“Honey, I can’t wait all day for you. Let’s go.”
Slowly Amalthea turned. Her eyes were still vacant. The words she said next came out in a voice that was not quite human, but mechanical. A foreign entity, channeled through a machine. She looked at Maura.
“Now you’re going to die, too,” she said. Then she turned and shuffled away, back to her cell.
“She has tardive dyskinesia,” said Maura. “That’s why Superintendent Gurley tried to discourage me from visiting her. She didn’t want me to see Amalthea’s condition. She didn’t want me to find out what they’ve done to her.”
“What exactly did they do to her?” said Rizzoli. She was once again behind the wheel, guiding them fearlessly past trucks that made the road shake, that rattled the little Subaru with turbulence. “Are you saying they turned her into some kind of zombie?”
“You saw her psychiatric record. Her first doctors treated her with phenothiazines. That’s a class of antipsychotic drugs. In older women, those drugs can have devastating side effects. One of them is called tardive dyskinesia-involuntary movements of the mouth and the face. The patient can’t stop chewing or puffing her cheeks or sticking out her tongue. She can’t control any of it. Think about what that’s like. Everyone staring at you as you make weird faces. You’re a freak.”
“How do you stop the movements?”
“You can’t. They should have discontinued the drugs immediately, as soon as she had the first symptoms. But they waited too long. Then Dr. O’Donnell came on the case. She was the one who finally stopped the drugs. Recognized what was happening.” Maura gave an angry sigh. “The tardive dyskinesia is probably permanent.” She looked out the window at the tightening traffic. This time she felt no anxiety, seeing tons of steel hurtling past. She was thinking instead of Amalthea Lank, her lips ceaselessly moving, as though whispering secrets.
“Are you saying she didn’t need those drugs in the first place?”
“No. I’m saying they should have been stopped sooner.”
“So is she crazy? Or isn’t she?”
“That was their initial diagnosis. Schizophrenia.”
“And what’s your diagnosis?”
Maura thought about Amalthea’s blank stare, her cryptic words. Words that made no sense except as a paranoid’s delusion. “I would have to agree,” she said. With a sigh, she leaned back. “I don’t see myself in her, Jane. I don’t see any part of me in that woman.”
“Well, that’s got to be a relief. Considering.”
“But it’s still there, that link between us. You can’t deny your own DNA.”
“You know the old saying, blood is thicker than water? It’s bullshit, Doc. You don’t have anything in common with that woman. She had you, and she gave you up at birth. That’s that. Relationship over.”
“She knows so many answers. Who my father is. Who I am.”
Rizzoli shot her a sharp glance, then turned back to the road. “I’m going to give you some advice. I know you’ll wonder where I’m coming from on this. Believe me, I’m not pulling this out of thin air. But that woman, Amalthea Lank, is someone you need to stay away from. Don’t see her, don’t talk to her. Don’t even think about her. She’s dangerous.”
“She’s nothing but a burned-out schizophrenic.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Maura looked at Rizzoli. “What do you know about her that I don’t?”
For a moment Rizzoli drove without speaking. It was not the traffic that preoccupied her; she seemed to be weighing her response, considering how best to phrase her answer. “Do you remember Warren Hoyt?” she finally asked. Though she said the name without discernible emotion, her jaw had squared, and her hands had tightened around the steering wheel.
Warren Hoyt, thought Maura.
That was what the police had dubbed him. He had earned that nickname because of the atrocities he’d inflicted on his victims. His instruments were duct tape and a scalpel; his prey were women asleep in their beds, unaware of the intruder who stood beside them in the darkness, anticipating the pleasure of making the first cut. Jane Rizzoli had been his final target, his opponent in a game of wits he’d never expected to lose.
But it was Rizzoli who brought him down with a single shot, her bullet piercing his spinal cord. Now quadriplegic, his limbs paralyzed and useless, Warren Hoyt’s universe had shrunk to a hospital room, where the few pleasures left to him were those of the mind-a mind that remained as brilliant and dangerous as ever.
“Of course I remember him,” said Maura. She had seen the result of his work, the terrible mutilation his scalpel had wrought in the flesh of one of his victims.
“I’ve been keeping tabs on him,” said Rizzoli. “You know, just to reassure myself that the monster’s still in his cage. He’s still there, all right, on the spinal cord unit. And every Wednesday afternoon, for the last eight months, he’s been getting a visitor. Dr. Joyce O’Donnell.”
Maura frowned. “Why?”
“She claims it’s part of her research in violent behavior. Her theory is that killers aren’t responsible for their actions. That some bump on the noggin when they’re kids makes them prone to violence. Naturally, defense attorneys have her on speed dial. She’d probably tell you that Jeffrey Dahmer was just misunderstood, that John Wayne Gacy just got his head knocked a few too many times. She’ll defend anyone.”
“People do what they’re paid to do.”
“I don’t think she does it for the money.”
“Then for what?”
“For the chance to get up close and personal to people who kill. She says it’s her field of study, that she does it for science. Yeah, well, Josef Mengele did it for science, too. That’s just the excuse, a way to make what she does respectable.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a thrill seeker. She gets a kick out of hearing a killer’s fantasies. She likes stepping into his head, taking a look around, seeing what he sees. Knowing what it feels like to be a monster.”
“You make it sound like she’s one of them.”
“Maybe she’d like to be. I’ve seen letters she wrote to Hoyt while he was in prison. Urging him to tell her all the details about his kills. Oh yeah, she loves the details.”
“A lot of people are curious about the macabre.”
“She’s beyond curious. She wants to know what it’s like to cut skin and watch a victim bleed. What it’s like to enjoy that ultimate power. She’s hungry for details the way a vampire’s hungry for blood.” Rizzoli paused. Gave a startled laugh. “You know, I just realized something. That’s exactly what she is, a vampire. She and Hoyt feed off each other. He tells her his fantasies, she tells him it’s okay to enjoy them. It’s okay to get turned on by the thought of cutting someone’s throat.”
“And now she’s visiting my mother.”
“Yeah.” Rizzoli looked at her. “I wonder what fantasies
Maura thought of the crimes Amalthea Lank had been convicted of. She wondered what had gone through her mind when she’d picked up the two sisters at the side of the road. Did she feel an anticipatory thrill, a heady shot of power?
“Just the fact O’Donnell finds Amalthea worth visiting should tell you something,” said Rizzoli.
“What should it tell me?”
“O’Donnell doesn’t waste her time on your everyday murderers. She doesn’t care about the guy who shoots some 7-Eleven clerk during a robbery. Or the husband who gets pissed at his wife and shoves her down the stairs. No, she spends her time with the creeps who kill because they enjoy it. The ones who give that knife the extra twist, because they like the way it feels scraping against bone. She spends her time with the special ones. The monsters.”
My mother, thought Maura. Is she a monster, too?
SEVENTEEN
