Show of Evil

Twenty-Three

As Tony guided the Cadillac up to the main building of the Daisy, Vail saw a tall man sitting on a wooden bench beside the stairs to the administration office. He was filling a pipe, tapping the tobacco down with a small silver tool with a flat, circular tamper at the end of its stem. He seemed totally engrossed in the task, twisting the pipe between his fingers, stopping to study the tobacco, then packing it even tighter.

'That's the chief of staff, Dr Samuel Woodward,' Tony said. 'Big muckety-muck. He's waiting to greet you officially.'

'No band?' Vail said.

Tony laughed. 'They only let them out on Fridays,' he said.

As Vail got out of the car, Woodward stood. He was taller than Vail had guessed, six-three or four, and was dressed casually in dark brown corduroy slacks, a pale blue button-down shirt, open at the collar, and a black alpaca cardigan, one of its side pockets bulging with a packing of tobacco. He was a lean man with the gaunt, almost haunted face of a long-distance runner. His close-cropped, dark red hair receded on both sides to form a sharp widow's peak and he wore a beard that was also trimmed close to his face. He dropped the pipe tool in the other pocket of his cardigan and held out a hand with long, tapered, aesthetic-looking fingers.

'Mr Vail,' he said, 'Dr Sam Woodward. It's a pleasure. Sorry I wasn't here to take your call the other night.'

'My pleasure,' Vail said.

'It's such a pleasant day I thought we might stroll around the grounds and chat,' he said in a soft, faraway voice that sounded like it was being piped in from someplace else. 'No smoking inside the buildings. I quit cigarettes about six months ago and thought I'd taper off with a pipe. Instead of getting lung cancer, my tongue will probably rot out. You smoke?'

'I'm thinking about quitting.'

'Ummm. Well, good luck. Ferocious habit.'

He took out a small gold lighter and made a production of lighting his pipe. The sweet odour of aromatic tobacco drifted from its bowl. Vail lit a cigarette and tagged along with Woodward as he walked down the pavement that bounded the broad, manicured quadrangle formed by several buildings.

'I must say I'm curious as to why, after ten years, you should suddenly come back into Aaron Stampler's life,' Woodward said. 'You never have been to visit him.'

'I don't make a practice of seeing any of my old clients when a case is over. It's a business relationship. It ends with the verdict.'

'That's rather cold.'

'How friendly are you with your patients, Doctor? Do you go to visit them after they're released?'

'Hmmph,' he said, laughing gently. 'You do go to the point, sir, and I like a man who goes to the point, says what he thinks, so to speak. That's rare in my business. Usually it takes years carving through all the angst to get to the baseline.'

'I suppose so.'

'So why are you here?'

'Curiosity.'

'Really? Having second thoughts after all these years?'

'About what?'

'Come, come, sir. Now that you're a prosecutor, the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak. I have always found that all prosecutors think MPs are faking it.'

'Hell, Doctor, he convinced me. I saved his life.'

'And do you regret that now?'

The question took Vail by surprise and he thought about it for a moment before answering. 'I don't… No.'

'It is hard, isn't it? Accepting the absurdities of the mind.'

'That's what you call it? Absurd?'

'Well, to the average person, yes. Absurd. Ludicrous. Preposterous. Crazy. It's very easy to label anything we don't understand or like or accept as fake or insane. Insanity is what I call a phrase of convenience, nothing more than a medical description. Multiple Personality Disorder, on the other hand, ah! Now there we have a recognized mental disease, defined in DSM 3, accepted by the profession, one of the true mysteries of the human condition.'

'DSM 3, that's your bible, as I recall.'

'True, sir, absolutely true. Catalogues and defines over three-hundred mental disorders. The Gray's Anatomy of the mind.'

'Now that you've brought it up, what does DSM say about faking it?'

Woodward stopped. He did not look at Vail; he stared straight ahead and took several puffs of his pipe.

'I assume, sir, this is in the realm of an academic question. By that I mean nonspecific.'

