Джонатан Келлерман - When the Bough Breaks

She was wisely silent.

“No,” I corrected myself. “The old Alex was a bore. I promise not to bring him back, okay?”

“Okay.” She kissed the tip of my chin.

“Just give me a little time to get through this.”

“All right.”

But as I dressed she looked at me with a combination of worry, hurt, and confusion. When I started to say something, she turned away. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took her in my arms. I rocked her until her arms slid around my neck.

“I love you,” I said. “Give me a little time.”

She made a warm sound and held me tighter.

When I left her she was sleeping, her eyelids fluttering in the throes of the first dream of the night.

I tore into the one hundred and twenty files I had set aside, working until the early morning hours. Most of these turned out also to be rather mundane documents. Ninety-one of the patients were physically ill men whom Handler had seen as a consultant when he was still working at Cedars-Sinai as part of the liaison psychiatry team. Another twenty had been diagnosed schizophrenic, but they turned out to be senile (median age, seventy-six) patients at a convalescent hospital where he’d worked for a year.

The remaining nine men were of interest. Handler had diagnosed them all as psychopathic character disorders. Of course those diagnoses were suspect, as I had little faith in his judgment. Nevertheless the files were worth examining more closely.

They were all between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two. Most had been referred by agencies – the Probation Department, the California Youth Authority, local churches. A couple had experienced several scrapes with the law. At least three were judged violent. Of these, one had beaten up his father, another had stabbed a fellow high school student, and the third had used an automobile to run down someone with whom he’d exchanged angry words.

A bunch of real sweethearts.

None of them had been involved in therapy for very long, which was not surprising. Psychotherapy hasn’t much to offer the person with no conscience, no morals, and, quite often, no desire to change. In fact, the psychopath by his very nature is an affront to modern psychology, with its egalitarian and optimistic philosophical underpinnings.

Therapists become therapists because down deep they feel that people are really good and have the capacity to change for the better. The notion that there exist individuals who are simply evil – bad people – and that such evil cannot be explained by any existing combination of nature or nurture is an assault upon a therapist’s sensitivities. The psychopath is to the psychologist and the psychiatrist what the terminal cancer patient is to the physician: walking, breathing evidence of hopelessness and failure.

I knew such evil people existed. I had seen a mercifully small number of them, mostly adolescents, but some children. I remember one boy, in particular, not yet twelve years old, but possessed of a cynical, hardened, cruelly grinning face that would have done a San Quentin lifer proud. He’d handed me his business card – a bright rectangle of shocking pink paper with his name on it, followed by the single word Enterprises.

And an enterprising young man he had been. Buttressed by my assurances of confidentiality, he had told me proudly, of the dozens of bicycles he had stolen, of the burglaries he had pulled off, of the teenage girls he had seduced. He was so pleased with himself.

He had lost his parents in a plane crash at the age of four and had been brought up by a baffled grandmother who tried to assure everyone – and herself – that down deep he was a good boy. But he wasn’t. He was a bad boy. When I asked him if he remembered his mother, he leered and told me she looked like a real piece of ass in the pictures he had seen. It wasn’t defensive posturing. It was really him.

The more time I spent with him, the more discouraged I grew. It was like peeling an onion and finding each inner layer more rotten than the last. He was a bad boy, irredeemably so. Most likely, he would get worse.

And there was nothing I could do. There was little doubt he would end up establishing an anti-social career. If society was lucky, it would be limited to con games. If not, a lot of blood would be shed. Logic dictated that he should be locked up, kept out of harm’s way, incarcerated for the protection of the rest of us. But democracy said otherwise, and, on balance, I had to admit it shouldn’t be any other way.

Still, there were nights when I thought of that eleven-year-old and wondered if I’d be seeing his name in the papers one day.

I set the nine files aside.

Milo would have more of his work cut out for him.

Three days of the old wear-down-the-shoe-leather routine had worn Milo down.

“The computer was a total bust,” he lamented, flopping down on my leather sofa. “All of those bastards are either back in the joint, dead, or alibied. The coroner’s report has no forensic magic for us. Just six and a half pages of gory details telling us what we knew the first time we saw the bodies: Handler and Gutierrez were hacked up like sausage filler.”

I brought him a beer, which he drained in two long gulps. I brought him another.

“What about Handler? Anything on him?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, you were definitely right in your initial impression. The guy was no Mr. Ethical. But it doesn’t lead anywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“Six years ago, when he was doing hospital consultations, there was a bit of a stink – insurance fraud. Handler and some others were running a little scam. They’d peek their heads in for a second, say hello to a patient, and bill it as a full visit, which I take it is supposed to be forty-five or fifty minutes long. Then they’d make a note in the chart, bill for another visit, talk to the nurse, another visit, talk to the doctor, etc. etc. It was big bucks – one guy could put in for thirty, forty visits a day, at seventy, eighty bucks a visit. Figure it out.”

“No surprise. It’s done all the time.”

“I’m sure. Anyway, it blew wide open because one of the patients had a son who was a doctor, and he started to get suspicious, reading the chart, seeing all these psychiatric visits. Especially ’cause the old man had been unconscious for three months. He griped to the medical director, who called Handler and the others in on the carpet. They kept it quiet, on the condition that the crooked shrinks leave.”

Six years ago. Just before Handler’s notes had started to get slipshod and sarcastic. It must have been hard going from four hundred grand a year to a measly one hundred. And having to actually work for it. A man could get bitter…

“And you don’t see an angle in that?”

“What? Revenge? From whom? It was insurance companies that were getting bilked. That’s how they kept it going so long. They never billed the patients, just billed insurance.” He took a swig of beer. “I’ve heard bad things about insurance companies, pal, but I can’t see them sending around Jack the Ripper to avenge their honor.”

“I see what you mean.”

He got up and paced the room.

“This goddamn case sucks. It’s been a week and I’ve got absolutely zilch. The captain sees it as a dead end. He’s pulled Del off and left me with the whole stinking mess. Tough breaks for the faggot.”

“Another beer?” I held one out to him.

“Yeah, goddammit, why not? Drown it all in suds.” He wheeled around. “I tell you, Alex, I should have been a schoolteacher. Viet Nam left me with this big psychic hole, you know? All that death for nothing. I thought becoming a cop would help me fill that hole, catch bad guys, make some sense out of it all. Jesus, was I wrong!”