Book of the Dead

Chapter 8

The next morning, eight o’clock, Pacific Daylight Time. Lucy eases to a stop in front of the Stanford Cancer Center.

Whenever she flies her Citation X jet to San Francisco and rents a Ferrari for the hour’s drive to see her neuroendocrinologist, she feels powerful, the way she feels at home. Her tight jeans and tight T-shirt show off her athletic body and make her feel vital, the way she feels at home. Her black crocodile boots and titanium Breitling Emergency watch with its bright orange dial make her feel she’s still Lucy, fearless and accomplished, the way she feels when she’s not thinking about what’s wrong with her.

She rolls down the window of the red F430 Spider. “Can you park this thing?” she asks the valet in gray who tentatively approaches her at the entrance of the modern brick-and-glass complex. She doesn’t recognize him. He must be new. “It’s Formula One shift, these paddles on the steering wheel. Right for shifting up, left for down, both at the same time for neutral, this button for reverse.” She notes the anxiety in his eyes. “Well, okay, I admit it’s kind of complicated,” she says, because she doesn’t want to belittle him.

He’s an older man, probably retired and bored, so he’s parking cars at the hospital. Or maybe someone in his family has cancer or did. But it’s obvious he’s never driven a Ferrari and may never have seen one up close. He eyes it as if it just landed from outer space. He wants no part of it, and that’s a good thing when one doesn’t know how to drive a car that costs more than some houses.

“I don’t think so,” the valet says, transfixed by the saddle leather interior and red “start” button on the carbon-fiber steering wheel. He steps around the back of the car and looks at the engine under glass and shakes his head. “Now, that’s something. A convertible, I guess. Must blow you around a lot when you got the top down, as fast as it must go, I guess,” he says. “I got to admit that’s something. Why don’t you just pull it right over there.” He shows her. “Best spot in the house. That really is something.” Shaking his head.

Lucy parks, grabs her briefcase and two large envelopes containing magnetic resonance films that reveal the most devastating secret of her life. She pockets the Ferrari key, slips the valet a hundred-dollar bill, says very seriously but winks at him, “Guard it with your life.”

The cancer center is the most beautiful medical complex, with expansive windows and miles of polished wooden floors, everything open and full of light. The people who work here, many of them volunteers, are unfailingly polite. Last time she had an appointment, a harpist was perched in the corridor gracefully plucking and strumming “Time After Time.” This afternoon the same lady is playing “What a Wonderful World.” What a joke, and as Lucy walks fast, looking at no one, a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, she realizes there’s no music anyone could play that wouldn’t make her feel cynical or depressed right now.

The clinics are open areas, perfectly appointed in earth tones, no art on the walls, just flat-screen TVs that show soothing nature scenes: meadows and mountains, leaves in the fall, snowy woods, giant redwood trees, the red rocks of Sedona, accompanied by the gentle sounds of flowing streams and pattering rain and birds and breezes. Live potted orchids are on tables, the lighting soft, the waiting areas never crowded. The only patient in Clinic D when Lucy reaches the check-in desk is a woman wearing a wig and reading Glamour magazine.

Lucy quietly tells the man behind the counter she’s here to see Dr. Nathan Day, or Nate, as she calls him.

“Your name?” With a smile.

Lucy quietly tells him the alias she uses. He types something on his computer, smiles again and reaches for the phone. In less than a minute, Nate opens the door and motions for Lucy to come inside. He hugs her, always does. “It’s great to see you. Looking fantastic.” He talks as they walk to his office.

It’s small, not at all what one might expect of a Harvard-trained neuroendocrinologist considered one of the most outstanding in his field. He has a cluttered desk, a computer with a large video screen, an overflowing bookcase, multiple light boxes mounted on walls where in most offices there might be windows. There’s a couch and one chair. Lucy hands over the records she brought with her.

“Lab work,” she says. “And the scan you looked at last time, and the most recent one.”

He settles behind his desk, and she sits on the couch. “When?” As he opens the envelopes, then reads her chart, not a word of it stored electronically, the paper file kept in his personal safe, identified by code, her name not listed anywhere.

“Blood work was two weeks ago. Most recent scan a month ago. My aunt’s looked, says I look good, but then considering what she looks at most of the time,” Lucy says.

