Virgin Lies: A Novel - Softcover

Anscombe, Dr. Roderick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031294750X ISBN 13: 9780312947507

Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2008

Synopsis

One summer day, Boston forensic psychiatrist Paul Lucas gets a call from his social worker wife, Abby: A nine-year-old girl has gone misisng. Paul, an expert interrogator, is called in to help evaluate the testimony of the only witness: a homeless woman who happens to be a paranoid schizophrenic.

Further interviews with other possible witnesses go nowhere, frustrating detectives and calling into doubt Paul’s role in the case. Believing the girl is alive but soon to die, Paul is pushed to the brink of a professional abyss—harangued by local media, distrusted by police, and pressured to save the day by Abby, whose stake in the search becomes deeply personal.

With time running out, Paul has to make a choice: to uphold the central oath of his profession or to do whatever it takes to find the girl—even if he must crack the mind of a vulnerable patient, and risk everything he has in the process.

About this title

About the Author

Roderick Anscombe, M.D., is a forensic psychiatrist who has interviewed more than two hundred murderers. He is an expert in the detection of deception and teaches interview technique at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of The Interview Room, The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula, and Shank, and lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Visit his Web site at www.roderickanscombe.com.

From the Back Cover

From the author of The Interview Room comes another “Gripping psychological thriller” (Kirkus Reviews) that will leave readers breathless.

A desperate attempt

One summer day, Boston forensic psychiatrist Paul Lucas gets a call from his social worker wife, Abby: A nine-year-old girl has gone misisng. Paul, an expert interrogator, is called in to help evaluate the testimony of the only witness: a homeless woman who happens to be a paranoid schizophrenic.

A race toward justice

Further interviews with other possible witnesses go nowhere, frustrating detectives and calling into doubt Paul’s role in the case. Believing the girl is alive but soon to die, Paul is pushed to the brink of a professional abyss—harangued by local media, distrusted by police, and pressured to save the day by Abby, whose stake in the search becomes deeply personal.

A JOURNEY INTO FEAR AND DARKNESS…

With time running out, Paul has to make a choice: to uphold the central oath of his profession or to do whatever it takes to find the girl—even if he must crack the mind of a vulnerable patient, and risk everything he has in the process.

“Intense, bone-chilling”—Tucson Citizen

“Suspenseful and insightful.” —Booklist

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt

 

10:45AM

The tiger cages were hard to take, even for those of us used to maximum security. It was Kovacs who came up with their name—not that any of the clinical staff wanted one, far less a reference to the human rights violations of a repressive regime. Kovacs had seen the originals, he said, on one of his tours of duty in Vietnam, and once the name stuck we couldn’t get rid of it.

Each of the four cages sat at the periphery of an imaginary five-spoked wheel, with a gap where I sat. Around us, the cavernous space of a disused cell block had been soundproofed at great expense, so that however loudly the participants in the group yelled—as Sammy Fields, brain-damaged child killer, was doing now, in full moralistic rant at the man in the cage beside him for a crime much like his own—the confidentiality of these outpourings would be maintained.

With each patient individually confined, nothing could get out of control. But this sound clinical rationale didn’t make me feel any better about the cages. When you’re surrounded by the routine exercise of raw power, you are never free of the nagging question of whether you are part of a repressive regime. In prison, so many of the ethical stop signs have been removed that you can’t ever be entirely sure you have the right of way.

It was hard enough to keep my concentration without interruptions.

“Phone call, Dr. Lucas.”

“Okay,” I said without turning. “I’ll call them back.”

But Lieutenant Kovacs remained standing behind me. “You’re going to want to take this call,” he said.

“How so?”

“It’s from your wife.”

A call from the doctor’s wife was a signal event. The Sanders Institute wasn’t the kind of place where family of staff called for a chat. For one thing, Security would likely be monitoring the call. More than that, you did everything you could to insulate your family life from Sanders.

 

I walked quickly along the short corridor that joined the tiger cages to the control center, where two officers lounged in chairs, occasionally checking the bank of monitors. A telephone receiver lay on the console.

“Is this you?” Abby asked. “Thank God! It’s been so awful!” There was a catch in her voice that alarmed me. Abby at the brink of tears at work wasn’t something I’d encountered before. I had the sinking feeling that one of her clients had suicided. “They wouldn’t put me through at first. They didn’t believe who I was.”

“That’s normal operating procedure.”

“Danielle’s missing, Paul.”

I was supposed to know who Danielle was, and I racked my brains to remember when, during one of our all-too-sparse dinner conversations, Abby had mentioned her. Was she a social worker at the agency? No one came to mind. I was grateful she’d called me at this time of crisis; I didn’t want to fail the test, even if it was only putting a name to a face.

“When did you last see her?” I asked, playing for time.

“We sent her on her regular coffee run around nine o’clock. She does this every day for us. She’s only a young girl, but it’s less than three hundred yards.”

