Читать книгу None So Blind - Barbara Fradkin - Страница 7

“I think it’s bullshit.”

Hannah spoke with the cocky assurance that is the hallmark of the young. Before all life’s puzzles and contradictions have a chance to confound her, Green thought wryly. He held his tongue, which prompted Hannah to roll her eyes.

“I mean, come on, Dad. Amnesia? How lame is that?”

“It happens,” Sharon said. She was perched on the edge of her chair, her own dinner neglected while she attempted to wrestle a spoon away from Aviva. When the baby screeched, she abandoned the effort and picked up a second spoon. The floor around Aviva’s high chair already looked like the morning after a street party, but the dog was happily stationed underneath doing cleanup duty.

It was Shabbat, but Sharon had abandoned much of the ritual of the Friday night dinner since the baby’s arrival on the scene. They had retreated to the cramped but scrubbable kitchen and the silver candlesticks were relegated to the counter. Today, Green’s father had declined to come, citing fatigue, but Green suspected — indeed, hoped — that Aviva’s lungs were the main reason. Recently, however, his father’s skin looked greyer than ever and his stoop more pronounced.

Amid the chaos, Green noticed his seven-year-old son casually slipping his Brussels sprouts under the table for the dog. A grin sneaked across the boy’s face, whether at the dog’s enthusiasm or his sister’s profanity was unclear.

“In bad movies,” Hannah countered. “But on a college campus? You should see what it’s like, Dad. College profs hardly older than their students, strutting around campus like their dicks are a mile long —”

“Hannah!” Sharon snapped. Tony burst out laughing, and, to her credit, Hannah flushed.

“Sorry,” she muttered before reaching under the table to tickle her brother. “But he should learn this stuff. He’ll be after the girls himself soon enough and if you don’t want him to be a jerk —”

“We have a little time yet before his education.”

Hannah sighed. “All I’m saying is, these profs have it all offered to them on a silver platter. Hot young girls lining up to score with them to get the inside track, better marks, exam secrets, maybe just bragging rights. The whole place is floating in hormones.”

“That doesn’t make it acceptable,” Green said. He could feel his lips tighten primly and he felt a hundred years old. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had been shamelessly prey to his hormones himself.

Predictably, Hannah took up the challenge. “Acceptable’s got nothing to do with it. The temptation is there. Hard to resist. Some profs don’t even try.”

“That’s why there are laws —”

“Exactly!” Hannah flailed her fork, sending a Brussels sprout flying. Modo snapped it from the air. They all laughed.

“Saved by the circus dog,” Green said, rising to pick up plates. “Let’s see what she thinks of dessert.”

Hannah didn’t move. “Why do you never take me seriously? Why is my opinion always a joke, just because you’ve got a hundred years as a cop? I know something about this!”

Green paused to study her. Spots of red stood out on her cheeks and her hazel eyes glittered as they met his. She was just finishing her first undergraduate year at Carleton University and had been frantically cramming for exams and completing papers. In recent weeks, she had rarely surfaced for dinner or conversation. He felt a twinge of worry that he had lost track of her. Perhaps this wasn’t the usual contrary Hannah; perhaps something was truly troubling her.

He planted a quick kiss on her head. “Okay, let’s you and me talk about it later while we do the dishes.”

“I’ve got a paper to do. It’s way overdue.”

“Ten minutes? I could use your input.”

It was half an hour before Sharon had shepherded the two younger children upstairs, leaving Hannah and Green to the peace of the kitchen. Now that silence had descended, Hannah was curiously tongue-tied.

Green busied himself at the dishwasher. “Everything okay, honey?”

“There’s no prof hitting on me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Then…?”

“I just think it’s way too convenient, this amnesia crap. The guy murders his student but he’s such a hard-working, loving family man that he can’t live with himself so he forgets the whole thing? For years? Even with all the evidence piling up in court to remind him? Then, twenty years later, when he’s finally got parole coming up, he suddenly remembers? Boy, that’s some trick!”

“I’m not saying I believe it.”

“Good. ’Cause if you did, I’d say you needed a brain transplant.”

“But the point is, the parole board seems to have swallowed it. At least some of the psychologists and counsellors.”

