David addressed me in his soft, professional tone.
“Did Jed sleep with her, Alex? Did they have an affair?”
“For what it’s worth, he denied they ever did. Of course, I wouldn’t trust him from here to the kitchen now, but the first night I met him, when he told me the story, he had no reason to lie to me. st ”In fact, he made quite a point of telling me that it played r a big role in his divorce. The stalker actually called and spoke to Jed’s wife. Tried to convince her that they had been having an affair which didn’t take much for his wife to believe. I’m so confused by him now I don’t know what to believe anymore.“
“Do you know any more about this than you’ve just told me?”
“No, David. I don’t. It’s sort of like what happens to doctors. Every time you go to a cocktail party, people complain to you about their aches and pains and hope for a free diagnosis. Well, for me, it’s the high crimes and misdemeanors they all unload on me. I listened to Jed’s story, but he thought the situation had ended when he moved to New York and neither one of us dwelt on it.
I guess it had a certain resonance for Isabella.“
“Alex‘ David was in his most sincere mode now ”Alex, would you mind if I talked to Jed about this a bit more?
Perhaps something Isabella confided in him, because of his history with a similar problem, perhaps that will shed some light on these strange letters.“
Of course I minded. Mike leaped in over me.
“Hey, that’s a great idea. His lawyer won’t let him talk to us, but if you call him, as Coop’s friend, I bet he’ll be hungry to talk to you. He’s screaming to get her back, Doc. That’s a great angle to work with him.”
“How do you feel about it, Alex?”
“What difference does that make?” I could feel a good pout coming on.
Maureen came to my defense. She could see I was flagging and knew that I didn’t want Jed to get his toe back in the door.
“Do what you gotta do, guys, but don’t put Alex in the middle of it, okay? Cut her a break, will you?
Where do you think this exercise in futility will get you?“
“I’m not proposing that there’s any direct connection between Isabella’s killer and Jed’s problem, but it would certainly be interesting if they discussed the phenomenon with each other. He can tell us that, of course. Very interesting.”
Riveting. Ask him if they ever bothered to talk about me, while you’re at it.
David tried to draw me back into the conversation.
“Alex, I’m sure you’ve come across this in some of your stalking cases. Obsessional love, delusional disorders it’s in all the forensic psych literature. Quite fascinating material. Do you detectives ever work with the DSM?” “I’ve seen the book in Alex’s office. Can’t say I’ve ever used it,” Maureen replied. Chapman just shook his head.
“It’s the forensic psych bible,” I explained. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, weighty scientific tomes that detailed and outlined the elements and criteria for a mind-boggling array of psychiatric disorders, which guided doctors and lawyers through all the odd routes of affirmative defenses and excuses for criminal conduct.
“Yeah, I know it.
”I killed my mother because I was born with very short earlobes and webbed feet and wasn’t allowed to eat Cheerios for dinner; I skinned the cat because Uncle Harry never let me kiss Aunt Mary’s ass after church? on Sundays; I put the baby in the microwave because Jupiter didn’t align with Mars and no one ever lets me do what I want to do anyway.“ Yep, for every violent crime 35 there’s a shrink with an excuse. I didn’t know it all came out of one big book.” Mike’s disdain for the psychiatric community was beginning to rear its head.
“What are we looking for here, Doc?”
“I’ll have to do some more reading tomorrow. There’s one category called obsessional love. Those are the cases where there was some kind of relationship between the subject and the victim a love affair, a one-night stand, a ”fatal attraction,“ if you will. The harasser begins a campaign to regain that relationship, or to seek revenge.
“The more unusual category is quite different. It’s called erotomania and-‘ ”Erotomania? That sounds like something I’d like to catch.“ Mike was clowning again, trying to get me to cheer up.
“In cases of erotomania,” David continued, ‘there was never an affair or a romance between the parties exactly like Jed told you, Alex. The stalker suffers from a delusion, the delusion that the man she fixates on actually loves her, even if she’s had only the briefest contact with him. It’s extremely bizarre.“
Maureen questioned him, ”Are you serious, that this is a real disorder? The woman believes the man’s in love with her or vice versa, even though there has never been any kind of social or sexual interaction?“ ”Exactly. It’s a delusion that they are loved by another person. And other than that delusion, the patient’s behavior is completely normal. In fact, these people are usually extremely intelligent. No other signs of mental illness or dysfunction.“
“Would you call Segal for us tomorrow, Doc? I bet he’d jump at the chance to crawl on your couch and talk to somebody about this, really.”
“Certainly, Mike, I’ll call him. I don’t think we can ignore that history of his in view of these references that Cordelia Jeffers makes, whoever she is. I’ll leave a message for Jed at his office. Alex, you can jot down his number for me.
And I’ll pull some of the literature so we can find out more about the disorder. I have to take the shuttle to Washington first thing tomorrow meeting with the Drug Czar about funding treatment programs. But I can see Segal in my office at the end of the day, and if that works with his schedule, we should know a lot more about whatever Isabella may have discussed with him by the same time tomorrow.” “Great. I’ll call the LAPD. They’ve actually got a special bureau called the Threat Management Unit only one I know of in the country. Maybe they can pull up Segal’s file and see if there’s anything we should know about in it.” I wrote down the CommPlex number and handed it to David as he left. Chapman answered the intercom and told the doorman to send the kid with the pizza upstairs. I sat and chatted with Maureen and Mike as they devoured their dinner, then sent them on their way home just before midnight. I undressed, brushed my teeth, and started to get into bed, and remembered that I had a dog-eared copy of the DSM on the shelf with my reference books in the second bedroom, which I used as a home office. It was my habit to bring the old editions of penal codes and trial manuals here whenever the new ones arrived in my office, so I had a version to work with instead of carrying the oversized books back and forth each night.
The Diagnostic Statistical Manual was hardly bedtime reading, but I had put myself to sleep so many times with autopsy photographs and Emergency Room medical records that this would be relatively light fare. I carried the volume I needed back to my bed and climbed in, looking in the Index for Delusional Disorders.
The DSM noted a clear distinction in the two categories of behavior that David Mitchell had discussed. The more common was the one he referred to as ‘obsessional love.“
It was fascinating to read, because it seemed to have been written about Isabella Lascar and her kind of problem. The manual described the prototypical obsessional love victim as a ‘sexy actress or bombshell’ that was our girl. In these cases, the women who became victims had prior knowledge of their harassers, usually intimate, and most of the stalking activity began following a ‘love gone sour’ relationship.