William Hughes is a professor of political science at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. He received his doctorate in American politics from the University of California, Davis. He has done voice-over work for radio and film and is also an accomplished jazz guitarist.

Dennis Palumbo, a former Hollywood screenwriter, is a psychotherapist in private practice, as well as an author. He is the author of a mystery collection, From Crime to Crime, as well as the Daniel Rinaldi mystery novels, and his short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the Strand, among others.

Mirror Image

Poisoned Pen Press

Chapter One

Face tightened in anguish, a young man named Kevin Merrick was sitting in my office, telling me about the first time he'd slept with his sister.

"I musta been eight or nine," he said. Kevin was in his early twenties, but thinning hair and pained, sunken eyes made him seem older, faded somehow. The three-week-old growth of beard didn't help.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Rinaldi. I didn't think ... I mean, shit, it was all so long ago ..."

"Take your time," I said.

I let a silence fill the space between us. But inwardly, I was thrilled. After months of intensive work, of building trust and rapport, he was finally opening up, risking connection with another human being.

Not an easy task for him, considering what he'd been through. Life had battered him, left invisible bruises no less real than the old needle tracks on his forearms, the self-inflicted scissor-cuts emblazoned on his wrists.

His eyes flitted to the window overlooking Forbes Avenue five floors below. The steady drumming of the rain masked the usual hum of afternoon traffic snaking out of the Pitt campus.

Beyond, through the grey-black webbing of the storm, you could just make out Heinz Hall and Carnegie Museum, venerable Pittsburgh landmarks, hunched beneath the regal spire of the Cathedral of Learning.

Kevin stirred, hands massaging the arms of his chair. This calmed him. It had taken time, but my office had finally become a sanctuary for him, a refuge. Once, he'd jokingly referred to it as the Womb with a View.

He did seem to derive solace from the place: the tan leather sofa, the twin brass table lamps, the marble-topped antique desk. My worn Tumi briefcase leaned against it.

Then there was the stuff my patients didn't see—the photo of Barbara taken on our honeymoon, tucked away on a book shelf; a copy of Ringsider magazine, autographed by Sugar Ray Leonard, sharing cabinet space with patient files and a pewter hip flask—a gift from my old man after the Allentown fight, twenty years ago. Consolation prize, I guess. I'd gone down in the seventh.

Kevin's eyes had been slowly sweeping the room, as though searching a crowd for a familiar face. His gaze rested finally on some psych journals stacked on the floor.

"Karen was four years older than me," he said at last. "We were in her room ... it was late. I knew I was supposed to be in bed, but Dad hadn't tucked me in ..."

"Did he usually do that?"

"Every night, since the year before, when Mom died ... I remember people saying what a burden he had now. That he had to be both mother and father to me and Karen ..." He blinked up at me. "What was I saying? ..."

"That your father wasn't in Karen's room that night."

"Yeah. Anyway—" His voice caught. "All of a sudden, we were in her bed ... just foolin' around ... Laughing. I remember how girlie I thought the sheets smelled ..."

"Girlie?"

"You know what I mean." A crooked smile. "I remember thinking, Yuck, how could she sleep in here? ... Those pink, frilly sheets with the girlie smell ... Yuck!"

His smile faded.

"Then ..." He dropped his head. "Then she touched me ... and I was so confused. It felt so strange. Not bad, but not good either ... I mean, I knew what was happening ... I was already pretty good at jerkin' off, ya know? ..."

He tried to laugh, a dry rasp that held no mirth.

"And I loved Karen so much ... I mean, I hated her, too, 'cause she was my older sister and a bitch and everything, but I also loved her ... and ever since Mom died, she was—"

He looked away again, at the window.

"And then she had her pajamas off," he said slowly, "and I could see—it was dark, but I could sorta see everything, and feel everything ... and it felt so ..."

Suddenly, a sheet of shame reddened his face. His hands shot up, palms pressing against his eyes, like a child trying to push the tears back in. He cried out.

I leaned closer, on the edge of my leather chair. I could almost see a shudder move through his body, like a powerful wave. I also saw how thin and bony his shoulders were under his light blue shirt.

Finally, he turned, eyes searching for mine. His face was bleached of color, lifeless.

"I ... I felt her hand on the back of my neck ... I was shocked, surprised ... The hand was so strong, pressing my face down ... forcing my mouth between her legs ... forcing me to ... making me ... taste her ..."

Great sobs wracked his whole body. Without a thought, I reached across and held him, felt his body slump in my embrace. His tears were wet on my cheeks.

We stayed that way for an endless minute, the blood pounding in my ears. My own feelings shot through me. Anger. Pity. Some vague sense of anguish ...

