“What’s she bring you?”
“Oreos,” he said. “She’s mad.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I ruined it.”
“Ruined what?”
“Everything.”
“How’d you do that?”
His eyes fluttered. The lids dropped. “My sin.”
“Your sin.”
“Killing that baby.” He lay back down, flung an arm over his eyes.
“You feel bad about that,” I said.
No answer.
“Killing the baby,” I prompted.
He rolled away from me, faced the wall.
“How do you feel about what happened to the baby, Rand?”
Several seconds passed.
“ Rand?”
“He laughed.”
“Who laughed?”
“ Troy.”
“ Troy laughed.”
“Hnnh.”
“When?”
“When he hit her.”
“ Troy laughed when he hit Kristal.”
Silence.
“Did Troy do anything else to Kristal?”
He was inert for nearly a minute, then rolled back toward me. His eyelids lifted halfway. Licked his lips.
“This is tough to talk about,” I said.
Small nod.
“What else did Troy do to the baby?”
Sitting up with the stiff, labored movements of an old man, he encircled his own neck with his hands and pantomimed choking. More than mime; his eyes widened, his face turned scarlet, his tongue thrust forward.
I said, “ Troy choked the baby.”
His knuckles whitened as he squeezed harder.
“That’s enough, Rand.”
He began to rock as his fingers dug into his flesh. I got up, pried his hands loose. Strong kid; it took some doing. He gasped, made a retching sound, flopped back down. I stood by his side until his breathing slowed. He drew his knees up toward his chest. Pressure marks splotched his neck.
I made a note to request suicide watch. “Don’t do that again, Rand.”
“Sorry.”
“You feel bad about what happened to the baby.”
No response.
“You watched Troy choke and hit the baby and thinking about it makes you feel really bad.”
Someone’s radio spat a hip-hop number. Footsteps from afar sounded but no one approached.
I said, “You feel bad about watching Troy.”
He mumbled.
“What’s that, Rand?”
His lips moved soundlessly.
“What, Rand?”
The deputy who’d escorted me strolled by, scanned the cell, and moved on. Fifteen minutes hadn’t passed. The staff was taking special care.
“ Rand?”
He said, “I hit her, too.”
For the next week, I saw him every day for two hourly sessions, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. Instead of opening up, he regressed, refusing to divulge anything more about the murder. Much of my time was devoted to formal testing. The clinical interview was a challenge. Some days he remained resolutely mute; the most I could hope for were passive, monosyllabic answers to yes-no questions.
When I brought up the abduction, he seemed confused about why he’d participated, more stunned than horrified. Part of that was denial, but I suspected his low intellect was also a factor. When you comb through the histories of seriously violent kids, you often find head injuries. I wondered about the crash that had killed his parents but had spared him obvious damage.
His Wechsler Intelligence scores were no shock: Full Score I.Q. of 79, with severe deficits in verbal reasoning, language formation, factual knowledge, and mathematical logic.
Tom Laskin wanted to know if he’d been functioning as an adult when he killed Kristal Malley. Even if Rand was thirty-five years old, that might’ve been a relevant question.
The T.A.T. and the Rorschach were pretty much useless: He was too depressed and intellectually impoverished to produce meaningful responses to the cards. His Peabody I.Q. score was no higher than the more verbally influenced Wechsler. His Draw-a-Person was a tiny, limbless, stick figure with two strands of hair and no mouth. My request to free-draw elicited a blank stare. When I suggested he draw himself and Troy he resisted by feigning sleep.
“Just draw anything, then.”
He lay there, breathing through his mouth. His acne had grown even worse. Suggesting a dermatologic consult would have elicited smirks from the jail staff.
“ Rand?”
“Hnnh.”
“Draw something.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
His mouth twisted as if his teeth hurt. “Can’t.”
“Sit up and do it, anyway.” My hard tone made him blink. He stared at me but couldn’t hold it past a few seconds. Pitiful attention span. Maybe part of that was sensory deprivation due to being locked up, but my guess was he’d always had trouble concentrating.
I handed him the pencil and the paper and the drawing board. He sat there for a while, finally put the board in his lap, gripped the pencil. The point froze on the paper.
“Draw,” I said.
His hand began circling lazily, floating above the paper. Finally making contact, as he created flabby, barely visible, concentric ellipses. The page began to fill. Darker ellipses. His eyes shut as he scrawled. For two weeks he’d done that a lot- blinding himself to his hellish reality.
Today, his pencil hand moved faster. The ellipses grew more angular. Flatter, darker. Sharpening to jagged, spearlike shapes.
He kept going, tongue tip snaking between his lips. The paper became a storm of black. His free hand fisted and gathered the hem of his jail shirt as his drawing hand moved faster. The pencil dug in and the page puckered. Ripped. He slashed downward. Circled faster. Digging in harder, as the paper shredded. The pencil went through to the drawing board, hit the glossy, fiberboard surface and slid out from his hand.
Landing on the floor of the cell.
