by Lisa Regan
“Lorelei was murdered yesterday. So was one of her daughters. We found medication in her home that was prescribed by you. She also put you down as her emergency contact. I need to meet with you as soon as possible to discuss anything you can tell us about Lorelei and her family situation.”
More silence. His breathing quickened. “M-m-m-my,” he stammered. “I don’t know what to say. I—what happened? Can you tell me what happened?”
“We don’t know what happened,” Josie said. “That’s why I called. What can you tell me about Lorelei’s living situation?”
Instead of answering, he said, “Can you describe the scene for me?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“The, uh, crime scene.”
“I can’t give out that information, Dr. Buckley. This is an open investigation.”
“I understand. Her living situation? She lived with her children.”
Josie held back a sigh of exasperation. “Dr. Buckley, we’ve got a murderer on the loose. Time is of the essence. If you could tell me everything you know about Lorelei then I can decide what information is useful and what’s not.”
“What, specifically, would you like to know?”
He wasn’t going to make it easy. “Are you the father of her children?”
A chuckle. “Goodness, no. Lorelei and I were colleagues back when she was practicing. That’s how I know her.”
“All right,” Josie said. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill her?”
“I live two hours from her. I didn’t see her often. I was not privy to the minutiae of her daily life.”
“She was your patient and you were her emergency contact. She must have confided in you about many things.”
Another long hesitation. Just as Josie was about to ask if he was still there, a long sigh came over the line. “Detective, Lorelei Mitchell was not my patient.”
“What? We’ve got medications with your name on them.”
“Right. This is a lengthy conversation that is best had in person. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to drive just now. My car is in the shop. But I’ll have it back by the end of next week. Perhaps then we could—”
“I’ll see you in a few hours,” Josie said, and hung up.
Nineteen
Vincent Buckley lived on a sprawling farm in Bucks County surrounded by a low, crumbling stone wall. The driveway to his large farmhouse was at least a half mile. On either side of it were rolling fields of verdant green dotted by the occasional tree. While it didn’t offer the kinds of views Harper’s Peak did, it was very beautiful. She and Noah parked in front of the house and climbed the steps to the large wraparound porch. A man in his seventies with thick, wavy white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard sat in a rocking chair. Beside him was a small circular table with an ashtray on it. In one hand he held a half-finished cigar and in the other, a book. Tendrils of smoke rose from his cigar, sending its strong scent in their direction.
“You must be the detectives from Denton,” he said, not getting up.
Josie and Noah both showed him their credentials. He studied each one for a long moment. Then, apparently satisfied, he put his cigar into the ashtray and his book into his lap. He motioned toward a wicker bench across from where he sat. “Please,” he said.
“Dr. Buckley,” Josie said. “On the phone you said Lorelei wasn’t your patient, yet you’ve clearly prescribed medication to her. That’s a pretty serious admission. Your license could be revoked or suspended.”
“Will you report me, then?” he asked in a tone that sounded like he almost wished they would.
Noah said, “We have to discuss it with our Chief. For now, we just need to know why you would be prescribing medications for someone who was not a patient.”
“Her son was my patient.”
Josie felt a tickle at the back of her neck. “I’m sorry, Dr. Buckley. You said her son?”
“Rory Mitchell.” He put his book onto the table and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I can tell by the looks on your faces that news of Lorelei’s son is a complete shock to you. This is exactly how she wanted it, although ultimately, I’m not sure that it served her all that well. She is dead, after all.”
Noah asked, “How old is her son?”
“Oh, he would be fifteen by now, I imagine. Detectives, if you want to know who killed Lorelei and anyone else living in her house, you need look no further than Rory.”
“He wasn’t there,” Josie said. “There was no evidence that he even lived there. No one has even mentioned him.”
Buckley gave a pained smile. “Because he was her secret.”
Noah said, “How and why would you keep a child a secret?”
