Compulsion

by Keith Ablow

  A nineteen-year-old man I evaluated was upset that his cousin-a South Boston gang member who disliked blacks-had been stricken with leukemia. To fuel the cousin's recovery, he approached a fourteen-year-old black boy in Roxbury and emptied four bullets into his chest. "I was sort of doing what my cousin would do, kind of like that might bring him back," the man told me.

  Strange calculus, indeed. And none of it surprises me, anymore-certainly not after what 1 was to learn about the Bishops.

  Anderson and I made it to the Brant Point Racket Club just after 2:00 p.m. There was enough activity in the place that we attracted little attention as we located Garret's locker.

  I had a moment of trepidation after North put the key in the lock. "Hold on," I said.

  Anderson stopped and looked at me. "What?"

  "We're following Garret's road map without a thought. Any chance this thing could be rigged?" I said.

  Anderson looked at me askance. "Like, with explosives?"

  I shrugged.

  "I guess there's a chance." He turned the key and pulled the door open, partway. "I think it's slim." He grinned. "You've been hanging with the paranoids too long. You need to take some time when this is over."

  "No kidding," I said. But I didn't think the symptoms of my patients at MGH were rubbing off on me. More likely, the vector was my feeling deceived by Julia, my worry over what else might be hidden in her closet.

  Garret's locker was a window on his soul. A single racket was angled against two walls of the lower compartment, but there were none of the accouterments favored by tennis fanatics-no lambskin glove, no athletic tape, no sweatbands, no Bolle glasses, not even a pair of sneakers. The back wall of the lower compartment was wallpapered with very competent black-and-white photographs of Nantucket. There were shots of the harbor, the Commons, dunes, beach.

  "The kid can use a camera, if these are his work," Anderson said, admiring the images.

  "They're beautiful," I said. I lingered on the photographs for several seconds, then my gaze moved to the locker's upper compartment and the dozen or more old books haphazardly stacked there-works by Kafka, J. D. Salinger, Steinbeck.

  Anderson took out a paper bag and used it to cover his hand. A plastic bag might cling to the bottle and rub away fingerprints. He glanced at the books. "Garret loves the classics," he said.

  "There are worse escapes than photography and literature," I said, thinking of my own.

  He reached past the books to the back, right-hand corner of the top shelf, where Garret had said the nortriptyline bottle would be hidden in a tennis ball can.

  I realized we might be on the brink of evidence that would help exonerate Billy. The excitement of that possibility dulled the pain in my back, at least for the moment. Maybe it was my own strange calculus, but I felt as if I had the chance to discharge a debt I had been carrying for years-what I owed Billy Fisk and the cosmos and, ultimately, myself for losing that decent young man to suicide. And no doubt I felt that another debt was about to be satisfied. If Win Bishop were ultimately exposed as a murderer, part of me would feel I had paid back my father what I owed him: trial, conviction, and sentencing for stealing my boyhood.

  "Got it," Anderson said, bringing down the tennis ball can. He used a piece of tissue to open the lid, then dumped the nortriptyline bottle-one of those typical orange-brown plastic affairs-into his bagged hand. He turned the bag inside out, securing the bottle inside it. "If Win's fingerprints are all over this, and Billy's aren't," he said, "the old man will wonder a long time why he didn't toss this over the cliffs." He smiled. "You were heading to Boston, anyhow. Why don't we bring the bottle to the State Police crime laboratory? I could grab prints off it right at the station, but I'd rather get it done by the experts."

  Anderson arranged for a chopper to fly us directly to the crime lab in Boston. I was glad to be headed in Julia's direction-and fast-not only to confront her about the letter Claire had shown us, but also to protect her from Darwin, who would have arrived in Boston hours earlier. The latter motivation was the stronger of the two. Even with her shining more brightly as a suspect, even with my new doubts about what, if anything, our "love" really meant to her, I felt moved to rescue her. She was the most powerfully seductive woman I had ever met.

