Victim

by Gary Kinder

  The evidence Moore now had against Pierre was the sort that festers into cynicism in a detective’s mind: enough to convince his street-sharpened instinct that Pierre was the murderer, but too little to sway that sense of due process in the judicial mind. In the hands of an experienced interrogator, one able to seize inflection and nuance, one able to read the intricate music of the nervous system in a man’s face, such evidence could be used as nimble fingers to play the suspect, stroke him, massage his conscience, sometimes terrify him, sometimes befriend him, and ultimately to pull from him an admission. Moore considered interrogation an art form of finesse and timing. Upon questioning a suspect, he first filled his head with every fact of the case, then faced the subject and observed closely each response, waiting for his cue to come in with a soft sympathetic word, or to switch on his blue eyes and fly into a rage.

  Their third meeting opened as the other two had, slowly, Moore asking the same questions he had asked twice before, and Pierre offering the same answers. Pierre was as controlled and indifferent as he had been the first two times they had met. Moore watched him, pretending not to notice his obvious annoyance at having to answer the same questions again. Twenty minutes into their encounter Moore asked Pierre about the locksmith, and Pierre admitted for the third time that he had been at Jefferson’s when the keys were lost and again when the keys were found, that he had helped look for the keys both times. But, he calmly stated, again for the third time, he did not steal the keys, he did not have the keys duplicated, he did not steal Jefferson’s car, he did not kill… .

  Suddenly, Moore hurled his six-foot-six-inch, 225-pound body across the desk, his blue eyes on fire.

  “You’re lying to me, Pierre!” Moore shouted, his face inches from Pierre’s. “I know you stole Jefferson’s keys, I know you went to the repair shop, I know you had these duplicates made, I know you forged the name Curtis Alexander!”

  Moore paused for a second to let his enraged, bulged eyes flick from one of Pierre’s eyes to the other.

  “Jefferson knew it too, and he caught you, didn’t he! And he had all of his locks changed, didn’t he! And he threatened to bust up the car ring you had going, so you killed him, didn’t you! You drove a bayonet right through his Goddamn head! Didn’t you!”

  Moore later recalled what happened next. “I got up close to him, started violating his body space, reached out and touched him on the shoulder and said, ‘I know you’re involved in this!’ But Pierre didn’t mind that. He didn’t fidget or move around or act nervous or anything. He just got that much closer to me, and then he rose up and looked me right in the eye with those eyes of his and said, ‘I didn’t commit any murder.’ That’s when I could see a noticeable change coming over him. It was visible, you could see his eyes becoming more fixed, and staring at you, and he just quit talking, and this cold, cold atmosphere came over him.

  “I’ve run across acts of defiance where somebody’ll just look you right in the eye and dare you. I see that all the time. But this was different. I can’t put my finger on it, but you could just watch a change come over him. As soon as we started going into his criminal activity, you could actually see it coming. Of all the subjects I’ve ever interrogated, he was by far the toughest because of the way he looked back at you. I think Pierre could probably intimidate people just with that look. That look, that whole attitude, it was an eerie, eerie feeling that would emit from him. He could probably scare the daylights out of somebody. I’ve never run across it before or since.”

  Now kneeling in the basement of the Hi-Fi Shop six months later, if Moore had only known that the man who had knelt there just hours before him was in the Air Force, or if he had somehow gotten a clear description of the man’s eyes, he might have connected the two murders and shortened the twenty-four hours it took to capture Dale Pierre.

  A speaker clamped to his partially raised window, Gary Naisbitt was slumped in the front seat of his car, hypnotically absorbed in a mindless and forgettable drive-in movie. The conversation with his father had left him with a dull sense of relief, and the movie helped to numb his thoughts. It was novocaine for his mind that wore off when the movie ended just after midnight.

  Stopped at the traffic light on his way back to Centerville, Gary noticed a police car situated curiously in the middle of the street. Its blue lights were flashing and the officer was glaring seemingly at him. The light turned green and Gary hesitantly entered the intersection. Suddenly the police car swung around, shot in front of Gary, and forced off the road the vehicle that had been next to him at the light: It was a light-colored van. Gary slowly pulled away from the van and the flashing blue lights, watching as the ordeal faded in his rearview mirror, and proceeded to Centerville. He had been home fifteen minutes when the phone rang.

