by A J Grayson
Pauline rises slightly in her seat, adopting a yet more formal, professional posture. She speaks with confidence and an authority borne of long experience in her field. ‘That’s correct. I’ve been working with him, on and off, for the past eight months. I took over after Dr Grainger left for Colorado.’
‘And how was that … work … going?’ The voice of Christina Vermille is tainted with what sounds like suspicion of the whole process. Pauline accepts the question, and the tone, without being fazed by either. Vermille’s role on the committee is to question everything, including the efficacy of the confinement and treatment. Suspicion is entirely appropriate.
‘I consider that we were making progress,’ Pauline answers honestly. ‘He’d been beginning to confront the reality of his crimes.’
‘Beginning? In all this time he hadn’t done so before?’
‘I’m afraid it’s no surprise that he hadn’t. That’s the nature of his personality and his actions. He’s a man of intense repression.’
‘Repression or not,’ the warden kicks in, ‘he’s an individual who’s unstable and whose crimes more than justify his confinement here. Who’s been involved in two prior escape attempts, and now, with this.’ His hands are in the air in a sign of self-evident emphasis.
Pauline says nothing. The warden extinguishes his interjection with a sigh and lets his arms collapse back onto the table.
‘The warden is right. Your patient’s record indicates a pattern of increasing instability. Yet you still consider that you were having success?’ Vermille presses.
‘I do. Progress in these matters is often very slow, especially given the psychological effects of incarceration itself. But we were seeing signs of real steps forward.’
‘Though I take it that none of those signs included a proper confession? An admission of his acts?’
Again Pauline doesn’t answer. She’s too experienced to fall prey to leading questions. The panel is well aware of the content of her reports, and the fact that they don’t include bringing her patient to such an admission. Not to the degree that any of them would like.
‘Sounds like this is a man who doesn’t want to take responsibility for those actions,’ Vermille continues. A nod of agreement from the warden, and even the wizened and grandfatherly visage of the chairman is bobbing in affirmation.
‘Actually, it’s quite the opposite,’ Pauline counters. Her fingers are interlaced on the table before her. Her eyes bear directly into those of the other woman, then sweep slowly and deliberately to each of the men.
‘Accepting responsibility is precisely what he was trying to do. Especially over our last few conversations. I got further with him in those sessions than over the past several months.’
‘But we have reports his aggressive tendencies increased during that precise period, and I remember the experiences personally,’ the warden interrupts. ‘My guards had to sedate him multiple times when his temper flared beyond limits they felt were safe. And you won’t have forgotten that he attacked you as well, Doctor. Threw a table at you, if I remember the incident report correctly.’
‘It wasn’t at me,’ Pauline counters. The encounter refreshes itself in her mind – the tension of the inmate’s body; the acrid smell of the sudden spike of adrenalin in his sweat in the small room. ‘He was simply acting out. Even the guards that entered the room noted that he threw the table to the side, not in my direction.’ She gazes across the three faces opposite her, recognizing this was a hard sell. ‘He wasn’t intending to harm me, of that I’m certain. It was an outburst, and in someone with his condition, a controlled outburst is actually a good thing. It comes with the territory.’
‘He brutally assaulted a cell-block guard during this latest escape attempt,’ the warden adds. His words are now accusations. ‘Is that also something that “comes with the territory”, Dr Lavrentis?’
She sits in silence. Finally she leans towards the microphone again.
‘Controlled aggression, the kind we were able to deal with in sessions, is an important part of trying to get to the root of his issues. One of the main factors in his condition is an inability to come to grips with his own emotions.’
‘So,’ the female panel member interjects, ‘the lack of control we read about in the trial records still exists?’
Pauline ponders the question thoughtfully. ‘Yes, in a sense. His profile remains largely unchanged. He is generally calm, but then things snap into focus. Something brings him to the breaking point, and he folds. And that’s when the outbursts come.’
‘So he maintains as much control as he can for as long as he can,’ the warden interrupts, ‘but then eventually snaps and goes violent. This is the profile of a killer. It’s the profile he had when he first arrived here.’
‘The way out of this condition,’ Lavrentis answers, pushing back, ‘starts with coming to grips with one’s own actions. One’s behaviours, and the evidence of them from one’s past. For all the time I’ve known him, the patient has denied every element of his crimes.’
‘Even that he’s a criminal,’ the chairman adds, noting a detail from one of his printed pages. ‘It says here he’s generally denied ever having been involved in the crimes for which he was convicted.’
‘That’s right, and a denial of guilt, one that’s not made just to the authorities as an excuse but to one’s own self – a genuine, absolute belief that you’ve not done anything wrong – that’s the thickest layer of skin to get through. Until recently, I couldn’t even scratch the outer layer of it. He’d deny his crimes outright, insist everything spoken against him was a lie. But then the first of those concrete signs of progress you were asking for, Mr Chairman.’ Pauline glances at Tolbert. ‘He began to concoct other crimes to replace them.’
‘In other words, lying,’ Vermille interjects. ‘I don’t see how that counts as progress.’
The chairman holds up a hand to stop her. ‘Hold on just a moment, Christina. Dr Lavrentis, what sort of other crimes are you talking about?’
