Compulsion

2

I drove my black Ford F-150 truck out of the Mass General parking garage, took a right onto Storrow Drive, and headed toward the Tobin Bridge to Chelsea and East Boston. I wanted to chase North Anderson and the Bishops out of my thoughts, to keep my distance from death. That used to mean half a bottle of scotch and a gram of cocaine, but I knew I would have to settle for my ritual coffee at Cafe Positano, an unexpected collage of mahogany, marble, and brass in the middle of a run-down row of storefronts, sandwiched between a discount packie and a variety store.

I pulled up in front of the place, went inside, and stepped up to the espresso bar. Mario Graziani, a broad-shouldered, perpetually tanned, fifty-something-year-old, who wore a tattoo of the Colosseum on his forearm, was bantering in Italian with the bricklayers and bookmakers and judges who were his regulars. Without my asking him to, he steamed my milk to a cottony froth, spooned it over a couple ounces of ink-black espresso, and dusted the top with cinnamon. He slid the mug across the bar. "Qualcuna ti vuole," he said, nodding discreetly over my shoulder.

I had picked up a bit of Italian about five years before, treating an eighty-four-year-old Sicilian man with Alzheimer's disease. His name was Maurizio Riccio, and his cortex was so full of the tangled neurons of dementia that he had become unshakably convinced he was back in Sicily with his teenage sweetheart. This break with reality was distressing to his children, who wanted their father to know for sure that he wasn't nineteen and frolicking in the Mediterranean, that he was slowly wasting away from prostate cancer, in the Cohen, Florence, Levine Assisted Living Center, right in Chelsea. They insisted I prescribe him an antipsychotic like Thorazine. I refused, and they took his case away from me. I held on to what I'd learned of his language-and what I'd learned from him about the agelessness of the human soul.

Qualcuna ti vuole-Someone wants you. I lighted a cigarette, sipped my coffee, then turned slowly and glimpsed Justine Franza sitting alone toward the back of the place, reading a book. She was resting her head on her palm, her elbow on the table, so that her long, golden hair hung to one side, like a curtain. She was a thirty-two-year-old, upper-crust Brazilian photographer touring the United States. I had met her the night before when she'd come in with a few friends. We'd spent twenty minutes talking about the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro and the seaside resort town of Buzios, all of it a pleasant enough cover for what I really had to say. If I were alone with you on the beach in Rio or in a cliffside cottage in Buzios or down the street in my loft…

"Molto bella, no?" Mario purred.

I drank enough of my coffee to be able to walk with the mug, then started toward her table.

"Clevenger!" someone shouted.

I stopped and turned toward the door.

Carl Rossetti, a local defense attorney who looked more like a drug dealer, bounded in. He had straight, jet-black hair to the small of his back, gold bracelets on both wrists, earrings in both ears. He also had one of the sharpest legal minds in or around Boston. "You think you could analyze me, doc?" he announced. "Let me tell you: You ain't got that kind of time."

Men and women seated at the tables around me looked up at him. He threw waves and smiles back at them.

I had analyzed Rossetti, but he could count on my never telling a soul.

He walked up to me, kept shifting foot-to-foot, as if still on the move. "How about that adopted lunatic on Nantucket?"

My heart sank.

"I guess he's some piece of work. Strangled a couple cats around the island a year or so back. Nearly burned down the Bishop estate. And he's got a history of breaking and entering every place within walking distance." He grinned. "From Russia with love, huh?"

"The way I heard it," I said, "nobody has any idea whether he's involved. They haven't ruled out sudden infant death syndrome."

"C'mon. The kid's got the whole profile. What odds you want to give me he's a bedwetter?"

Rossetti was referring to the triad of bedwetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals typical of budding psychopaths.

"He's a juvenile," I said. "And he hasn't been charged. Who's leaking his life story?"

"Who else? Harrigan-the D.A. This case is a rocket ship, and he knows it. He could ride the publicity right to the Attorney General's office."

"So I heard."

He put a hand on my shoulder, looked at the floor. "Listen," he whispered, "if I wanted to come in for a tune-up, like… You know, no major overhaul. I'm basically good. A couple sessions, maybe. That kind of thing."

"No problem," I said automatically. I was having trouble dragging my mind away from Nantucket.

He dropped his voice even lower. "I don't want to ask any special favors. But I know you been some of the same places I been in life, and I don't want to go there no more, if you get what I'm saying."

"Give me a call. We'll set something up right away." Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Justine watching us.

She noticed me noticing her and went back to reading her book.

Rossetti slapped me on the shoulder, took a couple steps back. "You look friggin' fantastic," he half-shouted. "Still got the bike?"

We'd taken our Harleys to the White Mountains after our last session. I nodded.

"They'll throw mine in the box with me, Doc, 'cause I'm ridin' till the light turns red for good." He pointed at my head, winked. "What about one of them weaves? They're good now. You can hardly tell." He started toward the bar, where Mario, no doubt, was already steaming his milk.

I walked the rest of the way to Justine. She was reading Angela's Ashes. "Light reading?" I said.

She lowered the book. "So sad, Frank. What they went through." She pulled out a chair.

I sat down. Her olive skin, full lips, and deep brown eyes steadied me. Something ugly inside me has always retreated in the face of feminine beauty.

"You look tense. What is the matter?" she asked.

"Rough day," I said, and left it at that.

"What? What was rough?"

I'm used to asking the questions. Answering for a change felt uncomfortable and inviting at the same time. I pointed at her book. "People. Their suffering. Knowing what you can do for them, and what you can't."

"Yes," she said. The look in her eyes made me feel she might actually understand. "This has to be very difficult." She drank the last of her coffee. "For me this would be too much."

I motioned to Mario for a refill, took a drag off my cigarette. "Why do you think that?"

"I could not keep myself… how do you say?… apart from it."

"I've got the same trouble."

Justine used the tip of her finger to steal a bit of the froth off my coffee, licked it away. "But you see patients even knowing this. You don't worry for yourself?"

"Every day."

A few seconds of silence passed. "My day," she said, "was mostly thinking of you."

The last of the tightness in my jaw and neck melted away. I took her hand and felt my pulse slow.

I took her home. My place. A nineteen-hundred-square-foot Chelsea loft with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the steel skeleton of the Tobin Bridge as it arches into Boston. The building had been constructed as a factory when the Industrial Revolution transformed Chelsea from farmland and summer homes to coal yards and textile mills. It had stood through two fires that burned most of the city to the ground, in 1908 and 1973. It had stood as the city welcomed wave upon wave of immigrants-the Irish speaking Gaelic, Russian Jews escaping anti-Semitism, Italians, Poles, Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, El Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Serbs.

My view was as raw and beautiful as a heavyweight bout. In the foreground: triple deckers, smokestacks, tugboats driving full throttle against the massive hulls of oil tankers on the Mystic River. In the distance: the shimmering skyline of Boston 's financial district.

Justine, elegant and slim in tight black cigarette pants and a fitted black sleeveless shirt, stood facing one of the windows as I poured her a Merlot and myself a Perrier.

"Cheers," I said, handing her the glass.

She noticed I wasn't joining her. "No wine?"

"I can't drink." I paused. "Actually, I can drink more than anybody I know. I just can't stop."

"Why not?"

"Why not what?"

"Why can't you stop?"

For a moment I thought we were separated by a language barrier, that she wasn't getting the fact that I was in recovery from alcohol, among other things. But then she looked at me in the same knowing way she had at Café Positano, and I realized she had intended the question- and wanted the answer. I nodded. "I can't stop because I lose myself in the booze. And I end up never wanting to find myself."

"Right."

"Thanks. I hate being wrong about my own disease. It makes me wonder whether I'm worth my hourly rate."

She laughed. As she moved, her collar gaped open enough for me to glimpse her cleavage and the top of her black lace bra. "No," she said. "I mean, I understand." She sipped her wine.

I still felt the need to explain. "It's like having a headache that finally goes away with a pill. You might have struggled through the pain before, but now you know relief is just a swallow away. So you keep swallowing. And meanwhile, underneath the waves of calm, your life is unraveling."

"I understand. My mother died of this."

I felt like an idiot. "Of alcoholism."

"Yes. They have this even in Brazil."

