Do No Harm (38 page)

Into the back of one of the chairs, someone had etched the three wise monkeys wearing gangsta shades--see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. An apt trio of mascots for an interrogation room.

Finally, Yale entered. He pulled up a chair opposite David.

"I want to help you catch him," David said. "And don't tell me to talk to the Public Information Officer. I can help you. Let me help."

When Yale stood up and paced behind him, David resisted the urge to turn and keep him in sight. "And what do you want?" Yale asked.

"I want the guarantee you wouldn't give me earlier. That Clyde won't be taken into an alley and shot."

Yale let out his breath in a long rush. "I don't get you. This guy has attacked your colleagues and now your girlfriend, and you're still hell-bent on protecting him. When do you get mad?"

David felt his face color with intensity. "I'm mad already. But that's not relevant."

"When do you want revenge?"

"I'm not about revenge. I'm happy to leave that to Jenkins. And Clyde."

"He's escaped. No longer under your care. Why do you still give a shit?"

"I want to deliver him to the authorities safely, as he would have been had I not contributed to his being in this position." David leaned forward, hands resting on the table. "Listen. I'm going to have access to a lot of information. Would you rather I shared it with another law agency?"

Yale circled around and sat opposite David again. "I can't give you a guarantee--now or ever--but I can tell you this: This case has become too much of a media circus for Jenkins to be allowed latitude within it. The Mayor's been cracking the whip. We have pressure coming at us from all angles. Things will go by the book. And if you don't trust my interpretation of the political situation, trust my selfish nature. Shit is not coming down on my ass. Jenkins's sister took it from the wrong end, and that is certainly unfavorable, but I am not having my case fucked up. There was a time when Jenkins might have had an . . . outlet . . . but that time has long passed." He let his hands slap to the table.

He and David regarded each other for what seemed a very long time.

"If a cop shoots Clyde in self-defense, or in defense of some other victim, would that be okay with you?" Yale asked.

The harsh realities of the case hammered David even through his haze of exhaustion. Clyde had whipped the city into a hurricane frenzy. Considering all the forces at work felt like sifting through the aftermath of some natural disaster. Every new bit of information seemed only to increase the burden on David's shoulders.

David weighed Yale's question cautiously. "No. But it would be acceptable."

"What are you offering me?"

"I have access to Clyde's medical records. I'm the only one he's really spoken to, and I believe he's attached to me in some ways that might prove helpful down the line. I can assist you in navigating through the hospital bureaucracy should the necessity arise. Anything new I discover, I give to you."

"I don't want you interfering with our investigation."

"I'll stay out of your way."

Yale settled back in his chair with a sigh. "I'm still gonna treat you like the dirt dog you are in front of my colleagues because I don't want them to know we're dealing."

"Are we dealing?"

"Not yet." Yale slid a business card across the table. "This is my pager number. Only talk to me."

"My preference." Still no pact, but it seemed they were making headway. "How did he get into Dr. Trace's apartment?"

"She's listed. There are two Traces in the area, and the other one's not Doctor. The front door of her complex is a simple bar lock, can be picked with half a brain and a tilted credit card. Used a regular pick set on her apartment door. No prints, smudges consistent with latex gloves. SID couldn't even find a partial. We found he dropped a couple extra doctored capsules in her Tylenol bottle, in case she popped a few of those first." Yale chewed his lip, his features softening. "It seems we all underestimated this guy."

DAVID stood at the counter in Medical Records, staring down at Clyde Slade's file. He'd spent about an hour at the station, filling in Yale but withholding the theories he wanted to flesh out more in his own mind. And of course, he'd made no mention of Ed. On the drive home, he'd received a page from Medical Records, informing him Clyde's file had arrived.

Again, the clerk was listening to the Dodgers game, staring at the radio as though that would enhance the experience. He broke off his intent focus to glance at the skimpy file. "Not much there, huh?" he said.

David flipped open the file, revealing a single sheet. The note at the top: Admitted 8/13/73 for NPI study under Dr. J. P. Connolly.

A tingling swept across David's body: the feeling of nailing a difficult diagnosis.

August 13. The day of Nancy's attack. Clyde had been admitted for the study twenty-eight years before--to the day. He would have been ten years old. The study was a likely source of his fear of the Neuropsychiatric Institute and of Dash as its representative. Maybe the date had been an unconscious trigger, a precipitating event for Clyde's assaults. Psychologists refer to the phenomenon as the anniversary syndrome--people entering depressions on the anniversaries of the deaths of their loved ones, post-traumatic stress victims feeling their anxiety escalate on the anniversaries of the original trauma.

The study's lead researcher, Dr. J. P. Connolly, had been a world-renowned psychologist. A close friend of David's parents, he had grown somewhat cantankerous in the final years of his life. He'd passed away about a decade ago.

David glanced down the page. The only other note indicated a respiratory infection Clyde had sustained in September of '73--the reason for the file's existence in Medical Records as opposed to the NPI's.

David picked up the phone and reached Dash at the office. He took a few steps away from the counter, lowering his voice, though the desk clerk seemed immersed in the ball game. "Hi, Dash. Did you look for that NPI file I asked you about?"

"Despite my better judgment. Nothing came up under either name."

"I found a peds file for Clyde Slade. Shows he was entered in a study run out of the NPI by Connolly in August of '73."

"That's odd. There's nothing here under Slade--I did a thorough search. Hang on a sec, I'm logged on right now." The sound of keyboard strokes. "Nothing about a Connolly study in August either. Of any kind."

"Why would files be missing?"

"I don't know. Restricted, maybe. Or Connolly could have kept his files at home. He did have funding from a variety of sources."

"But shouldn't there at least be copies at the NPI?"

"Yes. And the journal in which the study was published. But there's nothing."

