by Julia Shupe
She made a tisking sound with her tongue. “If it had been my decision, Carlton Tubbs would still be in prison right now, or in a psychiatric hospital, to say the least. He was—and probably still is—a deeply troubled man. He suffered terrible trauma as a child. He learned, repeatedly, that he couldn’t trust people. His father beat him, and ultimately abandoned him, and five years later, his mother did the same. In his most formative years, Carlton was abused and betrayed by the people he trusted most. And though he was too young to remember his father, the memories of his mother are clear and vivid. He blames her for all his life’s problems. And as a result, he developed a strong hatred for women.”
“Then why let him out?” I asked. “Why recommend his release? I’m sure the parole board asked for your opinion.”
“Come on,” she answered dryly. “You know how this works. He did his time and completed his sentence. None of what I said meant a thing.”
“No? Then why bring you in at all? No offense, Dr. Waite,” said Gil, “but if they weren’t planning to heed the advice, why assign Tubbs a psychiatrist? Why waste a valuable resource? Why seek an opinion at all? Did you speak on his behalf, or against him? Did your point of view carry any weight at all?”
“It’s not that simple. Prison psychiatry isn’t the same kind of therapy people receive on the outside. Carlton Tubbs didn’t—or doesn’t—enjoy the same privacy laws, nor did he enjoy the same personalized treatment. I did the best I could with the time I was given, but the truth of the matter is this: my job was to assess a future threat. That’s all. It wasn’t about him. Carlton’s therapy wasn’t centered on him. It was more about protecting Meghan Newton. It was my job to determine if he’d attack her again, to see if he’d try to find her once he was released. Can you image the resulting lawsuit if that had happened? Can you imagine the negative press? I cared about my patients. I genuinely tried to help them. People like Carlton need long-term care, but the system just isn’t designed for that. It’s interested in protecting itself, not the patients. It’s all about preventing future incidents. You have to remember, Agents: it’s often about money.”
“And did he?” Jacob pressed. “In your professional opinion, did Tubbs plan to pursue Meghan Newton?”
“No. In my professional opinion, no. It was almost as if he had scrubbed her from his mind. I rarely brought her up, and he never did. When we spoke about his crime, it was always abstractly. Meghan Newton was ‘the victim’, or ‘she’. We rarely mentioned her name. If I said her name, he would immediately shut down.”
“And why would that be?”
“In a word, detectives—shame.”
Gil seemed to be suppressing incredulity. “You think that Tubbs was remorseful?”
“I do.” Dr. Waite took a breath. “Like I said, Carlton was a very unusual case. I think I was the first person he ever opened up to, and once he did, I think he liked it. I found him to be remorseful and penitent. He actually had a conscience. He was a serial killer who didn’t want the title.”
I shook my head. “But he wasn’t a serial killer. Not yet, anyway. He wasn’t a killer at the time, to our knowledge. Do you know something contrary to that?”
“No. I don’t. And you’re right. He wasn’t a serial killer. But he was a classic case in the making. Don’t you think? Think about it.” She turned her eyes to Jacob. “Especially you, Agent Forrest. As a profiler, you must appreciate the unique opportunity I was given. I was witness to the birth of a serial killer. I had a front row seat to the action, so to speak, to the range of emotions, the thrills, and the shame, to the excitement he felt, and the doubts.”
“But serial killers,” Jacob said slowly, “don’t tend toward shame and doubt, Dr. Waite. They’re sociopaths. They’re incapable of empathy.”
Dr. Sandra Waite pursed her lips. “Not always. You’re generalizing, Agent. People don’t fit into neat little boxes. They’re complicated and messy, frustratingly so, at times. One case can be entirely different than the last, and Carlton was dissimilar from many. He was fighting inner demons while sitting across the table front me. They would grow, rise up; he’d do his best to tamp them down. He was a fledgling killer experiencing all the characteristic impulses—a serial killer in the making, like I said. He was struggling with the ebbs and flows of his desires. He picked Meghan Newton that day because the demon had risen up and taken him over. It wasn’t a crime of passion, detectives. Like a serial killer, he was acting out a fantasy. He saw Meghan Newton as his mother. She was his first attempt at creating a ritual. If he’d successfully killed her—and gotten away with it—you can bet your ass there’d be many more behind her. The way I see it, for Carlton Tubbs, that was the day the demon won.”
