Free Compulsion by Keith Ablow

law enforcement."
    She didn’t take the hint.  "I’ve never heard of anything like the case of that psychotic plastic surgeon," she led.  "Where was it?  Lynn, Massachusetts?  The state hospital?"
    "Right," I yielded.
    "Dr. Trevor Levitt."
    I really wished she would stop.
    "No.  Lucas," she said.  "Trevor Lucas.  He had taken hostages.  Nurses, patients, and so forth."
    "Yes."
    "And you negotiated their release," she said.
    I could feel my pulse in my temples.  "Not all of them," I said.  "Lucas butchered a few of them before I declared victory and had my picture taken for the papers.  It’s a minor detail people tend to forget."
    "I’m sorry," she said.  "I do recall reading about an elderly woman.  Her body had been disfigured — with a knife."
    I didn’t respond.
    "And if I remembered correctly, Lucas performed some sort of crude neurosurgery on another hostage?"  She shook her head.  "It was very brave of you to go onto that unit in the first..."
    My brow was damp.  I wiped it with my shirtsleeve.  "These memories are very painful to me.  I don’t talk about them."
    Mossberg leaned back in her chair, then sat there, watching me intently.  "I see," she said, a therapeutic strain of kindness in her voice.
    I knew what she was thinking.  I would have been thinking the same thing:  That not being able to talk about a memory means your mind is still enslaved by it.  But I wasn’t ready to do the work of freeing myself, and I hadn’t come to Mossberg for that kind of help, anyway.  I had come for clues to help solve the murder of an infant girl — and to make sure that her twin sister stayed alive.  I sat straighter in my chair.  "What can you tell me about Billy Bishop?" I asked her pointedly.
    Her eyes narrowed, and she pressed her lips together, as if finalizing her diagnostic impression of me.  If she was as sharp as I thought she was, she’d get it right:  something just shy of full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder.  A few moments passed.  "Very well," she said.  "I’m sorry to intrude.  I tend to wander places I haven’t been invited."
    "No offense taken," I said.  "I understand."
    She nodded.  "About Billy..." she said, reorienting herself.  "I can tell you he’s a very dangerous person.  He seems to be a young man without conscience.  I’m not surprised that he lashed out at his sister."
    "Why do you say that?"
    "Certainly not because of anything he’s told me," she said.  "He’s happy enough to talk about Nantucket, Manhattan, sports, television, and anything else unrelated to the Bishop baby’s death — or to his life in Russia.  He avoids those topics like the plague."
    "I can understand that," I said.
    "Of course you can," she said.  She paused to underscore her point.
    "Let’s stick to Billy," I gently reminded her.  "I promise to work on my own avoidance another time."
    "You’re right.  I lost my head."  She winked.  "My main concerns about Billy," she continued, "come from the psychological testing we conducted yesterday, shortly after he arrived on the unit."
    Psychological testing involves a variety of evaluations, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Bender Gestalt Intelligence Test, and the Rorschach series of inkblots.  The goal of the testing is to determine whether the examinee suffers from any major mental illness, as well as to assess his core character traits, how he thinks about himself, and how he responds to the world around him.
    "He cooperated with the testing?" I asked.
    "Not really.  The deception scale shows he gave untruthful answers to many of the questions.  He was trying so hard to appear absolutely healthy psychologically that he didn’t endorse a single sign or symptom of psychic distress.  He rated his mood at ten out of ten.  He insisted that he saw only happy scenes in the inkblots.  No blood.  No monsters.  No storms.  He said he ‘always’ gets along with people and that they do