“She’s saying you don’t look dead. That’s a relief. And how’s Kay?”

“She likes Charleston, but I’m not sure it likes her. I like it okay…. Well, I’m always motivated by places that are a bad fit.”

“Which is most places.”

“I know. Lucy the freako. I trust we’re still undercover. Seems like it, since I gave my alias to that same what’s-his-name at the desk and he didn’t question it. Democratic majority notwithstanding, privacy’s a joke.”

“Don’t get me started.” He peruses her lab report. “You know how many patients I have who would self-pay if they could afford it just to keep their information out of databases?”

“Good thing. If I wanted to hack into your database, I could probably do it in five minutes. The Feds might take an hour, but they’ve probably already been in your database. And I haven’t. Because I don’t believe in violating a person’s civil rights unless it’s for a good cause.”

“That’s what they say.”

“They lie and are stupid. Especially the FBI.”

“Still topping your Most Wanted List, I see.”

“They fired me for no good cause.”

“And to think you could be abusing the Patriot Act and getting paid for it. Well, not much. What computer stuff are you selling for multimillions these days?”

“Data modeling. Neural networks that take input data and basically perform intelligent tasks the way our brains do. And I’m fooling around with a DNA project that could prove interesting.”

“TSH excellent,” he says. “Free T-four fine, so your metabolism’s working. I can tell that without a lab report. You’ve lost a little weight since I saw you last.”

“Maybe five pounds.”

“Looks like you’ve gained muscle mass. So you’ve probably lost a good ten pounds of fat and water weight from bloating.”

“Eloquently put.”

“How much are you working out?”

“The same.”

“I’ll note that as obligatory, although it’s probably obsessive. Liver panel’s fine. And your prolactin level’s great, down to two-point-four. What about your periods?”

“Normal.”

“No white, clear, or milky discharge from your nipples? Not that I expect lactation with a prolactin level this low.”

“Nope. And don’t get your hopes up. I’m not letting you check.”

He smiles, makes more notes in her record.

“Sad part is, my breasts aren’t as big.”

“There are women who’d pay a lot of money for what you’ve got. And do,” he says matter-of-factly.

“They’re not for sale. In fact, I can’t even give them away these days.”

“That I know isn’t true.”

Lucy is no longer embarrassed, can talk about anything with him. In the beginning, it was a different story, a horror and humiliation that a benign pituitary macroadenoma — a brain tumor — was causing an overproduction of the hormone prolactin that fooled her body into thinking she was pregnant. Her periods stopped. She gained weight. She didn’t have galactorrhea, or begin to produce milk, but had she not discovered what was wrong when she did, that would have been next.

“Sounds like you’re not seeing anyone.” He slides her MR films out of their envelopes, reaches up, and attaches them to light boxes.

“Nope.”

“How’s your libido?” He dims the lights in the office and flips on the light boxes, illuminating films of Lucy’s brain. “Dostinex is sometimes called the sex drug, you know. Well, if you can get it.”

She moves close to him and looks at her films. “I’m not having surgery, Nate.”

She stares dismally at the somewhat rectangular-shaped region of hypointensity at the base of the hypothalamus. Every time she looks at one of her scans, she feels there must be a mistake. That can’t be her brain. A young brain, as Nate calls it. Anatomically, a great brain, he says, except for one little glitch, a tumor about half the size of a penny.

“I don’t care what the journal articles say. No one’s cutting on me. How do I look? Please tell me okay,” she says.

Nate compares the earlier film to the new one, studies them side by side. “Not dramatically different. Still seven to eight millimeters. Nothing in the suprasellar cistern. A little shift left to right from the infundibulum of the pituitary stalk.” He points with a pen. “Optic chiasm is clear.” Points again. “Which is great.” He puts down the pen and holds up two fingers, starts with them together, then moves them apart to check her peripheral vision. “Great,” he says again. “So almost identical. The lesion isn’t growing.”

“It isn’t shrinking.”

“Have a seat.”

She sits on the edge of the couch. “Bottom line,” she says, “it’s not gone. It hasn’t burned out from the drug and become necrotic, and it never will, right?”

