Free The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted: A Psychological Thriller by Andrew E. Kaufman Page A

was in the process of committing her. Permanently.”
    “Do you know what brought this on?”
    He pressed his hands together, looked down at them for a moment, then back up at me. “When I said Mrs. Kingsley was a different person, I meant it.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “She was experiencing what we call a major depression with psychotic features.”
    “Which means…”
    “She was severely delusional, seeing and hearing things that didn’t exist, and…” He let out a labored sigh. “…and she began assuming an identity other than her own.”
    “What identity?”
    “She called herself Bill Williams.”
    “She thought she was a man?”
    He nodded.
    Glancing down at my notes, I raked my fingers through my hair, then looked back up at him. “Was she in this state all the time?”
    “No. She’d slip in and out.”
    “When did it start?”
    “Toward the end of her last stay.”
    “So, close to the time she died,” I confirmed.
    “Yes.”
    “And who was this Bill Williams?”
    “Nobody, I’m sure. But in her mind, she was him. Her vocal tone became deeper, her mannerisms, even her facial expressions…all convincingly masculine. It was a startling transformation.”
    “Did she give any details about him? Who he was?”
    “Just that he was a murderer.”
    “She took on the role of a killer…”
    “Yes, and according to her, one of the most dangerous killers of our time, maybe ever.”
    “What did he do?”
    “Question should be, what didn’t he do? She reported that he began murdering when he was nine years old. Lured his best friend into a shed behind his house, then beat him to death with a claw hammer, to the point where the child’s face was unrecognizable.”
    I cringed at the thought, said nothing.
    “She talked about it frequently—as Bill Williams, that is. She…I mean, he …took great delight in the feeling in his hands when the hammer made powerful impact with flesh and bone…the release, the euphoric pleasure. And it doesn’t end there. He just kept going. Several years later after his mother remarried, he climbed into their bed while she and the stepfather were asleep and began spooning the husband. Then he shoved the man’s face into his pillow…and a kitchen knife up his rectum. The mother woke in the middle of the night drenched in blood. Bill had wrapped the man’s arms around her, then went off to his room and peacefully back to sleep.”
    “Good Lord ,” I said. “All this created from her mind?”
    “I’m afraid so. A very disturbed one, I remind you, one that had lost contact with any form of reality.”
    “Did this Bill—or Mrs. Kingsley— talk about anything else?”
    “Plenty. In her final days, she spent a good part of her time bragging about the other murders he’d committed.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Horrible things. Gruesome things. Some of the most disturbing I’ve ever heard—and trust me, I’ve experienced a lot here.”
    “Details?”
    “I’ve actually tried to forget them… but with a few, I’ve had a hard time doing that.”
    “You can’t tell me?”
    Doctor Faraday gazed out the window and shook his head very slowly. A tree branch shifted in the wind and threw an odd shadow across his face. “I’d rather not.”
    I drew in some air, blew it out quickly. “Can you at least tell me why she’d dream up someone so horrible, let alone want to assume his identity? Who was this guy?”
    He turned back and caught my gaze, held it for moment. “According to her, Bill Williams was the man who kidnapped and murdered her son.”
    The hair on my arms stood straight up—on the back of my neck, too—and suddenly the room felt frigid. I didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then, “She assumed the identity of the man who killed her son…”
    “Correction: the one she manufactured as the killer.”
    “Why would she do that?”
    “With the mentally ill, there really isn’t any rhyme or reason, Mr. Bannister.”
    “She ever say why