Once bitten Read online

  "What year were you born?"

  She smiled. "What is this, Wheel of Fortune?" she asked.

  "Just help me out, Terry. Answer the questions and then I can go home to my bed. When were you born?"

  "Twenty-five years ago," she said. "Or thereabouts." She was a lot older than she looked.

  "Who is the president of the United States?"

  "George Bush." She giggled and put her hands up to her mouth again. There was dried blood on her hands, too.

  "What's the capital of the United States?"

  She grinned. "Los Angeles," she said. She watched me scribble her answer in my notebook and held up her hand, waving it to stop me. "I was joking, Jamie. OK? I was joking. Washington is the real capital."

  I sat back in the chair and gave her a stern look. Or tried to anyway. She wasn't supposed to be using my first name. It didn't show the proper respect, you know? "This is serious, Terry," I said.

  "Oh, for sure," she sighed. "For sure it is." She leant forward and looked at me intensely with her jet black eyes. "The black guy, now he's serious, Jamie. He's trying to bring me real grief, but you? You, Jamie, you're a pussycat." She smiled and winked. "Fire away."

  "Can you name three cities beginning with the letter D?"

  "Detroit, Dallas, Durham."

  "Durham?"

  "Yeah, Durham. It's in England."

  "I know, it's just a strange city to think of, that's all."

  She shrugged.

  "Have you been there?" I asked.

  "Oh, sure," she sighed, and I wasn't sure if she was joking or not.

  "What's your favourite food?"

  "Are you hitting on me?" she said coyly.

  "No," I said.

  "Lasagna. What's the point of these questions?"

  "They help me assess your state of mind. What was the last film you saw?"

  She looked up at the ceiling, thinking. There was dried blood on the underside of her chin, a thin streak as if she'd run a bloody finger gently along it and left behind a trail. She lowered her eyes and caught me staring at her neck. "TV or movie?" she asked.

  "Doesn't matter."

  "Casablanca."

  "What's your favourite colour?"

  She looked down at her gown. "Well it shitfire sure ain't grey," she said. "Black, maybe. Yeah, I like black."

  "Which weighs the most – a pound of coal or a pound of feathers?"

  "Shoot, Jamie, we did that one at school. They're the same."

  "Which would you rather have, a dog or a cat?"

  "Neither."

  "You don't like animals?"

  She shrugged. "Don't like, don't dislike. Neutral."

  "Do you know why you're here?"

  "Yes."

  I waited but she didn't expand on her answer, she just sat back and looked at me.

  "Will you tell me why you think you're here?"

  "They, like, think I killed a man."

  "And did you?"

  "Are you a psychologist or a detective?"

  "Fair point," I replied. "How do you feel?"

  "About being here?" I nod. "Scared, I guess. Confused. A bit, like, angry. Yeah, angry, for sure."

  "Why haven't you asked for a lawyer?"

  "I haven't done anything wrong, that's for sure."

  I asked her a few more general knowledge and current affairs questions and then I switched off the tape recorder and put my pen in the inside pocket of my jacket. "OK, Terry. That's it. I told you it'd be painless."

  "Is that all?"

  "That's the first bit over." I picked up my briefcase, opened it and took out my portable computer. She watched as I flicked up the screen and powered it up. The disc whined and the orange screen flickered into life. It asked me for my password and I typed in "Deborah" and I made a mental note to change it because her name brought back too many memories.

  "OK," I said. I moved my chair next to her's and swivelled the computer round so that we could both see the screen. I looked up at the guard and asked her if she'd take the cuffs off Terry.

  "I'll have to check," she said and went out, to look for De'Ath I guess and to get his blessing.

  "You really should ask for a lawyer," I said to Terry.

  She shrugged. "I haven't done anything," she said. "I mean, like, it's their problem, not mine, you know? Their mistake. I'll be back on the streets before you know it. I'm cool, you know?"

  "I can recommend a good lawyer. If you change your mind."

  She smiled and nodded. "Thanks, Jamie. But no thanks."

