Incarnate Read online

  “She wanted you to call her Izzi?”

  “She said she was Izzi.”

  Zack took in Brad’s wide, bloodshot eyes and trembling fingers. He had to admit that Brad actually seemed . . . scared. And then there was what Mr. Hascall had said about her identity disorder. Could it be . . . true? Could she really be suffering from multiple personalities, some of which were violent? Nothing in Zack’s experience supported such a far-fetched theory.

  Brad had little to add after that, and after a few more minutes, Zack left, calling the chief from the car to check in. “This situation is so messed up. You know how Peter said Scarlett has multiple personalities? Well, Brad says Scarlett was pretending to be Isabel Wilcox.”

  “Huh. What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Zack mused. “Scarlett’s smart. And there’s definitely something . . . off about her. Could be she’s a better actor than we’ve been giving her credit for. Maybe . . . maybe if you bring her in, and we get her into the interview room, away from her dad, we can shake a little more out of her.”

  “Yeah . . . I don’t know,” Holt said. Zack could picture him thinking it over, rubbing his chin the way he did when he was deep in thought. “Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt. You free now?”

  “Actually, give me an hour,” Zack said. “I need to make a stop first.”

  TEN

  Kim gave herself a little extra time to finish her rounds that afternoon, feeling guilty about letting Scarlett Hascall’s case take the lion’s share of her focus.

  “Mr. Jacobson. If you tell me I look like Greta Garbo one more time, I will commit you,” she said, patting the arm of the elderly man she’d found in just his underwear outside his room.

  Down the hall, a man got off the elevator and moved toward her with purpose: Zack Trainor. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over his uniform that emphasized his broad shoulders. He hadn’t bothered to remove his sunglasses, and the mirrored lenses obscured his expression. Kim gave Mr. Jacobson a final, distracted pat.

  “Leslie, could you please escort Mr. J back to his room?” she called to a young orderly. “I think I’m about to be busy.”

  “No fair,” Leslie sighed, eyeing Zack. “How come I can’t get interrogated instead?”

  “Doctor. I need a word,” Zack said. He removed his sunglasses and jammed them in his pocket, never taking his eyes off her.

  “Fine. We can talk right here.” She made a show of looking at her wrist, which wasn’t terribly effective, considering she’d forgotten her watch again. “I’ll give you five minutes.”

  Zack pulled his phone from his pocket. “Mind if I record our conversation?”

  “Sure, as long as you don’t mind if I don’t say anything.”

  Zack regarded her thoughtfully, a small smile playing at the corners of his lips, before putting his phone away. He crossed his arms over his chest and nodded. “Okay, we’ll do this your way. For now. What do you know about Isabel Wilcox?”

  Kim tried not to let her surprise show. She truly had no connection to Isabel—unless Zack somehow knew about Scarlett’s alter. But she wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  Zack drilled her with his intense gaze and let a moment go by. Finally, he sighed. “This is supposed to be where my silence coaxes you into unwittingly telling me more than you want to.”

  Kim rolled her eyes. “I’m a psychiatrist. It’s going to take a lot more than that to get me to break patient confidentiality.”

  “Isabel Wilcox is your patient?”

  Kim pressed her lips together, realizing she’d just implied a connection between Isabel and Scarlett. Maybe he was smarter than she’d realized. “You know I don’t have to answer that.”

  “Relax. All I’m trying to do is establish some background information for my missing-persons case.” He leaned toward her slightly. “Believe it or not, I’m one of the good guys here. I like the new duds, by the way. Huge improvement.”

  Kim glanced down at her plain white jacket, still creased from the package. “You’ve got me all figured out, don’t you?”

  “Okay.” Zack sighed, and some of the friendliness drained from his voice. “I was trying to give you a chance to tell me yourself, which, frankly, would have eased my mind about the . . . irregularity of certain things that have come to my attention.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know you called Isabel’s home. You spoke to her father, pretending to be Izzi. Scared the crap out of him, understandably. What the hell are you playing at here, Doctor?”

