"I'll sleep later. First of all, cards on the table. Your Inspector Hawkin said that Vaun is no longer under suspicion of committing those murders. Is that true, or did he just want to manipulate me into coming out to treat her? It's difficult to tell, over the telephone."
"Wouldn't you have come in either case?"
"No." Kate glanced over at him. "I said I would have come out, but only to see her and her family. I'm not going to bring Vaun back to life just for you people to lock her up. If that's the choice, you can let me out now and I'll make my own arrangements."
"I thought you were her friend. They say she'll die if she's left like this."
"That's her choice. She'd die anyway, if she was imprisoned again. It would be deliberate cruelty, and I'll have nothing to do with it. Vaun isn't my client, my patient. She's a beloved friend, and I refuse to interfere in her life that way merely for the convenience of the police."
Kate, hardened cop that she was, found it difficult not to be shocked. She cleared her throat.
"Yes. Well, you don't need to worry, it's obvious now that she's a victim, not a perpetrator." She gave him a synopsis of the last few days, ending with what they knew of Andy Lewis/Tony Dodson. He made no comment for several miles.
"Yes," he said finally. "I know about Andy. We worked on that for a long time, Vaun and I."
"What—" she began, then realized that he would undoubtedly refuse to talk about Vaun's revelations during therapy, and changed it to, "Is all this possible? I mean, it seems such an unlikely scenario, even to us—some lunatic who goes to such elaborate lengths to make life hell for a woman he resents, then tries to kill her, and all without giving himself away."
"Oh yes, it's quite possible. And, from what I know of Andy Lewis, through Vaun, you're probably looking at the right man."
"I wish I could understand it." Kate heard the plaintive undertone in her voice and hastened to modify it. "I mean, I've been a cop for six years now, and God knows I've seen what people can do to each other. But this one, it makes even a torture-murder look straightforward. I just can't get a handle on it, can't imagine his motives."
"The mind of someone like Andy Lewis is not finally comprehensible to a normal, sane human being. You can trace patterns, even analyze the labyrinth enough to plot its development, but motives and sequences are very slippery things, even at the best of times."
"But if he's so abnormal, why didn't we see him earlier?"
"Because he's very good at keeping up the front. When you track him down you'll probably find all kinds of criminal, even pathological, behavior, but until you pry up the lid, all will look normal. Actually, I would venture a theory that had it not been for Vaun, it would have remained at that. He would never have taken to murdering children, or not for many years at any rate."
"You mean Vaun set him off?"
"Triggered him, yes. She must never suspect this, by the way."
"No. Oh, God no. You don't mean she did anything deliberately, I take it."
"As innocent as one chemical reacting with another. No, that's not a good analogy, because in a reaction both chemicals are changed, and in this case Vaun remains Vaun. Vaun doesn't need to do anything deliberately to change people's lives. Perhaps a better image is that of a black hole, one of those things the astronomers love to speculate about, so massive they influence the motions of everything around them in space, so immensely powerful that even light particles can't escape, so that they cannot even be seen except by inference, by reading the erratic movements of nearby planets and stars. Vaun passes by, utterly tied up with her own inner workings, and people begin to wobble. Tommy Chesler makes adult friends for the first time in his life. John Tyler gets serious. Angie Dodson looks at her hobbies and sees a mature art form. Andy Lewis is nudged from criminality to pathology. A psychiatrist in Chicago tears his thinning hair out and finds himself practicing a style of psychotherapy unknown to modern science, and damned if it doesn't work. God only knows what effect she's having on a couple of unsuspecting homicide detectives from the big city," he laughed. "And none of it deliberate. Vaun is as passive and as powerful as a force of nature. Her only deliberate actions are on canvas, and even then she would insist that there's no choice, only the recognition of what's needed next. Someday Vaun may be forced into action. I can't imagine what would do it—certainly not a threat to herself; perhaps to protect someone she loved—but I can imagine that the results would be spectacular. Or perhaps catastrophic."
Bruckner talked with the enthusiasm of a man finally permitted to speak about something that has long fascinated him, and Kate was not certain what was required of her in the role of coenthusiast.
"You sound like you've given this a great deal of thought." She settled for a cheap therapist's tell-me-more noise. He caught her uncertainty and laughed happily.
"Said she, dubiously. Yes, Vaun is the sort of person one tends to think about. My wife wants me to work up a paper on the 'triggering personality' concept, but I can't see that it would do much good. After all, you can't very well treat the innocent trigger, even if the explosive personality blames him, or her. And it's hardly a new idea, after all. Do you know Othello?"
"Er___"
"Iago is a nasty, sly, traitorous character, but even he needs his self-respect. To justify to himself the enormity of his own evil, he blames his victim Cassio for it, saying, 'He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.' Count on it, when you find Andy, he'll blame Vaun."
"He's proving a slippery character to find."
"If you're patient, he'll come to you. Not turn himself in, I don't mean that, but he'll come. He won't be able to help himself, not now. It's gone too far. However. Enough of Andy Lewis and black holes, and chemical reactions. Metaphors and analogies are the curse of cheap psychotherapy. Tell me about Vaun. How she is."
"Vaun? No change, they say, over and over."
"I don't want that 'they' way. I know what 'they' say, endlessly. How do you think she looks?" he pressed.
"I don't know how she looks. She's unconscious. She looks like someone who got run over by an overdose, is how she looks. I'm no doctor."
"Good, I don't want a doctor's eyes, I want your eyes. In one word, don't stop to think about it, how does she look?"
"Dead. Dead is how she looks. I'm sorry, you're her friend, but you did ask."
"Yes, I did, didn't I?" He sighed. "All right, tell me about her. What kind of room do they have her in? Who comes in contact with her, and how do they touch her? And what do they smell like?" He spoke as if unaware of the lunacy of his words, and Kate looked closely to see if he was serious before she began hesitantly to answer him. He made short notes by the light of the glove compartment in a small notebook that he pulled from his jacket pocket, and asked more questions. Then, abruptly, he flipped the glove compartment shut and leaned back.
"Right, that'll do for now. I'll need a few things—any chance of getting someone started on them at this hour?"
Kate reached for the car phone, got the hospital exchange, asked for the extension of the room Hawkin had said he would be using. He answered on the second ring.
"Hawkin."
"Sorry to wake you Al, but Dr. Bruckner has a list of things he's going to need, and it might save some time if he has them there when we get in."
"Go ahead."
She handed the instrument to her passenger, who first asked about Vaun; listened; asked about her pulse rate; told Hawkin not to bother, it wasn't that important; and asked if he had a pen. He read from his notebook: a cassette player; some roses, any color so long as they had a smell; a bristle hairbrush; some dark orange velvet; a patchwork quilt—perhaps one made by Angie Dodson?—a large pad of artist's watercolor paper; a can of turpentine; Vaun's most recent painting; and finally, complete privacy and quiet in Vaun's wing.