Black Water (24 page)

"There's also the difficult area of psychogenesis memory disorders."

"Psychogenic memory disorders," said Merci.

"Yes. That means disorders of the memory that are not tied organic damage or disease."

"Psychological."

"Basically, yes. See, Mr. Wildcraft knows what happened. He remembers some of it. And the more time goes by, if the edema and bleeding subside, he will remember more. But the more he remembered the better chance he has of developing various forms of hysterical amnesia. Hysterical amnesia is brought about by psychological stress and trauma, as opposed to strictly organic damage. Its range is wide and unpredictable."

Merci thought about this. "So, the part of his brain that forgot will start to remember. And the part that remembered will start to forget."

He smiled. "That's roughly true."

"Sounds tiring," she said.

"My patients undergoing that kind of retention-loss pattern tell me it's exhausting."

Stebbins sat back down and swiveled his chair around to face them. Merci watched the fan lift the paper corners, heard the quiet hiss of moving air, saw the collar of Dr. Stebbins's lab coat flutter briefly.

She tried to imagine what it would be like to be remembering and forgetting at the same time. Remembering and forgetting the
same event
at the same time. What, she wondered: you remembered the coat collar fluttering but you forgot there was a fan in the room? How did you explain things?

"Dr. Stebbins," she asked, "will he make things up?"

Stebbins started to answer, then caught himself. He looked at Merci, then Zamorra, then back to Merci again. "I'd hate to find myself on a witness stand against a patient. I'm not sure I would do that."

"You would if the court ordered you to."

"Is that how it works?"

"That's how it works. But we're not asking you to," she said. "We're trying to understand this man. We don't think he killed his wife, but some people do. What you tell me here might keep you off the stand, Doctor. And keep Archie out of jail."

Stebbins sighed quietly and shifted some papers. "We call it confabulation," he said. "Invention, exaggeration, chronological transposition. Some amnesic patients can invent perfectly logical and believable events that never took place. Some, when you ask them what they did the day before, will tell you in great detail—but it was what they did on a day twelve years ago. Some get fanciful and the inventions are very easy to identify as spurious."

"So which is Archie?"

"I didn't have time to find out," he said quietly. "And it may change—as the edema comes and goes, and as the psychological trauma runs its course. Confabulation is unpredictable. Generally, we see that patients with damage to the right temporal lobe are prone to feelings of deja vu, which we consider a form of confabulation. Generally, we find that the more a patient is aware of his own amnesia, the less he will confabulate. Those who most strongly deny having amnesia are most likely to invent. But these are generalizations, they won't turn out to be true in every case."

"Archie recognizes that he's lost memory," said Zamorra. "He ADmits it. He seems to remember things a little at a time, like he's retrieving the pieces of a puzzle."

"That's exactly what he's doing."

"Is it selective?"

"He's not consciously controlling the amount and quality of his recall, no. But Archie's memory is being filtered through, and certainly guided by, his general emotional state. Absolutely. He's gone through a profoundly traumatic experience. It's possible that he'll never fully recall some of what happened, that he'll remember in painful detail other aspects of that night. When all is said and done, we have difficulty differentiating organic from psychogenic amnesia. When you factor in the damage to the amygdala, it gets almost impossibly complex to make a sound prognosis."

"When will he be healed?" asked Merci. "I mean, physically? If nothing more goes wrong?"

Stebbins shook his head and exhaled. "Probably
never
if you don't get him proper medical care."

"And if we can do that?"

"It's impossible for me to say. I'm sorry."

"Two weeks? Two months? Two years?"

He looked at her. "If he develops no infection, and if the edema controlled by the steroids, he'll likely have recovered what memory he's going to recover within a year. But you have to understand that he's had tissue damage. Some of his memory has been lost. It's not retrievable. It's gone. The same can be said of the psychogenic amnesia—if the psychological trauma was severe enough, he may never recover certain memories."

"But they're in there," said Zamorra. "Those memories are inside him."

"Yes."
"How do you get them out?"

"Hypnosis."

Merci thought of Dr. Joan Cash and the terrific results she'd gotten from a witness using hypnosis. She wrote
J. Cash?