  While we were in flight, Anderson radioed the New York City Police Department to arrange a computer transfer of Bishop's fingerprints, first logged when he was arrested during 1980 for the restraining order violation. We didn't expect Darwin to deny handling the prescription bottle, but we didn't want to take any chances with documentation; evidence can disappear at the worst possible moments, especially evidence against an influential suspect.

  Billy's prints had been stored by the U.S. Department of Immigration and were already part of the investigation file. Anderson was carrying a set with him.

  We met with Art Fields, director of the crime lab, who agreed to let Anderson and me watch the testing. Fields is a short, bulky man of about sixty, with bushy black eyebrows and a permanent mischievous smile that looks as if he's just heard a witty, off-color anecdote. "What are we looking for?" he asked Anderson.

  "The main question is whether Billy Bishop's prints are on the bottle," Anderson said. "If not, then one big piece of evidence points away from him as a suspect."

  "Is this kid slow, or something?" Fields said. "Mentally, I mean."

  "No," I said. "He's extremely bright."

  "He couldn't think to wear gloves?" Fields asked.

  "Of course he could," Anderson said, "but his prints are all over the crime scene: the window and window frame he boosted himself through, the twins' room and cribs, even the antique desk he stole five grand out of. He left a note, too. It starts to stretch the imagination to think that his only effort to avoid detection would be slipping on a pair of gloves when he poisoned the baby."

  "I don't think it would stretch Captain O'Donnell’s imagination," Fields said. "He's certain the boy is guilty. And he's pretty sharp."

  "Certainly seems to be," Anderson agreed, obviously wanting to avoid a conflict.

  Fields smiled even more widely than usual. "Very political of you," he said to Anderson. "Personally, I can't stand the fucker."

  Anderson chuckled. "That makes two of us," he said. He looked at me. "Maybe, three."

  "What bothers you about O'Donnell?" I asked Fields.

  "I'm a pathologist, not a prosecutor," he said. "I go after facts, not any particular slant on them. I don't get convinced that blood just has to be on a piece of clothing. If I find it, I find it. If I don't, I don't."

  "Whereas O'Donnell…" I prompted.

  "He lobbies for the evidence to conform to the case he's building. He campaigns for a particular outcome. Not that he'd tamper with anything, but his absolute certainty that things ought to come out one way, rather than another,' can infect the technicians. And he tends to hang around them. So if they get clumsy, I worry they'll stumble toward the results he expects of them, without their even being aware of it."

  That was pretty high-end psychological reasoning, especially for a pathologist.

  The expression on my face must have telegraphed what I was thinking. "I have my Ph.D. in psychology," Fields explained. "This is a second career for me."

  "That's quite a change," I said. "What motivated you to switch?"

  "I got tired of coaxing the truth out of people," he said. "When I want the facts from a hair sample, I don't have to worry about creating a safe, therapeutic environment. I just toss it in a blender and run its DNA on a gel."

  "You really can't do that with psychotherapy patients," I said, with a wink.

  "Not if you're depending on repeat business," he said.

  Fields walked us from his office into the laboratory. We stood with him at a long black lab bench outfitted with chrome gas jets and faucets, watching Leona, a fiftyish wisp of a woman no taller than four feet, her hands disfigured by rheumatoid arthritis, as she used an ostrich-feather duster to powder the prescripti
on bottle. Every movement seemed to tax her, and she winced frequently, apparently from the pain in her joints. She took nearly twenty minutes to lift half the prints off the bottle, using two-inch lengths of special tape. When she seemed about to cry, Fields asked her whether she wanted him to take over. "No," she said tersely. "This has to be done right."

  Fields laughed and backed off, and we waited another fifteen minutes for Leona to finish up.

  "We'll bring the whole set down the hall to Simon Cranberg," Fields told us. "He'll let us know if the prints match whatever's on record for Darwin Bishop and Billy."

  We were already headed out the door for that session when Leona called to us. "I think I should have dusted the inside of the bottle, too," she said.

  We looked back at her.

