Now, within a week, the drugs would be distributed to ten thousand moderately to severely depressed patients around North America, all of whom had seriously contemplated killing themselves.
And then, within six to eight days of those people taking their meds, the suicides would begin.
24
Considering all that I had on my mind, I slept well. No nightmares haunted me, and I felt refreshed and ready to go at it today.
After breakfast, I spent some time examining the forensics reports from the apartment where Basque had taken Lien-hua.
For security reasons, members of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime didn’t meet at FBI Headquarters or at the Academy.
Our offices were located in a warehouse that the Bureau had purchased ten years earlier near Quantico. The sign for Tarry Lawnmower Supply still hung out front, the lobby still had posters of lawnmowers on the walls, and when you called in, the receptionist cheerfully told you that you’d reached Tarry Lawnmower Supply.
Every week, semis drove to the back of the warehouse and loaded and unloaded the mowers alternately. All of these precautions were necessary, because the building didn’t just house the NCAVC, but also all the records and computers that made up ViCAP.
I shared the official definition with our students so I had it memorized: “ViCAP maintains the largest investigative repository of major violent-crime cases in the U.S. It is designed to collect and analyze information about homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and other violent crimes involving unidentified human remains.”
And the location of that was worth keeping a secret.
Even if Tessa chose not to come along with me to the hospital this morning to see Lien-hua, I figured I should let her know that I was heading over and wouldn’t be back until later this afternoon, when the briefing was over.
It would probably also be a good idea to inform her that there would be police protection for her if she decided to stay at the house.
Going to her room, I knocked lightly on the door to see if she was awake. “Tessa?” I heard her gerbil, Rune, running on his gerbil-wheel-thing, but Tessa didn’t reply.
I eased the door slightly open and caught a glimpse of her still lying in bed, eyes closed, her teddy bear, Francesca, snuggled up tightly in her arms.
Christie had given her the bear on her fifth birthday, and as far as I knew Tessa had slept with that stuffed animal every night since then. Yes, a girl whose walls were covered with posters of death-metal bands like Boomerang Puppy, Death by Suzie, and Trevor Asylum had a pet gerbil and slept with a teddy bear.
A quirk? Yeah, I guess that would definitely count.
I remembered when Tessa first told me she wanted a gerbil. “I figured you for a snake person,” I’d told her. “Maybe a rock python or something.”
“I like gerbils.”
“But they’re cute and furry and they don’t really go with the death motif here in the room.”
“It’s not a death motif. It’s just posters of the bands I like.”
“Find one without a skull on it.”
She pointed.
“The name of that band is House of Blood.”
“Well,” she countered, “there’s no skull. Besides, gerbils don’t eat meat…” She caught herself. “Well, I suppose locusts and grubs — but only if there’s no other food around. Anyway, I couldn’t deal with a constrictor. I could never watch it kill mice like that every week. Totally disturbing.”
In the end, I’d thought it might be good for her to have a pet to take care of and I’d told her that it was fine with me if she got a gerbil. She’d named him Rune, which came from an Old English word that meant “mystery,” or “secret.”
“Because I’ll never know what he’s thinking,” she explained, “and I’m always going to wonder about that. What would it be like to think what a gerbil thinks, from a gerbil’s point of view? Kind of like Thomas Nigel’s 1974 paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ There’s a subjective character of experience that’s never captured in reductive accounts. Know what I mean?”
“Um… Sure.”
Now I called to her again, a little louder than before, using her nickname: “Raven?”
Finally she groaned and rolled over, turning her back to me.
“I’m going to leave for the hospital in half an hour.”
She groaned again in acknowledgment.
“Would you like to come along or are you going to stay here? I won’t be back until later this afternoon.”
“Yeah,” she said feebly.
“Does that mean stay here or come along?”
“I’ll come,” she mumbled. “I wanna come.”
“You sure?”
She gave another groan and I took that as a yes.
Twenty minutes later she staggered blearily into the kitchen in her pajamas and without a word poured herself a mug of coffee, mixed four heaping tablespoons of sugar into it, and flumped onto the chair across the table from me. “So what are we drinking today?” she asked sleepily.
“Tanzanian Peaberry.”
She nodded, cupped the mug in her hands, and took a sip. “So you’re really leaving in ten minutes?”
