No response-not that he'd been expecting one.
26
Roadblocks, helicopters, a mustering of off-duty officers in both the Sheriff's Department and the Salinas PD, door-to-door searches of the neighborhood surrounding the courthouse complex, a widely broadcast BOLO (Be On the Lookout For) describing both the fugitive and the Plymouth that had been stolen from the county lot: all for naught so far as the Ripper was concerned. By dawn on Thursday it had become apparent that although all but two of the other escapees had been recaptured, the man who'd sprung them had somehow slipped through the security cordon.
The manhunt would of course continue-but from here on in the FBI, citing the likelihood that the escaped prisoner was an interstate fugitive, would have jurisdiction over the investigation. Which was fine with Sheriff Bustamante, who hadn't survived three contested elections by personally associating himself with the sort of disaster this business was turning out to be. One citizen disemboweled within sight of Deputy Jervis; Deputies Jervis and Knapp grievously injured, along with the FBI agent Bustamante had personally allowed into the prisoner's cell; Deputy Twombley dead. Worst of all from the standpoint of accountability, there had finally been a mass breakout from the old jail that a Monterey County grand jury had recommended be closed over a year ago.
By ten o'clock on Thursday morning, the sheriff's deputies at Irene Cogan's front and back doors were replaced by a fully equipped, innocuous-looking FBI surveillance van from San Jose with “Coast Heating amp; Cooling” painted on the side. The FBI's lower profile was appreciated by Irene, who had two patients coming in that day; the presence of armed guards would not have been conducive to the atmosphere of trust and relaxation required for hypnotherapy sessions.
Her first patient was a middle-aged civil engineer from Santa Cruz who'd awakened in Reno one morning with no idea how he'd gotten there. It was your classic dissociative fugue state, which often involved physical as well as mental and emotional flight (fuga in Latin) from an intolerable set of circumstances.
In Donald Barber's case, he'd been served with divorce papers while at work. Up to that point a timid gambler and a faithful husband, he left his office without saying a word to his secretary and woke up three days later next to a hooker in a high-roller suite in the Silver Legacy.
Even more surprising, he was up fifteen thousand dollars. Irene was thinking about using a humorous subtitle-“The Art of the Fugue”-for an article she planned to submit to the Journal of American Clinical Psychology.
But there was nothing humorous about Irene's afternoon patient. Lily DeVries was a fifteen-year-old girl who'd been unspeakably abused by both parents as a toddler. And unlike most such cases, the abuse was amply documented-photographs of Lily's decade-old sex torture were still turning up on the Internet and in the archives of pedophiles.
By the time Lily was placed in the custody of her paternal grandparents in Pebble Beach, her personality had long been fragmented-thus far Irene had identified thirty-seven distinct alters. Sessions with Lily were always interesting, if exhausting.
After hypnotizing the girl, Irene began every session by speaking to Queenie, Lily's host alter. She would then let Queenie help her decide which alters to call up-an unconventional approach. But Irene believed that many therapists did more harm than good to the overly suggestible patients, either implanting false memories with overaggressive hypnotherapy or, like incompetent exorcists, reinforcing malign alters by calling them up too often. Letting the patient's host personality assist her was a way of avoiding those pitfalls.
The subsequent parade of alters required Irene to be a jack-ofalltrades: some were children, some male, some bipolar, some schizo-affective. Whomever else she “saw” during a particular session, however, Irene tried to end every session by speaking with Lily, the original personality who had been so long buried. She was not always successful-Lily was a shy flower of a three-year-old-but on Thursday afternoon she came out, and for the first time as Lily, relived her earliest memories of abuse directly, without Irene having to resort to the split-screen distancing technique.
It was a breakthrough for the patient, but the sheer accumulation of horrific detail left the therapist absolutely drained. After the session, Irene called Barbara Klopfman to invite herself to dinner that night for a little gemutlichkeit therapy with the Klopfman family.
“You'll have to take pot luck-and no shop talk at the table,” Barbara had warned her.
Small danger of that-as always, Barbara's husband and two teenage sons monopolized the conversation with baseball talk. Apparently the Giants were clinging to first place, a game ahead of a team called the Arizona Diamondbacks-which came as a surprise to Irene, who'd hadn't even known Arizona had a team. But the dinner-pot luck turned out to be pot roast-and the banal sanity of Sam Klopfman and the boys were just what Irene needed.
After dinner Sam and Irene retired to the front porch while Barbara and the boys did the washing up. The evening fog had drifted in from the bay, blanketing the cozy little seaside town with a soft grayish-pink light. Sam Klopfman, bespectacled and round-bellied as a Teletubby, lit up a twenty-year-old Kaywoodie prime grain imported briar filled with a custom blend of vanilla and rumflavored tobacco from old Mr. Hellam's tobacco shop in Monterey.
“That smells so good,” said Irene, rummaging in her purse for her cigarettes. “It reminds me of my grandfather.”
Sam chuckled. “I've found women have a two-stage response to a man's pipe. The first stage, when you're dating, is ‘That smells wonderful.’ The second stage, after you're married, is ‘Not in my house, buster!’ ”
Instead of her own Benson and Hedges, Irene came up with the pack of Camels she'd bought for the prisoner. Seeing them, she shook her head regretfully. “I still think I could have helped him,” she said softly.
“Really?” asked Sam, just to get her started. He was an attorney, but understood as surely as his psychiatrist wife that Irene needed to talk about some of the issues they'd avoided all through dinner.
“Absolutely.” Irene absentmindedly fired up a Camel, then looked down at it in surprise when the toasty smoke lit up tastebuds long dormant after years of smoking Benson and Hedges Lights. “Maybe not an integration, but at least some fusion.”
“What's the diff?”
“Integration involves a complete and final psychic restructuring. Fusion is more of a consolidation-you map the alters, get them all communicating and working together, consolidate some of the subsystems, and with the help of the other alters, teach the more extreme personalities less extreme coping techniques. It's not a dramatic cure like you see in the movies, but as Dr. Caul, one of the pioneers in DID therapy, always said, what you want after treatment is a functional operation, never mind whether it's a big corporation, a limited partnership, or a one- owner business.”
“So we get a more efficient homicidal maniac?” said Sam. “Swell. Seems to me this guy's functioning better than our sheriff's department already. By the way, let me know if you want to sue the bastards for last night. I'd take it on pro bono just for the fun of deposing old Bustamante.”
Irene thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “Thanks anyway, Sam-I'd just as soon put this whole business behind me.”
By Friday morning, it seemed that Irene was a little closer to her goal of putting the incident behind her. When she woke up, the FBI surveillance van outside her house was gone. Special Agent Thomas Pastor, who'd been brought down from the field office in San Francisco to take charge of the botched operation, had come to agree with Bustamante's conclusion that Irene was neither an accomplice nor a potential victim, despite the words Pender had written in his own blood on the floor of the cell. The injured agent's opinions were not currently held in high esteem by the powers-that-be.
Pastor did, however, call Irene at ten o'clock to make an appointment for an interview later that afternoon. Pastor also asked Irene if she wouldn't mind typing up her case notes for him. Apparently he was unaware that the sessions had been taped-and she had no intention of telling him.
Irene finished typing her notes into her PC around eleventhirty, but when she attempted to print them out, she discovered the print cartridge on her HP was bone-dry. There wasn't time to pick up another before her jogging
