Compulsion

17

I grabbed a cab back to Chelsea and walked through the door of my loft at 9:17 p.m. By 9:22 I had already gotten the number for Dr. Marion Eisenstadt from Manhattan Directory Assistance, dialed her up, and convinced the woman at her answering service to page her. I hung on for her more than five minutes.

"Dr. Eisenstadt," she said finally. Her voice was younger than I had expected.

"This is Dr. Frank Clevenger, in Boston," I said. "I'm a psychiatrist working with the Bishop family, on Nantucket."

"Yes?" she said.

"I'm calling to…"

"You're a forensic psychiatrist," she said. "Is this a police matter?"

Having a reputation isn't always an advantage. "Not formally," I said. "The Bishops allowed me to evaluate their son, Billy. Now I'm learning as much as I can about the entire family, so I have a complete picture of him when I testify at his trial."

"Okay," Eisenstadt said tentatively.

"And Julia Bishop told me you've treated her. She suggested I call you."

A few moments went by. "I don't think I can tell you much without a release of information from Ms. Bishop."

I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my soul. First of all, Eisenstadt actually existed. Secondly, Julia was clearly her patient. "I completely understand," I said. "We haven't had time to dot our i's or cross our t's. You probably know Billy is still at large. I've had contact with him by phone. Anything you can share with me could help me-either to reach out to him now, or to help him in court later."

"Such as…" she said.

"Such as where you think he fits, in terms of family dynamics," I said, as a throwaway line. "Have you treated Ms. Bishop a long time?"

"Sporadically," Eisenstadt said, still sounding cautious.

"She summers on Nantucket, of course," I said.

Several more seconds passed. "More sporadically than that would explain. I think we've met four, possibly five times, in total. But that's really all I can say."

My confidence in Julia's story plummeted and all that weightiness settled right back inside me. I sat down. "I didn't know it was that infrequent," I said. "Perhaps you still feel you know her well enough to-"

"If you do get that release, I'd be happy to share the file."

"Would that include her letters?" I asked, reaching.

Eisenstadt was silent.

"Ms. Bishop mentioned she's written you, from time to time," I said. I could hear my tone of voice drift toward an investigator's, and I knew Eisenstadt would hear it, too.

"Without a client's written permission, I can't confirm or deny the existence of any specific item in the medical record," she said flatly. "That's the law. I'm sure you're familiar with it."

"I understand," I said. I tried taking another tact. "Shall I have Ms. Bishop specifically authorize release of the letters, or would a general release of information suffice?"

"I can't say any more," she said, coldly this time.

"Of course. Thank you for your time. I'll be in touch."

"Not at all. I'll be happy to talk with you again." She hung up.

I stood there, holding the phone in one hand, rubbing my eyes with the other. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility to think that Julia could have bonded so closely with Eisenstadt in four or five hours as to have written that Eisenstadt "sustained" her, that she meditated "constantly" on their time together, and that she had the will to live only when "I think of seeing you." Eisenstadt was female, after all-the wrong gender to inspire that kind of intimacy from Julia.

Julia had another lover. I didn't know whether that fact itself, or her lying about it, troubled me more. In any case, the investigation had missed a critical beat: Interviewing whoever she had been sleeping with at the time of Brooke's murder.

There was no telling what such an interview would yield. What if Julia and her lover had plans to run off together-plans her lover abandoned when she became pregnant with the twins? What if Julia had come to see Brooke and Tess as the only barrier between her and a fresh start with another man?

Conversely, what if her lover had come to see the twins as an obstacle? A man might do anything to have Julia.

A dull headache had cropped up at the base of my skull. I needed better news. A little relief. Ballast. I dialed State Police headquarters and asked for Art Fields, feeling like I was pulling the lever on a one-armed bandit that had just swallowed my last coin. He picked up a minute later. "Frank Clevenger calling," I said.

"Glad you called."

"Do we know whose prints are on that negative yet?" I asked.

"Just one person's," Fields said tentatively. " Darwin Bishop's."

I felt like I had hit the jackpot. But Fields's voice didn't have celebration in it. "You don't sound satisfied with that," I said.

"There aren't any other prints," he said. "Not Billy Bishop's. Not anyone's. I would have liked to see one unidentified stray-from whoever processed the roll, some clerk in a store, whoever shot the film for Bishop and turned it over to him. Somebody."

"Wouldn't those people be trained to hold the negatives without touching the surfaces?" I asked. "Don't some of them wear gloves?"

"But a lot of them screw up, don't care, or whatever," Fields said. "So you have to wonder whether someone went to the trouble to keep the negative extra clean before it made its way to Bishop. And you have to wonder why."