  Damn. “It . . . wasn’t me,” she hedged. “I mean, it was my phone. That part’s true. Come on, let’s talk in my office.”

  She set off down the hall, buying herself some time.

  Zack followed, keeping pace at her elbow and ignoring the curious looks from the other staff and patients.

  “Okay,” he said, “that’s a start. Now tell me exactly who used your phone to call Don Wilcox, and why.”

  “Look, Detective,” Kim said when they’d arrived at her office. She fumbled with her keys. “I told you I can’t discuss patients who are actively in my care.”

  “I’m not asking about your patient,” he persisted. “I’m asking about you. Did you or did you not make the call?”

  Kim deliberated a moment more. If she told him what happened, it was going to make him suspicious about Scarlett. But if she lied, she risked jeopardizing her own credibility, which could hurt Scarlett in the long run. “Okay, fine,” she blurted, finally getting her door open and wishing she could close it in his face. “Scarlett made the call . . . but it was during a session, so I can’t say anything more.”

  “Scarlett made the call?”

  “Was I not clear? Or are you hoping for a different response?”

  Zack shook his head. “No, that was just a stall tactic. While I was just putting some pieces together in my mind.” He then went silent. She knew he could tell it was killing her.

  Finally, she asked, “What pieces?” He remained silent. “What kind of pieces are you putting together?”

  “Oh, so we’re going to help each other now?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Did you know that Scarlett was sleeping with Isabel’s boyfriend?” Zack said. “Because Isabel has been missing for three weeks now, and let me tell you, jealous lover is as good a motive as any to make someone disappear.”

  Kim inhaled sharply. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “She went after Brad. Last night. Went to his house and attacked him.” Zack looked like he was going to say more, and then changed his mind. “If there’s something more you know about Scarlett—if there’s any way that she could be involved with the Isabel Wilcox disappearance—I hope you’ll tell me.”

  Kim’s mind raced, wondering if what the detective was telling her could be true. If an alter had taken over, could she really be sure of Scarlett’s innocence? Yet her instincts told her that Scarlett had nothing to do with Isabel’s disappearance; she believed in her patient. “Scarlett did not kill Isabel Wilcox, any more than I did.”

  “If that’s so, I hope you have a good alibi.”

  Kim huffed, not rewarding the halfhearted threat with a dignified response.

  “So you’re saying Scarlett couldn’t have killed Isabel? Then let me ask you . . . what about her ‘violent tendencies’?” Seeing the shock on Kim’s face, Zack added, “Peter Hascall told us about your diagnosis. And Brad Chaplin told us that Scarlett was pretending to be Isabel.”

  “She’s not ‘pretending.’ ” Kim hated how defensive she sounded.

  Zack took a deep breath. “If some dangerous personality took the wheel while Scarlett ‘blacked out’ and she hurt someone . . . that doesn’t make her any less guilty.”

  “You don’t have the faintest understanding of her disorder.” Kim felt her heart pounding, the tingling sensation in her extremities that signaled a rush of adrenali
ne. “It’s true that an alter can ‘take over’ motor function in a very limited sense. When under the influence of an alter, a host might go places she wouldn’t ordinarily go, or have conversations she wouldn’t later remember. She might lash out in fear or anger or experience any number of unfamiliar emotions. But she wouldn’t do something that drastically contradicted her sense of right and wrong. She wouldn’t kill someone.”

  “You’re sure about that, Doc?”

  Zack’s gaze was unwavering, his scrutiny like a spotlight bearing down on her. Kim shifted uncomfortably: was she sure? While Kim held strong opinions about dissociative identity disorder, the condition had an army of detractors—it was still one of the most controversial and misunderstood mental disorders in the medical community. Kim was lacking in indisputable facts to back up her theories. What if she was too personally invested in this case? Could she even trust her instincts?

  “How about you let me do my job and you stick to doing yours instead of trying to diagnose my patients?” she resorted to saying, aware she was deflecting his question. Somehow it was easier, with Zack, to go on the offensive than to examine her defense too closely. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check in with my boss about a patient.”

