Suffer the Children

by Lisa Black

  “Out of control,” Jack said. “And the parents just let it happen.”

  “Yes and no. The parents would try to correct the behavior but not follow through with consequences. They’d say, ‘Bad boy,’ but not force him to correct the behavior or make amends, so he promptly tuned them out. He went down that path, and no one forced him to reverse course.”

  “How did he come to be here?” Riley asked, saving Jack from having to do so. No need to hear about every scuffle or stolen piece of candy in young Derald’s misspent youth.

  Now Bellamy hesitated, scratched one ear, shifted his feet. Things a psychologist such as himself would no doubt identify as delaying actions.

  “That was me. In a way. Mom and Dad just knocked along, letting Derald dictate conditions in the household—in which, by the way, the other two kids are doing fine, proving once again that it’s not all nurture, it’s a bit of nature, too. The other two kids are a little spoiled and I feel sorry for whoever they marry someday, but hardly criminal and not violent. So far, anyway. They’ve learned to capitalize on the distraction Derald provides—with the parents spending so much time on the problem child the other two can pretend this neglect can only be fixed by expensive toys. But they’re not violent, and actually the daughter is about the only support Mom has. Dad is a complete pushover, and when she tries to put her foot down he says she’s being too harsh. But when thirteen-year-old Derald came within two minutes of completing a rape of a schoolmate, then told his mother that the girl had been asking for it and ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,’ she finally grew a pair of ovaries and hired me.”

  “And you fixed him?” Jack asked, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, without success. He didn’t really dislike this guy. He just wanted him to get to the point.

  Without any humor at all, Bellamy said no. “In truth, I failed completely and it doesn’t surprise me a bit. I knew I was in trouble the minute Derald walked into my office for the very first time. Usually kids—even tough, violent kids—are nervous. Hell, even violent adults are nervous when they’re not hostile. Everybody is—you get used to that in my line of work. I meet my buddies’ dates and there’s that choking moment when they wonder if I’m analyzing them, if I’m going to report to my pal later or if they should be careful what they say so I don’t think they’re a neurotic idiot. But Derald? Sauntered in like he was taking a seat at his favorite bar. Plopped down, looked around, complimented me on the office, and asked how much I made in a year.”

  “Cocky,” Riley said.

  “They’re all cocky, usually, unless they’re so troubled they can’t keep up the pretense. So I told myself it was bravado, a brave front, or perhaps the result of years of training himself not to feel so that he wouldn’t feel bad. But I knew right away.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That he was no such thing. He wasn’t putting on a show for me because he wasn’t troubled. He seemed relaxed because he was—he was the king of his own world and happy as a fu—happy as a clam. I have no doubt he slept like a baby at night while his parents stared at the ceiling and his sister locked her door. That kid was a stone-cold psychopath by the age of ten.”

  “So what’d you do?” Riley asked. Jack leaned forward despite himself as if watching a horror movie, knowing the monster was about to make an appearance.

  “I tried. His parents were paying me, after all.” He smiled, a crooked slash of leaking pain. “I told Mom and Dad not to get their hopes up, and gave it a shot. Talking, talking, talking. I tried playing video games with him, biting my lip at his smug smile when he beat me—because of course he beat me, he’s a freakin’ thirteen-year-old. You should have seen the look on his face when I finally bested him in one single game. Eyes flat, face still. Part of me thought great, he’ll respect me now. Part of me thought I had just set the therapy back four months. Part of me thought he would stab me in the head with the game controller.”

  “Control freak?” Riley asked.

  “Sociopath, in common parlance. Control is their drug. Anyway it wasn’t all touchy-feely. I worked with the parents and even the other kids to set up a house plan, an organized structure of what we would expect from Derald and consequences for bad acts, reward the good ones, blah blah blah. I tried to get him to come with me to homeless shelters, old folks homes, to get him to view those less fortunate as needing his help rather than easy targets, but he always had an excuse to call it off. I talked about feelings and compassion and putting oneself in others’ shoes until I got hoarse.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nada.” He threw his paper cup into the garbage, leaving a spray of dregs along the plastic liner. “He already had a home business of stealing and reselling jewelry, bicycles, anything he could pick up from the other kids at school. He’d use the jewelry to buy sexual favors from girls, having found that easier than raping them. All I could do was pray that he’d get locked up before he procreated and, as far as I know, he did.

  “He found an inner-city gang to use as a source for drugs and guns, which he’d resell instead of use. He wasn’t in the gang, he carefully explained to me. He used them. Any other kid I’d think yeah, sure, but him I believed. He also said he didn’t use the drugs, and on that I think he waffled a bit, but he didn’t show any signs of a hard addiction. More importantly, he had formed a mutually beneficial business arrangement that entailed a steady flow of firearms. Then I started praying he’d get locked up before he shot his whole family to death in the middle of some random night. The violence had grown on him until that cocky, relaxed attitude hardened into something cold and scary.”

  “And did he?” Riley asked.

