“Yes.”
“Would I be right in assuming you haven’t suffered chest pains while performing this activity in the past?”
“You would.”
She pursed her lips. “Normally I wouldn’t make a rush to judgment, but you’re not a typical patient. By helping you, I might be protecting others.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “So what’s the verdict?”
“We haven’t spent enough time together for me to pronounce this with a high degree of certainty. But at first blush, this seems to be a classic example.”
“Of?”
“Psychologically Induced Pain Syndrome. PIPS, for short.”
“PIPS? I’ve got PIPS? Boy, won’t Gladys Knight be jealous!”
“Psychological pain syndromes are defense mechanisms created by your subconscious mind to cover up unresolved emotional issues. In short, whatever your body was doing the day of the chest pains, your mind wanted no part of it. Your mind fought back the only way it could: by creating pain.”
“Are you being serious?” I said.
“Completely. Your mind creates an intense pain to try to force you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. It forces you to focus on the pain. If you don’t, the pain gets worse. Your mind is determined to make you stop doing whatever it is that is so distasteful. If you don’t come to grips with it, it can shut you down altogether.”
I thought about that for a minute. “Is this a common thing?”
“It is, but it typically manifests in back pain.”
“Then why the heart this time?”
“Look at you,” she said. “You’re strong as an ox. I’m guessing you’ve never had the slightest back pain, am I right?”
“You are.”
“So your mind knows you wouldn’t believe a back pain. The subconscious mind is very clever. It won’t create a pain that can be ignored or put off . It takes advantage of you by creating something so convincing, you have to focus on it. In your case I’m going to go out on a limb and guess your father, or someone close to you, died of a heart attack.”
I could feel her looking at me, hoping for a reaction.
“So you’re saying the pain is only a smokescreen, something my subconscious mind created to distract me from what I was doing at the time.”
“That’s correct. Be glad it wasn’t colitis.”
“Colitis?”
“That’s the worst of the psychosomatic pains.”
“Worse than the heart?”
“Far worse.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But as we discussed, what I was doing at the time is something I’ve done many times before.”
“Think it through, Donovan. I’ll bet there was something different about that particular time.”
So she was saying that my mind didn’t want me to kill the Peterson sisters. No, it was more than that. My mind tried to prevent me from killing them. But why? I’d killed dozens—okay, more than a hundred—people before. What made the Petersons different? It couldn’t be that they were women. I’ve killed women before, with no pains or afterthoughts. It couldn’t be that I’m going soft, because I’d recently killed Ned Denhollen without the first sign of chest pains.