“But it’s not growing,” he repeats himself. “The medication did shrink it some and is containing it. All right. Options. But what do you want to do? Let me say that just because Dostinex and its generic have been linked to heart valve damage, I’m not sure you need to worry. The studies are dealing with people who take it for Parkinson’s. At your low dose? You’ll probably be fine. The bigger problem? I can write you a dozen prescriptions, but I don’t think you’ll find a single pill in this country.”

“It’s manufactured in Italy. I can get it over there. Dr. Maroni said he will.”

“Fine. But I want you to get an echocardiogram every six months.”

The phone rings. Nate punches in a button, listens briefly, and says to whoever it is, “Thanks. Call security if it seems to get out of hand. Make sure nobody touches it.” He hangs up and says to Lucy, “Apparently, someone drove up in a red Ferrari that’s attracting quite a lot of attention.”

“Kind of ironic.” She gets up from the couch. “It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it.”

“I’ll drive it if you don’t want it.”

“It’s not that I don’t want it. It’s just nothing feels the same anymore. And that’s not entirely bad. Just different.”

“That’s the thing about what you’ve got. It’s something you don’t want. But it’s something more than what you had, because maybe it’s changed the way you look at things.” He walks her out. “I see it every day around here.”

“Sure.”

“You’re doing well.” He stops by the door that leads out to the waiting area and there’s no one to hear them, just the man behind the desk, who smiles a lot and is on the phone again. “I’d put you in the top ten percent of my patients in terms of how well you’re doing.”

“Top ten percent. I believe that’s a B-plus. I think I started out with an A.”

“No, you didn’t. You’ve probably had this thing forever and just didn’t know it until it became symptomatic. Are you talking to Rose?”

“She won’t face it. I’m trying not to resent her for it, but it’s hard. Really, really hard. It’s not fair. Especially to my aunt.”

“Don’t let Rose run you off, because that’s probably what she’s trying to do for the very reason you just said. She can’t face it.” He slips his hands into his lab coat pockets. “She needs you. She’s certainly not going to talk about it with anyone else.”

Outside the Cancer Center, a thin woman with a scarf wrapped around her bald head and two little boys are walking around the Ferrari. The valet rushes over to Lucy.

“They haven’t got too close. I’ve been watching. Nobody has,” he says in a low, urgent voice.

She looks at the two little boys and their sick mother, and walks over to the car, remotely unlocking it. The boys and their mother step back, and fear shows on their faces. The mother looks old but probably isn’t more than thirty-five.

“I’m sorry,” she says to Lucy. “But they’re smitten. They haven’t touched it.”

“How fast can it go?” the older boy asks, a redhead, maybe twelve.

“Let’s see, four-ninety horsepower, six speed, a four-point-three-liter V-eight, eighty-five hundred rpm and carbon-fiber rear diffuser panel.

Zero to sixty in less than four seconds. Around two hundred miles an hour.”

“No way!”

“You ever driven one of these things?” Lucy says to the older boy.

“I’ve never seen one in person.”

“What about you?” Lucy asks his redheaded brother, who is maybe eight or nine.

“No, ma’am.” Shyly.

Lucy opens the driver’s door and the two redheads crane to get a peek and suck in their breath at the same time.

“What’s your name?” she asks the older boy.

“Fred.”

“Sit in the driver’s seat, Fred, and I’m going to show you how to start this thing.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Mom says to her, and she looks as if she’s about to cry. “Honey, don’t you hurt anything.”

“I’m Johnny,” the other boy says.

“You’re next,” Lucy says. “Get over here next to me and pay attention.”

Lucy turns on the battery, makes sure the Ferrari’s in neutral. She takes Fred’s finger and places it on the steering wheel’s red start button. She lets go of his hand. “Hold it in for a few seconds and fire her up.” The Ferrari roars awake.

Lucy gives each boy a ride around the parking lot while their mother stands all alone in the middle of it and smiles and waves and wipes her eyes.

Benton records Gladys Self from his office phone inside McLean’s Neuroimaging Lab. As is true of her famous daughter, the name Self suits her.

“If you’re wondering why that rich daughter of mine doesn’t put me in some nice mansion in Boca,” Mrs. Self says, “well, sir, I don’t want to be in Boca or Palm Beach or anywhere but right here in Hollywood, Florida. In my run-down little oceanfront apartment on the boardwalk.”

“Why might that be?”

“To pay her back. Think how that will look when they find me dead in a dump like this someday. Let’s see what that does to her popularity.” She chortles.

