Speaking in Tongues Read Online Free PDF Page B

professionally, accept the existence of luck, sometimes it took little more than a shadow of superstition like this to drop him into the cauldron of a mood. Matthews was bipolar—the diagnosis that used to be called manic depression. In order for him to carry out the kidnapping he’d gone off his meds; he couldn’t afford the dulling effects of the high doses of Prozac and Wellbutrin he’d been taking. Fortunately, once the medication had evaporated from his bloodstream he found himself in a manic phase and he’d easily been able to spend eighteen hours a day stalking Megan and working on his plan. But as the weeks had worn on he’d begun to worry that he was headed for a fall. And he knew from the past that it took very little to push him over the edge into a lethargic pit of depression.
    But the near miss with Collier faded now and he remained as buoyant as a happy child. He sped to I-66 and headed east—to the Vienna, Virginia, Metro lot—the huge station for commuters fifteen miles west of D.C. It was Saturday morning but the lot was filled with the cars of people who’d taken the train downtown to visit the monuments and museums and galleries.
    Matthews drove Megan’s car to the spot where his gray Mercedes was parked then climbed out and looked around. He saw only one other occupied car—awhite sedan, idling several rows away. He couldn’t see the driver clearly but the man or woman didn’t seem to be looking his way. Matthews quickly bundled Megan out of the Tempo’s trunk and slipped her into the trunk of the Mercedes.
    He looked down at the girl, curled fetally and unconscious, bound up with rope. She was very pale. He pressed a hand to her chest to make sure that she was still breathing regularly. He was concerned about her; Matthews was no longer a licensed M.D. in Virginia and couldn’t write prescriptions so to knock the girl out he’d stockpiled phenobarb from a veterinarian, claiming that one of his rottweilers was having seizures. He’d mixed the drug with distilled water but couldn’t be sure of the concentration. She was deeply asleep but it seemed that her respiration was fine and when he took her pulse her heart rate was acceptable.
    Between the front seats of the Tempo he left the well-thumbed Amtrak timetable that Megan had used as a lap desk to write the letters to her parents and that now bore her fingerprints (and only hers—he’d worn gloves when handling it). He’d circled all the Saturday trains to New York.
    He’d approached the abduction the way he once would have planned the treatment of a severely disturbed patient: every detail meticulously considered. He’d stolen the writing paper from Megan’s room in Bett McCall’s house. He’d spent hours in her room—when the mother was working and Megan was in school. It was there that he’d gotten important insights into her personality: observing thethree Joplin posters, the black light, the Márquez book, notes she’d received from classmates laced with words like “fuck” and “shit.” (Matthews had written a breakthrough paper for the APA Journal on how adolescents unconsciously raise and lower emotional barriers to their therapists according to the doctors’ use of grammar and language; he’d observed, during the session that morning, how the expletives he’d used had opened her psyche like keys.)
    He’d been careful to leave no evidence of his break-in at Bett McCall’s. Or in Leesburg—where Dr. Hanson’s mother lived. That had been the biggest problem of his plan: getting Hanson out of the way for the week—without doing something as obvious, though appealing, as running him over with a car. He’d done some research on the therapist and learned that his mother lived in the small town northwest of Washington, D.C., and that she was frail. On Wednesday night Matthews had loosened the top step leading from her back porch to the small yard behind her house. Then he’d called, pretending to be a neighbor,