“Then they’re dumb. I’m doing a paper on criminals and amnesia. A lot of them make it up — it’s the best defence, even when you’ve got blood all over you. ‘I don’t remember, it’s all a blank.’ How do you disprove that?”

He turned from the dishwasher to face her. Hannah was in her first year of a criminology degree, but in typical Hannah fashion, until now she had shared almost nothing with them. Now he realized she was wrestling with important issues of justice, evil, and the dark labyrinth of the human mind. Heady ideas for a twenty-year-old, especially after all she had been through in her young life.

She seemed to be asking him to help her rather than argue with her.

“That’s the big question,” he said gently. “I’m bushed. Let’s make some tea and go sit in the living room.”

She seemed embarrassed. Ready to flee again. He touched her arm as he moved past to fill the kettle. “I really could use your thoughts on this.”

Rosten’s psyche — the contradictions and inconsistencies — had always confounded him. As a young detective, he had shrugged off his doubts. He was not a shrink, he’d told himself. It was not his job to analyze or to explain, merely to follow the trail of evidence.

Yet the psyche was at the core of it all.

Hannah said nothing as they prepared two cups of tea and headed into the living room. “I don’t really know too much,” she muttered, fussing with the cushions as she prepared to settle in. “It’s just a first-year paper. Short.”

“All the same, you’ve researched the theory of amnesia. I know Rosten and the circumstances of the murder. Maybe we can tease it out.”

She twirled her cup. “I know Rosten too. I used him as a case study.”

His eyes widened, prompting her to scowl. “I’d have to be living under a rock in this house not to hear you and Sharon talking these past few months.”

His jaw dropped in dismay, but she cut him off. “Calm down, I didn’t report any of that stuff. I just read the court transcripts.”

“Okay,” he said carefully. “What’s your take on him?”

She fidgeted. Blew on her tea. “I keep coming back to why he would have killed her in the first place? He could have slept with her; lots of profs sleep with their students without a bit of trouble.”

“I always figured she was going to blow the whistle on him. Even back then, universities disapproved of faculty seducing students. He would have faced not only gossip and scandal but also disciplinary action. Possibly the denial of tenure when it came up. Not to mention repercussions with his wife. She might have left him and taken his children away. As indeed she did.”

He could see Hannah weighing his words. Rejecting them. “But did you have any evidence that this girl, Jackie, was threatening to rat him out?”

“No. We never even had proof they were having a private relationship, other than the tutoring.”

“So she didn’t talk to girlfriends? Her mom? Even just hinting at it?”

He shook his head.

“See, that’s the thing, that’s not normal. Girls talk about stuff like that. Unless we’re really ashamed or afraid, we’d be sounding out what we should do. She didn’t even mention this to her sister? Weren’t they almost the same age?”

Green rifled through long-forgotten memories. Julia and Jackie were four years apart but had never been close. Their temperaments were too different, and because Julia wasn’t attending university, they had few experiences in common. But more than that, after the murder no one had wanted to push Julia to talk about her sister. At first she’d been convinced Jackie had run away to avoid dealing with her stepfather when he was drunk, and she’d been inconsolable when Jackie’s body was found. She had blamed Lucas and become hysterical the moment anyone questioned her reasons.

“I don’t think her sister had any idea that a relationship was going on,” he said finally.

Hannah looked unconvinced. “That’s a massive secret to keep from your friends and your sister. Maybe there was no relationship. Maybe Rosten hit on her that one time, she freaked out and threatened to tell, so he killed her.”

That had always been Green’s most likely scenario, but he was still dissatisfied with how the facts fit. “Murder is not as easy to pull off in real life as it appears in fiction,” he began. “Even a desperate, spur-of-the-moment killing. It takes a lot of strength, nerve, and persistence to pin down and strangle a victim who’s fighting for her life. She would have lashed out, scratched, or bruised him. Plus, most people would be agitated if they’d just killed someone, no matter how hard they tried to cover up. According to his wife, he hadn’t a mark on him, except for a scratch on his forehead and some dirt on the knees of his jeans.”

“Where did he get those?”

“He claims he went out to the cottage that day to close it up for the winter, and bumped his head crawling around underneath disconnecting the water. When we checked, it was in fact disconnected.”

“Pretty feeble story,” Hannah said. “And convenient too, picking that very same day to go out to his cottage.”

