Incarnate Read online

  Twenty-four hours ago, Zack had been working hard to keep his faith in Scarlett, and Kim. But his trust in Kim had shattered when he learned that she wasn’t exactly who she’d said she was. And now, that erosion of trust was spreading to encompass Scarlett, too.

  One thing was certain, at least: he and Kim were finished.

  Zack was not a man who made the same mistake twice.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Kim didn’t sleep well. The twists and turns of Scarlett’s case were challenging enough, and it had been extremely difficult to stay detached and professional during the interview with the Henry alter, hearing about the horrors he’d endured.

  Then, there was Kim’s frustration that Kyle hadn’t fought to get her back to work yet, considering the revelations about Scarlett’s condition. She felt she deserved a ticker-tape parade, not the radio silence that was still in effect. The fact that she was still on suspension triggered feelings of shame and self-criticism that had plagued her childhood and teenage years. The fact that she’d been involved with her boss now seemed like more than a simple error in judgment. And the long, empty day with nothing to do but mull it over and over and over certainly hadn’t helped matters.

  Plus, there was what had happened with Zack. After spending what she considered to have been a pretty spectacular night together, he hadn’t called or even texted. Another woman—someone without Kim’s history—might be able to let that go, and not look for reasons to take it personally. Instead, Kim found herself wondering what she did wrong. Had she been too aggressive? Was he frustrated that she wouldn’t let him see her naked in the light? Maybe he, in fact, knew the troubling reason why.

  Falling into bed with Zack had felt suspiciously like the first giddy foray into falling for him, which was something she hoped to prevent. After the Kyle breakup, she knew she needed to do some work on herself first: she had too many skeletons in the closet, too many barriers, too many scars.

  She was tempted to call her parents, or maybe just get on a plane and go home to Massachusetts for a few days, but after her humbling exit from her last job, she couldn’t bear to tell them the truth about her suspension.

  The residency in San Diego had come to an abrupt end—a firing disguised by the lawsuit-leery HR department as a mutual agreement—when Kim had taken a patient off a course of medication that was causing a host of dangerous side effects. Unlike the hospital, which encouraged the distribution of pills like they were Tic Tacs after a garlicky dinner—all to up their bottom line—Kim felt that, often, overmedication concealed the symptoms without actually improving the health of the sufferer. Kim was fearful that her patient was showing suicidal ideation, and chose not to follow her supervisor’s recommendation. She took her patient off the pills, and he did improve, but not before his condition became temporarily worse.

  She’d known it was a risk—just as she knew it was a risk to pursue treatment of Scarlett Hascall.

  She finally fell into a deep and dreamless sleep in the early hours of the morning. Waking when the sun was already high in the sky, she felt groggy and disoriented. She made coffee and sat down with her notes on Scarlett’s treatment, more to distract herself than anything, and then she went online to see if there were any new developments in the various missing-persons and murder cases.

  There was a heartbreaking photo of Henry Beaumont’s parents kneeling at his graveside during his re-internment service, but no comment from the authorities concerning arrests in his case. Which meant they still didn’t have enough on Sullivan to press charges or release an official statement. Damn. And there was nothing at all new in Isabel’s case. A small item in the local online paper mentioned that George DeWitt, a local hunter, had been missing for nearly three weeks. The article quoted his wife as saying, “He gets a wild hair now and then, but he’s never been gone this long before.” When asked why she didn’t report him missing for over two days, she responded, “I wasn’t missing him until then.”

  Kim clicked over to the site that friends of the Wilcox family had set up initially to communicate news of the search, and later to support her parents and to share memories of Izzi. The latest posts by her friends featured photos from Izzi’s senior trip to Seattle, laughing teenage girls linking arms and making faces, standing in front of the Space Needle. They looked so innocent, girls on the brink of womanhood, with their whole futures in front of them.

  Something had made Isabel turn away from the safety and security of her family, her friends, her seemingly happy childhood. Kim wondered if there was an untreated mood disorder in Isabel’s past, perhaps a struggle with untreated attention deficit that had led to frustration and poor performance in school. None of these things necessarily made a person more prone to self-destructive life choices, but the co-occurrence was high enough that Kim wished she could have talked to the girl when she was alive. Perhaps if Izzi had tried to get real help earlier, she wouldn’t have been attracted to the criminal types she associated with at the end. Perhaps, if she could gain Izzi’s trust now, through Scarlett, Kim could discover who had killed her—and, in turn, help her to move on, for both her sake and Scarlett’s.

  But maybe there was still a way. If she could “talk” to the Isabel alter through Scarlett, focusing on her past this time rather than the murder itself, maybe she could dig up something that the police could use. Maybe her mistake had been to focus solely on her death. Instead, she needed to ask Izzi about her life before, any secrets she may have had that could shed light on the case.

  Energized at the prospect of this new approach, Kim quickly showered and dressed. She would head over to the police station and talk to Zack first: if she could get him to share some key information from the case, she’d have a jumping-off point for a session with Isabel. And if she was able to glean any information about how he was feeling about their night together, well, that would only be a side benefit.