“Sounds like you might have a hard time saying anything nice about her,” Benton says. “And I do need several minutes of your praising her, Mrs. Self. Just as I’m going to need a few minutes of your being neutral and then critical.”

“Why’s she doing this, anyway?”

“I explained it at the beginning of our conversation. She volunteered for a scientific research project I’m conducting.”

“That daughter of mine doesn’t volunteer for shineola unless there’s something she wants out of it. Never known her to do anything for the pure reason of helping others. Hogwash. Ha! A family emergency. She’s lucky I didn’t get on CNN and tell the world she’s lying. Let’s see. Wonder what the truth might be. Let me follow the clues. You’re one of these police psychologists at what’s the name of your hospital? McLean? Oh, that’s right. Where all the rich and famous go. Just the sort of place she’d go to if she had to go somewhere, and I know a good reason why. Would knock you out if you knew. Bingo! She’s a patient, that’s what this is all about!”

“As I’ve said, she’s part of a project I’m conducting.” Dammit. He warned Dr. Self about this. If he called her mother to make the recording, she might suspect that Dr. Self is a patient. “I’m not allowed to discuss anything about her situation — where she is or what she’s doing or why. I can’t divulge information about any subjects in our studies.”

“I sure could divulge a thing or two to you. I knew it! She’s worth studying, all right. What normal person would get on TV and do what she does, twisting people’s minds, their lives, like that tennis player who just got murdered. Bet you dollars to donuts Marilyn’s somehow to blame for that, had her on her TV show, getting into all this personal information from her for all the world to see. It was embarrassing, can’t believe that little girl’s family allowed it.”

Benton’s seen a copy of it. Mrs. Self is right. It was too much exposure and made Drew vulnerable and accessible. Those are the ingredients for being stalked, if she was. It isn’t the purpose of his call, but he can’t resist probing. “I’m wondering how your daughter happened to get Drew Martin on her show. Did they know each other?”

“Marilyn can get anybody she wants. When she calls me on special occasions, mostly she brags about this celebrity and that. Only the way she says it, they’re all lucky to meet her, not the other way around.”

“I have a feeling you don’t see her very often.”

“Do you really think she’d go to the trouble to see her own mother?”

“Now, she’s not completely devoid of feelings, is she?”

“As a little girl she could be sweet, I know that’s hard to believe. But something went haywire when she turned sixteen. She ran off with some playboy and had her heart broken, came back home and we had quite a time of it. Did she tell you about that?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“That figures. She’ll go on and on about her father killing himself and how horrible I am and all the rest. But her own failures don’t exist. That includes people. You’d be surprised if you knew the people she’s managed to excommunicate from her life for no good reason except they’re inconvenient. Or maybe someone shows a side of her the world’s not supposed to see. That’s a killable offense.”

“I assume you don’t mean that literally.”

“Depends on your definition.”

“Let’s start with what’s positive about her.”

“She tell you she makes everybody sign a confidentiality agreement?”

“Even you?”

“Do you want to know the real reason I live like this? Because I can’t afford her so-called generosity. I live off Social Security and what retirement I got from working all my life. Marilyn never did a damn thing for me and then had the nerve to tell me I had to sign one of these confidentiality agreements, you see. She said if I didn’t, I was on my own no matter how old and sick I got. I didn’t sign it. And I don’t talk about her anyway. But I could. I sure could.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“Well, now, she told me to, didn’t she? She gave you my phone number because it suits whatever little selfish purpose she has this time. And I’m her weakness. She can’t resist. Just itching to hear what I’ll say. Validates her beliefs about herself.”

“What I need you to try,” Benton says, “is to imagine you’re telling her what you like about her. There must be something. For example, ‘I’ve always admired how bright you are’ or ‘I’m so proud of your success,’ et cetera.”

“Even if I don’t mean it?”

“If you can’t say something positive, I’m afraid we can’t do this.” Which would be fine with him.

“Don’t worry. I can lie as well as she can.”

“Then the negative. Such as, I wish you were more generous or less arrogant, or whatever comes to mind.”

“Easy as pie.”

“Finally, neutral comments. The weather, shopping, what you’ve been doing, things like that.”

“Don’t trust her. She’ll fake it and ruin your study.”