“I was planning to.”
She sipped some more coffee. I had the sense that she’d gotten up about fifteen seconds before entering the room.
I added a little honey and cream to my cup.
“Yeah,” she said, “okay — ten minutes.”
She rummaged through the cupboard for some granola, dumped it into a bowl, and poured soy milk over it. “I’m gonna change. I’ll meet you in the car.” She turned toward the hallway and I wasn’t sure if she was being morning-brain-distracted or if she was going to bring her breakfast with her to eat on the way.
Before she left the kitchen I cleared my throat. “Hey, listen. I was thinking about last night, when you were talking to me about going to church.”
“Never mind.” She brushed a hand across the air as if she were erasing something. “It’s all good. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, it does. I didn’t want you to think I was blowing you off.”
“Okay.”
“I mean—”
“I get it. Okay.” She yawned, started for her room, but then stopped suddenly, leaned against the wall, and rubbed some sleep out of her eyes. “I don’t think I ever told you, but when I was little I was always scared of the dark, scared of monsters in my closet. You know, like what happens with kids.”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, Mom told me there was no such thing as monsters.” She scratched uneasily at the back of her neck. “But there are, aren’t there?”
The transition from church to monsters wasn’t immediately clear to me. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Don’t you ever wonder about vampires and werewolves? Where all the stories come from?”
“Actually, I’ve got a theory on that.”
“Let me guess, it has to do with serial killers?”
“Well”—she’d taken a little air out of my balloon—“yes, actually.”
“That villagers maybe… what? Found bodies, mutilated or something, and didn’t think a human being could ever be capable of doing that to someone?”
I nodded. “The term ‘serial killer’ is fairly recent. They used to be called ghouls or fiends and were often attributed superhuman powers — often they weren’t even considered human. After all, it’s a lot easier to believe a monster could do those things to another person than to accept that it was someone who lived in your same village, maybe next door, maybe even in your own home.”
“Those who should know killers best, often know them the least.”
“Yes.”
“And those around them suspect nothing at all.”
“That’s right, all too often they suspect nothing at all.”
“But,” she said, “it’s worse this way, that’s my point. With monsters, I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if you had real monsters they’d be easy to identify, you know? Werewolves and vampires only look like the rest of us some of the time, sometimes they look like what they really are.”
Now I saw where she was going with this and concluded her thought for her. “But serial killers always look like the rest of us. They never really look like what they are.”
“Or maybe they always do.”
That was a troubling thought.
She looked at me intently. “I’ve been thinking about it since we talked about how clever criminals can be in prison — how they could ever act so inhuman to each other. Do you know how to turn someone into a monster?”
“I’m not sure. No.”
“Let him be himself without restraint.”
Then she went to her room and left me to sort through what she’d just said.
We’d had discussions on this subject before, and she’d quoted to me the words of Dr. Werjonic: “The road to the unthinkable is not paved by slight departures from your heart, but by tentative forays into it.”
Being yourself without restraint.
Taking deeper forays into your own heart.
Two ways of saying the same thing.
She reemerged, brought her cereal and a copy of Michael D. O’Brien’s novel Island of the World with her to the car, and we drove to see Lien-hua.
As I picked my way through the morning DC traffic, I reflected on what Tessa had just said about people turning into monsters.
I think it was Plato who first recorded asking people what they would do if they weren’t visible — if they could do anything without consequence or chance of discovery. Almost no one answered the question by listing all the good things they would do for other people. Instead, they fantasized about all the things they could get away with, all the things that society and culture and their own consciences constrained them from doing on a day-to-day basis — a Lord of the Flies sort of thing.
Inadvertently, both Plato and Tessa had identified one of the premises of environmental criminology: crimes almost never occur in the presence of an authority figure.
Are students better behaved when the teacher steps out of the room? Are gang members more law-abiding when the police stop patrolling their neighborhoods? Is genocide less frequent when the UN stops imposing sanctions?
No, we don’t become kinder, gentler, and more virtuous in the absence of authority figures, we become more violent and ruthless. The unrest and genocide in Africa over the last thirty years hasn’t been because of closely guarded, fair laws, but in large part because of the absence of anyone to enforce them. The true nature of man left to himself without restraint is not nobility but savagery.
What an encouraging thought to start the day off with.