Page 10 of Deadly Attraction
“Like I said, it was my first trial. I was wet behind the ears, as Victor loves to remind me, but I knew my subject matter well. The defendant suffered from disassociate amnesia and had no memory of committing the murder she was charged with. Victor, on the other hand, had profiled her and believed she was a serial killer who’d gotten away with multiple murders over a span of several years.”
Keep her talking.“Who was right?”
“We both were. The court ruled the defendant mentally unstable at the time of the crime and she was remanded to a psych hospital for further evaluation. There, under hypnosis, it was revealed she had multiple identities and one of those identities admitted to several other murders. That personality took over and committed the crimes, and she had no memory of them.”
“Damn.”
“Classic textbook for both of us, yet neither Victor nor I suspected she suffered from disassociate identity disorder. I had interviewed her but she didn’t fit the classic DID model, so I ruled it out. She claimed there was no deep trauma in her past that would cause such a mental break. We had no records of other physical or mental issues.”
“So what caused it?”
She shrugged. “We don’t know. I believe there might have been a trauma in her early childhood that caused a break with reality. Probably happened to her around age two. Unfortunately, no amount of therapy or further hypnosis was able to identify the original cause, but I suspect she witnessed the death of her grandmother who died in the home around the time our perpetrator was two years old. The grandmother supposedly died in her sleep, but me being me, I could spin another story that would fit with the defendant’s psychosis. She may have witnessed one of her parents killing the grandmother, or she herself may have been playing—experimenting with a pillow or something—and somehow managed to asphyxiate the grandmother, who was quite frail according to reports and regularly took a sleeping pill.”
She obviously relished retelling this case, but an exit was beginning to look further and further away. “Wow, you have quite the imagination. Who did the gal kill?”
“She was a nurse standing trial for killing a patient in the long-term care facility of the hospital she worked for.”
“The others were patients too?”
“Every one of them. Frail, older people, on many medications that extended their life, but certainly not the quality of it.” She kept her hands wrapped around the teacup but didn’t drink. “Victor and I crossed paths again down the road with Chris Goodsman. Marlie Klein, the woman he killed, was actually Susie Warren, a girl who went missing from Gum Pond, Arkansas, back in 1997. She was five years old. The FBI believed her mother’s boyfriend kidnapped her when her mother ended up in jail for a petty crime. The mother never reported her missing. Somehow, she ended up in Los Angeles, living in a commune of other people much like her—outcasts from society with dubious backgrounds. Chris met her while she was waitressing at a club he frequented.”
If she was going to recount every detail, he was going to have to make other arrangements in case trouble came to them first.
“I don’t remember any of that coming out when she died.”
“Victor kept it quiet. He was hoping to catch the man who had kidnapped Susie. It’s his One—the case he never solved. He was a field agent in that area when it happened, and it still eats at him after all these years and all of his career success.” She seemed to know Dupé better than he did. In that case, he would know how difficult she could be.
Back to reality and the here and now. “If we’re going to continue to stay here, we should move to a safer room. I’ll kill the lights.”
“You’re good at your job, aren’t you? Hyperaware of everything, even while carrying on a conversation with me.”
“You really should get a security system—cameras, motion sensors, the works.”
She sat back and studied him, tea still cupped in her hands. “The dogs are my security system. They alert to strangers.”
Dogswerea good alert system. “That’s great if you’re scaring off a burglar, but two dogs alone won’t stop a killer.”
She gave him an amused look, even though her eyes went hard. “That’s what the gun is for.”
Damn, she was stubborn, and he was bent, because that look on her face was turning him on. She wasn’t scared in the least. Accepting, yes. Ready to defend herself, absolutely. But could she take on Goodsman and make it out alive?
Mitch’s phone rang. Turning his back on the doctor and doing a stroll through the main floor of the house, he answered. “We’re good,” he told his boss by way of greeting. “Collins is safe.”
“Are you on your way to the safe house?” Harris asked.
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
There was no way around it—he had to tell Harris the truth, but he still hesitated. Failure sucked. “She refuses to leave the ranch.”
For the next minute or so, Mitch listened to Harris rant. He tried getting in a few words, but Coop was on a roll. Dupé would have both of their hides for this, yada, yada, yada.
By the time he’d checked all the doors and windows a second time, and satisfied himself that there were no unwanted visitors creeping in the shadows outside, he’d walked two full circles around the first floor. On his second round, he realized the house was dark. The kitchen light was off.
His pulse sped up, his eyes—already adjusted to the dark—scanned the room for Collins.
She wasn’t there.
