“Because he was mentally handicapped.”
“No… not handicapped. I just don’t think… I don’t think he could have understood what it meant, to kill himself. And I don’t think he could have planned it out. There is other stuff that can go along with autism… His executive planning skills…”
Zachary wasn’t sure what that meant. He looked at the other angles of the case. “Was he depressed?”
“He was happy at Summit. It was a good place for him. The only place that had been able to manage his behavioral issues.”
Zachary looked at the haunting eyes that looked up from the photograph. “This is a recent photo?”
“Yes.” Mira looked down at him. “I know he’s not smiling for the picture. But he never smiled for pictures. He was happy at Summit. They were able to get him off of all of the meds that the other places had put him on. So that he could be himself and not a drugged-out zombie.”
“Sometimes depression isn’t obvious. People are often taken by surprise by suicides.” Zachary looked away from her uncomfortably. Other times, depression was obvious and friends or family members did everything they could to head it off. Like with Isabella Hildebrandt, when her mother had hired Zachary to look into her son Declan’s untimely death, hoping to bring Isabella some peace. They’d been unable to prevent her suicide attempt. Only luck and quick-acting professionals had been able to bring her back. As they had done for Zachary in the past. “When you say they took him off of his meds… did that include antidepressants?”
“No, he was never on antidepressants. He was on other medications to keep him quiet. I couldn’t have him at home anymore, because he was too much of a danger to my younger sons. And me.”
There was a snapshot on the fridge of Mira with two younger boys, maybe eight and ten. Mira was a slight, small woman. The ten-year-old was almost her height. There were no pictures of her with Quentin, but Zachary suspected he was taller than she was by a few inches. Even though Quentin had a slim build, a child in the midst of a meltdown could be very strong. Looking down at the pictures of Quentin on the table, Zachary saw another child in his mind’s eye.
Annie Sellers had also been autistic, and well-known for her rages. He had watched, through the narrow observation window of his detention cell, as several members of the Bonnie Brown security staff had tried to bring her under control. She was slim and small, but even three guards together could barely hold onto her to get her into a cell.
Zachary blinked, trying to focus on the case at hand. Annie was in the distant past. He couldn’t do anything for her. No one could.
“How long had Quentin been at Summit?”
“Two years. They turned him around completely. He was not the same child.”
“And you hadn’t noticed any changes in behavior recently. Anything at all.”
Mira bit her lip. She was a strawberry-blonde with a pixie cut. She kind of reminded Zachary of a forty-year-old Julie Andrews. The same shape to her face. But there were fine lines that told the tale of a hard life. There was no sign of a man in the house. Raising three boys as a single mother was not an easy job, especially when one of them had behavioral issues. Summit was a good two hours’ drive from Mira’s house, which meant that she wasn’t visiting him daily.
“He’d been agitated the last few times I went to see him,” Mira said finally. “They said it was probably just hormones, and they were increasing his therapy sessions to address it.”
Zachary scratched a note to himself in his notepad. “What do you mean by agitated?”
“More… anxious… more… behaviors…”
“Describe to me what that looked like. What exactly was he doing?”
“Picking at his skin… flapping… He was voicing and didn’t want to sit down to visit with me. He wanted to walk around to visit, but they said… his therapist said he needed to work on sitting quietly to visit. When they forced him to sit down, he started banging his head or got angry, and they had to take him out and cut our visit short.”
Zachary wrote down each of the behaviors. “He didn’t usually do those things?”
“No, he’d been pretty good at Summit, they could usually suppress them.”
“Is there something that triggers them? When he lived at home, did he do them all the time, or just sometimes?”
Mira ran her fingers through her hair. There were bags under her eyes, camouflaged with makeup. She looked exhausted. She probably wasn’t sleeping.
“Yes, when he was frustrated about something… Before he died, I felt like he wanted to tell me something. But it’s difficult for him. If I’d been able to walk around with him, talk with him some more, I might have been able to figure out what it was. But they said he had to go back to his room.”
“So he could talk…?”
“He was mostly nonverbal. He had a few words. He would take my hand to show me something or ask me to do something for him. But Summit said I needed to force him to use speech.” Mira sighed heavily. “They said that if I ignored his nonverbal communication… he would use words more…”
“Oh.” Zachary nodded. “Then he could, if he had to?”
Mira frowned and tugged at a lock of hair. “Well… it was hard for him. They said that if he could speak some of the time, then he could speak all of the time, if he just worked at it. When he was at home, we would use pictures, gestures, whatever we could.” She wrapped the lock around her finger. “It wasn’t like he was just being willful or lazy when he wouldn’t speak. That’s what Dr. Abato says, but I always thought… Quentin was doing
