Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder

by Margaret Truman

  His resignation only three years after having joined the MPD didn’t go over well with his superiors. They tried to persuade him to stay, but Tatum, whose decisions in life were carefully thought out and resolute, declined their vague promises of great things in his future and left to establish a private practice and to teach. Although he was no longer on MPD’s payroll, he was often called in to help with a particularly baffling case in which his expertise in profiling criminal behavior was needed.

  He sat alone in the faculty lounge and picked up that day’s Washington Post. Dr. Mark Sedgwick’s death received a surprising amount of column inches considering it had nothing to do with government or the presidential election a little more than a month away. Had Sedgwick died as a result of a vehicular accident, it wouldn’t have commanded much space. But the reporter had cited an anonymous source within the MPD who’d told her that it was being considered a homicide and that the driver had, according to eyewitnesses, deliberately aimed for and struck the doctor. Being a diligent reporter, she tracked down those eyewitnesses and got their statements. The headline read: HIT-AND-RUN ON VIRGINIA AVENUE A DELIBERATE KILLING? The question mark had been inserted by her editor to cover for not having proof of the allegation.

  Tatum dropped the paper on the table and drew a breath.

  He’d known Mark Sedgwick. They weren’t friends, but they had run across each other numerous times at NIH, where they were colleagues in federally funded experiments, and had sat together on various panels over the years. Tatum had always considered Sedgwick inaccessible, buttoned-up and defensive when it came to his personal life, and his professional life, too, for that matter. They’d socialized only a few times, including a dinner party at Sedgwick’s home years ago. Tatum reflected on that night as he waited for his class to resume.

  It had been a pleasant evening, although he’d soon tired of the conversation. The six male guests were all M.D.’s or Ph.D.’s, which limited the scope of topics, although politics did come up a few times. Based upon Sedgwick’s comments, Tatum assumed that he leaned right on the political spectrum. Far right. He knew that Sedgwick had connections with the intelligence community, although he wasn’t sure of the extent of them.

  Deliberately run over?

  He returned to the classroom, where his students had again gathered. “Okay,” he said, “I know that you’re wondering how this will benefit you with clients or in a courtroom.” He proceeded to ask a series of questions of individual students, going to them and standing close while posing his questions. He also asked them to look straight at him and then to roll their eyes up as far as they could toward the top of their head. After twenty minutes of this, he resumed his place behind his desk and asked, “How many of you have ever been to a nightclub where the entertainment was a stage hypnotist?”

  One hand went up.

  “Stage hypnotists are very good at quickly identifying the Dionysians in the audience. Their answers to the hypnotist’s questions, as simple and silly as they may sound, provide him with clues to how suggestible certain audience members are. And he watches their eyes.”

  “Why their eyes?” a student asked.

  Tatum went on to explain how the ability to roll one’s eyes up and display a lot of white cornea indicates how suggestible and hypnotizable a person is.

  “Obviously,” he said, “what I’m telling you represents only the bare bones of the science behind the theory. Doctors who use hypnosis in their practices utilize what’s called the Hypnotic Induction Profile. It was created by one of the giants in the field of medical hypnosis, Dr. Herbert Spiegel. I had the privilege of studying medical hypnosis with Dr. Spiegel at Columbia University in New York, and I based my Ph.D. thesis on a pioneering study he did at Columbia matching a patient’s level of hypnotizability with that same patient’s success when treated with acupuncture. Dionysians—the more hypnotizable—tended to do better with acupuncture, while Apollonians fared less well.

  “What it boils down to for you as future lawyers is that if you know a client or witness is a Dionysian, your best approach is to appeal to his or her softer side, the more emotional, feeling side. The heart side. Apollonians will want a more factual approach, a more cognitive one to appeal to their head side. Knowing who you’re questioning, truly knowing what makes that person tick, gives you a valuable leg up in the relationship.”

  “Sounds like it could be useful between the sexes,” someone offered. “I think the girl I’m seeing is an Apollonian, always questioning me, always wanting to drive.”

  Tatum laughed and packed up his materials. “If I’ve managed to salvage a relationship this morning, it will all have been worthwhile. Have a good day, ladies and gentlemen.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Four detectives augmented by a half dozen uniformed officers fanned out over the city in search of the white sedan with a broken headlight and smashed windshield. Motor Vehicle Bureau records contained lots of white four-door sedans, which led the force to first concentrate on repair facilities and known chop shops. They got lucky two days after launching their search. The car, a white Buick Regal, sat on the lot of a junkyard along with a hundred other damaged vehicles.

  “Where’d you get this?” a detective asked the yard’s owner, a portly man whose clothing wasn’t in better shape than his cars.

  “I bought it.”

  “Yeah, but who’d you buy it from?”

  “Some guy.”

  “Some guy?”

  The man grinned. “Yeah.”

  “When did you buy it?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “This guy drove it in?”

  A nod.

  “How much you pay for it?”

  “Four hundred.”

  “He have a woman with him? A blond woman?”

