Mind Games (23 page)

“I think we should review the magazine articles first and try to make sense of Dana’s comments.” She slipped off his lap and reached into the box, hefting up a stack of magazines that she dropped onto the coffee table. “I have to warn you.” She picked up Dana’s journal and continued, “The writings in his journal are disturbing.” She handed him the journal and then picked up the magazine on the top of the stack before she sat down on the floor, crossing her legs.

“Have you read all of it?” he asked.

“Only the first and last entries.” She leaned back against the palms of her hands with the magazine faceup on her legs. Derrick squinted down at the title.

“And?”

“And I think you need to read them in that order too.”

“Why?”

“Dana suggests that if we can locate brain scans taken of him, we’ll know who is responsible for his suicide.”

Derrick turned the first page of Dana’s journal and started to read. He glanced up to see Sparrow looking at him. She still hadn’t opened the magazine on the tops of her thighs. When he finished the last entry, he said, “What’s the name of the hospital your dad took you to?”

“Our Lady of Sorrow.”

“I’m a doctor. I can get us access to the unit, but I think we need to call Tony before we go over there.”

“Okay, but I need to be the one making that call.”

A determined look spread across her face.

“Are you sure?”

She looked from him to the magazine resting on her lap. “Yes.” She shoved the magazine onto the floor and went to the dining room table to retrieve her cell phone. Tony’s business card was still lying there where he had left it the other day. She punched in the number and waited for him to answer. Derrick came to her side. He put his hand against the small of her back, offering her emotional support. He couldn’t fathom how difficult this call was for her.

“I think my father might be abusing his power as a behavioral therapist. The stuff your brother left for me, well, you need to see it. Please call me.”

Her hand was shaking. Derrick took the phone from her and set it on the dining room table. He pulled her next to him.

“I know that wasn’t easy.”

She glanced up at him, but behind the determination in her eyes a single ray of hope seemed to shine through. He hated shattering her optimism. The awareness of her father’s guilt could no longer stay buried deep down inside of her. The ugly truth had slowly surfaced. She had admitted as much to Tony in her voice mail to him.

She turned away from him and went back into the living room, where she settled herself cross-legged on the floor and reached for the magazine she had set aside. Derrick fanned out the magazines on the coffee table, noticing that Dana had taken the time to mar the title
Psychology Today
so that every masthead read
Psycho Today
. He picked up a magazine and opened to the flagged article. He started to read when Sparrow burst out, “I can’t read this.” He took the magazine from her shaking hand. His eyes scanned the page. It was the same article he’d read online.

“To keep these kids emotionally regulated takes severe learning,” says Dr. Von Langley. “With my therapy, using the Theo Effect, they are taught control and their emotional reactions are validated. I help my patients to identify the thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions that make their lives challenging and teach them new ways of thinking and reacting.”

Other experts in the field agree with Dr. Von Langley, who is an advocate of deep meditation and yoga. “These exercises focus the mind and center the body,” says Dr. Von Langley.

Dana’s interpretation: Severe learning to him means exposing me to nightclub strippers, where he paid a handsome price for me to spend time in the champagne room, getting private lap dances while I sipped on hard liquor. I couldn’t “regulate” myself, and the whores doing the dancing allowed me to touch. Why wouldn’t they when he’d given me a wad of bills to stuff in their bloated g-strings? My thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions followed this logic: I thought what I was doing was wrong, but I believed the girls in the strip clubs wanted me to want them. I assumed it was right for me to touch them however, wherever, and whenever I wanted to. He did not try to focus my mind and center my body with yoga and meditation. He would subject me to electroshock therapy, telling me I had a normal brain and should have resisted the temptation. The shock therapy increased as he exposed me to more sexually charged situations, and at that point I couldn’t regulate myself. I needed sex to survive. He could have fried my brain with the shock treatment, and I wouldn’t have stopped.

Derrick looked up from the magazine. He shook his head at her. “I’m sorry.”

She wrung her hands. Her face contorted in a mass of shock and sickness. The truth about her twisted dad was printed in black and white.

“Do psychiatrists still use electroshock therapy?” she asked.

“Yes, they do, it’s called electroconvulsive therapy. Sparrow, I know this is hard, but we’ve got to keep reading before we turn everything over to Tony and let the police conduct a formal investigation.”

