Primal Fear

  One thing he agreed with Molly about, Aaron was definitely one sick boy. And if Aaron did have a separate personality, who the hell was he defending, Aaron or Roy?

  Roy was easy to pin it all on. He appeared bereft of compassion, sensitivity, response—everything but passion. Hate seemed to be his passion, his fire and fuel, the brain that focused the energy, the muscle that propelled the knife.

  The question was, whose hate was it?

  Did Roy draw his passion from Aaron? Or did Roy invent his own enmity? How detached were Aaron and Roy? Were they umbilically bonded like brothers, or were they enemies at heart? Did they share the same id, the same headaches, the same desires? Did Roy want to rule their singular universe, ascend to host? Or was he simply an errant clone?

  Who really killed Archbishop Rushman? Aaron? Roy? Both of them?

  Strategy, not truth, would keep them alive, because it didn’t matter who killed the bishop. If one of them died, they both died.

  He sat on the edge of his table, hands poised pyramid-fashion in front of his lips, staring into the fireplace. Then finally he stood up and started pacing around the room.

  “When I was a child my best friend was Beanie McGlaughlin,” he said aloud, addressing the fireplace as if it were a jury box. “He had three brothers and two sisters and they were always in trouble. And when one of them did something wrong, his mother would swat them all. ‘That way I’m sure to get the right one,’ she used to say. It was effective, but it wasn’t equitable.

  “Justice is equitable. Justice is fair, impartial, and unbiased. Justice is truth. That’s why we’re here today, ladies and gentlemen. To seek the truth.”

  He stopped and shook his head. “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Sounded pretty good to me,” Molly said from the office doorway. She had been standing in the shadows watching him, listening to him developing a case through oration. Vail was startled. Shaken from his reverie, he seemed at first annoyed, but that quickly changed to empathy.

  “Hey,” he said, smiling, “how’s the head?”

  “Worst hangover I’ve ever had.” She sat on the overstuffed sofa. “And my knees are made of rubber. But I think I’ll survive.”

  She was huddled in a long satin bathrobe. Her hair was loose and flowed down over her shoulders. He was stunned at how vulnerable, how young, how naturally beautiful she was. Stripped of her professional veneer, she sat like an injured bird, and there was about her a softness she had not revealed before. He felt suddenly protective of her. She seemed a different person than the tough professional who had faced down this shadow killer in a small room—a killer who had threatened her verbally and physically—and beaten him at his own game. He went over, draped a blanket over her knees and inspected the knot on her head.

  “You got a tomato growing out of your head,” he said.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” she groaned.

  “How about a cup of coffee?”

  “Actually, I’m starving to death.”

  “And well you should be,” he said. “You’ve been out of it for almost twenty-four hours. How about eggs and bacon? I make a mean poached egg.”

  “You cook?”

  “I suppose you can call it cooking,” he said, heading for the kitchen.

  “What do you think of the tape?” she asked.

  He stopped at the kitchen door and looked back at her. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

  “I don’t think many people have, unless they’re in the business.”

  “I’ve heard of it, of course, seen some movies, but I never really thought much about it. That’s the way it happens, huh? He just changes, pop, like that, almost in the middle of a sentence?”

  She nodded. “I’ve actually seen cases where personalities switched in the middle of a sentence.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “That’s a tough question on the basis of a one-hour interview. Let’s just say I can’t discount it.”

  “He could be faking it, right?”

  She nodded. “I’ve dealt with at least thirty cases of dissociative behavior in the last six years. If this is not a real case of dissociative multiple personality disorder, I’ll find out.”

  He dropped the eggs in small containers in a fry pan half filled with boiling water and turned the bacon over with a spatula.

  “How long will that take?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It could take a few weeks or a few months. It will depend on how often he comes out, whether I can trip him up in analysis. We’ll do tests …”

  “You’ll do the tests,” Vail said quietly. “I don’t want the state’s people to know anything about this yet.”

  “All right…”

  “This is a specific disease, right?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s described quite explicitly in DSM3. It’s no different in my business than measles and heart disease are to a medical doctor.”

  “To you, maybe. And other doctors, but it might not fly with a jury of people whose average IQ is probably one-ten, one-fifteen.” He buttered toast and put the eggs and bacon on plates. He lit two candles and put them on the dining room table.

  “Breakfast is served, madam,” he said, and offered his arm as she wobbled to the table.

  “If this Roy character is for real, can he switch in and out whenever he wants?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Can you bring him out when you want to?”

  She shook her head. “Not at this point. If he is for real, I don’t know what brings him out yet. It’s going to take time.”

  “Which we’re running out of…”

  “I know,” she said. “But I have to deal with the situation very carefully. Aaron is either a very sensitive young man with an alternate personality or a psychopathic faker. If he is a split, the shock of finding out could have disastrous results. We could lose Aaron and Roy could become the dominant personality, and he is apparently an extremely volatile, amoral psychopath.”

  “What are the chances he’s faking it?”