“The demon,” I murmured, meeting Jacob’s flashing glance. “Dr. Waite, that’s an interesting way to put it.” I tilted my head. “We visited Meghan yesterday.”
She leaned forward, her back stiff and straight. “And? How is she doing? Over the years, I’ve thought about her often. I’ve tried to keep tabs on her. I’ve read her bestselling book. I was confident—100% confident, actually—that Carlton would leave her alone. At the time, she was my primary concern. She was my charge. And I assure you: I didn’t take that assignment lightly. If I thought for a moment that he’d hunt her, I would have fought much harder to keep him locked in a cell.”
“She’s fine,” I replied, and Dr. Waite slumped forward.
“Fine?” Gil had failed to suppress his scorn. “If you consider hiding in a dark house fine, or trapping yourself behind a door with eighteen locks, or living with a pit bull that attacks on command, or eating once a week, and hiding from the sun. That woman is anything but fine. She’s trapped inside fear. She’s wrapped herself in it. It’s all she knows. I’d hardly say she’s fine.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dr. Waite whispered. “I’ve prayed for her. My heart has bled for her. I’ve wished for her to find contentment, and peace.”
I shook my head. We were getting off topic. I wanted to know about the so-called demon. “Dr. Waite,” I began again, “Meghan said something that interested us. During the attack, she recalled Tubbs speaking to another person. She said he was whispering, sometimes even arguing. She said it was like someone else was in the woods.”
Dr. Waite smiled thinly. She suddenly looked drained.
“Ah,” she said. “She must have been talking about Smith.”
Chapter 22
Gil and I exchanged a look.
“Smith?” he barked. “Who the hell is Smith?”
This was unexpected, but it certainly seemed to fit. Maybe this was why things had always seemed a bit off to me, why the crimes, though similar, were slightly different. Maybe someone else had committed them altogether; someone with ties to Tubbs, but not him.
“Smith,” Dr. Waite clarified, “isn’t anyone. He’s a figment of Carlton’s overactive imagination. Smith is his imaginary friend, his muse, someone he created to deal with the frightening fantasies in his head.”
“Pardon me, Doctor,” Gil frowned. “But adults don’t tend to have imaginary friends.”
“I never said Smith was an adult. Smith was an eleven-year-old boy from Carlton’s childhood. It took months of therapy for Carlton to even mention his name. And even when he did, it was only in passing.”
For a moment, Jacob was quiet. I could see the gears turning in his head. “Who was Smith,” he asked quietly. “The child, I mean. Tell me about him. What was he like?”
Sandra sat back, her eyes flicking to the beams in the ceiling overhead. “I liken Smith to Carlton’s imaginary, but evil, twin. He represented Carlton’s darker side, the place his hedonism lived and thrived. Smith was the daring one, the dauntless instigator, the one who acted without fearing consequences. In clinical terms, Smith represented Carlton’s duality, his struggle.”
“Carlton was suffering DID?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say that for sure. And frankly, with this, we find ourselves in
sticky territory. We’re starting to speak in theoretical terms, and you know I can’t do that. When it comes to patient confidentially—even a convict’s—I’m not able to posit on things I never diagnosed.”
“We’re not asking you to posit,” Jacob clarified. “We’re trying to determine if Tubbs had an accomplice. When speaking theoretically, stick to the facts as you remember them to be. What did you see? What did you experience?”
