Projection
Authors: Keith Ablow
Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General
Projection
Clevenger 02
by
Keith Ablow
Contents
I watched Josiah King pace in front of the witness stand. His stout, six-foot-two frame, outfitted in a plum-colored, double-breasted suit, dominated the scene. "Dr. Elmonte," he started, "can you give an opinion, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty, whether Dr. Lucas knew right from wrong at the time he took the lives of Sarah Johnston and Monique Peletier?"
Elmonte, a slender and pretty blonde who was a full professor of psychiatry at Yale Medical School, stared at Lucas and nodded once. "I can."
Lucas pulled at his salt-and-pepper hair and whistled from the defense table as though he was heckling a schoolgirl. Three television cameras — two from local networks and one from COURT TV — swung in his direction.
"Dr. Lucas," Judge Barton scolded.
Lucas shoved his heavily casted right arm off the table and slumped forward to lay his head down. He was wearing the scrubs he'd been given at Lynn State Hospital, where, for the past five months, he had been locked up on a unit for dangerous patients. Defendants accused of capital crimes are usually held at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, but Lucas had unraveled there, ranting around the clock about the devil. Early one morning he had braced his right arm between the bars of his cell and snapped his radius, ulna and humerus. That was enough to make the transfer to a psychiatric ward happen.
King had been watching Lucas, but now looked back at Elmonte. "I'm sorry. Your opinion, doctor?"
Elmonte turned to the jury. Her blue blazer and gold monogram lapel pin complemented her authoritative tone. I could see why King had chosen her as an expert witness for the defense. "Dr. Lucas lacked the capacity to distinguish right from wrong at the time of Ms. Johnston's and Ms. Peletier's deaths," she said.
King nodded and glanced at Lucas. "Did Dr. Lucas, therefore, lack the ability to conform his behavior to the requirements of the law?"
"He lacked that ability. He could not control himself."
"You would conclude, then, doctor, that Trevor Lucas should not be held legally responsible for the violent acts he committed in the days in question."
Red Donovan, the new district attorney, shot to his feet. "Objection." Mid-forties, with an athlete's build and waves of rust-colored hair, he reminded me of a human torch. The Lucas case was his most publicized trial since taking office just eight months before. "Dr. Elmonte was qualified before the court as a psychiatric expert, not a legal scholar."
"Sustained," Barton said. He looked down at Elmonte. "The jury will decide questions of legal responsibility. Please confine your comments to the patient's state of mind."
"Of course," she said, a touch of arrogance in her tone.
King was still pacing. "You would conclude, Dr. Elmonte, that the accused was insane at the time he killed Ms. Johnston and Ms. Peletier."
"I believe he was insane."
Lucas stood up for the fifth time. "Objection," he barked, staring down at his casted arm. "
I
didn't kill anyone."
"Dr. Lucas," Barton fumed, "sit down and be quiet." His bald head, large even for his massive shoulders, reddened. He waited a few moments after Lucas took his seat, then turned to Josiah King. "Defense counsel has submitted a motion indicating that the defendant's impaired state of mind at the time of the crimes in question shall serve as the mainstay of his defense. Is that still your contention?"
"It is, Your Honor," King said.
"Then I would advise you — and your client — that further outbursts will not be tolerated."
"Understood, Your Honor," King said. He walked to the defense table and stood by Lucas. "May I continue?"
"Of course."
King took a few moments to refocus. "Dr. Elmonte, would you tell the jury what you have learned about Dr. Lucas that supports your conclusion that he was insane at the time of the two homicides?"
Elmonte turned to the jury again. "Dr. Lucas suffers from bipolar disorder," she said. "Even while functioning brilliantly as a plastic surgeon, he has, at least for the past decade, been subject to severe mood swings. At one moment he is somber, at another elated, without any stimulus intervening. His appetites — for sex, sleep, food — wax and wane unpredictably. He may be voracious today and completely disinterested tomorrow. Most importantly, his thinking often includes paranoid delusions."
I looked over at Emma Hancock, Lynn's Police Commissioner. Monique Peletier, the second victim, had been her niece. She looked back at me and shook her head in disgust. Her lips silently mouthed, "Bullshit."
"Might the symptoms you speak of explain Dr. Lucas' violent acts?" King asked.
"They would. In the weeks prior to the murders, Dr. Lucas developed the fixed and paranoid belief — the delusion — that he was an agent of Satan, a pawn in a final struggle between the forces of good and evil. As he put it, he was the devil's ‘right-hand man.’"
I heard sobbing from the front of the room and noticed Karl Johnston, Sarah's father, bent over in his seat at the end of the second bench, his head in his hands.
"The devil's right-hand man." King looked over at Johnston, pursed his lips and closed his eyes in the necessary display of empathy. His fingers massaged his overgrown eyebrows. "This is very difficult for everyone involved, Dr. Elmonte," he went on, "but I need to ask whether Dr. Lucas' psychiatric symptoms might explain why the victims were disfigured in the way they were."
She nodded. "In the days prior to Ms. Johnston's and Ms. Peletier's deaths, Dr. Lucas had come to believe that his right arm was no longer his own. It was Satan's. The doctor was horrified as he removed the breasts of each woman, even more so as he lacerated the genital area of Ms. Peletier, but he had no control over what his arm did."
