Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

Guys’re so disgusting, Crazy Megan offers.

Megan agreed; who could argue with that?

This meant that someone else probably lived here-someone young (she supposed older guys jerked off too but tried to imagine, say, her father doing it and couldn’t).

Way gross thought. From CM.

Then she saw the closet.

Oh, please! She mentally crossed her fingers as she pulled the door open.

Yes! It was filled with clothes. She pulled on some jeans, which were tight around her hips and too long. She rolled the cuffs up. She found a work shirt-which was tight, too, but that didn’t matter. She felt a hundred percent better. There were no shoes but she found a pair of thick black socks. For some reason, covering her feet gave her more confidence than covering the rest of her body.

She looked through the closet for a knife or gun but found nothing. She returned to the other room. Rummaged through the desk. Nothing to use as a weapon, except a Bic pen. She took it anyway. Then she looked through the rest of the room, focusing at first on the bookshelves.

Some books were about psychiatry but most were fantasy novels and science fiction. Some were pretty weird. Stacks of comic books too- Japanese, a lot of them. Megan flipped through several. Totally icky- girls being raped by monsters and gargoyles and aliens. X-rated. She shivered in disgust.

The name inside the books and on the front of the comic books was Pete Matthews. Sometimes he’d written Peter M. It was written very carefully but in big block letters. As if he was a young kid.

Megan looked through the files, most of them filled with psychological mumbo jumbo she couldn’t understand. There were also stacks of the American Psychiatric Association Journal. Articles were marked with yellow Post-its. She noticed they’d been written by a doctor named Aaron Matthews. The boy’s father? she wondered. His bio gave long lists of credentials. Dozens of awards and honorary degrees. One newspaper clipping called him “the Einstein of therapists” and reported, “He can detect and categorize a psychosis from listening to a patient’s words for three or four minutes. A master diagnostician.”

In between two file folders was another clipping. Megan lifted it to the light. It showed Dr. Peters and a young man in his late teens. But wait… The doctor’s last name wasn’t Peters. The caption read: “Dr. Aaron Matthews leaves the funeral home after the memorial service for his wife. He is accompanied by his son, Peter.” Matthews… the one who wrote those articles. So he must have been a doctor here. That’s how he knew about the hospital-and that it would make a perfect prison.

Megan studied the picture again, feeling crawly and scared. The doctor’s son was… well, just plain weird. He was a tall boy, lanky, with long arms and huge hands. He had thick floppy hair that looked dirty and his forehead jutted over his dark eye sockets. He had a sick smile on his face.

Leaving his mother’s funeral and he’s smiling?

So this was his room-the son’s. Maybe Peters-well, Matthews- kept the boy locked up here, a prisoner too.

Her eyes fell to an official-looking report. She read the top page.

EMERGENCY INTAKE EVALUATION

Patient Peter T. Matthews presents with symptoms typical of an antisocial and paranoid personality. He is not schizophrenic, under DSM-III criteria, but he has, or claims to have, delusions. More likely these are merely fantasies, which in his case are so overpowering that he chooses not to recognize the borderline between his role-playing and reality. These fantasies are generally of a sadoerotic nature, with him playing a nonhuman entity-stalking and raping females. During our sessions Peter would sometimes portray these entities-right down to odd mannerisms and garbled language. He was often “in character,” and quite consistent in his role-playing. However, there was no evidence of fugue states or multiple personalities. He changed personas at his convenience, to achieve the greatest stimulation from his fantasies.

Peter is extremely dangerous. He must be hospitalized in a secure facility until the determination is made for a course of treatment. Recommend immediate psychopharmacological intervention.

Stalking… rape.

Megan put the report back on the desk. She found a notebook. Peter’s name was written on this too. She read through it. In elaborate passages Peter described himself as a spaceman oran alien stalking women, tying them up, raping them. She dropped the book.

Tears again.

Then another thought: Her cell! This Dr. Matthews, her kidnapper, had locked her up not only to keep her from getting out but to keep his son from getting in. He was- A creak, a faint squeal. A door closed softly in a far part of the hospital.

Megan shivered in terror.

Move it, girl! Crazy Megan cries, in a silent voice as panicked as uncrazy Megan’s. It’s him, it’s the son.

She grabbed a pile of things to take with her-several of the magazines, file folders about the hospital, letters. Anything that might help her figure out who this Dr. Matthews was. Why he’d taken her. How she might get out.

Footsteps…

He’s coming. He’s coming here. .. Move it. Now!

Holding the files and clippings under her arm, Megan fled out the door. She ran down the corridors, getting lost once, pausing often to listen for footsteps. He seemed to be circling her.

Finally she found her way and raced into the room that adjoined hers, the “rat room.” She rubbed the grate along the edges of the hole in the wall to widen it. She started through and, whimpering, clawed her way forward. Five inches, six, a foot, two feet. Finally she grabbed the toilet in her room and wrenched herself through the hole. She replaced the grate on the far side of the wall and then slammed the metal plate into place in her bathroom.

She ran to the door and pressed her ear against it. The footsteps grew closer and closer. But Peter didn’t stop at her door. He kept moving. Maybe he didn’t know she was here.

Megan sat on the icy floor with her hands pressing furiously against the plate until they cramped.

Listen, C. M. starts to say. Maybe you can- Shut up, Megan thought furiously.

And for once Crazy Megan does what she’s told.

The eyes.

The eyes tell it all.

When Aaron Matthews was practicing psychotherapy he learned to read the eyes. They told him so much more than words. Words are tools and weapons and camouflage and shields.

But the eyes tell you the truth.

An hour ago, in Leesburg, he’d looked into the glassy, groggy eyes of a drugged Greta Hanson and knew she was a woman with no reserves of strength. And so he’d leaned close, become her son and spun a tale guaranteed to send her to the very angels that she was babbling on and on about. It’s quite a challenge to talk someone into killing herself and he’d thoroughly enjoyed playing the game.

He doubted she’d die from the dosage of Nembutal he’d given her and he doubted that she could find a vein anyway. Besides, it was important for her to remain alive-to blame her son for the Kevorkian number. Poor Doe Hanson now either in jail or on the run. In any case, he’d be no help as a witness to Tate Collier.

Now, as he strolled along the sidewalk near Jefferson High School, Aaron Matthews was looking at another set of eyes.

Robert Eckhard’s-the teacher who’d seen his car as he stalked Megan.

Studying the man’s eyes, Matthews was concluding that Eckhard might or might not have been a good English teacher but he didn’t doubt that he was one hell of a girls’ volleyball coach. The diminutive, tweedy man sat with a sports roster on his lap outside the sports field between the grade and high schools.