“Well,” she said slowly. “I can’t speculate on a medical condition, but I can speak about Carlton’s suffering. For a doctor to diagnose dissociative identity disorder, he or she must bear firsthand witness to the symptoms. Carlton never manifested symptoms. He never became Smith in front of me, or slipped into an alternate persona. He never assumed different traits or mannerisms, nor did he refer to himself by any another name. You have to understand: DID is complex—and rare, if I might add. I’ve never seen a legitimate case. There are hundreds of shades of gray on the DID spectrum, and I believe every person fits somewhere along that spectrum. Even you, Agent.” She lifted a brow, and I found myself liking her more. “Ever find yourself talking to yourself out loud? Placating yourself? Telling yourself to calm down? To be patient? To give things time? Do you ever console yourself when something bad happens? When speaking to yourself, have you ever used a plural pronoun? Have you ever said ‘we’ll get through this?’, ‘we’ll feel better tomorrow’, or ‘let’s hang in there’? In that sentence, Agent, who is the we? You, and who else? You’re only one person.”
“I get it,” Jacob said, “I know what you’re saying. And on the DID spectrum, where does Carlton fit?”
She dodged the direct question by giving us something else. “In my sessions with Tubbs, I came to see Smith as a clever defense mechanism, a way for Carlton to separate himself from things that caused him shame, or pain.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Doc.” This from Gil who’d settled his arms across his chest.
“Actually, detective, it does. It’s a very clever strategy, if I do say so myself. It protects the self from the self. Think about it. Smith was the deviant. Smith was the pervert. Whenever Carlton gave into temptation, it was because Smith was dangling the meat.” She smiled. “Smith was everything Carlton wasn’t. He was strong and confident, sure of himself. He knew what he wanted, what he liked, what he desired, and he never apologized for any of it. Smith—whether Carlton was conscious of it or not—was everything Carlton wanted to be.
“But he was also a place Carlton hid his madness. Smith manifested all of Carlton’s darkest urges. Carlton assigned Smith his nastiest fantasies, and by extension, forgave himself for having them. When Smith was involved, he could examine those strange urges safely, at a distance. He could complain that ‘Smith made me think about it, or do it’.”
I still wasn’t entirely convinced. “But how do you know Smith isn’t a real person?”
With a shrug, she answered me. “I guess I don’t know. Not for sure. Nobody knows, except for Carton, of course. And even he might not know the answer to that question. But what I can tell you is this: when pressed for details, Carlton couldn’t give me any. He had no address for Smith, no mother’s name. There wasn’t a father to speak of. He always said Smith had the perfect life, loving parents, a safe and stable home. But he couldn’t say where that home actually was. All of those details were part of Smith’s character, but none were specific or quantitative. It was all just part of the illusion. And when you think about it, isn’t that what most children do? In the world of fantasy, details are mundane. They’re unimportant in the grander sense. Carlton couldn’t name a school Smith attended, or the names of brothers or sisters he may have had.” She smiled. “He never even gave Smith a last name. Or,” she added, after a moment of thought. “Maybe Smith actually was his last name. We’ll never know. But is it all that difficult to conceive of how he came up with it? How many Smiths would you find at an orphanage? How many Jones, Williams, or Johnsons?”
Jacob shifted in his chair. “What do you mean?”
“Think about it, Agent. Think about the building blocks of a fantasy realm. As humans—particularly as children—we create fantasy from reality; from things we see every day. In very simple terms, we only know what we know. Am I right?” She spread her hands as if the answer was so clear. “Hence the name Smith. It’s obvious. How many Smiths did Carlton know at the children’s home? When parents don’t want to be found, detectives, they tend to give false information. It’s very common in orphanages. First names are often correct, but in many instances, the last names are wrong. It prevents children from later finding their parents. Smith is common, as is Jones, and Johnson. If you don’t want your child trying to find you as an adult, you choose a common last name. In Carlton’s case, the most common last names in the country.”
It made sense to me in an instant. And it made Carlton Tubbs a stronger suspect in my eyes. Gil was right. This guy was batshit crazy.
“Smith,” Dr. Waite added, “was a father figure to Carlton. Carlton never had a father of his own, so what did he do? He made one up. It’s easier that way. It’s easier to blame others for the things we do, instead of accepting responsibility for our actions.”
