Miracle Creek: A Novel

by Angie Kim

  Heights said, “No, of course not. You can’t look at one thing in isolation. It wasn’t just HBOT. She did extreme things like IV chelation and feeding Henry bleach.”

  “Ah, yes. Let’s turn to that. IV chelation is an FDA-approved treatment, correct?”

  “Yes, but for heavy-metal poisoning, which Henry did not have.”

  “Are you aware, Detective, of a Brown University study in which mice injected with thimerosal, a mercury preservative that used to be in many vaccines prior to 2001, became socially atypical, akin to autism, and when treated with chelation became normal again?”

  Matt hadn’t heard of that. Was that true?

  “No, I haven’t heard of that study.”

  “Really? The study was summarized in a Wall Street Journal article I found in your own files, right next to the sheet noting that Henry had seven thimerosal vaccines as a baby, back when thimerosal was still present in some vaccines.”

  Heights pursed her lips, as if forcing herself to say nothing.

  Shannon said, “And are you aware that one of the study’s researchers, a Dr. Anjeli Hall, who was an attending at Stanford Hospital and professor at Stanford Medical School, treats children with autism with, among other things, chelation?”

  Matt didn’t know the name, but those credentials—how could anyone dispute the legitimacy of someone like that?

  “No, I don’t know that doctor,” Heights said, “but I do know that autistic children have recently died from IV chelation.”

  “Caused by negligence of a doctor no longer licensed to practice medicine, correct?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “People die from doctors’ mistakes.” Shannon turned to the jury. “Just last month, I read about a child dying from a pediatrician’s dosage error for Tylenol. Tell me, Detective, if I give my child Tylenol tomorrow, is that medical abuse because Tylenol is obviously a dangerous medical treatment that can kill children?”

  “Chelation is not Tylenol. The defendant gave Henry DMPS, a dangerous chemical normally administered in a hospital. She got it by mail, through an out-of-state naturopath.”

  “Are you aware, Detective, that this out-of-state naturopath practices in Dr. Hall’s office, and she was refilling a prescription Dr. Hall originally wrote for Henry?”

  Heights’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Do you consider it medical abuse to provide medication prescribed by a neurologist who happens to teach at Stanford?”

  She pursed her lips and thought for a while, and Matt wanted to say, Come on, don’t be an idiot. “No,” she finally said.

  “Great.” Shannon crossed out IV Chelation on her chart. “Now, that leaves the so-called bleach treatment. Detective, what’s the chemical formula for bleach?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s in your files, but it’s NaClO, sodium hypochlorite. What’s the chemical formula for MMS, the mineral solution that Elizabeth gave to Henry, which you’re calling bleach?”

  She frowned slightly. “Chlorine dioxide.”

  “Yes, ClO2. Actually, a few drops of it diluted in water. Are you aware, Detective, that companies use this to purify bottled water?” Shannon turned to the jury. “Water we buy in supermarkets contains the same chemical as the MMS formula she’s been calling ‘bleach.’”

  Abe stood up and said, “Who’s testifying here, Judge?” but Shannon kept going, her voice rising and words getting faster. “Chlorine dioxide is present in over-the-counter antifungals. Are you arresting all the parents who buy those at Walgreens?”

  Abe said again, “Objection. I’ve been trying to be patient, but she’s badgering the witness with all these questions outside the scope of her expertise, not to mention assuming facts not in evidence. Detective Heights is not a doctor, nor is she a chemist or medical expert.”

  Shannon’s face flushed red with an indignant fervor. “That’s exactly my point, Your Honor. Detective Heights is not an expert, doesn’t know the first thing about these treatments she’s labeled—based on what, I have no idea—as dangerous and unnecessary, and she hasn’t bothered to learn the basics, which are all in her own files, if she’d bother to look.”

  The judge said, “Objection sustained. Ms. Haug, you can call your own experts, but for now, stick to what’s in the record and within the scope of the detective’s duties.”

