Gregg Hurwitz: The Crime Writer

"Of course the tumor must reach a if you'll pardon the expression critical mass, where it's begun encroaching on essential structures," our neurologist said. "But as for the tipping point? The addition of a few more cells. A constriction of blood vessels. Because the temporal lobe is intricately tied to emotional response and arousal, there is plentiful evidence that once a patient has reached such a fragile state, the final mental break can be triggered by an emotionally intense event." The doctor polished his glasses on a monogrammed handkerchief. "While there's much that we know about the brain "

"There's so much more that we don't know," Harriman finished with an accommodating grin.

During the six months before my surgery, I'd been no stranger to migraines, certainly, even a few that had blotted my vision. At first I'd presumed the usual suspects stress, computer monitor, dehydration but then I'd blacked out over the washing machine, coming to after fifteen lost minutes feeling little more than a rise in my stomach and liquid detergent dripping across my knuckles.

"But isn't it true that most people with this type of tumor don't cross the line into psychosis at all?"

The neurologist replied, "Erratic, violent behavior is not uncommon, espe "

"Perhaps you didn't hear my question. I asked if it was true that most people with this type of tumor never cross the line into psychosis."

"Statistically speaking."

"Is there another manner of speaking that better answers a medical question like the one I posed?"

There was not.

"Is there a single medical precedent that you can cite for a person" she'd shrewdly dropped "patient" "with a left anterior temporal ganglioglioma committing murder?"

The doctor rolled his lips, his face bunching. "No."

In quiet concert, Donnie, Terry, and I exhaled. Katherine Harriman did not. "Do most individuals with a left anterior temporal ganglioglioma experience postoperative retrograde amnesia?"

"Most do not, but when paired with acute stress, more than thirty percent "

"So it is possible that an individual with a tumor such as the defendant's could be perfectly rational right up until surgery?"

"A lot is possible. The body is amazing, and constantly defies our expectations. The brain, more yet. The mind, even more than that."

"So that's a yes?"

"It is."

"And is it also possible," Harriman continued, wheeling on me and piercing me with a top-shelf stare, "that a very clever individual, someone much like our defendant, might use all these conditions that you've so generously laid out as smoke cover for a premeditated plan?"

As my lawyers leapt to their feet with objections, Harriman remained perfectly still, a slight smile tensing her lips, her eyes never leaving mine. She was articulate and sharp, attuned to the inherent ridiculousness of matters. Her calm unnerved me. There was much murmuring and disorder in the court, and the judge nodded to the bailiff, who called for recess.

After we returned, the onslaught continued. Our witnesses. Their witnesses. Detective Three Bill Kaden assumed the stand, every bit as sturdy as he'd been in that moment when I'd returned to consciousness. Bristly mustache, thick wrists, golf shirt under a blazer. Scrappy, chinless Ed Delveckio watched from the gallery and nodded along with Kaden's testimony, twenty courtroom feet and one rank separating him from his senior partner. The boning knife made an appearance, stained nearly to the end of the handle, swinging crudely in an evidence bag. I did my best not to break down or react with anger.

Next up was Lloyd Wagner, a criminalist who'd lent me his time on several occasions to process fictitious bodies and who'd responded with the lab team to Genevieve's house. Yet another disturbing spillover from my prior life. We got along well, and I had found him alarmingly adept at helping me massage plot elements, so much so that on occasion I'd brought him whole scenes to put his skills to work on. Dressed in his dated court suit and holding a duplicate knife taken from my very own kitchen, Lloyd offered me an apologetic little nod before displaying on a dummy the forcefulness of the plunge that had yielded the stab wound. I found myself, along with the jury and audience, wincing at the viciousness.

After Lloyd's performance the voice mail Genevieve had left for me the night of her death was given yet another airing, issuing from Katherine Harriman's laptop.

A respectful silence for the voice of the dead. "I wanted to tell you I'm with someone new. I hope I hurt you. I hope you feel this pain. I hope you feel so alone. Good-bye."

Of course, Genevieve hadn't been with someone new, at least no one she'd told her friends or family about. Her not-so-deft manipulation wasn't devastating to me from where I sat now, though the prosecution asserted that it had been on the night of September 23. The defense asserted privately that the message made Genevieve less sympathetic and publicly that it had provided the final jolt of head pressure to initiate my ganglioglioma's interference. Given my lack of criminal history, Donnie argued, the tumor was the only logical explanation for my behavior.

On day five of sanity, cutting through any calluses I thought I had built up, Genevieve's family made their eagerly awaited entrance. Her mother, long of bone and broad of bosom, requisite Hermes scarf draped across her clay-court shoulders, rode the arm of her husband, ever dapper in a bespoke suit. Though they carried themselves with characteristic elegance, there was a hollowing in their cheeks, a nearly imperceptible erosion in posture, that betrayed their crushing loss. At Luc's other side strode Adeline, her fair face flushed to overtake her freckles. Though they stared at me with unmitigated hatred, the reality of their diminished presence, Luc's quavering hand touching the hard wood before he sat, undid whatever self-protective remove I'd managed. Their appearance, timed just before I was to take the stand, had precisely the effect on me Harriman wanted. My throat tightened, my lips jumped, and I leaned forward on the table and pressed both palms to my face as if to hold it together. My reaction was likely taken by the jury as shame, but it was worse than shame. It was the final roosting of Genevieve's loss, a woman whom I had loved, perhaps not wisely, but had loved nonetheless.

Donnie asked for a recess so I could get myself together to take the stand, but the judge denied the request. My heart still pounding, I climbed those three short steps to the birch witness stand and raised my right hand, finally able to take in the faces of the gallery without peeking furtively over a shoulder. There was a heightened intensity to it all, yet also an apologetic ordinariness. Reporters in their good suits, cameramen with their digital gear, the court stenographer pretending not to chew gum.

Donnie questioned me gently and with great empathy. When her time came, Harriman strolled toward me, relaxed, a text open in one hand like a psalmbook. She'd removed the dust jacket, so I didn't know what was coming until she read, "'We all have an ex-lover we want to kill. If we're lucky, we've got two or three.' "

The book snapped shut like a turtle's jaws, startling the jurors in their seats. "Do you believe that?"

"No," I said.

"You wrote that, did you not?"

I acknowledged that I had.

"So you don't expect us to believe what you write?"

"Of course not," I said. Terry gave me the patting-down hands, so I proceeded, more obligingly. "The protagonist, Derek Chainer, says that. An author doesn't necessarily endorse the views voiced by his characters. I create characters who are not me and on a good day breathe life into them."

"So you write things you don't believe?"

"I try to let the characters express their own opinions."