“And what,” asked Gil, “did Carlton do? What things did he do that he later blamed on Smith?”
“It’s not so much about things he did. Like I told you: Carlton struggled with inner demons and voices. After spending time together—a long time, mind you—he finally acknowledged his violent tendencies. But that didn’t mean he liked having them.”
“And it was your job,” I reasoned, “to bring those emotions to the surface, so to speak, to make him face them, and ultimately deal with them.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know if that was my job exactly, but it was something I tried very hard to do. I’m a psychiatrist, Detective. I know how human emotions work. When people refuse to face certain things, those things can end up rotting inside their heads. Carlton needed to face his mother’s betrayal, the fact that she chose her addictions over him.”
“And how,” Gil asked, “did you make him face that?”
I could tell Gil wasn’t buying her theory. He was a man’s man if I ever saw one. He was probably reasoning that Smith was a real person, that he was out there killing people, and taking their feet, not a figment of a boy’s imagination.
“Well, for starters,” Dr. Waite began, “I made him focus on what he’d do when he got out of prison, on what kind of life he would make for himself. Carlton liked making plans, which was something I actually encouraged him to do. When your childhood is turned upside down, detectives, you tend to prefer order when you reach adulthood. When you’re surrounded by uncertainty, you begin to crave certainty. So I tried to encourage him to make life plans, to face his demons, and to plan his life around them.”
“Tried?” Gil said, ever the skeptic. “Sounds like you’re not really sure the plan worked.”
“You’re right. I’m not sure. I never followed up with him. But like I said, he liked to make plans. The issue was always that he was a terrible alcoholic. Alcoholism tends to destroy even the best-laid plans. Neatness and order don’t go hand in hand with addiction.”
“So you talked about his sobriety,” I offered. “That would have been an important part of the plan.”
“Yes, sobriety was something we talked about, as well as how to hold onto it for rest of his life. We also talked about things that trigger him. We focused on things that brought his darker side to mind: pornography, sex, violence, and Smith. We talked about the importance of keeping busy, staying focused, of creating daily routines. We talked about what kind of job he might be have, about where he might live, and if he’d have any friends. I tried to get him to visualize freedom, to look forward to it, and to embrace it. When people look forward to something, they make better choices. When they believe their dreams are possible, they work harder to manifest them.” She gave us a tight smile. “I thought, at the time, that it ac
tually worked. At the end of our time together, Carlton was convinced he could make it in the outside world. He was absolutely certain he could control his violent tendencies.”
“And what about you?” Gil asked. “Were you convinced?”
Sandra Waite took a long moment to compose her thoughts. She was staring at Gil, giving him the evil eye. She seemed to be sizing him up. We were straddling that invisible line again, that division between fact and opinion. I wondered how far she would take this conversation, how much information she’d deem necessary. In this particular case, the lines were strangely blurred. What was fact? What was supposition? We wouldn’t know the truth until we were able to get Tubbs into an interrogation room. At this point, all else was speculation and conjecture.
I held my breath while she deliberated. In the end, she seemed to reach a decision. She took a deep breath and turned her eyes to Jacob. It was clear she liked him better than Gil. Or me.
“I remember our last session together,” she said slowly. “I broke his heart that day. I’ve regretted that since. I brought up Meghan Newton, his first and only crime—his only crime that we know of, of course.” She shook her head. “I just wanted him to succeed. He asked me outright. He asked me to be honest. And I owed him that. I wanted to give him that. He wanted to know if I thought he would make it, if I thought he could stay on a straight path.”
Jacob was clearly enthralled. “And? How did you answer his question?”
Raising a hand to her hat, she took it off. Beneath it, her grey hair was short and matted with sweat. “I gave him what he asked me for,” she said quietly. “I told him the truth, whether he liked it or not. I told him this thing would likely never let him go. I likened it to a demon, to something he’d live with for the rest of his life. Detectives,” she added, her voice full of remorse. “I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, but I gave him an honest answer to his question. I thought honesty would be helpful in that instance. Lying to people doesn’t help them grow.”