Fragments coalesced in memory. Danielle’s mother was a graduate of New Beginnings, the agency that Abby directed for pregnant teenagers and young mothers. The kid was going to spend the summer hanging around on the street and sooner or later getting into trouble, and Abby had arranged for her to work as a volunteer at the agency. She’d taken Danielle under her wing. That Danielle.

Abby dropped her voice almost to a whisper. “Please come, Paul.”

No command could have been more compelling.

 

Abby’s agency was housed in a large Victorian on a street undergoing sporadic gentrification. A three-decker two houses farther down Eastern Boulevard had gone condo and sported a crimson paint job with sparkling white trim; but plastic siding on the houses between hung loose at the corners, fast-food wrappers clung to front-yard chain-link fences, and the neighborhood still had a down-at-heel air.

It was eleven-thirty, and the heat of the summer morning hit me as I stepped out of the air-conditioning of my car. By the time I’d climbed to the top of the granite steps and reached for the door, I was already sweating.

Inside, the reception area of the agency was unusually crowded. The young women kept their children close at hand, and the kids themselves seemed subdued and watchful. Several uniformed cops were taking down details in notebooks, and a couple of male detectives were questioning a woman holding a baby on her hip.

Off to the side, in a space made by people keeping a respectful distance, a large woman in shorts and a tank top was slumped in a chair, weeping uncontrollably as a member of Abby’s staff tried to comfort her.

When I came through the door, people turned as if I might be the bearer of news, and even the woman I took to be Danielle’s mother stopped sobbing to look up.

The truth was, I expected the girl to turn up at a friend’s house or a movie theater, surprised at the fuss. I’d come for Abby, not because I’d be much use to the missing girl. I was here to rescue my marriage.

But the presence of the detectives was an ominous sign. I recognized Detective Wolpert and inadvertently caught his eye. I looked away and saw other faces that were less familiar, recalling them vaguely from holiday parties or tedious hours in courthouse lobbies. Finally, I saw Abby just as she spied me and started through the crowd.

She hugged me fiercely; her fingernails dug through the light cotton shirt I was wearing.

“I’m so glad you’re here!” She sighed, her lips pressed close to my ear. And then, to my disappointment, she added a formal, “Thank you.”

“I know,” I murmured, already dropping into the cadence of someone comforting the bereaved. “I know.” I rocked her for a long moment, wondering if this child would bring us together, thinking of our own child, Adrian, who had died.

Abby pulled away. “She’s still alive,” she said defiantly.

“Of course she is!”

“She’s hardly been gone any time at all.”

“Which makes it all the more likely that she’s hiding out somewhere with a friend.”

“That’s not Danielle. She wouldn’t pull a stunt like that.”

“But she’s a kid. Maybe one of her buddies came along with some pocket money. Maybe they took off for the mall.”

“We know she picked up the coffee from the coffee shop. She was on her way back. She had change she had to return. She wouldn’t have taken off.”

I turned to look at the cops in the hallway. Someone had pulled a lot of manpower off the streets.

“She’s been abducted, Paul.”

“Someone witnessed this?” I asked with a sinking heart.

Abby shook her head. “No. She just disappeared.”

“Okay. It doesn’t do any harm to get an early start.”

“We have to accept, one, that Danielle’s been abducted. And two, that she’s not dead.” She angled her head back to scrutinize my face, and her blue eyes nailed me as if their intensity could make me a believer.

“No, she’s not dead.” I wouldn’t tell her now what I knew from my clinical practice about people who snatched children. “You’re right. We don’t know.”

But when you’re a forensic psychiatrist and you hear that a child’s been abducted, you automatically check off a chilling list of likely outcomes. This was different, though; this was close to home. Danielle was one of Abby’s girls.

“She was only out of sight a few minutes,” Abby said. “It was a regular coffee run that she did for the day care staff.”

Regular, I thought, and therefore predictable. Regular, so that the perpetrator could plan and lie in wait. This wasn’t an impulsive grab. He would have prepared the abduction. Therefore, he would have prepared the keeping place. The place where Danielle was now, confused, alone, scared out of her wits.

Abby said, “She’s eight years old.”

I nodded. An eight-year-old girl wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a struggle, even if she’d wanted to. More likely, though, he lured her.

“But she has street smarts,” Abby said. “She lives a couple of blocks from here. This is her neighborhood. She isn’t some kid from the burbs.”

Then the lure must have been more difficult. The lure was stronger, or Danielle’s fear had been less. “Maybe she knew him,” I suggested hopefully.

“That would be something. That might lead somewhere. The police are all over it. They’ve been great. They came down here like a SWAT team. But now they don’t have any leads to follow up.”

“This was when?”

“Just after nine.”

“Nine o’clock on a Thursday morning—someone has to have seen something.”

As Abby and I were talking, Brenda Gorn, the assistant DA, had...

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 031294750X
• ISBN 13: 9780312947507
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 320