"I'm sorry. I…"

She left me at the window and walked over to the largest of five paintings I had hanging on a brick wall that ran the length of the place. It was a six-by-nine-foot canvas by Bradford Johnson depicting the rescue of the crew of a sailing ship by another vessel. A rope is tied between their masts, high above the raging seas, and a man dangles by his hands as he traverses the fragile connection. "I like this very much," she said.

I walked to her side. "What do you like about it?"

"Taking a risk to help someone." She pointed at the ship that was still in one piece. "That one could have kept sailing."

Her comment made me think again of the sixteen-year-old Bishop boy, probably headed for trial as an adult, facing life in prison. Would the system stop long enough to listen to him? Then I thought what it would be like to hear about the animals he had tortured, about his torture in Russia, about Darwin Bishop finding one of his baby girls dead in her crib. I thought about having to feel all the jealousy and fear and anger coursing through the family, in order to understand whether it could have added up to murder. "What if both ships end up sinking?" I half-joked.

"Then taking the risk was even more beautiful," she said.

In my heart I agreed. But coming close to drowning in the undertow of Trevor Lucas's terror had left me with deep respect for solid ground. I pushed the Bishops out of my mind and reached for Justine, using her beauty to anchor me in the moment. My hand found the soft curve of her arm, just above the elbow, then moved down her rib cage, not stopping until my fingers were curled under the waistband of her pants.

She touched her lips to mine, then leaned back. "Perhaps we should not start," she said. "I am in this country only one more day."

I have seen lives saved and others destroyed in less time. 1 tightened my grip and pulled her to me.

I took her to bed, a king-sized Italian creation with chrome legs and a gray flannel, upholstered headboard, all done up with pearl gray linens. She sat at the edge and lifted her arms so I could help her with her top, but I gently pushed her onto her back, moved my hands to her ankles, and pulled off her pants. The scantiest black lace thong covered her. A vertical fold in the cloth was enough to make me lightheaded.

Five or so years back, my own psychiatrist, Dr. James, then eighty-one and still razor-sharp, had challenged me to consider whether my sex life was actually driven by addiction. He was a Freudian analyst and a Talmudic scholar, and I am eternally in his debt for partly filling the holes left in my personality after it developed without a real father.

"How would I know if I'm addicted?" I had asked.

"Are you seeking the woman or the act?" he said. "Do you want her soul or her body?"

"Both," I said immediately.

"For what purpose? To what end?"

"To feel love."

"You can fall in love in a day?"

I thought about that. "In an hour."

"Again and again?" he said.

"Dozens of times. A hundred times."

"You believe these women seek this also? This union? What you call love?"

"I do."

"And you believe this is Nature's design?" he asked.

"Yes."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he sat there looking at me, without speaking.

The quiet began to weigh on me. "What do you think?" I surrendered. "Do I add sexual addiction to my list of diagnoses?"

"I'm afraid not," he said. "The case is worse."

"How so?"

"You have a touch of the truth." He smiled, but only for an instant. "God help you."

Tonight my truth was Justine. In a world of artificial intelligence, transplanted organs, and cloned sheep, I knew it was my heart pounding in my chest as I looked at her, my lungs working like a bellows, my blood feeding my excitement. I reached and pulled the cloth triangle up between her lips, watched the cloth dampen, listened to her groan as my fingers moved inside her panties, then inside her. I knelt in front of her and traced her smooth lips with my tongue, moving her thong first this way, then that, teasing. When I could feel her muscles starting to tense for complete release, I stopped and stood up. I pulled her thong off. Then, never taking my eyes off her, I freed myself, lifted her knees, and spread them apart. I moved inside her, reveling in the way her flesh resisted then yielded to my thrusts, resisting less and less each time. And then I yielded, abandoning control, moving now as one with Justine, as Nature dictated, with no more thought of it than waves rolling onto a beach, soaking into soft, moist sands.

Sunday, June 23, 2002

My eyes snapped open, flicked to the bedside clock-7:20 a.m. I had the feeling we were not alone. I dropped my hand to the Browning Baby semiautomatic I keep between my bed frame and mattress, a vestige of my days tracking killers. I lay still. I had almost convinced myself I could hear the intruder's footsteps when the lobby buzzer sounded two insistent blasts, vaguely reminding me that I had heard the same sound in my sleep. I realized I had probably been awakened by something closer to a Federal Express delivery than an attempt on my life.

