False Allegations

'Sure. Why not?'

'It would be like having sex with a priest or something,' she said. 'I didn't use to see that, but I do now. I would never…'

I looked into her orange eyes and I got it then.

'When do you do the brain stuff?' I asked Perry two mornings later. It was almost eleven, the time he said he'd have free for me.

'Well…actually, all of this has been 'brain stuff.' We reviewed every available record, her self–report forms for past recollections and current symptoms, the cognitive and projective test results…and Jennifer has had a series of nonstressed, unstructured clinical contacts during which we monitored her heart rate. We videotaped all those interviews and time–sequenced the tapes with the continuous heart rate data. So, up to now, it's all been relatively unintrusive. She has been exposed to a variety of our team members. I don't do any of the initial work—I just kind of float around the perimeter so they grow accustomed to my presence. When I sit down to do the actual forensic interview, I want to be richly informed, but I don't want to be the gatherer of the information.'

'Because…?' I promoted him.

'The nonstructured interview is a critical component,' he explained. 'But before we use that technique, we need to know some evocative cues: what will set them off. When it comes to memories, some of the most reliable and powerful cues are olfactory—smells. These tend to be very deeply ingrained…so that if a particular smell is associated with a buried trauma, one whiff and the patient can be right back there. A classic example is the smell of bleach; for many children, it is reminiscent of the smell of semen. Or ask a Vietnam vet about the smell of flesh and napalm—it doesn't go away. We see this with kids in here all the time, even when they're way too young to speak.'

I still remember smells. From that foul war in Biafra. Dead flesh, ripe–to–bursting from the relentless jungle sun. And the terror stench from those packed–earth tunnels they called bomb shelters. That was just a stink—I've smelled it since, and I stay in control.

But I remember the smell of chains too. The chains they put on me in that basement of the foster home. To hold me against that post while they…

Maybe that's why the first time the cops tried to put handcuffs on me I fought them so hard they had to knock me unconscious. I came to, blood fogging my eyes, trapped, hate and fear struggling for supremacy in my soul, wishing for a gun with all my tiny heart. I was nine then. I shoved the memory away, reached down and grabbed my center, calmed my voice. Asked him: 'So you just…watch them to see if they react?'

If he noticed anything, it didn't show on his face. 'No,' he said. 'As a matter of fact, external observation is bound to give you inaccurate results. One of our most remarkable findings is that the heart monitor is often inconsistent with affect. A child can be telling us about his home, nothing intense, just describing a regular day. His heart rate is predictable, varying according to his narrative. But then we introduce an innocuous word, like 'bedtime,' and although the narrative doesn't change, the needles bounce to the sky.'

'Like a polygraph?'

'No,' he said, a hint of sharpness in his voice. 'There's no real connection. The child isn't being tested for truth. It's an internal probe—it has to be tightly focused to really work. At different points during the interviews— while we're monitoring heart rate and videotaping—we collect samples of stress–response hormones: melatonin and cortisol. We ask the kids to chew some Trident, and at different points they spit into a little tube. Then we measure these hormones—'

'Which is where the brain…?' I asked, starting to struggle a little bit.

'Again, all these things give us different parts of the whole picture of how the individual's brain is organized. How it functions; how it is regulated. And after all of this, we look more directly at brain processing by putting EEG leads on the child's head and have her read a series of vignettes from her life, which we put together when we gathered her history. One would be an account of a neutral event; another, say, a sad event. And then an event which should elicit a 'trauma' response,' he said, making the quote–marks sign. 'We can examine how different parts of the brain are activated and which parts shut down…'

'So you don't actually ask them questions?'

'Not at this point. Not about the actual…allegations. Later, during the final forensic interview, which I conduct, I will. We want to match those responses against not only her individual patterns of brain reactivity, but against those of other individuals who experienced similar events at similar times in their development.'

'Okay,' I said, thinking it through. 'But what if someone did a lot of reading? You know, on child sexual abuse. They'd already know what people who'd been abused were supposed to feel, right?'

Perry's face tightened, but his voice went on smoothly, as though he hadn't caught what I was really asking him. 'One of the most useful procedures we will use this next couple of days is during the sleep study. In some people, we can see changes in their brain activity when they're exposed to sounds or smells associated with the original trauma. 'Lying' under those conditions, clearly, is not possible.'

'But how do you know—'

'Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. Burke. Look, the brain develops over time. It doesn't just come as this minibrain that grows into a big brain, like a pumpkin from a seed—it grows sequentially and almost all in the first three years of life. First the brain stem, then the midbrain, then the limbic system, and finally the cortex—that part that allows us to 'think.' When we look at the data from all these comprehensive evaluations, we can literally place in what part of the brain the dysfunction resides. This allows us to fix the time, to some degree, when the disrupting event—the trauma—took place.

'See, when adults are traumatized, they will have event–specific changes in brain functioning. But when a child is traumatized—while the brain is still in development, still organizing—the trauma acts like a fault line, impacting everything that grows around and over it. The neurobiology of the traumatized adult will be different from that of the traumatized child. The alterations will be more pervasive. And those vulnerabilities may not show up until later in life.'

'Like a scar? A scar you can't see unless you know…?'

'More like a substance that fluoresces under a special light, or turns color when exposed to a specific reagent. Like the field test for cocaine…?'

'Yeah, I get it,' I told him, meaning it.

A young woman with the face of an Indian princess and braided black hair to match rapped against the jamb of the open door to Perry's office. She was wearing blue surgical scrubs, face set in severe lines. When he looked up, the nurse said: 'She got a court order. She's coming to visit him. This afternoon. At three o'clock. What should we…?'

'Set up the Munchausen camera,' he answered her. 'You know, the fiber–optic one? Tell Ronnie to monitor. If she makes a move on the kid, you stop her, right then and there, understand?'

'Yes!' The woman flashed a smile, like someone just gave her a present.

Perry turned back to me like he'd never left the track. 'The key to understanding the brain is to understand its role in mediating every signal that the organism receives. The brain processes information, and some early– childhood damage changes the way the brain works. If you wave at a little baby,' he said, waggling his hand to show me what he meant, 'the baby coos and giggles, right? But for some babies, when they see an adult's hand raised, you get a startle reaction instead. That's not because the baby has learned a raised hand means a blow; it's because, to that baby, the brain translates that raised hand so it becomes a blow, you see? It's not learning; it's processing.'

'And once that's locked in…'

'Yeah, that's right,' he said sadly. 'It takes an enormous amount of work, highly skilled work, over a long time, to even have a chance of modifying it. Trauma generalizes—that's its nature. So instead of the child being afraid of the man who hurt her, she becomes afraid of all men, understand? The brain takes the baby to a safe place in response to chronic pain and terror. After a while, the baby does whatever it takes to get to that place. Sometimes that means dissociation. Sometimes it means hair pulling.'

'Or homicide?'

'Yes. The mystery of life isn't why a tortured child becomes a serial killer—it's why so many children don't. If we could only understand how the brain learns new accommodations…But we