The clothes were expensive, but they looked as if they'd been slept in.
'Doctor,' he said, barely looking at me. Then, inexplicably, he smiled, and I saw, in the humourless upturning of petulant lips, the resemblance to Jamey.
'Mr. Cadmus.'
'Sit down, Dwight,' said Souza, exerting pressure with his hand. 'Rest yourself.'
Cadmus sank like a stone.
Souza gestured to a chair. 'Make yourself comfortable, Doctor.'
He seated himself behind the desk and rested his elbows on its tooled leather top.
'First let me lay out the facts, Doctor. If I cover familiar ground, please bear with me. Yesterday, in the early hours of the morning, James escaped from his hospital room. Shortly after, he phoned you from a vacant conference room. Do you remember the time of the call?'
'Around three-fifteen.'
He nodded.
'That jibes with the reports of the hospital staff. Unfortunately it doesn't help our case from a time frame perspective. In any event, subsequent efforts to locate him on the grounds were unsuccessful. A call was dispatched to Dwight in Mexico, and he and his family flew back up immediately. Upon landing, they contacted me. We held
an emergency conference with Dr. Mainwaring, during which a list was compiled of any locations Jamey'd been known to frequent. Attempts were made to contact each by phone.'
'What kinds of locations?'
'Homes of acquaintances mostly.'
'It was a short list,' said Cadmus in a near whisper. 'He hasn't liked people for a long time.'
There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. The attorney glanced at Cadmus, who kept his gaze on his wing tips.
'We've wrestled with the boy's emotional problems for a long time,' explained Souza. 'It's been a strain.'
I nodded sympathetically.
'One of the parties we tried to reach was an Ivar Digby Chancellor of Beverly Hills. Jamey had developed a - friendship with him, though to our knowledge it had ended some time ago.'
'Damned deviate,' muttered Cadmus.
Souza looked at him sharply and went on:
'Despite the fact that the relationship had been put to rest, it seemed possible he'd return to Chancellor's house. However, no one answered there. None of the other calls was fruitful either. Finally we called in the police. They took our list and visited each address. Sometime later -around eight in the morning - the boy was located at the Chancellor residence.'
Souza stopped and looked at the uncle, as if expecting another interruption. Cadmus kept quiet, seemingly oblivious of both of us.
'The police walked into a bloody scene, Doctor. Chancellor was dead, strangled and stabbed repeatedly, as was a second party, a sixteen-year-old male prostitute known as Rusty Nails - given name, Richard Ford. According to the report, Chancellor's body had been trussed up, Ford's was prostrate, and Jamey was sitting cross-legged on the floor between the two corpses, clutching a long-bladed knife and a swatch of lavender silk. He seemed in a trance, muttering incoherently - something about bursting arteries and zombies - but went wild at the sight of the officers. It took several policemen to subdue him, and he was put in restraints before being taken away.'
I remembered the boy's phone call, the terrible images.
Souza kept reciting:
'They booked him in the county jail, placed him in isolation, and phoned me. I set out immediately to do all the lawyerly things at my disposal in order to obstruct the investigation: filed a writ prohibiting interrogation because of mental incompetence, protested at the lack of adequate medical care at the jail, and demanded release on bail or immediate transfer to a psychiatric facility. The writ was complied with - a minor victory because he's too incoherent to be interrogated anyway. The medical care issue was handled by allowing Dr. Mainwaring to visit him and administer medication under supervision. In view of the boy's escape and the enormity of the charges, you can imagine how the bail transfer request was received. He remains at the jail, curled in his cell like a foetus, mute and unresponsive.'
The attorney sat back in his chair, picked up a fountain pen, and suspended it between his index fingers. As promised, he'd laid out the facts with the precision of a draughtsman. The end result was the blueprint of a nightmare. I searched Dwight Cadmus's face for reaction, found only arctic immobility.
Souza got up from behind the desk and straightened one of the cups in the tea set. Instead of returning to his chair, he stood with his back to the French doors, outlined squarely against the glass.
'I've done some research into your background, Doctor. Your scholarly credentials are impeccable, you have a reputation for honesty, and you've had an impressive amount of courtroom experience as an expert witness -though I don't believe any of it was in a criminal trial.'
'That's right,' I said. 'I testified at the Casa de los Ninos trials as a material witness. My expert testimony's been limited to child custody issues and personal injury cases.'
'I see.' He thought for a moment. 'If it sounds as if I'm quizzing you, forgive me. How familiar are you with the notion of insanity?'
'I know it's a legal concept, not a medical or psychological one.'
'Exactly,' he said, obviously pleased. 'A defendant may be a stark, raving lunatic and still be judged legally sane. The essential question is the capacity to distinguish right from wrong. Diminished capacity dictates the absence of guilt. I want your help in constructing a dim cap defence for Jamey.'
'I thought the legislature eliminated psychiatric testimony in dim cap cases.'
He smiled tolerantly.
'The Twinkie defence hubbub? Not at all. Psychiatrists and psychologists are no longer allowed to get up on the stand and draw conclusions about diminished capacity, but they're permitted to present clinical data from which those conclusions can be drawn. For the purpose of this case the distinction is insignificant.'
'Despite that,' I said, 'I have lots of problems with the concept of diminished capacity.'
'Really? What bothers you about it, Doctor?'
'For one, it asks us to go beyond our training and pull off the impossible - crawling into someone's head and reconstructing the past. It's little more than officially sanctioned guesswork, and laymen are starting to see through it. On top of that, it lets too many bad guys off the hook.'
Souza nodded, unperturbed.
'That's all very fine, in theory. But tell me, when you spoke to Jamey on the phone, how did he sound?'
'Agitated, confused, hallucinating.'
'Psychotic?'
'I can't diagnose from a phone call, but most probably.'
'I appreciate your professional caution, but believe me, he's psychotic. Severe paranoid schizophrenia. He's been ill for quite some time. He hears voices, sees visions, is overtly delusional, and has been deteriorating steadily. Dr. Mainwaring hasn't been encouraging about the prognosis. The boy's out of control. Do you think it fair that he be
called to answer for acts that are rooted in that kind of madness? That he be viewed as a bad guy? He needs care, not punishment. The insanity defence is his only hope.'
'You're assuming, then, that he committed eight murders.'
He pushed a wing chair opposite me and sat down, so close that our knees almost touched.
'Doctor, I've managed to obtain an early look at everything the police have put down on paper. The time frame is incriminating, and the physical evidence is overwhelming. Following a violent escape from Canyon Oaks, he was found at the scene of the crime with the murder weapons in hand. His fingerprints were all over the Chancellor house. And there'll be more evidence to follow, I guarantee you. They won't slip up on this one. We won't be able to fight the facts. In order to keep him off Death Row, our strategy must be to show that his mental state had deteriorated to the point where free will was impossible.'
I remained silent. Souza leaned close enough for me to smell his breath.
'It won't be a fishing expedition, I assure you. There are robust medical and social histories, a verified pattern