‘Most recently, he confessed to murdering his wife.’
There is a confused silence from the panel’s table. It seems that no one was expecting this.
‘His wife?’ the warden asks. He’s already flipping through his papers, his face confused. ‘We have no records of him being married.’
‘He never was.’ Pauline is content with the wide eyes before her. Surprise, and for a moment at least, a genuine willingness to listen. ‘He constructed the wife as a first step towards admitting guilt.’
Vermille can’t restrain herself. ‘Sounds like a fishy first step, Doctor.’
‘That’s your judgement.’ Lavrentis smiles, attempting to ensure the other woman doesn’t take her words as an insult. ‘But it’s a huge leap from convincing yourself you’re an innocent, wrongly accused victim, to admitting you’ve committed one of the most heinous acts possible. That he constructed a fake person to have done it to was a mental buffer. A way to edge a little closer to the truth, without yet being able to grasp the full horror of what he’d actually done.’
The female investigator leans back in her chair.
Benjamin Tolbert rests his gaze pensively on a fixed point at the far side of the room, pondering Lavrentis’s answer. Finally, he turns to face her.
‘Would he ever have done that? Understood the full scope of his actions? Was he close?’
Pauline sags slightly. It is her first visible indication of frustration.
‘We had just got there.’
56
Conference Room 4C
California Medical Facility
‘Dr Lavrentis, I am ready to admit that I’m finding your answers to this committee to be elusive and evasive.’ The accusation comes from Christina Vermille, whose whole demeanour radiates her annoyance with the psychology-speak she’s hearing from the other woman. ‘We’ve asked for a straightforward answer to a straightforward question. Did the patient ever take full responsibility for his actions? And if so
, was it in a spirit of regret or of defiance?’ Lavrentis leans forward to answer but Vermille holds up a hand and continues her own remarks before she has a chance.
‘The pressing need for a direct answer to these questions should be obvious to a woman of your professional stature, Pauline. If a man who’s repressed his violent past has suddenly had it return to him, if he knows what he did and has become comfortable with it, at the same time as his pattern of aggression begins to increase, then we have a man who is a very real threat to the general population of this institution, guards and fellow prisoners alike. Thus far we’ve treated inmate #10481-91 as a delusional individual who thinks the worst thing he did in life was steal his neighbour’s skateboard as a boy. But if he’s realized he’s something else, and is already acting on that …’ She allows the conclusion to be drawn without saying anything further.
Pauline Lavrentis waits patiently until she is done.
‘I do not disagree with you on any of your points of fact, Ms Vermille,’ she finally answers. ‘But I must respectfully disagree with the implication that recognizing his crimes leads a man to becoming once again the violent individual he once was. It’s actually quite the opposite. The most dangerous condition of all is that of denial. All the anger, all the violence, they’re still there. They haven’t just vanished. They’re lurking under the surface, and at some point they’re going to boil up and explode.’
‘This is a somewhat regular occurrence?’ the chairman asks.
‘It is an absolute pattern, sir. Predictable and assured. That is why we spend so much time trying to get these kinds of patients to acknowledge their crimes. It’s not to revert them back to their criminal state, but to lead them through an honest awareness of it to a place where they can address its underlying causes.’
Vermille slumps back in her chair, unhappy but unwilling to press the point.
The warden looks directly at Pauline.
‘Dr Lavrentis, I have a guard with a shank wound in his abdomen. That’s a simple fact, and it’s an unacceptable one.’ He leans forward. ‘The only real question facing this panel is how severe the response should be. You can talk of progress all you want, but this man is a danger. We’re trying to figure out whether an indefinite stay in solitary confinement is even enough, or whether we need to have your patient in restraints to prevent more “outbursts” with such violent ends.’ The warden’s voice is anxious and frustrated.
‘I don’t think that would be helpful,’ Lavrentis answers. There is strain in her voice now, almost worry. ‘You’re talking about a response that could destroy a man in his state. His mental condition … he’s fragile. We may be a penal hospital, but we’re a medical facility all the same.’
‘It’s not only him that we have to consider. There are other patients. Staff. Their welfare must be taken into account in all of this. His increasing instability makes him an increasing threat.’
Pauline nods with a certain resignation. The arguments are reasonable. Yet there is a pressing look on her face, as if there is more that the panel needs to understand.
‘Isolation could break him. I know he’s caused problems, but the damage this could effect, it could be permanent.’
The chairman leans towards her. ‘Tell me, Pauline, what sets this man off, when he has outbursts like this?’
She considers Tolbert’s question.
‘There can be a number of factors, Mr Chairman. But in this case, he was discovering something about himself that he simply couldn’t handle.’
‘You mean the details of the murders,’ Tolbert replies. ‘I can see why. I can’t even look at the crime-scene photos, and I’ve been doing this a lot of years.’
Pauline is shaking her head. ‘It’s not just the killings, though that’s a critical part of it.’
‘What else is there?’ Vermille asks.
‘He was having to come to grips with something worse than what he’d done. He was being forced to discover who he really is.’
