When She Was Bad

upset about it.”

But it wasn’t, thought Lyssy. Not for him. Because the more upset he got, the louder the muttering in the dark place. By now it was already loud enough that he could almost make out the words-and whoever it was in there, he didn’t sound happy.

CHAPTER TWO 1

“Basically, you had this couple living way the hell and gone on a ridgetop in Oregon,” explained retired FBI Special Agent E. L. Pender, sitting in the copilot seat of the air ambulance transporting himself, Dr. Cogan, and her sedated patient from Redding to Portland. The pilot, recognizing Pender from the book tour he’d taken to promote his ghostwritten autobiography a few years ago, had invited him up to the cockpit for a chat; as happened more often than not, the conversation had turned to the most notorious case of Pender’s career. “Maxwell, he was so crazy he thought he was ten different people, and his foster mother/lover/accomplice, she was so crazy she made him look sane.

“Only in her case she had a pretty good excuse. The bad news was, about half the skin on her body had been burned off-the worse news was, it was the front half. A real horror show-not much face left to speak of, and no more hair than yours truly.”

Pender lifted his brown Basque beret and rubbed a hand the size of an oven mitt across the barren expanse of his scalp by way of illustration. “Originally she was his elementary school teacher. Fourth, fifth grade, something like that. They say she was a gorgeous young strawberry blond-the kind of teacher every boy student gets a crush on and every girl student wants to grow up to be like. Then one day Maxwell shows up at school with both eyes swollen shut from a beating, and the whole story comes out. Turns out his parents were members of this twisted satanic cult whose leader was a flat-out pederast; they’d been abusing the kid since he was like, three, sexually, ritually, physically, you name it. Cowards to the end, the parents kill themselves-technically, it was a homicide/suicide-and the teacher gets custody of little Ulysses. But then for some equally twisted reasons of her own-probably because she’d been abused as a child-her idea of parenting included having sex with the kid on a regular basis.”

“Oh, man.” The pilot-fit, tanned, with Ray-Ban sunglasses and close-cropped hair graying at the temples- winced.

“It gets worse. The sex continued until Maxwell was around sixteen, then she told him it was all over, that part of the relationship, and that she was going to marry the high school shop teacher. He went ballistic, snuck into the bedroom while she and her fiance were doing the nasty, stabbed him about fifty times with an icepick, and set the bedroom on fire. Burned the shit out of his hands, left her looking like something out of The House of Wax.

“But she told the police that her fiance was trying to rape her, and that the fire got started accidentally. Then when she got out of the hospital, she sprang him from the juvie farm and he moved in with her. Only from then on, around once a year or so she sent the lad out hunting, with orders to come back with a strawberry blond. That was about the only criteria-it had to be a woman and she had to have strawberry blond hair. To make wigs for the old horror.”

“Jesus.”

“I’d been searching for Maxwell for close to ten years before he finally slipped up and ran a stop sign down in Monterey with a dead strawberry blond in the passenger seat. I was about ninety percent sure he was the one who’d killed all those other women, but just to be sure, I talked the sheriff into putting me into a cell with him for an undercover interview. Bad mistake.” Pender raised his beret again to show the pilot the livid, trident-shaped scar across his scalp. “By the time I woke up in the hospital he’d already busted out, killed three deputy sheriffs, a highway patrolman, and at least two civilians….

“When I finally caught up to Maxwell, there were a dozen strawberry blond wigs in a glass case in his basement, plus two half-starved survivors who looked like concentration camp victims.” Plus Dr. Cogan, of course, but as always, Pender chose to protect her anonymity.

“He drew down on me, I put one round through his shoulder, a second through his knee, and between you, me, and the lamppost, I gave some serious goddamn consideration to putting a third round right through there”- touching a forefinger the size of a ballpark frank to where his third eye would have been, if he’d been a Hindu deity-“and saving everybody a shitload of trouble. As it was, he narrowly missed bleeding to death before we could get him to a hospital-they had to amputate what was left of his leg.”

But as Pender started to explain how the old woman had died in a fall shortly after the shootout, he realized the pilot was no longer really listening-just nodding politely at intervals as he checked gauges and flipped switches, preparing the plane for descent.

Oh shit, oh dear, thought Pender, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. How bored he used to get, pretending to listen politely in cop bars as some over-the-hill agent blathered on about his adventures back in the day. Pender had sworn more than once that he’d eat his 9mm SIG Sauer P226 before he’d let that happen to him.

The pilot pushed gently forward on the steering yoke, sending the plane nosing downward into the roiling cloud cover. “We’ll be touchin’ down in Portland in just a few minutes,” he told Pender in a standard issue, Right Stuff drawl. “Would you mind headin’ on back and makin’ sure everybody’s buckled in?”

Pender nodded briskly-he decided he’d probably done enough talking for one fat old man, for one morning.

2

Irene Cogan had suffered two brutal blows in her lifetime. Six years earlier, stunned by the unexpected death of her husband, she had more or less shut down emotionally, while her kidnapping and subsequent ordeal at the scarred hands of the serial killer Ulysses Maxwell three years later seemed to have had precisely the opposite effect.

With death imminent, Irene had promised herself that if she did by some miracle survive, she would spend less time working and more time smelling the roses. Unlike most such promises, that one had been kept-the second part, anyway. Her recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t exactly been a picnic-three years after her kidnapping she still suffered from the occasional PTSD flashback-but in general she had come through it with a renewed sense of possibilities, stronger where she was weak, less brittle where she was strong, a good deal kinder to herself, and an inveterate smeller of roses.

“You’re just in time,” she greeted Pender upon his return to the cabin, which resembled a long, narrow hospital room. Lily lay strapped into the adjustable bed, fully clothed, tossing restlessly in her sleep. “I think she’s starting to come out of it.”

“Which she would that be?” asked Pender.

“Hard to say. Stress, trauma, periods of unconsciousness as opposed to natural sleep all tend to trigger alter switches. But as to which alter comes out the other side, that’s a crap shoot. Or I suppose I should say a game of roulette-you know, round and round she goes, and where she stops…“

“…nobody knows,” Lily said sleepily, opening her eyes. “Oh, hi, Dr. Irene. Boy, am I glad to see you. I just had the strangest dream. I dreamed I was home alone, and the phone rang, and it was this policeman, and he, he said…“Her dark eyes widened as she took in her surroundings; she sat up, looking around dazedly. “Am I still dreaming?”

“Not at all.” Irene took Lily’s hand in one of hers and patted it with her other hand to help Lily ground herself. “We’re in an airplane-it’s like a flying ambulance. You’ve had a rather severe dissociative episode-I’m afraid I had to