"Understand," said Dr. Stebbins, "that using hypnosis on a subject like Mr. Wildcraft could be damaging to him. You would be bringing forth memories that he is not presently able to process, emotionally. You'd be overriding his mechanisms of self-defense and self-preservation. It would be tantamount to trying to remove that bullet from his brain surgically. It would be ill-advised, destructive, possibly catastrophic."

In the quiet that followed, Merci listened to the fan-blown air tapping at the surfaces of the room, heard the footsteps and the echoes of footsteps in the hall outside. She wondered how many tough decisions had been made by people sitting right here where she was. How many people had looked down at the same floor, heard the same sounds, prayed to their gods for guidance.

"We couldn't use him in court if he'd been hypnotized," she said. "California law."

"Well," said Stebbins, "as I've said, that's getting ahead of what's really feasible now."

"Can you get us exact measurements on the bullet fragments?"

"I can get you measurements accurate to one millimeter, which would be acceptably accurate if the bullet was in one perfectly shaped piece. But there are three fragments visible on the spiral CT, and there are probably more that are too small for us to see. So there's no way to tell which dimension we're measuring—diameter, length? A combination of the two? I can't get an accurate caliber for the bullet—I assume that's what you're after. After talking to Sheriff Abelera I did some measurements. All I can say with reasonable certainty is that the caliber of the bullet is probably between a twenty-two and a thirty-eight."

"You're not even sure of that?"

"No. It's possible that the bullet fragmented on entry and part of it never penetrated. It's even possible that a fragment left his skull and
came to rest somewhere else in his body. We only had time to take pictures of his head before he so foolishly checked himself out."

"If we got him back, could you try an MRI?"

"We can't do an MRI because of the metal in the bullet."

"What about positron emission tomography?" asked Zamorra.

"Wonderful for the biochemical activities in the brain, but not for space and volume measurements that precise. I'm sorry."

"I just exhausted my medical scan knowledge," said Rayborn.

"I did, too," said Zamorra.

"Believe me, I'd get you a caliber on the bullet if I could. An autopsy would be the only way. We'd literally have to put the pieces back together."

A moment of acknowledged possibility passed between them--- three blinks and a small stretch of silence.

"Thanks for your help on everything else," said Merci. "And for your honesty."

"I don't know any other way to practice medicine."

Dr. Stebbins met her stare for a moment and neither looked away. Then he swiveled his chair and looked again at the x ray of Archie Wildcraft. "The human brain weighs about three pounds. It's small. You can hold one in your hands. But it's hugely complex. The hard you look the bigger it gets. It's like looking at the night sky through a telescope. The more you see the more there is to see. The more you learn the more there is to learn. It goes on forever, and there's so much we don't know."

He turned back to Merci. "But, Sergeant Rayborn and Sergeant Zamorra, I do know that Archie belongs under medical care. Too much can go wrong. I strongly advise you to get him back into this hospital.

T
hey walked across the Sheriff's Headquarters parking lot. Heat waves shimmered up from the cars into a humid brown sky. Merci looked up at the building—large, concrete and impersonal—of little more architectural flair than a home-improvement center. She'd always liked it because it was a no-nonsense building. It promised nothing except an attempt to enforce the law, and it sheltered people who were willing to die for this idea.

Sheriff Vincent Abelera's office was on the fourth floor. It was large and sunny and had two adjacent walls of windows. The carpet was light blue and the wood was all dark walnut, which Merci thought was a superb combination of texture and color. Especially the way the brass of the plaques and trophies and awards shined in the beams of the recessed lights. Abelera had a big desk in the far corner. A computer monitor sat where the former sheriff used to have a blotter and a marble two-pen holder. There was a sink and counter, bookshelves, two sitting areas with couches and coffee tables, and a big TV on a wheeled stand.

Walking into this office, Merci thought of the several agonizing meetings she'd had here late last year with Chuck Brighton, the previous sheriff. He had held the position for almost four decades. She had liked Brighton and she'd come to see how he bore the ills of his department as if he'd somehow caused them all himself. But she'd brought his career down by solving a homicide that had been unsolved for thirty years, a murder that Brighton and his inside circle had never wanted solved for reasons that became obvious. It was the same case that had disgraced her father and some other deputies, both retired and active. Walking across the pale blue carpet now sent a familiar ripple of nerves down her back and brought her senses to a keen and heightened edge. And it made her swallow hard as she was reminded of the terrible price of loyalty.

