The Unquiet-CP-6 (12 page)

“Curiosity,” he said. “It’s a long time since anyone has mentioned Daniel Clay to me, at least outside this branch of the medical community.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Just so we’re clear, I’ll be straight with you if you’re straight with me. Clay and I disagreed on certain matters. I don’t think he cared much for me. I didn’t care much for him. Professionally, most people believed that his heart was in the right place, for what it’s worth, at least until the rumors began circulating, but that element needed to be balanced by objectivity, which I don’t think Daniel Clay had in sufficient quantities for his opinions to be taken seriously.”

“I heard that you’d clashed,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. His daughter hired me. Someone has been asking about her father. She’s worried.”

“So now you’re going back over the trail, trying to find out why someone should be concerned about him so many years after his disappearance?”

“Something like that.”

“Am I under suspicion?” He smiled.

“Should you be?”

“There were certainly times when I would cheerfully have strangled him. He had a way of getting under my skin, both personally and professionally.”

“Would you care to explain?”

“Well, I guess to understand him, and what happened prior to his disappearance, you need to know something about what we do here. We perform medical examinations and psychological evaluations in cases where there are allegations of abuse of children, whether that abuse is physical or sexual, emotional or the result of neglect. A call comes through to Central Intake in Augusta. It’s referred to a supervisor, screened, then a decision is made on whether or not to send out a social worker. Sometimes that call may have originated with local law enforcement, or Child Protection Services. It may have come from a school, a parent, a neighbor, even from the child in question. The child is then referred to us for evaluation. We’re the main provider for this service in the state. When Daniel Clay first started performing evaluations, we were still finding our feet a little. Hell, everyone was. Now, things are a little better organized. We can do everything in this one building: examination, evaluation, initial counseling, interviewing of the child and the alleged perpetrator. It can all be handled here.”

“And before the center opened?”

“The child might have been examined by a doctor, then sent elsewhere for an interview and evaluation.”

“Which is where Clay came in.”

“Yes, but, again, I don’t think Daniel Clay was careful enough. It’s a delicate business, what we do, and there are no easy answers. Everyone wants a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’—the prosecutors, the judges, obviously the people directly involved, like the parents or guardians—and they’re disappointed when we can’t always give it.”

“I’m not sure that I understand,” I said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Christian sat forward in his chair and opened his hands. They were very clean, the nails cut so short that I could see the soft, pale flesh at the fingertips.

“Look, we deal with eight to nine hundred children every year. In terms of sexual abuse, maybe five percent of those children will have positive physical findings, say small tears in the hymen or rectum. Many of those kids will be teenagers, and even if there are indications of sexual activity, it can be hard to tell if it was consensual or not. A lot of adolescent females can even be penetrated and still have a normal exam that reveals an unbroken hymen. If we do establish nonconsensual sex, then we often can’t tell who did it, or when. All we can say is that sexual contact did occur. Even in a very young child, there may be little or no evidence, especially taking into account the normal anatomical variations that may occur in children’s bodies. Physical findings that used to be considered abnormal have now come to be regarded as nonspecific. The only surefire way to establish sexual abuse is to test for STDs, but that assumes that the perpetrator was infected. If the test is positive, then abuse is a done deal, but even then, you’re no closer to establishing who did it, not unless you have DNA marking. If the perpetrator wasn’t infected with an STD, then you have nothing.”

“But what about the child’s behavior. Wouldn’t that change after abuse?”

“The effects vary, and there are no specific behavioral indicators to suggest abuse. We may see anxiety, difficulty sleeping, sometimes night terrors, where the child wakes up screaming, inconsolable, yet will have no memory of the event in the morning. There may be nail biting, the pulling out of hair, refusal to go to school, an insistence on sleeping with a trusted parent. Boys will tend to act out, becoming more aggressive, while girls will tend to act in, becoming withdrawn and depressed. But those types of behavior may also occur if, say, the parents are going through a divorce and the child is becoming stressed. By themselves, they don’t offer proof one way or the other of abuse. At least a third of abused children will have no symptoms whatsoever.”