"Make them go away," Justine said, still half-asleep.

I got up and headed to the door. I pressed the speak button on the intercom panel. "If it's a package and it isn't ticking, leave it," I said. I hit listen.

"It's North."

I squinted at the intercom. I thought I had gotten more distance on my past. I should have known better. Anything you run from turns up in front of you, usually sooner rather than later.

"Frank?"

"I'll be right down," I said.

"Who is it?" Justine asked.

"An old friend," I said, getting into my blue jeans and black turtleneck.

She sat up, gathering the comforter around her. "So early?"

I slipped on my boots. "He needs some advice."

She swung her legs to the side of the bed and got up. She was naked. She reached for her clothes where I had left them, draped over a leather armchair.

I stood there watching her.

"What?" she asked, noticing my stare. She pulled on her pants, nothing underneath.

"You're magnificent."

"Your friend's waiting," she said, feigning irritation. She put on her top, glanced at me. "Do you have food? Eggs, bacon? I could make breakfast."

"Pop-Tarts, if there are any left." I wanted her to stay. "There's a 7-Eleven up the street. I'll be back with everything in thirty minutes."

"No. I'll go. That way everything will be ready when you're finished with your friend."

"Perfect."

We took the elevator to the lobby and walked outside.

North Anderson stood on the sidewalk in front of the building, in black jeans and a black T-shirt. He looked pretty much the way he had two years before. His shoulders, chest, and arms were still overbuilt from working out. He still had the habit of planting his feet far apart and clasping his hands behind his back, as if his wrists were cuffed. The only change in him was a three-inch, jagged pink scar over his right eye. On a white man, the wound would have been less noticeable. Against Anderson 's black skin it was arresting.

"Jealous husband?" I asked, running a finger along my own brow.

He acknowledged Justine with a nod, then looked back at me. "My life's not that interesting. Run-of-the-mill car thief. Just before I left Baltimore."

"Some souvenir." I extended my hand. He shook it. Then we pulled one another close, holding on long enough to respect what we'd been through together. "This is Justine," I said, as we broke.

"My pleasure," he said.

"And mine," Justine said. She navigated the moment effortlessly. "I'm off to the store. Will I see you later?" she asked him.

"Probably not this visit," Anderson said.

"Next time, then." She smiled and walked away.

He glanced after her. "I should have guessed I wouldn't find you alone. Some things don't change."

"You want to grab coffee?" I said. "There's a place not too far."

"Let's just walk."

We started down Winnisimmet, toward the Fitzgerald Shipyard, a stretch of asphalt and seaworthy docks where Peter Fitzgerald worked magic on injured ferries and Coast Guard cutters. I noticed that the limp Anderson struggled with, the result of taking two bullets from would-be bank robbers several years before, was more pronounced than I remembered. There was a new outward arc to the swing of his right leg. That quirk, combined with his new scar, made me glad he'd left Baltimore before dissolving completely into its streets.

We sat on a stack of lumber at the water's edge. A lone barge made its way toward Boston Harbor, carrying a mountain of silt from a dredging operation downstream. "How are Tina and Kristie?" I asked.

"Great," he said, without much conviction. "The island's good for a family, you know? Different than the city."

"Night and day," I said.

"We're in a little place in Siasconset, right near the beach. Sunsets. Clean air."

"Nothing better."

He smiled, but tightly. "She's pregnant again. Tina is."

I kept watching his face. "Congratulations. How far along is she?"

"Six months."

"Boy or a girl?" I asked. "Or don't you know?"

"A boy," he said. His eyes narrowed, as if he was trying to see his future through the mist.

Anderson was both brave and sensitive, and I liked thinking of him fathering a son. But I couldn't tell how much he liked the idea. "How do you feel about it?" I asked.

He focused on me. "Feel about what? What do you mean?"

"I mean, about having a child. Are you happy?"

"Of course." He shrugged. The tight smile reappeared. "How could I not be happy about it?"

"A whole bunch of ways" the voice at the back of my head whispered.

"People feel all kinds of things about having kids," I said.

He shook his head, looked out across the water. "I didn't fly here to lie on your couch, Frank. Do you ever turn it off?"