  The guard came back with two uniformed officers, which I reckoned was piling it on a bit thick because the girl was showing no signs of aggression and she certainly wasn't on Angel Dust or anything else that was going to give her the strength of ten men, or even one. One of the men stood by the door, his hand on the gun in his holster. The female guard unlocked Terry's handcuffs while the second man went and stood behind us.

  Terry massaged her wrists.

  "Better?" I asked.

  "Yeah, thanks. What do you want me to do?"

  "OK, this is just another test, just like the questions I asked you before, except this time they're on this screen. All you have to do is to make choices."

  "Multiple choice questions?"

  "That's right, just like you did at High School. Each question will give you a choice of two answers, yes or no. You use the mouse to indicate your choice." I showed her how to use the mouse and she nodded. I pressed the start button and a single line of type flashed up on the screen.

  "I prefer cold weather to hot weather," it said. "This is an example," I explained. "If you prefer cold weather to hot weather, you indicate Yes. If you prefer hot weather, you indicate No. It's as easy as that. The machine will ask you five hundred questions. Some of them will be very straightforward like this one, others might seem a little strange. But you must answer yes or no.

  You can't pass or say both, or neither. You must pick the answer that is closest to the way you feel."

  She nodded, her eyes fixed on the screen.

  "There's no time limit, but try to answer the questions as quickly as possible. You must concentrate. No daydreaming, OK?"

  She looked at me with her unblinking black eyes and grinned. "For sure, Jamie, it's no great intellectual challenge, is it? How do I, like, start?"

  "I'll do it," I said. "You ready?"

  She nodded and I set the program running and moved my chair away to let her get on with it. I leant back in my chair and watched her deal with the questions. She crouched forward slightly, her jet black hair falling across her face. She seemed at ease with mouse and her eyes remained fixed on the screen. The clicks of the mouse being depressed were fairly evenly spaced, three seconds at the most. Five hundred questions, three seconds a go, one thousand, five hundred seconds in all.

  Twenty-five minutes.

  When she finished she looked up at me and held up her hands like a child showing that they were clean.

  "Finished," she said in a sing-song voice. "Did you make up all the questions?"

  "Most of them," I answered.

  She shook her head from side to side and sighed. "You are one weird dude," she said. "Totally, totally weird."

  "What did you find strange?" I asked as I pulled the computer towards my side of the desk.

  "The ones about, like, death. And killing. And the fact that every question was asked twice, but, like, in reverse. Why was that?"

  "To check that your answers are consistent," I said. That's what I told her, but that was only part of the reason. The time difference between the question being flashed on the screen and the mouse being pressed was also important. It gives a clue as to how much thought is being put into the answer, or how much confusion it has caused. And the time taken to deal with the same question when asked in reverse is even more significant. That's what the computer program does, compares the answers and the time intervals with profiles of more than a thousand case histories. And then it gives me the inf
ormation I need to make a judgment on her sanity.

  "To check that I'm not lying?" she said.

  "Something like that," I said. "But if you've done nothing wrong, Terry, you've nothing to worry about."

  "Have you finished, sir?" the female guard asked me, and when I said I had she pulled the girl's arms behind her and handcuffed her again.

  "Does she have to be handcuffed all the time?" I asked.

  "It's procedure, sir," she answered.

  I stored Terry's answers in a new case file and then ran a sorting program through them. It flashed WORKING for a minute or so and then the word DONE came up. It only took a few minutes, but the program represented more than ten years of my life. I'd started the research as part of a post-doctorate project trying to come up with a computerised version of the Rorschach Ink Blot Test. I got myself into a dead end on that one and I'd switched to the more easily computerised question and answer psychological evaluation systems, such as the Cattell Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire and the Graduate and Managerial Assessment system. In the past interpretation of the tests required a hell of lot of experience and the results were as much down to the examiner as to the person taking the tests. That's where the Beaverbrook program scored: by allowing the computer to grade the results it did away with the personal foibles of the guy doing the interpretation. I did a couple of papers on the computerization possibilities and they were well received and I managed to attract extra funding from a couple of mental health charities and I went onto the second stage of the research – developing a subsidiary program which would assess the validity and reliability of the individual tests. The normal way of testing was to repeat the tests, or variations of them, on several occasions and then to compare the results and run them through a Standard Error Of Measurement equation. What I was trying to do, though, was to come up with a one-off evaluation system, something that would act as a sort of Litmus test, an instantaneous verdict: sane or insane. I eventually came up with a variation of the Spearman-Brown Prophecy Formula which took the results of one test and effectively split them in half and treated them as if coming from parallel tests. It took the world of psychometrics by storm, I can tell you, and lost me a lot of friends. No-one likes to be told that a computer can do their job faster and more efficiently, especially psychologists with twenty years clinical experience.