  Shannon nodded. “Yes, Your Honor.” She turned. “Detective, are you permitted to start your own investigations? In the course of one case, if you come across evidence of another parent committing abuse, for example, could you open a new case?”

  “Of course. It doesn’t matter how a claim comes to our attention.”

  “In this case,” Shannon said, “you came across evidence of many other parents in your jurisdiction doing both IV chelation and MMS, through online discussions, correct?”

  The detective’s eyes flickered to the gallery before she said yes.

  “How many of these parents did you investigate for medical abuse?”

  Her eyes flickered to the gallery again. “None.”

  “And that’s because you don’t consider MMS and chelation to constitute child abuse, isn’t that correct?” Shannon didn’t say it, but Matt could almost hear the unsaid words: Because if those treatments were abuse, half the people here should’ve been thrown in jail long ago.

  Heights glared, and Shannon stared right back, the staring duel lasting for many seconds, past awkward to downright painful, when Heights said, “Correct.”

  “Thank you,” Shannon said, and slowly, deliberately, she walked to her chart and put a big, fat line through the last row, Medical Abuse.

  Matt looked at Elizabeth, her face unchanged, still wearing the expressionless mask she’d worn all yesterday as Detective Heights portrayed her as a sadistic abuser conducting painful experiments on her child for the hell of it. Except now, she didn’t look heartless but numb. Dazed from grief. And it occurred to him, what he’d known ever since he woke up: he had to tell Abe, and probably Shannon, too. Maybe not everything, but at least about Mary and the insurance call, the H-Mart note. The cigarettes, he could wait and see. But he had to go find Mary and warn her. Give her a chance to go to Abe first and confess.

  He touched Janine on the shoulder. “I need to go,” he mouthed, and pointed at his pager like it was some work thing. She whispered, “Okay, I’ll fill you in.”

  He stood and walked out of the courtroom. As he was leaving, he saw Shannon gesturing to the now-decimated chart. “Detective,” she said, “I’d like to clarify something we discussed earlier.” Shannon wrote something on the chart and said, “This is what you wrote in your meeting with your colleagues, correct?”

  Matt stopped at the door and looked. It wasn’t until after Heights said, “Yes, that’s correct,” that Shannon stepped back, unblocking Matt’s view of the poster. On top, above all the crossed-out categories of abuse, Shannon had written in fat letters and circled, NO ABUSE = NO MOTIVE.

  ELIZABETH

  SHE SAW THEM DURING RECESS, outside the courtroom. A sizable contingent—twenty, maybe thirty women—from her autism moms’ group. The last time she saw them was at Henry’s funeral, back when she was still the tragic mother, the focal point of their sympathy and sorrow (and maybe guilt, for secretly feeling a pinch of superiority at their own children being alive). Before the arrest and news stories that stopped the visits with dropped-off casseroles. She’d expected some to attend the trial, but she hadn’t seen anyone all week.

  But now, here they were. Why today? Perhaps the latest news had piqued their curiosity to the pay-for-special-needs-babysitter-for-a-whole-day level. Or maybe today was the monthly meeting—yes, it was a Thursday—and they decided to take a field trip. Or … was it possible? Could they have heard how her treatments for Henry—the same treatments many of them were giving their own kids—were being branded “medical abuse,” and they’d come out in support?

  The women were sta
nding in a loose circle, talking and milling around like bees near a hive. As she walked toward the courtroom, getting closer to them, one woman on her phone—Elaine, the first to have tried the so-called bleach treatment, even before Elizabeth—looked up and noticed her. Elaine’s eyebrows shot up and her lips spread into a smile as if she was glad to see her. Elizabeth smiled back and veered toward the group, her heart fluttering and leaping against her chest, her whole body buoyed by hope.

  Elaine’s smile fell, and she turned toward the group and whispered something. And now all the women were glancing at her the way they might at a rotting corpse—unable to contain their curiosity but disgusted, their eyes darting at her, then quickly away, their faces contorting as if they’d sniffed something putrid. Even as Elizabeth realized that of course Elaine’s raised brow and smile were from surprise and embarrassment, the women walked inward to a huddle, their backs to her, forming a circle so tight it seemed ready to collapse onto itself.