"All right. Thanks for your help." David hung up, his enthusiasm undercut by the nagging sense of something askew.

The walkway was as David remembered it as a child, a thin path twisting through gardens to the front door. The gardens themselves, however, were hardly recognizable, so overgrown were they with weeds and patches of sourgrass. The trademark marigolds drooped in limp clusters, baked brown by the heat.

David had not been to the Connollys' house in over twenty-five years. He recalled dark leather furniture, thick carpeting, and the pervasive, comforting smell of a pipe. When he knocked on the front door, a distant, warbling voice sounded from within. "Just a minute, please."

Mrs. Connolly's estimate was overly ambitious; it took her nearly two minutes to get to the door. Clutching a tissue that had been worried to shreds, she gazed up at David. Old and quite frail, she wore a heavy cotton nightgown decorated with flowers. The skin of her arms draped in wrinkled sheets over her bones. "Yes?"

"Hello, I'm David. Janet Spier's son." David realized too late that he'd neglected to mention his father.

"Oh my goodness." The woman's eyes grew watery. Her hand described a fretful arc in the air with the tissue. "David, I haven't seen you since God knows. I just can't believe it. How handsome you are." She reached out and stroked the front of his white coat once, reverently.

"It's good to see you, Mrs. Connolly."

"I remember you used to run around wearing your mother's white coat. It would be down to your shins." A faint, sad grin etched itself on her face. "I was so sorry to hear about her."

"Thank you. My father too."

"Oh dear," Mrs. Connolly said. "Oh dear."

"And I'm sorry about your husband. I don't believe we've spoken since he passed. Dr. Connolly was a great psychologist."

"Yes." Her head bobbed with tiny nods, perhaps a Parkinson's tremor. She stepped back, opening the door. "Please come in. It's been so long since I've had a visitor. What prompted you to stop by?"

"I . . . I actually wanted to know if your husband kept any of his old files and records."

Her face fell with disappointment, and David could have killed himself for it. "Oh, of course. You stopped by on a work matter. You must be awfully busy."

She turned and shuffled slowly back into the musty interior of the house, steadying herself by setting her trembling hands on counters and the backs of chairs.

"My J.P. kept all his files and records. They're in his study, every last one of them, organized by date, color, size. He was very protective about them, but I'm sure he wouldn't mind Janet Spier's son having a look around." She raised her arm up in the air with a giggle, and David recognized, for the first time, the younger Mrs. Connolly he remembered. He followed her patiently down a long, thickly carpeted hall, gripping her arm gently from behind. She paused before a door. "You'd better open it, dear. It sticks. I'm afraid I don't have the strength anymore."

David found he had to throw a little shoulder into the door to get it open. Dr. Connolly's office sat virtually untouched. A magisterial desk and leather chair, a wall of filing cabinets, rows of meticulously organized medical journals. A thick film of dust covered everything, and the smell of pipe smoke that David recalled still tinged the air.

Mrs. Connolly stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the room. "I haven't seen the inside of this room in some time." She shook her head once, as if throwing off sad thoughts, and forced a smile. "Take your time, dear," she said. "I'll be in the living room, watching the TV."

David waited to make sure she safely navigated the dark hall, then closed the door and surveyed the room. Dr. Connolly kept his office impeccably organized, and David located the relevant files in the cabinets in no time. Fear's Legacy--1973.

He pulled out the two general files and set them on the desk. Swirls of dust lifted from the leather blotter and refused to settle. The abstract sat at the front of the first folder. It was titled FEAR'S LEGACY: SORROW, DISTRESS, AND ANGER.

Fear arousal can be obtained using several stimuli, including but not limited to: noise; sudden change in illumination; sudden unexpected movement; rapidly approaching objects; height; strange people; familiar people in strange guises; strange objects and strange places; threatening animals; darkness. Often, two or more of the above items can be combined to achieve a higher degree of fear arousal (i.e., darkness and the noise of a growling dog's rapid approach). When confronted with fear, children respond in three distinct and predictable ways: They grow immobile, or "frozen"; they increase their distance from one type of object (snakes, loud noises, flashes of light); they increase their proximity to another type of object (mother figures).

Twenty-seven boys between the ages of six and ten were selected from foster homes, orphanages, and delinquent holding facilities. Each subject was removed from his "home" for a period of six weeks and taken through a twelve-phase series of fear-arousal experiments, four trials a day, seven days a week, increasing in intensity. Each set of subjects lived together through the six-week trial, barracks-style, so the contagious effects of fear might also be analyzed. All trials occurred within a controlled environment.

Feeling a growing sense of nausea, David paused to rub some dust from his eyes. Dr. Connolly had chosen children without families. That way, there were no parents to complain. No one to notice if the children deteriorated emotionally as a result of the experiments, or developed abnormal attachment patterns. Further, the study evinced bad science. There was no control group--Connolly had selected children who already, in all likelihood, were emotionally fragile. The experiments were biased before they even got off the ground.

Remembering Dr. Connolly's kindly blue eyes and his well-trimmed white beard, David could not recast him as the perpetrator of these experiments. But his mother had told David cautionary tales about Dr. Connolly, who had deteriorated in his later years beneath the burden of tongue cancer and a rapidly diminishing reputation. He'd become reclusive, holing up in his house. For the last three years of his life, the professional community heard from him only in the form of his letters to psychology and psychiatry journals, angry diatribes decrying the work of more-renowned rivals.

David's mother, he recalled, had gone to great lengths to distance herself from the man. Now he knew why. The study had taken place during his mother's tenure as chief of staff--he was appalled and surprised she had permitted it. When he glanced back at the abstract, he felt the soothing glow of relief. Results were inconclusive, as the study was terminated on October 15, 1973. David's mother had, in fact, stopped the experiments. The paper continued: