Over the Line - Rilegato

Dr.  Faye Sultan, the director of University Psychological Associates in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a forensic psychologist who has consulted on some of the most high-profile murder cases in the country.

Teresa Kennedy, who lives in New York City, is a former book editor and a professional writer with more than thirty books to her credit.  Her most recent work, Welcome to the End of the World: Prophecy, Rage and the New Age, is an examination of millennial movements in popular culture and their effect on social psychology.

The fourth door was open and she found herself in a closetlike booth, the window in the door affording the only view of the poorly lit corridor.  She sized up the arrangements in one instant; the tiny room was halved by a Plexiglas and wire partition over a narrow countertop; both were old and scarred, with only a smattering of tiny holes in the Plexiglas to serve as a speaker opening.  She glanced around again--no panic buttons--and somewhat reluctantly slid into a molded plastic chair on her side of the chamber.  She set the yellow legal notepad on the narrow ridge of chipped Formica that served as a countertop and tapped a number two lead pencil lightly against the edge, waiting for them to bring in Jimmy the Weird from the other side.  In the hallway behind her, guards patrolled idly, pretending not to notice she was there.  The sight of a woman was rare enough on the block; the sight of a good-looking one rarer still.  Their covert glances through the window at the back of her head made her feel like a zoo specimen.  

It was several more minutes before they brought him.  She twisted in her chair at a rhythmic metallic clanking in the corridor, holding her breath as the bulk of him filled the small chamber.  Shackled hand and foot, Jimmy Wier was a huge man, yet he looked somehow boneless and defeated in his ill-fitting prison jumpsuit.  Portia studied him carefully.  He might have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty.  His fair hair was oily and unkempt.  His huge hands dwarfed the circles of steel around his wrists, and she shifted a little in the chair.  What was it the guard had said--that he was playing possum?  Despite herself, she felt a tickle of fear in the small of her back.  

The big man's head was bowed low, his eyes fixed on the floor.  She caught the scent of masculine sweat and prison laundry hanging in the stale air.  For the second time that day, Portia had to struggle with a dizzying little rush of claustrophobia.  

As his escort secured him behind the partition, Wier began to shuffle back and forth on his side of the room, never looking at her, the shackles making an eerie sound as the chains dragged over the linoleum.  Portia studied him in silence for a few moments.  They hadn't been kidding when they said he was nonresponsive.  His affect was totally flat, the soft lines of his profile without animation.  

Then, without warning, he raised his head and looked at her.  And the eyes that met her own held an expression that sent flocks of panicky butterflies swirling through her innards.  For one long, indescribable moment she felt the rest of the world falling away.  For the prisoner's eyes held nothing of fear or hatred or hostility at her presence--all of those things she might have expected, even prepared for.  Instead she found herself looking into twin voids--blue and empty as a whole wilderness of sky.  They were eyes that held nothing, no spark of recognition, no flicker to betray the fact that he was seeing her, or the room, or anything at all.  It seemed almost like blindness, but the lock of his eyes on her own was unmistakable, viselike and inescapable.  And she could not look away.  He'd caught her like a rabbit with a single look; something in that vacuum sucking her down into a vast emptiness as she searched in vain for a spark of life or thought or humanity, the eyes daring her to turn, daring her to blink.  She did not even think to be afraid.  For the madness in Jimmy Wier's eyes was huge and hypnotic and insanely seductive, beckoning her into a bottomless, jibbering chaos where nothing mattered anymore.  Not good nor evil nor guilt nor innocence nor death.  Everything was equal in those eyes.  Everything was free.  

And at last, almost without meaning to, she glanced away, catching some movement by the guard outside the window in her peripheral vision.  The game was ended, the spell broken.  

She drew a ragged breath and steadied herself.  If the eyes were truly the windows of the soul, then Wier's were looking out from a rare and special kind of hell.  

She wet her lips and reached for something to say, aware suddenly of the sound of her own heartbeat, the whisper of papers on the countertop.  

