Compulsion

by Keith Ablow

  "Garret?" McCarthy prompted him.

  No response.

  I glanced at Anderson, who looked just as worried as I was that Garret was losing his nerve.

  "Garret, if you don't want…" McCarthy started.

  "Tell me again how I know I'll be safe," Garret said, still staring at the table.

  "Okay, let's go over that," McCarthy said. "A state trooper is being assigned to you as a bodyguard. That person will be with you for at least six months, much longer if anyone you implicate in a crime is ultimately brought to trial. It's important you understand, though, as we've informed your mother and your lawyer: There are no guarantees. Nothing we can do will take away every bit of risk."

  Garret pursed his lips, apparently pondering what he had just heard.

  All I could do was sit there and wait. I scanned the faces in the room. Tom Harrigan rolled his eyes and shrugged.

  "Are you reconsidering, Garret?" McCarthy said. "You shouldn't feel pressured to say anything." His tone suggested otherwise. "We can call it a night right now, if you want. Everyone will go home, like this never happened."

  Garret looked up at him, glanced at me. A few more seconds of silence, then: "I was reading in my room. It was about eleven-thirty or so."

  I felt my whole body relax. I sensed victory. I looked at Anderson. His fist was clenched. This was the moment we had worked for.

  "I was reading and I heard something downstairs-from the basement," he went on. "It was a crash, like something had fallen."

  McCarthy nodded encouragingly.

  "I thought everyone else had gone to bed, so I was like, "That's weird,' you know? So I started going down to the basement." He squinted, as if visualizing the scene. "I got as far as the family room and I was walking toward the kitchen, where the basement door is. But before I got there I heard footsteps coming toward me. So I stopped. And Darwin walked into the room." Garret paused, looked directly at McCarthy. "He had a tube of plastic sealant in his hand."

  Every trace of sound seemed to evaporate from the room. What Garret had said was enough to help Billy, but he wasn't finished.

  "I told Darwin I had heard something in the basement," Garret continued. "He said not to worry about it, he'd knocked something over, to go back to my room."

  "And what did you do?" McCarthy said.

  "I went upstairs. But I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. Eerie, like. Darwin never goes down to the basement, first of all. And he seemed, like, out of it."

  "Out of it," McCarthy repeated.

  "Major league stressed or angry, or something," Garret said. "I couldn't tell."

  "What happened next?"

  "I heard him walk past my room, toward the nursery. So I waited until he'd gotten all the way down the hall, then I sneaked out of my room and followed him."

  "And?" McCarthy said.

  Garret closed his eyes. "I saw him take the tube of caulk and…"

  "What did he do with the caulk?" McCarthy said.

  "He put it in Brooke's nose. First on one side, then the other," Garret said. "Then down her throat." He opened his eyes. They were filled with tears.

  It was the first time I had seen Garret cry. And for the first time, he seemed his age to me. He looked like an emotionally awkward, adolescent boy struggling to be a man, under the worst of circumstances.

  "Then what happened?" McCarthy continued, unfazed.

  "I went back to my room," Garret said, wiping tears off his cheeks.

  "And you didn't tell anyone about this until now?" McCarthy said.

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "I was scared," Garret said.

  "Of what?" McCarthy asked.

  " Darwin."

  "Why?"

  "Because I've watched him beat my brother Billy almost unconscious," Garret said. "Because he's threatened more than once to kill me if I disobeyed him-let alone… turning him in."

  "So why go out on a limb now?" McCarthy asked.

  Garret swallowed, took a deep breath. "I saw what he did to my mother," he said, his lip starting to twitch again.

  "If I had had the guts to stop him sooner, that never would have happened. I'm not going to wait until she's dead to do the right thing."

  Garret left the interview room with a police escort. The plan was for him to stay the night in Boston, then head back to Nantucket.

