Buch lesen: «Beauty Vs. The Beast»

Chapter One

Kay knew he was coming. She stood behind her desk and waited impatiently as she wondered why Adam Justice, her senior partner at the law offices of Justice Inc., had been so mysterious about this new client he was sending her.

The stranger stepped through the open doorway of her walnut-paneled office, halting uncertainly the second he saw her.

“You’re K. O. Kellogg?”

Kay nodded mutely, at the same time wincing internally at the surprise stamped on his face and in his deep voice. She should be reconciled to both by now. She wasn’t.

Still, just as she obviously didn’t fit his preconceived idea of a lawyer, he didn’t fit her preconceived idea of a psychologist.

His full, unruly, dark brown hair framed a ruggedly square, sun-darkened face. He looked as if he’d be far more at home at the helm of a ship than anchored to an analyst’s couch. Yet, in contrast to his rough, outdoorsy features, his dark dress slacks, tan cashmere jacket and open-necked, salmon-colored silk shirt bespoke a man thoroughly at ease in more formal, indoor settings.

“Please come in, Dr. Steele. I’ve been expecting you.”

He closed the door behind him and advanced into the room. His stride was long, muscular and powerful. His face was open, fluid and friendly.

Except, that is, for the sharp assessment in his glinting green eyes. Something about that intense, imposing glint belied the casual countenance of the man.

“I’m only Dr. Steele to my patients,” he said. “Call me Damian. And your first name is...?”

Kay leaned across her neat, polished walnut desk to extend her hand. “I’m called Kay.”

“Kay,” he repeated as his much larger hand engulfed hers and lingered, branding her with its gentle insistence. As she looked into those deep green eyes and felt the claim of his hand, a strange, warm sensation streaked down the back of her thighs.

Kay quickly slipped her eyes and her hand from his and sat down. She knew what that strange sensation was, of course. Her new shoes had to be cutting off the circulation in her legs. She had suspected the heels would be too high. Still, the idea of adding a full three inches to her height had been too enticing to resist.

That would teach her to watch those illogical impulses. As soon as this interview was over, she’d slip her feet into the pair of fuzzy slippers she kept in her drawer. Until then, she’d try to remain seated. She motioned toward one of the walnut-armed chairs in front of her desk.

“Were you expecting a man, Dr. Steele?”

He took the offered chair, but sat on its edge. “No. Your senior partner told me you were a woman.”

Kay thought as much. Adam Justice generally cleared that particular obstacle from the start. As for clearing the misleading image of her small size and too youthful face, well, here she was again, beginning the uphill climb. Kay took a deep, resolute breath.

“So, it’s my appearance that has caused your...surprise.”

His eyebrows raised slightly. He obviously had not expected her to address the issue so candidly. The upturn to the corners of his mouth hinted at a small amusement.

“Yes, Kay. You could say your appearance came as somewhat of a surprise.”

Well, at least he was open about it.

She felt the frown line forming between her eyebrows. “I hope you’re not the kind of man to be unduly influenced by appearances.”

He smiled directly at her frown. “I think you’d be safe in assuming I’m not.”

He had an inviting, disarming smile—the kind that made one instinctively trust him. Kay did not allow herself to succumb to any such instinct. She rested her hands on her desk and launched into the well-rehearsed litany of her professional credits.

“I’ve been a practicing attorney for six years, the last five at this firm. I was made a full partner fifteen months ago. Mr. Justice told me that your case involves an unusual civil matter. I’ve handled many civil matters for this firm, some of which have been most unusual. I’ve gone to trial on thirty cases and won twenty-nine.”

“Adam mentioned you had an impressive trial record.”

Kay’s forward momentum immediately swerved to this interesting side road. “Adam? I didn’t realize you were on a first-name basis with our firm’s senior partner. How do you know Adam?”

“We met a few years back.”

“Where?”

“Around.”

“You’re friends?”

“We know each other.”

His sentence dropped into a definite and deliberate period. Kay’s brief hope of finding out something more personal about Adam Justice took a nosedive. It seemed Dr. Damian Steele was as good at playing mysterious as her firm’s senior partner. Yes, that impenetrable glint in those deep green eyes was undoubtedly a warning—this was a man who kept secrets and kept them well.

