Along Came a Spider

nineties.
    I thought about Maggie Rose Dunne that morning on my drive. I had to conclude that she was dead by now. Her father was raising all kinds of hell through the media. I couldn’t blame him very much. I’d spoken to Katherine Rose a couple of times on the phone. She hadn’t given up hope. She told me she could “feel” that her little girl was still alive. It was the saddest thing to hear.
    I tried to prepare myself for Soneji/Murphy, but I was distracted. Images from the night before kept flashing by my eyes. I had to remind myself that I was driving a car in midday Metro D.C. traffic, and I was working.
    That was when a bright idea hit me: a testable theory about Gary Soneji/Murphy that
seemed
to make some sense in psych terms.
    Having an interesting theory
du jour
helped my concentration at the prison. I was taken up to the sixth floor to see Soneji. He was waiting for me. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night, either. It was my turn to make something happen.
    I went at him for a full hour that afternoon, maybe even a little longer. I pushed hard. Probably harder than with any of my patients.
    “Gary, have you ever found receipts in your pockets — hotels, restaurants, store purchases — but you have no memory of spending the money?”
    “How did you know that?” His eyes lit up at my question.
    Something like relief washed over his face. “I
told
them I wanted you to be my doctor. I don’t want to see Dr. Walsh anymore. All he’s good for is scrip for chloral hydrate.”
    “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’m a psychologist, not a psychiatrist like Dr. Walsh. I’m also part of the team that helped arrest you.”
    He shook his head. “I know all that. You’re also the only one who’s listened before making final judgments. I know you hate me — the idea that I took those two children, the other things I’m supposed to have done. But you listen, at least. Walsh only pretends to listen.”
    “You need to continue seeing Dr. Walsh,” I told him.
    “That’s fine. I guess I understand the politics here by now. Just please, don’t leave me in this hellhole by myself.”
    “I won’t. I’m with you all the way from here on. We’ll continue to talk just like this.”
    I asked Soneji/Murphy to tell me about his childhood.
    “I don’t remember a whole lot about growing up. Is that very strange?” He wanted to talk. It was in my hands, my judgment, to determine whether I was hearing the truth, or a set of elaborately constructed lies.
    “That’s normal for some people. Not remembering. Sometimes, things come back when you talk about them, when you verbalize.”
    “I know the facts and statistics. Okay. Birthdate, February twenty-fourth, nineteen fifty-seven. Birthplace, Princeton, New Jersey. Things like that. Sometimes I feel like I
learned
all that while I was growing up, though. I’ve had experiences where I can’t separate dreams from reality. I’m not sure which is which. I’m really not sure.”
    “Try to give me your first impressions,” I told him.
    “Not a lot of fun and laughs,” he said. “I’ve always had insomnia. I could never sleep more than an hour or two at a time. I can’t remember
not
being tired. And, depressed — like I’ve been trying to dig myself out of a hole my entire life. Not to try to do your job, but I don’t think very highly of myself.”
    Everything we knew about Gary
Soneji
depicted the
opposite
persona: high energy, positive attitude, an extremely high opinion of himself.
    Gary went on to sketch a terrifying childhood, which included physical abuse from his stepmother as a small child; sexual. abuse from his father as he got older. Over and over, he described how he was forced to split himself off from the anxiety and conflict that surrounded him. His stepmother had come with her two children in 1961. Gary was four years old, and already moody. It got worse from that point on. How much worse, he wasn’t willing to tell me yet.
    As part of his workup under Dr. Walsh, Soneji/Murphy had taken Wechsler Adult, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and Rorschach tests. Where he sailed completely off the scales was in the area of creativity. This was measured by single-sentence completion. He scored equally high in both verbal and written responses.
    “What else, Gary? Try to go as far back as you can. I can only help if I understand you better.”
    “There were always these ’lost hours.’ Time I couldn’t account