Dante's Dilemma Read online

  “How did you come up with his name?” I asked.

  “We found it in one of those baby-name glossaries. It comes from the Lakota Sioux word for raccoon. We thought it fit him. His eyes are like little black buttons.”

  I shifted Mika so that his head was resting in the crook of my arm. He rewarded me with a jerky fist to my chest and another contented grunt.

  Alison patted me on the shoulder. “You like babies,” she accused.

  “Should I be concerned that you find that shocking?”

  “Not shocking. But you’re better with kids than you give yourself credit for.”

  I kept my shrug to a minimum. According to Alison, Mika was only just getting over his colic, and getting him down after a feeding was a major feat. “You’re forgetting that my track record in the children department hasn’t been all that great.”

  Alison was one of the few people with whom I’d shared my history.

  “You did pretty well just now getting him to go to sleep. Your ex was crazy to shut you out—then and now.”

  I tried to lure her off the topic. “Thanks for having me today. I had a great time.”

  “Oh no, boyfriend. You’re not changing the subject that easily. I can tell what happened to you yesterday is really bothering you.”

  “Wouldn’t it bother you to make a mistake like that?”

  Alison sighed. “You’re having second thoughts.”

  I could tell Alison wasn’t going to be deterred, so I confessed some of my fears. “Not about getting more time with him. But maybe asking for joint custody isn’t such a good idea. What if Louis had slipped away from me in that crowd and I couldn’t find him?”

  “You’re not the only blind parent in history,” Alison said, echoing what I had told my lawyer two weeks back. “You’ll do just fine. And don’t forget, he needs his father.”

  “But what if I can’t manage it? What if I can’t keep him safe? Hell, if anything ever happened to him while he was with me I’d . . .”

  I’d kill myself, no two ways about it.

  Alison said, “Every parent has those fears.”

  But not every parent had seen them materialize.

  Alison read my thoughts. “Mark, one day you’re going to have to stop taking all the blame for your son’s death. Wasn’t your ex there that night, too? If you ask me, she was just as much at fault as you were for not getting him to the hospital sooner.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “She was eight months pregnant. She was—”

  “Was what? Too exhausted to pick up the phone? If it had been me, I would have been screaming for an ambulance long before you returned. Haven’t you ever thought about what Annie was doing all that time you were gone?”

  “Sure, but—”

  Alison put her hand on my arm to stop me. “No. Shut up and listen. Don’t you see what you’ve been doing all this time? You’re an expert. You know all about how guilt plays out in the minds of people who have undergone catastrophic trauma. If you had a patient who experienced something just as terrible—a rape victim, for example—how would you handle it?”

  That was easy. First, I’d work to reestablish the patient’s feelings of safety, of being in a place where she could control her environment. Then, when she felt secure, we would begin the process of remembering, of retelling everything that happened until the memory no longer held such vicious sway over her thoughts. Dissect it like a rotting corpse until the flesh fell away and it was nothing more than a drafty pile of bones. Only then could we start on the later stages of therapy—reconnecting with loved ones and creating a positive self-image for the future.

  Alison congratulated me on a textbook response. “So which of those things have you done for yourself?”

  Almost none, to tell the truth. I’d seen another shrink for a while, when it was forced on me to save my job. But I’d stopped going six months later, convinced it was taking up too much time. And I’d needed every ounce of forgetfulness to get me through the crisis of losing my sight.

  “Don’t you see?” Alison said softly. “You’ll never trust yourself with Louis until you go back there.”

  She was right. And wasn’t it the same thing Kay Bergen had asked me to do? To reconstruct everything that happened that night—down to the last gut-wrenching second? Whether or not it would help win my custody battle, I would have to try.

  Doctor heal thyself.

  But later. After the Lazarus trial was finished.

  FOURTEEN

  The next day, I was finally ready to read Brad Stephens’s report.

  Arriving at 10 a.m., I wasn’t surprised to find the office almost deserted. Besides being the day after Christmas, it was a Friday, and most of my colleagues had chosen to take advantage of the long weekend for some well-deserved R&R. It’s a myth that psychiatric emergencies are more common during the holidays. Though people’s moods often worsen—based on the mistaken belief that everyone else in the world is having a better time—they tend to put off harming themselves until the weather warms up. Psychiatrists have no idea why suicides go down during winter, but it’s one of the few good things I can say about the season.

  I unlocked my office door and proceeded to unravel from the layers I’d used to protect myself during the twelve-block walk from home. My wool Mets hat, a muffler, two fleeces, a down parka, and mittens I’d bought from an adventure-travel outfit specializing in polar expeditions. Typical for this time of year in Chicago, the wind chills were hovering in the forties—below zero, that is—and I had more reason than most to be worried about frostbitten fingers. Some blessed soul had come up with traction bands I could slip on and off my boots, and I removed those too, having just that morning solved the mystery of my AWOL footwear, which the movers, in another triumph of logic, had deposited in a box behind the furnace.

  That done, I went looking for the key Yelena kept in the upper right-hand drawer of her desk.