  “No, no, they’re all still alive. But he did shoot two other kids who tried to rip him off, or he tried to rip off, depending on who you believe. Somehow no weapons were found near their bodies and they were both shot in the back, so the self-defense claim wasn’t really going to fly. They were known gangbangers, the cop screwed up and didn’t read his rights because he assumed the white kid had to be the victim—”

  “I remember that,” Riley said. “Rick Gardiner and his partner had that one. Didn’t you assist?”

  Jack said, “Yeah, I took a few of the witness interviews, went to the hospital for the victims’ statements.”

  “Gardiner. No wonder it got screwed up.”

  Bellamy didn’t seem interested in the police department’s internecine rivalries. “Whatever the issue, they charged him as a juvenile. Mom and Dad wanted to post the bail and I convinced them not to, and called in a ton of favors to get him placed here. Hard sell—as desperate as those parents were they wanted to faint at the thought of their baby in prison. I wanted to faint at the idea of him going home, convinced they’d be dead in their beds the first night.”

  “And so Derald came to the Firebird Center.”

  “And died here,” Bellamy said. “So now his parents are gathering lawyers to sue me, by the way. If I hadn’t talked them into placing him here, their sweet baby boy might still be alive.”

  “Where’d he get the drugs?” Riley asked.

  The young doctor let air escape from his lips like an agitated horse. “Who knows? I’m sure this place has its pipelines, like any prison. I asked one day, when he came to a session with dilated pupils, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Did he have any friends here?”

  “In true Derald form, he got along with everyone else because everyone else wasn’t worth noticing.”

  “He didn’t mention anyone?”

  “Nope.”

  Jack asked, “Did they do group therapy here? Maybe he said things—”

  Bellamy was shaking his head. “Group with teenagers is largely pointless. They’re all just posturing for the other kids. You have to be alone in a room to get anywhere. You have to have that one-on-one relationship. That’s what people don’t get about therapy with juveniles. They think I can sit in an armchair on the other side of this plushy office and charge two hun
dred an hour to take a few notes about their relationship with their mother. It’s a lot more than that.”

  “The drugs,” Jack reminded him. “How do you think Derald came to overdose?”

  “I don’t know. I told him if he kept playing around the drug would be in control and not him, and he said that would never happen. Outside, maybe that was true, but in here where he had nothing else to do … no one has as much self-control as they think. Not even sociopaths. Especially not sociopaths.”

  “How long was he here before he died?”

  “Three weeks.” At their raised eyebrows, he said, “Yeah, not much time from nonaddict to overdose, but Derald was a hard-core adrenaline junkie. Besides, he couldn’t buy from his usual source so who knows what the stuff he used had been cut with.”

  “So you don’t find his death suspicious?” Jack asked.

  Bellamy’s eyes narrowed. “Suspicious how?”

  “Just—unexpected?”

  He spoke with a weary expression. “Everything about juveniles is unexpected and yet not surprising. This is the difficulty in treating them, restraining them, reacting to them—it’s why theories and techniques come and go. Programs like this center try to quantify a person’s life to a series of checkboxes on a form. It has to be done—how else to measure risk or success—but it’s largely impossible. Could you do that with your own life? Why do we assume a child’s life is exponentially simpler? Sorry, I’m wandering. Did it surprise me that Derald overdosed? Not really. He was a walking disaster hell-bent on destruction. I’m only surprised it happened sooner rather than later.”

  Jack and Riley thanked him for his time.

  “What do you think?” Riley asked his partner as they descended the steps to the first floor.

  “Believe it or not, I kind of liked him.”

  “Bellamy or Derald?”

  “Bellamy,” Jack said, jerking the stairwell door open. “Derald should have been drowned at birth.”

  Chapter 19

  “Are you supposed to be here?” the pathologist asked Maggie, his words slightly muffled by a paper mask over his nose and mouth, with a plastic face guard resembling a clear welder’s helmet over that.

  The relatively small room with tiled floors hummed with its usual bustle. A female doctor at the next table sliced open an overweight man while an assistant stood ready with the long-handled pruning shears to cut through the ribs. The pathologist hovering over Damon’s wisp of a body had not been out of med school for long, his caramel skin smooth and unblemished, whereas the diener assisting him had been rode hard and put away wet for decades, to judge from the broken blood vessels and pockmarks in his face.

  Maggie explained her job and credentials, believing the pathologist wanted to know why a person who didn’t work for the medical examiner’s office stood in his autopsy suite. He interrupted with “Weren’t you in that school shooting yesterday?”

  “It wasn’t a school shooting,” she said. “I mean, it was, but not the way—”

  “Doc Fielding is doing that autopsy,” the diener told her, and added it wouldn’t take place for another two hours.

  “Yes, that’s all right. I don’t—”

  “You don’t need to be here for that one, though. You know how he died. Coupla bullets through the head. No mystery there.”

  “Exactly. It’s Damon here that’s sort of a—”

  “’Cause you was there.”

  “Saw you on the news,” the pathologist said, sketching the road-rash scrapes on the dead boy’s thigh.

