"Comfy?" Becker crooned, smiling with a benevolence that fooled no one.
"Fine, yes, fine," Hatcher said.
Gold and the other agent continued to avoid each other's eyes. The psychiatrist glanced at Karen and intercepted a look of cold fury directed at Becker, who seemed oblivious. Gold wondered about the long-term health of their relationship. Certainly the stress of the Cooper case was doing nothing to holster it.
"So good of you to make time for us like this," Hatcher was saying. "I realize you must be very busy… uh… with your interests."
"Yes. Today I was trying to learn to cut the ball,"
Becker said, smiling. "My normal shot is a slight draw, very good for most purposes-better distance, for instance-but there are times when you want to have that high fade available. The kind Nicklaus hils. Faldo and Norman have it when they need it, too."
"Ah, yes." Hatcher nodded. He thought he recognized the name Nicklaus.
The others meant nothing to him.
"It's hard, though. Especially with a wedge," Becker said.
"Yes, difficult, I should imagine so," Hatcher said.
"Well, now, John, we have come to see you-you do know Special Agent Withers of Behavioral Sciences, don't you?"
Becker nodded. "Withers."
"Of course," said Withers, who knew Becker only by reputation. He returned the nod of greeting.
"We have come on a matter of some urgency which I believe you already know about."
"What's that?" asked Becker.
Hatcher looked at Karen. He hoped not to let Becker drag every bit of the story out of him, inch by painful inch.
"The Cooper business," Karen said briskly. She was in no mood for Becker's antics. Being front man for Hatcher was bad enough for her without jumping through hoops held up by the man she lived with.
"You know about the Cooper business, with the two girls in the coal mine." Her tone allowed no room for disagreement.
"Special Agent Withers raised a few questions about the overall credibility of Cooper's story," Hatcher said.
"Nothing crippling to the case, certainly, but an odd question here and there. When these-ah-doubts were brought to my attention, naturally I asked for more opinions. It was then that Assistant Director Crist and Dr. Gold came forward with what they tell me was originally your… idea."
Becker smiled confusedly as if he had not yet fully grasped the meaning of the conversation.
"You know what he means," Karen said sharply.
Becker turned his countenance towards her, still looking bemused. She glowered back darkly.
Hatcher continued. "I refer to your-suggestion-that Cooper was somehow coached into confessing the murder of the Beggs girl. While not granting that that is the case at all, — not at all, it still raises an interesting line of speculation that one must conscientiously pursue.
Dr. Gold has been good enough to do a bit of research into the subject."
Becker turned his attention to Gold. He imagined that Hatcher had given the assignment to Gold for two reasons.
The first would be to keep the possibility that Hatcher might be wrong about Cooper's guilt-and that Becker might be right-within as small a group as possible. Since Gold was one of the group that had originated the doubt, Hatcher would be containing the spread of doubts if he had Gold do the work. The second reason, a happy offshoot of the first from Hatcher's point of view, was to punish Gold for having been a party to the doubts in the first place. Becker also imagined that Hatcher's greatest punishment would be reserved for Becker himself It was Hatcher's way.
Gold cleared his throat. "Well, not to get overly technical, we have done a number of studies on eyewitnesses, as you all know, and the results are not only that they are notoriously unreliable but that they actually 'see' and 'remember' those things which they are preconditioned to see. If they are shown videos of a traffic accident, for instance, and are personally inclined to believe that women are worse drivers than men, given the least bit of ambiguity in what they see, they will identify the driver who has caused the accident as a woman. That's a very simple example, of course. Any skillful questioner can plant suggestions in their minds as to specific details of the scene and they will soon parrot what they were told, convinced that it was what they saw. A rather extensive study of this phenomenon was done at Princeton, where Johnson was able to make her subjects swear they saw and heard things that never happened. They can be shown pictures of people embracing and interpret them as acts of violence, if they have been lead to believe that's what they will see. Most common, of course, is the identification of a perpetrator as being a member of whatever race the spectator identifies with criminal acts. Whites are notorious for believing all black men are dangerous, and consequently 'seeing' all dangerous men as black.
"Of most interest to us in this case, of course, are those examples in which the questioner can make the witness remember' things that did not happen. It is not difficult to do, and the witnesses are by no means stupid or pliable people. It is simply a matter of playing into their preconceptions as to how things are apt to happen, or supplying details that they missed but that their minds tell them should be there. It is easier still if the ideas are planted before the witnesses see the event. If the scene is dark, if details are obscure and the witnesses have been told to watch for a man with a knife, they will 'see' a man with a knife, no matter the facts of the event.
"Now these are ordinary people with no ax to grind beyond ordinary prejudices and preconceptions. Cooper is a very stupid man with a strong desire to believe that he is a killer. Such a notion enhances his self-esteem-and indeed actually gets him the esteem of others within the prison system, where he has spent a good deal of his life.
Again, without getting technical, the more people he thinks he killed, the better Cooper feels about himself. To be simplistic about it, we all know high school athletes whose exploits become more and more heroic in the telling the further they get from the event until by the time they're in middle age or beyond they themselves actually believe their stories of past glory. They have convinced themselves through repeated telling.
"With Cooper, we have a man who could have been convinced through repeated telling that he did something which in fact he never did. I stress the could because right now we really don't know what happened.
But given Cooper's need to believe the worst about himself, given his prolonged isolation with Swann, given an apparent cleverness on Swann's part — ." Gold trailed off, not wanting to reach the dangerous conclusion aloud.
"Well, hardly the sort of thing to convince a jury", Hatcher said, "but helpful in a speculative way." His fear, of course, was that it was precisely the kind of thing to convince a jury, just exactly the sort of vagary that in the hands of a skillful attorney could turn into a weapon of doubt with which to pry the case wide open. Juries were acquitting people right and left with not much more to justify their verdict than what Gold had just said. There was a predisposition to innocence abroad in the legal system that Hatcher found alarming. He did not dare to risk such an outcome while Beggs stood to lose face.
"What do you think, Withers? This is your line of work," Becker asked.
Withers had been hoping that no one would address him at all. It seemed the sort of conference in which no participant was going to win.
"I'm sure Dr. Gold has done his research well," Withers said noncommittally. "There are always some inconsistencies in anyone's confession. That's just human nature. All I did was point out a few in Cooper's case.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything."
"Oh, good, then there's nothing to worry about," Becker said.
Hatcher improved the crease in his pant leg.