Death Match

Lindsay Thorpe’s test results came first. Lash paused a moment to imagine her in the examination room. It would be quiet, comfortable, free of distraction. The test administrator would be sitting slightly behind her; face-to-face examinations were to be avoided. Lindsay Thorpe would not see the inkblots until the moment the examiner laid them upon the table before her.

The ground rules of the test were as guarded as the blots themselves. Any question she asked would be met with a preformulated response. Lindsay would not know that everything she said about the blots, relevant or not, would be written down and scored. She would not know that her responses were being timed with a silent watch: the quicker her responses, the better. She would not know that she was supposed to see more than one thing in each card; seeing only one was suggestive of neurosis. And she wouldn’t know that — though the test administrator would deny it if asked — each card did in fact have a “normal” response. If you saw something original, and could justify it, you’d get points for creativity. But seeing something nobody else saw in an inkblot usually implied psychosis.

Lash turned to the first blot. Below it, the administrator had recorded Lindsay’s responses verbatim.

There were two steps to viewing each card: a free-association phase, where the subject stated his or her first impressions of the card, and an inquiry phase, where the examiner would ask the subject to justify their impressions. Lash noticed, from the arrow marked on the third free association, that Lindsay had on her own volition turned the card upside down and kept it that way. That was a sign of independent thinking: if you asked whether you could turn the card over, you got a lower score. Lash recognized this blot, and Lindsay had hit most of the typical responses: a mask, a bat. No doubt the examiner would have noted Lindsay’s reference to the devil, an extraneous remark that would need to be scored.

The next sheet in the pile was the examiner’s scoring sheet for this first card:

Lash quickly reviewed the way Lindsay’s four responses had been typed and scored. The examiner had done a thorough job. Despite the years since he’d last administered a Hirschfeldt test, the arcane codes came back to him: B stood for a response encompassing the whole blot; D for a response to a commonly noted detail. Human and animal forms, anatomy, nature, and the rest were all noted. In all four responses, Lindsay’s form factors had been marked OK: a good sign. She saw more images in the white spaces than usual, but not enough to cause any concern. In the “specials” category — where examiners listed deviant verbalizations and other no-nos — Lindsay received only one mark, MOR, for morbid content: no doubt for her characterization of the image as a “devil mask” and “scary.”

He moved on to the second blot:

Again, the examiner had carefully listed Lindsay’s responses.

Again, Lash recognized this blot. Lindsay Thorpe’s responses were all within normal.

Lash looked back idly at the blot. Suddenly, he stiffened. Completely unexpectedly, a series of associations flashed through his own mind as he stared: a quickly spreading sea of red across a white carpet; a dripping kitchen knife; the gri

God damn Roger Goodkind and his curiosity, Lash thought as he put the blot quickly aside.

He leafed brusquely through the other twenty-eight blots, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Lindsay was characterized as a well-adjusted, intelligent, creative, rather ambitious person. He knew this already. The faint hope that had again stirred within him began to fade.

There was still one more item to examine. He turned to the structural summary page, where all Lindsay Thorpe’s scores were put through a series of ratios, frequency analyses, and other algebraic convolutions to determine particular personality traits. One of these sets of traits was known as “special indications,” and it was to this Lash turned his attention.

The special indications were red flags. If more than a set number of responses fell under a specific indicator — SZ for schizophrenia, for example — it was flagged positive. One of the special indications, S-Cluster, measured suicide potential.

Lindsay Thorpe’s S-Cluster showed negative; in fact, she was coded as displaying zero out of eight possible suicide indicators.

With a sigh, Lash put Lindsay’s results aside and picked up her husband’s.

He had just finished ascertaining that Lewis Thorpe’s suicide cluster was as low as Lindsay’s when a beep sounded from his jacket pocket. Lash drew out his cell phone. “Yes?”

“Dr. Lash? It’s Edwin Mauchly.”

Lash felt mild surprise. He didn’t give out his cell number to anybody, and he certainly didn’t recall giving it to Eden.

“Where are you right now?” Mauchly’s voice sounded different: clipped, brusque.

“Greenwich. Why?”

“It’s happened again.”

“What’s happened?”

“There’s been another one. Another double-suicide attempt. A supercouple.”

“What?” Surprise vanished beneath a wave of disbelief.

“The couple’s name is Wilner. Larchmont residents. They’re en route to Southern Westchester now. From your location, you should be able to make it in—” there was a brief pause “—fifteen minutes. I wouldn’t waste any time.”

And the line went dead.

NINE

Southern Westchester County Medical Center was a cluster of brick buildings on the outskirts of Rye, just over the New York border. As Lash screeched into the ambulance entrance, he could see that the ER was unusually quiet. Just two vehicles sat together in the shadows beyond the glass admitting doors. One was an ambulance; the other a long, low, hearse-like vehicle bearing the seal of the county medical examiner. The rear doors of the ambulance were open, and as Lash trotted across the blacktop he glanced toward it. An EMS technician was at work with a bucket and sanitizer, swabbing the interior. Even from twenty yards Lash caught the coppery tang of blood.

The smell brought him up short, and he glanced hesitantly up at the building’s dark-red bulk. He had not been inside an emergency room in three years. Then, recalling the urgency in Mauchly’s voice, he forced himself forward once again.

The waiting area seemed subdued. Half a dozen people sat in plastic chairs, staring vacantly at walls or filling out forms. A small knot of policemen stood in one corner, talking among themselves in low tones. Quickly, Lash headed for the door marked SQUAD ROOM, opened it, felt along the wall for the button that opened the automatic doors into the emergency room.

The doors whispered open onto a far different scene. Several orderlies were at work, scrambling with equipment trays. A nurse walked by, liters of blood clutched in her arms. Another followed with a crash cart. Three EMS technicians were standing at the nurses’ station, not speaking. They looked dazed. Two were still wearing pale-green gloves heavily smeared with blood.

Lash sca

The resident’s eyes were on a metal clipboard in his hands, and he didn’t bother looking up at Lash. As Chen passed, Lash stuck out an arm. “Alfred. How’s it going?”