  "The suspect might have been careful not to touch the outer surface," she said, "but not as careful removing the pills."

  "She's right," Fields said.

  We walked back to the lab bench. Anderson surrendered the paper bag with the bottle inside.

  Leona pulled it out, twisted off the cap, and squinted inside. "Hmm," she said.

  "Hmm, what?" I asked.

  She didn't answer, instead picking up a pair of tweezers and fishing inside the bottle with them. When she pulled them out, a two-inch photographic negative was caught in their pincer grip.

  "What the hell is that?" Anderson said.

  "It was curved flush to the inside wall," she said. "The color's so close to the orange plastic that we wouldn't have seen it if we didn't take our time and go the extra mile." She pointed a crooked finger at Fields. "Let that be a lesson to you." She held the negative up to the light so we could all get a peek at it. The image was small and shadowy, but it looked like a beach scene, with tiny people in the foreground.

  "Let's get a print made," Fields said. "It won't take more than a couple minutes."

  We left the bottle with Leona so she could lift any prints from the interior wall. Then we dropped the negative with the photography department and headed to Cranberg's office.

  Simon Cranberg turned out to be a lumbering man in overalls, with lamb chop sideburns and half-glasses-a cross between Ben Franklin and Attila the Hun. He had already loaded Darwin Bishop's prints onto his computer, so we started by looking for their match on Leona's pieces of tape. Cranberg scanned each length with a magnifying glass, checking his computer screen now and then. Within a minute he decided to run one of the strips through a scanner that transferred the lifted prints to a split screen next to the ones from Bishop's criminal record. "That's a match," he said with certainty. "Darwin Bishop's prints are on that bottle."

  That was no surprise to me. I glanced at Anderson, expecting him to look reassured, but he looked oddly unsettled. "What's wrong?" I said.

  "Nothing," he answered unconvincingly. "It's going like we thought it would."

  "Let's look at the boy," Fields said.

  Cranberg went over each length of tape meticulously, loading every image onto the screen next to Billy's fingerprints from Immigration. A few times he went back to pieces of tape he had already looked at. After he had scanned the last of them, he shook his head. "None of the lifted prints belongs to Billy Bishop," he said.

  "You're certain," I said.

  "A bunch of people barehanded that medicine bottle," Cranberg said. "Billy definitely isn't one of them."

  "That's it, then," Fields said. "You've got your answer. I can tell you, it isn't the one Captain O'Donnell will want to hear."

  I felt a real sense of relief for the first time since taking the Bishop case. Because I believed what Anderson had said: If Billy had tried to kill Tess, he wouldn't leave prints everywhere except the prescription bottle, not to mention leaving a note. And if Billy hadn't poisoned Tess, it was highly unlikely he had killed Brooke. I hoped a jury would see it that way, too.

  I looked over at Anderson again, expecting a mirror image of my mood. He winked and nodded his head tentatively. No sign of triumph anywhere. Maybe, I told myself, he had simply run out of steam getting us where we needed to go.

  A young man from the photography department appeared at the door, holding a manila envelope.

  "Perfect timing," Fields said. "Let's get a look at that photograph. Maybe we're on a roll here."

  "Did you want to review it first?" the young man asked Fields. He sounded like he was making a suggestion.

  Fields either didn't pick up on his discomfort or he ignored it. "No need," he said. "We're all friends here." He took the envelope, opened it, and pulled out a five-by-eight black-and-white glossy. Then he stood there staring at it, his face losing its permanent smile for the first time since I had met him. "What's this about?" he said quietly.

  I walked over and looked at the photograph. My heart fell. The muscles in my back felt like they were knotting themselves into a noose around my gut. I looked at Anderson, who had hung his head. No doubt he had recognized the beach scene even when Leona had held up the negative. Because he and Julia were the only two figures in it, holding each other close on a deserted stretch of Nantucket beach. Before I could think what to say to him, he walked past Fields and me, and out of the room.

