THE NEXT morning I put on jeans, a polo shirt, and sandals, took my briefcase, and walked down the glen toward ULCA. The road was choked with cars -commuters making the daily pilgrimage from homes in the Valley to West Side business districts. Watching them inch forward, I thought of Black Jack Cadmus and wondered how many of them had fruit trees in their backyards.
I crossed Sunset, continued south on Hilgard, and entered the campus at Strathmore. A short hike brought me to the northern edge of the Health Sciences Center - a complex of brick behemoths rumoured to house more corridor space than the Pentagon. I'd misspent a good deal of my youth in those corridors.
Entering at ground level, I made a familiar right turn. The hallway leading to the Biomedical Library was lined with glass display cases. This month's exhibit was on the history of surgical instruments, and I glanced at the array of therapeutic weaponry - from crude, stone trepans exposing the cerebral tissue within a mannikin's skull to lasers traversing arterial tunnels.
The library had just opened and was still quiet. By noon the place would be jammed with medical students and those aspiring to be medical students, sleep-deprived residents, and grim-faced graduate students hiding behind hillocks of reference material.
I sat down on an oak table, opened my briefcase, and pulled out the volume of Fish's Schizophrenia that I'd brought from home. It was the third edition, relatively new, but after two hours of study I'd read little I hadn't already known. Putting the book aside, I went searching for more current information - abstracts and journal articles. Half an hour of peering into microfiche viewers and shuffling index cards and three more hours hunched in the stacks made my eyes blur and my head buzz. I took a break and headed for the vending machines.
Sitting in an outdoor courtyard, I drank bitter coffee, chewed on a stale sugar doughnut, and realised how few facts I'd found floating in a sea of theory and speculation.
Schizophrenia. The word means 'split mind,' but it's a misnomer. What schizophrenia really represents is the disintegration of the mind. It's a malignant disorder, cancer of the thought processes, the scrambling and erosion of mental activity. Schizophrenic symptoms - delusions, hallucinations, illogical thinking, loss of touch with reality, bizarre speech and behaviour - embody the layman's notion of crazy. They occur in one percent of the population in virtually every society, and no one knows why. Everything from birth trauma to brain damage to body type to poor mothering has been suggested as a cause. Nothing has been proved, although much has been disproved, and as Souza had pointed out gleefully, the evidence suggests a genetic predisposition to madness.
The course of the disease is as unpredictable as that of a flash fire in a windstorm. Some patients experience a single psychotic episode that never recurs. Others recover after a series of attacks. In many instances the disorder is chronic but static, while in the most severe cases deterioration progresses to the point of total breakdown.
Despite all this ambiguity, the relationship between madness and murder is clear: The vast majority of schizophrenics are harmless, less violent than the rest of us. But a few are stunningly dangerous. Paranoid, they lash out in sudden bursts of rage, often maiming or killing the very people working hardest to help them - parents, spouses, therapists.
Schizophrenics don't commit serial murders.
The sadism, premeditation, and ritual repetition of the Lavender Slashings were the trademark of another denizen of the psychiatric jungle.
He's the beast who walks upright. Meet him on the street, and he'll seem normal, even charming. But he roams those streets, parasitic and cold-eyed, stalking his prey behind a veneer of civility. The rules and regulations that separate humans from savages don't concern him. 'Do unto others as you damn well please' is his creed. He's a user and a manipulator, and he lacks empathy or conscience. The screams of his victims are at best irrelevant, at worst a source of pleasure.
He's the psychopath, and psychiatry understands him even less than it does the schizophrenic. The symptoms of madness can often be altered with medication, but there's no therapy for evil.
Madman or monster, which was Jamey?
Sonnenschein, with a cop's natural cynicism, had suspected the latter. I knew he spoke from experience, because the first thing psychopaths often attempt after being caught is feigning insanity. The Yorkshire Ripper had tried it, as had Manson, Bianchi, and Son of Sam. All had failed, but not before fooling several experts.
Over the years I'd examined a fair share of budding psychopaths - callous, shallow kids who bullied the weak, set fires, and tortured animals without a shred of remorse. Seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds who were downright scary. They followed a pattern that Jamey didn't fit; if anything, he'd seemed overly sensitive, too introspective for his own good. But how well had I really known him? And though the decompensation I'd witnessed in the jail had seemed the farthest thing from fraud, could I be absolutely certain that I was immune from subterfuge?
I wanted to believe Souza, to be certain I was on the side of the good guys. But at this point I had nothing to go on besides wishful thinking and the Cadmus family history the attorney had given me - a propaganda piece that may or may not have been accurate.
It was homework time. I needed to plumb the past in order to bring the present into focus, to conduct a psychological autopsy that illuminated the fall of a young genius.
The meetings with the Cadmuses and Mainwaring were days away. But the psychology building was a short sprint across the science quad.
I found a pay phone, dialled the psych department, and asked the receptionist to connect me with Sarita Flower's extension. Seven rings later a cool young female voice answered.
'Dr. Flower's office.'
'This is Dr. Delaware. I'm a former associate of Dr. Flowers. I happen to be on campus and wonder if I could drop by and talk with her.'
'She's tied up with meetings for the rest of the afternoon.'
'When will she be free?'
'Not until tomorrow.'
'She might want to talk to me before then. Could you please reach her and ask?'
The voice tightened suspiciously.
'What did you say your name was?'
'Delaware. Dr. Alex Delaware.'
'You're not a reporter, are you?'
'No. I'm a psychologist. I used to consult to Project 160.'
Hesitation.
'All right. I'm going to put you on hold.'
Several minutes later she was back, sounding resentful.
'She'll see you in twenty minutes. My name is Karen. Meet me at the fourth-floor elevators.'
She rounded the corner just as I got off, tall and angular,
wearing a red and white Diane von Furstenberg dress that dramatised the blackness of her skin. Her hair had been trimmed to a half-inch nap, accentuating tiny ears and high cheekbones. Ovals of ivory dangled from each ear, and ivory bracelets segmented one ebony forearm.
'Dr. Delaware? I'm Karen. Come this way.'
She led me down the hall to a door labelled A.D. OBSERVATION - DO NOT DISTURB.
'You can wait in here. She should be out in a minute.'
'Thanks.'
She nodded coolly. 'Sorry for hassling you before, but the press has been hounding her ever since the Cadmus thing. We had to call campus security to eject a guy from the Enquirer this morning.'
'Don't worry about it.'
'Want coffee or anything?'
'No, thanks.'
'Okay, then. I'll be off.' She put her hand on the doorknob but stopped before turning it. 'You're here about Cadmus, too, aren't you?'
'Yes.'
'What a crazy thing to happen. It's created some real problems for the project. She's been under a lot of stress anyway, and this just makes it worse.'
Not knowing what to say, I smiled sympathetically.