They were two minutes early, and the last ones to arrive. They sat on a sofa along one windowed wall, facing District Attorney Clayton Brenkus and Assistant DA Ryan Dawes. The lawyers had claimed sofa of their own, as well as the view. Sheriff Abelera himself, as to establish independence and superiority, sat in a leather armchair at the head of and exactly midway between the two couches.

Abelera was in uniform today. Brenkus wore dark trousers and blue shirt. Dawes was his fashionable self, Merci noted: a soft olive colored suit with a crisp abstract tie. He looked tanned from the weekend. She looked down at her black pants and white blouse and gray sport coat and figured they'd do.

Marilyn, the sheriff's secretary, offered coffee all around but no one accepted. She was an elegant, older woman with gray-black hair she only wore one way: in a bun. "Too hot for coffee today," she noted. She said they had juice and soft drinks but nobody wanted those either.

"How about a beer after work?" asked Dawes.

Marilyn smiled and blushed a little, closing the door behind her.

Abelera, an arm on each rest, sat up straight and considered Brerkus. Then he looked at Merci.

"I've been working law enforcement for almost thirty years," he said. "And I've never seen the DA eager to file and the detectives not. It's
always
the other way around. So, here I am, not yet a year on the job, and you're making department history."

"It's our way of welcoming you," said Brenkus. "I feel very welcomed, then," said Abelera. His face was sharp angles and his smile looked easy and genuine. "Merci, Paul, I want to start with the prosecutors because I know they're ready to file. After that, I'll hear from you, okay? Clay, Ryan—tell me why we should arrest and charge my deputy."

The district attorney looked at his assistant and nodded.

"Because he murdered his wife and tried to murder himself," said Dawes, looking at Abelera. "Why did he do that? Because he's a manipulator, and like most manipulators, when things didn't go his way he turned into a coward. A violent coward. First, the deputy and Gwen were under financial duress—they'd spent almost nine hundred grand in the last six months, and they were living on one income—a deputy's. Which is about fifty grand a year if he works overtime. And the deputy worked a lot of overtime in the last two years. He knew the whole financial burden was on him. New home, new cars, trips all over the place. This is easy enough to establish.

"Second, I'll prove that Archie Wildcraft was a jealous and manipulative husband. He had a temper. Gwen was beautiful and knew how to use it—her friends will attest to that part of her character. Archie was angry a lot. Gwen couldn't figure out why he was so angry all the time. It must have been kind of scary. But I can figure it. Any of us can. It's because he was going broke and he's losing his wife.
Losing his wife. His prize. His trophy.
They get in a fight and he throws a rock through a window. They yell at each other. The neighbors hear them. That night he's planned a big party for her, but she doesn't appreciate it. She flirts shamelessly. She drinks a little too much. At home he demands sex, she won't do it. He forces her. She gives in against her will because she can't fight him physically. He's six-three and weighs two hundred and five pounds. Besides, this has happened before. So she gives in to him, but that's not enough for this guy because nothing's ever been enough for this guy because he's a manipulator and a coward. He drinks, he broods, he wants sex again and she locks herself in the bathroom with a cell phone because she thinks he might be losing it and she's afraid. She's right but not right enough. The guy comes through the door with a lot more than sex in mind. He's got his nine, he pulls. She falls and he jams it against her head and pulls again. It's a mess in there. It smells like blood and gunpowder and his beautiful wife's dying on the floor. So he leaves her there, goes outside and kills himself too. That's what he wanted all along, was just to get out of this, end it, but he couldn't leave his wife alive for his friends to take care of, could he? Not when she's the cause most of this. Trouble is, the bullet takes a lucky turn inside his head and he doesn't die. He wakes up and realizes, hey, I'm alive and I've got another chance at things. He figures out that he can say anything he wants about that night and there's nobody to contradict him. So
remembers
certain things. But then again, he also
forgets
other thinks. Guess what—he can even
make things up.
This is what he's doing ladies and gentlemen of the jury: he's manipulating you just like he manipulated his wife."