Jonathan Kellerman: Rage

“Kinda.”

“What made her angry?”

His grainy skin reddened. “Stuff.”

“Stuff,” I said.

No answer.

“Has Gram been to see you, here?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah.”

“How often does she come?”

“Sometimes.”

“She have anything else to say?”

Silence.

“Nothing?” I said.

“She brang me to eat.”

“What’s she bring you?”

“Oreos,” he said. “She’s mad.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I ruined it.”

“Ruined what?”

“Everything.”

“How’d you do that?”

His eyes fluttered. The lids dropped. “My sin.”

“Your sin.”

“Killing that baby.” He lay back down, flung an arm over his eyes.

“You feel bad about that,” I said.

No answer.

“Killing the baby,” I prompted.

He rolled away from me, faced the wall.

“How do you feel about what happened to the baby, Rand?”

Several seconds passed.

“ Rand?”

“He laughed.”

“Who laughed?”

“ Troy.”

“ Troy laughed.”

“Hnnh.”

“When?”

“When he hit her.”

“ Troy laughed when he hit Kristal.”

Silence.

“Did Troy do anything else to Kristal?”

He was inert for nearly a minute, then rolled back toward me. His eyelids lifted halfway. Licked his lips.

“This is tough to talk about,” I said.

Small nod.

“What else did Troy do to the baby?”

Sitting up with the stiff, labored movements of an old man, he encircled his own neck with his hands and pantomimed choking. More than mime; his eyes widened, his face turned scarlet, his tongue thrust forward.

I said, “ Troy choked the baby.”

His knuckles whitened as he squeezed harder.

“That’s enough, Rand.”

He began to rock as his fingers dug into his flesh. I got up, pried his hands loose. Strong kid; it took some doing. He gasped, made a retching sound, flopped back down. I stood by his side until his breathing slowed. He drew his knees up toward his chest. Pressure marks splotched his neck.

I made a note to request suicide watch. “Don’t do that again, Rand.”

“Sorry.”

“You feel bad about what happened to the baby.”

No response.

“You watched Troy choke and hit the baby and thinking about it makes you feel really bad.”

Someone’s radio spat a hip-hop number. Footsteps from afar sounded but no one approached.

I said, “You feel bad about watching Troy.”

He mumbled.

“What’s that, Rand?”

His lips moved soundlessly.

“What, Rand?”

The deputy who’d escorted me strolled by, scanned the cell, and moved on. Fifteen minutes hadn’t passed. The staff was taking special care.

“ Rand?”

He said, “I hit her, too.”

For the next week, I saw him every day for two hourly sessions, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. Instead of opening up, he regressed, refusing to divulge anything more about the murder. Much of my time was devoted to formal testing. The clinical interview was a challenge. Some days he remained resolutely mute; the most I could hope for were passive, monosyllabic answers to yes-no questions.

When I brought up the abduction, he seemed confused about why he’d participated, more stunned than horrified. Part of that was denial, but I suspected his low intellect was also a factor. When you comb through the histories of seriously violent kids, you often find head injuries. I wondered about the crash that had killed his parents but had spared him obvious damage.

His Wechsler Intelligence scores were no shock: Full Score I.Q. of 79, with severe deficits in verbal reasoning, language formation, factual knowledge, and mathematical logic.

Tom Laskin wanted to know if he’d been functioning as an adult when he killed Kristal Malley. Even if Rand was thirty-five years old, that might’ve been a relevant question.

The T.A.T. and the Rorschach were pretty much useless: He was too depressed and intellectually impoverished to produce meaningful responses to the cards. His Peabody I.Q. score was no higher than the more verbally influenced Wechsler. His Draw-a-Person was a tiny, limbless, stick figure with two strands of hair and no mouth. My request to free-draw elicited a blank stare. When I suggested he draw himself and Troy he resisted by feigning sleep.

“Just draw anything, then.”

He lay there, breathing through his mouth. His acne had grown even worse. Suggesting a dermatologic consult would have elicited smirks from the jail staff.

“ Rand?”

“Hnnh.”

“Draw something.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

His mouth twisted as if his teeth hurt. “Can’t.”

“Sit up and do it, anyway.” My hard tone made him blink. He stared at me but couldn’t hold it past a few seconds. Pitiful attention span. Maybe part of that was sensory deprivation due to being locked up, but my guess was he’d always had trouble concentrating.

I handed him the pencil and the paper and the drawing board. He sat there for a while, finally put the board in his lap, gripped the pencil. The point froze on the paper.

“Draw,” I said.

His hand began circling lazily, floating above the paper. Finally making contact, as he created flabby, barely visible, concentric ellipses. The page began to fill. Darker ellipses. His eyes shut as he scrawled. For two weeks he’d done that a lot- blinding himself to his hellish reality.

Today, his pencil hand moved faster. The ellipses grew more angular. Flatter, darker. Sharpening to jagged, spearlike shapes.

He kept going, tongue tip snaking between his lips. The paper became a storm of black. His free hand fisted and gathered the hem of his jail shirt as his drawing hand moved faster. The pencil dug in and the page puckered. Ripped. He slashed downward. Circled faster. Digging in harder, as the paper shredded. The pencil went through to the drawing board, hit the glossy, fiberboard surface and slid out from his hand.

Landing on the floor of the cell.

He moved quickly, retrieved it. Exhaled. Held the yellow nub in a grubby, moist palm. “Sorry.”

The paper was confetti. The pencil’s graphite tip had broken off, leaving behind splintered wood. Sharp little spikes.

I took the pencil. Put it in my pocket.

After my final visit, walking to the subterranean parking lot, I heard someone call my name and turned to see a heavy woman in a flowered dress leaning on an aluminum cane. The dirty-milk sky matched her complexion. I’d awakened to sunny blue Beverly Glen firmament, but cheer had eluded the grimy corner of East L.A. dominated by the jail.

She took a few steps toward me and the cane clunked on pavement. “You’re the psychologist, right? I’m Rand ’s gram.”

I walked to her, held out my hand.

“Margaret Sieff,” she said, in a smoker’s voice. Her free arm remained at her side. The dress was a scratchy-looking cotton print, relenting at the seams. Camellias and lilies and delphiniums and greenery sprawled across an aqua background. Her hair was white, short, curly, thinning so severely that patches of pink scalp shone through. Blue eyes took me in. Small, sharp, searching eyes. Nothing like her grandson’s.

“You been here all week but I never heard from you. You don’ figger to talk to me?”

“I plan to when I’m finished evaluating Rand.”

“Evaluatin’.” The word seemed to distress her. “What you figger you can do for him?”

“I’ve been asked by Judge Laskin to- ”

“I know all that,” she said. “You’re supposed to say was he a kid or an aldult. Ain’t that cristo clear? What I’m askin’ is what can you do for him?”