I read the message twice more, feeling inexplicably angered.
Stop who from doing what? Why not just tell me?
I started to ball up the paper, intending to toss it, but then stopped.
Who’s sending them? And why?
Taking a deep breath after these questions popped in my head, I realized the message was a form of manipulation, a way of toying with me.
It was in my nature to help people whenever I could, either through my practice or through my investigative skills.
The message asked me to help but didn’t say how. I sensed that was deliberate and designed to irritate me, to get me asking myself unanswerable questions like Who’s sending these messages? And why?
The mind is an ancient contraption controlled by questions, which is both a positive and a negative. Ask yourself a good, definable question, and your mind will do everything in its power to answer it, and it probably will be able to if given enough time.
But if the question is unanswerable, the brain spins, hearing the question over and over and over and getting no response. Why does this always happen to me? Or Why can’t I get over this tragedy? Or Who’s sending these messages?
Like twisting the key in the ignition of an engine that won’t turn over, the brain whirls on these unsolvable or as-yet-unsolved queries. Eventually, without answers, the brain gets agitated, angered, and then ground down. Eventually, it burns its way into a crisis or stalls entirely.
Is that what these messages are meant to do? Get me wondering and then fixated on who is sending them and why? Get me—
I heard a knock at my outer basement door. After putting the message in the top drawer of my desk, I went to answer the door and found Nina Davis, the Justice Department attorney, waiting.
“I’m glad you decided to come back,” I said.
She smiled weakly. “I didn’t know if I would until just a few minutes ago.”
Nina made her way to my office and took the same seat she’d occupied during our first appointment.
I sat opposite her. “How are things?”
“Oh, you know, busy, busy, busy.”
“Did you have the chance to do that exercise we discussed yesterday? Where you looked for good memories of your mother?”
Her face fell. “You know, Dr. Cross, work’s been so crazy, I…no, actually, I didn’t go there.”
I noted that, said, “Because those memories don’t exist?”
Nina shrugged. “Because it’s a waste of time. If they did exist, they were blotted out by other memories, but really, that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Okay.”
She struggled, said, “I told you I can’t feel love, but that’s not totally true. I…”
She looked at her lap.
“As I’ve said, Nina, this is a safe place. You’ll get no judgment from me, and nothing you tell me ever leaves here. And honestly, I’ve heard so much and seen so much over the years, very little shocks me. I’ve found that most behaviors and problems, they aren’t all that unique once you talk them out, get to the root of things.”
She crossed her arms and seemed offended, which didn’t surprise me.
“You have no idea the things I’ve done, Dr. Cross,” she said. “The things I do when I’m not at work.”
I kept quiet and gazed at her expectantly. I’d intentionally broken her pattern of thinking by intimating that her story, whatever it was, was not unique.
Why? People in mental crisis are often convinced that they’re the only ones in the world suffering like this, which simply isn’t true. Once they abandon that notion, after realizing that most people have thoughts just like theirs, it’s often easier to get them to open up fully.
“I do feel something like love,” Davis said at last. “Not the real thing, but close enough to crave it.”
“When does that feeling happen?”
Davis hesitated, glanced at the floor, then stiffened her shoulders and looked back up at me. “When I put myself in extreme situations. Sexually, I mean.”
Over the course of the next forty-five minutes, Nina Davis told me of Kaycee Janeway, her dark side and alter ego when it came to sex.
Nina liked to stalk men, big strong men who could dominate her.
She would see a man like that, usually outside of work, and actually feel something, a tingle of attraction, perhaps, a twinge of risk, or a more primitive reaction to his particular musky smell. Whatever it was, there was always something else about him that took it further, triggered fantasies, and changed her fully from Nina to Kaycee.
“I follow them when I can,” Nina said, staring off. “The men. At night, mostly, in bars, restaurants, even movie theaters. With their wives and girlfriends, or without. And the entire time I’m thinking of having sex with them. Rough stuff, mostly, but other times tender and sweet, and everything it’s supposed to be.”
After several nights of stalking, Nina would try to ambush or accidentally encounter her prey and lure him in.
“Once I know the fantasy I want to fulfill, I’ve never had problems attracting the men, or anyway Kaycee hasn’t,” Nina said. “And once the men know what I want, it’s not hard to convince them to give it to me, or at least try to give it to me.”
No judgments, I reminded myself.
“And you feel something like love during these encounters?”
She brightened then, became almost radiant, and for the first time I realized just how beautiful Nina Davis was. Those eyes, those lashes, her dazzling smile. I understood in that moment that most men she stalked would indeed succumb to her.
“Yes,” she said. “I feel…desperate emotion, during the sex and after. Other than the brief happiness I get from a job well done, they’re the only times I feel deeply—when they’re rough and domineering and…especially when they’re strangling me.”
“So you engage in asphyxiation sex?”
“As often as Kaycee can get it,” she said matter-of-factly.
Nina said that when the blood flow to her brain was cut off by strangulation during intercourse, she almost always orgasmed and almost always felt flooded with warm feelings and positive emotions afterward.
“But they don’t last,” she said. “After a few hours, I’m back to Nina, and there’s nothing to really feel again.”
I said nothing, took a few notes.
“So I’m a basket case, right?” Nina asked as the hour ended.
“No,” I said. “Not in the least.”
“But you’ve never heard of something this weird, this disturbed, have you?”
I smiled, determined to break her of the idea that her issues were unique, and said, “Actually, I’ve heard stranger, and much more disturbed.”
She blinked. Her face tightened. “Well, then, I guess…”
“You guess?”
After a moment’s struggle, she stood and said, “Nothing, Dr. Cross.”
“Maybe something to talk about next time?”
She hesitated again. “Maybe. Do you think I could come back tomorrow to talk about this?”
I checked my schedule. “Yes, tomorrow at one thirty.”
“Thank you. And, again, thank you for listening without judgment. I’m still trying to understand myself.”
“We all are. Thank you for sharing. It had to have been difficult.”
She knitted her brow. “You know? Not really.”
When Nina Davis had gone, I let myself admit again how very attractive she was before thinking how defensive Nina had been when I’d challenged her. It was a clear sign to me that she was heavily invested in the role of a hypersexual woman.
This was beyond sex with strangers as a way to unlock emotions. This was some deep, dark story she told herself or tried to forget, a story I didn’t think I’d come close to hearing all of yet.