'Of course. Generic.'

They walked down the pavement and then Woodward led Vail out across a broad expanse of lawn bordered by the buildings. From one of the buildings, Vail heard a muffled scream, a howling that quickly changed to laughter and then died away. If Woodward heard it, he made no acknowledgement of the fact. There were several inmates in the quadrangle, one pacing frantically back and forth, waving his hands and screaming silently to himself; another standing against a tree, his face a few inches from the bole, talking intently in tongues; another strapped in a wheelchair, his mouth hanging askew, his eyes half open and unfocused, staring at infinity. It was hard for Vail to ignore these human aberrations. Woodward was right. As sympathetic as Vail felt towards these unfortunate souls, they did seem strange, absurd, and ludicrous and he felt embarrassed for thinking about it.

'It's acceptable to stare, Mr Vail. Natural, in fact. They'll just stare back. You probably seem as bizarre to them as they seem to you.'

He nodded to a patient, who was picking imaginary flowers, and she smiled and nodded back.

'As to your question - about faking multiples - I presume it could be done for a short period of time. I seriously doubt that it could be sustained for very long. Too much involved, you know. My God, changing one's entire posture, body language, voice, general appearance, personality, attitude, persona. Virtually impossible to pull off over a protracted time period.'

'You said virtually impossible.'

Woodward smiled condescendingly. 'Hah! Forgot I was talking to a lawyer. Virtually impossible, yes, I did say that, didn't I? Well, sir, I suppose nothing is absolutely impossible anymore, technology being what it is. But I would say the chances of winning the lottery are far, far, far more likely than faking MPD.'

'Is Aaron Stampler capable of doing it?' Woodward stopped again, this time staring at Vail hard before he answered. 'If he is, I wouldn't know it. Good lord, man, he was diagnosed as a dissociated multiple personality by your own psychiatrist. You were the one who uncovered this problem, Mr Vail. Now ten years later you drop out of the sky and start raising questions. Questions that, in effect, could destroy eight years of hard work and incredible research? No, this man is not acting. This man is not faking it.'

'I'm just asking, Doctor. We're just talking.'

They strolled further, Woodward puffing on his pipe, obviously deep in thought.

'Do you dream, Mr Vail?' he said finally.

'Rarely.'

'But you do dream?'

'Occasionally, yes.'

'You're in another place, another dimension, and you wake up and suddenly you're in a totally different place' - he snapped his fingers - 'just like that. Right?'

'Well, sometimes…'

'Instant displacement.'

'You're saying dreams are a form of losing time, Doctor? That's what Aaron called it when he went into a fugue state and changed to Roy, losing time.'

'It's a common expression used by anyone who suffers fugue events. Let me put it another way. Say you drift into a nap in the middle of a concert, next thing you know the concert's over, everybody's leaving the amphitheatre. Would you call that losing time?'

'I'd call it boredom.'

Dr Samuel Woodward laughed. 'That's because you're normal,' he said. 'Normal, of course, being a relative term. The point is, a fugue is losing time. Usually not for long, a few minutes. Five, I would say is average. It can occur over a period of years - its victims, understandably, are usually afraid to talk about it. Of course, everyone who experiences a fugue event isn't necessarily a multiple, you understand.'

'How did you end up with Aaron?' Vail asked.

'That calls for a bit of biography, not that I want to bore you. I graduated from Harvard, interned at Bellevue, did my residency at Boston General, and then I was five years in psychiatric emergency at Philadelphia Memorial. I loved it. You saw everything, something new every day. That's when I first became fascinated by multiple personalities - MPs. From Philly, I went to the Menanger. And at Menanger I began to specialize in MPD. In fact, I've written several papers on the subject. When they offered me the position here, I jumped at it, and Aaron Stampler was one of the lures.'

'What made him so different?'