  State Police Captain O'Donnell was the first to speak. "Officer Anderson," he said, "based on what I just heard, along with the fingerprint evidence you obtained and the other circumstantial evidence in this case, I plan to charge Darwin Bishop with the first-degree murder of his daughter Brooke and the attempted murder of his daughter Tess." He glanced at Tom Harrigan. "I would presume the District Attorney's office will ask the grand jury to indict Mr. Bishop for those offenses, along with the attempted murder of his wife Julia earlier today."

  "We'll be in front of the grand jury as soon as they can convene one," Harrigan said.

  "I hope we can arrange Billy Bishop's release in the same time frame," Carl Rossetti said.

  "We'll drop the charges against him as soon as possible," Harrigan said.

  "When would that be?" Rossetti asked, stonefaced.

  "I'll take care of it personally tomorrow morning," Harrigan answered.

  Terry McCarthy looked over at Anderson and me. "That means Billy goes free in the a.m.," he said. "Would you two be picking him up?"

  Anderson turned to me. "You mind taking care of that, Frank?" he said, with a wink. "I should get back to the island tonight."

  "I don't mind," I said. "I don't mind at all."

  As the room emptied, I pulled O'Donnell aside. "I think you owe me one thing," I said.

  "What?" he said, annoyed. "You want some kind of formal apology? I should contact the newspapers, tell them how fucking brilliant you are? You haven't had enough news coverage in your life, Doc?"

  "No," I said. "I'm not looking for anything like that."

  He didn't walk away.

  "He's gonna pay up," the voice at the back of my mind said. "He owes you the truth and he knows it."

  "I meant what I said when we met at your office," I told him.

  He smiled a surprised, good-natured smile. "That I'm a sociopath?" he said.

  So he knew where we were headed. "Not that you're a sociopath," I said. "But that something got in the way of you doing the right thing here." I saw him stiffen. I shook my head and looked away, giving him a little space. "This is over," I said. "No hard feelings. All I want is the answer to one question." I looked back at him.

  He took a deep breath, let it out. "Ask already." His eyes met mine and stuck.

  "You've been through something painful," I said. "I want to know what it was."

  The smile left his face. "Why? What does that matter to you?" he said.

  "It does," I said.

  "But why?"

  "It just does." I could have said much more. I could have told him that, wherever I go, I keep searching for primary evil, out of the womb-the bad seed-but have never found it. I could have told him that everyone really does seem to be recycling pain, that empathy, properly harnessed, really does seem to stop the cycle of hurt-and heal people. And I could have told him that something about those two facts kept my mood from plummeting and kept me out of the gutter, because they reassured me we might be a worthwhile species, capable of more compassion than we seem to be. "If it turned out we were butting heads purely over some allegiance you've got to the mayor or Darwin Bishop, I just wouldn't know what to do with that. I wouldn't understand it, you know? I-"

  "You need to know why people act the way they do. You want things to make sense," he said.

  "Yes," I said.

  O'Donnell chuckled, looked away. The smile on his face vanished. "I had a sister less than a year old kidnapped and killed by some bum drifter out of Colorado." He shrugged. "Maybe I wanted this case to go away. Maybe I shut down on it. My mistake." He glanced at me, then walked off.

 
I closed my eyes. "Thanks," I said quietly.

  20

  Sunday, June 30, 2002

  It was after midnight, but I didn't drive right home. I drove to the Suffolk County House of Corrections.

  Luckily, Anderson 's friends were working the overnight again. Tony Glass, a spark plug of a man about thirty, thirty-five, wearing Coke-bottle lenses, ran the front desk. He asked me if I was there for another visit with Billy.

  "No," I said. "I want to see Darwin Bishop."

  "Strange, huh?" Glass said. "The father and the son in the same jail at the same time?"

  "Not for long," I said. "Billy should be released in the morning."

  "Good. He seems like a decent kid," Glass said. "A couple of the guards were saying so. They like him."

  I smiled. Billy might be likable, but he was also destructive and manipulative. I hadn't forgotten that. "He can be charming," I said.

  "The father's in protective custody," Glass said. "He got into it with another inmate, took a little beating. You might want to see him down on the cell block, if you don't mind."

