Chapter 29
I was ill at ease, sitting down with Curtis in his office a half hour later. He’d dragged in a third armchair and it was a snug fit.
“You’re welcome to stay,” Curtis said to Benjamin. “There’s nothing I’m going to say to your mother that I wouldn’t also be willing to discuss with you.”
“I’d rather not.”
Today we’d be doing the full debrief Curtis had promised and I knew that once we dug into the details, little else would seem to matter.
Not wanting to forget, I rustled in the inner pocket of my laptop bag for the thumb drive, past several other thumb drives, coins, and lip balm.
Curtis took it and slid it into his pocket with barely a nod, eyes still on Benjamin.
“I agree with Dr. Campbell,” I said to Benjamin. “You’re old enough to hear whatever he has to say.” Benjamin was looking down at his hands on his knees. “Or, if you prefer, you could go sit in the car.” I pulled the keys from my pocket. “Just don’t—”
“Go anywhere,” Benjamin completed my sentence. “Obviously.” He directed his irritated gaze to Curtis. “See how she doesn’t trust me?”
Curtis smiled. “If she didn’t trust you at all, I don’t think she would have handed you a set of car keys.”
When we were alone again, Curtis said, “Thanks for bringing me a coffee.” He picked up the thin brown envelope of MRI scans. “We have a lot to cover—”
“I just heard some important news that will factor into Benjamin’s case. They found the person who is responsible for the deaths of Izzy and Sidney. Evidently, he was a former inmate of an institute for troubled teens near Madison.”
“I know,” he said, taking a moment to adjust the coffee sleeve and take an agonizingly slow sip.
“The car wreck happened in the middle of the night and the institute was informed by law enforcement within hours. They contacted all researchers and former staff, knowing we would get ‘gotcha’ calls from the media.”
“So you worked there, at some point.”
He looked at me with a bemused smile. “I’ve mentioned it to you. It’s the preeminent institute of its kind in the country. My affiliation is in my bio. It’s no secret, Abby.”
“Were you . . . shocked?”
“Shocked that a psychopath would engage in high-risk behaviors that would lead him to drive his car off the road?”
“Another car was involved.”
“I would assume that Christopher was a reckless and aggressive driver. Maybe he pissed somebody off. It’s all part of the profile. Shall we get back to today’s priority? Let the authorities be happy that there’s one less recidivist psychopath in the world.”
I was taken aback by both his brazen attitude and his word choice. “I didn’t expect you to call him a psychopath.”
“We both know it’s a problematic word, but we also know what it means.
Antisocial personality disorder with psychopathic traits.
The institute wasn’t founded to serve that kind of person per se, but that does represent our population.
We do extreme interventions with violent, intransigent individuals.
None of it is secret. We get a lot of press. ”
His sober expression failed to mask his pride.
“I know you can’t talk about him in detail, because he was a client. But why do you think he picked Sidney and Izzy? Was it just about sex and then his plans went awry, or do you think he planned to kill them from the start?”
“Theoretically? People like Christopher explore fantasies and decide when they’re ready for fantasy to become reality. We often see that with serial killers.”
“The newspapers didn’t label him a serial killer.”
I was still resisting that phrase and all of its tawdry associations.
Curtis shrugged. “He died young. Two known victims. With more time there would have been others.”
He was speaking matter-of-factly, just as Robert spoke about criminals. It bothered me more than it should.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s a common pattern.
Those first flawed kidnappings. The break-ins that stop short of murder.
The not-quite rapes, especially in the case of a tentative individual without a lot of real-life experience, where women are involved.
Even for those killers motivated by sexual gratification, there’s a lot of variety. ”
I didn’t want to know about all that “variety”—didn’t want pictures forming in my head that might never go away. I only wanted to understand about Christopher Weber and how his and Curtis’s paths had first crossed.
I said, “I didn’t know you work with incarcerated psychopaths.”
“Worked, for the most part. Past tense. I planned to mention the institute today, when we go over Benjamin’s test results.
But he’s not a good candidate for the youth treatment center.
He wouldn’t be admitted, because he isn’t already in juvenile detention.
The institute only has room for a few dozen—”
“Benjamin?”
Curtis tapped a finger against the MRI envelope. “Abby.”
I’d been holding a nearly empty paper coffee cup between both hands, squeezing so hard I dented it.
“Talking with parents is the hardest part,” he said. “But the pain is usually short-lived, and it’s followed by relief, because the good parents—the ones who show up for appointments at all—already know. They may not know the correct terms to use. But they know.”
“Aren’t parent interviews essential to the diagnosis?”
“Benjamin supplied more than enough information. He was willing to be frank about school fights, in particular, as well as the impulses he has felt but not acted upon.” He paused, letting me absorb.
“Impulses,” I said.
“Now, Abby. We all have impulses.”
I sat back, directing myself to say less, to listen and be patient.
“I needed to earn Benjamin’s trust and get to the point where he could report with some degree of honesty. And I needed to build up the timeline. I knew you’d feel better if I relied on more than just the PCL: YV.”
I knew the sequence of steps, all of the boxes that needed to be ticked. It wasn’t enough for a child to exhibit grandiosity, pathological lying, failure to accept responsibility. It wasn’t enough to know a child took excessive risks or constantly required stimulation.
“But he isn’t on probation or parole,” I pointed out. “He hasn’t had multiple brushes with the law. That’s practically a requirement of the diagnosis you’re suggesting.”
“Not multiple brushes,” Curtis agreed. “Not yet.”
I thought back to Ralph King’s certainty that I should get Benjamin into therapy, his confidence that we needed to “shape the narrative.” But Curtis seemed to be heading toward a narrative—a specific diagnosis—that would look very, very bad, if a prosecutor ever discovered it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Curtis said. “You want to know the truth about your son, so you can guide his development. But you don’t want him to be stigmatized.”
