By Reason of Insanity Read online

  Yet, in this case, losing might be the only way that she could get what she wanted.

  She only hoped that he could help her get out of this jail, so she could do what she really wanted to do out in the world. She felt like a wild caged animal. She could feel the heat crawling from her insides, working its way through every cell in her body, so that her skin felt painful to the touch. She touched her arm, and it felt warm, like she had a severe fever.

  She was sitting in her cell, when her cellmate, Alyssa, came in. Alyssa was a mouse, and Marina had no respect for her. Alyssa was in this place because she was caught with a bag of coke in her car. She told Marina that the coke didn't belong to her - it belonged to her boyfriend, and she didn't know it was there. She was just driving his car, because hers was in the shop. She was making a trip to Walmart when a cop pulled her over for a busted tail-light. She was nervous when he pulled her over, because cops, in general, freaked her out, and every time she was pulled over, she sweated bullets. Because she was so nervous, the cop asked her if she had been drinking. She said no, he made her walk the line, and she blew clean. The cop then asked to search the car, and she let him. She didn’t know that the coke was in the tire well in the hatch.

  So, she was genuinely shocked when the cop came to the window with the bag full of white powder, asked her about it, and then arrested her.

  That wasn’t what pissed Marina off. The girl was unlucky, that was all. No, what made Marina angry was that the bastard boyfriend, whose name was Greg, let Alyssa take the fall for him. He never even spoke to the prosecutors about who really owned those drugs. And yet, Alyssa was still crazy about him. That made Marina sick to her stomach.

  Alyssa was scared all the time. She was one of those girls who cried herself to sleep every night and worried about what was going to happen to her. She walked around the lunch room like she was constantly worried that somebody was going to jump her, her tiny frame compacted even more than it already was, her eyes always darting around the room. Marina thought that Alyssa half expected a prison riot every single day, with her caught in the middle.

  When Marina returned to her cell, Alyssa was there on the top bunk, crying, as usual. She was also shaking all over. Marina rolled her eyes. She despised weak people.

  Marina decided that she was going to play a trick on her wuss of a roommate. She was dying to do something that made her feel like she was alive, and tricking people was one of the ways that she did it.

  “I just saw my attorney and his investigator, and you’ll never guess who I saw when I was meeting with him.” Marina smiled, knowing that she was about to lie, and it was a lie that Alyssa could certainly catch her on if she had a brain in her pea head.

  Obviously, she didn’t see anybody else when she went to see her attorney, because her attorney had to meet with her in private. If there were other parties around when she talked to Aidan, there wouldn’t be any kind of confidentiality in what she said to him. She knew enough about the law to know that this was true.

  Alyssa turned her red-rimmed eyes to Marina, and faced her. Her mousy brown hair was tangled and she had obviously not showered for quite a long time. Which was par for the course, because the girls didn't shower every day.

  Alyssa’s lips were quivering, and she was as tiny as a bird. "Who?" she asked in a small voice. Her left hand went up to her neck and she looked like she was stroking a non-existent necklace.

  "Don't you know?” Marina asked casually. “Well, I'll give you one hint. I saw Gregory." Alyssa pined for Gregory the loser day after day, night after night. She had pictures of Gregory up on her wall and she confided in Marina that she was worried that he wasn’t going to wait for her to serve her sentence for distribution. Apparently, the amount of coke in the car was enough that the prosecutors were able to charge her with intent to distribute, which meant that she probably was facing quite a few years in prison.

  Marina was, quite frankly, disgusted by the whole thing. Here was a girl who was pining after a guy who let her take the fall for him. As far as Marina was concerned, Greg was lower than low.

  So, Marina felt she was doing Alyssa a favor when she said, "he was here to see somebody else. I think you probably know who I'm talking about. Jennifer, in the cell next to us."

  Jennifer was a statuesque blonde, hot, a mean girl fully grown. Marina went on. “Greg and Jennifer were talking about how he couldn't wait to get her out of jail, so that he could get her into his bed again. Or something like that. I don't know. All I know is that they were making googly eyes at each other for the entire time."

  Alyssa’s eyes got huge, and her lips started to quiver even more. Marina was struck by how gullible Alyssa was. “He, he, he, he, was here to see Jennifer?" She started to breathe harder and harder. “Why was he seeing her?"

  Marina rolled her eyes. "I just told you why he was seeing her. Apparently he and Jennifer are banging. And I even heard him say that he wasn’t concerned about you, because you're going to be going away for a long time for what he did. I think it's time for you to stop pining away for that guy, take the pictures down, and get on with it."

  Marina felt powerful. She felt like she had brought Alyssa to her knees. Alyssa needed to just forget about that asshole Gregory, and come to her senses. If Alyssa wasn’t going to come to her senses on her own, Marina was going to help her along.

  When Marina went to bed that night, she didn’t feel badly about her roommate crying herself to sleep. She cried herself to sleep anyhow, every night. She was wailing more than usual, however, and Marina had to put her pillow over her ears to drown out the noise.