“The brain can’t fake it,” Benton says. “Not even hers.”

An hour later. Dr. Self, in a shimmering red silk pants suit and no shoes, is propped up with pillows on her bed.

“I understand your feeling this is unnecessary,” Benton says, turning pages in the pale blue Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis 1 Disorders patient edition.

“Do you need a script, Benton?”

“To keep things consistent in this study, we SCID with the book. Each time for each subject. I’m not going to ask you things that are obvious and irrelevant, such as your professional status.”

“Let me help you out,” she says. “I’ve never been a patient in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t take any medications. I don’t drink too much. I usually sleep five hours a night. How many hours does Kay sleep?”

“Have you lost or gained much weight recently?”

“I maintain my weight perfectly. What does Kay weigh these days? Does she eat a lot when she’s lonely or depressed? All that fried food down there.”

Benton flips pages. “What about strange sensations in your body or on your skin?”

“Depends on who I’m with.”

“Do you ever smell or taste things other people can’t smell or taste?”

“I do a lot of things other people can’t.”

Benton looks up at her. “I don’t think the study is a good idea, Dr. Self. This isn’t constructive.”

“That’s not for you to judge.”

“Do you think this is constructive?”

“You haven’t gotten to the mood chronology. Aren’t you going to ask me about panic attacks?”

“Have you ever had them?”

“Sweating, trembling, dizzy, racing heart. Fear I might die?” She gazes thoughtfully at him, as if he’s the patient. “What did my mother say on the tape?”

“What about when you first got here?” he says. “You seemed rather much in a panic over an e-mail. The one you mentioned to Dr. Maroni when you first got here and haven’t mentioned since.”

“Imagine your little assistant thinking she was going to SCID me.” She smiles. “I’m a psychiatrist. It would be like a beginner playing Drew Martin in tennis.”

“How are you feeling about what happened to her?” he asks. “It’s been on the news that you had her on your show. Some people have suggested the killer may have fixed on her because of…”

“As if my show was the only time she was on TV. I have so many people on my show.”

“I was going to say because of her visibility. Not her appearance on your show, specifically.”

“I’ll probably win another Emmy because of that series. Unless what happened…”

“Unless what happened?”

“That would be grossly unfair,” Dr. Self says. “If the Academy were prejudiced because of what happened to her. As if that has anything to do with the quality of my work. What did my mother say?”

“It’s important you don’t hear what she says until you’re in the scanner.”

“I’d like to talk about my father. He died when I was very young.”

“All right,” says Benton, who sits as far away from her as he possibly can, his back to the desk and the laptop computer on top of it. On a table between them, the recorder runs. “Let’s talk about your father.”

“I was two when he died. Not quite two.”

“And you remember him well enough to feel rejected by him?”

“As you know from studies I presume you’ve read, infants who aren’t breast-fed are more likely to have increased stress and distress in life. Women in prison who can’t breast-feed suffer significant compromises in their capacity to nurture and protect.”

“I don’t understand the connection. Are you implying your mother was in prison at some point?”

“She never held me to her breast, never suckled me, never soothed me with her heartbeat, never had eye contact with me when she fed me with a bottle, with a spoon, a shovel, a backhoe. Did she admit all this when you taped her? Did you ask her about our history?”

“When we tape a subject’s mother, we don’t need to know the history of their relationship.”

“Her refusal to bond with me compounded my feelings of rejection, my resentment, made me more prone to blame her for my father’s leaving me.”

“You mean his dying.”

“Interesting, don’t you think? Kay and I both lost our fathers at an early age, and both of us became doctors. But I heal the minds of the living while she cuts up the bodies of the dead. I’ve always wondered what she’s like in bed. Considering her occupation.”

“You blame your mother for your father’s death.”

“I was jealous. Several times I walked in on them while they were having sex. I saw it. From the doorway. My mother giving her body to him. Why him and not me? Why her and not me? I wanted what they gave to each other, not realizing what that meant, because certainly I didn’t want oral or genital sex with my parents and didn’t understand that part of it, what they did as things progressed. I probably thought they were in pain.”

“At not quite two, you walked in on them more than once and remember it?” He has placed the diagnostic manual under his chair, is taking notes now.