"Unless it's a coincidence," I said. "I mean, one of Darwin 's security guards could shoot the film, turn it over to a lab for processing, and bring the negatives back neatly tucked in an envelope, with no one ever touching their surfaces."

"Sure. That's possible. Sometimes you get perfect pitch out of a choir, too. I just would have been reassured by a little background noise."

"Agreed," I said. "Did you call in the results to Captain Anderson?" I said.

"Should I?" he asked.

That question had to be about whether Anderson was to be trusted, given what Fields had seen in the photograph. And the question helped me see that I still had faith in Anderson. I believed his story about having been magnetically drawn to Julia and having lost his bearings in the relationship. She had that power. That was more obvious to me than ever. "Yes," I said immediately. "He's the one to funnel all the information through."

"Will do then," Fields said.

"I appreciate it. Thanks for your help."

"No problem," he said. "I do the work for whoever comes through the door with credentials, but I actually like doing it for people who want to hear the truth. Take care." He hung up.

I agreed that the photographic negative would have been an even more convincing piece of evidence had it been a little dirtier. But the portrait of Darwin Bishop as the killer was compelling, nonetheless. His were the only fingerprints on that negative. He had lobbied Julia to abort the twins. He had taken out life insurance on them, had a history of domestic violence, and had asked Julia for her bottle of nortriptyline.

It was just past 10:00 p.m. Julia would probably be arriving soon. I needed to sleep, even for half an hour. I dropped into a tapestried armchair that looked out at the Tobin Bridge, enjoying the silent, firefly traffic arching through the night, then closed my eyes and actually drifted off.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang again. I glanced at the caller ID and saw North Anderson 's mobile phone number. I figured he was calling to touch base after Fields shared the news about Bishop's prints with him. Part of me wanted to let it ring. But I knew that avoiding Anderson wouldn't solve anything. I grabbed the receiver. "It's Frank," I said.

"How are you doing?" he said.

"Okay," I said, a little more stiffly than I wanted to. "You?"

He skipped the question. "They picked Billy up," he said. "He wants to see you."

"Picked him up?" I said. "Is he all right?"

"Other than being worn out, from what I hear. He hadn't eaten or slept much."

"Where did they find him?" I asked.

" Queens. LaGuardia Airport," Anderson said. "He was ready to board a flight to Miami."

"How did he manage to get off the island without the police stopping him?"

"He probably made a run for it right after the break-in."

"I'll fly to New York on the first shuttle," I said.

"Stay put. He's headed back your way," Anderson said. "The State Police are picking him up by van and transporting him to the Suffolk County House of Corrections, right downtown in Boston. I can get you in there as soon as you want. He's under arrest, charged with one count of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder, and a laundry list of lesser charges-breaking and entering, grand larceny, fleeing the jurisdiction. A grand jury will decide whether to indict sometime tomorrow. If they go for it, Billy stands trial as an adult. He could get life."

"Does he have a lawyer?" I asked.

"Court-appointed, so far. Darwin Bishop didn't want to pay for private counsel, assuming he still has the cash to swing it. I thought you might talk to Julia. See if she can help."

I could recognize an olive branch when somebody held one out. Anderson was yielding Julia to me. "I'll mention Carl Rossetti to her," I said. "He's brilliant. And I've known him almost as long as I've known you. We can trust him."

Anderson heard my handshake loud and clear. "Thanks, Frank," he said. He let a few seconds pass. "Billy's going to need somebody like Rossetti. O'Donnell and the D.A. are both convinced they've got their man. They'll paint Billy as such a monster in the media that he'll be public enemy number one by the time he steps into court."

Their man happens to be a boy, I thought to myself. If they can try kids as adults, why don't they try immature fifty-year-olds as juveniles? Another one-way street paved by the state. "Have you talked to Fields?" I asked, switching gears.

"I did. There are a lot of things pointing in good old Darwin 's direction-including that negative-but it's all circumstantial. The way the D.A.'s office is looking at this case, the break-in is the place to hang their hats. If they can convince a jury that the timing of Tess's cardiac arrest and Billy's B & E is too close to be a coincidence, then they prevail. Billy fleeing the jurisdiction doesn't look good, either."

"No," I agreed. "It doesn't."

"That it?" he said.

"I talked to Julia about the letter," I said.

"What did she say?"

"She told me she wrote it to her therapist, in Manhattan. Marion Eisenstadt."

"Can you check that out?"

"I already called her," I said. "She wouldn't really open up without a release from Julia, but she did tell me the two of them had only had four or five sessions together."