'Everything, sir, everything. His background, his intelligence, the nature of his crimes, cause and effect. Absolutely fascinating case. I had read the reports prepared by Bascott, Ciaffo, and Solomon, as well as Dr Arrington's summary. There were only two personalities involved. He hadn't splintered off into five, six, or a dozen, so it was a chance to deal with the disease on a relatively elementary level. A challenge. And — most important of all - he had not been treated. A lot of interrogation, therapy sessions, that sort of thing, but no attempt to treat the disease. Put it all together? Irresistible!'

He paused for a moment to relight his pipe, then: 'I also read the trial transcript. Quite a legal feat, sir. The trial, I mean.'

'I'm not sure whether that's meant to be a compliment or not.'

'Oh yes, a compliment by all means. Back in those days, using the MPD defence was quite daring.'

'It was a sticky problem - whether the jury would buy it or not. In court, the truth sometimes can be detrimental to the health of your client.'

'Is that why you settled it in chambers?'

Vail suddenly felt cautious. The question triggered his paranoia for a second or two. Did Woodward know Stampler had been faking it all along Vail wondered. Was he in on the game or had Stampler conned him, too? Vail quickly decided that Woodward had bought in to Stampler's malevolent trick.

'No,' Vail answered. 'The prosecutor triggered him. That's what put it into Judge Shoat's chambers.'

They walked a little way in silence, then Woodward said, 'Frequently, the initial reaction to multiple personality disorder is disbelief and rejection.' He paused for a moment, then added, 'And you're correct, sometimes the less the public knows about some things, the better.'

'I've often wondered who really killed the bishop, Aaron or Roy,' Vail said. 'What I mean is, Aaron provided the motive, but Roy did the killing. Legally, a case could be made against Aaron for conspiracy to commit murder, possibly aiding and abetting.'

'I disagree, sir, most heartily. They were two different separate and distinct personalities. Aaron didn't consciously conspire to kill the victims. In point of fact, he was as much a victim as the victims themselves.'

Vail thought about that for a moment and nodded. 'Good legal point,' he said.

'From the beginning of his treatment, I had to deal with Aaron and Roy as two different people,' Woodward said. 'The same heart, different souls, if you believe in the soul.'

'I believe in the conscience. I suppose they could be considered the same.'

Woodward didn't respond to Vail's comment; he kept talking as if he was afraid he would lose his train of thought.

'What do you remember about the mind, Mr Vail? About the superego and the id?'

'Not much. The superego is like the monitor of our morals. The id is where all those repressed desires go.'

'Very succinct and relatively accurate, sir. When the wall between the id and the superego breaks down, the repressed desires become normal. Suddenly the idea of murder becomes normal. The mind is disordered - that's the disease - murder is just a symptom. In a manner of speaking, Roy was Aaron's id. Aaron repressed everything, Roy repressed nothing. If Aaron hated someone, Roy killed them.'

'A very convenient arrangement when you think about it,' said Vail.

'It's meant to be. That's one of the reasons human beings create other personalities, the pain becomes unbearable so they invent something to alleviate it. Look, Mr Vail -'

'Call me Martin, please.'

'Martin, I've been Aaron Stampler's shrink, confessor, friend, doctor - his only companion - for the last eight years. He was a classic mess when I came on board. Phobia, disassociation, my God, sir, Aaron had them all! He feared the dark, hated authority, distrusted his elders, dismissed his peers, was sexually confused.' Woodward stopped and shook his head. 'Did you ever hear him talk about what he called the hole, the coal mine his father forced him into?'

Vail nodded. 'The first time I ever interviewed him. Shaft number five, I'll never forget it. Creepy, crawling critters and demons.'

'What was that?'

'Creepy, crawling critters and demons. That's what he told me was waiting for him at the bottom of the shaft. That I do remember quite vividly.'

'That hole might very well be the symbol for everything in life that he dreaded. The dwelling place of his disobedient dreams. You see, when you look at Aaron, you see a madman. When I look at him, I see a person with a disease. And from the very first day I arrived, I regarded him as curable.'

