Incarnate Read online

  “Hurting yourself isn’t the answer,” Kim forged on. “I know . . . I’ve been there. Please, Scarlett, look at me.”

  Bang. Bang. Someone was pounding on the one-way mirror. Sounds of yelling came from the hallway.

  “What’s happening?” Scarlett cried.

  The door burst open, and Scarlett’s father ran in. Zack followed behind, his hand on the other man’s shoulder, trying to force him back. As Peter Hascall fought his way free, Zack glared at Kim.

  “Time to go. Now. Both of you. Scarlett, you stay here,” Zack commanded.

  “Daddy?” Scarlett tried to get up, but Kim held her back with a hand on her arm.

  “Get her out of here!” Hascall shouted, pointing angrily at Kim.

  “I’ve got it, Mr. Hascall,” Zack said wearily. “Dr. Patterson, I need you to step outside now.”

  “Get away from my daughter!” Hascall yelled as she went past him.

  “I’m her doctor,” she responded calmly.

  “Not anymore, you ain’t.”

  “She’s an adult, so she can make—”

  Hascall lunged at Kim, fist flying. Reacting quickly, Zack caught his arm mid-swing. He surely saved Kim from a black eye, if not a concussion. She looked to the detective, gratitude washing over her face.

  Zack pulled Peter Hascall back as he continued to lash out at Kim.

  “No, Dad,” Scarlett cried. “Please.”

  Zack shoved Kim and Hascall into the hallway. “I’m calling a lawyer,” Hascall said to no one in particular. “Right now!”

  Zack turned his glare on Kim, before following Hascall toward the door, making sure the father didn’t change his mind and return. After Hascall was safely outside, Zack turned on his heels and stalked wordlessly past Kim, disappearing into a back office.

  Well, that had gone well. Kim’s heart sank as Hascall trudged to the exit without looking back at her. She understood why Scarlett’s father didn’t trust her—she probably wouldn’t, either, if she were in his shoes. After all, Scarlett’s condition had seemed to become worse, not better, since Kim had started treating her.

  With Scarlett in custody, Peter Hascall threatening legal action, and her own job in jeopardy, Kim had no idea what to do next. She walked back to the reception area and sank dispiritedly to a sofa facing an enormous bulletin board covered in missing-person flyers. As she tried to make sense of everything that had happened in the last few days, she idly scanned the images of the missing: the names, the dates they disappeared, the desperate pleas of their loved ones. They went back for years, some of them faded and creased, others—Isabel’s among them—fresh and new.

  Claudia Johnson. Julian Tate. Gloria Eng. Henry Beaumont.

  She backtracked. Julian . . . Henry.

  Kim leaped up from the sofa to take a closer look at the bulletin board. Henry Beaumont’s faded flyer said the little boy disappeared when he was only five years old. The Henry alter had said he was five . . .

  Kim grabbed the flyers off the board, pushpins flying and her heart pounding. Then she raced back the way she’d come. She saw Holt stepping out of his office, yawning, and headed straight for him.

  “Chief! I need to speak with you!”

  The receptionist was quicker to react this time, popping off her stool with alacrity and chasing after her. Zack must have forewarned her this time. “Miss, you can’t be in here!”

  “It’s fine, Deb,” Holt said mildly. “I’ll handle this.”

  Reluctantly, Deb returned to her station, her eyes narrowed at Kim.

  “Dr. Patterson, since you’re here, you might as well come on in and join us,” Holt said, and Kim followed him into his office, where Zack Trainor was occupying one of the chairs. She took the one as far away from him as possible. Just looking at him, knowing what he was putting Scarlett through, made her hot with anger.

  “Chief, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to explain this without sounding like a crazy person,” Kim said.

  “I’ve already heard about your . . . dissociative what-was-it? Multiple personalities?”

  “Like that movie Fight Club. With the guy,” Zack said sarcastically. “But he’s really the other guy.”