"And?"

"And Julia's letter sounds like something you'd write to a therapist after four or five sessions a week, for a lot of weeks."

"Sounds that way," he said. "But don't forget who we're dealing with here."

"Meaning?"

"Julia brings out incredibly strong feelings in people, incredibly quickly. Maybe that kind of thing cuts both ways."

"That she'd bond that quickly in therapy herself? Instant transference?"

"You're the psychiatrist," Anderson said, "but it seems possible."

"Possible," I agreed. "But, more likely, that was a love letter to another man."

"A man we'd want to talk to," he said.

"If we ever find out who he is," I said.

Anderson was silent a few seconds. "It doesn't make you feel very special, does it?"

"No," I said. "I guess not." Saying that, I didn't quite believe it. Remarkably, I was still holding on to the slim chance that Julia was a woman with a complicated past who had firmly settled on me for her future. I wanted to forgive her-almost anything.

"Are you headed back to the hospital to talk to her?" he asked. "I'd like to know what she has to say when you tell her you talked with her doctor."

I didn't want to tell him that Julia was headed over to my place. "I'll get to her one way or another," I said. That didn't sound great, even to me.

"It's your call," Anderson said. "Just keep being careful. You lucked out last time. You could have been killed."

"I hear you," I said. I paused, noticing that a hint of paranoia about Anderson had crept back into my mind. From his tone of voice, I wouldn't have been able to say whether he was warning me or threatening me. You lucked out last time. You could have been killed. "Can you get me an interview with Billy at eight a.m.?" I asked.

"You got it," he said.

"Let's talk soon," I said, and hung up. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. On empty. I closed my eyes again, thirsting for sleep.

I woke with a start, not knowing where I was for the first few seconds. I checked my watch-1:20 a.m. and still no Julia. I dialed Mass General to see if she had left the Telemetry unit.

The unit clerk answered the line. "This is Dr. Frank Clevenger," I said. "I'm calling to see whether Ms. Bishop might still be with her daughter Tess."

"Can you hold?"

"Of course."

Almost a minute passed. I started getting nervous, wondering whether something had happened to Tess. John Karlstein finally picked up the phone. "Frank?" he said.

"Right here." I wasn't sure why he was still following the case outside the intensive care unit, but I knew it couldn't be for any happy reason.

"They had a little problem down here with Tess," Karl-stein said. "I was still upstairs tying loose ends, so I came by."

I closed my eyes. "What sort of problem?"

"Her breathing slowed. Respiratory rate went down to eight. We watched her blood oxygen concentration fall all the way to seventy-seven. I didn't want to put her on a face mask because I worried we'd suppress her respiratory drive even more. We kind of held our breath, along with her, for twenty minutes. Then everything drifted back toward normal. Now she seems fine. Her pO₂ is back up to ninety-five."

"What happened?"

"Honestly, I don't know," he said. "It could be that she's got a little residual neurological damage somehow affecting her respiratory rate. It could be the nortriptyline wasn't the only toxin in her bloodstream when she was admitted. Or it could be one of those things that happens out of the blue, like I warned you about. Patients who code once tend to code again."

"Is Julia Bishop there?" I asked, tacking on her last name to make the relationship sound professional.

A new note of worry entered his voice. "She left a while ago-just before this happened," he said.

"You're still concerned about her and the baby, their interactions, I mean?" I said.

"I don't know if I am or I'm not. But I have found myself thinking once or twice about Caroline Hallissey's assessment. Long and short of it, I figure there's no harm having her attending physician down here order up another twenty-four-hour sitter." He cleared his throat. "Chances are, this was a fluke. It happens. I've had patients look like they were about to code, then bounce back and never have another problem."

"Or it might not be a fluke," I said, half to myself.

"There are lots of medications that can suppress your breathing," Karlstein said. "Ativan. Klonopin. They're all commonly prescribed to people with depression." By which he meant Julia. "We'll grab a toxic screen of Tess's blood, just to be on the safe side."

"That's the right thing to do," I said.

"I knew you'd see it that way, Doc. Check in, any time," Karlstein said. "I'm hoping to be out of here in a few, so I'll let the house officer know to fill you in on any changes. You on beeper?"

"Sure am," I said.

"You're the man," he said.

We hung up. I didn't like the fact that Julia had left the unit just before Tess had run into respiratory trouble. Karlstein obviously didn't like it, either. But there wasn't any clear reason-let alone evidence-to believe the two events were causally linked. At least not yet. The toxic screen would show any new prescription medication in Tess's bloodstream.