57
Taped Recording Cassette #058A
Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
The final cassette in the case-file drawer is marked #058 and begins with an unusual jumble of mechanical noise. On analysis, it is the sound of fingers fumbling in a rush with the mechanism of the recorder itself. The cassette-change between the preceding recording and this was evidently managed in extreme haste, resulting in a few foibles of grip. Joseph is already speaking, mid-stream through an ongoing sentence, as the noise subsides and his words become audible.
‘… and when I broke through the door, my plan was only to kill the old man.’
‘Can you say that again? You had a plan to kill the man in the house.’
‘Fuck’s sake, woman, am I talking to myself here? I thought it was your job to listen.’
Pauline doesn’t respond. She’s given Joseph time to take a few deep breaths, which had calmed him down only a little. The anger on his face, she remembers, had been fixed as if in plastic.
A pained edge remains in his voice when it returns.
‘I only intended to go after the man, no one else. I need you to know that. Anything else that may have happened, that was an accident. I had one target only, and it was him.’
‘I’ll make sure I take a note of it.’
‘Good. Get it in the documents. Make sure that whoever looks at these things knows what really went down.’ There is a new intensity to Joseph’s words, but then a halting pause, and then an abrupt change of tone. ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I wasn’t intending to kill him at all.’
Pauline hesitates. ‘You weren’t? You just told me your plan was to kill the old man. Those were your exact words, Joseph.’
‘I know what I said!’ he barks. ‘I just wanted to scare the shit out of him, really. That’s all I was planning. Maybe out a kneecap or an ankle or something small like that. Make the bastard bleed a little. But mostly I wanted him to feel real fear, and you don’t have to die to feel real fear.’ The last statement emerges from the recorder with a kind of knowing, learned force behind it. They are the words of first-hand experience.
‘What changed?’ Pauline asks. ‘What happened that caused such a different outcome than the one you’d anticipated?’
‘It was when I saw him. That was the change. The sight of his face. Oh God, I ran through that door and saw him – perched in his seat like some despotic king on his throne. He had such a smug look. He didn’t give a damn about any of it. After all I’d just heard him doing, minutes before! He had the content look of a man who was proud of everything he’d ever done in life.’
‘That must have been terrib—’
‘It was like I went blind, just then,’ Joseph continues, not seeming to take any notice of her consoling interjection. Pauline recalls the moment vividly. Joseph had suddenly been, for all intents and purposes, utterly oblivious to her presence.
On the cassette, his words are pouring out of him. ‘It was like something took me over, and it started invading my eyes. Everything went white around the edges of my vision. The whole world was on fire, burned away from me. I don’t know a better way to say it. I could still see, but I couldn’t, all at the same time. The only thing that wasn’t a blur was him, and I felt … I felt … I don’t know how to describe what I was feeling.’
‘Can I take a guess?’ Pauline asks. Even now, she fidgets in her seat on hearing her own question through the speakers. It isn’t her normal pattern to suggest answers to her patients’ questions or speculate about their emotional states, but the circumstances had pressed her into an unusual position. She had wanted to help him. God help her, she still did.
‘A guess?’ Joseph’s voice questions back. ‘No one’s stopping you.’
‘I think what you were feeling is rage,’ she says. ‘It’s an anger that goes deeper than normal anger. An uncontrollable violence deep inside, that bursts out of you like an explosion.’
The increase to Joseph’s breath is audible in the recording. ‘Yes! It was
exactly that. And damn, it was rage like I’ve never known. It took me over, like something besides me was controlling my body.’
‘And what did you do when this rage took you over?’
‘I shot and I shot and I shot,’ Joseph answers, his words racing. ‘I shot until the trigger no longer produced the effects I wanted, then I spun the gun around and swung with its butt like a bat.’ He takes a deep, coursing breath. ‘I crashed it into him. I could hear the crunch of bones. I could hear it, but I couldn’t really see. My vision was even blurrier then, all white light and nothing. But I kept going, and each shot, each swing and impact, it was like … righteousness!’ Joseph’s voice roars out the word like a lion. It’s so loud the speakers rattle as the magnetic recording overloads their threshold. ‘Real righteousness, at last! And justice. Finally, justice!’
A long pause. Twenty-three seconds. Heavy breathing. The words have physically depleted him.
‘Do you remember what happened after that?’ Pauline’s voice is exceptionally soft and gentle. As she listens now, her eyes are moist. This was the moment. All her work had been pointing to this, and yet somehow she hated to have had to bring him here.
‘I remember … I don’t know how much later it was, but it was like waking up. That’s what I’d call it. Like coming to. My eyes had never been closed, but suddenly I started to be able to see again. That bright white haze went away and normal sight returned, and …’
‘And?’
‘There was blood everywhere. God, it was more than I’d ever seen. I’d been to horror films before, but I’d never imagined anything like this. It was even on the ceiling. And I … I remember I couldn’t breathe.’
‘Why couldn’t you breathe, Joseph?’
A six-second pause. When Joseph’s voice returns, the anger is gone. It quavers, two notes struggling for dominance, as if it’s on the verge of a sob.
‘I couldn’t breathe because when I looked down, I didn’t see his eyes staring up at me.’