  “No. Just this guy. He says it was in an accident and didn’t want to drive it no more. Says it was bad luck.” His laugh was almost a giggle.

  The detectives examined the front of the vehicle again. “Jesus,” one muttered, “she didn’t do much of a job of wiping off the blood.” The car’s owner had made an attempt but had succeeded only in smearing it over a larger surface.

  “He,” corrected his partner. “He says a guy brought it in.”

  “You saw the blood on the car?” the yard owner was asked.

  “Yeah, sure, I saw it.”

  “It didn’t raise any red flags with you?”

  “Why should it? It’s the fall. Lots of deer accidents.”

  “You think that’s deer blood?”

  “I wouldn’t know. It could be.”

  “Who was the seller?” a detective asked through clenched teeth.

  A shrug from the junkyard owner.

  “Come on, he turned over the registration. Right?”

  “No, no registration.”

  They opened the driver’s door. The seats had already been removed, the radio, too.

  “The seats were clean,” the man said. “Good radio, too, CD and all.”

  “Where are the plates?”

  “The guy took ’em with him.”

  “So you don’t know who you bought this heap from.”

  “What does it matter? I paid him a fair price.” He waved his hand in the direction of other vehicles in various stages of dismantling. “People crash their cars, they want to get rid of them. I don’t blame ’em. Once a car gets smashed, it ain’t worth fixing.”

  “What did this guy look like?”

  “Normal. Average. Wore glasses. I remember that. Had long hair, like a hippie.”

  “How long? What color?”

  “Not too long.” He used his hand to indicate a cutoff at the back of his neck. “Normal color. Brown, maybe a little gray. I can’t be sure. I don’t pay attention to people who dump their cars here.”

  “We’re taking the car,” one detective said while the other called for an MPD tow truck to be dispatched.

  “Hey,” said the yard owner, “I laid out four bills for
it.”

  “You made a bad investment, pal. Where are the seats and radio?”

  The yard owner swore under his breath as he led one of the cops to an area where dozens of automobile seats were piled on top of each other beneath an overhang that kept them dry. He pointed to a pair, gray with red trim.

  “The radio.”

  “Yeah, the radio.” It was inside the shack that served as his office along with a pile of other radios and GPS units. He picked one up. “This one. I’m out four bills. You gonna reimburse me, right?”

  They ignored him as they took the radio from the shack. One stood with it by the seats while the other stationed himself next to the car. A half hour later, the Buick was on a flatbed along with the seats. The radio was tucked in an evidence bag and held by one of the detectives as they drove to MPD’s vehicle inspection facility, where technicians went over it inside and out for prints and telltale scraps of anything left behind that might help identify the owner.

  Later that afternoon, the vehicle’s VIN was matched to a white Buick Regal that had been reported stolen six months earlier in Southeast. The same two detectives who’d discovered the car were dispatched to interview the owner, an older woman with blue hair who walked with the aid of a walker. “The car belonged to my deceased husband, bless his soul,” she said. “He treated it like a baby, washed and waxed it every Saturday morning. I hope you caught the bastards who stole it.”

  The detectives smiled. They hadn’t expected such language from this little old lady.

  “We’re working on it,” one said.

  “The insurance company gave us a hard time after it was stolen. Those insurance people are whores. They take your money until something happens and then they don’t want to pay up when it’s time. Bastards!”

  As they drove away, one of the detectives said, “If some insurance agent gets whacked, we know who to go after.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  As police technicians combed the confiscated white Buick inch by inch, Dr. Nic Tatum was in his apartment in D.C.’s Capitol Hill district walking on the treadmill in the spare bedroom that he’d converted into a gym.

  You wouldn’t know from looking at him that Nicholas Tatum Ph.D. was one tough dude. Working out had been a sustaining part of his life since his teen years. As a skinny, nerdy kid with large glasses and lank, almost colorless hair, he was picked on by the usual cast of high school bullies, resulting in fights that had him retrieving the pieces of his broken spectacles, or returning home with a blood-spattered white handkerchief pressed against his nose. But his physical appearance wasn’t the only reason he was picked on. He was clearly one of the brightest students in the school. While other academically superior students were sometimes reluctant to answer questions in class for fear of ridicule by their less intelligent classmates, Tatum never hesitated to shoot up his hand and give the correct response. Because of this, he was adored and respected by his teachers—and scorned by certain other students.

  Like all teenage boys, Nic’s life was filled with dreams of being something that he wasn’t. He often imagined himself as invincible, a rough-and-tumble guy with bulging muscles, hair-trigger reflexes, and a granite chin, someone whom other male students avoided bumping into in the hallways. Of course his physical features changed, too, during these flights of fancy. He was movie-star handsome with a wide smile that displayed perfect white teeth, dark hair cropped close to his head, his complexion dusky, his eyes clear and filled with understanding and wisdom beyond his years. He’d never heard of Charles Atlas, but this skinny teenager was the epitome of Atlas’s skinny kid on the beach who was tired of having sand kicked in his face—and did something about it. It was all, of course, fantasy until …

  “I think it’s time that you fight back, Nicholas,” his father said one night over dinner. Nic had returned from school that afternoon with bruises and another pair of glasses to be repaired.