Less than two minutes later, the buzzer at the front door sounded. I walked over to the intercom. "Hello?" I said. I hit the listen button.

"Sorry I'm late," Julia said. "Still have time for me?"

"You know I do," I said. I let her in.

When she walked into the apartment, Julia seemed more relaxed than I had ever seen her, which I took to mean she hadn't heard about Tess and probably hadn't heard about Billy being arrested, either. I was anything but relaxed myself. I didn't linger with her at the door. "Can I get you coffee? A drink?" I asked, walking toward the kitchen.

She strolled through the loft, stopping in front of the plate-glass windows. The Boston skyline shone before her.

"Anything?" I asked again.

She turned slowly around. She looked like a goddess against the night sky. "Just take me to bed, okay?" she said, in a tired, needy way that, even under the circumstances, had me thinking about helping her out of her clothes.

I studied her for any sign of anxiety. There was none. Was it even remotely possible that she was fresh from trying to kill her daughter? "We need to talk," I said.

She took a deep breath and sat down at the edge of the mattress. "I've told you everything about North there is to tell," she said. "Go ahead, ask away."

"It isn't about North," I said. I walked over to her and, like a reflex, like there was no question of maintaining any real distance, held out my hand. She took it. I nodded toward the couch. "Let's sit."

The mother in Julia must have read the part of my mind that was preoccupied with Tess's difficulty breathing-unless she already knew about it, having caused it. "Is something wrong at the hospital?" she said.

"Not anymore," I said. "Everything's fine." I helped her up and guided her to the couch. We sat down close to one another.

"Something's happened," she said, her voice straining. "What? Tell me."

"Things are fine. I called looking for you on the Telemetry unit. I ended up talking to Dr. Karlstein."

"Doctor-"

"He was there because Tess had had some trouble breathing."

Her head fell into her hands. "Is she all right?"

"She is," I said definitively. "Her breathing is completely back to normal."

"I'm going there right now," she said. "Will you drive me?"

"Hold on. She's fine. Really." I moved my hand to her knee and felt my own breathing quicken. Strange. With all the fires burning around us, the energy between us still felt the most incendiary. "Give me a minute to finish," I said.

Julia's panicked eyes searched my face. "Oh, God. You're not telling me everything."

"It's not about Tess," I said. I paused. "They found Billy. He was at LaGuardia, waiting for a flight to Miami."

She let out a sigh of relief. "At least he's safe."

"They're bringing him to the Suffolk County House of Corrections, in Boston. I'll see him there tomorrow morning."

She shook her head. "He shouldn't have to spend a single day in a place like that," she said. "He's innocent. I'm sure of it now."

I took back my hand, nodding to myself.

Julia looked at me with concern. "What else could be wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. A sigh that escaped me said otherwise. "I had a chance to call Marion Eisenstadt," I said.

She stared at me a few moments. "You're kidding."

"You can tell me if that letter wasn't written to her," I said.

"I can't believe you actually bothered her with this. Behind my back."

"She told me you've had four or five sessions together. That's all she'd say."

"She didn't tell you about the letters?" Julia asked.

Was she bluffing? "She wouldn't," I said. "Not without a written release of information from you." I let that not-so-subtle hint hang in the air.

"You want me to sign some form to let you look at my psychiatric records, to prove I haven't been fucking someone else? Are you joking?"

"I just want you to be honest with me. I want you to know that you can be."

She shook her head in frustration. Her eyes filled up.

"If that letter was written to someone else, I have to talk to that person, as part of the investigation. I can't let it-"

She looked back at me, a new anger in her eyes chasing away any hint of sadness. "That's right. You can't let it go. You can't let go of the past and let us have a life together. You'll see phantom lovers of mine everywhere you turn. Because jealousy doesn't take any courage. Acceptance does. Loving someone does. And you can't really love anybody."

I pressed ahead, even though Julia's diagnosis of me gave me pause. "It's still hard to understand how after four or five…"

"It's not my job to convince you of anything," she said. "You'll believe what you want." She stood up. "This is foolishness. We're foolishness. I need to be with my daughter."

I wasn't at all sure I wanted her to leave-the apartment or me. Because even if Julia was lying, all she was probably lying about was her complicated past with men. And my own romantic life had been anything but simple. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was hesitating at the threshold of an emotion that had evaded me my whole life-the feeling of unconditional love for a woman.

She started toward the door.

"Don't leave," I said.

She stopped, but didn't turn back to me. "You're the one who left," she said. She started walking again.

"It's late," I said. "At least let me drive you."

She pulled open the door and slammed it behind her.