Now is the Time of Monsters, page 36
“Gotcha. But five personalities?” Counting on her fingers, he gently kissed them, one at a time, then gingerly folded them toward her palm. “Cassie, Solomon, Joey and Holden makes four.” He held Siobhan’s thumb standing proud above her palm and kissed it, too. “So where’s the fifth?”
“Janice Wynn.” Siobhan answered and kissed his hand in return. “She came later, but still served a purpose.”
“Which was…?”
“Cassie is a good soul. She’d never hurt a fly. Holden, too, even though he was a soldier in Vietnam. Killing there was his duty. A matter of survival. But put him back in everyday society and he’s as conscientious as we are. He loved Hannah Wilson. But Solomon would not allow that. It was Solomon who arrived at Hannah’s door that day. Not Holden, as she expected. And when she freaked out, Solomon struck.”
“Because Solomon is charmless and couldn’t lure someone if he tried. From what you’re saying, he’s one step from an animal.”
Siobhan placed her fingertip to her nose. “Correct. So, enter Janice Wynn. Not as put together or as pretty as Cassie Kennedy, admittedly, but certainly charming enough to convince a child to come with her.” She waggled her empty wine glass and Ressler took it to the kitchen for a refill.
“So Cassie Kennedy was never a psychic,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Her visions were dissociated memories of Solomon’s and Janice’s actions. It’s why she knew so many details about the Roes, and about Hannah Wilson’s attack at her Sausalito home.”
In Ressler’s mind he saw the missing poster for little Lyndsey Roe with her ivory dress and a matching bow in her hair, and his stomach tightened.
He served his new bride her fresh glass of chardonnay—oaky, not buttery—and forced the conversation to pivot.
“Whaddya say we hit the sack soon?” He winked at her, a comical, overexaggerated gesture. “And I’m not talking about going to sleep. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.”
He narrated the gestures as he performed them and Siobhan giggled, patting him on the backside as he turned for the bedroom.
“Tempting. Very tempting.” She winked back with equally exaggerated hokeyness. “But I have my final session with Holden tomorrow. And I really need to be alert. You understand, right?”
“Of course. My part in it is pretty much over. In many ways, yours has only just begun.” He blew her a kiss and said goodnight before disappearing down the hallway.
Alone in the living room, Siobhan waited until he turned out the light in their room at the end of the hall before she buried her head in her hands and cried.
) (
“Oh my, don’t you just look spectacular this morning!” Holden beamed with delight as Siobhan Jacobs joined him in the interview room. Only it wasn’t his voice. Nor was it Cassie’s or Solomon’s. “Loving this look with your hair! You must give me the name of your stylist.”
With his ankles bound together by heavy shackles and handcuffs locked to his wrists, the metal clinked and jangled with every slight movement.
“I’ll be sure to do that.” Slightly perplexed, Siobhan pointed toward the bindings. “This is new.”
“I guess that’s what happens when you slam a table into your head shrink’s legs.”
“Mmmmm, I see.” She waited to find if Holden had anything else to say about the matter. When he didn’t, Siobhan shuffled through her notes, familiarizing herself with where they had left off the day before. “Holden, today is a very important day. Do you know what a competency analysis is?”
Studying his nails, Holden shook his head.
“No, darlin’. Why?”
He placed his palms flat upon the table and looked up to hold Siobhan’s gaze. A single eye, dark and devoid of emotion, drilled into the psychiatrist’s.
“And I’m afraid you have me mistaken for someone else, dear. My name is Janice, not Holden.” Lowering her gaze, Janice went back to examining her nails, tsking at the state of them. “I really must get to that mani-pedi appointment, so if you could hurry it along?”
“Oh,” Siobhan said in feigned surprise. “I am so sorry. I guess I do have you mistaken.” She pointed to her own right eye, tapping her cheekbone just below it. “You don’t often see eyepatches. I guess that threw me.”