  “Gary?” said the voice on the other end.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is your Uncle Paul.”

  “Hello!”

  “There’s been an accident,” continued his uncle. “I want you to come to St. Benedict’s Hospital as fast as you can. Don’t do it recklessly, I want you to get here.”

  “Sure,” Gary said. “How bad is it?”

  “One of them,” said his uncle, “is very bad.”

  That automatically told me that at least two people were involved, and that accounted for Mother and Cortney not coming home. It implied that she had found him, and I just figured they had been in a car wreck on the way home. At the time I had this distinct feeling that Cort would somehow be okay and that the one that was really bad would be Mother.

  So I got dressed again and drove to the hospital about seventy-five or eighty miles an hour. I was fairly calm, but my legs were shaking. I walked into the emergency room and hardly even broke stride. I was trying to affect a jovial mood, but I was in turmoil inside, I had the nervous shakes, because I had no idea what to expect. I asked them, “Where’s the Naisbitt group?” and they said, “Up in ICU, third floor.” Then no one said a word and there was no expression on anyone’s face as I walked down the hall and got in the elevator.

  When the elevator door opened on the third floor, the first person I saw was John Lindquist, a close friend of the family and a mortician. He said, “Hi, Gary,” and I said, “Oh, you’re a bad omen.” He said, “You haven’t heard?” I said, “No, just getting here.” And he never said another word, just got in the elevator and closed the door.

  I walked down the hall trying to be calm, trying to get hold of myself. I passed a room filled with all kinds of relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, but I didn’t take the time to stop, everybody was crying and everything. I just kept right on going, on into the ICU.

  Cort was the first thing I saw, I didn’t see Mother anywhere, but Cort was right there in front of me, all covered with tubes and people. He was all bandaged up and wired in and stuff, and he looked like Cort, but he looked like he had just run a three-minute mile. And I thought, Well, a car accident of some sort … Mother found Cort and they had been in a car accident. I didn’t go in and take a look at Cort. It was just a quick glance.

  Dad was back in a little alcove where they had a light box and he was looking at some X rays with Dr. Wallace. They were X rays of Mother, and they were postulating whether the two white blurs were the bullet and a bone fragment or an unjacketed bullet that had split in two. So I walked over to Dad, and I was pretty much matter-of-fact, I think that was my way of keeping from going all to pieces. I said, “Well, here I am, what’s wrong?” He said, “Let me tell you what’s happened, Gary … your mother’s dead and Cortney’s been shot, he’s still alive, but we don’t know for how long.” I didn’t know how in the world they could possibly be shot. The first thing that flashed through my mind was that Mother must have really gone berserk, shot Cort and then committed suicide, but that seemed a little farfetched. The thought couldn’t have lasted more than a split second, because it was just the next sentence that he said, “There was a robbery at the Hi-Fi Shop and they were both involved.�
�� He didn’t have to tell me that Mother had backtracked to find Cort at the Hi-Fi Shop.

  I was too tied up with myself to see how Dad was taking all of this. I can’t say for sure that I put my arms around him and said, “I’m sorry,” though I possibly could have, and I hope that I did, though I can’t say for sure. I just can’t remember. I asked him, “Well, how about Cort?” and he said: “He’s still alive, but he’s not in very good shape. They made him drink some stuff and his throat’s all burned up, and he can’t breathe, but he’s been stabilized for now and they’re going to do an operation to see if they can relieve some of the pressure that’s going to develop in his brain, get rid of some of the blood.” He was very professional, very controlled. Maybe slightly forced, but he wasn’t enraged.

  I know I controlled my emotions for a few more minutes, but then I broke down and cried and I couldn’t help it. Dad had already done his crying and now he was taken up with the medical problems of trying to save Cort. I know that I used Cort’s situation as an escape. I assume that’s what he was doing too, but only because there was hope in Cort’s case. Mother’s story had already been told.

  IV bottles dribbling life into Cortney were unhooked and placed on the bed beside him. His arterial line was disconnected. The respirator was replaced with a hand-squeeze bag and portable oxygen supply. Cortney was now mobile. A nurse sprung the chocks on the gurney, and with an entourage of tubes and technicians keeping pace, he was rushed around the corner and down the hall to surgery.