  Shannon mouthed, “Come on, let’s go.” Elizabeth nodded and stepped away from them, her legs feeling simultaneously hollow and heavy, making it hard to walk. For many years, this group had been the only place where she’d felt a sense of belonging as a mother, a world where she wasn’t politely avoided and pitied as the (whispered, always whispered) “poor mom of that boy with”—pause—“autism, you know, the one who just rocks all day long.” The opposite: in the group, for the first time in her life, she’d felt something akin to power. Not that she hadn’t achieved before—she’d gotten honors in school, bonuses at work—but those were worker-bee types of success, the quiet kinds noticed only by one’s parents. In the autism moms’ world, though, Elizabeth was a rock star, a miracle worker, the leader of the in-crowd, because she was what everyone dreamed of becoming: the mother of a Recovered Child, a child who started out as a nonverbal, nonsocial, nonpresentable mess like the others, but over the years, catapulted into the realm of mainstream classes and therapy graduations. Henry had been the role model, the crystallization of the hope that one day, their own kids could undergo their own metamorphoses.

  Being the object of so much envy and esteem had been intoxicating but (not being used to it) also embarrassing, and she’d tried to downplay her role in Henry’s progress. “For all I know,” she told the group, “Henry’s gains weren’t from the treatments, and the timing was coincidental. There’s no control group, so we’ll never really know.” (Not that she actually believed this, but she thought her correlation-doesn’t-equal-causation logic made her seem rational, which made nonbelievers less likely to dismiss her as one of those “antivaccine nutjobs.”)

  Even with Elizabeth’s caveats, though, virtually everyone in the group joined the biomed stampede and rushed to get their kids on the same treatments. “Elizabeth’s protocol,” they called it, despite her protests that she’d merely followed others’ recommendations, with only tweaks based on Henry’s lab tests. When many of the other kids improved (although none as quickly or dramatically as Henry), that was when she became the true queen bee, the expert everyone turned to. Every one of the women standing outside the courtroom now had e-mailed her for advice or picked her brain over coffee, asked for help interpreting lab tests, and sent her muffins and gift cards to thank her.

  And now here they were, these women who’d once been united in their admiration for her: their backs turned to her, united more tightly than ever in their condemnation of her. And here she was, the onetime near deity, shuffling away, now a pariah. And if the group’s reaction was any indication, mere days away from becoming a death-row inmate.

  * * *

  SITTING IN COURT, Elizabeth looked at the chart on the easel, the ugly word ABUSE.

  Child abuse. Was that what she’d done? After that first pinch in her neighbor’s basement, she promised herself she’d never do it again—she was a proponent of positive parenting, didn’t even believe in threatening or scolding—but the frustration would build over time. Weeks and months of patience, of ignoring negative behaviors and praising positive ones, then, like a riptide, fury would rush in, knocking her down and making her desperate for the sweet release that came with grabbing Henry’s soft flesh and squeezing or yelling. But she never hit, never slapped, and certainly nothing to cause injuries requiring medical attention. And wasn’t that—things that ended with blood and broken bones—child abuse, not the invisible things she did to cause a moment’s pain, just enough to jolt Henry out of whatever behavior she needed him to stop? Was that any different from spanking?

  She looked at the chart, all the NOs confirming the absence of wrongdoing, and felt anguish for Henry, the knowledge that she and those listed on the chart—the people whose job it was to protect him—had failed him. And when Shannon said, “Abe’s doing a redirect on Heights, but don’t worry. No one believes this abuse claim of hers,” Elizabeth felt a pinch of pity for her, too, for having been so thoroughly duped.

  Abe went straight to the chart. He pointed to the phrase NO ABUSE = NO MOTIVE and said, “Detective, when you wrote this phrase, did you mean that if the defendant didn’t abuse Henry, she’d have no motive to kill him?”