“Have you found out about Lorelei’s past? I assume you have if you’re here talking to me.”
“She was a psychologist,” Josie said. “She specialized in adolescent abnormal psychology, and she was attacked by a patient who killed his mother and then, later, himself.”
Buckley nodded. Gone was his smile. “I’ve already admitted to prescribing medications to someone who isn’t my patient, and now I’m going to tell you something else that would end my career, except that I will retire now that Lorelei no longer needs me. I haven’t treated patients in over five years. Rory was my last patient. Only Lorelei didn’t want him in any system—not the medical system, not the mental health system, and certainly not the criminal justice system—so I prescribed his drugs to her, and she dispensed them to Rory as needed.”
“What’s the other thing you were going to tell us?” Josie asked, sensing he was losing track of his thoughts.
He raised a finger in the air. “Oh right. Yes. Here it is.” He put his hand back into his lap. “Lorelei and I were colleagues. She was a great deal younger than I was, but so brilliant. Very successful treating even the most difficult patients. Her specialty was cognitive behavioral therapy. She didn’t like to medicate patients. That was my job. We often disagreed on when or whether to medicate patients. We had many arguments. Then there was a particularly troublesome patient. She had worked with him for just over three years. She’d made great progress.”
“What was his diagnosis?” Josie asked.
Buckley waved a hand. “Oh dear. Is there ever one single diagnosis for the children most afflicted in mind and heart? Many children have several comorbidities. Therefore, it becomes difficult to treat one without somehow worsening the other—or others. The trickiest cases are the ones that you cannot pin down to one single cause. Imagine, if you will, a child who comes to a clinic with a general feeling of malaise. He doesn’t feel well. Perhaps he is achy or his stomach bothers him. Perhaps he has headaches or fatigue. Overall, he simply doesn’t feel right. He’s not able to function well. What do you do?”
He went silent, as if waiting for an answer. Finally, Noah ventured a guess. “Try to rule out different causes until you’ve narrowed it down to one or two?”
Buckley smiled. “Yes. Indeed. That is part of what I tried to do. If you have a child who is experiencing episodes of extreme rage, who is acting out violently, you might say perhaps this child has intermittent explosive disorder, conduct disorder, or oppositional defiant disorder, or a number of other things. It will help to pinpoint which one, if possible. But what if you’ve got symptoms and behaviors that are more consistent with ADHD, OCD, or even bipolar disorder? What if you believe there is some combination of these at work? What if that child also displays indicators of schizophrenia? What if he has fixed paranoid delusions? We do try to narrow it down, but sometimes we cannot. Sometimes the inner workings of these various syndromes and disorders on a child’s mind are so complex, we can only treat them through trial and error.”
Josie said, “You’re saying the patient that you and Lorelei treated twenty years ago suffered from multiple diagnoses, some of which caused him to have violent episodes?”
“Precisely, yes.”
Noah said, “Lorelei didn’t want to
medicate him?”
“Quite the opposite. She did want to medicate him. She’d gotten as far as she could with him using her therapies, and she believed he was declining. Headed toward some kind of psychotic break. She wanted me to medicate him.”
“But you didn’t,” said Josie.
“I did not.”
Noah said, “If she believed this patient was that much of a danger to others or himself, couldn’t she have him committed?”
“She did. But you must understand, there are few structures, if any, in place to deal with children who have these sorts of problems. He was out within a week. He’d done fine in the hospital. Lorelei believed it was because it was a controlled environment where he didn’t have access to the things he needed in order to carry out a violent act. She still wanted to start him on a medication regimen beyond what he was given in the hospital to treat him acutely.”
“You said no,” Josie said. “Why?”
He gave a heavy sigh and his gaze drifted over the tops of their heads. “Why? The question that has plagued me for nearly twenty years. Why? Because I was a drunk. I was lazy. I was stubborn, and I was a lecherous old fool. I didn’t want to help Lorelei with her patient because I had made a pass at her, and she’d turned me down. The truth is I was too wasted during that time in my life to remember much of it. It was a blur. She tried to find another psychiatrist to treat the patient, but before she could find anyone, he had carried out his attack.”
