“Okay.”
She struggled, said, “I told you I can’t feel love, but that’s not totally true. I...”
She looked at her lap.
“As I’ve said, Nina, this is a safe place. You’ll get no judgment from me, and nothing you tell me ever leaves here. And honestly, I’ve heard so much and seen so much over the years, very little shocks me. I’ve found that most behaviors and problems, they aren’t all that unique once you talk them out, get to the root of things.”
She crossed her arms and seemed offended, which didn’t surprise me.
“You have no idea the things I’ve done, Dr. Cross,” she said. “The things I do when I’m not at work.”
I kept quiet and gazed at her expectantly. I’d intentionally broken her pattern of thinking by intimating that her story, whatever it was, was not unique.
Why? People in mental crisis are often convinced that they’re the only ones in the world suffering like this, which simply isn’t true. Once they abandon that notion, after realizing that most people have thoughts just like theirs, it’s often easier to get them to open up fully.
“I do feel something like love,” Davis said at last. “Not the real thing, but close enough to crave it.”
“When does that feeling happen?”
Davis hesitated, glanced at the floor, then stiffened her shoulders and looked back up at me. “When I put myself in extreme situations. Sexually, I mean.”
Over the course of the next forty-five minutes, Nina Davis told me of Kaycee Janeway, her dark side and alter ego when it came to sex.
Nina liked to stalk men, big strong men who could dominate her.
She would see a man like that, usually outside of work, and actually feel something, a tingle of attraction, perhaps, a twinge of risk, or a more primitive reaction to his particular musky smell. Whatever it was, there was always something else about him that took it further, triggered fantasies, and changed her fully from Nina to Kaycee.
“I follow them when I can,” Nina said, staring off. “The men. At night, mostly, in bars, restaurants, even movie theaters. With their wives and girlfriends, or without. And the entire time I’m thinking of having sex with them. Rough stuff, mostly, but other times tender and sweet, and everything it’s supposed to be.”
After several nights of stalking, Nina would try to ambush or accidentally encounter her prey and lure him in.
“Once I know the fantasy I want to fulfill, I’ve never had problems attracting the men, or anyway Kaycee hasn’t,” Nina said. “And once the men know what I want, it’s not hard to convince them to give it to me, or at least try to give it to me.”
No judgments, I reminded myself.
“And you feel something like love during these encounters?”
She brightened then, became almost radiant, and for the first time I realized just how beautiful Nina Davis was. Those eyes, those lashes, her dazzling smile. I understood in that moment that most men she stalked would indeed succumb to her.
“Yes,” she said. “I feel... desperate emotion, during the sex and after. Other than the brief happiness I get from a job well done, they’re the only times I feel deeply — when they’re rough and domineering and... especially when they’re strangling me.”
“So you engage in asphyxiation sex?”
“As often as Kaycee can get it,” she said matter-of-factly.
Nina said that when the blood flow to her brain was cut off by strangulation during intercourse, she almost always orgasmed and almost always felt flooded with warm feelings and positive emotions afterward.
“But they don’t last,” she said. “After a few hours, I’m back to Nina, and there’s nothing to really feel again.”
I said nothing, took a few notes.
“So I’m a basket case, right?” Nina asked as the hour ended.
“No,” I said. “Not in the least.”
“But you’ve never heard of something this weird, this disturbed, have you?”
I smiled, determined to break her of the idea that her issues were unique, and said, “Actually, I’ve heard stranger, and much more disturbed.”
She blinked. Her face tightened. “Well, then, I guess...”
“You guess?”
After a moment’s struggle, she stood and said, “Nothing, Dr. Cross.”
“Maybe something to talk about next time?”
She hesitated again. “Maybe. Do you think I could come back tomorrow to talk about this?”
I checked my schedule. “Yes, tomorrow at one thirty.”
“Thank you. And, again, thank you for listening without judgment. I’m still trying to understand myself.”
“We all are. Thank you for sharing. It had to have been difficult.”
She knitted her brow. “You know? Not really.”
When Nina Davis had gone, I let myself admit again how very attractive she was before thinking how defensive Nina had been when I’d challenged her. It was a clear sign to me that she was heavily invested in the role of a hypersexual woman.
This was beyond sex with strangers as a way to unlock emotions. This was some deep, dark story she told herself or tried to forget, a story I didn’t think I’d come close to hearing all of yet.
Chapter 23
El Paso County, Texas
After seeing to his two horses, Dana Potter picked up the last plastic storage box from the bed of the white Dodge Ram pickup with Kansas plates that he’d stolen in Abilene the evening before.
Potter lugged the boxes across the dusty yard to the back of an old ranch house surrounded by steep, rocky, arid hills in the middle of a nowhere that began thirty miles to the east and went on all the way to the New Mexico border.
A tall, wiry, and weathered man in his early forties, Potter toed open the kitchen door with his cowboy boots and went inside.
“That’s the lot of it,” he said.
Mary, his wife, looked up from the ultralight rifle she had mounted lengthwise in a portable gunsmith vise set up on an old wooden table covered in grocery bags.
“Put them there,” Mary said, gesturing with a screwdriver to the floor.
He put the boxes down and went over to his wife. “She come through zeroed?”
“Only one way to find out,” she said.
He hugged her. “I’ll do the basic check if you want to call on the sat phone. We can shoot her tomorrow.”
She hugged him back. “Thanks. I’ve been worried.”
“I know. Go on, now.”
Potter leveled the bolt-action rifle in 6.5mm Creedmoor using a bubble level he placed on the elevation turret of the gun’s Schmidt and Bender tactical telescopic sight. Then he dug in an open box of tools next to the gun vise and came up with a hard plastic case that contained a bore-sighting system precisely calibrated to the gun.
Mary was on her phone. “Jesse?”
She listened, smiled, said, “Long drive, but it’ll be worth it. How’re you feeling?”
In the silence that followed, Potter leveled and taped a custom cardboard chart to the kitchen wall. Then he got out the bore-sighting device itself.
It had a long tapered front end that fit snugly down the barrel of the rifle. The rear of it was the size of a Bic lighter and featured a laser.
Mary listened intently, and then her face clouded. “Put on Patty.”
Potter said, “What?”
His wife held up a finger.
Potter threw up his hands and turned around to peer through the scope. He adjusted the gun and the vise until the crosshairs were dead on a similar set of crosshairs printed on the chart taped to the wall.