A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

My breathing changed.

I was back in Pat’s studio, her showing me the naked photos of herself, and that dog of hers, the rottweiler, throwing herself against the window. She had not been found when Pat’s body was discovered.

How had I missed this? Billie had brought a rottweiler to For Pitties’ Sake. When she and I drove up there, she had asked Alfredo how the dog she’d brought in was doing. I remembered what Billie had said to him: “I worried about that one.”

I asked a guard if I could make a phone call.

• • •

It took McKenzie no time to find out that the rottweiler was microchipped. The information the vet scanned showed Pat Loewi as the dog’s owner. Alfredo said that Billie had told him the owner had died, so he had not scanned the chip. He said he would be willing to testify that Billie brought the rottweiler in. He said it freaked him out that the dog he had been caring for was evidence in a murder investigation.

McKenzie updated Amabile’s detective cousin, Bienvenido, at the Suffolk County PD, since Pat’s case was in his jurisdiction.

Steven had already picked up my computer and turned it over to the police, whose forensic computer expert traced Libertine’s IP address to Billie.

Once the police suspected Billie, they impounded her car, and even though she’d had it detailed since that trip, they found fur that matched the Dogos.

Billie was taken into custody at her grandmother’s house. I like to think that she was put in the cell I had vacated. Carol Anders, the criminal attorney Steven and McKenzie had retained for me, got the charges against me dropped once Billie was picked up. She was charged with the murder of a police officer and the attempted murder of a second, and the murder of Pat Loewi. After another couple of days the Boston police found the hammer that had killed Susan Rorke. Billie had hidden it in the same closet at her grandmother’s house where she had kept her toys. The Tiramisu lipstick found in Billie’s glove compartment had been used by Samantha Couper — DNA proved it. The New York police turned this evidence over to the Toronto police, and the murder of Samantha Couper was added to the list of charges. Which left Bennett. Or Jimmy Gordon. The DA told me that in order to charge Billie with this murder, Jimmy’s body would need to be exhumed. I thought of what that would do to his mother. New York had eliminated the death penalty in 2007; Billie would not be getting out of prison even without a conviction for his murder.

I knew some people looked for — believed in — closure. How I loathed that false notion, that one could tie up the loose ends of mystery and grief. Did that mean one stopped being haunted day and night? Did it mean one could get on with one’s life, such as it was? I thought it was a cruel term, a grail that could never be found. But maybe some people did find it. Or convinced themselves that they did.

Whatever works.

As someone who had been deeply conned by not one person, but two, and not just conned, but exposed to a multiple murderer, I found myself examining both my suitability for the work I had chosen and the definition of the people I had been studying. Neither the term sociopath nor psychopath appears in the DSM-5. The closest term to sociopath is antisocial personality disorder . The criteria for diagnosis include impairments in self-esteem, self-direction, empathy, intimacy, plus the use of manipulation and deceit, and the presence of hostility, callousness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and a lack of concern for one’s limitations: risk-taking.

• • •

The most widely used test for psychopathy is the PCL — R—Psychopathy Checklist — Revised — also known as Hare’s Checklist. The Canadian psychologist Robert Hare has pointed out that sociologists are more likely to focus on environmental or socially modifiable facets, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists include the genetic, cognitive, and emotional factors when making a diagnosis.

I did use Billie as the case study for the final chapter of my thesis. I ended with the question Should these people be forgiven?

I could not forgive myself.

Forgive yourself for what? my brother and McKenzie asked. For thinking the best of people? For having a trusting heart? But I needed to find another way to think about forgiveness — some people think the ability to forgive will just come to them at a certain point, but others recognize that it can be a choice. That it can manifest as another form of empathy, a gift to oneself.

• • •

Billie’s grandmother’s money bought a team of attorneys who are fighting to get Billie committed to a private psychiatric hospital rather than prison. This despite the fact that psychopaths are believed not to benefit at all from psychiatric intervention. She is being held for now in the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, a maximum-security hospital of the New York State Office of Mental Health, where she is being evaluated by a state psychiatrist for the prosecution and by eminent expert witnesses for the defense. It is the large, grim-looking structure that Billie and I saw across the Harlem River the day we got Cloud out of the shelter and walked her along the water, letting her taste and sniff her freedom.

• • •

When you meet someone during a crisis, you have immediate history, Cilla had told me. You skip over the petty revelations and embarrassments. You bypass the quotidian and go right to the core.

McKenzie had seen me in jail. He’d seen me gullible, afraid, and jealous. He’d seen me miss what was right in front of me. Yet he had seen me.

And wanted to see me again. We all have a fantasy that collides with reality. I would not have pictured a first kiss when I was just released from Rikers with dirty hair, unbathed, feeling less desirable than I ever had. But that is when McKenzie pulled me into him and held my face — that gesture that is both tender and possessive — and kissed me. I thought of the old song Betty Everett sang, “If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.” The reality was better than the fantasy. Better because desire was fused with ease, not the anxiety that accompanies obsession. Better because he had been courtly — I noted the pun even as the word occurred to me — and because I knew who this man was.

• • •

McKenzie filed a petition to get Cloud released a week after my own release.

He had offered to drive me to the sanctuary to pick her up, but I wanted to go by myself. I passed the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center as I drove along the FDR north and out of the city. Billie was behind one of those thousand barred windows.

The day was clear with a few clouds that, according to weather reports, would gather in the late afternoon, possibly bringing showers. There was little traffic, and I was content to drive at the posted speed limit, even though I was headed to get my dog back. I did not turn on the radio or put in a CD. I reveled in the clarity I had in the aftermath of finding myself alive. I was proud to know that I had fought for my life. It seems obvious — that a person would fight for her life — but it wasn’t at the time. This is not to overlook luck, that I was lucky, too. It was humbling to acknowledge how much luck was involved.

It would be another forty minutes or so until I would reach the exit for the bar where Billie had revealed herself as Libertine. The transformation still unnerved me. Over a couple of drinks, she had exhibited five of the seven hallmarks of a psychopath.

I pulled Steven’s car into a gas station. I used to feel that I was not put on this earth to pump my own gas, but I had come to enjoy it. Something about simply knowing how to do it, and the instant gratification of filling the tank. I paid cash and got the lower price for doing so.