptly. “I'll be evaluating the tests tonight—if I need a follow-up interview, it'll probably be within a day or two.”

  “I'll be looking forward to it,” said the prisoner.

  For the first time that day, Irene turned her back to him as she lifted the receiver of the black telephone on the wall.

  “We're about done here,” she told the female deputy who picked up on the other end. The woman told her someone would be right in. When Irene turned around again she had the impression she was meeting yet a fourth alter—his posture had slumped, as if he were suddenly exhausted, and he had developed a mild tic in his right eye.

  “There ih-ih-is one thing,” he said—the stammer on the initial vowel sounds was new. “If it were possible, if circumstances were uh-uh-altered, so to speak, would you consider taking uh-us ahahon a-as uh-uh-a patient?”