“I’m glad Adam told you about my trial record. However, he may not have mentioned that I’ve also negotiated equitable settlements on as many cases that never went to tri—”

“I’m not interested in settling.”

The easy smile had quickly left Damian Steele’s face. His smooth, deep voice had developed a rough, sharp edge. There was a menacing feel to the glint that now flashed in his eyes. And that’s when Kay knew that, charming smile and civilized dress notwithstanding, this man could be dangerous. A half chill, half thrill shot up her spine.

“All right, Dr. Steele, I hear you. You don’t want to settle your case.”

“Damian, remember?”

The smile was suddenly back, as charming as ever.

“Of course, Damian,” she repeated casually. But the sound of his first name passing between her lips set off a warm hum inside her mouth that made her curiously self-conscious.

There was certainly an intriguing mercurial quality to Dr. Damian Steele—open and thoroughly enticing one instant, mysteriously closed and darkly dangerous the next.

Kay cleared her throat and gave herself a moment to whisk away her strangely contrasting and singularly unsettling reactions to this man. She steadied her hands on her desk as she determinedly brought her attention back to the issue at hand.

“Why don’t you tell me about your situation? From the beginning, if you please.”

He watched her a long moment before leaning back in his chair. Despite his initial surprise at her appearance, he wasn’t running for the door. Yet. She followed his lead and relaxed in her chair.

“I’m a psychologist in private practice. Five and a half years ago, a man named Lee Nye came to me plagued by troubling blackouts. In the course of my therapy with Lee, I discovered that living inside him, he had another separate and distinct personality named Roy.”

Kay instantly shot forward in her chair. “You mean he’s one of those multiple-personality people?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t he just tell you that?”

“He didn’t know. Neither of his personalities was aware of the other.”

Kay leaned back again, taking a moment to consider his words. Multiple personalities were the latest of the legal hot spots. She’d followed several recent cases with interest.

In those cases, defendants with the disorder claimed that since only one of their multiple personalities committed a crime, their other personalities were blameless and shouldn’t be punished. It had become a very sticky legal issue, no doubt about it.

Kay believed that most of these defendants were only doing what defendants had done since the beginning of the trial-by-jury system—latching on to the newest legal loophole that would allow them to get out of taking responsibility for their actions.

She carefully kept the cynicism out of her tone.

“I confess I know very little about this condition. How is it possible for a man to possess two personalities inside him and not know it?”

Damian Steele had been watching her intently with that open face and those secretive eyes. She knew it was impossible, but she had the uncanny feeling that he had been reading her thoughts as easily as a highway sign warning of a divided road ahead.

He raised his hands off the arms of his chair and slowly brought them together. His fingers moved as though to interlace, but instead butted up against one another.

“The two Nye personalities had been living separate mental lives and saw themselves as separate identities. When each personality started to seek control over the consciousness, their identities began to clash.”

She leaned forward slightly. “You describe these personalities as having separate identities. Is this multiple-personality phenomenon an intense, extended form of role playing? Like an actor throwing himself into a part so thoroughly, he forgets he’s acting?”

“No, Kay. There is no conscious intent to role-play. The divergent and distinct personalities are absolutely real to that person. That’s why a clash resulted when these two both sought control over the consciousness.”

“How were these personalities able to coexist before without a clash?”

“Lee—the personality I treated—had been submerged for many years while Roy held control over the consciousness. Then Lee began to lay claim to the consciousness approximately six years ago. Lee’s emergence caused each of the separate personalities to experience memory blackouts during the time the other took control. After one of these blackouts, Lee would suddenly come to awareness and find himself in a place he didn’t recognize, with people he didn’t know and with absolutely no memory of the intervening hours, days or maybe even longer periods of time.”

“A kind of recurring amnesia.”

“Yes.”

“And you say the clash between the two personalities began about six years ago because this Lee personality that was subordinated started to come out?”

“Yes.”

“Why did Lee start to come out?”

“Because the previously dominant personality—Roy—had been steadily getting weaker over the years, and Lee had been steadily getting stronger.”

“Ah, it was like a tug-of-war between them.”

“In a manner of speaking. Only, since neither knew about the other, each was tugging, as you put it, against an unknown.”

“Tugging against an unknown,” Kay repeated, trying out the words in an attempt to better grasp the elusive concept. “I’m striving to relate this to something familiar in my own personal experience, but I confess I’m having trouble finding anything.”