  “Listen to me!” Kim said, willing Zack to shut up for once. “Early on, it became very clear that Scarlett has at least three alternate identities. She may have more—”

  “—and this is where you tell me she’s actually innocent because one of her alters is the real killer.” Zack turned his keen gaze on Kim, and for a moment, her anger subsided. Then all her fury and desperation came rushing back.

  “No, that’s not what I— I messed up. I misdiagnosed her. I don’t believe she has DID now.” She infused her statement with all the authority she could muster, even while confessing her error.

  “Uh-oh,” Zack said, leaning back with his hands behind his head. “Here we go.”

  “The names of Scarlett’s alters that I know about are Isabel, Julian, and Henry. But . . . these personalities weren’t created in Scarlett’s mind. They are all real people.”

  “Come again?” Holt said curiously.

  Kim lay three flyers on his desk, carefully lining them up. “Isabel,” she said, tapping one with her fingertip. “Julian. Henry.”

  Holt and Zack exchanged a look.

  “What exactly are you suggesting, Dr. Patterson?” Zack demanded.

  “I’m not suggesting anything . . .” She pointed at the pictures, gulping down her doubts. “The facts are, Isabel, Julian, and Henry are all either missing or dead. And somehow, they’re all . . . inside Scarlett Hascall.”

  NINETEEN

  Kim took a sip of the stale coffee in her mug—really, at this point, more like tepid, congealing coffee grounds with milk—and pushed her notes away. She glanced at the clock: 3:02 a.m. She’d been at this for hours, ever since getting home from the station, and she was no closer to understanding what might be going on with Scarlett than when she’d started. But she couldn’t stop, not until she’d figured out a way to free Scarlett from police custody and clear her from suspicion once and for all.

  “Hey, Siri. Call Dad. Speakerphone.”

  Siri’s muffled voice piped up from somewhere in the pile of paperwork, and after only a single ring, her father picked up.

  “Honey,” Roger Patterson’s voice came on, sounding alert and awake. “It’s three in the morning where you are.”

  “Yeah, what are you doing up at this hour?” Kim asked lamely, attempting to inject a note of humor into her voice and failing.

  “Kim.” The tone in his voice made her feel suddenly exhausted. “That last message of yours made me want to fly your mother up there to see you—see if she can help you make sense of things.”

  “Don’t joke, Dad. Two psychiatrists in one family is two too many. Keep her away. Please.” Her mother’s interference was the last thing she needed right now.

  “Okay, but . . . are you all right?” After she didn’t respond for a moment, he added, “Kimberly?”

  “Yeah. It’s just . . . my new patient. She reminds me of . . . Joselyn.” There was a weighted silence. “This case might be cutting too close to home.”

  “I’m sorry. I know that can be tough.”

  “Emotions are clouding my judgment. I’m sounding like a lunatic.” She laughed a little, and then realized the deranged sound of her laugh wasn’t helping her case.

  “Well, Kimmy, your compassion is what makes you a great doctor. And, of course, you are a lunatic.”

  Kim couldn’t help smiling at that. “You get my e-mail? Did you find anything? I figure since you’ve spent your life studying religions, you might have a take. What do you know about reincarnation?”

  “Well, obviously you’ve gone down the Hindu route.” Kim relaxed as her father’s voice took on a professorial tone. If she kept him talking about academic subjects, she’d keep him away from asking more questions about how she was doing. “They’re one of the largest groups that believe in reincarnation. B
ut based on the notes you sent, I’d start investigating the Druze.”

  Kim grabbed her laptop and started typing in her browser’s search field. “The Druze? What the hell is the Druze? Some crackpot cult?”

  “Hey, it’s got more than two million followers. It’s a religion based on the teachings of Socrates, Aristotle, Plato . . .”

  As her dad continued to describe the roots of this religion, Kim scrolled through the results on her screen, picked one, and started reading. “Wow. Casey Kasem was Druze? Shaggy from Scooby-Doo?” She kept scrolling. “Sorry, it’s late, I’m punchy. But tell me, Dad, what’s Shaggy’s connection to my case?”

