Read Psychopath for Free Online Page B

said, "it’s thanks to you."
    Jonah winked at him.  "Assuming the MRI doesn’t come back normal," he said.
     
    *            *            *
     
    Jonah planned to spend the rest of the day and night on the locked unit, reviewing the medical charts of six patients being transferred to his care from Dr. Jenkins and Dr. Plotnik.  Craig Ellison had offered to let Jonah get his feet wet with just a few patients, but Jonah had jumped at the chance to immerse himself in a half dozen young lives.
    He sat in his borrowed office on Seven West, poring through what amounted to chronicles of soul murder.  Naomi McMorris, six years old, raped at age three by her mother’s live-in boyfriend; Tommy Magellan, eleven years old, born addicted to cocaine and now addicted to both cocaine and heroin; Mike Pansky, fifteen years old, hearing voices telling him to kill himself, fully ten years after his psychotic mother had tried to kill him.
    With every page he read, Jonah felt further and further from Route 90 East and Anna Beckwith’s frozen corpse.  He had another chance to redeem himself, another chance to be a healer, and he was intoxicated enough by the river of psychopathology flowing at his feet to believe he could make that commitment — and keep it.  He would do no more harm.  Like an addict with a needle in his vein, he could not see past the high.  He could not see that drugging himself with other people’s demons would never purge him of his own.
    He sat back, closed his eyes, and imagined living through parts of a day or night as Naomi McMorris or Tommy Magellan or Mike Pansky.  He felt the ceaseless tug-of-war they fought hour by hour between instincts to love and to hate, to trust and to fear, to hope and to despair.  He understood — not only with his mind, but with his heart — how an ego stretching to bridge such extremes could collapse, leaving a boy like Mike in a free fall from reality, his inner feelings of worthlessness boomeranging back to him as disembodied voices demanding he kill himself.  He imagined waking from a deep sleep as little Naomi might, not simply embarrassed to have wet the bed, but utterly undone by it, shrieking, clawing, inconsolable, her shame and terror at losing control of her bladder rooted in a rape that had robbed her of all control.  He shuddered with the unquenchable desperation of Tommy as a newborn, wrenched not only from the peace of the womb, but from a constant infusion of cocaine, every cell in his body already craving a chemical he would always and forever unconsciously connect with comfort and safety.
    As Jonah absorbed these children, he felt the raging tides in his own soul ebb, with an easing of his skeletal muscles, a watering of his eyes, the familiar stiffening in his groin.  He felt as though he could shed his own skin and slip inside any other life.  He felt free.
    He opened his eyes and started to reach for a fourth chart, but stopped at a knock on the office door.  He took a long, dreamy breath, stood, walked to the door, and opened it.
    Michelle Jenkins smiled at him.  "Settling in?" she asked.
    Jonah turned and looked back at the office.  It was a barren space, with a pressed wood desk, a black leather desk chair, a single upholstered chair for a patient, an empty bookcase, and a beige metal filing cabinet.  The walls were off-white and freshly painted, decorated with two framed mountain scenes like those in the auditorium.  "It needs something," he said.
    "Jim Wyatt had every inch of this place stacked with books and journals.  The walls were covered with photographs he’d taken and landscapes he’d painted.  He’d been here almost twenty years."
    "I don’t think I’ll do it justice in six weeks," Jonah said.  He walked to the desk, sat on the edge.
    Jenkins stepped into the room.  She nodded at Jonah’s briefcase sitting beside the desk — an oversized, well-worn brown leather satchel with a combination lock.  "You