  In the operating room green tile covered the floor and climbed the walls halfway to the ceiling. At the center of the room hung a glaring surgical lamp, three feet in diameter. It was ringed by eight smaller lights concentrated on a point directly below the center of the large dome. At the convergence of light was Cortney’s shaved head, smooth and rounded but for a mottled lump now swollen to the size of a child’s fist. His gray body was propped in a stiff sitting position, his legs wrapped tightly in elastic bandages, his arms extended and supported as though he were presiding from a throne. With tubes and wires sprouting from his neck, his wrists, his groin, his bladder, his forearms, his nose, and his heart, he looked like an electrically operated boy-king. His head was crowned with a stainless steel brace, three-pronged, like a Christmas tree stand, the rubber-padded screws cranked down tightly against his skull to hold it fast. Only half closed and covered by a thick, protective jelly were his eyes.

  Before Brett Naisbitt could set up the scrub for Cortney’s operation, another OR technician, qualified in neurosurgery, had been located and had come in to assist Dr. Hauser. Brett, however, had remained in his pajama greens, hoping he would be allowed to watch the operation with his father and uncle; it seemed easier than waiting outside for scraps of Cortney’s progress.

  The operation was to consist of drilling two holes through the underside of Cortney’s skull in back, and another at the point of the bullet’s impact. Once into the region of the brain, Dr. Hauser would evacuate the collection of blood he hoped to find and try to explore the extent of physical damage. The more blood he could evacaute, the less of Cortney’s brain would have to be removed to accommodate the swelling.

  Dr. Hauser was a finicky surgeon. He enjoyed surgery, and he insisted on organizing each operation down to the smoothest possible coordination of time and instruments. Those assistants who caused the slightest interruption in his impeccable planning found him to be impatient and tactless. Unfortunately, trauma surgery was always a hurried affair, never performed under optimum conditions. It was a circumstance Dr. Hauser had learned to tolerate. But the atmosphere of the operating room that night was exacerbated by the background of emotion and tension now focused on the operation. To this was added the unique and unsettling presence in the operating room of the patient’s father, uncle, and brother. Dr. Hauser finally decided the whole affair was so singular and impossible that it would be better to allow the boy’s family to observe the operation than to submit them to an agonizing wait outside.

  Cortney’s head was soaped and scrubbed with disinfectant for a full ten minutes. Then with Dr. Rees monitoring Cortney’s life signs, and Byron, Paul, and Brett Naisbitt scrubbed, green-suited, and silently watching, the deft neurosurgeon began a ritual of placing sterile green towels all around Cortney’s head, beginning just above his eyebrows and hooking each to the skin with a scissor clamp. When he was finished, the lower rear of Cortney’s head was isolated for surgery and the lump at the back rose singularly above the green covering.

  Beginning the procedure for drilling the first two holes, Dr. Hauser made a vertical incision at the back of Cortney’s head and neck and began filleting the tissues, stretching them back with hemostats. Slicing further, stretching back, he reached a thin layer of tissue, the pericranium, just outside the skull, and scraped this away. Then he took a Hudson brace-and-bit, a hand drill resembling a carpenter’s tool, and cranked slowly into the bone, augering out bits of skull and periodically flushing the hole with a saline solution, until he reached the leathery covering of the brain, the dura mater. He swabbed the dime-size hole he had just drilled, and with a pair of bone rongeurs began snipping off chips of skull to enlarge the hole to the size of a silver dollar.

  As Dr. Hauser repeated the drilling and snipping process on the opposite side of the midline, Byron, Paul, and Brett stood immediately behind him, gazing over his shoulder. Except for the metallic click of the instruments and the breathing behind each mask, the shiny, sterile room was silent. A few feet from the operating table Dr. Rees scanned the lighted board on the machine that could see inside Cortney’s body. The orange light at the top continued to blink slowly. Byron’s eyes moved from the orange light to the back of his son’s head to the side of Dr. Hauser’s face. As yet, Hauser had said nothing.