“I doubt you ever will. This phenomenon is hard to relate to normal experience. The individual I treated was born LeRoy Lyle Nye on August 20, 1952. That means his body is in its forties. But Lee, the man who came to me for treatment, can remember very little personal history before six years ago.”

“Because he only came to life six years ago?”

“In some respects, yes, but he is an adult. He views himself as a man in his early thirties and behaves consistent with that view.”

“Surely this Lee personality must have suspected something was amiss when he could only remember back such a short time.”

“He thought very little of his past. The present and future claimed his primary focus. His blackout episodes were far more disturbing to him than his lack of earlier personal memories. The latter he accepted as a mere inconvenience.”

“He only felt inconvenienced? I would think a normal person would be frantic.”

“Because a normal person would feel the loss. But when Lee thought about his lack of memories, which wasn’t often, he merely assumed others had the same difficulties remembering as he did.”

“Is Lee’s reaction typical for someone with his disorder?”

“There is very little that is ‘typical’ in a multiple-personality case. Each is as individual as the mind from which it evolves. These cases were once thought to be rare. Now, most in the field believe they are far more common than any of us imagined. The literature is growing on the subject, but we still have much to learn about diagnosis and treatment.”

“You realize, I expect, that the concept of two separate and distinct personalities existing in the same mind is rather an unusual one for the layperson to envision, much less accept.”

His left hand swept across the thick, unruly hair at the side of his head. It was a rough, square hand, a tool for the impatience that she sensed had set it into motion. But it was also a servant to the disciplined mind that returned it to the arm of his chair. As she had earlier sensed, this psychologist could be just as complicated as his subject.

“Kay, multiple personality disorder or MPD still seems like science fiction to many people, even many psychologists. Some postulate that the affected individuals possess not many personalities, but many fragments of one personality.”

“Which approach do you consider more accurate?”

“I’m a pragmatist. I don’t fixate on disputing or embracing labels or adhering to hard-and-fast data.”

“So how do you approach treatment?”

Damian rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, the heels of his shoes disappearing into the thick mustard-colored carpet, his long, lean legs crossing at the ankles.

“I believe achieving results is what is important, not how the results are achieved. Patients come to me or any psychologist because they want to eliminate their disruptive feelings or behavior, sometimes both. I try what I believe will work, and if my method doesn’t work, I drop it and try something else until I find what does work.”

“What did you try with Lee when he came to you?”

“Lee wanted to eliminate his disruptive blackouts. Nothing in his present life appeared to be causing them. His lack of memories strongly pointed to the possibility of past trauma. I hypnotized him to discover what that past trauma might be. It was under hypnosis that Roy emerged.”

“So up until the time you hypnotized Lee, you didn’t know Roy, the second personality, existed?”

“That’s correct. Actually, Roy never came out in my sessions with Lee unless Lee was under hypnosis.”

“Are you saying he had to be hypnotized into being Roy?”

“No. What I’m saying is that under hypnosis, the control Lee exerted over the shared mind was relaxed sufficiently to allow Roy to be called out at will.”

“At your will, as opposed to Lee’s or Roy’s.”

“Yes. The first time it happened was quite unexpected. I had hypnotized Lee and asked him to tell me about his blackout periods, reasoning that an unconscious part of his mind must know. And it did. That unconscious part was Roy.”

“He popped up and introduced himself?”

Damian smiled. “Not exactly.”

“Then how did you know you were talking to this other personality?”

“Frankly, I didn’t know who I was talking to at first. The experience of finding another personality inside one’s patient is unnerving. It takes some adjusting and reflection on the part of a therapist not used to the phenomenon.”

“Lee was the only multiple case you had seen?”

“At that time, yes. I was eager to get up to speed on proper diagnosis and treatment. After I discovered Roy, I videotaped every subsequent session in order to be certain that I wouldn’t miss anything. That proved very fortunate. If I hadn’t had the tape to replay for Lee, I doubt he would have believed in the reality of Roy. You see, even people with multiple personalities have difficulty accepting the concept.”

Damian smiled at her with warm understanding for her reservations. “I know it must be difficult to take all this in,” he said.