  I asked for the results in graph form and the screen cleared and then horizontal and vertical lines sprouted from the bottom left hand corner followed by diagonal wavy lines that represented the parameters within which previous cases suggested normal personalities would lie. A small flashing star marked Terry's profile. Dead centre. This girl was more stable than I was.

  "Am I, like, OK?" she asked.

  I smiled. "You're fine, Terry."

  She grinned. "Can you do me a favour now?"

  "Depends what you want," I told her.

  She nodded her head sideways, indicating her arms handcuffed behind the chair. "Can you get them to take these off me. They hurt, for sure, and my nose, like, itches."

  "I'll try," I said, getting to my feet and picking up the briefcase. "I'll ask De'Ath."

  "Don't go yet," she said. "Scratch my nose for me, first. Please."

  "Are you serious?"

  "You don't know how shit fire serious, Jamie. It itches like you wouldn't believe."

  She smiled and nodded, looking earnestly at me like a dog asking for a bone. I sighed and reached over and scratched her slowly on the tip of the nose. She groaned quietly, her eyes closed.

  The door banged open and I flinched. "You finished?" De'Ath asked.

  I felt my cheeks go red because I was sure he'd seen me touching her and there was a supercilious smirk on his face.

  "Yeah, I'm done," I said. I nodded at Terry and went to the door, which De'Ath held open for me.

  "Jamie?" she said, and I looked back at her. "Thanks," she said, and winked at me.

  De'Ath followed me out into the corridor. "Well?" he asked.

  "She seems fine to me," I said. "Though it might have been a help if you'd told me beforehand that she was a girl."

  He laughed. "I must've forgotten," he said. "Sorry 'bout that."

  "What did she do, Samuel?"

  "Stabbed a guy, in the heart. Then slashed his throat. When we found her she was crouched over him, lapping at the blood. We haven't found the murder weapon yet, but it won't be long. And what we don't want is for her to spring some vampire story on us, you know. Now, is she sane or not?"

  "As sane as you or I," I said. "Or at least as sane as I am. You I'm not sure about."

  "That's all I need to know, Doc."

  "And Samuel?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Don't tell people that my name is Van Helsing. It's not funny."

  "You know what your problem is, Beaverbrook? You've no sense of humour, that's what."

  "From you, dumb shit, I take that as a compliment. Now who's this other guy you want me to see?"

  De'Ath took the file from under his arm and opened it. "Name's Kipp, Henry Kipp. Six priors, five of them armed robbery. He's…"

  "Come on De'Ath," I interrupted, "you know you're not supposed to give me information like that. I'm only supposed to make my judgments on the basis…"

  "OK, OK, stay calm, man. Forget what I said."

  "You're always pulling dumb stunts like that, so don't tell me to forget it," I said. "These people deserve a fair hearing, and for that I have to be completely impartial."

  Our argument was cut short by the swing doors being banged open and a gruff voice echoing down the corridor. "Well if it isn't Batman and Robin."

  I turned to see a barrel-chested white-haired man in a dark blue suit, his cheeks flaring red.

  Captain Eric Canonico. Not one of my greatest fans. He pointed at me and yelled at me with his head slightly back, his booming voice echoing off the walls of the corridor. "And who the fuck gave you permission to park in my spot, Beaverbrook? Who the fuck told you to leave the Batmobile in my parking space?"

