The Girls He Adored: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

fractures of the orbital bones surrounding both eyes, broken nose, broken ribs, crushed pelvis. The doctors had managed to save the penis, though it would never function again save as a conduit for urine; the testicles, however, were gone, along with the rest of the contents of the scrotal sac.
    “I wish I had some pictures to go along with that, my frien',” said Bustamante. “Just so you know what you're getting into.”

6

    I RENE C OGAN HAD SPENT the rest of the morning administering the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests, and the hundredquestion Dissociative Experiences Scale, saving the personality index for the afternoon session—it took most people a couple of hours to get through the 567 questions of the full MMPI-2. But the clinical interview had gone so poorly that after a lunch break—the prisoner was taken back to his cell; the psychiatrist picked at a dubious salad from a roach coach parked on Natividad Road near the jail—Irene decided to make another stab at it before moving on.
    “What's the last thing you remember before waking up in the car next to the—” She censored herself midsentence. The dead woman, she'd been about to say, but she didn't want to risk upsetting him with any charged words. “Before waking up in the car?”
    “Making love.” This appeared to be the third alter again, the vulnerable one.
    Making love. Irene wondered if those words had ever been spoken before in this lifeless room with its glaring fluorescent lights. “Go on.”
    “In the backseat. Parked in a redwood grove. Sunlight in long thin columns pouring through the trees. She's kneeling—” His eyes grew dreamy. “Kneeling on the backseat, leaning against the rear window ledge. I'm behind her. When she leans forward, a shaft of sunlight catches her hair. She has such beautiful strawberry blond hair. I part it at the back of her neck and kiss her nape every time I—” His eyes closed; his belly muscles tightened, and his pelvis thrust forward in a humping motion. “And every time I kiss her she says my name.”
    “What does she say?” Irene couldn't pass up the opportunity. “What does she call you?”
    The prisoner's eyes opened; the dreamy look had faded, replaced by a cold, glittering intelligence. “Tell me,” said the alter who called himself Max. “I haven't looked in a mirror for a while— do I have ‘stupid’ tattooed across my forehead or something?”
    Rats. “I'm sorry—please go on.”
    “Thank you, I'll pass.”
    “No, really. I apologize—I shouldn't have interrupted you.”
    “Too late for that now,” he said coldly. But just as Irene was telling herself that perhaps she was the one who should have stupid tattooed across her forehead, the prisoner changed his mind.
    “Christopher,” he whispered, leaning toward her as far as the shackles would permit. “She called me Christopher.”
    “I see. Is that your name, then?”
    “That's for me to know and you to find out.” Common enough childhood repartee, but there was something in the careful way he said it, in the steady, amused look in his eyes, that suggested something more to Irene. A challenge perhaps—or an offer, or an opportunity.
    In order to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Max/Christopher would need a hand free to hold a pencil. The deputy reluctantly agreed to unhook the cuffs from the chain around the waist, but left the wrists cuffed together, and insisted on remaining in the room with his can of pepper spray and his short-handled riot stick at the ready.
    “There are five hundred and sixty-seven statements in this test,” Irene explained. “I want you to—”
    “Like you said earlier, I know the drill,” he interrupted.
    “I need to be sure that—”
    “Don't insult my intelligence, Doctor,” he said, each word carefully measured. “Don't ever insult my intelligence.”
    Irene handed him the blunt, soft-leaded pencil, and saw for the first time that the inside surfaces of