  “I’ve seen a couple of feeble stabs at faking split personality but they’re usually amateurish. We discount them very quickly,” Molly said. “I’m sure it’s been done, everything in the world’s been done, but it would take someone with an explicit understanding of the disease and tremendous powers of concentration.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the faker can’t just act like somebody else, he or she literally would have to adopt the psyche of the host and the alternate. Sustaining the charade would be the toughest part of it—and the body changes that frequently accompany it are hard to fake. Actually, it’s more of an attitude change than a physical one. I don’t think that’s really the problem.”

  “Then what is?”

  “He is definitely suffering from some form of psychosis or none of this would’ve happened.”

  “So now we’re into an insanity plea for sure?”

  “That’s your call, Counselor. But he definitely has a mental problem of some kind.”

  “Give me a quick profile of a psychopath,” Vail said.

  “I hate to stereotype it with quick brush strokes,” she said.

  “It’ll never leave the room,” he assured her with a smile.

  “Well, psychopaths are totally amoral, usually paranoid, harbor great rage—which they successfully hide. Remember the boy in the Texas tower? Nobody knew how angry he was. They also tend to consider others inferior, have contempt for their peers. They’re antisocial, pathological liars, often homicidal. Laws don’t count to them.”

  “Real charmers,” Vail said.

  “Well, they can also be charming, intelligent, witty, socially desirable.”

  “I really don’t know anything about this,” Vail said. “How about legal cases? Are you familiar with any?”

  She nodded. “Very recently. A mentally disturbed man over in Ohio named Billy Milligan. The last time I heard he had over thirty different alternates.”

&nbs
p; “Thirty!”

  “And counting. Men, women, children. One’s a very talented artist.”

  “You saying Aaron could have several personalities?”

  “Yes. But it could be months before all of them come out.”

  “Let’s just stick with two for the time being, that’s all the clients I need for now. What happened in the Milligan case?”

  “He was tried for rape and used multiple personality disorder as his defense. He’s in a mental institution instead of prison.”

  “You know, according to Roy, Aaron had an orgasm when Roy killed the bishop. Where does one stop and the other begin?”

  “We don’t know at this point how disjunctive they are. The complexities are enormous. I’m sure they both lie to me at times, which doesn’t help.”

  “Is there any way to figure it out?”

  She thought about the question as she ate. “I don’t know. Certainly we have to study the tapes. Maybe there’s a clue there. Once I establish a strong rapport with him, I might be able to bring him out by simply mentioning his name. That’s usually what happens in cases like this. But right now, it’s up to Roy to come out on his own.”

  “If there is a Roy.”

  “Yes. If…”

  They finished breakfast and moved back into the office. He poured them each a fresh cup of coffee.

  “I have to admit, these cases are absolutely fascinating,” she said. “There’s no telling what we can learn from this relationship.”

  “Maybe we can have him classified as a valuable scientific experiment.”

  “Very funny.”

  “As I understand this, Aaron doesn’t know about Roy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “He still thinks he blacks out from time to time when he’s under stress?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then who does he think killed the bishop?”

  “I don’t think he knows. He thinks somebody else was in the room and he fears whoever it was.”

  “But he understands what a fugue state is?”

  “Yes. He calls it ‘losing time.’ It’s a common term in the business, particularly among those who suffer from it. I had a case once, a woman who was obese. She was in therapy, Weight Watchers, everything, but she kept gaining weight. Then one day her husband found dozens of Big Mac wrappers stuffed in the back of a cupboard. That’s when I got her. She swore she didn’t put them there. Turns out she would leave work, and on the way home she would get an eating attack and lose time, stop at the hamburger place, get a dozen burgers and fries, eat them all, and then hide the wrappers.”

  “All this while she was in this fugue state?”

  She nodded. “Usually a fugue event is quite short. One or two minutes. Even the victim doesn’t realize it happened unless it’s obvious. You’re watching a football game on television and suddenly in the snap of a finger ‘60 Minutes’ is on. You know you lost time.”

  “What would happen if you showed him the tape? If he saw Roy in the flesh?”

  “It’s hard to say,” she answered. “It would certainly be traumatic. There’s a chance Roy could come out and become the host personality and Aaron would withdraw into his own world. There’s no way to predict what might happen.”

  “So you don’t want to take a chance?”

  “No, not yet. Although he has to face the truth sooner or later.”

  “We’re running out of time, Molly.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Tell me about your brother, again,” Vail asked.

  “He’s catatonic schizophrenic,” she said. “He has a fixed stare, hasn’t said a word for years, no recognition of where he is. He’s in another world.”

  “And you don’t have a passport,” Vail said.

  “Well put. One of the reasons I went to Justine is that they agreed to take him as a patient.”

  “Doesn’t it get to you, seeing him like that every day?”

  “I got used to it. There are others far worse. It’s a totally different situation than Aaron and Roy. They live in our world, they are dysfunctional in a different way.”

  “Is that what you meant when you said we may lose Aaron?”

  She nodded. “He could retreat into that dark world.”

  “So if it is a multiple personality problem, we could lose Aaron and be stuck with Roy?”