  "No problem." I wondered whether Bishop had had a run-in with another inmate, or whether he'd run into a guard who didn't stomach wife-beaters.

  Protective custody was basement level in the jail, a cell block like the others, but without access to any common areas or recreational activities. It was also cold and dark down there, maybe to remind the inmates that protecting them was an additional burden for the system, not something that got them any warm fuzzies.

  Only a few of the cells were occupied. A guard walked me to the last one in the row. Darwin Bishop was lying on a cot, wearing the same anonymous orange jumpsuit that Billy had been wearing. "Got a visitor, Bishop," the guard said. He walked away, leaving me there.

  Bishop sat up. His lip was split, but he looked okay otherwise. "Dr. Clevenger," he said, sounding weak. "What brings you?"

  What, indeed? Did I want to see with my own eyes that the truth had caught up with a man who had run from it for so long? Or had Julia sparked such a primal, competitive instinct in me that I wanted to savor a rival's defeat? I had planned to take her from him, after all. I had been planning it at some level since the day I met her. "I'm not sure why I'm here," I told him.

  "I didn't go to the hospital to hurt Julia," he said. "I love her, probably more than I should. I lost control. And you're partly to blame. You've been seeing her."

  "Terrorizing your family isn't a great strategy to keep them faithful," I said. "Having affairs of your own doesn't help, either."

  "That doesn't excuse you," he said. "I never took something of yours."

  "Is that why you sent your bodyguards to my apartment yesterday?" I said. "To even the score?"

  "Yes," he said. "I wish you had been at home. You'd look worse than I do."

  "Too late now," I said.

  "Possibly." He ran a finger over his lip. It was bleeding. He looked at the blood. "You're not her first, you know. Your buddy North had her, too. She doesn't discriminate."

  I said nothing.

  Bishop looked at me. "You don't even care," he said.

  "You want her anyhow. You're addicted to her, same as he was." He paused. "Same as I am." He looked at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and shook his head, as if he still couldn't quite believe what had happened to him. Then his gaze drifted around the walls of the cell. He swallowed hard. "I've been here before," he said quietly. "Alone. With nothing. I always come back."

  The way he said those words, almost as a mantra, to soothe himself, made me feel something like pity for him. "No one can stop you from getting rich inside," I said.

  Drake Slattery, Lilly's internist, called me just before 7:00 a.m. to tell me Lilly would be going home later that morning. I told him I'd be by to see her off.

  She was dressed in street clothes-white jeans and a simple, light green blouse-when I got to her room. She had swept her blond curls over one shoulder and put on pretty pink lipstick and was seated in one of the armchairs by her bed, reading. I knocked. She looked up, smiled. "Come in," she said.

  I took the other armchair. "Anything interesting?" I asked, nodding at the magazine.

  She held up the magazine so I could see the cover. It was a copy of True Confessions. "Appropriate, huh?" she said.

  I smiled. "I suppose so."

  "Discharge day," she said.

  "How are you feeling?" I asked.

  "Honestly?" she said.

  "Of course."

  "I would love to do it again," she said.

  "Inject yourself," I said.

  She nodded. "I think about it most of the day. Sometimes I dream about it at night." She looked directly into my eyes. "This isn't going to be easy."

  Lilly was describing something similar to the craving addicts experience when they try to put down a drug. For her, the injections and resulting infections had been intoxicants, after all. They had numbed her mind so she couldn't focus on her complex feelings for her grandfather. Now, with painful reality pressing in, her mind was pleading with her to keep the drugs flowing. "Have you thought a lot more about your relationship with your grandfather?" I asked.

  "A little bit during the day," she said. "A lot when I'm falling off to sleep."

  She seemed reticent to say more, so I chose provocative words. "What comes to mind while you're lying in bed?" I asked softly.

  Her face flushed. "I have these dreams. They're different from the ones where I'm hurting myself. Very different."

  "How so?" I said.

  "I'm hurting… him," she said.