  Zack raised a brow. “Your boss? I thought he was your boyfriend.”

  Kim glared at him. “How did you know he’s my boyfriend?”

  “I didn’t. But I do now.”

  “That’s—that’s—” Kim could feel her face flushing, and she looked away in annoyance. It wasn’t often that someone got the best of her.

  “Okay, truth? After I found out you called the Wilcox residence, we ran your phone records. I saw a lot of calls to Dr. Berman’s cell . . . in the middle of the night. A lot of calls. And hey, I’ve made a few of those calls myself. I mean, not to Dr. Berman, but . . .”

  “Okay, I think that about does it for now,” Kim snapped. She pushed past him into her office and shut the door behind her, locking it. She sank into her desk chair and pointedly turned her back to the door, staring at the blank screen of her computer monitor.

  Zack had gotten a rise out of her with very little effort, and Kim was left trying to figure out why. Either his questioning of Scarlett’s innocence was hitting even closer to home than she knew . . . or she had completely lost her professional remove.

  ELEVEN

  The whole drive back to the station, Zack replayed his conversation with Kim in his head. He smiled, thinking of how flustered Kim had gotten when he called her out on dating her boss. It was nice to know he’d gotten under her skin the same way she managed to get under his. She was just so incredibly confident and stuck on her convictions. She seemed utterly convinced that Scarlett was innocent, but for Zack, it was one coincidence too many. He felt it in his gut that some way, somehow, Scarlett was involved in Isabel’s disappearance. Now it was his job to prove it.

  He’d decided to stop for doughnuts, hoping to put Scarlett at ease, make it seem like they were having a friendly conversation versus a full-fledged interrogation. In the interview room, Zack leaned back in his chair casually and slid the doughnuts toward Scarlett as she shifted in her seat and examined the split ends of her hair.

  At first, Scarlett insisted she wasn’t hungry, but as Zack edged the plate slowly across the wooden table, she finally grabbed a jelly-filled doughnut and ate it in about three bites, licking the sugar from her fingertips.

  “Thanks,” she said in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

  “Not much in this world that a good doughnut can’t make better,” Holt said, patting his belly with satisfaction. Zack had brought Holt’s favorite, a couple of maple bars, and tamped down his impatience while the other two ate.

  “Okay,” Zack said, after Holt scooped up the crumbs and made short work of them. “Scarlett, I want to talk to you about a session you had with Dr. Patterson. You apparently, er, borrowed her phone to make a call to Isabel Wilcox’s house. Do you want to tell me about that?”

  Her wide, frightened eyes flicked up to his for a brief second before she resumed staring at the table, her hands twisting nervously. “No.”

  Zack sighed. “All right, let me put it a little differently. Unless you want this to escalate into a situation where you have no choice but to tell me, you might want to . . . open up little.”

  “I don’t remember.” Her voice was anguished. “Any of it.”

  “You don’t remember the session with Dr. Patterson?”

  “No, not that. I—I remember talking to her, and when she started the hypnosis and all that. But there’s a big blank space in the middle. It’s like—like if you’ve ever had surgery, like when I had my tonsils out, and they put the mask over your face and the next minute you’re waking up in another room hours later and you can’t remember how you got there?”

  “I’d say that’s pretty damn convenient,” Zack said. He felt terrible as soon as the words came out of his mouth, but he had a job to do.

  “You can give me a lie detector test. If you want,” Scarlett offered.

  “It may come to that,” Zack said, though he knew from experience how unreliable polygraph tests could be. Anyone skilled at lying and able to remain calm under pressure could game the system. And a false-negative could sink an airtight case.

  “This theory the doc’s got,” Holt said, breaking in. Zack knew the chief would attempt to disarm Scarlett with his folksy affability, while Zack hammered away relentlessly at her weak spots. It was their well-honed good-cop-bad-cop routine. “The, uh, multiple personality thing. What do you make of it?”

  Scarlett burst into tears. Here we go, Zack thought darkly; now she was playing on their sympathies.

  “I hate it,” Scarlett snuffled, while Holt pushed a box of Kleenex her way. “How would you like it if you blacked out and had no idea what you’d done while you were out?”

  “I wouldn’t like that at all,” Holt said kindly.

  “Well, I might,” Zack snapped, “if it meant I could get away with things and then claim I couldn’t help it. Like if I had a beef with someone, I’d just wait until I was conveniently out of it and then hammer the crap out of them. Kind of like you did with Brad.” He judged it the right moment to pull out his ace card. “Why’d you do that, Scarlett? Was it because he wouldn’t give you the time of day after you slept with him? Don’t tell me you thought your little one-night stand actually meant something to him?”

  Scarlett sobbed harder, dabbing her eyes with wadded tissues. “I never slept with Brad Chaplin! Why would I—he’s awful!”

  “That’s not what Brad says,” Zack shot back. “And while it’s a toss-up between the two of you as far as who’s less trustworthy, I think you’re the better liar.”

  “Was that it, honey?” Holt said sympathetically. “Was it hard to see him go to Izzi after being with you? Maybe he made promises, maybe he told you what you wanted to hear—”

  “And you figured you’d just take Izzi right out of the picture,” Zack concluded. “Get her out of the way so Brad would come back to you. It sounds like you fell pretty hard for him . . . and who wouldn’t, right? Local hockey hero, smooth talker, and from the way he gets around with the women in town, probably pretty good in bed, too.” Zack hesitated a half a second before hitting her with his closer. “The way he tells it, you were pretty wild in the sack yourself.”

  There was a knock on the door. Zack frowned; he’d given instructions that they weren’t to be bothered unless it was important. He excused himself and stepped into the hall, where Phil Taktuq was waiting. There were dark circles under his eyes and his cuff was fraying at the hem. He gazed at Scarlett for a brief moment, frowning, before focusing on Zack.

  “Evelyn just picked up El Da Fusion,” he said. “Thought you’d want to know—he says he was with Brad Chaplin both nights when Izzi went missing.”

  “No shit,” Zack said. El Da Fusion was a heroin dealer from Anchorage who the department had long suspected was the source of most of the
product that made it to Jarvis, though they’d never been able to prove it. “Damn. You feel sure about this?”

  Phil shrugged. “Timing works. Fusion hadn’t been around for a few months, so he was probably due. I talked to his parole officer in Anchorage, and he missed an appointment that week. Plus there were those two busts the week after, remember?”

  “Because the scag hit the streets,” Zack said, nodding.

  “Yeah. Fusion had photos on his phone of them at a party out in the abandominium. Evelyn’s checking out witnesses now, but if Brad was there, it makes sense why he didn’t want to tell that to us.”

  Zack sighed. The abandominium—an abandoned condo on the waterfront where users congregated—had been a thorn in the department’s side for months. “Okay, thanks,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  Zack stood outside the door of the interview room for a few more moments, thinking. If Brad had been with Fusion, there was no way he’d been out murdering Izzi. Brad’s business depended on his sources in Anchorage, and even though he was only a small-time middleman, there was no way he’d jeopardize his income by taking chances.

  Which meant they were back to square one, with no suspects other than the tear-stained waif on the other side of the door. Damn. But his mood brightened considerably when he saw Tim Olsen being led into the station, hands cuffed behind his back.

  “Tim!” Zack shouted out like he’d just seen an old college buddy across a crowded pub. Tim whipped his head around so fast that his long, stretched-out earlobes flapped like an old man’s drooping underarms.

  Tim shook his head, testing out his best innocent face. “I have no idea what this is about.”

  “No?” Zack smiled wide as he walked over, throwing his arm around Tim’s shoulder as he escorted him toward booking. “Well, it might have to do with those DVDs you left behind at your office. You know, the ones with titles like Underage Bangers.”

  Tim’s face fell, but he still pleaded innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”