Stephen Leather - Once bitten

The cartilage in my knees made cracking noises when I got up and occasionally my hips would pop if turned suddenly. Please God, I prayed, don't let me get old and don't let me die. Let me stay as I am right now. Or if you're feeling extra merciful, let me stay as I was five years ago, when I was in my prime. When I was young. I took a deep breath and I could hear the air rushing down into my lungs and when I breathed out it made a wheezing noise like the wind whistling through the branches of a dying tree. What must it be like, I thought, to stop breathing? That was the way people usually went when they died, I guess, the lungs stop functioning first, then the heart, and only then would the brain start to realise that it wasn't getting freshly-oxygenated blood like it was supposed to, like it had been for the past God-knows how many millions of heart beats. Would the body panic, or would it go quietly and surrender peacefully to the infinite oblivion?

I tossed and turned but I couldn't sleep, not because I wasn't tired but because dark, depressing thoughts kept slipping into my mind and pushing out everything else. Thoughts of sickness, of aging, of death. I switched on the television at the foot of the bed and watched a detective show where two young women private eyes in expensive convertibles cornered a drugs ring, survived two car chases and a shoot-out without smudging their make-up. It depressed me even more so I went to the kitchen and got myself a Budweiser and drank it in bed, propped up with pillows because I didn't want to lie down and listen to my heartbeat any more.

The Apartment I don't remember falling asleep but I must have done because the next thing I remembered was waking up with my neck at a painful angle on the pillow and two empty cans of Budweiser on the bedside table. The television was on and a blonde with blow-torched hair was telling me that there had been seven murders in downtown Los Angeles and the police were expecting more, what with it being a full moon and all. It was seven o'clock in the morning, an hour or so before I normally got up, but I showered, shaved and dressed and sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and a couple of apples. My briefcase was on the desktop where I'd left it the night before and I opened it and took out my laptop computer and ejected the floppy disc on which was stored the data on Terry Ferriman and Henry Kipp. I normally write up my reports in my office but I wanted to make an early start because it wasn't going to be too long before the phone rang, not if there had been seven homicides overnight. I was one of four psychologists employed by the LAPD, but one was in hospital having her breasts lifted and another had gone skiing in Aspen which meant double the workload for me and the other guy left behind, Anton Rivron.

The department insisted that all homicide suspects were examined by a psychologist as soon as possible, and had done since the early nineties. It was supposed to be in the interests of justice and all that fair play crap, but it was little more than a cost-saving exercise. There was no point in mounting a full Homicide investigation if the perp turned out to be insane. It was far easier, and cheaper, to set the shrinks on him and have him locked away in a secure mental institution and throw away the key rather than trying to pin down a motive and opportunity and all that sort of stuff they do on television. And if the perp wasn't mad then it was important to get a psychologist's report on him in the file right from the start of the investigation, so that when the Homicide detectives had finally put a case together the defence didn't simply try to con the jury into believing that the perp had been temporarily a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It used to happen a lot, the perp would sit in his cell and wait until the Homicide boys had put together a watertight case and then they'd start talking to themselves and rolling their eyes or claim to have amnesia or any one of a dozen tricks that they thought would get them out of prison and into a mental hospital where they'd stay until they could either persuade the authorities they were cured or they could manage to escape. And the waiting was a hell of lot more comfortable in a hospital than it was in a high security prison.

What the department needed was someone who could make a snap, but accurate, decision on the mental stability or otherwise of suspects which would tell the detectives the best way of proceeding with the case. They'd headhunted from England me to set up the system and recruit the three psychologists who worked with me on a consultancy basis. I'd been working at the University of London on a computer system which could assess a person's sanity and compare it with models of various mental disorders. I'd first got interested in the field after following the work of Professor David Carter at the University of Sussex who the British police called up whenever they had a serial killer or multiple rapist they couldn't catch. He'd come up with a way of drawing psychological profiles on computers based on the clues found by police. By giving the police the profile of the man they should be looking for, he made their job a hell of a lot easier. I started to get interested in what happened at the other end of the investigation, after they'd been caught. For my doctorate I developed computer models of various mental disorders and criminal tendencies based on the better part of a thousand interviews I carried out in prisons and mental hospitals in the United Kingdom and then I began working on a computer program which from simple questions and answers could be used to ascertain a person's mental state. It took many years of work, but eventually I worked it up to the point where it could be used with a considerable degree of accuracy. I produced several well-received scientific papers and went on a couple of lecture tours and then one day I got a phone call from the London office of an American headhunting firm and three months later I was in Los Angeles earning five times what I had been paid as a post-doctorate researcher.

The move to Los Angeles made a lot of sense, both from a personal point of view – I'd always been an Americophile – but also because it was the perfect place to research into sociopaths and psychopaths and a host of other mental abnormalities. Put simply, there were more lunatics per square mile in Los Angeles than anywhere else on God's green earth, and I reckoned that while drawing an obscenely high salary I'd also be able to churn out a fair number of research papers.

That's the way it worked out, too. Mind you, there was a downside. My wife left me and I lost my daughter and she set a lawyer on me who had all the sympathy of a Rotweiler with an exceptionally low IQ. And I picked up a nickname. Jamie D. Beaverbrook, the Vampire Hunter. Don't you just love America?

I did the Kipp report first and printed it out on the laser printer. I slotted the sheets into a blue cardboard folder and wrote Kipp, H, on it and then went and got another cup of coffee from the kitchen. I put the cup on the desk and then I went to fetch the morning paper and I sat on the sofa and begin to read it and then I realised that my subconscious was playing for time, trying to defer the moment when I'd start to put together the report on Ferriman, T. Why was that, I wondered.

Because she was so pretty? So young? Because she looked so helpless, and yet, at the same time, so in control of herself?

I flipped the paper closed and sat back at the desk and called up her file on the computer and went through the answers she'd given. They were the answers you'd expect from any well-balanced young woman, not too aggressive, not too self-centered. The sort of girl who'd make a good friend, or lover. It took me twice as long to finish the report on her than I'd taken over Kipp. It wasn't that she was a more complicated case, it was more that I was finding myself trying to always portray her in a good light, then realising that it might look as if I was being biased in her favour so I'd go the other way and be too hard on her. The whole point of the Beaverbrook Program was that it was supposed to take the emotion out of the judgment, the verdict should be totally objective, and it almost always was, yet in her case I was having to constantly force myself to be neutral. And all the time the image of her in my mind was the girl in the alley in the black leather jacket, her lips against my neck. No, I didn't mention the dream in my report. Once bitten…