“This ol’ thing?” Janice Wynn sneered as she lifted the black fabric patch and leaned forward to display the sinewy hole where Holden’s bright blue eye had once been. “Catfight. Looks worse than it is. But you should see the other gal.”
“And who would that be, Janice?”
“That Cassie chick. She really got the shit end of the stick, lemme tell ya.”
Pretending to rifle through her papers, Siobhan spoke without looking up, her nerves firing off warning shots. For the first time since their interviews had begun, the head of Forensics had to force herself to concentrate to keep her voice from cracking.
“Oh yes? How so?”
Janice leaned ominously forward, a cold, steel-blue eye locking onto Siobhan’s. Her lips curled slightly. Not into a smile, but into something humorless; dark and threatening. Each of her slow breaths amplified the sensation of menace, making Siobhan feel small and powerless in Janice’s suffocating presence.
“Because the bitch is dead,” Janice Wynn sneered. “No use for her anymore. Much like you, you big sloppy C-U-Next-Tuesday.” Now Janice leaned back in her seat, threw back her head and guffawed. “There’s no one else here now, but me. So I don’t really care about what day it is. I don’t care about your interview. I don’t care about your analysis. And I sure as shit don’t give a rat’s ass about any cocksucking thing that comes out of your Mick whore of a mouth.”
It was an extreme response. More than extreme. And Siobhan bristled. Still, something felt off. She’d been introduced to Janice just once before. And while that interview had been brief, Janice had presented herself in a way that was somewhat socially awkward, yet charming. It was a perfect overlay for the role she fulfilled as the lure for children like little Lyndsey Roe. She hadn’t come across as disagreeable in any way in that meeting, let alone caustic. Not even a bit.
This Janice seemed more like Solomon.
Or maybe it was an act.
“Janice. I would like to speak with Holden. Can you ask him to come into the light, please?”
Slapping the table, Janice laughed loud and hard. “Now why would I do that? Because you want to analyze him some more? See if he’s fit to be strapped into that great green monster in the basement so he can suck on hydrogen cyanide until every cell in his body dies a slow, excruciating death by suffocation? He’s quite fine where he is, thank you. The shadows suit him.”
“Because I have something for him, that’s why. Something I think he’ll like.” Siobhan sat forward, bolstered by the eagerness which slept across her interviewee’s face. “Or should I say, I have someone for him.”
She signaled to the armed guards just beyond the interview room and they unlocked the door. While never taking their eyes off their prisoner at the table, they held the door open as a woman stepped tentatively through, something small and uneasy fidgeting beneath a blanket.
Playing it cool, Janice sat upright, her expression little more than detached disinterest. She crossed her arms and adopted an air of aloofness. But she did not take her eye off the door.
Siobhan, on the other hand, studied Janice’s face intently as she made their introduction.
“Janice, I’d like to introduce you to Ms. Patricia Brewster.”
And there it was—the slightest twitch in her left eye. While the rest of her stature remained staunchly unresponsive, that eye had just belied the pretense.
“I believe you know one another? Patricia, this is Janice Wynn. Janice, this is Patricia Brewster.”
Janice smirked and tightened her arms over her chest as much as the handcuffs would allow. “No idea who this bitch is.”
At the sound of her voice, the thing beneath the blanket in Patricia’s arms began to squirm.
“You sure?” Siobhan asked. “I seem to think you not only know one another, but are friends. Close friends.”
“Best friends,” Patricia interjected, her voice shaking. Wet and jittering every which way, her eyes focused on everything and anything but the person who had once been her Cassie.
Patricia Brewster sidled next to Siobhan, standing at what felt a safer angle behind the psychiatrist’s chair.
“See?” Siobhan confirmed. “Best friends. She recognizes you.”
“She’s full of shit, is what she is. And a disgusting lesbo,” Janice denounced, her sour face twisting into a snarl. “I can tell by the smell of her nasty poontang. It reeks all the way over here.” Janice wrinkled her nose then spat, a ball of gelatinous mucous splatting onto the table.