I took off my jacket, then continued making notes. Christian smiled. “More complicated than you thought, isn’t it?”

“A little.”

“That’s why the evaluation process and the interview technique employed for it are so important. The professional can’t lead the child, which is what I believe Clay did in a number of cases.”

“Like the Muller case?”

Christian nodded. “The Muller case should be offered as a textbook example of all the things that can go wrong during the investigation of alleged child abuse: a child being manipulated by a parent, a professional who sets aside his objectivity as part of some misguided crusading impulse, a judge who prefers black-and-white to shades of gray. There are those who believe that the vast majority of sexual abuse allegations that arise during custody disputes in divorce cases are fabricated. There’s even a term for the child’s behavior in such disputes: Parental Alienation Syndrome, where a child identifies with one parent and in so doing alienates the other. The negative behavior toward the alienated parent is a reflection of the alienating parent’s own feelings and perceptions, not the child’s. It’s a theory, and not everyone accepts it, but looking back at the Muller case, it should have been clear to Clay that the mother was hostile and, had he asked more questions about her own medical background, he would have discovered that there were indications of personality disorder. Instead, he sided with her and appeared to accept the child’s version of events unquestioningly. The whole affair was a disaster for everyone concerned, and damaged the standing of those who work in the field. Worst of all, though, a man lost not only his family, but his life.”

Christian realized how tense he had become. He stretched, and said: “Sorry, I got us kind of sidetracked there.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I asked you about the Mullers. You were talking about interview techniques.”

“Well, it’s pretty simple, in one way. You can’t ask questions like ‘Has something bad happened to you?’ or ‘Did X touch you somewhere special or somewhere private?’ That’s particularly the case when you’re dealing with very young children. They may try to please the evaluator with the right answer just so they can leave. We also have instances of what’s called ‘source misattribution,’ where a kid may have heard something and applied it to himself, perhaps as a way of seeking attention. Sometimes, you may get a good disclosure from a younger child initially but find that the child then recants under pressure from, say, family members. It happens also with teenagers, where Mom has a new boyfriend who starts abusing the daughter but Mom doesn’t want to believe it because she doesn’t want to lose the guy who’s supporting her and would rather blame the child for telling lies. Teenagers in general bring with them their own challenges. They may lie about abuse for gain, but generally they’re pretty resistant to suggestion. The problem with them is that, if they have been abused, it can take a couple of sessions just to get the details from them. They won’t want to talk about it, maybe out of guilt or shame, and the very last thing they’ll want to discuss with a stranger is oral or anal abuse.

“So the evaluation has to be conducted with all of these elements borne in mind. My position is that I don’t believe anybody: I only believe the data. That’s what I present to the police, to the prosecutors, and to the judges if the case gets to court. And you know what? They get frustrated with me. Like I said, they want definite answers, but a lot of the time we can’t give them those answers.

“That’s where Daniel Clay and I differed. There are some evaluators out there who have almost a political position on abuse. They believe that it’s rampant, and they interview children with the presumption that abuse has occurred. It colors everything that follows. Clay became the go-to guy to confirm abuse allegations, whether in the first instance or where a lawyer decided to seek a second opinion on abuse. That was what got him into trouble.”

“Okay, can we go back to the Muller case for a moment?”

“Sure. Erik Muller. It’s a matter of record. The papers reported a lot of the details at the time. It was a nasty divorce case, and the wife wanted custody. It seems like she may have pressured her son, who was then twelve, into making allegations against his father. The father denied the allegations, but Clay offered a pretty damning evaluation. There still wasn’t enough evidence for the D.A. to indict, so it went to Family Court, where the burden of proof is lower than at criminal level. The father lost custody and killed himself a month later. Then the child recanted to a priest, and it all came out. Clay went before the Board of Licensure. It took no action against him, but the whole thing looked bad, and he ceased to do case evaluations shortly afterward.”

“Was that his decision, or was it forced upon him?”

