Jonathan Kellerman - Devil's Waltz

Three weeks had stretched to three months.

I ran my finger along the metal table and ended up with a dust-blackened tip.

Turning off the light, I left the room.

Sunset Boulevard was a bouillabaisse of rage and squalor mixed with immigrant hope and livened by the spice of easy felony.

I drove past the flesh clubs, the new-music caverns, titanic show-biz billboards, and the anorexically oriented boutiques of the Strip, crossed Doheny and slipped into the dollar-shrines of Beverly Hills. Passing my turnoff at Beverly Glen, I headed for a place where serious research could always be done. The place where Chip Jones had done his.

The Biomed library was filled with the inquisitive and the obligated. Sitting at one of the monitors was someone I recognized.

Gamine face, intense eyes, dangling earrings, and a double pierce on the right ear. The tawny bob had grown out to a shoulder-length wedge. A line of white collar showed over a navy-blue crewneck.

When had I last seen her? Three years or so. Making her twenty.

I wondered if she’d gotten her Ph.D. yet.

She was tapping the keys rapidly, bringing data to the screen. As I neared I saw that the text was in German. The word neuropeptide kept popping out.

“Hi, Jennifer.”

She spun around. “Alex!” Big smile. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and got off her stool.

“Is it Dr. Leavitt yet?” I said.

“This June,” she said. “Wrapping up my dissertation.”

“Congratulations. Neuroanatomy?”

“Neurochemistry — much more practical, right?”

“Still planning on going to med school?”

“Next fall. Stanford.”

“Psychiatry?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe something a bit more... concrete. No offense. I’m going to take my time and see what appeals to me.”

“Well, there’s certainly no hurry — what are you, twelve years old?”

“Twenty! I’ll be twenty-one next month.”

“A veritable crone.”

“Weren’t you young, too, when you finished?”

“Not that young. I was shaving.”

She laughed again. “It’s great to see you. Hear from Jamey at all?”

“I got a postcard at Christmas. From New Hampshire. He’s renting a farm there. Writing poetry.”

“Is he... all right?”

“He’s better. There was no return address on the card and he wasn’t listed. So I called the psychiatrist who treated him up in Carmel and she said he’d been maintaining pretty well on medication. Apparently he’s got someone to take care of him. One of the nurses who worked with him up there.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said. “Poor guy. He had so much going for and against him.”

“Good way to put it. Have you had any contact with the other people in the group?”

The group. Project 160 . As in IQ. Accelerated academics for kids with genius intellects. A grand experiment; one of its members ended up accused of serial murder. I’d gotten involved, taken a joyride into hatred and corruption...

“... is at Harvard Law and working for a judge, Felicia’s studying math at Columbia, and David dropped out of U. of Chicago med school after one semester and became a commodities trader. In the pits. He always was kind of an eighties guy. Anyway, the project’s defunct — Dr. Flowers didn’t renew the grant.”

“Health problems?”

“That was part of it. And of course the publicity about Jamey didn’t help. She moved to Hawaii. I think she wanted to minimize her stress — because of the M.S.”

Catching up with the past for the second time today, I realized how many loose ends I’d let dangle.

“So,” she said, “what brings you here?”

“Looking up some case material.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Familiar with it?”

“I’ve heard of Munchausen — people abusing their bodies to fake disease, right? But what’s the proxy part?”

“People faking disease in their children.”

“Well, that’s certainly hideous. What kinds of illnesses?”

“Almost anything. The most common symptoms are breathing problems, bleeding disorders, fevers, infections, pseudoseizures.”

“By proxy ,” she said. “The word is unnerving — so calculated, like some sort of business deal. Are you actually working with a family like that?”

“I’m evaluating a family to see if that’s what’s going on. It’s still in the differential diagnosis stage. I have some preliminary references, thought I’d review the literature.”

She smiled. “Card-file, or have you become computer-friendly?”

“Computer. If the screen talks English.”

“Do you have a faculty account for SAP?”

“No. What’s that?”

“ ‘Search and Print.’ New system. Journals on file — complete texts scanned and entered. You can actually call up entire articles and have them printed. Faculty only, if you’re willing to pay. My chairman got me a temporary lectureship and an account of my own. He expects me to publish my results and put his name on it. Unfortunately, foreign journals haven’t been entered into the system yet, so I’ve got to locate those the old-fashioned way.”

She pointed to the screen. “The master tongue. Don’t you just love these sixty-letter words and umlauts? The grammar’s nuts, but my mother helps me with the tough passages.”

I remembered her mother. Heavyset and pleasant, fragrant of dough and sugar. Blue numbers on a soft white arm.

“Get an SAP card,” she said. “It’s a kick.”

“Don’t know if I’d qualify. My appointment’s across town.”

“I think you would. Just show them your faculty card and pay a fee. It takes about a week to process.”

“I’ll do it later, then. Can’t wait that long.”

“No, of course not. Listen, I’ve got plenty of time left on my account. My chairman wants me to use all of it up so he can ask for a bigger computer budget next year. If you want me to run you a search, just let me finish up with this, and we’ll find all there is to know about people who proxy their kids.”

We rode up to the SAP room at the top of the stacks. The search system looked no different from the terminals we’d just left: computers arranged in rows of partitioned cubicles. We found a free station and Jennifer searched for Munchausen-by-proxy references. The screen filled quickly. The list included all the articles Stephanie had given me, and more.

“Looks like the earliest one that comes up is 1977,” she said. “ Lancet . Meadow, R. ‘Munchausen syndrome by proxy: The hinterland of child abuse.’ ”

“That’s the seminal article,” I said. “Meadow’s the British pediatrician who recognized the syndrome and named it.”

“The hinterland... that’s ominous too. And here’s a list of related topics: Munchausen syndrome, child abuse, incest, dissociative reactions.”

“Try dissociative reactions first.”

For the next hour we sifted through hundreds of references, distilling a dozen more articles that seemed to be relevant. When we were through, Jennifer saved the file and typed in a code.

“That’ll link us to the printing system,” she said.

The printers were housed behind blue panels that lined two walls of the adjoining room. Each contained a small screen, a card slot, a keyboard, and a mesh catch-bin under a foot-wide horizontal slit that reminded me of George Plumb’s mouth. Two of the terminals weren’t in use. One was marked OUT OF ORDER.

Jennifer activated the operative screen by inserting a plastic card in the slot, then typing in a letter-number code, followed by the call letters of the first and last articles we’d retrieved. Seconds later the bin began to fill with paper.