“How was that her fault?” Josie asked. “Her license was revoked. Her career was destroyed.”
Buckley sighed again. “It wasn’t her fault. It was just so egregious that the powers that be felt something had to be done. Even then, she was only to get a slap on the wrist. Then the boy’s father got involved. A man who had not even seen his son for ten years because he couldn’t handle his behaviors. This man gave up on his son, but when there was money to be had in suing our clinic, he was front and center. Made a cool million from our insurance policy. Lorelei’s license was just a casualty.”
“But not yours,” Noah said.
“No. Not mine. Lorelei could have taken me down with her, but she didn’t. Of course, I’ve spent a lifetime repaying that debt. Until today. Now I am free. So is Lorelei. Finally.”
Josie didn’t think that Emily would see it that way, but she didn’t say that. Instead, she turned the conversation toward the case, and finding out everything they could about Lorelei’s life and who had been in it. “Were you in touch with Lorelei through the entire process? The lawsuit and licensing hearings?”
“No. I didn’t hear from her until Rory was about six years old. He had been throwing tantrums. Severe tantrums. Destroying toys and anything he could get his hands on. He was spiteful. If she told him to brush his teeth, he might try to throw her hot coffee in her face. She could not manage him—not with a toddler in the house.”
Josie said, “The children’s father wasn’t involved?”
“No. She said he was a non-factor. He had shown some interest in Rory when he was an infant but once the difficulties started, he did not want to be involved. Very much like the father of her last patient, sadly. I don’t think that Lorelei wanted him involved anyway. She had serious trust issues when it came to men. Well, not only men, I suppose, but let’s say she trusted men least of all. She was the expert, she said, and she didn’t want another person there making decisions for her children.”
Noah asked, “She never told you anything about the father? His name? Anything at all?”
Buckley shook his head. “All she would say is that he was a mistake. That was it. I used to joke that he was clearly a mistake she liked to make over and over again. She didn’t appreciate that.”
“What happened when she called you about Rory?” Josie asked. “What did she want?”
He spread his hands. “Help. She had already evaluated him and thought he probably had oppositional defiant disorder. I went there and evaluated him. I agreed with her assessment, although I also suspected that he might have comorbidities like conduct disorder, autism, and ADHD, which made things much more complicated for him. One thing was for certain: he had uncontrollable aggression. Most of the time, these children with disorders that cause violent ideations don’t actually act on them. Sometimes they’ll destroy property but violence against other people is extremely rare, believe it or not. But Rory was not responding to Lorelei’s efforts. She wanted to medicate him. I do not typically medicate children that young.”
“So you didn’t?” Josie asked.
“I didn’t. I told her to keep working with him. She had been out of practice for some time. I made some recommendations based on studies I had read.”
“But that didn’t work,” said Noah.
Again, Buckley’s gaze went over their heads, as if he were looking into his past. He didn’t like what he saw. “No. It didn’t. I was back there within a year.”
“You prescribed medication,” Josie said. “Why?”
“Rory had injured his sister, Holly. Badly. He routinely beat her, shook her, pushed and pulled at her. He was out of control. Lorelei could not manage him.”
“What did you do?” Josie asked.
Buckley waved a hand toward the grounds all around them. “I brought him here. Got him stabilized. Worked with him until I felt it was safe for him to return to Lorelei’s care.”
“Lorelei just gave you her child?” Josie said.
“You must understand how desperate she was, how exhausted, and how frightened.”
Noah said, “Why didn’t she just have him admitted somewhere?”