  On my way over, I caught the sound of a Rachmaninoff concerto emanating from Sep’s new office, a closet-like space to the rear of our suite. I smiled to myself. It was just like the old man not to take any time off. Even though officially retired, Sep had been coming in every day to finish up a research project and attend to a handful of patients he’d been seeing for years. I thought to stop in and wish him a Merry Christmas but decided against it. Rachmaninoff usually meant he was deep in thought and wouldn’t welcome the interruption.

  Possibly because she never did any real work, Yelena’s desk was always a model of tidiness, and I had no trouble locating the key in its usual place under a stack of magazines. Then it was off to the bank of pullout filing cabinets on the far wall. The ones belonging to me were in the middle. The bottom drawer held the files I deemed especially confidential and was labeled Private. I opened it with the key and felt around inside until my hand closed on the envelope Linda O’Malley had passed to me at our meeting. It was still sealed tight with multiple layers of tape.

  Before returning to my office, I stopped off in the lounge to make a cup of tea and waited impatiently for the single-brew machine to heat up. I was feeling the sort of mild excitement people have when they expect their opinions to be vindicated, a twin of the confirmation bias that had kept me from opening Brad Stephens’s report until now. Based on what I knew about him, I was expecting our conclusions to be roughly the same. Sure, we might approach the problem from separate angles, dwell on some facts more than others, attach varying degrees of significance to the same things. But it didn’t even occur to me that we might disagree.

  The first sign of trouble came back at my desk, after I slit open the envelope and shook out the contents. In addition to a bunch of paper, I was expecting some kind of digital file. But there was none. No thumb drive or CD. No indication that any copy of Brad’s report existed beyond what I was holding in my hot little hand. Maybe O’Malley had instructed him to limit the number of copies. Maybe Brad had been paranoid about its contents leaking out. The only sure thing was tha
t it created a pain for me, since I would have to scan all the pages before I could listen to them on my computer. Sighing, I got that process underway, figuring from the size of the report it would take a good half hour.

  There wasn’t much to do while I waited, so I went over to my box of toys, found my Ohio Art Astro-Ray Gun set, taped the target to a bare section of wall, and spent the next twenty minutes shooting at it and feeling sorry for the children of today who have only video games to play with. I even managed to land a few suction darts on the six-inch cardboard circle.

  When the scan was finally complete, I donned my headset and began listening.

  While there are no hard-and-fast rules about how much should be included in a forensic report, Brad had done a very thorough job. His report began with a summary of the referral and the legal issues it was intended to address. This was followed by a chronological list of the dates he had met with Lazarus, including the nature of the contact—for example, interview, psychological testing, and so on—and the time spent during each session, all of it cross-referenced to his recordings and the Cook County Jail visitors’ log. He identified his sources of information, such as academic, medical, and employment records, along with a list of each test and procedure he conducted. Last, before launching into an interpretation of the facts, he included a neutral, yet detailed description of Rachel Lazarus’s background and the events leading up to her husband’s death.

  It was a well-organized document that up to this point gave no hint of the author’s leanings in the best forensic-expert manner.

  I read on, especially interested in how Brad had handled Lazarus’s claimed inability to remember much about the night her husband died. Amnesia is easily faked and frequently fabricated, especially in legal settings where it may help excuse a defendant’s conduct. Although clinicians are trained to ask questions that reveal when a subject is lying, nothing is foolproof and it’s often difficult to say when reports of limited memory are genuine.

  While not exactly “truth serums,” certain narcotics may be helpful in this situation to lower the amnesiac’s defenses and permit “lost” memories to surface. Likewise, the examiner may try hypnosis. Both are controversial. Even in individuals like me with strong eidetic capabilities, memory is influenced by a number of factors and can never be deemed completely accurate. In addition, some individuals don’t respond to drugs or hypnosis, especially if they have rehearsed a story many times.

  With the permission of Lazarus’s first attorneys, Brad had first elected to try Brevital, a general anesthetic administered intravenously. The Brevital interview was a complete failure. Even in a completely relaxed state, all Lazarus could remember was seeing her husband with his head smashed in and the poker in her hand, leading to her assumption they had fought. Hypnosis had also failed to elicit any more detailed recollections.

  Brad had further tested whether Lazarus was feigning a mental disorder using a psychological assessment tool known as the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms or SIRS, along with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and several other measures that also tend to reveal, if indirectly, whether or not an individual is mentally ill. The scores obtained from all these tests were consistent with the idea that Lazarus was under severe psychological stress both before and after she attacked her husband.

  Pleased with where Brad’s report seemed to be headed, I proceeded ahead quickly, setting my ears to browse mode and sending my cursor down the pages at a brisk pace, picking out bits and pieces of information but not giving them my full attention. My thoughts wandered, and I was lazily considering when to break for lunch when I reached the final section of the report.

  Even then, I was several sentences into it before I realized what I was hearing.

  “. . . firmly of the opinion that Ms. Lazarus is prevaricating . . .”