And the writhing blanket in Patricia’s arms jiggled free.
“Oh, and this little gal,” Siobhan declared, “is Isabella.”
Flailing free of Patricia’s arms, Bella leapt onto the table. Slipping and sliding, her little paws scurried across its surface, her entire body wriggling back and forth as she erupted into a series of ecstatic barks.
She leapt into Janice’s arms and licked every inch of her face.
Janice did nothing.
But the recognition was evident.
To Siobhan Jacobs, it was unmistakable. “That has to feel amazing, doesn’t it, Cassie? To not only see, but actually feel, your Bella Luna in your arms once more?”
Janice pushed the dog away, a hard but calculated swipe so that it would flit across the table but not slide off. Instantly, Bella was pawing for purchase to scrabble back to her mommy.
This time Janice swiped at her harder, and Bella yelped and flew off the table.
Siobhan caught her before she hit the floor, and immediately called the guards to take the dog away to safety.
“That seemed a bit extreme, don’tcha think, Janice? I mean, who doesn’t like dogs? You’re locked away in here for six months already, with a lifetime of isolation lying ahead of you, and you don’t enjoy the affection from a little pup who clearly misses you? Feels a bit…odd. Some might even say, contrived.”
Jacobs gestured for Patricia Brewster to take a seat in the chair she’d just vacated, but the café owner remained standing. Her face had blanched, her expression troubled and tense, and Siobhan was certain she could see the pulse of Cassie’s friend throbbing in her neck.
Janice had no reply.
But the sternness in her face had softened.
“Janice, I’m going to share something with you. And I want you to be honest with me. Can you do that?”
Sticking to her position, Janice merely tilted her head.
Siobhan shrugged. “Fine. I’ll take your silence as consensus. So here it is, in a nutshell. If I deem you competent today, Holden, you’re going to trial. You’ll be found guilty, we both already know this, and, like you said, you’ll go to the gas chamber.”
Janice’s eye—Holden’s eye—did not blink.
“Or,” Siobhan countered, “you come clean with me. Admit everything. And I write up a report that says you’re incapable of understanding the consequences of your actions, so we can get you the help you need. It may not be the life you—or Cassie—thought you would have. But you’ll be alive. And you’ll be in a Federal medical institution with some limited freedoms and choices, instead of waiting in San Quentin for your life to end.”
She perched on the edge of the table, her body language open and vulnerable.
“The FBI have approached me. They want to help you.”
And Janice/Holden laughed. “And why would they do that, exactly?”
“Because they want to study you. They’re launching a program to better understand people like you. They help you; you help them. Quid pro quo. It’s ready when you are. The only catch is that you wouldn’t be in California. The therapy is at an institution back east. A highly respected facility called Barrow Moor.”
In response to this, Holden’s good eye flitted to Patricia, then back to Jacobs, looking less and less like Janice and more like the handsome, compassionate face of the man Hannah Wilson had fallen in love with.
“She can come visit you, yes,” Siobhan assured her. “And even your sweet little Bella Luna. All you have to do is say the word.”
Jacobs allowed the silence to consume them as Janice all but disappeared and Holden shrank in his seat, his cuffed wrists jangling as he nervously tapped the tabletop.
In the corner, stock-still, Patricia Brewster did everything in her power not to break down into a flood of tears.
“Tell her, Cass,” she implored, though the person she spoke to looked little like the friend she so loved. “Tell her you want help. I understand it now. All of it. It’s not your fault. That was someone else who did all of those horrible things, not you. Not my Cassie.”
And Holden Albrighton broke into tears.
) (
When he composed himself, it was no longer Janice Wynn sitting at the table. The voice was now Cassie’s, the expressions were Cassie’s, even the features of Holden’s face seemed to have changed just enough that they had become Cassie’s Kennedy’s
“I’m so sorry for what I put you through,” she said to Patty. “How could you ever even begin to forgive me?”