“Stigmatized is the least of it.”
“But we both know that because of his age, we can only say so much. That’s a good thing.”
My distress must have shown on my face, because he tried again to reassure me. “You were frustrated with the session you had with Dr. Adelman because she didn’t give you hard answers. I’m guessing she would have mentioned conduct disorder.”
“She wasn’t ready to use that label.”
“Or the one that sometimes follows, yes, if the behaviors persist?” Antisocial personality disorder, he meant. “Don’t worry. I’m not ready to use that label, either. Certainly not on any forms of documentation that could surface easily in the event of a negative future event.”
Negative future event.
I nodded, if only to urge him to go on. I needed to know everything. Once I knew, I could help. We could help. If I didn’t believe that, I’d chosen the wrong profession.
“Let’s continue,” Curtis said. “We’re not talking fate here.
But we are talking about a poorly stacked deck.
” He opened the flap of the MRI envelope.
Inside were the images of Benjamin’s seven-year-old brain, the one I’d thought was perfect, aside from a soccer concussion.
“Early onset is a key element of accurate diagnosis, and we do see signs in Benjamin’s scans, unfortunately. ”
He pulled out one of the images and began pointing to various features. I’d never studied this area of neuroscience. They didn’t have MRI scanners in the high schools where I’d always planned to work.
“We can see reduced volume in the amygdala, just to start.” He paused to see if I was still following. “You’re quite lucky to have these scans as a baseline.”
Lucky? I felt sick.
He said, “I thought you’d feel better seeing the biological origin. It can make a parent feel less directly responsible.”
“Curtis, I am responsible. He has my genes. He was shaped by the fetal environment within my womb. I didn’t beat him or ignore him or warp him in some other despicable way, but I made him.”
Never mind, I thought, that any seven-year-old’s brain would have been shaped by nature and nurture.
The perfect parent might have modified seemingly innate tendencies.
More enriched learning opportunities. More socializing with others.
More love. More discipline. Better food.
Better toys. Brighter sunshine. All of it!
“Let’s talk about his assets,” Curtis said after a respectful delay.
“In many ways, Benjamin is the very opposite of my Menkoka research subjects. Goal setting, for example. Benjamin excels at that. Intelligence: no problem there. Impulse control, however . . .” Curtis held out a level hand, seesawing it.
“Sometimes very strong, sometimes not. But that’s something we can work on. ”
I was waiting for more good news, trying to hold back from taking my own turn listing Benjamin’s positive behaviors. He was protective, sensitive, and dutiful—at times! And yet we were here because of the other times. Those brief, regrettable moments that could change a life’s trajectory.
“Has Benjamin told you something specific that the police need to know?”
Curtis looked taken aback.
“You’re upset.”
Of course I was upset!
“The answer is no,” he said.
I wanted to believe him. There was no reason not to believe him.
Except, of course, for the rules of confidentiality. The question wasn’t whether Benjamin had been a threat—to Izzy or anyone else. From Curtis’s logical and legally defensible perspective, the question was whether Benjamin was a threat now.
Curtis smiled, and this time, it was a relaxed smile, open and sincere, even ebullient.
“Abby, you can’t believe how frustrating it is, working day in, day out with psychopathic boys who are .
. . may I be frank? . . . stupid and impulsive.
They don’t try to evade most negative consequences, because they simply don’t care.
Sometimes, you can reward them—a candy bar here, a video game there.
But you can’t punish them. To find a young male subject with psychopathic traits who will actually listen and learn, that’s nothing short of remarkable. ”
I sat back in my chair, stunned.
Psychopathic traits. We might as well have been using the single-noun term. Psychopath. My son, a psychopath.
Not yet a psychopath with a long criminal record. Not a psychopath whose every behavior was a flagrant violation of societal norms. But that was only on account of his youth. With time, there’d be more opportunities for bad choices and even worse influences.
In a shaky voice, I said, “I’m grateful for your candor, Curtis. I really am. But I thought you weren’t prepared to apply that sort of label.”
“I didn’t say antisocial personality disorder with psychopathic traits. We already agreed that’s not a diagnosis for anyone under eighteen.”
“But . . . traits.”
“Traits!” he called out. “Traits! Traits! It’s not such a scary word.
It shouldn’t be.” He was still smiling. “I’ll be honest, Abby.
Many of my clients frustrate me. I can’t cure them, given the nature of the pathology.
I can’t sufficiently mentor or mold them.
At Menkoka, two-thirds of our released juveniles commit crimes again, and we’re supposed to be happy, because it’s not the ninety-eight percent recidivism we see in the general psychopath population.
But that still means the average Menkoka resident is an abject failure. ”
I tried to keep focusing on his words, instead of rushing ahead into the future—trying to determine how we’d find a new therapist, wondering what sort of interventions had been shown to work, if there was a developmental window that closed during adolescence, and how I could make the most of the time left.
“Benjamin is different,” Curtis said, pulling me back to the present. “Give him a chance, Abby. Give us a chance.”
“I’ll need some referrals. I have to help Benjamin transition to another therapist he trusts. I’m indebted to you, for all you’ve done. But you’re leaving town soon, to be with your father and work on your book.”
“Yes, but. Let me think on it, Abby.”
Curtis’s lengthening silence told me that our meeting was finished. No more diagnostic revelations. No more claims for the efficacy of treatment. I stood up, feeling numb, and only remembered as I neared the door that Benjamin had no idea the police had found their man.
“I’ll show him the news about Christopher Weber when we get home. I’ll tell him it’s all over. But he might need to process it all with someone. Will you talk to him, tomorrow?”
Curtis nodded. “Of course. But you have to realize—he won’t be half as relieved as you are. Benjamin always knew he was innocent. You were the one who doubted.”