'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.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They 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