She held out her cuffed hands and spread them apart, beckoning an embrace, and Patty Brewster sprung toward her, arms wide as tears glistened on her cheeks.
Siobhan Jacobs grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her back, restraining her from reaching across the desk.
But Patty twisted away.
She stumbled around the desk and threw her arms around her friend and both of them embraced.
“I’ve missed you, Cass,” Patty whispered in her friend’s ear. “God, I’ve missed you. Bella misses you. How did any of this ever happen?”
Twitching and lifting her cuffed hands to her head, Cassie pulled back just enough to look her friend in the eye. She rubbed her temple, squinting.
“These damn headaches…” She grimaced, a pitiable pout drooping the corners of her mouth; shook her head as if fending off a stubborn, lingering sleepiness. “I miss you, too, Pat.”
Not Patricia. Not Patty. Not Trish…but Pat.
And Patty pulled away.
Or tried to.
But Cassie’s voice had grown heavy; masculine. Her single eye had followed suit, no longer soft and remorseful, it was the dagger-sharp eye of the identity claiming to be Janice Wynn.
Everything from this point on occurred as if in slow motion:
Siobhan twisted toward the door, her ginger hair sweeping around her in a flowing arc.
Wide-eyed, the guard on the other side lunged for the handle.
From somewhere down the corridor Bella began barking.
And Holden Albrighton captured Patty Brewster in a perilous embrace by sweeping his cuffed hands over her head and pulling tightly to him in one seamlessly executed move.
“Don’t worry, Trish,” he whispered in Patty’s ear, his voice steady and calm. “I really did love you when I was Cassie. But Solomon will never let me go. I knew he was in me, all along. If I had been brave enough, I would’ve stopped him. This is the only way left.”
With a violent heave he tossed Patty to the side, ensuring the guard had a clear shot. And with no one left between them, Holden rushed him.
) (
He never looked away from Patty.
Not even when the bullet tore through his chest.
“Take care of my precious Bella Luna,” Cassie bade her friend as she stepped into the light where Holden was waiting for her, his arms open wide.
And Janice receded into the darkness.
Where Solomon, too, was waiting…
∞
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READERS/BOOK CLUB GUIDE
** WARNING: SPOILERS! **
REFRAIN FROM READING UNTIL YOU HAVE FINISHED THE BOOK
***
WHEN I FIRST had the idea to write Now is the Time of Monsters, I had no idea the toll it would take on my own emotional and psychological wellbeing. “This will be fun,” I told myself as I dove into the research, starting with a week-long trip to San Francisco where I walked mile upon city mile, rode the cable cars and trolleys, chatted with locals and tourists alike, and genuinely just got a feel for the real vibe and history of this colorful town.
As a method writer, I immerse myself into the world of my story and characters on a very personal level. In many ways, I am my characters. So, portraying the mental struggles of Cassie Kennedy, our primary protagonist, became my struggles—on a very real level. Add to this the inherent challenges of writing a character who is not only believable but intriguing…without giving away the fact that she is both the protagonist and antagonist at once…and I had myself a recipe for emotional turmoil on a daily basis for over nine months.
For the story to feel as legitimate as possible, I’m proud to have engaged in more research for this book than any other project to date. These efforts included studies on Dissociation, the contemporary history of San Francisco (in particular, Haight-Ashbury and the youth counter-culture movement of the 60s) and extensive research into serial killers from Ed Gein to Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac, and others. Much of the Gemini in Now is the Time of Monsters is an amalgam of them all.
Armed with a new understanding of Cassie’s unique disorder, along with an enhanced knowledge of the history and modus operandi of some of America’s most notorious killers, I then dove into the FBI’s publication, ‘Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators’ issued by the Behavioral Analysis Unit-2 of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Critical Incident Response Group. I hope the result is a character and story that are both credible enough to be real.