  That didn't surprise me. The longer Lilly stayed away from her habit, the more she thought about the inappropriate relationship that had sparked it, the angrier she was likely to get. I wanted her to know that she didn't need to be ashamed of that anger, that she could talk openly about it-to me or her new therapist (my old one) Ted James. "How are you hurting him?" I asked her.

  "It's awful," she said.

  "They're just feelings," I said. "The only person you've really hurt is yourself."

  She looked down at her leg for several seconds. "In the dreams, I'm in bed," she said, tentatively. "Grandpa comes into my room to kiss me good night." She looked back at me.

  "And then?" I said, keeping my voice even.

  "I pretend I'm asleep, but I'm not. He comes closer and closer. It feels like he's taking forever to get to me. Finally, I see his shadow on the wall. I watch it as he leans over to kiss me. And just as his lips are about to touch my forehead, I turn over and…" She closed her eyes.

  "And…" I said, encouraging her.

  She kept her eyes closed. "I have a knife."

  "What happens?" I asked.

  She looked directly at me again. "I cut his throat." She looked horrified.

  "And then?" I said.

  "Then he just stares at me with this terrible confusion in his eyes. Like he has no idea why I did it. And that's the worst part. That look on his face. It's even worse than picturing what I did to him-you know, the way his neck bleeds. I can't get his expression out of my head."

  "Make sure she can keep it out of reality" the voice at the back of my mind said.

  "You don't feel the impulse to strike out at your grandfather that way right now, do you?" I asked. "While you're awake?"

  She looked at me as if I had two heads. "My God, no. I don't ever want to hurt him."

  "I didn't think you did," I said.

  Lilly's nightmare was transparent. Her grandfather had strung her along, seducing her for years. He had come closer and closer, without ever laying a hand on her. To an adolescent girl's unconscious mind, it must have seemed that he was taking forever to claim her. But such a girl's rage at being manipulated would grow in tandem with her erotic impulses, hence the fantasy of killing her grandfather as she lay in bed, just as his lips are about to touch her. Even the grandfather's confusion seemed on the mark. He may never have consciously intended to harm Lilly, acting automatically on his own bent emotio
nal reflexes-his shadow-born of who knows what childhood trauma.

  Something Ted James had told me years before came back to me. He'd been trying to help me let go of my anger toward my father, which I was never fully able to do. "Eventually," James had said, "you'll realize there's no one to blame and no one to hate. Your father was a victim, just like you."

  I looked at Lilly. "Maybe the reason your grandfather looks confused," I said, "is because he never understood why your relationship turned toxic-the dynamics that drove it in a destructive direction. Maybe he didn't understand it any better than you did."

  "In other words," she said, "he didn't mean to screw me up?"

  "Maybe not," I said.

  She seemed to be grappling with that notion.

  "Do you say anything to him when he's looking at you with that confusion in his eyes?" I asked. "After you've cut him?"

  "No," she said. "That's when I wake up."

  "What would you say to him?" I asked.

  She shook her head. "I don't know."

  "Think about it," I said.

  She smiled, then squinted past me, presumably imagining the situation. After a few moments, she looked back at me. "Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite," she said. She laughed.

  I let myself laugh with her, to drain the tension from the moment. Were she a long-term patient of mine, her words and the tone of voice in which she had delivered them-combining innocence, rage, and something vaguely sensual-would have been a perfect launching pad for a longer flight over the terrain of her trauma. That was a very good sign indeed. "You're going to be okay," I said.

  "Think so?" she said.

  "I know so." I extended my hand. She took it. "Good luck," I said. "I'll be thinking about you."

  Billy was scheduled to be released later that day, but the gears of the legal system always grind. He wasn't released that day, or the next. He and I joked about him being set free on Independence Day, but that didn't happen, either. It took ten days for the relevant paperwork to flow between the D.A.'s office and the jail. Finally, on July 10, I went to the Suffolk County House of Corrections and watched him walk through the two sets of sliding steel doors that pretend to separate good from evil. He glanced back just once as he half-jogged to me. "I can't believe I'm out of there," he said. "Thank you."