“His wife corroborated his statement. She said he’d been looking for a spare afternoon to get out there before the pipes froze.”

“She could have been lying.”

He shook his head. “Maybe in her initial statement, but by the end she would have put the nails in his coffin herself if she could.”

“So he’s a killer who’s so calm, cool, and collected that he can strangle a girl and act like he’s been for a walk in the park.”

“It happens,” he replied, thinking of the killers he’d known. The predators and psychopaths for whom extinguishing a life that had become an impediment or a threat was akin to squishing a bug.

She was leaning forward intently. “But wouldn’t someone know? His wife? Can you sleep beside someone every night and not sense something is wrong with them?”

“If you’re really smart, good at acting, and good at compartmentalizing your life, maybe. And if your wife isn’t looking too closely. She might have thought, He’s under pressure, he needs his own space, he needs to feel in control. We don’t usually think, Gee, maybe my husband is a killer. And the wife did say he was under stress. Everybody attributed it to the birth of the twins.”

She shook her head, still skeptical. “But he’d show his true colours sometime. Surely! A guy doesn’t just wake up at the age of thirty and become a psychopathic sex murderer!”

He grinned. “No, but if they’re smart and careful, these guys can operate undetected for decades. And it escalates. He might have started off with just fantasies. Then stalking, then a few bouts of rough sex.”

There had been a few hints of that. Rosten had married his lab assistant while he was doing a post-doctorate at Dalhousie University, suggesting that he was inclined toward relationships with those he could control. One former girlfriend had surfaced to report that he was an ambitious, unfeeling bastard who put women on a par with invertebrates in a Petri dish. A few coeds had testified to flirtatious remarks. But how many men would emerge with their reputations untarnished from their interactions with women over the years? Certainly not me, Green acknowledged ruefully.

“So maybe something pushed him over the edge?” Hannah said.

He reached over to tousle her soft curls, now red with turquoise tips that shimmered when she tossed her head. “You’ve learned a lot for this short paper of yours.”

She jerked away. “Dad, I do know something about being pushed over the edge.”

Shame stole over him. The previous summer she had barely escaped with her life from people pushed to the edge. “Of course you do.” Despite his best efforts, he could hear the gravel in his voice.

“So could it have been the twins? His new responsibilities?”

“Certainly that factored into the various psychiatric theories. Who knows what it triggered deep in his psyche that drove him to a bigger, more dangerous thrill.”

Hannah was silent, perhaps caught up in her own memories of danger and death. He sat quietly at her side, sipping his now lukewarm tea and letting her follow her thoughts. He heard Sharon’s footsteps first in the kitchen and then in the hallway to the living room. Pausing there. Perhaps wondering whether she should interrupt this rare moment of father-daughter intimacy.

Hannah broke the silence finally. Her voice was hard. “So let’s assume he’s a cold-blooded psychopath pushed to a new thrill. Is it possible he’d block out the whole thing afterwards?”

Green shook his head slowly. This was the inherent contradiction he had struggled with. “If amnesia is intended to protect the person from a traumatic or intolerable memory, psychopaths don’t need it. They don’t feel guilt and fear like normal people.”

Hannah snorted. “It’s all circular, isn’t it? Label him a psychopath for what he did, then explain what he did by calling him a psychopath. Doesn’t help us understand, does it?”

“No. And I don’t think we can really understand psychopaths. They are different from us, and no amount of trying to step into their shoes can help us understand. And God knows, I’ve tried.”

“Amnesia can have different causes, though,” Sharon said, stepping into the room with her own tea. “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing.”

He smiled up at her. “The munchkins asleep?”

“Tony’s reading in bed.”

Green glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock. It amazed him how quickly time flew by. The hours, the years … now he had a seven-year-old son who could read his own bedtime stories. How long before he was borrowing the car keys? Heading off into his own life?

Hannah was oblivious to the private detour of Green’s thoughts. She swivelled around to look at Sharon. “Like what? I know about brain damage, tumours, concussions. But none of those happened to Rosten.”

“No, but drugs and alcohol can also make you blank out. Give even a normal person enough of either, and their brain wouldn’t register the memories.”