  “Yes.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Wonderful. Their ids must really be a mess.”

  “Actually, if Roy does exist, he doesn’t have an id. He represses nothing. In a way, he’s Aaron’s id. I hope what drew Roy out is that I’ve achieved transference with Aaron.”

  “Transference?”

  “It’s one objective in treatment. Hopefully, the patient comes to regard the analyst as a figure from the past—a parent or mentor—somebody they relate to and trust.”

  “Like Rebecca?”

  “Not really. I’m sure she became a surrogate mother to Aaron, but she’s also part of the past.”

  “You?”

  She nodded slowly. “I think it’s possible he’s beginning to transfer to me.”

  “Then Aaron would have sexual desires for you?”

  “Possibly. Which he represses.”

  “And so Roy lusts after you?”

  “That’s one possibility. There’s also a downside to transference. It creates a subconscious fear that all the old injuries and insults will be repeated—by children, friends, husbands, wives …just about anybody.”

  “All the hurts are transferred from past to present?”

  “That’s right. And those fears can result in uncontrollable anger … frustration … unreasonable expectations. It’s a double-edged sword. It causes great anxiety in the patient, what we call reexperiencing—living past injuries—but also it permits the analyst to make connections between the past and present. That’s eventually how we diagnose the problem.”

  “Can he be cured?”

  “Possibly. Or, we could literally fuse Aaron and Roy into a single personality with an id strong enough to control Roy. And then there’s the possibility we could end up with a totally new personality. The mind is a remarkable invention, Martin.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Molly, it all scares hell out of me. I can just see the jury sitting there, thinking I ought to be locked up with both of them.” He paused, sipped his coffee and said pensively, “If Aaron has a split personality, we have to bring Roy out. If we can’t, we can forget the multiple personality defense.”

  He lit a new cigarette off his old one and dropped the spent butt in his coffee cup. “And what a defense,” he said sarcastically. “Aaron Stampler’s not guilty—Roy did it.”

  He shook his head and laughed dourly. “Hell, they’ll fry ’em both—and me with them,” he said.

  “Don’t you ever explode?” Molly asked. “Don’t you ever get mad and kick things? Haven’t you ever just lost it?”

  “Anger wastes energy.”

  “Oh hell, Martin, waste a little energy. Rail out at these bastards that stuck you with this impossible case. Nobody can be as cool as you are. It’s scary.”

  “I’m not cool. Inside, I’m a bundle of balled-up nerves and they all have frayed ends. I do a lot of silent screaming. If that’s obsessive or compulsive or repressive, then so be it. People put their lives right here.” He held his hand out with the palm up. “They have to come first.”

  “That’s very admirable.”

  “It’s not admirable, it’s work. You open up minds and try to let a little light in. I defend felons. I think we both pay a price for our choices.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess both our ids runneth over.”

  “Just what the hell is an id, anyway?”

  “It’s where all our repressed desires are stored,” she said.

  Vail laughed. “Well, mine all seem to be under lock and key,” he said. “My last love affair lasted seven months. It ended during a trial. That appears to be the acid test, trials.”

>   “I lived with a guy once for eighteen months before I found out he was manic depressive,” Molly said. “I don’t know which was worse, breaking up or realizing it took me eighteen months to figure out there was something wrong with him.”

  “Blinded by love?”

  “I suppose. That doesn’t seem to be one of your problems.”

  “No, I seem to be blinded by jurisprudence.”

  They fell into an awkward silence, staring intently across the room at each other.

  “I think I need another twelve hours’ sleep before I go back to Daisyland,” she said finally, and stood up. “Thanks for the breakfast. It took the wobble out of my legs.”

  “So, what are we going to do about our overcrowded ids?” Vail asked.

  “Well, for starters, I suppose we could stop repressing our libidos,” she said as she went up the stairs.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Molly had increased her daily sessions with Aaron to three a day, seven days a week. When Roy appeared for the second time, it was only for a few minutes—to deride her for asking Aaron about Rebecca. The next day he was back, this time to argue with her. After that it became a daily occurrence, sometimes twice a day, and always adversarial.

  She tried to trap him to see if he was faking, checking the tapes for slipups, looking for him to go out of character for just a moment. But after almost eighty hours of interviews she was ready to accept Roy as Aaron’s real-life alter ego. She was still not sure if any particular subject triggered Roy’s appearance.

  Then she had her most significant, and frightening, interview with Aaron and Roy. That morning, Aaron was quiet, almost sullen. Then ten minutes into their session he suddenly sat up on the cot and laughed. Molly felt her usual surge of excitement when Roy appeared.

  “Good morning, Roy,” she said.

  He looked over at her and the smile disappeared.

  “The food here sucks,” he said.

  “Have you complained?”

  “Hey, I don’t complain about anything and he hasn’t got the balls to do it.”

  “Any other complaints?”

  He laid back down and stared at the ceiling. “I’ll tell you if there is.”

  “What would you like to talk about today?”

  “Well, aren’t we being friendly,” he said.