F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 (41 page)

           
The reception area he knew from this
morning. He went into the consultation room. He dearly would have loved to turn
on the lights but he was afraid lighted windows might draw attention from
someone on the street. Maybe he was being overly cautious, but he was taking
every precaution he could think of.

           
Nothing in the consultation room, at
least nothing he was looking for. He wanted the files. There was a flush oak
door behind the desk. He opened it and was faced with three more doors. The
middle turned out to be a small private bathroom.

           
Thank
God
! he thought as he stepped in to relieve his aching bladder.
Never should have had that third coffee
.

           
The room behind the left hand door
was lined with file cabinets. And it was windowless. He flipped on the light
and pulled on the handle of the nearest drawer. It wouldn't budge. Same with
all the others. Every cabinet was locked.

           
Ed spent a few moments cursing Dr.
Gates with every four-, ten-, and twelve-letter word he knew. He'd never
imagined he might run into locked files inside a locked office.

           
As he turned to make his way back to
the consultation room, he noticed that the third door was standing ajar. He
pushed it open and shone his flashbeam inside.

           
Another windowless room, only empty.
But the walls… they were covered with fabric. Thick fabric. The floors and
ceilings too. He stepped inside and checked the inner surface of the door. That
was covered too. He touched it. Soft. Then he realized where he was.

           
In a padded cell.

 
 

           
Kara hung up the phone. She was
grateful that Rob cared enough to call and check on her, but was uncomfortable
with the implication that she needed someone to watch over her. Or was she
being too analytical?

           
She lay back in bed and waited for
the Halcion to work.

           
No
dreams tonight. Please, no dreams.

           
She wasn't up to any sex tonight,
real or imagined. Peace, that was all she wanted. And a reasonably normal life,
one in which she would feel safe sleeping in the same house as her daughter.

           
Actually, she was spending more time
than usual with Jill these past five days. And Jill, with the adaptability of a
nine year old, had been quite content to go to parks and places like the Museum
of Natural History when her mother was around, and watch the VCR when she
wasn't. Today Kara had tried to watch a Disney movie with Jill. But it was
Freaky Friday
, the one in which Jodie
Foster switches bodies with her mother. It struck Kara as too much like that
damn crazy note. She'd had to leave the room.

           
And her book… her book was going
nowhere while the deadline kept creeping up. She didn't want to blow this. She
was counting on that second payment on the advance. But more than that, she
believed in her book, knew it would be an important contribution to the women's
movement. If only she could get back to work on it.

           
Tomorrow… she'd force herself to
work on it tomorrow…

           
Right now she felt sleep creeping
over her. She blanked her mind and welcomed it.

           
Rob sat in his car, smoking and
sipping Dunkin' Donuts coffee as he watched Gates' townhouse. He was waiting
for the lights to go out so he could call it a night.

           
Rob had been asking around about
Gates. Nobody knew too much about him. Seemed to be a real homebody. Took
vacations from his practice but never left town. No social life that anyone
knew of. His world seemed to consist of his home and his office, and
occasionally a trip to the hospital. Gates could walk to all three: a few
blocks downtown on Seventh Avenue and he was at his office. A few blocks
further down and he was at St. Vincent's on Eleventh Street in the village.
That was his world. Family dead, no friends, no close ties to the medical
community. The guy lived in a vacuum.

           
Actually, he lived in a Victorian
townhouse. Rob knew the type well: four floors and a basement. Once upon a
time, before the recent regentrification of Chelsea, he had lived in one of
these townhouses, two blocks down on Nineteenth. He had been a rookie then and
had been rooming with Tony Morano, a friend from the Academy. But they had shared
one of seven apartments in a subdivided building just like Gates'. Two
apartments per floor and one in the basement.

           
Gates had a whole townhouse to
himself. That took bucks. Big bucks.

           
Rob flipped the cigarette butt out
the window.

           
Come
on, Lazlo Gati. Lock up your castle and go to bed.

           
Just then the front door opened and
Gates came down the steps. He started toward Seventh Avenue, just as he had
last night. He was heading back to his office.

           
Muttering under his breath, Rob
started his car and prepared to follow.

           
Ed flipped the light switch in the
padded cell. A fluorescent tube flickered to life behind a metal grille in the
ceiling. There was no furniture, just the door, four walls, floor and ceiling,
all padded.

           
It was the damnedest thing. Whoever
heard of a padded cell in a psychiatrist's office? What for? In case someone
went berserk during a session? Ed smiled. Maybe it was for after they got the
doc's bill.

           
Seriously, though, what kind of
people did this Dr. Gates treat that he needed a padded cell?

           
And who cared, anyway? This wasn't
helping him help Kara.

           
As Ed turned to go, he noticed a row
of buttons on the inside of the door. He recognized it immediately as an
electronic combination lock. Six push-button numbers, and a "Lock"
button.

           
It struck him as odd that there
would be a "Lock" button on the inside. He could see providing a way
to let yourself out should you get locked in accidentally, but why would you
want to lock yourself
in
here?
Weirder and weirder.

           
But again, this wasn't what he had
come here for. He turned off the light and returned to the consultation room,
making sure to leave the door closed behind him, just as he had found it.

           
It was time to get out of here.

           
He entered the waiting area and
closed the consultation room door behind him. As he started toward the outer
door, the glowing blip on the computer screen caught his eye.

           
I
wonder
…

           
He slipped behind the desk and
looked at the screen. One word glowed in the upper left next to the blinking
cursor.

           
READY?

           
Ed typed in YES and hit the Return
key.

           
The screen beeped and replied with:
CODE?

           
Oh, sure. Didn't that figure.
Everything else was locked up tight, so why shouldn't Gates have access codes
for his computer files.

           
For the hell of it, Ed typed in
GATES and hit Return. He was rewarded with:

           
INELIGIBLE COMMAND

           
CODE?

           
Ed tried again with LAWRENCE, LARRY,
MD, NUTS and made a final stab with SHIT. Each was answered with the same
message as the first. He was about to give up when he remembered that reference
book in the library, the one used by all shrinks to code their diagnoses. The
DSM-III-R. He racked his brain trying to remember the code for Multiple
Personality Disorder. He'd read it so many times he could almost picture it in
his mind. In fact, he
could
picture
it. And the code number was 300.14. He punched that in.

           
The screen beeped and a list of
names popped up.

           
Now
we're cookin!

           
He hit the Scroll button and
searched for "Wade" as the list of names slid up the screen.

           
Rob pulled into the curb half a
block down from the Kramer building and waited for Gates to catch up. The only
way this sort of move could backfire was if Rob had guessed wrong and Gates was
not going to his office.

           
Nope. There he came. Striding along
like he was out for his morning constitutional.

           
Crap. Another long night.

           
Ed was flabbergasted. He hadn't
actually counted, but a big part of Gates' practice was diagnosed as Multiple
Personality Disorder. All were women, and most were in their twenties and
thirties. The books Ed had reviewed had said the disorder was rare. If that was
true, Dr. Gates had tapped into a rich vein of multiple personalities.

           
But that wasn't all that had
disturbed Ed. He had scrolled through Kara's file and then Kelly's. They'd been
very similar. That was to be expected, he guessed, what with their being twins
with the same disorder, but a number of paragraphs appeared word for word in
both files. That bothered him. He picked a few other names at random from the
list.

           
They all had the same psychiatric
history. Classic Multiple Personality Disorder. Their histories were described
each time in almost the exact same wording. It was almost as if Dr. Gates were
using a computer boilerplate method for his medical charts, the way Ed's legal
department used computers to piece together the paragraphs of various
contracts.