Green weighed the idea carefully. He had met numerous men who had killed in a drunken rage, but all of them had been serious alcoholics with a long history of assaults. In all cases, they had left a trail of clues that even a rookie detective could follow. One had been found passed out in the adjacent bedroom with the kitchen knife still in his hand. Drunk or drug-addled killers didn’t think clearly enough to cover their tracks as Rosten had.

“Was he drunk, Dad?”

He paused, trying to recall the investigation. In her initial statement, Rosten’s wife had said that when he arrived home shortly after 9 p.m., she detected a faint smell of alcohol, but he was not staggering or slurring his speech. However, although she had been his strongest ally in the beginning, the defence had not called her as a witness. Green recalled the Crown crowing about her change of heart as the evidence mounted. By the time the defence began its rebuttal, she was no longer sure of his state of mind on the evening in question, nor indeed what time he had come home, because she had fallen asleep. Possibly he’d been as late as midnight. He had seemed tired, she said. Distracted and preoccupied. His eyes had been red-rimmed and he had stammered slightly. He had brushed aside her concern by saying he’d dropped by the university after the cottage to pick up some lab reports.

No one had seen him there, however.

He could have been drunk, Green acknowledged. Drunk enough to lose his inhibitions, drunk enough to make unwise advances toward a pretty co-ed, maybe even drunk enough to get angry when she refused him. But drunk enough to black out the entire episode from his memory?

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “This killer was more careful and controlled than that.”

Hannah swung on Sharon. “Is there a type of amnesia that could do that? Block out the entire thing but leave him in control? What about that multiple personality stuff? That’s not just in the movies, is it?”

Sharon shook her head. “But it’s extremely rare. The mind is capable of the most astonishing things. The more I see, the less I know for sure. Anything is possible, but usually this kind of dissociative amnesia — when the mind blocks out a traumatic memory — occurs in people with a history of chronic, severe abuse, so the forgetting becomes a mental escape hatch for them. It becomes their way of coping with the intolerable. Did James Rosten have a history of childhood trauma?”

Green dredged his memory again. In truth, unlike Green, the OPP and the Crown had not been interested in the man’s psyche. They had constructed their case on circumstantial evidence: the cut on his head, the dirt on his knees and in the treads of the car tires, Jackie’s hair in his car, the sighting of Rosten and Jackie together and later of his car near the scene, the exam note in Jackie’s backpack, Rosten’s flimsy alibi and his flirtatious behaviour with other students.

Now Green recalled that only one brother had come forward to offer character evidence for the defence. He had testified to Rosten’s intelligence, drive, and rough, blue-collar roots. As the son of a Sudbury miner with no patience for book learning, he had delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, and shovelled laneways all through school to earn the money to continue his studies. He was the first in the family to go to university, the only one to earn a graduate degree.

The Crown had had only two questions for the man during their cross-examination. “Would you say that your brother’s accomplishments and position were important to him?”

To which the unwitting man replied, “No question.”

“Important enough to fight for?”

“He fought for them every day he lived in Sudbury.”

The Crown had quietly taken her seat. Green recalled thinking that the brother had clearly not inherited the same brains.

The brother’s testimony provided no hint of childhood abuse or trauma. On the contrary, he had described a capable and focused young man who’d carved his own path. But Green knew that beneath the veil of normalcy, a family could hide horrendous secrets. Children learned to keep them private from prying eyes and to act normal as if their life depended on it. Often it did. Perhaps James’s father had expressed his contempt not just with belittling words but with his fists.

“Can a childhood of abuse be hidden behind a façade of competence?” he asked Sharon now.

“Absolutely. Sometimes even super competence. But dig deep enough, there are scars. Often anger issues. Lack of trust, trouble with intimacy.”

“Pent-up rage?”

She studied him briefly, as if recognizing the implication. “That too. But amnesia suggests more than that. Usually people who dissociate are mentally fragile. They don’t learn to handle stress, because they escape it. So they usually have pretty serious chronic psychiatric problems, like anxiety and depression. Every time there is a new stress, they are prone to crumble. Maybe even dissociate again.”

If — if — this theory were true, Green thought, the stress of a new job and a new family could have been the trigger, and the killing of Jackie Carmichael the unconscious acting out of his buried childhood rage. Farfetched, barely credible, but, as Sharon said, the human mind was an astonishing thing.

And now this loose cannon was on the loose again. Without treatment and facing perhaps the worst stresses of his life.