  I stopped and sat straight up.

  Removed my headset and let it drop to my shoulders.

  Rubbed my ears.

  Put the headset back on and returned the cursor to the top of the page.

  But there it was, in stark black and white—or would been if I could have seen it on the screen:

  “. . . regretfully unable to say that at the time of the alleged offense the accused suffering from a psychological disorder that affected her ability to perceive reality or distinguish between right and wrong. Though such conclusions depend a great deal on the subjective impressions of the examiner, I am firmly of the opinion that Ms. Lazarus is prevaricating about the circumstances surrounding her husband’s murder . . .”

  I felt the blood drain from my face and read on:

  “During numerous sessions in which I was able to assess Ms. Lazarus’s truthfulness through careful observation of her facial expressions, mannerisms, and modes of speech, Ms. Lazarus appeared to me to be a talented, in fact pathological liar. It is, of course, not my role to adjudicate her guilt or innocence, and I leave it to the jury to decide whether she has been coached to tell a story that might bring down a lesser sentence upon her. But as a psychiatrist with many years’ experience, the indications that she has consistently misrepresented her mental state, both on the date in question and throughout the period following her arrest and incarceration, are quite unmistakable. Indeed, one would have to be blind not to see them.”

  I felt unmistakably ill.

  “Which is not to say that Ms. Lazarus’s reported symptoms lack any resemblance to those of a legitimate PTSD sufferer. To a less-experienced mental-health professional, or one harboring unacknowledged biases, her story might well be regarded as genuine and deserving of sympathy. The reality of psychiatry is that it is not a science. Opinions differ, and some practitioners will see the signs and symptoms of mental illness where none are reasonably present. I can only state my own views in the matter—namely, that Lazarus acted intentionally on the night she went to her husband’s home, seeking retribution for what was concededly a lengthy history of domestic abuse, and that she was fully capable of appreciating the wrongful nature of her conduct when she murdered and subsequently mutilated him as a symbol of her deep-seated rage.”

  I was shaken to the core.

  So I did the only thing I could think of under the circumstances.

  I went down the hall to seek Sep’s advice.

  “Odd,” Sep remarked, after I’d finished telling him everything. “And nothing in any of his previous work predicted he would come out that way?”

  I shook my head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think the last part of the report was written by an entirely different person.”

  “I wouldn’t rule that possibility completely out.”

  “You mean that the report was altered? But how? The envelope it was in was taped shut when it was given to me, and it’s been sitting here inside a locked file cabinet for all of the last month. Yelena may not be diligent in all things, but she guards my files as if they contained her entire collection of Victoria’s Secret.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting it was tampered with. Didn’t Stephens have Parkinson’s disease?”

  I considered this. “You’re saying his reasoning may have been impaired?”

  Sep said, “It’s one hypothesis. The man was in his fifties, wasn’t he? It’s not unusual for Parkinson’s patients to begin showing signs of dementia at that age.”

  It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, but I doubted it. “The last time I saw Brad, he seemed as sharp as ever. And the way the conclusion’s written—other than coming completely out of left field—sounds professional enough. Take a look for yourself.”

  Sep took a few minutes to read the pages I’d hurriedly gathered up from the scanner and brought with me. When he got to the end, he harrumphed and set them down on his desk with a disapproving thud. “Yes, he does seem very sure of himself. I didn’t know the fellow all that well, but I’m afraid I agree with you. These aren’t the words of a dementia patient. Tell me, was Stephens always this arrogant?”

  I was quick to com
e to my dead friend’s defense. “Arrogant? No, that’s the last word I’d use to describe him. What makes you think so?”

  “Presuming he could spot a liar from her body language. Yes, I’m aware that everyone thinks liars give themselves away. Upward eye movements and all that poppycock they teach at police academies and throw around on television. But it is a fiction. Or do you dispute that?”

  I had—at one time. Though study after study shows that people identify liars no more accurately than a coin toss, there was a time when I was as unconvinced as the rest of the world, certain that if others could detect the lie on my face—if not the gymnastics of my overactive knee—I was equally skilled at interpreting the tics, body postures, and shifty glances that betrayed theirs. It was only when I could no longer see those things for myself that I conceded the possibility—no, the necessity—that the studies might be right.

  Sep was quick to interpret my silence. “Is that what you’re concerned about? That Stephens saw something you didn’t?”

  “You have to agree it’s a legitimate fear.”

  Sep sighed. A less astute man would have rushed in to offer platitudes and sugarcoated reassurances. Reminded me that I was still as good as I used to be, that a psychiatrist didn’t really need his eyes to see what was in a person’s heart. Not Sep, who always seemed to understand me better than I understood myself.

  “Tell me everything you heard when you were with Lazarus,” he commanded quietly.

  I took him through my interview, summarizing Lazarus’s responses to my questions and describing the way she had phrased them. “She wasn’t always eager, but she answered everything I asked—without hesitation or any kind of qualification.”

  “And she wasn’t being theatrical—trying to impress you with the severity of her symptoms?”