Still whispering: “Do you know how you were going to die? Number thirteen?”
“What-” She started to ask him what difference it would make, but something in his expression stopped her. “No, I don't.”
Pender's eyes filled with sorrow for what he was about to do. Over the years, he had made a habit, almost a religion, of keeping the horrors he had seen to himself, at least where civilians, including his then-wife, were concerned. It helped cost him his marriage. But most people couldn't live in the world Pender inhabited. And now he had to take poor Dr. Cogan, who looked like a forlorn waif in his enormous, bedraggled jacket, with her hair all cropped to stubble, and drag her through it. Rub her nose in it.
“To start with, he would have raped you, repeatedly, in every conceivable orifice and every conceivable position. He would have tied you, posed you, costumed you, beat you, tortured you, penetrated you, and inserted foreign objects into you, over and over and over, in a growing frenzy that would have ended only in your death. If you were one of the lucky ones, you'd have lost consciousness early on-not that that would have stopped him until he was ready to stop-or died accidentally, from a skull fracture, say, or internal bleeding, or asphyxiation.”
If that's lucky, thought Irene, I don't want to know about unlucky. But she made no attempt to stop him. She liked having him this close-he was shelter, he was safety. She knew that nothing he was telling her should have made any difference to her Hippocratic oath. She also knew she had to hear him out.
“But if you were unfortunate enough to be born with a strong constitution, or a fierce desire to live, it would have ended with a knife.”
Pender's mind drifted back to the bedroom of the little ranch house in Prunedale. Harriet Weldon pulls back the sheet that Maxwell had drawn up to the dead women's waists. One of the investigators gasps, another moans. The photographer snaps a flash picture; the sudden glaring whiteness sears the image into Pender's memory. How many knife blows would it take to obliterate a woman's private parts, reduce them to this unrecognizable state, he wonders. A hundred? A thousand?
“Agent Pender?”
Pender was vaguely startled to find himself standing over Maxwell's body. “Sorry. Drifting. Must be more beat than I thought. Where was I?”
“A knife?”
“Oh, yes. A knife. A good strong butcher knife-sturdy enough to survive being driven through bone-pelvic bone-again, and again, and again, until there's nothing but a bloody-”
“No more. Please.” Irene's head was spinning. She was afraid for a moment that she was about to pitch forward across Maxwell's body. Pender slipped his arm around her.
“Kinch,” she said as he eased her back into a sitting position a few feet from the body.
“What?”
“Kinch-that's the name of the alter who carves the women up.”
“Then you'll let me do it?”
“Do what?”
“Loosen the tourniquet.”
Irene thought about it. She thought about it longer and harder than she'd ever care to admit, even to herself. In the end it wasn't her Hippocratic oath that swung the balance, it was the fact that in more than ten years of specializing in dissociative disorders, Irene had never heard of, much less treated, a multiple even remotely like Maxwell. He was sui generis. The chance to study him, to learn from him, might in the long run lead to breakthroughs in the treatment and understanding of DID that could benefit victims like Lily DeVries. Against that, her own fear, and a vaguely defined urge for revenge, didn't measure up. She shook her head no.
Pender climbed wearily to his feet. “Is there a telephone back at the house? My cell phone doesn't work out here.”
“Not that I know of.”
“I'm going to hotwire one of these vehicles then. Will you be all right here if I go for help, or do you want to come with me?”
“No, I think I should stay with Donna and Dolores.”
It didn't register for a moment-then, for the second time that day, Pender's universe underwent a paradigm shift. “Say again?”
“Donna and Dolores-I should stay with them until the ambulance comes.”
“Donna Hughes and Dolores Moon? They're alive?”
“You didn't know?”
No, Pender started to say. Then he realized that he had-that somehow or other he'd known all along. He just hadn't always believed it.
88
Huddled by the ventilation shaft next to the faucet after Maxwell dragged the psychiatrist out of the drying shed, Donna and Dolores held hands. An eternity passed.
“It'll be over soon,” said Dolores.
“One way or the other,” Donna replied.
It was the very phrase that had been going through Dolores's mind, though she'd chosen not to voice it. “Know what I keep thinking about?” she asked Donna.
Again their thoughts were in synch. “Tammy?” After going five days without a meal during the last week of Max's absence, Tammy Brown had drowned herself under the cold-water tap while the other two slept. It couldn't have been an easy thing to do. They'd found her lying on her back on the grate the next morning, her body cold, her skin slick and pebbly as a dolphin's, her parted lips blue. And after Donna shut off the faucet, they saw that Tammy's open mouth was full to the brim with clear dark water, like a fathomless lake about to overflow its thin blue banks.
“If she'd only held on a little bit longer.” Maxwell had arrived that very night, dumped her body into the privy, and shoveled a bucket of lime over it.
Another eternity passed. It was nearly dark-then it was dark. They'd left off holding hands. Dolores had her back to the wall, facing the door. They heard the outer hatch sliding open. The eternity that passed between the opening of the outer hatch and the inner door, though it contained only footsteps and the tinkling of keys, was the longest eternity of all. Dolores felt her heart pounding at her ribs and thought it was about to burst.
Then the door opened and a huge blood-spattered bald man stood there holding a battery-powered lantern. Beside him, the psychiatrist had her arms full of clothes.
The alter or entity known as Max had never been entirely sure about his own nature, or origins. The fact that the other alters looked upon him as some sort of demon was of course convenient, and had helped him wrest dominance over the system from Useless and Christopher. But for himself, the possibility that he might be an incarnation of Carnivean was only conjecture based upon the circumstances of his first appearance, the perverse delight he'd always taken in activities that others saw as shameful or evil, and the system's undeniably superior level of functioning, compared not only to other multiples but to the human race in general.
It might be coincidence, it might be random mutation, but the possibility that an evolutionary leap such as he represented might also be the result of demonic possession could never be entirely discounted.
So as he found himself slipping into the darkness, once again Max managed to convince himself that it wasn't all bad. At least he didn't have to worry about hell. If it existed, he told himself, he was on the board of directors; if not, oblivion, and an end to the agonizing pain he now found himself in. And in either event, the riddle of his origins would be solved soon enough.
But no sooner had Max arrived at this state of inner peace than it was shattered by the sound of Miss Miller's voice. She had somehow managed to hump her way across the loft on her uninjured back, though her arms and legs were still securely-and painfully-bound, then work the gag out of her mouth.
“Ulysses?” she called.
Max opened his eyes, saw that night had fallen. What a sky, what a sky! “Down here. He shot me.”
“I heard.”