I never do, which has cost me more than one friend and countless dinner invitations. At some point during my training in psychiatry, I lost the ability to stay on the surface of things. I became a relentless burrower-so much so that even after Anderson 's plea to let his unconscious off the hook, I was wondering whether ambivalence about his unborn child was driving his interest in the death of the Bishop baby. "Sorry," was all I said.

He turned to face me. "I didn't mean that the way it came out. I'm running on empty. I was up all night."

"No apology required."

"So how about you? Mass General's the end of the line. Impressive stuff."

"You definitely didn't fly here to flatter me about my job."

He leaned a little into my space. "Look, I heard everything you told me on the phone yesterday. Believe me, I still get nightmares from that case myself. I can still see-"

"-Then you're still human," I interrupted, not needing a recap of the carnage.

"And I don't blame you one bit for not wanting to get involved this time."

"Good. Because I'm not planning to."

"Can I tell you what's bothering me?" he said.

"Didn't you just say you wanted nothing to do with my couch?"

Anderson didn't break stride. "Like I said on the phone, with all his millions, Darwin Bishop pretty much invited me to question his son. Right in the house. No attorney present. No nothing. He could have pulled a Ramsey, tied the department in knots for months until we proved probable cause." He shook his head. "The kid wouldn't talk, but even so…"

"Maybe he's got no reason to get in your way. Maybe his little girl died of SIDS, after all."

"But she didn't."

"You know that for a fact," I said.

"We got the autopsy results late last night," Anderson said. "Brooke Bishop died of asphyxiation due to airway obstruction." He dropped his voice, maybe to take the edge off his words. "Her nasal passages and trachea were filled with plastic sealant, like you'd use to caulk up a window."

My stomach fell. I tried not to think of little Brooke's last minutes of life, but unwelcome images and feelings crashed through my resistance. I imagined her watching the person approaching her, maybe even smiling expectantly, cooing, then opening her eyes wider with curiosity at the white tube of caulk. I felt her laugh as the plastic tip tickled the rim of one nostril, then fall silent and begin to squirm as the tip moved deeper inside. I felt her begin to gag and strain, mouth open, lungs sealed. Cut off. Did she, I wondered, wish some last, infantile wish to be held? Did her mind flee to a memory of her mother's face or smell or touch?

"Frank?" Anderson said.

I focused on him again. "I'm listening," I said.

"Like I was saying," he went on, "if I'm Darwin Bishop, loaded to the gills, I get Billy the best lawyer money can-"

"Billy?" I broke in.

"They obviously renamed the kid when they brought him over from Russia," Anderson said. "American as apple pie, huh?"

I had lost one patient to suicide in my seventeen years as a psychiatrist. He was a depressed teenager named Billy Fisk. I had never stopped feeling responsible for his death. "Right," I said.

"Right?"

I closed my eyes, remembering Fisk.

"There are no coincidences" the voice at the back of my mind prodded me. "Take it as a sign."

"You still with me?" Anderson said.

I looked at him. "What else do you know about the family?"

Anderson relaxed visibly and let out a sigh.

"I'm just asking a question," I said. "I'm not signing onto the case."

He held up a hand. "Of course not." His tone said he thought otherwise. "It turns out Darwin Bishop grew up in Brooklyn," he said, "even though you'd never know it from his voice or the way he carries himself. He's all Park Avenue and Nantucket now. Fifty-one years old. His wife Julia is a former model. It's his second marriage."

"Much younger?" I said.

"Mid-thirties," Anderson said.

"How's she bearing up?"

"What would you expect?"

"I don't. Ever," I said. "That way I'm never surprised."

"She's a basket case," Anderson said. "She hardly leaves the twins' bedroom."

"And the older adopted son? The seventeen-year-old. What's he like?"

Anderson shrugged. "I only got about ten minutes with him. His name is Garret. Bishop adopted him a year before his divorce. He's a golden boy. Good-looking. Straight A's at Andover Academy. Varsity tennis and lacrosse. Headed for Yale in the fall. You know the pedigree."

"Did you learn anything from him?" I asked.

"I'd say he's in shock," Anderson said. "He kept holding his head in his hands, saying, 'I can't believe this is happening.' He was worried about his mother, mostly- whether she'd hold up. She's got a history of depression."

