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    “We're about done here,” she told the female deputy who picked up on the other end. The woman told her someone would be right in. When Irene turned around again she had the impression she was meeting yet a fourth alter—his posture had slumped, as if he were suddenly exhausted, and he had developed a mild tic in his right eye.
    “There ih-ih-is one thing,” he said—the stammer on the initial vowel sounds was new. “If it were possible, if circumstances were uh-uh-altered, so to speak, would you consider taking uh-us ahahon a-as uh-uh-a patient?”
    “I'm not terribly comfortable with hypotheticals,” said Irene, her suspicions heightened—true multiples, who'd spent their entirelives trying to disguise their dissociated identities, rarely used the first person plural until after months of therapy, if then. She hauled her leather briefcase onto the desk and began to pack up her things. “In any event, I wouldn't be able to say for sure until after I'd reached a working diagnosis. I have a small, rather specialized practice, and I couldn't tell you at this point whether you fit the parameters. I can tell you this much, though—I couldn't treat a patient who doesn't trust me enough to even give me his name.”
    “Fair eh-eh-enough,” replied the prisoner. Another eye roll, another alter switch, as the deputy entered the room behind him. Then, in a whisper: “By the way, next session, if you get a chance, maybe you could pick up a pack of Camel straights on your way over. There's not enough nicotine in those Benson and Hedges to pacify a lab rat.”
    “Maybe,” said Irene. “If there is a next time.”
    “Thanks,” he said hurriedly, as the deputy tapped him on the shoulder.
    “On your feet, Doe—let's go.”
    “Whatever you say, boss—you're the ace with the Mace.”
    “Good-bye, Christopher,” Irene said, snapping her briefcase shut. She wanted to see how he would react to the name.
    “Call me Max,” he said with a wink, shuffling toward the door with the deputy at his elbow.
    “Good-bye, Max.” Irene wasn't sure what, if anything, she'd learned from this latest gambit.
    The prisoner turned and and gave her another wink, broader this time. “Good night, Irene,” he called, as his guard hustled him out the door. “See you in my dreams.”

7

    S HERIFF B USTAMANTE'S WARNING aside, Special Agent E. L. Pender knew better than most what he was getting into. (E.L. stood for Edgar Lee, but no FBI man named Edgar used his first name professionally for long.) He'd joined the FBI in '72, at the age of twenty-eight, after working six years as a Cortland County sheriff's deputy and earning a degree in criminology in his spare time, then spent his first five years with the bureau paying his dues at the resident agency in Arkansas before being transferred to the New York field office. His wife Pam had paid her dues too, trying to make a go of it in New York on the same salary he'd earned in Arkansas—in those days there was no cost-of-living differential for FBI agents.
    In the late seventies, Pender had been transferred to Washington to help his old FBI Academy roommate Steve McDougal form a unit to coordinate multijurisdictional, multivictim homicide investigations. Never again, it was hoped, would a serial killer be able to gain an advantage by moving from one jurisdiction to another.
    And for the next ten years or so Pender was one of the bureau's golden boys. He'd hunted serial killers all around the country, moving from one task force to another, going wherever his skills were needed, and spent his spare time interviewing jailed serial killers for the VICAP—Violent Criminal Apprehension Program— files.
    But by the time the nineties staggered around, both Pender's career and his marriage were in tatters. Too many road trips, too many affairs on both sides, and too much booze. If Steve McDougal hadn't put his considerable clout on the line, Penderwould almost certainly have lost both his