She readjusts her position on the bed, makes herself more comfortable and provocative, making sure Benton is aware of her body’s every contour. “I saw my parents alive, so vital, and then in the blink of an eye he was gone. Kay, on the other hand, witnessed her father’s long, lingering death from cancer. I lived with loss and she lived with dying and there’s a difference. So you see, Benton, as a psychiatrist, my purpose is to understand my patient’s life, while Kay’s is to understand her patient’s death. That must have some effect on you.”

“We’re not here to talk about me.”

“Isn’t it wonderful that the Pavilion doesn’t adhere to rigid institutional rules? Here we are. Despite what happened when I was admitted. Has Dr. Maroni told you about coming into my room, not this one, the first one? Shutting the door, loosening my gown? Touching me? Was he a gynecologist in a former career? You seem uncomfortable, Benton.”

“Are you feeling hypersexual?”

“So now I’m having a manic episode.” She smiles. “Let’s see how many diagnoses we can conjure up this afternoon. That’s not why I’m here. We know why I’m here.”

“You said it was because of the e-mail you discovered while you were taking a break at the studio. Friday before last.”

“I told Dr. Maroni about the e-mail.”

“From what I understand, all you told him is you’d gotten one,” Benton says.

“If it were possible, I might suspect all of you hypnotically lured me here because of that e-mail. But that would be something out of a movie or a psychosis, wouldn’t it?”

“You told Dr. Maroni you were terribly upset and feared for your life.”

“And then I was given drugs against my will. Then he fled to Italy.”

“He has a practice there. Is always in and out, especially this time of year.”

“The Dipartimento di Scienze Psichiatriche at the University of Rome. He has a villa in Rome. He has an apartment in Venice. He’s from a very wealthy Italian family. He’s also the clinical director of the Pavilion, and everyone does as he says, including you. Before he left the country, we should have sorted through what happened after I checked in.”

“‘Checked in’? You seem to refer to McLean as if it’s a hotel.”

“Now it’s too late.”

“Do you really believe that Dr. Maroni touched you inappropriately?”

“I believe I’ve made that patently clear.”

“So you do believe it.”

“Everybody here would deny it.”

“We absolutely wouldn’t. If it were true.”

“Everybody would deny it.”

“When the limousine brought you to admissions, you were quite lucid but agitated. Do you remember that? Do you remember talking to Dr. Maroni in the admissions building and telling him you needed a safe refuge because of an e-mail and would explain later?” Benton asks. “Do you remember becoming provocative with him both verbally and physically?”

“You have quite the bedside manner. Perhaps you should go back to the FBI and use rubber hoses and whatnot. Perhaps break into my e-mail and my homes and my bank accounts.”

“It’s important you remember what you were like when you first got here. I’m trying to help you do that,” he says.

“I remember him coming into my room here at the Pavilion.”

“That was later on — in the evening — when you suddenly became hysterical and incoherent.”

“Brought on by drugs. I’m very sensitive to drugs of any sort. I never take them or believe in them.”

“When Dr. Maroni came into your room, a female neuropsychologist and a female nurse were already there with you. You continued to say that something wasn’t your fault.”

“Were you there?”

“I wasn’t.”

“I see. Because you act as if you were.”

“I’ve read your chart.”

“My chart. I suppose you fantasize about selling it to the highest bidder.”

“Dr. Maroni asked you questions while the nurse checked your vitals, and it became necessary to sedate you by intramuscular injection.”

“Five milligrams Haldol, two milligrams Ativan, one milligram Cogentin. The infamous five-two-one chemical restraint used on violent inmates in forensic units. Imagine. My being treated like a violent prisoner. I remember nothing after that.”

“Can you tell me what wasn’t your fault, Dr. Self? Did it have to do with the e-mail?”

“What Dr. Maroni did wasn’t my fault.”

“So your distress had nothing to do with the e-mail that you said was your reason for coming to McLean?”

“This is a conspiracy. All of you are in on it. That’s why your comrade Pete Marino contacted me, isn’t it? Or maybe he wants out. He wants me to rescue him. Just like I did in Florida. What are you people doing to him?”

“There’s no conspiracy.”

“Do I see the investigator peeking out?”

“You’ve been here for ten days. And told no one the nature of this e-mail.”

“Because it’s really about the person who has sent me a number of e-mails. To say ‘an e-mail’ is misleading. It’s about a person.”