Kay found herself wanting to immediately release her skepticism and accept whatever this man said. She caught herself just in time and shook herself mentally. Damn, but this psychologist was good at getting one’s defenses down. She’d have to be careful. Very careful.

She sat up straighter in her chair, cleared her throat. “How can a person’s mind become separated into these different personalities as you’ve described?”

“Psychological research connects the development of multiple personalities to a traumatic fragmenting of the core personality.”

“And the English version of that translates to...?”

He grinned at her, a very attractive grin.

“Perhaps an analogy would be helpful. If you think of our early-childhood personalities as rough diamonds and life experiences as the diamond cutter, then a multiple-personality individual is the result of life’s diamond cutter clearly missing its mark. The personality ends up shattered into pieces—sometimes two, far more often into many different pieces.”

“And in the case of your patient, the different fragmented personality piece that emerged as a young child was Roy.”

“He was chosen by the mind to exist in the hostile childhood environment.”

“What was the hostile environment that fragmented the personality?”

“Roy’s mother became pregnant as a young teen. Her parents arranged for the baby to be adopted by a childless couple they knew. However, when Roy was two, his teenage mother kidnapped him from his adoptive parents and fled the state with a guy she had just met. The man physically and emotionally abused the child.”

Kay sagged into the back of her chair. She had had to deal firsthand with the emotional devastation of child abuse in her first year as a lawyer in the King County prosecutor’s office. The anger and repulsion she’d felt at hearing such stories, along with her frustrated efforts to gather enough evidence to put away so many of the abusers, had finally driven her out of the prosecutor’s office and into civil law at a private firm.

She knew she was tough. But she no longer kidded herself that she would ever be tough enough to deal with such horrors and inhumanity with the dispassion the profession demanded. She forcibly refocused her attention to the issue at hand.

“Why didn’t the child’s mother protect him?”

“I don’t know for certain. Maybe due to fear for herself. But by turning her back to the abuse, she contributed to it.”

“You say Roy’s mother did this. But wasn’t she also Lee’s mother?”

“Physically, yes. Emotionally, no. Lee remembers little of his childhood. He seems to have nearly total amnesia for his own life events occurring before approximately six years ago.”

“But earlier you said that he views himself as a man in his thirties. How can he sense thirty-plus years of existence when he only remembers six?”

“It’s like Lee was sitting in front of a window opening to the world. He can tell you about the social and cultural changes that have occurred during most of his lifetime, including names of presidents and world events. He just can’t relate them to anything personal that happened to him until about six years ago.”

“Because six years ago was when he began to interact with life and not just watch it.”

“Yes, very well put, Kay. The Lee personality existed in early childhood only as an observer. He lived in a kind of mental attic where he felt protected and safe. Then six years ago, he came down from his mental attic and began to take over from the Roy personality.”

Despite the fact that Kay was still having difficulty getting her mind to accept the bizarre nature of this disorder, she couldn’t help but be fascinated by it. Two people inside one mind—each compartmentalized into separate memories and identities. It was literally mind-boggling.

“You said Lee Nye came to you for help. Did Roy Nye also seek help?”

“No. Roy Nye attributed his memory losses to alcoholic stupors.”

“And when he learned about Lee?”

“When I showed him the videotape of the sessions with Lee in control, he erupted first into denial, then anger.”

“How does he handle the situation now?”

“He doesn’t. Roy Nye is dead.”

Kay blinked in surprise. “Dead?”

“Yes. He died four years ago. Which brings me to why I’m here, Kay. Mrs. Roy Nye has filed a three-million-dollar wrongful-death lawsuit against me.”

“Your patient was married?”

“No, Lee wasn’t married. Roy was.”

“And Roy’s widow blames you for Roy’s death?”

“Yes.”

“Because of your treatment?”

“Yes.”

“Were formal charges ever brought against you in connection with Roy Nye’s death?”

“No.”

“Did the police ever consider you a suspect?”

“The police were never involved.”

“If Roy died of natural causes or an accidental death, how can his wife—”

“Roy died neither by accident nor by natural causes.”

Kay leaned her forearms on her desk, trying to bore past the solid wall of secrecy in those deep green eyes.

“Okay, I confess I’m confused. How did Roy Nye die?”

His eyes never left hers. His deep voice did not alter a decibel as he delivered the news.

“I killed him.”