"Why didn't Schein put it in his records?" I asked.
She threw up her hands. "You're the lawyer. You figure it out."
"So, Millie, what are you saying? Schein secretly drugged Chrissy, then implanted memories of abuse that never happened?"
"Are you asking what I can testify to under oath?"
"Use the legal standard. What can you say to a reasonable degree of medical certainty?"
She shrugged. "Who the hell knows? Should I tell you what I suspect?"
"I think I know that, Millie."
"Look, memory fades with time, making it more susceptible to postevent information."
"Like a therapist's suggestions."
"Exactly." She sat down on a corner of the desk. "How will you deal with the tapes in court?"
"I don't know. Schein's questions weren't so much leading as 'pushing.' Chrissy denied being raped. Then the recorder was turned off. When it came back on, she remembered."
Millie Santiago was shaking her head.
I kept talking. "We'll have to produce the tapes, and Socolow will have a field day. He'll probably move to strike all the testimony about the abuse, and if that fails, he'll be happy to get the tapes in front of the jury."
"Heads you lose, tails you lose. Dr. Schein hurts you as much as he helps you."
Now it was my turn to stand and pace. "The problem is, I need Schein. I have no defense to a murder one charge except what he gave me."
"I'm sorry," Dr. Santiago said. "I didn't mean to clobber you like this."
"No. That's all right. I have to know the truth."
"Maybe another therapist would agree with Schein. I could recommend a couple if you want to try them."
"You mean someone who'll say what I want?"
"That's the way the game is played, isn't it?"
"I guess. I had a blood-spatter expert on the stand in a case not long ago. The state attorney is cross-examining, trying to be tough. He asks, 'Did Mr. Lassiter pay you to lie for him?' And the witness says, 'No, he doesn't have that kind of money.' "
"A little cynical, are we, Jake?"
"Yeah. You know the acronym for an expert?"
"Tell me."
" W itness H aving O ther R easonable E xplanation."
"Don't get hostile, Jake, or I'll have to suggest therapy."
"Sorry. It happens whenever I have a woman about to take a fall."
"A woman?"
"Did I say 'woman'? I meant 'client.' "
Her eyes twinkled at me. "Uh-huh."
"Hey, Millie, cut me a break."
"You left something out of the story, didn't you, Jake?"
The drone of the air conditioning was the only sound in the room. "Yeah, I left something out."
"You want some free advice?"
"Sure."
"Pull back. Don't get emotionally involved. There's only pain where you're headed."
"I know. I've been there before."
She cocked her head and studied me. "You want to talk about it? No charge."
An image flashed by, Susan Corrigan facedown in a swimming pool. "I've let someone down before."
"Someone?"
"A woman. I thought I could help her, but I botched it." Another image, Lila Summers looking out to sea, then the flash of an explosion, the boat tearing itself apart. "Maybe we can talk sometime."
"Anytime you say. If you're Doc Riggs's friend, mi casa es su casa."
I gathered my briefcase and stood up. "Thanks, Millie. Send me a bill."
"Don't worry. I will." She walked me to the door. "Oh, Jake, one more thing."
I turned around. "Yeah?"
"I'm not saying that memories can't be repressed and then later recovered. I can't say it's impossible. But suggestions can implant phantom memories that look like they're repressed, or they can shape real memories into something else."
"Dammit, Millie! What are you saying? What did Schein do?"
Her look was filled with regret, as if she'd like to help me but didn't know how. "Maybe Schein implanted your client's memories of abuse."
"Yeah, I already figured that out."
"But maybe he didn't."
"Meaning what?"
"Maybe she did it, Jake. Maybe she concocted these memories to fool her shrink. And to fool you, too."
13
Harrison Baker was yelling over the roar of the airplane engine, but I couldn't hear a thing. The old man tried again, then mouthed a word I couldn't quite pick up. He pointed to the cloudless sky above a cypress hammock and I saw the big black birds.
"Buzzards," he was saying.
Behind us, Jimmy Tiger eased back on the throttle and the airboat glided to a stop about two hundred yards from the higher ground. Jimmy's black hair was tied back in a ponytail, his eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses. He wore the traditional Miccosukee jacket of bright red with multicolored stripes.
As the engine idled. Baker said, "We get buzzards during floods, and we get them during drought. The damn shame is that man causes both. Feast or famine, we're to blame."
Baker sat next to me in the small airboat. He wore khaki pants, a bush jacket, and a Boston Red Sox cap. He had a white mustache, a sun-creased face, and a patrician bearing. Twenty years ago, Baker had retired from an insurance company up north and discovered the Everglades. Now he devoted his life to saving what was left of it.
In the water next to us, an alligator carried its baby on its back. Nearby, a scrawny deer waded through shallow water toward the hammock, but the leaves of low-hanging branches had already been stripped clean, leaving nothing edible on the little island. Through binoculars, I could see the skeletons of small animals on the shore. We floated in a shallow channel, but on both sides, the earth was dried into a cracked mosaic of parched soil. It was in the nineties and humid. This time of year, Miamians with the wherewithal head for the mountains. The deer apparently hadn't gotten the message or didn't know the route.
Baker pointed toward a stretch of land near the hammock. "There ought to be two feet of water right there. There ought to be plenty of vegetation for the deer, tiny fish for the wading birds, and water holes for the gators to lay their eggs. But look at it."
"Dry as my granny's rye toast," I said.
Jimmy Tiger leaned down from his perch above us. "They're taking all the water for the farms and the cities. Then, in the rainy season, they flood us."
Tiger gunned the engine, and we took off again down the channel in the east Glades, through patches of green water lettuce and lilies. To my untrained eye, there seemed to be plenty of flora and fauna as we sped over the shallow water, crunching through yellow sawgrass. But then, I didn't know what it was like a century ago. We roared past hardwood hammocks with live oak and royal palm trees, scattering half a dozen egrets into the air. A predatory osprey flew overhead, searching for lunch, reminding me that I was hungry. A turtle swam slowly by, and two black snakes gracefully slithered through the water. Earlier, on wetter ground near the Shark Valley Slough, I had spotted the unique pink feathers of a roseate spoonbill carrying twigs in its spoon-shaped beak and, not far away, a black-and-white wood stork.
When I pointed out all the birds, Baker gave me a bitter laugh. "Not long before you were born, Jake, there was an area called Rookery Branch west of here that was packed with white ibis, tricolored herons, and snowy egrets. Between half a million and a million of them in a strand of trees a hundred yards wide and three quarters of mile long. Can you even imagine the sound they made?"
"Yeah, and the birdshit, too," I said.
"Their songs could be heard for miles," Baker continued.
It made me think of the banyan trees near the public tennis courts on Florida Avenue in the Grove. Two dozen green parrots roost there in the winter, chirping their hearts out. "What happened?" I asked.