  With two holes now opened in the back of Cortney’s head, Dr. Hauser reached into each defect with a double-pronged hook, gaffed the dura mater twice and held it taut while making the dural incisions. Next he hooked a black silk suture into each flap of the sliced dura mater and spread the flaps to expose the surface of Cortney’s cerebellum. A clear cerebrospinal fluid was released through the two dural defects, but there was no evidence of blood clot.

  “There isn’t the accumulation of blood I had hoped to find,” Dr. Hauser spoke to Byron through his mask. “But we’ve still got the wound itself to look into.”

  Hauser extended the scalp incision upward in the shape of a hockey stick to include the wound made by the bullet. The outer layer of skull in that area was fractured, but a burr hole drilled adjacent to the wound revealed that the inner layer of bone, although cracked, was still in normal alignment. As he drilled the hole, Hauser explained to Byron what he was finding.

  “Frankly, the wound itself is not as bad as I expected it to be,” he said. “Somehow the bullet didn’t enter the brain. It smashed through the outer table of the skull and shattered the inner, but the inner wasn’t even depressed. It turned the bullet to the right, over here.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Byron.

  “Right now it doesn’t mean anything,” Hauser explained. “It’s just remarkable that the bullet or at least part of his skull wasn’t forced into his brain. That could’ve done significantly more damage.”

  Dr. Hauser was quiet again as he cleared the overlying bone from the area of impact and sliced open the freshly exposed dura. There on the surface of Cortney’s brain was a scarlet spot the size of a quarter. Byron and the rest crowded closer, leaning down to view the damage done to Cortney’s brain by the bullet. As they watched, Dr. Hauser called for a probe and carefully positioned the needlelike instrument in the middle of the bright contusion. He slid the probe cautiously beneath the surface of Cortney’s brain. It met with little resistance. Continuing to examine the wound, Dr. Hauser spoke to Byron over his shoulder.

  “By, it looks like the concussion of the bullet has turned a chunk of Cortney’s brain, I would say about half the size of my thumb, to jelly. It’s a
ll pulped brain and dark blood.”

  “What does that mean?” Byron asked again.

  “I hate to keep being evasive,” said Hauser, “but I really don’t know. It’s good that the bullet didn’t enter his brain, but I’m afraid that more damage can be done by the shock waves, which traveled from the lower right here where the bullet hit across to a point roughly in this area.” Hauser drew a circle in the air above the upper left portion of Cortney’s head. “That’s the contrecoup injury,” he continued. “The impact of the bullet causes the brain to smash into the skull on the opposite side. Now at the point of impact this pulverized mass of brain tissue will have to be scooped out to avoid infection and to give the rest of the brain a little more space in which to swell.”

  The back of Cortney’s brain glistened beneath the bright lamps. Dr. Hauser turned away from the incision and looked at Byron above his surgical mask.

  “I’m afraid these devitalized brain cells are in an area that controls vision. If the boy lives, he could well be only partially sighted.”

  Byron listened to the neurosurgeon. Then he asked, “What about the contrecoup injury?”

  “As for the contrecoup injury, it’s impossible for me to say what the damage will be, but the shock waves traversed areas that involve speech and the control of the right side of his body. He could be paralyzed on that side.”

  Cortney had been a graceful skier, a competent sailor, and a good wing-shot in the pheasant fields. In AAU swim competition he had won ribbons and medals for the breaststroke and freestyle. A year ago he had placed first in the Mt. Ogden Junior High Science Fair with a telescope patterned after that on Mount Palomar. He had ground the six-inch mirror and silvered it himself, then engineered an electronic tracking system so the telescope could automatically follow a particular heavenly body. The Ogden Standard-Examiner had run an article, complete with a picture of Cortney and his award-winning telescope. The newspaper piece was entitled “REACHES FOR STARS—Hard Work, Patience Pays Off For Energetic Science Student.” Cortney had aspired to be an aeronautical engineer since he was five years old, and Byron knew that he had soloed for the first time that same afternoon. Now Cortney was sitting hunched forward on an operating table, the back of his head sliced open and the exposed surface of his brain revealing a bright purple concentration of dead brain cells caused by a bullet from a murderer’s gun. And the most that Byron could hope for was that his son would be blind, paralyzed, and unable to speak.