sociopath-he's probably the one to watch for, the one who committed the murder. Then again, you might meet an entirely different set of alters than I did-I would expect the dynamic to be quite different in a more stressful environment.”
Pender glanced at his watch-1:50. “Thank you, doctor-you've been very helpful. Can I call you after my interview if I have any more questions?”
“Sure-just call my office.” She gave him the number; he jotted it down in his notebook. “If I'm not in, you can leave a number with my service-they'll know how to get in touch with me.”
“Great. Thanks again, Doctor Cogan.”
“No problem. Oh-one more thing, Agent Pender. If I were you, I would definitely take every precaution. Because the only thing I can tell you for sure about any of this individual's alters is that one of them is homicidal. At least one of them.”
16
The body of Ulysses Maxwell lay motionless on its bunk in the county jail on Natividad Road, an icebag balanced on its forehead. The skin was unbroken, the swelling had gone down, and the nurse at the jail, in consultation with Dr. Cogan, had already determined that there was no concussion, else Maxwell would have been transferred to the county hospital just up the road. The reason the body lay as if unconscious was that for the moment, there was no one in charge.
Inside the head, though, things were anything but quiet. Max raged about traitors, traitors who should be burned, traitors who could be expelled or banished into the darkness of non-being forever, while Lyssy the Sissy whimpered that it wasn't his fault, that he hadn't wanted to come out, that the doctor had made him, and Ulysses, the deposed host alter, known to the others as Useless, pleaded for his very existence-when he could get a word in edgewise.
In the end it was Ish who brought peace to the system, pointing out that the debacle in the interview room was at least partly Max's fault, in that it was Max who, in the mistaken belief that he could control the situation, had given the psychiatrist permission to attempt to hypnotize them in the first place.
Ish was the only alter who was allowed to criticize Max, or at least call some of his actions or decisions into question. He pointed out, in a diplomatic fashion, that although their system represented a new and superior order of multiple personality, DID was still DID, and every one of the interlocking identities, even Max, an alter like no other, was by nature enormously suggestible.
I'm sure you'll take that into account in the future, Ish suggested reassuringly. For the moment, though, instead of blaming each other, our time might be better spent figuring out how to limit the damage.
Eat shit and die, replied Max. He'd already figured out how to limit the damage.
A moment later the reanimated body drew a deep, calming breath, the long-lashed eyes fluttered open. Max took off the icebag and sat up slowly. He could hear a guard circling the pod; he waited until the footsteps had passed his cell before rolling up his sleeve and reaching into the urine-filled toilet beside the bunk. The toilet and sink were one stainless steel unit, sink above, toilet below. Max fished around in the bottom of the bowl, removed the inch-long handcuff key, washed it off in the sink, dried it on his jail-issue, postage-stamp washcloth, and slipped it into his mouth.
Max had been to court before-as Dr. Cogan would have said, he knew the drill. There was no metal detector for prisoners leaving the new jail on Natividad, no cavity search for prisoners being transported to and from the courthouse, and no metal detector at all at the old jail on West Alisal.
Prisoners returning to the new jail did have to pass through a sensitive, state-of-the-art metal detector on their way in, Max knew. He had no intention, however, of returning to Natividad Road, with or without Terry Jervis's handcuff key, which he planned to return to Deputy Jervis personally, at the earliest opportunity.
17
Just after two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, Lieutenant Rigoberto Gonzalez of the Monterey County Sheriff's Department- early forties, perfectly pressed uniform, carefully trimmed black mustache-met Pender in the alley next to the old jail, abandoned now except for the ground-floor cellblock in the east wing, and led him from the brightness of a sunny Salinas afternoon into the gloomy half-light of the jail. Directly ahead of them were sliding barred doors. Gonzalez turned right instead, and Pender followed him into a messy, crowded, claustrophobic little room that looked more like the office of an old-time two-pump country gas station than the command post for a metropolitan jail.
“You carrying?” asked Gonzalez, unholstering his own weapon, the sheriff's department standard-issue Glock. 40. Pender handed his SIG Sauer to Gonzalez, butt first; the deputy checked it out. “I thought you guys carry Glocks now.”
“I'm more comfortable with the SIG.”
“Not as much stopping power with a nine as with a forty.”
“The dual action is faster, though. I figure I can always shoot 'em twice.” Pender hadn't actually fired a shot in anger since his days as a Cortland County sheriff's deputy, but he remained range-qualified with both pistol and shotgun.
After locking up the guns and introducing Pender to Frank Twombley and Deena Knapp, the two deputies on duty, Gonzalez led Pender through the office-they were now on the other side of the sliding barred doors-then to the left, down a narrow corridor to the jail's old visiting room, bare save for a single metal bench suspended like a shelf from the back wall. The windows that had once separated the inmates from their loved ones were boarded up, the telephones gone, their torn wires sticking out from the wall at three-foot intervals.
“You can change in here.” Gonzalez handed Pender a paper bag containing an orange jumpsuit, a gray T- shirt, white socks, and rubber sandals.
Pender asked Gonzalez if there was any significance to the variety of jumpsuit colors he'd seen the inmates wearing.
“Orange is for your violent felons, red for nonviolent felons, green for misdemeanors.”
“So I'm a violent felon?”
“You'd have to be, for us to put you in with the Ripper. We keep the prisoners strictly segregated in the holding cells.”
“You call him the Ripper?” asked Pender, unfolding the jumpsuit and checking it for size. XXL-close enough.
“Did you see what he did to that girl?”
“Unfortunately, yes-I saw the autopsy photos.”
Gonzalez left Pender in the visiting room, returning a few minutes later with a full set of handcuffs, leg irons, chains, and a padlocking belt to pull the ensemble together. When he finished securing Pender, he stepped back and nodded approvingly. Bald, scowling, immense, the FBI man might have been the enforcer for a gang of over-the-hill outlaw bikers.
“Agent Pender, you could give mean a bad name. What do you want to be in for?”
“What do I look like I'd be in for?”
Gonzalez narrowed his eyes, gave Pender an exaggerated onceover. “How about rape? No offense.”
“None taken. But with a face like mine, who'd ever believe I had trouble getting any?”
The deputy grinned. “With a face like yours,” he said, “we should probably make it serial rape.”
The holding cells were at the opposite end of the corridor. Gonzalez opened the metal cabinet containing the door control panel beside the entrance to the cell block. Inside the cabinet were four vertically sliding knobs above a solid steel wheel eighteen inches in diameter. All four knobs were down in the red, or closed, position; Gonzalez raised the fourth until it showed yellow, then cranked the big wheel clockwise.
Ready? mouthed Gonzalez.