"Mr.  Wier," she began in a measured tone, raising her voice a little to make herself heard through the window.  "You like violets?"

The huge head twitched, as though listening to some unseen instruction.  He did not look at her, though, and that relieved her a little.  

"Do you know who I am--what I'm doing here?" she began again.  

For all he noticed, or was pretending not to notice her, the man might have been alone in the room.  Still shaken, she struggled to regain his attention, to make some relevant contact.  The first few minutes were important.  If she didn't break through in the first few minutes, it might never happen.  Portia tapped her pencil against the edge of the counter, the sound unnaturally loud in the cramped quarters.  Still nothing.  

"Do you know why you're here?" she went on.  Sometimes they didn't.  Trapped in some internal world, the changes in the details of the outer world failed to register.  Oftentimes the psychosis was such that a criminal had no memory at all of how he'd come to prison--nor any notion of where he was.  

Now, though, there was the barest moment of hesitation before the shuffling resumed.  So brief she might have missed it if she'd blinked.  But he had paused--he'd heard her, anyway.  Something had registered.  That meant a lot.  

Slowly, the psychologist got to her feet and leaned toward the Plexiglas shield that separated them.  She placed her hands, palms flat, against it.  "They sure have you locked up tight," she offered.  

A guard immediately came to the window at her back, but sensing his presence, she turned and waved him off.  

"I'm a doctor, Mr.  Wier," she went on, leaning casually against the counter while keeping her tone low and musical.  McTeague's voice was one of her best professional assets.  She knew it and she used it well.  An internship on a buzzing suicide hotline had forged its low, soothing tones, full of reassurance and peace.  

"Your lawyers asked me to come over here and talk to you a little bit. "

Miraculously, Wier nodded slowly without looking at anything.  

Yes! she thought with a little rush of elation.  Good start.  "People are saying you did some pretty terrible things.  Do you know that, Mr.  Wier?  Jimmy?  Can I call you Jimmy?"

Wier resumed his pacing, unable--or unwilling--to respond.  

Portia sank easily down into her chair, careful to make no sudden moves.  "Okay," she went on soothingly.  "I'll call you Mr.  Wier for a while.  

"They say you killed three women.  You know about that?"

Wier cast her a furtive glance as he paced.  Portia relaxed a little.  It wasn't much, but it was a whole lot better than nothing.  She struggled to fan the tiny flame of acknowledgment.  

"You're in deep shit, Jimmy Wier. " She paused, allowing the statement to sink in.  "You know that?"

Abruptly, Wier paused in his shuffling and looked at her.  Once again straight in the eye, daring her to fall back into that weird bottomless void.  Portia felt an unexpected chill.  Jimmy Wier might be nuts, but not so nuts that he didn't know his power.  

"This is a bad place," he whispered.  The voice was low and strange and rumbling.  "Why would you come here?" He paused and gazed upward, momentarily entranced by some invisible spot on the ceiling.  "That other one went away.  I made her.  I always make them go away. " He slowly lifted his huge hands as far as the shackles allowed and began to mime a choking motion.  Then he smiled.  

Portia took a breath and countered the gesture with a smile of her own.  "I don't think I'm going to go away," she said matter-of-factly.  "You know why?  Because I might be able to help you.  I might be able to help people understand how you got into this trouble you're in.  But you have to help me first.  You need to talk to me a little.  You think you can do that?"

He fixed his strange stare at some space just above her hair, his head utterly still, cocked slightly to the side as though he were listening to something far away.  Then, all at once, the expression in his eyes changed, like a light going on somewhere, and Wier began to make a low humming sound, big lips moving in a gray, doughy face.  

"Will you talk to me, Jimmy?" Portia leaned closer to the glass but he backed away, so she withdrew, easily resuming her place.  "Your lawyers told me you wanted to talk to a woman.  You said that? Remember?  Remember Dr.  Yarborough?"

Unexpectedly, Wier uttered a high-pitched, evil-sounding snicker and in th...