“Both. He decided not to conduct evaluations again, but he would not have been offered them even had he decided to continue. By that time, we had been up and running for some time, so the burden of evaluation in most cases fell on us. Well, I say ‘burden,’ but it was one that we were willing to accept. We’re as committed to child welfare as Daniel Clay ever was, but we never lose sight of our responsibilities to all of those involved and, most of all, to the truth.”

“Do you know where the Muller boy is now?”

“Dead.”

“How?”

“He became an addict and died of a heroin overdose. That was, um, about four years ago, up in Fort Kent. I don’t know what happened to the mother. Last I heard, she was living somewhere in Oregon. She married again, and I think she has another child now. I hope she does better with this one than the last.”

It sounded like the Muller angle wasn’t going to lead anywhere. I moved on to the subject of the abuse of some of Clay’s patients. Christian seemed to have the details at his fingertips. Maybe he had gone over them before I arrived, or it could simply have been one of those cases that nobody was very likely to forget.

“Two cases of alleged abuse were referred to us in the space of three months,” said Christian,

“each with similar elements: alleged stranger abuse, or abuse by someone apparently unknown to the child, and the use of masks.”

“Masks?”

“Bird masks. The abusers—three in one case, four in the other—disguised their faces with bird masks. The kids—the first a twelve-year-old girl, the second a fourteen-year-old boy—were abducted, one on the way home from school, the other while drinking beer by a disused railroad track, then taken to an unknown location, systematically abused over a period of hours, then dumped close to where they’d been abducted. The alleged abuse had occurred some years back, one in the mideighties and another at the start of the nineties. The first case emerged after a suicide attempt by the girl shortly before she was due to be married at the tender age of eighteen. The second came about when the boy went before the courts on a whole range of misdemeanor offenses and the lawyer decided to use the alleged abuse as mitigation. The judge wasn’t inclined to believe him, but when the two cases came to us, the similarities were impossible to ignore. These kids didn’t know each other and came from towns a hundred miles apart. Yet the details of their stories matched perfectly, even down to details of the masks used.

“You know what else they had in common? Both children had been treated by Daniel Clay in the past. The girl had made allegations of abuse against a teacher that turned out to be untrue, motivated by a belief that the teacher was secretly attracted to one of her friends. It was one of the rare instances where Clay’s evaluation did not find reason to support the allegations. The boy was sent to Clay after he’d engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with a ten-year-old girl in his class. Clay’s evaluation suggested possible indicators of abuse in the boy’s past, but went no further. Since then, we’ve uncovered six more cases with the bird element to them: three of those involved were former patients of Daniel Clay, but none of the cases took place after his disappearance. In other words, there have been no new reports of similar incidents since late 1999. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t occurred, but we haven’t heard about them. Most of the children involved were also, um, slightly troublesome in certain ways, which is why the allegations took so long to emerge.”

“Troublesome?”

“Their behavior was antisocial. Some had made allegations of abuse before, which may or may not have been true. Others had engaged in criminal activity, or had simply been allowed to run wild by parents or foster parents. Taken together, it might have made authority figures less willing to believe them, even if they had made an effort to talk about what had taken place, and police, especially male cops, tend to be reluctant to believe allegations of abuse from teenage girls in particular anyway. It also made the children in question vulnerable since nobody was inclined to look out for them.”

“Then before anyone could ask Clay about all of this in detail, he disappeared?”

“Well, most of the cases emerged subsequent to his disappearance, but that’s about right,” said Christian. “The problem for us is that we’ve had to wait for indications of similar abuse to come to us instead of being able to seek out the children for ourselves. There are issues of patient confidentiality, sealed records, even the natural dispersal of families and children that occurs over time. Any child who had undergone abuse similar to what I’ve outlined to you would be in his or her late teens at least by now, given that the victims of whom we’re aware were aged between nine and fifteen at the time when the abuse is alleged to have occurred. To put it simply, we can’t really place an advertisement in the newspapers asking people who may have been abused by men in bird masks to come forward. It just doesn’t work that way.”