  Chapter 5

  By 2 AM, Marina’s thoughts had changed. As she heard her cellmate crying, she felt extremely guilty. She felt like such a terrible person. Sometimes she had a hard time looking over at herself in the mirror, knowing what kind of an ugly person she was inside and out. Alyssa was an innocent soul who believed anything. Marina felt awful about dropping the lie about Gregory on her. That was a hammer that should never have dropped.

  There were times when she felt so bad about herself that she wanted to take her own life. Just end it all. She had a hard time dealing with the pain, the psychic pain that came from growing up in a Russian orphanage where she was starved, beaten, chained to a bed night and day, and sexually abused. That was why she delighted in making other people hurt - she, herself, was in severe pain, and sometimes the only way to lessen that pain was to visit it on somebody else. It was almost like she was able to give another person her own pain, if only for a moment, and, for that moment, she felt her own pain just a little bit less.

  However, when she heard Alyssa wailing that night, at first, she was annoyed. Then she felt terribly guilty.

  She didn’t do things like this. Wicked Marina did. She didn’t. She tended to think that there was a part of herself that was almost like a demon, one that could never be sated. A demon that wanted to destroy everything. One that wanted to watch the world burn, like the Joker in Batman.

  She hated when the demon would come out. Not that she could ever keep it in, because it just came out whenever it wanted to. She had seen many psychotherapists over the years, because she desperately wanted to know how to cope with life. One of her psychotherapists asked her to give a name to her demon, and treat her demon as if she would a friend. Try to talk to her kindly, and try to reason with her.

  So, Marina initially named her demon Sarah. Marina imagined Sarah to be a white bread girl, calm and soothing. Sarah was a girl who lived in a beautiful home up in Encinitas, maybe, or maybe Del Mar, or La Jolla, where Marina lived. Sarah was somebody who never cheated on her husband, who never would have lied to an innocent like Alyssa, who never would have physically attacked her own attorney. Sarah would have been kind to Aidan, respectful, honest. That was the kind of person that Sarah was, and that was the kind of person that Marina wished that her demon was.

  But her demon wasn't like that. No, Marina's demon was soon named something else - Mal
phas, second in command to Satan in hell. That was how Marina saw her evil self. Malphas was the bad Marina, her shadow self.

  Marina almost thought sometimes that her demon, Malphas or Sarah, depending on Marina's mood, was a separate person from her. The demon had different appetites, both sexually and food. For instance, Malphas could not tolerate milk. Marina loved dairy. Malphas loved hot foods, such as ghost peppers and other kinds of hot peppers such as habaneros. Marina was convinced that Malphas liked to consume those foods, because it made Marina’s insides burn. It made Marina have the runs, that chafed when it came out and caused a rash. It gave Marina severe indigestion.

  Malphas was the one who enjoyed torturing, psychologically, people around her, and also enjoyed physically torturing people who got in her way. And yet, whenever Malphas wreaked havoc on the people around her, Marina was never able to quite apologize for the way that she acted.

  And she didn't know why.

  Malphas was a horrible person. She was sadistic, cruel, and manipulative. Malphas made Marina sick, yet Marina knew that Malphas was a part of her and always would be.

  The question was, did Malphas somehow come out on the night of her husband's murder? Sometimes she thought that Malphas would take over her body, which was why she had such losses of time.

  She knew that when she saw her attorney again, the poor sap by the name of Aidan, she would probably be back to Malphas, the mean, shadow side of her self. As much as she didn't want that to happen, there was no controlling it.

  She wished that she could warn Aidan about what he was getting into, but she couldn't.

  Because she knew that she would not be herself by the time that she saw him again.

  Chapter 6

  Aidan

  Regina met me at my law office on Monday morning. I had already made it clear to James that I wanted her to be my investigator, explaining to him that our investigators were not experienced in investigating murder trials, and Regina was. They agreed to go ahead and contract with her, paying her $200 per hour, and Regina was happy with that.

  "Okay, who's first on our agenda, as far as who we’re going to talk to?" Regina asked me. She had her boots up on my desk, and she was leaning back in her chair. She was dressed in a leather jacket and a tight red shirt that showed off her impressive curves. As usual, she took my breath away.

  "Well, I was hoping I could to send you off to track down some leads. I have to go to court for Marina today. She's having her arraignment, and bond review hearing. I think I can probably get her a bond, but it’s going to be pretty steep – $5 million or more. But I think she can afford to pay that."

  "So, have you decided that you're going to go ahead and try to figure out if this chick did it or not?" Regina asked.

  “Obviously. I mean, I have to go ahead and try to cover all my bases with this woman. Because, as you say, getting a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict is not going to be a walk in the park. Especially because we don't even know if she did it or not. So, I want to go ahead and track down some of the people that they corresponded with over the Internet. People that they invited into their bedroom.”

  I found out that Lawrence and Marina had an open marriage, and they found people to swing with on a site called Alt.com. It was a site where people found others who liked to play. “I had Christian go ahead and get the records of all the people that they contacted on this site, and there were quite a few people, so I hope that you don’t get too bogged down in this,” I said. “Just collect their backgrounds, see who might have criminal records, find out who has any signs of violence in their past. Maybe a restraining order or two along the way. From what Christian tells me, it doesn’t seem like they were exactly discriminating about who they hung out with. Maybe when you talk to them, they can give you some leads as to who else we can track down. That's where I want you to start."

