Along Came a Spider

lot of laughs.
    “Very fucking funny, Alex,” Scorse finally said. “That’s VFF.”
    “Can you get in to see him again?” Jezzie asked me. She was as professional as Scorse, but a lot nicer to be around.
    “Yeah, I can. He wants to see me. Maybe I’ll even find out why in hell he asked for me down in Florida. Why I’m the chosen one in his nightmare.”

CHAPTER 47

    TWO DAYS LATER, I wangled another hour with Gary Soneji/Murphy. I’d been up the previous two nights rereading multiple-personality cases. My dining room looked like a carrel at a psych library. There are tomes written about multiples, but few of us really agree on the material. There is even serious disagreement about whether there are any real multiple-personality cases at all.
    Gary was sitting on his hospital cot, staring into space, when I arrived. His shoulder sling was gone. It was hard to come and talk to this kidnapper, child-killer, serial killer. I remembered something the philosopher Spinoza once wrote: “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.” So far, I didn’t understand.
    “Hello Gary,” I said softly, not wanting to startle him. “Are you ready to talk?”
    He turned around and seemed glad to see me. He pulled a chair over for me by his cot.
    “I was afraid they wouldn’t let you come,” he said. “I’m glad they did.”
    “What made you think they wouldn’t let me come?” I wanted to know.
    “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just… I felt you were someone I might be able to talk to. The way my luck’s been going, I thought they would shut you right off.”
    There was a naïveté about him that was troubling to me. He was almost charming. He was the man his neighbors in Wilmington had described.
    “What were you just thinking about? A minute ago?” I asked. “Before I interrupted.”
    He smiled and shook his head. “I don’t even know. What was I thinking about? Oh, I know what it was. I was remembering it’s my birthday this month. I keep thinking that I’m suddenly going to wake up out of this. That’s one recurring thought, a leitmotif through all my thinking.”
    “Go back a little for me. Tell me how you were arrested again,” I said, changing the subject.
    “I woke up, I came to in a police car outside a McDonald’s.” He was consistent on that point. He’d told me the same thing two days before. “My arms were handcuffed behind my back. Later on, they used leg-irons, too.”
    “You don’t know how you got into the police car?” I asked. Boy, was he good at this. Soft-spoken, very nice, believable.
    “No, and I don’t know how I got to a McDonald’s in Wilkinsburg, either. That is the most freakish thing that’s ever happened to me.”
    “I can see how it would be.”
    A theory had occurred to me on the ride down from Washington. It was a long shot, but it might explain a few things that didn’t make any sense so far.
    “Has anything like this ever happened to you before?” I asked. “Anything vaguely like it, Gary?”
    “No. I’ve never been in any trouble. Never been arrested. You can check that, can’t you? Of course you can.”
    “I mean have you ever woken up in a strange place before? No idea how you got there?”
    Gary gave me a strange look, his head cocked slightly. “Why would you ask that?”
    “Did you, Gary?”
    “Well… yes.”
    “Tell me about it. Tell me about those times when you woke up in a strange place.”
    He had a habit of pulling on his shirt, between the second and third buttons. He would pull the fabric away from his chest. I wondered if he had a fear of not being able to breathe, and where it might have come from if he did.
    Maybe he’d been sick as a child. Or trapped with a limited air supply. Or locked up somewhere — the way Maggie Rose and Michael Goldberg had been locked away.
    “For the past year or so, maybe more than that, I’ve suffered from insomnia. I told that to one of the doctors who came to see me,” he said.
    There was nothing about insomnia in any of the prison workups. I wondered if he’d told any of the doctors, or simply imagined that he had. There was stuff about an uneven Wechsler profile, indicative of impulsivity. There was a verbal I.Q. and a performance I.Q., both through the roof. There was a Rorschach profile that reflected severe emotional stress. There was a positive response to T.A.T. card #14, the so-called suicide card. But not a word about