  As Kim drove to the station, she felt a measure of relief. There was a time long ago when, overwhelmed by the various problems she both encountered, and created, in her life, she would end up cycling through a manic episode—acting out, self-sabotage, even resorting to hurting herself, which she hadn’t done since she was a teenager. This time, she’d managed to stay the course and interrupt the stressors near the start, in time to chart a better path. Her treatments with Scarlett had worked. She was hopeful that this progress would translate into forgiveness at the hospital. If she could prove to the review board that her treatments with Scarlett had not only set her on a path to be cured but also that the police department apprehended a killer because of Kim’s efforts. . . . If only they could arrest Albert Sullivan already.

  Most important, if she could get Zack a solve on the Isabel Wilcox case, maybe another one of Scarlett’s alters would leave the poor teenager alone. A girl could hope.

  When she arrived at the station, she gave the receptionist a cheery wave, along with a box of cherry Danish for the officers, and strolled back to Zack’s cubicle. He was turned away from her, but she enjoyed the view of his broad shoulders and strong neck, which, if she wasn’t mistaken, bore a few scratches for which she was responsible.

  “Hey there,” she ventured. Zack spun around in his chair.

  He did not look happy to see her. He looked like hell, in fact, his face drawn and exhausted.

  “Um . . . is this a bad time?” Kim said.

  Zack ran his hand over his face and sighed. “What are you doing here?”

  Kim tried to respond, but suddenly the confidence she’d felt in the car drained out of her. It looked like she had her answer about Zack: he looked plagued with regrets, and bent on shutting her out—of course he was, he was a by-the-book kind of guy, and she was a player in a case that mattered to him. “I . . . I think I’ll just go.”

  “No, wait. Kim.”

  Slowly, she turned. Zack stood and stepped closer, regarding her with what looked like pity. What the hell was going on?

  “About the other night . . .” she ve
ntured.

  “I’d rather not talk about that right now. I appreciate you stopping by . . .”

  Kim forced a smile. “Yeah, I could tell by the warm welcome.” He didn’t answer. “You do know that I’m a psychiatrist, which gives me mad skills reading body language and voice cues. Call me crazy, but you’re either not really appreciative that I stopped by, or you just got a phone call that your dog died.”

  “I don’t have a dog.”

  He stepped closer to her, so that prying ears couldn’t hear. “I think we need to formally agree that your involvement in my case—in any of my cases—is over.”

  “What happened?” Kim asked, her voice quavering.

  He stared at her for a moment, then walked into the interrogation room. While he didn’t ask her to follow, the request was implied.

  After he closed the door, he seemed to relent a little, dropping the rigid pose. “Oh hell, Kim, I wasn’t even going to say anything. But I saw something in your apartment.”

  Kim had no idea where he was going with this. She decided to deflect. “It’s a back massager. I know what it looks like, but . . .”

  He didn’t smile. “It wasn’t on purpose, it fell off the dresser. A file from the Massachusetts Department of Children and Family, with your picture . . . and a different name.”

  Kim was still. She couldn’t move. Not by choice.

  “After I saw it, I did a little looking—and I’m sorry about that, I shouldn’t have pried—but I think it’s pretty clear you’ve got some . . . issues. For one thing, you weren’t born in Acton like you’ve claimed.”

  Kim felt woozy. “I . . . was. But it’s complicated.”

  Zack held up a hand. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “I’m sure it is. And I’m not asking you to explain yourself. But I can’t—I don’t need that kind of . . . complication in my life. I’ve got a zero tolerance policy for dishonesty.”

  A tear spilled over Kim’s cheek, to her horror. She brushed it angrily away. “I never lied to you.”

  Zack shrugged. He seemed almost sad. “I won’t say anything to anyone else, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m not—but look, you’ve got to trust me. At least where Scarlett is concerned.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “Just because there are things in my past that you don’t understand, that you can’t understand—please don’t give up on Scarlett. None of this is her fault. Please, Zack.” Kim hated how quickly she’d lost control of this situation. But she couldn’t let her problematic past color Zack’s view of Scarlett—not when he and his team had so much power over the girl’s future.

  He shook his head slowly. “What you’re asking . . . I made a mistake the other night. I should have known better. I do my job to the best of my ability, every day, and in order to do that I need to follow my instincts. Not get distracted.”

  “Is that what the other night was? Just a distraction? That’s what I am? A distraction?”

  “Kim.” He took a step closer, so they were only inches apart. “You’re not listening to me. I didn’t want to discuss this with you, but you aren’t giving me a choice. I can’t let you anywhere near this case because you’re not credible. I know about your past, okay? I have access to records that the public doesn’t.”

  Kim felt the color drain from her face.

  “I know that when you were six, carjackers murdered your parents right in front of you; I know you escaped by hiding in the backseat. I know you saw the entire thing.”

  “You don’t know anything.” She wasn’t able to control the tears now.

  “And I know that the experience supposedly caused a . . . split in your psyche.”

  “Supposedly?”

  He took a deep breath. “I read the psychiatrist’s case notes, Kim, the ones that were included in your DCF file.”