  “So, you’re thinking that a rando they picked up might have done him in?”

  “Well, let’s start there. We have to start somewhere.”

  "Will do." Regina took the list of people out of my hand, and took a look at it. She nodded her head. "I see some familiar names on here, from my own days of being a working girl. Thank you for this Aidan, this is going to be helpful."

  I nodded my head, and looked at her. I wanted to say something else to her. I wanted to see if she wanted to go out that night, but, the way she shot me down the other day, I knew that I was gun shy.

  "Well, hopefully you can try to figure something out from this list."

  She took the list, and then left without a word.

  And I got ready to go to court for my client.

  Chapter 7

  Regina

  Regina had looked through the list of people that she was given by Aidan, and she wasn’t feeling hopeful about it. She had a nagging feeling that there was something that she and Aidan weren’t seeing, and she didn't really know what it was.

  She had a feeling that she was going to be barking up the wrong tree with these individuals. But she was going to be game about it anyways. She managed to find that there was one guy on the list, his name was Brock, and he had multiple restraining orders against him. He was somebody who was brought in to Marina and Lawrence's relationship as a part-time player, at least that was what she gathered from the evidence. The cell phone records that Christian had managed to get for her showed that they had called this guy several times over the course of six months, and, since he was known to be a violent person – at least he was according to his girlfriend, Daniela Thompson – he was a person who Regina was going to start with first.

  She made an appointment to see him, and then went over to his apartment. He was living in Barrio Logan, not exactly the most high-class neighborhood in the area, and his apartment complex was extremely rundown. It was one of those apartment complexes that was probably built in the 1950s and not updated since then. All the cars in the parking lot were older model, with the exception of just a few, and Regina knew that she was probably going to come across more than a few condoms and broken bottles in the parking lot, so she was going to have to be careful.

  She gingerly stepped along the sidewalk, passing by discarded potato chip wrappers and bottles that were filled with a yellow liquid that she knew was not Mountain Dew, and got to a heavy steel door. Opening the door, which opened into the stairway, she was hit in the face with the stench of rotting food and piss.

  She walked up the six flights of stairs to where his floor was. As she walked down the hallway, she heard babies crying in multiple apartments, and, in one apartment, she heard the loud sounds of people having sex, and right next to that, the even louder sounds of a major fight between a man and a woman. The man was screaming at the woman and the woman was crying. And because the walls were so thin, Regina heard all of it.

  Brock's apartment was at the end of the hall. The carpet in the hallway was threadbare, and in certain areas, it was a completely see-through. Like that stairway, it smelled of urine and garbage. Rotting garbage. She thought she smelled something else, and then saw down the hallway that there was a dead rat that was just laying next to the wall. He had been decomposing for quite a while, judging by the looks of it, and the stench of the rotting animal amplified all the other smells. Regina felt herself wanting to gag.

  She knocked on the door. She wondered how somebody like this Brock person, who obviously had no money, would have hooked up with such high-rollers as Marina and her husband Lawrence.

  She had heard of slumming before, but this was something else entirely.

  Brock open the door. He was expecting her, but, by the looks of it, he didn't want company at all. He was wearing a stained wife-beater and boxer shorts. His legs were extremely pale. He had a shock of bright red hair, the color of Marina’s, and the hairs on his legs were the same color, except for more ginger. He was extremely skinny, his face long and gaunt. When he smiled, she noticed that there were several missing teeth. And the few teeth that he had in his head were rottin
g out.

  And yet, there was something about him that was eerily familiar. Regina studied his face, and then shook her head. She hadn’t seen him before. Had she?

  "Brock Lewis?" Regina asked him.

  "Yeah. I guess you’re Regina, huh? You wanted to talk to me about Lawrence and Marina, huh?"

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Regina said.

  He invited her in, and she stepped into the apartment and looked around. As with the hallway, the carpet was threadbare, and extremely cheap. It was a sickly color of green, and was thin as paper.

  He had a cat, an enormous orange monstrosity that was pooping in the litter box even as she walked in. The poor cat didn't have any kind of toys around - no scratching posts, no towers to sit in.

  For that matter, Brock didn’t have a place for her to sit, either. There was a chair, but only one, and it had an enormous hole in the the middle of it. It looked like something that someone probably had thrown out on the curb, and this guy had picked it up and brought it into his apartment for himself. Other than that chair, though, there was no furniture in the place where Regina could sit. Besides the chair, the only furniture in the place consisted of a chest of drawers, which, like the leather chair, looked like it had seen better days. The paint was peeling off of it, and the middle door was completely missing. On top of the dresser was an old-school television, the kind with the glass front and large back, like people watched in the 1980s. The kind that you could find on Craigslist for free any day the week.

  Brock looked embarrassed. "Here, sit in my chair. I'll just sit here on the floor. You can ask me any question you want to ask me."