“Who?”

“A person Dr. Maroni could have helped. A very disturbed individual. No matter what he’s done or hasn’t done, he needs help. And if something happens to me, or to someone else, it’s Dr. Maroni’s fault. Not mine.”

“What might be your fault?”

“I just said nothing would be.”

“And there’s no e-mail you can show me that might help us understand who this person is and perhaps protect you from him?” he says.

“It’s interesting, but I’d forgotten you work here. I was reminded when I saw the ad for your research study posted in admissions. Then, of course, Marino said something when he e-mailed me. And that’s not the e-mail. So don’t get excited. He’s so bored and sexually frustrated working for Kay.”

“I’d like to talk to you about any e-mails you’ve received. Or sent.”

“Envy. That’s how it starts.” She looks at him. “Kay envies me because her own existence is so small. So desperately envious she had to lie about me in court.”

“And you’re referring to…?”

“Mainly her.” Hatred coils. “I’m perfectly objective about what happened in that gross example of litigious exploitation and never took it personally that you and Kay — mainly Kay — were witnesses, making the two of you — mainly her — champions of that gross example of litigious exploitation.” Hatred coils coldly. “I wonder how she’d feel if she knew you’re in my room with the door shut.”

“When you said you needed to talk to me alone in the privacy of your room, we made an agreement. I would record our sessions in addition to taking notes.”

“Record me. Take your notes. You’ll find them useful someday. There’s much you can learn from me. Let’s discuss your experiment.”

“Research study. The one you volunteered for, got special permission for, and I advise against. We don’t use the word experiment.”

“I’m curious why would you wish to exclude me from your experiment unless you have something to hide.”

“Frankly, Dr. Self, I’m not convinced you meet the criteria.”

“Frankly, Benton, it’s the last thing you want, now, isn’t it? But you have no choice because your hospital is far too shrewd to discriminate against me.”

“Have you ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”

“I’ve never been diagnosed as anything but gifted.”

“Has anybody in your family ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”

“What all this will prove in the end, well, that’s your business. That during various mood states the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain is going to light up, given appropriate external stimuli. So what. PET and fMRI have clearly demonstrated there is an abnormal blood flow in the prefrontal regions and decreased activity in the DLPFC in people who are depressed. So now you throw violence into the mix, and what will you prove, and why does it matter? I know your little experiment wasn’t approved by the Harvard University Committee on Use of Human Subjects.”

“We don’t conduct studies that aren’t approved.”

“These healthy control subjects. Are they still healthy when you’re done? What happens to the not-so-healthy subject? The poor wretch with a history of depression, schizophrenia, bipolar or other disorder, who also has a history of hurting themselves or others or trying to, or obsessively fantasizing about it.”

“I take it Jackie briefed you,” he says.

“Not quite. She wouldn’t know the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex from a small cod. Studies of how the brain responds to maternal criticism and praise have been done before. So now you throw violence into the mix, and what will you prove, and why does it matter? You show what’s different about the brains of violent versus nonviolent individuals and what does it prove, and what does it matter? Would it have stopped the Sandman?”

“The Sandman?”

“If you looked at his brain, you’d see Iraq. And then what? Would you magically extract Iraq and he’d be fine?”

“Is the e-mail from him?”

“I don’t know who he is.”

“Might he be the disturbed person you referred to Dr. Maroni?”

“I don’t understand what you see in Kay,” she says. “Does she smell like the morgue when she comes home? But then, you’re not there when she comes home.”

“Based on what you’ve said, you got the e-mail several days after Drew’s body was found. A coincidence? If you have information about her murder, you need to tell me,” Benton says. “I’m asking you to tell me. This is very serious.”

She stretches her legs and with her bare foot touches the table between them. “If I kicked this recorder off the table and it broke, what then?”

“Whoever killed Drew will kill again,” he says.

“If I kicked this recorder”—she touches it with her bare toe and moves it a little—“what might we say and what might we do?”

Benton gets up from his chair. “Do you want someone else murdered, Dr. Self?” He picks up the recorder but doesn’t turn it off. “Haven’t you been through this before?”

“And there it is,” she says from the bed. “That’s the conspiracy. Kay will lie about me again. Just like before.”

Benton opens the door. “No,” he says. “It will be much worse this time.”