"Is there a scientific name for this phenomenon?" King asked.
"
Alien hand
. The condition is well known in the literature. Oliver Sacks even writes of it."
I smiled, in spite of my raw nerves. Before closing my psychotherapy practice and becoming a forensic psychiatrist myself, I had treated more than a thousand patients and had never seen a single case of
alien hand
syndrome. Neither had any psychiatrist I knew.
"We notice that the arm is casted today," King continued. "Could you tell us why?"
"Dr. Lucas fractured the arm in three places using the bars of his cell for leverage. He wanted to be rid of it. Its actions — the arm's — were abhorrent to him."
Donovan popped up, again. "Objection. The doctor qualified before the court as a psychiatrist, not a mind-reader. She can't speak for the—"
"Dr. Lucas hates what the arm did," Elmonte interrupted. "That's why he tried to break it off."
* * *
I left for the lobby before King had finished his questioning. The judge announced there would be a short recess before Red Donovan's cross-examination of Elmonte, but I couldn't sit in the courtroom any longer.
My head was tight with anxiety. A cigarette would have calmed me down, but I didn't feel like freezing in the winter air. I thought of sneaking one in the men's room, but that reminded me too much of the days when I would have rushed into the stalls for a blast of cocaine. And I didn't have enough sober time behind me to risk rekindling the old habits. So I just stood there, watching the sculpted metal doors of the courtroom.
Nicotine wouldn't erase the truth anyhow. And the truth was the thing eating at me: Lucas had pled NGI — not guilty by reason of insanity — be he hadn't actually murdered anyone. Four mutilated bodies had been found in and around the urban squalor of Lynn, not two, and the last victims had been killed after Lucas had turned himself over to the police.
The prevailing theory was that Lucas’ crimes had spawned a ‘copycat’ killer. I knew better. One person had claimed all four victims.
Josiah King had to have considered making that argument the focus of Lucas’ defense, but it would have been tough to sell to a jury. There were disparities between the first two killings and the last two. Sarah Johnston and Monique Peletier had been Lucas’ patients and his lovers. The breast implants he had placed in each woman had been cut out of them. Their genitals had been shaved clean or mangled.
The victims found after Lucas had surrendered were also cut up, but their bodies were discovered in neighboring cities, not Lynn itself. The third victim, Michael Wembley, had been male. The fourth, Rachel Lloyd, had been set afire after her death. And neither Wembley nor Lloyd had been linked romantically to Lucas.
Those differences would go most of the way to supporting the ‘copycat’ theory and pinning the first two killings on Lucas, especially since a jury might relish sending a rich doctor away for life. No wonder a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict seemed like a deal to him. Five, ten years on a locked psychiatric unit beats life in prison hands down.
The only way Lucas would go free would be if I told what I knew about the four murders. And I couldn't.
Thinking about that started my heart pounding. I stepped into an alcove off the lobby, took a cigarette from my shirt pocket, lighted it and inhaled a third of its length. I turned and blew the smoke in back of me, took another long drag, then ground the butt out with the heel of my boot.
I wondered whether Lucas was fabricating all of his symptoms or whether the stress of his impending trial had actually touched off a break with reality. I had known for a long time that his character was warped, but what he had done to his arm seemed the act of a truly insane man, not simply a sociopath.
The doors to the courtroom opened. King, Donovan and a flood of reporters and spectators poured out. I spotted Emma Hancock right away. She was fifty-five years old, with graying hair, but her powerful build still demanded space in a crowd. I walked over to her. Without a word, we picked up our pace and started toward the concession stand one floor down.
Calvin Sanger, a reporter from the
Lynn Item
, appeared by Hancock's side and started matching our stride. He was a black man in his early thirties who was persistent and insightful — a good combination for a reporter and a nightmare for the police. He himself had made news every year for the past five, finishing the Boston Marathon near the front of the pack. He raised his pad and started to ask a question.
"No comment," Hancock said.
Sanger slowed his pace, drifted in back of us and reappeared next to me. "He has no comment, either," Hancock bristled.
"Do you agree with Dr. Elmont's diagnosis?" Sanger persisted.
Hancock stepped in front of us and blocked the way. She glared at Sanger. "Don't make me say it again, Calvin. I've always kept you in the loop when I could. Right?"
"Right, but..."
"But nothing. Don't blow it."
"Give me a break. You haven't said a word about Lucas since he was arrested."
Hancock started to walk away. I jogged a few steps to catch up with her.
"Any progress toward finding the second killer, Commissioner?" Sanger called after us.
My pulse quickened. I glanced at Hancock. "He can go straight to hell," she said.
I bought our coffee at the concession stand. We sat down on a wooden bench carved with obscenities. The jingle I had learned growing up on Lynn's decrepit streets, empty veins of a city that died with America's industry right after World War II, was etched in ball pen next to my thigh.
Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin, Never Come Out the Way
You Went In.
"Elmonte's a piece of work," she said. "You can pay a psychiatrist to say anything. Present company, of course, excepted."
"Thanks."
"I didn't mean it as a compliment," she smirked. "I thought you might learn something from her."