  “Well, if you’d been listening to me instead of reading Wikipedia . . . The Druze believe that after you die, your soul moves on, not to an afterlife . . . but to another life. At death, the soul is instantly transferred to another body. Sounds like it lines up with your crazy theory.”

  “So theoretically, Isabel’s soul could have transferred to Scarlett’s body upon death, according to these people.”

  “That’s the idea.” She could hear her father padding around his office, probably picking up some book or another to check his facts.

  “Do they believe that more than one soul can take up residence in a host body?” Kim asked.

  “Not to my knowledge, but then, I can’t say I’m an expert. I’ll do some further reading . . .” Kim had to laugh at the eagerness in his voice. Any excuse for a new research project.

  “Okay, then. How do the souls pick their hosts? I mean, why Scarlett?” Kim sat back in her chair, chewing on a thumbnail as she thought.

  “Good question. Some of the prominent recorded cases involve coincidence of birth and death. In other words, the first soul’s transference occurs exactly at the moment of the host’s entry into this world. Perhaps something to look into?”

  “Interesting,” Kim said, clicking on a link about a three-year-old Syrian boy who found the man who had murdered him in a past life. “Thanks, Dad . . . so did you need anything else?” she asked distractedly.

  “Uh, didn’t you call me?”

  Kim shuffled papers until she found the phone, kissed the air loudly, and hung up. Then she started banging away on the laptop, exploring the Druze, determined to find out everything she could about the single thread that seemed to lead anywhere close to Scarlett.

  * * *

  WHEN KIM’S PHONE RANG, she lifted her head groggily from her desk. She’d fallen asleep on her notes, her laptop pushed out of the way, its battery drained. Light poured through the windows, and for a moment, she panicked, wondering if she’d missed a shift. Then she remembered that she wasn’t due in until the evening, which was the excuse she’d given herself for staying up most of the night doing research.

  She grabbed the phone and managed a groggy “Hello.”

  “Kim.” In that one short syllable, Kim recognized Kyle’s voice—Kyle’s unhappy voice.

  “Well, hello, sunshine,” she said, trying to stave off whatever he was about to tell her. She had a bad feeling that this time it wasn’t going to be something she could solve by tackling him on her couch.

  “You need to come in to the hospital. Now.”

  That didn’t sound good. Kim looked at the clock—it was nine fifteen. Knowing Kyle’s schedule, that meant he’d been there for only twenty minutes.

  What could have happened in the first twenty minutes of the day?

  “I’ll be there in a half hour.”

  “I’d try to make it sooner if I was you. Graver is waiting. We’ll meet in her office.”

  Kim’s stomach dropped. “Miranda Graver?”

  “You know any others?” Kyle said irritably, then hung up without another word.

  As she brushed her teeth, splashed water on her face, and raced to put on a serviceable blouse and black pants, Kim tried to focus on reasons Graver would want to see her. The chief of staff was an imposing woman. She occasionally checked in on her doctors and oversaw diagnoses personally, as she had on the day that Scarlett had come in, usually terrifying the poor interns who stumbled into her path (hell, even the fully trained doctors were terrified of her). The rest of the time she could be seen striding through the halls, trailed by assistants and underlings, usually giving orders, as though on the way to fell an empire.

  Was Kim about to be fired?

  The thought was too awful to consider, and so Kim turned her mind back to Scarlett’s case as she drove. After reading about the Druze last night, she’d looked up the missing persons who’d taken residence as Scarlett’s alters and discovered something shocking: Henry Beaumont had disappeared from his home on precisely the same day that Scarlett had been born, just as Kim’s dad had suggested. It all seemed to match up.

  Maybe taking on that first soul when she was born had somehow made Scarlett’s psyche more receptive, more open to taking on lost souls in the future. Or maybe, possibly, it was pure coincidence. But what if, as she had suggested to Jen Wilcox, Henry was neither alive nor fully gone, but existed in some nether realm in between? What if, as his own life ended, he slipped into another body—a host, a refuge where he could retreat from the terror of his death, where he could find shelter as he waited to move on?

  Nothing that Kim had studied in medical school had prepared her for the possibility of reincarnation, and until recently, she’d rebelled against her father’s wide-ranging and tolerant ideas about mysticism, inexplicable phenomena, and unusual cultural belief systems. It had been a mild rebellion, based on love and mutual respect, but Kim’s attraction to the sciences had at least a little to do with growing up in a home where meditation was practiced with as much fervor as scholarship.

  But things had changed, abruptly and profoundly. Kim had come face-to-face with an actual example of something that until now had been purely theoretical, even to her father.

  At the hospital, she found her usual space taken by an Escalade with Oregon plates and had to park at the very end of the visitor lot. Almost jogging to make up the lost time, she was sweating and frazzled by the time she got to the top floor, where the administrative offices were located.

  As if in reproach, Graver’s secretary looked as though she’d stepped out of Fortune magazine. Dressed in an immaculate tailored jacket and a sophisticated silk blouse, her hair was swept back in a perfect, stylish cut. She gave Kim an icy appraisal before telling her to go on in, that she was expected.

  Kim walked into Dr. Graver’s office to find Kyle standing by the window, arms crossed, staring out over the view of the town below. Graver was typing, staring at her screen over her reading glasses, but as Kim entered, she removed the glasses and set them primly on the desk.

  “Dr. Patterson,” she said, in the impeccably enunciated voice that could strike terror into any resident’s heart. “So good of you to join us. Please, have a seat.”

  Kim did as she was told, and Kyle sat next to her, avoiding her gaze.

  “I’ll come right to the point. Dr. Berman and I have been discussing your latest departures from policy. Please,” she said, holding up a hand to stop Kim from responding. “Let me finish. This is only the last in a series of increasingly concerning violations of hospital code, a code that was constructed with enormous care by physicians who have a great deal more experience than you have. I am aware of your unorthodox approach to treatment, and you may be surprised to know that I admire you for being willing to push past accepted methods in the interest of your patients’ care. However.”

  She leaned forward, emphasizing her words by stabbing at her desk blotter with a pale-polished fingernail. “Our duty to our patients is to balance their care with critical oversight. As far as I can tell, you have acted entirely on your own, and in defiance of your direct supervisor’s orders. Time and again, you have taken actions that put at risk not only your patients but also the entire hospital. You have exposed us to possible legal action of a magnitude that could literally shut us down. In doing so, you have put hundreds of your colle
agues’ jobs at risk, with no apparent regard for their welfare, or the welfare of their families, or for the other patients who depend on them.”

  Kim longed to protest as Graver ratcheted up the stakes. Surely it was unfair to lay all of this on her; physicians made difficult judgments in hospitals everywhere, every day. But she knew saying anything to defend herself now would only make things worse. She stole a glance at Kyle, but he was staring fixedly ahead, his mouth set in a tight line. Clearly he wasn’t going to have her back here.

  She couldn’t exactly blame him. If Graver found out about their relationship, his job would be in jeopardy, too. And though she knew well that it took two to tango, she had pretty much dragged him onto that particular dance floor.

  “Am I fired?” she asked in a small voice when Graver’s lecture finally ended.

  The corner of Graver’s mouth twitched. “You are on official performance review,” she said crisply. “You can think of it as a form of probation. For the next three months, your work with your patients and your interactions with your colleagues will be closely monitored. You will have regular evaluations and status reports. At the end of this period, I will decide, with the board, whether you will be offered continued employment.”

  Kim opened her mouth to thank her, but Graver cut her off. “In addition, I want you to take the next two weeks off. When you return, the three of us will meet again to discuss a performance plan and develop concrete benchmarks. That will give me, Dr. Berman, and some of your other colleagues time to put together a strategy to save your career. Because let me be straight with you, Dr. Patterson—it’s make-or-break time for you. If you fail here, I doubt there’s any hospital in the country that’s going to welcome you. So I want you to use these next two weeks to think very carefully about your priorities and how you might finally learn to work within a system designed to serve and heal.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in. “I see,” Kim said, face aflame. She slowly stood up on shaking legs. “Thank you for your time.”