  “Really? Me?” She hadn’t spoken to any member of the media, and they’d gone back to their studios and offices by the time she’d left the building with Jack and Riley.

  “Your mug shot,” the diener explained.

  Probably from HR, her personnel file photo, taken several years previously. “Did I look good?”

  “Uh,” the diener said.

  “Uh,” the doctor said.

  “Yeah,” the diener said. “Great.”

  She made a note to visit HR.

  “What’s the story with this one?” the pathologist asked, and she filled him in on the strange history of Damon Kish. Then she stood and watched as they gutted the poor boy like a walleye. It took two and a half hours, not unusual for a child’s autopsy. First the external examination—any petechiae in the eyes or the inside of the lips (no), blood (no), bumps that might indicate a subdural hematoma (no), bruises (quite a few, typical of any young boy but especially unsurprising for one with Damon’s habit of throwing himself at doors and people), minor scars (ditto), major scars (none), or tattoos (none). He had bruising on both sets of knuckles, but Maggie remembered how quickly he had thrown a punch at her, and a pretty solid one at that. No doubt he was just as uninhibited with anyone and everyone else.

  The foam in his mouth might indicate poison, the doctor said, but could also be due to other causes.

  Maggie explained about the missing EpiPens.

  The pathologist noted the healing scabs on Damon’s thigh, but whether they were from needles or merely fallout from the scraping and injury, Maggie would have to wait until he could explore underneath the skin. She wanted to bring up her theory about the scrapes disguising the needle tracks—those EpiPens had gone somewhere—but didn’t say a word. No attorney would be able to say she had pushed the doctor toward a biased conclusion.

  Then they opened the chest cavity and removed the organs. The diener worked with the photographer to document the various bruises from the inside of the skin while the doctor sectioned and examined the lungs (normal), liver (normal), and spleen (slightly larger than expected for the size of the boy, but within the normal range, probably due to infections left untreated during the course of his short life). He spread these out for his dissection on a half-inch-thick polyethylene cutting board that took up most of the counter area.

  “There’s a little bit of congestion in the lungs,” the doctor said, adding that this, too, could result from a variety of causes. He squeezed pieces of the organs to show Maggie; she had no idea what she was supposed to be seeing but nodded anyway and told him that Damon had had strep throat. He said he knew that and had seen the remains in the throat. Though strep should not cause lung congestion possible complications from it might, but overall the congestion seemed too minor to play a factor in the boy’s death.

  Next came the heart. Maggie again brought up the missing EpiPens but the pathologist could not quite tell if the assumed bolus of epinephrine had pushed Damon into a heart attack. “It’s not as easy to tell when an attack didn’t happen for the usual reasons—blocked coronary arteries, pericardial fluid, hypertrophy, thrombi.” He examined all the valves and ran a finger along the insides of the now-opened chambers, then removed cross sections into plastic boxes that were about two inches square each. The boxes were flat and the sides looked like open miniblinds; the whole item resembled a miniature suet feeder for birds. These would be given to the histology department for the heart muscle to be fixed in a waxy substance and then sliced with a microtome to create slides for the doctor to examine under a microscope.

  The trachea and esophagus, aside from flecks of the aforementioned foam, were not irregular. If poison had been used it had not been caustic and didn’t badly upset the stomach, fairly unheard of for a poison.

  The stomach contents also did not support the poison theory. The doctor cut the flaccid bag open with a scissors and let what it held sploosh into a plastic measuring cup, while Maggie stood well out of splashing range. Then he rinsed off the liquid and spread the solid bits on the cutting board and yanked a magnifying lamp from its mount above the counter in order to take a closer look. Maggie peeped through it over his shoulder, occasionally rising to her toes for a better angle.

  The pathologist kept up a running dialogue with himself as he worked and she strained to hear all his conclusions. “Oatmeal, some kind of berry, maybe strawberry, maybe cranberry… would they put cranberries in children’s oatmeal, would nee
d more sugar … something … lump … apple? … apple … brown … lot of brown … brown lump …”

  “Brownie?” Maggie suggested.

  “For breakfast? Who gets dessert with breakfast?”

  “I always do.”

  “When you were ten?”

  “Maybe not then.”

  “Brown … hard brown … chocolate chip? … chocolate chip muffin, I guess…. They think if they call it a muffin it’s suddenly healthy … too many calories, too much sugar … that’s about it.” He swept it off the board into a plastic cup with an attached lid. The toxicology department would have to tell them anything more, if there were illegal drugs present or—

  “Can Tox tell you if he had amoxicillin in his stomach?” Maggie asked.

  This completely stumped the pathologist, who didn’t know. Normally they looked only for illegal drugs and alcohol. Exotic drugs, heavy metals, and poisons would be found only if more specific tests were requested.

  Because of the victim’s age and unknown cause of death he went quickly through the intestines as well, but didn’t find anything of interest. The air now smelled particularly rank, no longer just the vague smell of cold, dead flesh, but exhaust fans helped and her nose quickly adjusted.