The Girls He Adored by Jonathan Nasaw Page B

approval from older men—apparently any older man would do. Or not so much approval as acceptance—he wanted to be accepted as a man, by men. He also suspected that this compulsion toward sexual boasting had as much to do with Mr. Kronk as it did with Ulysses Maxwell Sr. It would be nice to ask Dr. Cogan about it when he got her back to Scorned Ridge and they started therapy again for real.
    The abduction of Dr. Irene Cogan: now that would be a challenge worthy of Max. He'd known he'd have to attempt it when he awoke from his hypnotic trance that afternoon—he'd been so damn smug, so sure she could never put him under. But she'd not only put him under, she'd made contact with little Lyssy.
    Lyssy the Sissy, his—their—original personality, was the only identity with whom Max did not share memory, so there was no way for him to know whether or not the little tattletale had let slip some clue as to their identity, or the location of Scorned Ridge. In any event, it was not a chance he cared to take.
    But self-preservation was only one of two reasons Max had determined to bring Irene along with him. The other had to do with his admittedly unique psychological makeup. Although he understood that to the rest of the world, DID was a disorder, personally Max liked to think of it as a new and superior order. Still and all, it was a great strain on Max, the de facto host alter after Useless had been supplanted, the personality who dealt with the world most of the time, whose job it was to hold together the complex and contradictory bundle of personalities known collectively as Ulysses Maxwell.
    It was for that reason that Max had turned to the study of psychiatry seven years earlier. With all the resources of the system, of course, there'd been no need for formal education. He'd simply bought a small library of psychology books down in Medford, plus every textbook on MPD or DID he could get his hands on, andsubscribed to every journal and magazine that came to his attention. Max read them, Mose memorized them, and Ish, who'd come into being during this period, integrated the insights into the system.
    But lately Max was beginning to think they'd taken their therapy about as far as they could on their own. And since Dr. Cogan was a specialist—an attractive specialist—in dissociative disorders, and since he needed to remove her from the general population for his own protection ASAP, why not bring her back to Scorned Ridge with him to continue his therapy?
    Max recognized that this was an insane idea on the surface of it. But since Paula Ann Wisniewski was dead, and Irene was—or could again be—a strawberry blond, he'd be killing two birds with one stone.
    Strawberry blonds! Suddenly it struck him. Parker's crap about liking blonds and redheads—what the fuck was that? And mentioning Plano to boot. Max thought back—were there any comedy clubs in Plano? Any clubs at all? Mose couldn't tell him—Mose only recorded what other alters read, observed, or heard. But Plano, though the Chamber of Commerce would deny the appellation, was really more of a wealthy bedroom community, a glorified suburb of Dallas. Dallas was where the nightspots were.
    So was it a trap? Was Parker a cop? There was definitely something familiar about the man, beneath that Bluto act. Max couldn't quite put his finger on it, so he instructed Mose to go through the archives, and report back when he had a hit.
    Seconds later Max sensed the MTP's excitement. Quickly he brought Mose up to co-consciousness, and was rewarded with a vivid recollection of sitting in a hotel room in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1994, watching Special Agent E. L. Pender holding a press conference in nearby Reeford, asking the public for assistance in locating one Gloria Whitworth, a coed at Reeford College, and in particular asking any strawberry blonds in the area to report suspicious contacts with strangers.
    Dear Gloria. Aptly named—though she was otherwise nothing to write