Finally, I released him, gently guiding him back against his chair. He seemed to be swallowed by it, legs half-drawn up in a fetal position. He closed his eyes.

I took a breath. Kevin and I would have to explore the meaning of my embracing him at some future date. For now, it was enough for me to know that I'd had the impulse to hold him, to cradle him, and so I did.

Fuck it, somebody should've done it a long time ago.

As I watched him settle down, I thought again about the clinical risks I often found myself taking with him. After all my years as a psychologist, it was always new; each patient a new beginning, a chance to teach myself how to do therapy all over again.

I recalled, too, something that Jung had told one of his students. "It's not what you know that heals," he said. "It's who you are." A sentiment I agree with. It's also a notion that conveniently flatters the narcissism woven into every therapist's personality.

Kevin's body had relaxed, and he was reaching for the Kleenex on the side table. As he dried his eyes, I managed a smile, which he managed to return.

Some deep chasm, some important gulf between us had been crossed, and we both knew it. Despite the potential for significant pain ahead, he'd made another crucial step on his personal journey. And at the end, I believed—I had to believe—there would come a healing.

I'd never find out.

Within an hour, Kevin Merrick would be dead.

Chapter Two

He led the police back to his place, an apartment just off-campus, where the trashed room backed up his story: he'd been awakened around midnight by an intruder in a ski mask rifling his bureau drawers. They struggled, then Kevin managed to get free and out through the window. He told the cops he could only remember running like hell, into the night ...

And then his memory went blank, until he found himself in the convenience store hours later, being rousted by two uniformed patrolmen.

After his discharge from the ward—where a computer check revealed he was no stranger to local mental health facilities—Kevin was questioned again by the police and a sympathetic Assistant DA, but he could offer no new information about the crime. All he could remember about the man was that he was big, and reeked of sweat.

"Probably a hype, needin' cash," the investigating officer said. "Fuckers don't use ATM's."

The police got a break two days later, when another local resident called 911. Same scenario: sweaty guy in a ski mask helping himself to cash and jewelry in the bedroom. Only this time the apartment's occupant—a retired steel-worker named Hanrahan—grabbed a baseball bat from under his bed and knocked the guy senseless. He was still groggy when the cops arrived.

With his mask off, the burglar was just another junkie, a scared black kid from the Hill District. His name was James Stickey, aka "Big Stick." Nineteen, with two prior convictions. They gave him eight years upstate.

Meanwhile, Kevin just wanted to forget about the whole thing and get back to class. It was springtime, and a week from finals. But his blackout the night of the crime, along with reports of nightmares and frequent disorientation, had worried the Assistant DA enough to call the Department's Chief Community Liaison Officer.

Who was worried enough to call me.

People like Kevin are my specialty. Victims of violent crime. Those who've survived the assault, the kidnapping, the crime itself—but who still lived with the trauma, the fear. The daily, gut-wrenching dread.

Or, perhaps even harder, lived with the guilt of having survived at all when a loved one didn't.

My job is to help them remember what they need to remember, so that they can forget. Or at least achieve a kind of forgetting that lets them move on with what's left of their lives.

Though the Pittsburgh Police have a number of shrinks on the payroll, they sometimes make use of outside consultants. Which is how I got into this in the first place.

* * *

It was about five years ago, during the public panic and media firestorm caused by Troy David Dowd, the monster they dubbed "the Handyman." A serial killer who tortured his victims with screwdrivers, pliers, and other tools, he'd murdered and dismembered twelve people before his eventual capture.

Dowd would snatch people outside of roadside diners or highway rest stops in isolated rural areas throughout the state. Only two of his intended victims managed to escape. One of these, a single mother of three, was sent to me.

Her name was Sylvia. Bound with duct tape, she'd been kept for two days in a stifling, stench-filled canvas tent, buried under a pile of twisted, decaying body parts from his earlier victims. Somehow, during one of Dowd's frequent absences, she was able to cut through a section of tape using the sharp edge of a metallic watch band still strapped to the wrist of a severed forearm.

For weeks after her escape, she'd wake up screaming, clawing the air at the imagined bloody, blackened stumps encasing her. Recurrent flashbacks of her ordeal with Dowd continued long after his arrest and conviction.

In fact, it wasn't until almost a year later—by which time Dowd was on Death Row, where he still sits pending his latest appeal—that Sylvia was willing to even leave the house. She'd walk around the block once with her oldest daughter and go back inside.

I considered this a victory.

My work with her caught the attention of the city fathers as well as the press, and soon the cops were using me on a regular basis whenever they feared for a crime victim's mental health. Or when the DA worried that the victim's emotional stability might be in question when it came time to testify.