“Because she knew what would happen to him. It would be a lifetime of him being in and out of institutions with no continuity of care. He would frequently be placed far away from her, because facilities equipped to deal with his range of issues are few and far between. Then, once he became a teenager, he would do or say something that would land him in the criminal justice system. That is where this story ends for children like Rory. Jail. They don’t get help. They don’t get care. At least, not into adulthood. There are not structures in place in this country to support these kids. Lorelei knew that first-hand. She didn’t want to lose her son.”
“Is that why you prescribed the medication to her and not him?” Josie asked.
“She didn’t want him to have the stain of taking those kinds of drugs so early in life. It was easier, fewer questions asked, if I prescribed them to her rather than to a young boy. There are also drugs and certain combinations of drugs I could not prescribe to a child, but could to an adult. We had to take some extraordinary measures to bring Rory to a place where he was functioning without violent outbursts. She was always afraid that if even one person saw him when he was at his worst, they would call the authorities, and he would be placed into the state system, and out of her reach, especially given her history of having her license revoked.”
“That’s why she was so secretive about him?” Noah asked.
“If you were in public somewhere, and your son began punching and slapping your younger daughter, shaking her, pushing her down, pulling at her limbs and saying things like, ‘I’ll find the knives and stab both of you to death. I’ll cut you into pieces. I’ll kill you,’ do you think people around you would walk on without doing anything?”
“Probably not,” Josie said.
“As I said, Rory could not control these rages or impulses. Just because they were out in public didn’t mean he would behave. If violent ideations overcame him, he would try to act on them. He once beat Holly bloody in the car on the way home from the playground. I believe that was the last time Lorelei ever took him out in public.”
Noah said, “It didn’t bother her that he was hurting her other child?”
“Of course it did,” Buckley said. “But what was she to do? They’re both her children. Both her responsibility. She wanted to protect both of them.”
“She thought she could save Rory,” Noah said, a slight edge to his voice.
“Noah,” said Josie.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Buckley. “I’m trying to understand. How do you protect both children when one of them is trying to kill the other?”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s an impossible situation. Both are your children. Must you choose? If you choose the one who doesn’t have psychological issues, then what do you do with the afflicted one?”
“Lorelei didn’t feel she had a choice,” Josie said softly.
“She loved her children,” Buckley said. “Intensely and passionately. More than anything or anyone else in the world. Holly could be insulated from harm to a large degree with an effective safety plan. But Rory was more difficult to protect. Lorelei felt she had to keep him away from a world that would not understand or accept him. She did not want a repeat of what had happened with her last patient.”
Josie and Noah were silent for a long moment, taking in this information. Then Josie said, “Holly’s autopsy showed chronic signs of physical abuse. It was from Rory. Not from Lorelei or the children’s father.”
“Correct.”
“You and Lorelei weren’t able to manage his violent behavior,” Noah said. “Not if there were still safety plans in place in the home. What was Lorelei’s long-term plan for Rory? He couldn’t stay there in the woods with her forever.”
“I often asked her that myself, but she was so exhausted and frazzled from being in a constant state of crisis with him, I don’t think she had thought that far ahead. I think she truly believed she could get him to a place where he would become high-functioning and non-violent. It’s certainly possible. One should never count these children out. But treatment is difficult. It’s very complicated. With these kids, it’s often like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
“That’s reassuring coming from a psychiatrist,” Josie said.
Buckley laughed. “I only mean to say that every person is different. What might work for one, might not work for another, even if they’ve got the same diagnoses. As I said, I suspect Rory had several comorbidities, and some we hadn’t yet fully addressed. With someone who is in almost a constant state of crisis, you’re always trying to put the fire out, and it becomes more and more difficult to find the time to look beneath and address all the things that continue to cause those fires in the first place. We did not learn to manage his violent behavior in the sense that we made it go away forever. It may never go away. But we managed to get him to a point where his outbursts were less frequent and less intense, where he had more control over them. Lorelei and her girls had a safety plan for when Rory would act out. Also, to my knowledge, he rarely hurt the younger one. What was her name?”