  The statement surprised Nic. Although his father was a mild-mannered CPA who never worked at a level beyond that of a glorified bookkeeper, he stood firm in his principles of justice and right. Had he been born in an earlier era, he might have been a Communist. His mother was a flighty woman with a ready laugh, who worked a variety of part-time jobs to help pay the family’s bills. They doted on their only child and encouraged his academic efforts. And it sickened them to see him return from a day at school bloodied at the hands of less gifted students.

  “We’re not suggesting, Nicholas, that you become a fighter,” explained his father. “Far from it. But there’s no reason for you to be at the mercy of these morons whose brains are smaller than yours and whose futures are dim. I want you to get in shape and give as much as you have been getting.”

  “And won’t they be surprised when you fight back and they end up on the ground with a bloody nose?” his mother added with a gleeful smile that led Nic to believe that she looked forward to witnessing his next fight.

  They signed him up at a local YMCA and purchased some rudimentary exercise equipment that was installed in their unfinished basement. Nic attacked his new workout regime with the same vigor as he tackled his studies, and the results soon became obvious. Not that he became muscle-bound; his basic skeletal structure wouldn’t support that. But muscles did begin to define themselves, and his strength increased. At the same time his confidence grew, bolstered by the knowledge that should someone pick on him again, he’d be ready to offer resistance—to give as good as he’d been getting.

  His social skills were bolstered also. Until becoming a gym rat, he’d been awkward around girls in the school and was aware that some of them, especially those in cliques, made fun of him behind his back. That changed in his senior year, when a pretty blond classmate who belonged to one of the popular groups began to show interest in him. She’d grown to appreciate his academic achievements—she’d shucked off some of her previous silliness and had begun to embrace her studies with an eye toward college—and was open in her admiration of his intelligence. “You’ll easily be our class valedictorian,” she told him more than once while they studied together in the library after school, where he happily helped her with some of her more challenging science subjects.

  Although they could hardly be considered boyfriend and girlfriend, they did catch an occasional movie together or end up in a local luncheonette enjoying ice cream sundaes. None of this went over well with a senior on the football team who had a crush on the girl and who took ribbing from teammates about how “that creep Tatum” was stealing her from him.

  One night as Tatum returned home after a workout at the Y, his rival suitor, accompanied by three friends from the team, accosted him on a dark street. As the football player taunted Tatum and warned him to stay away from the girl, a sense of fury welled up in him that he’d never experienced before. The football player poked him in the chest, then shoved him harder, causing him to stumble back a few steps. The other players urged on their friend, who wasn’t much taller than Tatum but was considerably beefier.

  Tatum calmly removed his glasses, placed them in his shirt pocket, closed the gap between them, and smiled, which seemed to confuse his adversary, who looked over his shoulder at his buddies. Tatum didn’t hesitate. He brought his right fist up from down near his knees, twisting his body to put every ounce of torque into the punch. It caught the football player flush on the side of his face and sent him sprawling into the arms of one of his friends. Before he could reset himself, Tatum swung again, this time his tightly clenched fist smashing into his opponent’s nose and flattening it. Blood flowed, and the football player sank to his knees. Tatum grabbed the beefy student’s hair, jerked his head up, and held his fist inches from his battered face. “More?” Tatum said. He took in the others. “You want some, too?”

  They hauled their buddy to his feet and dragged him away, uttering empty curses and threats as they went. Tatum thought he might explode. He shook violently and his breath came in gulps. He couldn’t believe what he had don
e, and back home in his room he swore to himself that he would never do it again. But he knew that he could if he had to, and that confidence carried forward throughout his college and adult life.

  * * *

  He’d dialed the treadmill to its maximum speed and was sprinting to keep up with it when the phone rang. He considered allowing the machine to answer but decided that he’d had enough exercise for the day. He reached the phone moments before the automated voice kicked in.

  “Hey, Nic, Joe Owens. Hope I didn’t take you away from some exotic scientific experiment.”

  “Not at all,” Tatum said, wiping perspiration from his face with an already soggy towel and trying to get his breathing back to normal. “I was just seeing whether I could outrun my treadmill.”

  “And?”

  “I was losing. What’s up?”

  “We’ve got a case here at MPD I thought you might lend a hand with.”

  “Mark Sedgwick?”

  “You read the papers. Yeah, it’s the Sedgwick case. You knew the guy?”

  “Not well. We worked together on some projects. I read that it might not have been an accident.”

  “Looks like it wasn’t. Got any time this afternoon?”

  “Nothing but time today. Want me to swing by?”

  “That’d be great. Three?”

  “Three it is.”

  Joe Owens was a veteran homicide cop with whom Tatum had worked before. An affable African American with an infectious laugh, Owens had risen through the ranks to reach senior detective status.