Brian Lane - Mind Games with a Serial Killer

The doctor who examined me fled into the OR where my mother was—I got a brief glimpse of a flurry of activity and a flurry of people and someone looking back at me and making sure to close the door so I couldn’t see anymore.

Suddenly, I was all alone. There was no one anywhere in all of the emergency room. I remember thinking how few lights were on, like the place had been closed and they’d just opened up for us, like they’d all been asleep or something when the ambulance had radioed we were on the way.

The obvious thought suggested itself: This can’t be happening. But the essence of that realization was that I no longer mattered, I no longer existed. What was going to happen, was going to happen; this drama, this tragedy, was going to play itself out on its own terms, and nothing I said or did was going to make one whit of difference.

In fact, that was the tragedy.

From somewhere in the ER, a phone rang and kept on ringing. With my blown eardrum, it was difficult to place the unseen phone in time and space, and my brain was pretty much ringing continuously inside itself even without the phone, so all this noise began to hurt and then it got all knotted up and seemed to float away and I saw the floor rushing up at me from the end of a dark tunnel, and I knew that I was passing out.

I found myself on the cold linoleum and I was angry. I needed to stay alert and focused. I climbed up onto the examining table and stretched out, fighting the waves of wooziness. The ringing had stopped, but now I heard soft rubber footsteps approach.

A nurse peered in at me—she was holding a telephone. “There’s a call for you,” she said.

I took the phone and the nurse disappeared.

“Hello,” I said into the receiver.

“This is Officer Tucker of the California Highway Patrol,” said the stern voice on the other end of the line. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

The words hit me square in the gut and I lost all ability to breathe. Cops scare me. The legal system terrifies me. Cops have absolute power to invade your privacy, to take away your property, your liberty, your life. Judges are paid to judge you. Lawyers in the American adversarial system seek victory rather than truth—it’s lawyer versus lawyer, with the clients as the pawns. And the first thing that cops and judges and lawyers are taught in school is never ask a question you don’t already know or suspect that you know the answer to. If you’re truly open-minded, you can be fooled. You must start with what you believe to be true, and then see if the evidence fits. Without a theory, you don’t even know where inquiry begins.

The only thing that had been on my mind was the health of my mother and brother. That was the last thing on this cop’s mind. What was to me an accident was to him a crime. And I was the chief suspect. You don’t call and question someone who’s being treated in an emergency room, someone who’s been knocked unconscious, who’s in shock, who’s been horribly damaged physically and psycho-logically, you don’t call and interrogate someone who’s in extremis if you want legitimate information. In my state, nothing I said or remembered would be reliable, and the cop knew that. The only purpose for this call was to see if I’d say something inculpatory because my defenses were down. On the one hand, if I admitted to some guilt it would justify some theory this cop was operating under, and that admission would be admissible in court. On the other hand, if I said I was innocent it would be discounted because nothing I could say would talk this cop out of some hard evidence he thought he’d culled at the scene of the crash. Finally, on that “third hand”, always the most damning hand, if I refused to answer his questions the cop would take that as a sure sign that I was covering up.

I knew all this in a split second, and I knew that all I wanted to do was tell the truth—that’s the rule I’ve always lived by—but the truth was that I didn’t know the truth. I didn’t know then what had caused the crash, and I didn’t know how fast I’d been driving at the moment of the crash. I only knew that I’d been driving safely and usually. I usually sped. My father, mother, and brother usually sped. My friends sped. Everyone sped in those days, and not just because the speed limits were higher. Cars were advertised for engine size and speed. A great car was a fast car, and a greater car was a faster car. Luxury cars were fast and powerful— enjoy the drive because this car’s smoother than that one at high speed. My mother always referred to my father as “Barney Old-field”, the former Indy driver, and my mother herself drove a striped, finned, spoilered Cougar Eliminator which we kids had prompted her to buy. My friend’s father owned a Mercedes because it was then the quickest accelerating car in the world, between twenty and eighty miles per hour, and, supposedly, at a hundred and thirty you felt like you were doing sixty. Status was how high the numbers went on your speedometer, whether you ever drove that fast or not.

At the time of the crash, I know I wasn’t going as fast as fast I’d gone during the many hours of our drive that day. I slowed when I was around traffic—you could never trust what other drivers would do, whether they’d pop into your lane or not; I slowed when I was near civilization where traffic might appear or cops might be hiding; I slowed whenever I saw a reflection in the rearview mirror and couldn’t identify it as either friend or foe. I drove at whatever speed felt safe, and I drove so as not to ever get a speeding ticket.

But I could hardly explain all that to this cop. He was going to judge whether I had done something wrong, and the basis of his judgment would have nothing to do with how my family and I had lived or how good and innocent were my intentions. His morality was about to be imposed completely and utterly and with great authority in place of my morality. Even if I told the truth, my life was about to become a lie—thanks to this cop.

“You there?” said the officer.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What happened on the road?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “I heard a bang, and then I couldn’t keep the car on the road. I kept us from skidding, but we still went off the road. It must’ve been a blown tire—but I don’t know.”

“Yeah—looks like a tire went. Have anything to drink before you drove? Take any drugs or prescription medications?”

“Orange juice and iced tea—that’s all I had—this morning for breakfast.”

“Yeah, the doc there at the hospital said you were clean.”

“Sir, officer, I’m in an emergency room, I’m pretty banged up and my mother and my brother are dying—I can’t talk anymore.”

Officer Tucker was undeterred, “When you were driving, you remember seeing a Pantera?”

There it was, the question I’d figured was coming.

While we were cruising along the road, a bright yellow Pantera had raced past us, weaving in and out of traffic, vanishing into the heat wave distance. My brother and I had looked at one another, and he—car expert that he was—proceeded to rattle off the engine, suspension, and speed specifics of a Pantera, a foreign sports car just then being imported by Ford. It was sort of the poor man’s Porsche or Ferrari, and my brother was none too impressed. In fact, he suggested rather strenuously that the Mercedes sedan we were driving—rented for this drive to Vegas—was a damn sight faster and certainly more comfortable and safe than that stupid-looking Pantera with its stupid-looking driver who clearly but wrongly and stupidly thought he was tough shit.

I had pursed my lips in thought and then wondered aloud what my brother and I ought to do to set this egomaniac Pantera driver straight.