Derrick shifted uncomfortably, throwing the magazine down next to him on the couch. He closed his hands over his face, trying to wash his mind of Dana’s revealing commentary, and then went back to the article he’d been reading about Dr. Von Langley’s use of psycho-therapeutic drugs. His heart built up speed in his chest as he read Dana’s thoughtful insight into the doctor’s addiction treatment.

You don’t expose drug addicts to drugs and expect them to refuse their vice. Do addicts go to rehab to be exposed to more drugs and booze? What kind of a person offers drugs to addicts, and then, once they’ve snorted, smoked, and shot up everything within reach, subjects them to punishment? Did he expect them to “Just Say No”? Of course he did, because a person with a normal brain should and could resist the temptation. He never took into consideration that addiction is a disease, not a brain abnormality. He thought he was clever in his methods, mixing drug addicts with sex addicts. Testing their boundaries to see how far they would go to get what they wanted and then punishing them. The drug addicts soon became sex addicts and the sex addicts became drug addicts. What choice did they have? One group was driven by drugs, and so they would sell themselves to the sex addicts holding the drugs; the other group, driven by sex, soon learned the power of drugs and the compounding effect induced when having sex. Ecstasy was the power source to hedonism and became the drug of choice. He made me the sexual deviant I’ve become.

I was not a sex addict. I was an adrenaline junkie. Testosterone powered my system. I was young, out of control, stupid, but I never meant to hurt her. I got carried away. I’m sorry, Jessica.

A ping-pong game of regret and guilt played in Derrick’s gut. He swallowed down the unease. He should have stopped Dana from leaving with her. Derrick took a deep breath and looked up from the magazine. Sparrow was staring blankly into space.

“Did you remember something else?” he asked.

She
faced him with tears in her eyes. “Just because Dana’s attached notes near articles my father had been interviewed for doesn’t mean he’s guilty. He never once comes out and says Dr. Von Langley did this. Do you think he might be referring to someone else? Maybe he’s not trying to point the finger at my father but a colleague?”

He expected her denial—after all, this was her father. But a fifth grader could have figured out that Dana’s commentary pointed directly at her father.

“Put that magazine down and come sit next me. Let’s take a break. We’ll need to get going soon anyway.”

She pushed herself up from the floor and slumped down next to him. Derrick wrapped his arm around her.

“Just relax a minute. I’m going to skim through Dana’s journal and see if I can find something more concrete. But, Sparrow, I’ve got to warn you: when you saw Katie in your vision she told you to ‘stop him,’ and Dana’s final journal entry ends with the same plea. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

“Then you may as well know the day of Dana’s funeral, when I was kneeling in front of his casket, his eyes sprang open and he viciously whispered, ‘Stop him.’ I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, or that I was in some deep state of shock over his death, knowing what I knew about his suicide and feeling guilty for not telling Tony. But he said it: ‘Stop him.’ I’m sure of it.”

He wrapped his other arm around her. Her rising hysteria bubbled. She shook against him.

“I wish you felt like you could have come to me sooner, but I understand your fear of being sent for a psychological evaluation, considering Bring Your Daughter to Work Day was at a mental institution for the criminally insane.”

The light extinguished from her eyes. She shifted against him and looked away. She sat staring at the back of the sofa, leaning against his arm. He reached for the journal on the coffee table, rested it on the top of his leg, and flipped through the pages. A bold heading stopped him short and his blood ran cold.

We buried the body…

I’ve kept secrets all my life. The worst is this. His amateur brain surgeries didn’t cause severe damage until he started experimenting further, and that’s when the first one died. I don’t know who she was or where he’d found her. I just remember her begging me to get her out. It wasn’t until her blood leaked from her skull, and he summoned me to help stop the bleeding. He knew she wouldn’t make it. Her skin turned ghostly white, and her eyes rolled around in their sockets. She grabbed on to my arm and in a hushed whisper she spoke to me before she took her last breath. It wasn’t until years later, when I was haunted by her memory and the sound of her strained voice, that I realized she’d said, “I’m Kat.”

Derrick’s heart stopped. He held on to Sparrow like a life preserver and the journal fell to the floor. His lungs seized. He couldn’t force air into the cavities. The torture Katie must have suffered had to have been unbearable. His mind raced. He was holding on to the woman whose father had murdered his sister. The ping-pong match going on in his stomach turned vicious. A new wave of emotions battled. His other muscles seemed paralytic. He couldn’t blink, move, or speak. Sparrow didn’t notice his state. His frozen arms remained latched around her, but didn’t cling to her for comfort.

“My sister didn’t die that night on the beach.”

