Projection by Keith Ablow Read Free Book Online Page A

her hand and just stood there in front of her.  I looked out the windows into the darkness.  "One of them was a patient.  A woman close to seventy.  The other one was a psychologist who was there trying to help."
    "How did they die?"
    "Do you follow the papers?"
    "Not much."
    "There's a doctor named Trevor..."
    "Well, everyone follows that ," she said.
    "Right."  Sometimes I forgot how much media attention the case had generated.  "Trevor Lucas took over the psychiatric unit where he's being locked up during the trial.  It looks like he threw the woman out a fifth-story window.  She'd been cut up badly.  The psychologist was killed — stabbed to death — trying to negotiate with Lucas face-to-face."
    She sat down on the edge of the bed.  "You watched all that?"
    I sat down next to her.  The horror of what I had seen Lucas do hours before and what I had done to him months ago gripped me all at once.  I closed my eyes and buried my head in my hands.  The image of Winston struggling for his life came to me.  I pictured his fingers clawing the ground as he tried to free himself from the bizarre beast Lucas had created.  The muscles in his hands, arms and chest contracted involuntarily.  Breathing was an effort.
    "Are you OK?" she asked.  She rested her hand lightly on the nape of my neck.
    I didn't answer.
    She traced the arc of my ear with her fingertip.  "Do you want to get some sleep?"
    I needed something much more than rest — to be rid of my isolation, to tell someone the truth.  I had the habit, then, of seeing people as I wanted to see them.  And I saw her as pure and trustworthy, a river to carry my sins away.  Some people go to church and talk to a priest.  Others choose a psychiatrist as their confessor.  My religion has no name, but three clear tenets:  that people are connected to each other in mystical, immeasurable ways, that we have the power to heal one another and that truth often precipitates out of our society and settles at the bottom.  It felt good and right to choose a hooker in a motel-turned-rooming house as a repository for my soul.  But it was a terrible mistake.
    "He didn't do it," I said.  My scalp tingled with the gravity of what I had revealed.
    "What do you mean?" Cynthia asked.
    I raked my fingers down my face as I sat up and stared at the ceiling.  I took a deep breath, let it out.  "Trevor Lucas.  He didn't commit the murders he's on trial for."
    "Why do you think that?"
    I looked her in the eyes.  I couldn't control the flow of my truth.  "Because I know who the real killer is."
    She nodded tentatively, becoming visibly tense.  She glanced at the door.
    I realized she might be worried I was about to confess to the murders myself.  "I haven't seen her in over five months.  I helped hide her, right after Lucas was arrested."
    " Her? "
    "The killer."
    She squinted at me like she was trying to figure out if I was leveling with her.  How could she be sure, after all, that I wasn't a compulsive liar, a nut case writing myself into the news of the day?  That, or something worse.  My apartment certainly didn't look like a doctor would live there.  I didn't look like a doctor, to begin with.  "She killed two people.  Why would you help her get away?"
    "She was sick," I said.  "She couldn't stop herself."
    "Then she'd have been found not guilty."
    "No, she wouldn't.  She would have spent the rest of her life in prison.  These days juries convict no matter what mental state the defendant was in at the time of the crimes.  Jeffrey Dahmer ate seventeen people, and he was found sane enough to die in prison."
    "But it's not up to you to..."  Cynthia stared into my eyes a few seconds.  "Who was this woman?  How well did you know her?"
    I finally, too late, held back.  "A friend.  I thought we were close, but we weren't."
    "So you let Trevor Lucas stand trial for something he didn't do.  To save her."
    "I figured Lucas would get the right lawyer and beat the