Denial by Keith Ablow Read Free Book Online

reach everything, but I was careful to stop without touching what she needed me to touch.  She took hold of my wrist and urged it toward her.  I let my finger brush the dampness of her cotton panties.  "Please..." she whispered.  I took a pinch of cotton in my fingers and pulled up on it.  She gasped.  I stroked the skin surrounding the cloth.  I pictured her biting her lower lip and started to work myself faster.  She was pleading with me.  "Please, please, please..."  My rhythm faltered.  I pressed against the wall and closed my eyes as my body went on autopilot, expelling Rachel from my mind.
    I turned into the shower stream and washed the hair back off my face.  The coke was kicking in, and my thoughts were coming clearer and faster.  I needed to get inside Westmoreland's head.  I didn't have five years to psychoanalyze him in order to unearth the roots of his psychosis.  I didn't even have the couple of weeks it would take for Thorazine to quiet his voices.  Emma Hancock would never go for it, but I knew that Amytal was the only answer.
    Amytal dissolves the mind's defenses and frees up traumatic memories.  I'd first used it as a psychiatry resident at the Boston V.A. Medical Center.  We were one of three national referral centers for the worst of the post-traumatic-stress-disorder patients, ‘treatment failures’ left over from Vietnam who'd witnessed atrocities so abominable they still couldn't remember them, let alone speak of them.  The starkest evidence of what they had been through was their suicide attempts.  Every other day someone was trying to off himself with whatever could be had — a plastic fork, an exposed wire, a pair of pants looped like a noose over a bathroom stall.  Like surgeons lancing boils, we injected patient after patient with Amytal and listened as their suppressed horror seeped out.  At least then the camouflage was stripped away; we knew the ghosts we were battling.
    Giving Westmoreland an injection of Amytal wouldn't cure him of schizophrenia, but it might overcome his resistance to describing what had happened in the Lynn woods.
    I turned off the hot water and held my breath.  Whenever Kathy and I showered together, we'd make a contest of who could stand the cold spray longer.  She almost always won because her pain threshold was much higher than mine — higher, really, than anyone I'd ever met.  I've never seen her use so much as an aspirin, even the time she smacked the wall after one of my indiscretions and broken two fingers.  I leaned back against the marble and tried to imagine her naked in front of me, snickering like an imp while I shivered.  Where, I wondered, would she be showering this morning?
     
    *            *            *
     
    I got to the station at six-fifteen.  Tobias Lucey, another recruit to the force, was on duty in the little teller's booth a the door to the lockup.  He was reading the Boston Herald .  "I'm Dr. Clevenger," I interrupted.  "Mr. Westmoreland's psychiatrist."
    He glanced at me, then went back to reading.  "I'd need a clearance from Captain Hancock to let you in."  He was wispy for a cop, and his voice had arrogance in it.
    "I know you just started," I smiled.  "I visit suspects all the time."
    "I got no notification," he said.  He turned a page.
    "You think I'd come down here this early just to bust your balls?"
    He finally looked me in the eyes.  "Westmoreland gets no visitors.  He's on special precautions.  He attacked someone yesterday."
    "I know that.  Do you know how I know?"
    He didn't respond.
    "Because I'm the one he attacked.  And he could go off again if I don't get in there with his medication."  I held up a vial of Amytal.
    "I can't let you visit anyone until Captain Hancock gets here.  No exceptions."  He glanced at his watch, then went back to reading the paper.  "She'll be in by seven-thirty."
    "Well, then.  I'll just leave this with you," I said.  I slid the Amytal