She twisted and looked at him. “What?”

“Read this.”

He dropped his heavy arms from around her and strained to reach the floor for the journal. Hot tears stung his eyes. The ping-pong game raged. The urge to wail over her painful death twisted his insides out, and underneath all that sorrow boiled a seething hatred and calculating desire to punish Dr. Von Langley using his own torturous means.

Sparrow had slithered off his lap. She scooted down the couch away from him. She read the journal entry and then turned to meet his glossy eyes filled with sorrow and anger. Her sadness mirrored his, and behind her anguished eyes he saw her guilt. She opened her mouth to speak, but Derrick shook his head. He didn’t want to hear her tell him she was sorry for what her father had done.

“Don’t. Just don’t say anything.”

She pulled her lips together into a tight line and looked away from him.

The ping-pong game raging war in his gut stopped. All at once, nothingness overtook him. Empty. Purged. Spent. Information overload. He dried his eyes. Denial tried to creep in. Katie was dead. His anger returned. Vengeance came next. Both made him happy.

Sparrow sat reading another
Psychology Today
magazine. He admired her perseverance. This couldn’t be easy for her, knowing her father had done such hideous things. Her tenacity impressed him now. And, when the time came, she would testify against her father. He’d make sure of it.

The ruffling of pages broke the silence. She softly whispered, “I’m sorry. My vision was wrong. She must’ve gotten out of the water after we left. All I know is I never saw her again after that day.”

Derrick couldn’t breathe. The thought of retaliation had his heart pounding, and her statement pushed him over the edge. He got up from the couch and went to the front door and pulled it open. The salty ocean breeze quelled him. Helped him think.

How much evidence would he need to force a search and seizure of the Von Langley estate? If Dr. Von Langley kept records of his research, and Derrick was certain he would have, it was possible they could link him to his sister’s death. His gut told him they would find CT scans at Our Lady of Sorrow ordered by Dr. Von Langley, and other records, because Dr. Von Langley would have presumed the mental institution the perfect hiding place for his work. He never counted on one of his patients leaving an evidence trail, or for his daughter to recover her memory.

Detective Tony Sargent’s cell phone vibrated inside his pants pocket. Assistant District Attorney Belinda Henriquez shot him a scathing look when he reached for it. He ignored the jumping phone, focusing his attention back on Judge Justin Thaylor’s serious-looking face. The trickle of sunlight behind the judge cast a halo glow around the top of his shiny head. His round brown eyes darkened and then narrowed at Belinda. He tilted his rotund head down and looked up at her from under the eaves of his winged brows in a lame attempt at intimidation.

Not much roused Henriquez. She had taken some licks as ADA but earned the respect of cops and judges alike. Tony appreciated the hard look she cast back at the judge, made all the more severe by the tight schoolmarm bun she forced her sleek black hair into daily. She wasn’t about to back down. He wondered, who would crack first? Henriquez or Thaylor?

Every so often Tony had caught her working late, clawing at her scalp. Her hair had fallen wildly around the delicate angles of her slender face. He had to admit. She looked pretty and friendly. He understood why she had cultivated a severe look and worked hard at maintaining her stern appearance: hair pulled back, little makeup, business suit, and smart shoes.

“Ms. Henriquez, let me get this straight,” Judge Thaylor said. “You’re asking me for a search warrant for Dr. Theodore Von Langley’s estate based on what?”

Henriquez had gotten to him. Tony was proud of her.

The wooden chair creaked. She leaned forward and handed him the search warrant application. He unfolded the document and then picked up his reading glasses from the desk. When he finished reading, he looked above the narrow oblong glasses perched at the end of his slender nose. His dark eyes shifted from Henriquez to Tony.

“No.” He yanked his glasses off and dropped them onto the desk, rubbing at his eyes. “Bring me more evidence.”

Tony relaxed his stiff posture and placed his forearms on the edge of Judge Thaylor’s cherry wood desk. Perhaps he’d sung her praises too soon. Belinda’s hazel eyes zoomed in on him, cautioning him.

“My brother is dead. How much more evidence do you need to tie him to Dr. Von Langley’s unorthodox practices?”

“Detective, I am truly sorry for your loss, but as Assistant District Attorney Henriquez knows, we can’t issue a warrant on a dead man’s word. However, before I go on, there’s something I need to tell you.” He folded his hands in prayer and drummed his long fingers together. Obviously, he was weighing his words, and then continued, “Your brother attacked my daughter, many years ago. She never quite got over that trauma. Dana was someone she liked and trusted. If it weren’t for Dr. Von Langley, she might have never overcome her fear of people. Do you have any idea how difficult it was for her trust anyone again?”

