Keith Ablow - Compulsion

"We'll drop the charges against him as soon as possible," Harrigan said.

"When would that be?" Rossetti asked, stonefaced.

"I'll take care of it personally tomorrow morning," Harrigan answered.

Terry McCarthy looked over at Anderson and me. "That means Billy goes free in the a.m.," he said. "Would you two be picking him up?"

Anderson turned to me. "You mind taking care of that, Frank?" he said, with a wink. "I should get back to the island tonight."

"I don't mind," I said. "I don't mind at all."

As the room emptied, I pulled O'Donnell aside. "I think you owe me one thing," I said.

"What?" he said, annoyed. "You want some kind of formal apology? I should contact the newspapers, tell them how fucking brilliant you are? You haven't had enough news coverage in your life, Doc?"

"No," I said. "I'm not looking for anything like that."

He didn't walk away.

"He's gonna pay up," the voice at the back of my mind said. "He owes you the truth and he knows it."

"I meant what I said when we met at your office," I told him.

He smiled a surprised, good-natured smile. "That I'm a sociopath?" he said.

So he knew where we were headed. "Not that you're a sociopath," I said. "But that something got in the way of you doing the right thing here." I saw him stiffen. I shook my head and looked away, giving him a little space. "This is over," I said. "No hard feelings. All I want is the answer to one question." I looked back at him.

He took a deep breath, let it out. "Ask already." His eyes met mine and stuck.

"You've been through something painful," I said. "I want to know what it was."

The smile left his face. "Why? What does that matter to you?" he said.

"It does," I said.

"But why?"

"It just does." I could have said much more. I could have told him that, wherever I go, I keep searching for primary evil, out of the womb-the bad seed-but have never found it. I could have told him that everyone really does seem to be recycling pain, that empathy, properly harnessed, really does seem to stop the cycle of hurt-and heal people. And I could have told him that something about those two facts kept my mood from plummeting and kept me out of the gutter, because they reassured me we might be a worthwhile species, capable of more compassion than we seem to be. "If it turned out we were butting heads purely over some allegiance you've got to the mayor or Darwin Bishop, I just wouldn't know what to do with that. I wouldn't understand it, you know? I-"

"You need to know why people act the way they do. You want things to make sense," he said.

"Yes," I said.

O'Donnell chuckled, looked away. The smile on his face vanished. "I had a sister less than a year old kidnapped and killed by some bum drifter out of Colorado." He shrugged. "Maybe I wanted this case to go away. Maybe I shut down on it. My mistake." He glanced at me, then walked off.

I closed my eyes. "Thanks," I said quietly.

Sunday, June 30, 2002

It was after midnight, but I didn't drive right home. I drove to the Suffolk County House of Corrections.

Luckily, Anderson 's friends were working the overnight again. Tony Glass, a spark plug of a man about thirty, thirty-five, wearing Coke-bottle lenses, ran the front desk. He asked me if I was there for another visit with Billy.

"No," I said. "I want to see Darwin Bishop."

"Strange, huh?" Glass said. "The father and the son in the same jail at the same time?"

"Not for long," I said. "Billy should be released in the morning."

"Good. He seems like a decent kid," Glass said. "A couple of the guards were saying so. They like him."

I smiled. Billy might be likable, but he was also destructive and manipulative. I hadn't forgotten that. "He can be charming," I said.

"The father's in protective custody," Glass said. "He got into it with another inmate, took a little beating. You might want to see him down on the cell block, if you don't mind."

"No problem." I wondered whether Bishop had had a run-in with another inmate, or whether he'd run into a guard who didn't stomach wife-beaters.

Protective custody was basement level in the jail, a cell block like the others, but without access to any common areas or recreational activities. It was also cold and dark down there, maybe to remind the inmates that protecting them was an additional burden for the system, not something that got them any warm fuzzies.

Only a few of the cells were occupied. A guard walked me to the last one in the row. Darwin Bishop was lying on a cot, wearing the same anonymous orange jumpsuit that Billy had been wearing. "Got a visitor, Bishop," the guard said. He walked away, leaving me there.

Bishop sat up. His lip was split, but he looked okay otherwise. "Dr. Clevenger," he said, sounding weak. "What brings you?"

What, indeed? Did I want to see with my own eyes that the truth had caught up with a man who had run from it for so long? Or had Julia sparked such a primal, competitive instinct in me that I wanted to savor a rival's defeat? I had planned to take her from him, after all. I had been planning it at some level since the day I met her. "I'm not sure why I'm here," I told him.

"I didn't go to the hospital to hurt Julia," he said. "I love her, probably more than I should. I lost control. And you're partly to blame. You've been seeing her."

"Terrorizing your family isn't a great strategy to keep them faithful," I said. "Having affairs of your own doesn't help, either."

"That doesn't excuse you," he said. "I never took something of yours."

"Is that why you sent your bodyguards to my apartment yesterday?" I said. "To even the score?"

"Yes," he said. "I wish you had been at home. You'd look worse than I do."

"Too late now," I said.

"Possibly." He ran a finger over his lip. It was bleeding. He looked at the blood. "You're not her first, you know. Your buddy North had her, too. She doesn't discriminate."

I said nothing.

Bishop looked at me. "You don't even care," he said.

"You want her anyhow. You're addicted to her, same as he was." He paused. "Same as I am." He looked at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and shook his head, as if he still couldn't quite believe what had happened to him. Then his gaze drifted around the walls of the cell. He swallowed hard. "I've been here before," he said quietly. "Alone. With nothing. I always come back."

The way he said those words, almost as a mantra, to soothe himself, made me feel something like pity for him. "No one can stop you from getting rich inside," I said.

Drake Slattery, Lilly's internist, called me just before 7:00 a.m. to tell me Lilly would be going home later that morning. I told him I'd be by to see her off.

She was dressed in street clothes-white jeans and a simple, light green blouse-when I got to her room. She had swept her blond curls over one shoulder and put on pretty pink lipstick and was seated in one of the armchairs by her bed, reading. I knocked. She looked up, smiled. "Come in," she said.

I took the other armchair. "Anything interesting?" I asked, nodding at the magazine.

She held up the magazine so I could see the cover. It was a copy of True Confessions. "Appropriate, huh?" she said.

I smiled. "I suppose so."

"Discharge day," she said.

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

"Honestly?" she said.

"Of course."

"I would love to do it again," she said.

"Inject yourself," I said.

She nodded. "I think about it most of the day. Sometimes I dream about it at night." She looked directly into my eyes. "This isn't going to be easy."

Lilly was describing something similar to the craving addicts experience when they try to put down a drug. For her, the injections and resulting infections had been intoxicants, after all. They had numbed her mind so she couldn't focus on her complex feelings for her grandfather. Now, with painful reality pressing in, her mind was pleading with her to keep the drugs flowing. "Have you thought a lot more about your relationship with your grandfather?" I asked.