  No. Kim felt an absurd urge to put her hands over her ears to keep him from saying the rest. How could she have been so stupid? He was a cop. An investigator. Following the trail to the truth was what he did, who he was. Getting involved with him was asking for trouble.

  She took a deep breath. “Those records . . .”

  “They’re sealed. I know. I had no right to read them. What I did was wrong, Kim, and I apologize. It’s just that—what we did, the feelings I had for you . . .” He seemed to be battling with himself, searching for the right words. “I had to know the truth,” he finally said. “To protect myself.”

  “To protect yourself from what?” Kim cried, knowing she shouldn’t say another word. That she should turn around and go, instead of trying to convince Zack that she’d done nothing wrong. But his words had sent her back in time, to a memory her own psyche had tried to help her never to revisit again.

  Those moments in the car—less than a minute, start to finish—would eventually transform her life forever. Her father whispering for Joselyn to “stay down” as two men approached their car in the dark. The driver’s door opening, her dad saying, “Hey—” That was as far as he’d gotten before the man punched him in the throat. Her mother screaming. They’d killed her first; the other man had simply reached through her open window and shot her in the face. Through her right eye. The bullet exited the side of her head, the slug coming to a stop inside the foam of the seat next to her bowed head. Her father had fought back, but only for a second, perhaps because he realized that his struggle might reveal his daughter in the backseat. He took two shots to the back of the head. And Kim, terrified, could only cower on the floor of the car.

  The two men had pulled her parents’ bodies from the car and tossed them to the street like bags of trash. All she remembered of the men were the ski masks they wore, their angry eyes. Their silence as they drove faster and faster through the light midmorning traffic. She learned later that they’d sped south on 495, and for reasons that were never known, pulled off near Milford and dumped the car in a parking lot of a vacant auto parts store. Kim had stayed in the car for hours before a man out walking his dog heard her crying through the open windows.

  “If you read my files,” she said shakily, trying to regain her composure, “you know that four years after they were killed I had a . . . a breakdown. But I received excellent treatment and I’m completely—”

  “You suffered a psychotic split, Kim,” Zack interrupted. “It was right there in the files. The person you were, ‘Joselyn,’ disappeared forever. Kim is an alternate personality.”

  “My name is Kimberly Patterson.”

  “You’ve suffered from dissociative identity disorder all along.”

  “It’s not . . . it’s not like that.” Kim heard a rushing in her ears, an overwhelming urge to run, to close her eyes, to hide. “I healed. I learned. I studied everything that has ever been written about DID, damn it. I’m . . .”

  Normal. The word mocked her from a host of memories—all the taunts she’d suffered as a child, all the pained rejections when she tried to tell the truth later. The boyfriend who called her a freak when he learned the truth. The supposed best friend who shared Kim’s deepest secret with other girls behind her back. Always, always, reminding Kim that she would never be like everyone else.

  Despite the loving parents who adopted her, the caring professionals, the hundreds of hours of therapy; despite becoming an expert in the field herself, a champion for the neuro-atypical, there was a part of Kim that longed to be normal.

  Zack was shaking his head. “Who is Joselyn Miller?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Does she come back? Will I meet her one day?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone! Your fucking name is Joselyn Miller!”

  “I don’t know who that is. I’ve always been Kim Patterson,” Kim insisted.

  “And I’ve always been James Bond.”

  “I didn’t know you were so . . . cruel.”

  There was a long moment as Zack just stared at Kim . . . at Joselyn . . . at whoever the fuck he thought
she was.

  Finally, Kim shrugged. She had been to this dance before. “Listen, I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Kim, it doesn’t matter that you’ve learned to manage your condition,” Zack was saying, as if he could read her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter that I . . . care for you. Given what I found out, I can’t let you anywhere near this case. Your point of view is just too compromised.”

  “Please . . . please just listen to me.”

  “What about these, Kim?” Zack said gently, touching her arm, sliding her sleeve up to reveal the very faint scars underneath. The ones he’d no doubt seen the other night, even in the dark.

  “I haven’t . . . cut . . . since I was a teenager.” She wanted to defend herself against the conclusions Zack had drawn, but it was all happening too fast, and she’d come here expecting something very different. She wasn’t prepared, and now that the lid had been opened on the past, painful memories were slamming her faster than she could cope.

  “I was wondering why you wouldn’t undress in front of me in the light. Why you insisted we stay under the covers in the morning. There are other scars. No?”

  She stared him down, defiantly. Yes, of course, yes.

  “Look,” Zack said softly. “I deplore what happened to you. I’ve devoted my life to protecting people from horrors like what you and your family went through. But I can’t change who I am. If things were different . . . if your past wasn’t all twisted up in this case, if you’d been honest from the start—”

  “If I’d been honest, there wouldn’t have been a start!”

  He continued on over her. “—and I didn’t have all these unsolved murders on my hands—” He cleared his throat. “I think you’re special, Kim, and the other night was . . . but we can’t do this. I can’t do this.”

  Kim backed away from him, bumping into the next desk. She couldn’t get away fast enough. But she had a feeling that no matter how fast she ran, the past would never loosen its grip.