Her gaze traveled from the box to the floor nearby, where there was a small, telltale pile of tortoiseshell shavings.
“Can’t you find it?” he demanded.
“Yes. Yes, here it is.”
She took out the blindfold, then stepped away from the box. With a nonchalant scuff of her shoe she scattered the shavings.
One problem taken care of.
But when he opened the door…
Her heart kept up a frantic staccato rhythm. The palsied shaking of her hands made it difficult to knot the blindfold in place.
When he opened the door, he might see it. The piece of the comb under there.
Impossible for her to explain away the tool as anything innocent. If he noticed it, she was dead.
“Hurry up,” he ordered.
Quickly she finished fastening the cloth over her eyes. She groped for the chair, found it, and sat.
“Ready,” she called. The chilly finger tickling the base of her spine was a trickle of sweat.
Rattle-a key. Clunk of the bolt retracting. Rasp of hinges.
Footsteps in the room.
The chair opposite hers scraped the floor, then protested as he sat.
He hadn’t seen the comb. Thank God.
She might live a little longer, then.
She’d lost her best chance of escape and broken the tool that had made it possible, broken it probably beyond repair, but at least, this night, she wouldn’t burn.
“Excited, Doc?” he asked softly.
“What makes you say that?”
“You seem… on edge.”
“I’m always a little tense when I’m working.” The lie came fluently. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it? To start our work together?”
“Of course it is.” His chair creaked as he leaned forward. “As of this moment, Doc, our first session has officially begun.”
21
Our first session. The words stirred a cold queasiness in the pit of her stomach.
She wished she could see the man before her, read his face. Difficult to analyze him without the nonverbal clues that often spoke louder than even the most candid testimony.
Well, she would manage. Would have to.
With effort she forced her mind into clear focus. He would judge her skills by her performance in this encounter. If she was found wanting, she might not get a second chance.
“All right,” she said slowly. “I’ve read the newspaper stories you left me. I’d like to discuss what it was like for you when you did those things. What you were feeling each time you… kidnapped a woman.”
“Burned one, you mean. Kidnapping was merely an unavoidable preliminary.”
“Burned one. Yes.”
“Don’t be afraid to speak plainly. I can take it.”
He sounded relaxed, almost cheerful. That state of mind was unlikely to last.
Therapy was not fun. Though it might seem like a game in the beginning, it quickly turned serious and, often, uncomfortable. Her style of analysis was aggressive, probing; to save time, to compress months of work into hours, she made intuitive leaps and challenged the patient to keep up. It was a method that got results, but it didn’t always make for restful exchanges.
She wondered how he would react when the first nerve was struck.
“I’ll try to refrain from euphemisms in the future,” she promised. “Now tell me about this compulsion to kill. Does it come on gradually or all of a sudden?”
“Gradually.”
“How does it start?”
“With physical sensations. Coldness in my fingers. Heat at the back of my neck.”
“Do your fingers get numb?”
“No. They tingle.”
“Painful?”
“Disturbing, that’s all.”
“Any other symptoms?”
“Sometimes… I hear a sort of chiming. Distant. Like ringing in the ears but more elusive. Hard to describe.”
She frowned. The symptoms he’d described were suggestive of the aura phase that marked the onset of an epileptic seizure. She’d experienced similar reactions in childhood.
The notion that an epileptic might imitate Frankenstein’s monster, blindly wrapping his hands around a terrified maiden’s throat, was an irresponsible myth. But in the case of a profoundly disturbed individual, someone already showing homicidal tendencies, a prolonged status seizure of the partial or focal type-a fugue state-might permit his suppressed aggressive feelings to rise uncensored to the surface.
It was possible. But she didn’t intend to raise that hypothesis with him, at least not yet. If he believed that a pill could cure all his problems, he wouldn’t need her anymore.
“Other than physical sensations,” she asked, “are there any other feelings-emotions, moods-that you associate with the murders?”
For the first time he hesitated. She heard a series of soft pops and realized he was cracking his knuckles.
“I don’t feel anything when I do it,” he said at last.
“No emotions at all?”
“None.”
“Any special dreams?”
“No.”
“Do you ever dream? At any time?”
“I… Sometimes.”
“Erotic dreams?”
His chair squeaked with a shift of his weight. “I knew you’d get to that.”
“To what?”
“Sex. And dreams. They’re unavoidable, aren’t they?”
She didn’t respond directly. “Tell me about your dreams.”
“They’re erotic, like you said.”
“In what way?”
He cleared his throat. “Nothing special. I mean… they’re dreams, that’s all.”
His first apparent resistance. Briefly she considered backing away from this subject if it was agitating him. But under other circumstances she would never do that. When the patient showed discomfort, that was the time to drill deeper, penetrate to the root of the problem.
If she didn’t use the techniques that worked for her, if she didn’t allow herself to function as a therapist, she would guarantee her own ineffectiveness. And the man before her already had made clear what he would do to her if she didn’t get results.
Probe, then. Push.
“You seem reluctant to talk about this,” she said carefully.
“I don’t see that it’s relevant.”