  "I didn't think you'd be in this late, Captain," I said.

  "Yeah, well you thought wrong, Batman. But it's not the first time you've been wrong is it?

  Now get that pile of shit out of my space and park it somewhere else."

  He lowered his accusing finger and transferred his fiery gaze to De'Ath. "Has Mr Wonderful here seen the girl?"

  "Yes Cap'n."

  "And?"

  "She's OK."

  "So have you started the interrogation yet?"

  "Just about to, Cap'n."

  "And the victim?"

  "No ID. No wallet. Stripped clean. We're running his prints through the computer and checking missing persons."

  "Keep me informed, I'll be in my office."

  The doors banged shut but Canonico's presence lingered in the corridor for a few seconds like a bad smell.

  "He's never forgiven you, has he?" asked De'Ath.

  "Never has, never will. What room's Kipp in?"

  "B. What do you think of the girl then?"

  "Young. Pretty. Innocent."

  "You man, would never make a cop."

  "De'Ath, I wouldn't want to. Not in a million years. By the way, she wants the cuffs off."

  "Procedure, Doc. She's in on suspicion of homicide, and a nasty one at that. The cuffs stay on till we're sure she's safe. All you can tell me is if she's sane or not, not if she's likely to scratch my eyes out with her fingers. Leave her to the professionals. And save your pity for the victims."

  "Why the blood?"

  "Blood?"

  "On her mouth. And her hands. I thought you said Forensic had been over her?"

  "They have, swabs and scrapings and samples. They're down at the lab now."

  "So why hasn't she been cleaned up?"

  "Man, this is a police station, not a dry cleaners. She can wash up later, right now I've a homicide to investigate. You concentrate on Mr Kipp. After you've moved the Batmobile."

  "Don't c
all it that, De'Ath. I hate it when you do that."

  De'Ath's laughter boomed around the corridor as he knocked on the door to the room where Terry sat. When it opened I saw her over De'Ath's shoulder. She looked up and smiled weakly at me, and then the door closed, blotting her out.

  I went outside and moved my car and then went to see Henry Kipp. He was as sane as I am, possibly saner. He'd gone into a drugs store on Olympic Boulevard run by an old Polish couple.

  He'd clubbed the old man over the head with the butt of his sawn-off shotgun, then taken a couple of hundred dollars from the cash register. The woman had begun crying and Kipp had forced the twin barrels of the gun into her mouth and told her to stop. Then he blew her head off.

  "The voices told me to do it," Kipp laughed, showing a mouthful of bad teeth.

  "What sort of voices?"

  "Devils," he said. "Devils in my head. They tell me what to do."

  "Male voices or female voices?"

  "Male."

  "Like your father?"

  "I never heard my old man's voice. Long gone before I wuz born."

  He had closely-cropped hair and a nose that had been broken so many times that it was almost flat against his face. His hands were square with nails bitten to the quick, strong hands that he kept making into fists as he tapped away at the mouse. He banged it so hard that it rattled and he ground his teeth as he answered the five hundred questions. He breathed through his nose, the heavy, snorting of a wild animal. But he was sane, the program said. Aggressive, amoral, cruel, and as nasty a piece of humankind as you're ever likely to meet, but sane. Sane according to the Beaverbrook Model, which at that stage was all that mattered. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, lying about the voices. Some amateur lawyer he met up with doing a previous spell in the slammer had probably told him that insanity was a good defence but the manic laugh and the staring eyes didn't fool the program. When I ran it the blinking star that represented Kipp's psyche was well within the boundaries of what the court accepted as sane. A bit lower and to the left of Terry's, but sane nonetheless.

  The door to room F was closed when I went back down the corridor and I stopped and put my ear to the wood and listened. I could hear De'Ath but not clearly enough to tell what he was saying.

  I left him to it.

  The storm was all but over when I left the station and climbed into my car. As I started the engine I saw that someone had hung a small rubber bat from my aerial. It was probably De'Ath.