"Why did Bishop adopt the two boys in the first place?" I asked.

"I don't know. I was focused on the kids themselves."

I nodded. "So there's Garret, then Billy, then Brooke and… what's the surviving twin's name?"

"Tess."

"Garret, Billy, Brooke, and Tess."

"Right."

"Was anybody else in the house the night before they found Brooke dead?" I asked.

"A nanny. Claire Buckley. She summers on the island with the family. Takes care of the kids, gets a place to stay, half her nights and weekends free-that type of thing."

"Young and pretty," I said. "Sticks close to the wife."

"You got it."

"Any guests that evening?"

"No," Anderson said.

I looked out over the water, its surface speckled with white, electric jewels of light. "So why do you figure Mr. Bishop flung the door wide open for you?"

"I don't know. Like I said, that's what bothers me."

"It was before the autopsy results," I said.

"Still…" Anderson said.

"Maybe he's burnt out," I said. "He's gone to bat for Billy over his firesetting, his cruelty to animals-now this. Maybe he finally gets the picture that Billy's a dangerous kid."

"Could be."

"Or it could be something else."

"Like…" he said.

"Like maybe he'd rather have Billy take the fall than somebody else," I said. "Like his golden boy. Or his wife. Or himself."

"Also possible," Anderson said. He paused. "If I had a psychiatrist working with me, I might actually be able to find out which answer is the right one."

I took a deep breath, let it out.

"I really need you on this," Anderson said. "My gut tells me Billy Bishop isn't guilty. And if I'm right, that's only half the problem. Because then I've got to find out who is. There's another baby girl in that house."

Anderson was right to worry about Tess. In the dozen or so recorded cases of infanticide in families with twins, the surviving baby eventually dies mysteriously over seventy percent of the time, usually due to sudden heart or respiratory failure. Some researchers have theorized that the jarring loss of one twin spawns a toxic grief reaction in the other that mysteriously shuts down cardiac conduction or short-circuits the respiratory drive. An immeasurable connection of souls has been abruptly severed, sapping the will to live. But the most convincing explanation is that the killer has simply been given time and opportunity to claim another victim-probably by suffocation-either because the wrong person was arrested or because lack of evidence precluded any arrest.

I looked up at the sky. For some reason I pictured my father in a drunken rage, ready to mete out one of the beatings that were my childhood. I thought how nice it would be to keep myself safe, for a change. I thought how no one could blame me if I did. Because I already had wounds crisscrossing my psyche like a map to hell. And some of them had never stopped bleeding.

“No one could blame you" the voice whispered, "except yourself."

Justine had breakfast nearly ready when I got back to the loft. Omelets and bacon sizzled on the stove. Still-warm bagels from Katz's, a sixty-five-year-old shop just beyond the 7-Eleven, were sliced and spread with cream cheese. A deep red, sparkly liquid filled the blender.

"Strawberries, ice, and sugar," she said, without my asking.

"Everything looks wonderful," I said.

"So you will leave this minute or later today?" She flipped an omelet.

I wasn't expecting the question and didn't answer.

She glanced at me. "I know you have to go. I could see it in your friend's face."

"I told him I'd meet him at the airport in four hours. He's got a tough case on Nantucket. A little girl was murdered."

"Oh, God," she said. "How old?"

"Five months."

She looked at me in that searching way people sometimes do when confronted by man's limitless capacity for cruelty.

"They're saying her adopted brother did it," was all I could think to say. "He's not well."

She shook her head. Without another word she turned off the burners, arranged our food on plates, and poured the strawberry concoction into two glasses. We sat on stools at the granite center island, eating in silence. "You can visit me in Rio or Buzios," she said finally.

"Buzios," I said. "As soon as I can get there." I meant it.

She took another bite, pushed her plate away. "This is a waste of time," she said.

I figured she was upset about my abrupt departure. I expected a scene.

She shrugged. "I don't even like eggs." She peeled off her shirt, tossed it on the floor, and walked over to the bed.

I followed. I could not have predicted how close to losing everything the Bishop case would bring me, but I must have sensed it. Because as my eyes and hands and mouth traveled over Justine, I felt more than passion. I felt the need to tap her spirit, to somehow use her aliveness to inoculate myself against death.