Vail looked at him incredulously.

'Why do you find that hard to believe? You saved his life.'

'Couldn't let them kill the good guy just to get to the bad guy, Doctor.'

'Touche,' Woodward said with a laugh. Then his mood immediately became serious again. 'In point of fact, my entire professional attitude changed because of Aaron Stampler. The belief that mental illness is a disease of the mind that can be treated with talk therapy was losing credibility when I started working with him. The new thing, the new kid on the block, was biological psychiatry.'

'That's a mouthful,' Vail said, just to keep his hand in.

'Well, you know what they say, we in the medical profession can't say hello in less than five syllables.'

'And lawyers can't pronounce anything with more than one.'

'Ha! Very good, sir, very good, indeed.'

'You were talking about biological psychiatry.'

'Yes. It theorizes that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, that it can be medicated. So you had — still have - polarized viewpoints. Cure by talk or cure by pills. I was of the old school, a talker - old habits die hard, as they say - but I decided to go into the Stampler case with an open mind, to try everything and anything.'

Woodward waved his arms around, clicked off numbers on his fingers, closed his eyes, lifted his eyebrows as he rambled on.

'The list seemed endless at times. Thorazine, Prozac, Xanax, Valium, Zoloft, Halcion. We have bezodiazepines, which are addictive, and Haldol to treat hallucinations and delusions. There are antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, and I tried them all, every damn one that I felt was applicable. I tried behavioural therapy, recreational therapy, occupational therapy. I tried shock treatments…'

He stopped and lit his pipe again, each draw making a gurgling noise, and blew the smoke towards the blue sky.

'And I spent two hours a day, five days a week, for eight years with Aaron. Nobody, sir, nobody knows him as I do.'

Woodward began talking intimately about Aaron Stampler, a rambling discourse that brought back, in a rush, details that Vail had forgot. Woodward described Stampler as a misplaced child who had grown into a gifted but frustrated young intellectual, his accomplishments scorned by a stern and relentless father determined that the boy follow him into the hell of the coal mines.

His mother considered Aaron's education akin to devil's play; a boy to whom the strap and the insults of his parents had done little to discourage him from a bold and persistent quest for knowledge. That quest was abetted by a sympathetic schoolteacher, Rebecca, who saw in the lad a glimmering hope that occasionally there might be resurrection from a bitter life sentence in the emotionally barren and aesthetically vitiated Kentucky hamlet, and who ultimately seduced him. Aaron was a loner, attracted to both the professions and the arts, who had wanted - as do most young people at one time or another - to be lawyer, doctor, actor, and poet - but whose dreams were constantly thwarted by everyone except his mentor, Rebecca.

And Woodward talked about the schoolteacher who appeared to be Crikside's only beacon, a lighthouse of lore and wisdom in an otherwise bleak and tortured place; a woman who threatened the bigotry of their narrow and obdurate heritage, a notion possibly vindicated by Rebecca's 'education' of Aaron Stampler. And finally he talked about the sexual liberation of Aaron Stampler, first by Rebecca, then later in a perverse and tormenting way by the paedophile, Bishop Rushman.

'It's easy to understand how this could have happened, considering what we know about Aaron's childhood and teen years. The simplified assumption was that Aaron created Roy to assume the guilt and responsibility for acts that Aaron couldn't perform himself. He transferred his guilt to Roy. As I said, this is an oversimplification of a very complex problem. We're dealing with the human mind, remember. The science isn't as obvious as DNA or fingerprints, which are unequivocal.'

'Look, Dr Woodward, I wasn't in any way demeaning your -'

'I understand that. I just want you to understand that work with him isn't a twice-a-week gabfest. This young man has dominated my professional life. I'm not complaining, it has also been most rewarding. But just achieving transference with him took three years.'

'Transference?' Vail said.

'A form of trust. When it works, the patient comes to regard the analyst as a figure from the past, a parent or a mentor, somebody they relate to. Trust is transferred from the mentor to the therapist.'

