When She Was Bad: A Thriller Read Online Free PDF

happen to be an insane asylum, would it? You know, as in nuthouse? Funny farm? Snake pit?”
    Cogan’s thin lips tightened. “It’s a hospital. One of the finest psychiatric hospitals in the country. And most important of all, it’s the only facility in the country with any kind of a track record when it comes to dissociative identity disorder. Dr. Corder, the director, treats the DID patients personally, and he does seem to be coming up with some surprising results.”
    “Results,” echoed Lilith doubtfully. “As in, cure?”
    “In some cases, yes.”
    “Then answer me this. Say, just for the sake of argument, the DID gets cured.”
    “Yes?”
    “What happens to me?—what happens to Lilith?” But the look on the doctor’s face was all the answer she needed. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” She stood up, muttering something about having to use the ladies’ room.
    “I think I’ll join you.” Cogan gathered up the tape recorder, the photographs, and the brochure, and slung her purse over her shoulder.
    “I figured that, too,” said Lilith. She already knew from Mama Rose’s furtive exit that there had to be a back way out, and had decided she could easily overpower the older woman once the two were alone. It was Pender she was worried about. But he made no move to follow—just smiled up at them as they passed his table, then turned back to his newspaper.
     

    Short corridor, cinder-block walls. Restroom doors on the left, a door marked Office on the right, and at the end of the hallway, a heavy-looking door with a push bar and a warning: Emergency Exit Only.
    Lilith opened the ladies’ room door, peeked in. Toilet in the corner, sink against the wall. One customer at a time. “After you,” she said, backing away.
    “No, you first,” Dr. Cogan said firmly.
    Lilith closed the door behind her, sat on the toilet long enough to warm it, flushed, washed her hands, splashed cold water on her face. Lily, my ass, she thought, staring at her reflection in the dingy mirror over the sink, then dried her hands with a coarse brown paper towel, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor, where Dr. Cogan had stationed herself between Lilith and the exit.
    “Your turn,” said Lilith.
    “Funny thing, I don’t seem to—”
    Lilith charged, drove her lowered shoulder into the doctor’s midsection, knocking her backward and sending her purse flying. The girl hit the breaker bar with both hands, crashed through to daylight, and ran straight into what felt like a wall of meat.
    “Going somewhere?” said the man called Pender, wrapping his arms around her and, in one impossibly smooth, tango-like move, grabbing her wrists, spinning her around, and forcing her arms behind her back. Lilith kicked backward at his shins; he wrenched her wrists upward, just high enough for the pain to immobilize her.
    Squirming, almost weeping with frustration, she swore at him like a biker’s bitch as Dr. Cogan came stumbling out into the glare with her jacket twisted sideways and her blouse hiked out from her skirt. “Nice catch,” she told Pender grimly, fumbling around in her purse and taking out a hypodermic syringe.
    “Just a—whoa there, easy honey—just a hunch. As Quasimodo once said.” Pender had of course circled the building as soon as they’d arrived, and mentally noted all the potential exits.
    Lily watched in horror as the doctor held the syringe up to the sky and tapped it a few times with a tapered, reddish-orange fingernail. “What’s that for?”
    “Just something to calm you down.”
    She was behind Lilith now, pushing up the sleeve of Lilith’s T-shirt and swabbing her tricep with an antiseptic towelette. A pinch, a needle prick. The sky darkened and the macadam opened beneath Lilith. She felt herself falling, falling, through bottomless space like Alice through the rabbit hole, until the darkness closed in overhead and swallowed her up.
    7

    The room that housed Ulysses Maxwell seemed