It was a rhetorical question. Tony didn’t respond, thinking offering an apology on behalf of his brother was futile.

“What about the evidence in my brother’s house?” he asked.

“Dr. Von Langley is an upstanding member of our community. I can’t authorize a search warrant based on a secret room in your brother’s house and nude photos of women that he took. As for the ‘rice’ treatment, therapists use all sorts of positive and negative reinforcement techniques. Was Dr. Von Langley approved for some such study? He mentions things in the article you brought me that lead me to believe it was accepted by his peers and their governing board.”

“Sir, what about the blog they found on Dana’s computer?” Henriquez interjected.

“Everyone’s a celebrity today, Ms. Henriquez, you know that. It’s a matter of a dead man’s written opinion against Dr. Von Langley’s, whom he never mentions in the blog,” Judge Thaylor said, then directed his attention to Tony. “Find me another blogger who states Dr. Von Langley mistreated him, detective, and who will come forward and testify, or a patient who can substantiate some sort of abuse. I need more than this. It’s all circumstantial.”

Henriquez pushed her chair back and got up. She offered Judge Thaylor her hand. “Thank you, sir. Have a good day.”

All five feet two inches of her hovered next to Tony, but he didn’t vacate the chair. He looked from her to the floor and at her sensible low-heeled shoes that click-clacked every time she entered the squad room.

She nudged his shoulder, then said, “Come on, we’ve taken up enough of Judge Thaylor’s time.”

Judge Thaylor leaned forward, drawing Tony’s attention back to him. Their at-odds eyes met.

“Bring me more evidence, detective.” He paused, turning his eyes to ADA Henriquez. “And then I’ll give you your search warrant.”

“Can I interview your daughter?” Tony asked in a gruff voice, unhappy with the judge’s decision not to grant them the search warrant.

Judge Thaylor retrieved a small square piece of paper from an open metal box on top of his desk then reached for his fountain pen. He scribbled her address on it and handed the slip of paper to him. Tony noted the address and the judge’s initials embossed in gold foil at the top of the paper. Ooh-la-la, fancy. Tony didn’t bother to thank him, and started to rise from the chair.

“I don’t think she’ll help your case. She and Dr. Von Langley got on just fine.”

“You never know, sir. You never know.”

When the door closed behind them, Tony said, “I didn’t know he knew about the night Dana forced himself on Jessica, or that she had been a patient of Dr. Von Langley’s. Do you think he gave up that information because he’s worried Dr. Von Langley might be at fault?”

“Only one way to find out—go ask her.”

Tony nodded and decided to take the stairs. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and listened to the message waiting for him. He raced down the stairs, thinking he needed to talk to Jessica Thaylor first, and Sparrow Von Langley second.

Tony joined the parade of cars on the freeway and headed for Laguna Beach. He hadn’t seen Jessica in years, but according to his smart phone, she’d had a stint on some of the
Law & Order
TV shows and small roles in lesser-known movies. Funny; he seemed to recall Dana telling him she had plans to go to law school. Tony had never seen her on TV or in a movie, not that he got out much. And if he watched TV, he steered clear of cop shows. He lived the real thing.

Big surprise. She lived in a studio apartment on the beach. He raised his fist to rap his knuckles against the door, but before he could, the door swung open and a lanky blonde with glossy, exaggerated lips, a smile as big as a crescent moon, and blinding stars for teeth greeted him. She was wearing skintight jeans, an equally tight white V-neck t-shirt that strained across her double—make that triple—D-sized breasts and curved over her narrow hips. An orange sweater with large black buttons fastened underneath her balloons held on for dear life. The photo his smart phone had brought up of her hadn’t done her justice. She looked like a smarter version of Hollywood’s latest blonde bombshell.

“Ms. Thaylor?” Tony asked.

“Yes, Detective Sargent, I’ve been expecting you. Please, come in.” She sounded smarter and less bubbly too. She stepped back from the door, and Tony entered the small entryway into her place.

He glanced around at the open floor plan, vaulted ceilings with skylights, and simple décor. On the wall next to him hung a pair of masks, comedy and tragedy. “Laugh now, cry later,” he said, looking at the hand-painted faces.

“That’s right. Can I get you something to drink? Sparkling water, iced tea…pick your poison.” She flashed her pearly whites.