  Heights said, “No, of course not. There are many cases of parents harming and even killing their children without prior abuse.”

  “So what did you mean?”

  Heights looked to the jury. “You have to understand the context. I’d barely begun the abuse investigation before the child and a witness were murdered. I was asking for more staff for my abuse investigation, and I was perhaps…” She took a deep breath, as if working up the courage to confess something embarrassing. “I wrote this as sort of a shorthand to make my point that at that time, which was still early in the investigation, the only motive we had was the abuse claim, so we should put more resources into that.”

  Abe smiled like an understanding teacher. “So you wrote that to convince your superiors to give you more power and resources. Did others agree?”

  “No. In fact, Detective Pierson erased it and said I had tunnel vision, that the abuse claim was a proof of motive, but certainly not the only one. And certainly, since then, we’ve uncovered a lot more proof of motive. The defendant’s Internet searches, notes, fights with Kitt, so on. So it is most definitely not true that no abuse equals no motive.”

  Abe took a red marker and put a thick line through NO ABUSE = NO MOTIVE on the chart. He stepped back. “Let’s explore the rest of this very organized chart from Ms. Haug. She asserts there’s no abuse here because other people weren’t aware of it. Detective, as a trained psychologist and detective specializing in child abuse cases, is that right?”

  “No,” she said. “Abusers often effectively conceal their actions and convince the child to go along with that.”

  “Did you find such evidence of concealment here?”

  “Yes. The defendant never told Henry’s pediatrician or even his father about giving him IV chelation and MMS, let alone that children have died from them. It was classic deliberate concealment, a hallmark of abuse.”

  Elizabeth wanted to shout out that she wasn’t hiding anything, simply saving herself an exhausting argument with an old-fashioned doctor. And Victor hadn’t wanted any details; he’d said he trusted her, that he didn’t have time for appointments and research articles. But something about the phrase “deliberate concealment” stopped her. It had a sinister quality, the kind of guilt-wrapped feel that infused her when she told Henry before pediatrician visits, “Let’s not tell him about the other doctors, because we don’t want him getting jealous, do we?”

  Abe stepped closer to Heights. “You mentioned this before, deliberate concealment. Why is that so important to you, as a psychologist and an investigator?”

  “Because it goes to the intent of the action. A parent tells a child, if you do X, you’ll get a spanking. The child does X, the parent spanks. It’s controlled and predictable. The spouse knows about it, the child can tell their friends. Many parents do that.

  “Same with medical
treatments. Your child is ill, you want to try a treatment, you talk to doctors, your spouse, decide together. Fine. But you deliberately hide your actions—whether it be treatments or physical punishment—that tells me you know what you’re doing is wrong.”

  She felt something go off inside her, like a bulb that burns too brightly and flames out, blinding and deafening her. She’d wondered what made her yelling and pinching different—and they were different, she knew it—from the yelling, spankings, and smacks on the head that other parents discussed, sometimes even did, in public. Was this it? That she didn’t want to do it, had promised herself she wouldn’t, and yet couldn’t help but do it? It was the difference between a regular person having a martini before dinner and an alcoholic doing the same; the physical act was the same, but the context—the intent behind it and the aftermath—couldn’t be more different. The loss of control, the unpredictability. And afterward, the cover-up.

  “In your expert opinion, do these NOs”—Abe pointed to the chart— “indicate no abuse?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Abe took the red marker again and crossed out all the column headings on top. “What about the rows?” he said. “Ms. Haug separated out different types of abuse and crossed them off, one by one. Is that a valid way to analyze child abuse cases?”

  “No. You can’t look at each charge in isolation. One incident, by itself, may be disturbing, but not enough to constitute abuse. For example, a parent saying a child’s annoying and people hate him. By itself, not abuse. Scratching a child’s arm, that again may not be abuse by itself. And on and on, with the forced drinking of MMS and IV chelation. But when you consider everything together, a pattern emerges, and things that may seem innocuous in isolation may not, in fact, be so harmless.”