  I followed Anderson, concentrating to keep my legs moving. Waves of emotion were crashing inside me. I felt betrayed, enraged, and foolish, all at the same time. I also felt unnerved. I was lost in the geography of the Bishop case. If North had lied to me about his connection with Julia, what else had he lied about? Could I rely on any of the data he had fed me about Bishop? He was the one, after all, who had told me about Bishop's affair with Claire Buckley. He was the one who had confirmed Bishop's having taken out life insurance on the twins.

  My mind upped the ante. Could Anderson, I wondered, have been directing my seduction from the beginning? Might he and Julia be partners in crime, using me to help focus suspicion on Darwin Bishop, to get him out of their way?

  And what about my having been attacked outside Mass General? Anderson knew my itinerary better than anyone. Was it possible I was winning over a woman he wanted badly enough to have me killed? Was the letter Julia had written meant for him?

  I couldn't believe I needed to do it, but I checked for the Browning Baby in my pocket as I headed down the hallway toward the exit to the heliport.

  I didn't get there. As I passed an open door to my right, a few feet from the exit, Anderson called my name. I stopped and looked into what seemed to be an anatomy lab, full of gleaming, stainless-steel dissection tables. Anderson was seated on one of them. I walked cautiously inside.

  Anderson stared up at the ceiling, shook his head, then looked at me. "I'd explain, but I can't," he said. "It was just something that happened. I never would have…"

  "I didn't want this fucking case!" I seethed. "I didn't need this case! Do you understand? You dragged me into it." My stitches pulled viciously at my insides. I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath as the pain died down slowly. I looked back at Anderson. "Why the hell didn't you tell me about this?"

  "I tried, in my own way," he said. "I kept warning you to keep your distance."

  "That's not the same as telling me you were with her," I said.

  "I was never with her," Anderson said, holding up his hands. "We were headed there-maybe. I can't even say that was in the cards." He dropped his hands to his thighs. "Let me try to tell you exactly what happened."

  I stared at him.

  "I met her about a month after I took the job down here. That's going back about a year and a half. She and Darwin hosted a fund-raiser for the Pine Street Inn, the big shelter in Boston. All the heavy hitters around here turned out, including all the local politicians. I was new in town, so I spoke to the crowd for ten, fifteen minutes about my plans for policing the island. She called me up, maybe three weeks later, said she wanted to talk about trying to help some of the kids on the island who were struggling with drug problems-maybe start some kind of community action group."

  I looked at him askance. "She called
you?"

  "Not that that's any excuse." He paused. "Things at home weren't the best for me. Maybe we were going through what every married couple goes through, but Tina and I were certainly having a rough time. We weren't talking as much. We were fighting more. And I was second-guessing the move here. I was pretty upset about it for a while."

  "Why?" I asked, unable to resist the therapist's mantle, even in my rage.

  "I loved Baltimore. That city was part of me. I came here because of what you and I had been through on the Lucas case and because I thought it would be better-safer, cleaner, prettier-for Tina and Kristie."

  I wasn't about to let him off the hook. "So Julia called you. Then what?"

  "After meeting a couple times for coffee, she told me how unhappy she was. And I started to talk a little bit about what was bothering me. We'd take walks, trade phone calls." He glanced down, let out a sigh. "I felt good. I really did. For the first time in a long time. She's amazing to look at, and that was certainly part of it. But it was more than that. Her voice, the way she looked at me, the way she listened… I thought I'd found someone who could help me change my life."

  I didn't like hearing how close Anderson felt to Julia or how similar his emotional experience with her was to mine. "When did you first have sex with her?" I asked, trying to chase the misty look out of Anderson 's eyes. "And how has that affected the investigation?"

  Anderson 's eyes thinned. His expression hardened. "Never did, on the first question. Never would, on the second."

  "Sure, and give me a break, in that order," I said.

  "I never had sex with her, Frank," Anderson bristled. "I'm not you."

  I shook my head. "Take the girl and the case and-" I started to walk out.

  "Wait a second, will you?" he said. "Look, I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that."