“Iced tea.”

He followed her into the dining room area, admiring a corner curio cabinet filled with masquerade masks.

“Nice home. You like to travel?” he asked, curious about the collection.

He turned his attention back to her.

“I call that collection ‘masks from around the world.’” She talked to him from the open kitchen, filling glasses with ice and pouring iced tea from a glass pitcher with sliced lemons and limes floating on top. There was a long pause, and he waited for her to continue. “I don’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look so much like Dana. I’m sorry about your loss. I always liked your brother.”

He nodded in acknowledgment then turned around to look at the masks again.

“Detective?”

She held out a glass filled with iced tea. He took the beverage from her.

“Thank you. Please call me Tony.” He took a drink. His eyes drifted back to the curio cabinet and the black and white mask with cat eyes. An elaborate array of black feathers fanned across the top and purple ribbons streamed down the sides of the empty mask’s face, but he remembered seeing a pair of striking emerald-green eyes filling it. Next to it stood a more masculine-looking version, with purple feathers minus any ribbons. “This is quite a collection.”

“I’ve collected masks from Mexico, Italy, and Carnival in Costa Rica and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Everywhere I go, I look for a mask to add to my collection.”

“Interesting. I gather you’ve talked to your father, so I’ll get straight to the point. How long were you a patient of Dr. Von Langley’s, and did he ever mistreat you?”

“About a year, after the incident, but it was no big deal. I mean, everyone my age at that time had a therapist. You know how it was? Parents.”

“Well, your dad seemed to think you had trust issues.” He watched her face closely, looking for a reaction to his questions.

“Dana and I liked to play games. That night, things went too far. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him I was a virgin. He got really angry with me and told me I was a dick-tease. How would you feel if someone you thought was a friend freaked out on you?”

He didn’t respond to her question. “You’re an actress now, right?”

She smiled, nearly blinding him with her white teeth. “Did you recognize me?”

“Funny thing, not from your work on film but from some still photos.”

The smile wilted from her face, and she followed his eyes to the curio cabinet. He pointed to the pair of matching masks.

“I know my brother was a photographer, but not that day, because you’re both in the picture.”

“I thought you wanted to talk to me about Dr. Von Langley.”

Her friendly attitude had turned a sharp corner.

“Was he the photographer?”

“How’d you get those photos?” She spoke between her gritted teeth. Her smiling green eyes glowed with angry heat. “I was young and stupid. Those photos could ruin my career if they got leaked to the media. Not to mention the embarrassment it would cause my family.”

“How old were you when they were taken?”

Her tall frame slouched. She leaned against a dining room chair. “Sixteen.”

“Who was the photographer?”

She stalled, jingling the ice cubes in the glass. “How do you know that’s Dana in the picture and not someone else?”

“Dana always wore his class ring. It’s in the photo. Who was the photographer?”

She crunched down on a piece of ice, making Tony cringe at the cold pain his teeth would have felt.

“Dr. Von Langley.”

“This is child pornography. You were under the age of eighteen.”

Tony reached for the steno pad and pen in his shirt pocket and then took a seat next to her.

“I need your full statement. I’ll see that you can testify in a judge’s private chambers so this doesn’t ruin your career. We’ll keep your name and family’s name out of the press.”

“I’d appreciate that. As crazy as this might sound, I didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, and I’ve just tried to forget about it after all these years. He said it would help me rebuild my trust, you know, being close to Dana. Dr. Von Langley told me he could sell the photos to magazines. That it was art.” She paused and took a breath. “I’ve always wanted to be an actress. I thought he was trying to help. By then I was desperate to land a role, something, anything. I never wanted to go to law school. I never wanted to go to college. But my dad, he hated the idea of me becoming a cliché. Kids from Crystal Cove weren’t supposed to turn out to be trust fund kids pursuing dreams.”

“Okay, Jessica, I’ll need you to tell me exactly what happened that day. How did he arrange this meeting between you and Dana? And where were you when he took the photos?”

Shame and anger glistened in her eyes. She violently crunched another ice cube.

“I believed him. I thought he was going to help me launch my career first as a model and then an actress. It makes me sick to think he might have sold the photos to some perverts who get off on young kids.”

“Hooray for Hollyweird.”

She glared at him and slammed her glass down on top of the table. “He lied. At least my identity was hidden, until now.”

“I understand. But you can stop him from hurting anyone else. He brainwashed you.”