'You just said Aaron transferred his guilt to Roy. Is this the same kind of thing?'

'Yes. He simply created his own avenger. There is a downside, there always is. It creates a subconscious fear that old injuries and insults will be repeated - what we call re-experiencing. Fear of reliving pain from children, friends, husband, wives, just about anybody.'

'So all the pain is transferred from past to present?'

'Everything. Pain, anger frustration, unreasonable expectations. But it is important because it permits us to make connections between the past and the present. Drugs can ease the fear. And, of course, at times the pain.'

'What's the ultimate objective, Doctor? What did you call it, the baseline?'

'Free association. Encouraging the subject to concentrate on inner experiences… thoughts, fantasies, feelings, pain. Hopefully creating an atmosphere in which the subject will say absolutely everything that comes to mind without fear of being censored or judged.'

'How does that help you?' Vail said.

'Well, what you're getting is their mental topography, like a roadmap to their secrets. They remember things from the deep past - traumatic events, painful encounters - very clearly, re-experience the fears and feelings that go with them. And, we hope, learn to accept them. Doesn't always happen, of course. Ours is not a perfect science like mathematics, where two and two always equals four. No, no, sometimes when dealing with the human mind two and two equals eight or twelve...'

'Or one?'

'Or one - or a half. In Aaron's case, remembering some of the horrible acts committed by Roy and learning to deal with the knowledge was the product of re-experiencing and free association.'

'So you have made progress?'

Woodward stopped, knocked the dead embers from his pipe into a trash barrel, and stuffed the pipe in his cardigan pocket. 'I would say so,' he said. 'I want you to meet someone. His name is Raymond Vulpes.'

'Who's Raymond Vulpes?'

'The only other person alive who knows - as I do - every intimate detail of the lives of Aaron and Roy.'

They walked across the yard to what was known as MaxSec. The first thing Vail noticed was that the windows had no bars, they were made of thick, bulletproof glass. It was an attractive-looking structure and obviously built to provide the most pleasant circumstances possible. Maximum security was at the end of a long, wide hallway that connected it to one of the wards in the newer wing. There was an office off to one side of the hall with a wire-mesh door and Woodward led Vail to it, took out a bunch of keys, unlocked the door, and entered. As Vail stepped through the doorway, he was instantly seized with an overwhelming sense of evil.

The air seemed suddenly to be sucked out of the room.

A wet, icy chill swept through it.

The hair bristled on the back of Vail's neck.

Gooseflesh rippled up his arms.

Sweat burst from the pores in his forehead - a frigid sweat, like water dribbling down the torso of a melting snowman.

He shivered spasmodically.

He unconsciously gasped for air.

And then it was over.

Vail was rooted in place for a moment, as if his legs had suddenly atrophied.

What was it? A rampant chimera let loose by his imagination?

A subconscious fear of the uncharted and unpredictable minds in this community of the deranged?

An omen of some kind?

He quickly regaining his bearings, wondering if Woodward had had the same reaction. But it was obvious that Vail had been the only one who had experienced… whatever it was. They were in a fairly confined space, an electronic repair shop littered with TVs, VCRs, oscilloscopes, and computers lined up on workbenches and tables and further cramping the limited space.

A man in his mid to late twenties leaned over a work-table in a corner near the room's single window. A gooseneck lamp curved down beside his face, its light revealing the insides of a dismantled computer. He had the smooth, muscular build of a swimmer, dark blond hair, and pale eyes, and he was wearing the khaki pants and dark blue cotton shirt of a guard, the shirt's sleeves hitched halfway to his elbows. He looked up as Woodward and Vail entered the room and grinned, a wide, boyish grin, full of straight white teeth.

'Mr Vail, I'm Raymond Vulpes,' he said, sticking out his hand. 'Can't tell you what a great thrill it is to meet you.'

Vail took the hand and looked into Vulpes's face and in that moment realized that he was shaking hands with Aaron Stampler.