Why me? Because of my background in Post-Traumatic Stress, working with Gulf and Iraqi War vets. Because I'd treated numerous victims of trauma and abuse at two state hospitals.

And probably because of something else, something personal, that inextricably bonds me to my patients, and always will. Something very personal.

Kevin was stirring.

I smiled at him again, absently pushing my hand back through my hair. Then I instinctively—an instinct reborn a thousand times—felt near the top of my head for the old scar, the familiar ridged surgical scar, where the bullet had gone in ...

Chapter Three

I turned to the small table beside my chair for a pen. The monogrammed one from my alma mater. It was gone.

I sighed. I knew where it was. With his body half-turned away from me at the window, I couldn't tell which pocket it was in. But I knew Kevin had it. He'd taken it.

As he'd taken other items from my office over the past months. A stapler. A letter-opener. A silver card case.

In the byzantine mesh of our relationship, Kevin was aware that I knew he'd taken these items, and that I probably wouldn't mention it. And felt both shame at his deeds and elation that he was getting away with it. Then shame at feeling the elation.

What Kevin had been doing, these last few months of treatment, was becoming me.

Hesitantly at first, and then quite blatantly, he'd begun dressing like me. Gone were the Pitt sweatshirt and jeans. He now wore therapeutically-neutral dress shirts and Dockers. Not to mention dark-framed glasses. His beard, without my telltale sprigs of gray, was coming in nicely.

Then today, when I opened the connecting door to the waiting room for our regularly scheduled appointment, I found Kevin hanging up a dripping jacket next to mine on the standing coat rack.

"Can you believe this weather?" he'd said. "Cold as hell, too. I shoulda worn a sweater or somethin'."

I must have been staring at the coat rack, for his glance nervously followed mine. His jacket was light brown, very similar to my own new Eddie Bauer. I'd only worn it a couple times to the office. But enough for Kevin to have registered it and found a similar one.

As I sat here now, watching him stand with his back to me at the window, I thought about those two jackets hanging on the rack in the next room, and wondered if I knew what the hell I was doing.

In our first few sessions, he'd appeared to have some classic "borderline" symptoms—poor self-image, a history of drug use and failed, half-hearted suicide attempts. He was suspicious of my attempts to help him, especially when I prodded him to relive the experience of finding an intruder in his room. These memories only reinforced his sense of violation, of vulnerability.

Then, below these feelings of dread and panic, the predictable litany of self-criticism emerged: he should have locked his windows. Fought back harder against the guy. Hell, maybe he deserved what happened to him ...

I'd seen it a hundred times. The victim blaming himself as a way to make sense of what's happened, to gain at least the fantasy of control over events that threatened to overwhelm him.

These feelings faded over time, and with them the nightmares, the panic attacks. We began to concentrate less on Kevin's symptoms and more on him.

It was then, as our bond deepened, that Kevin started to mirror me in dress and appearance. I didn't do anything to stop it. Given the shattering loss of his mother at a young age—and now with confirmation of my hunch that he'd been sexually abused as well—it was no surprise he'd be yearning for an identity. Even one that was borrowed.

"If I'm like you," some part of him was saying to me, "I'll be okay. So I'll become you."

And I'd been letting him do it. Part clinical judgment, part gut feeling. He'd come into my practice so lost, so fragmented, he needed a platform on which to stand. I was willing to be that platform. For how long, I didn't know. I'd hoped that same gut feeling would tell me when it was long enough.

A position I got all kinds of grief for. Recently, I'd presented Kevin's case at one of our peer review conferences at Ten Oaks, a clinic in suburban Penn Hills where I'd been on staff before going into private practice. Predictably, some of my colleagues there were outraged at what I was doing with Kevin. Or allowing to happen.

"It's just an extreme variation of Kohut's twinship longing," I'd argued.

Brooks Riley, the new shrink down from Harvard Med, disagreed. "No, it's a pathological accommodation. The poor bastard's willing to disappear, to allow himself to be literally usurped, and replaced by you."

He shook his head. "Christ, Rinaldi, I knew you were nuts. I didn't know you were arrogant as well."

Riley was a prick, but maybe he was right. I knew I was taking a big risk—sure as hell not the first I'd taken in my work. But I was convinced it was paying off. Kevin's bond with me was stronger now. He'd just trusted me enough to reveal the details of his incest with his sister.

A painful, anguished revelation. In the strange, hallowed vocabulary of my world, a breakthrough ...

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Mirror Imageby Dennis Palumbo Copyright © 2010 by Dennis Palumbo. Excerpted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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