Suffer the Children Page 16

  Riley scowled. “And yet managed to give the kid four shots in the scraped-up area of his thigh, where the scabs would mask the needle tracks?”

  “If that turns out to be the case. The pens are supposed to go into the thigh and through clothes. The person didn’t have to see the scabs. I admit it’s hard to picture. An adult would have—one hopes—the sense to grab the EpiPen Jr box, and at least would have yelled for the receptionist to fetch the nurse.”

  Riley said, “A kid could have wandered in to say hi to their pal Damon. Except Damon wouldn’t have known anyone except in the under-twelve group, and I have a hard time picturing one of them having the presence of mind to find and use one EpiPen, much less four.”

  Jack said, “I have a hard time picturing either an adult or a kid panicking enough to overdose the kid but having the presence of mind to wipe their prints off the pens, the cases, the box, and probably the cabinet.”

  “True,” Maggie said.

  “Who would want to kill the wild boy?” Riley said. “He might have been a handful but no one seemed to dislike him. At least among the adults.”

  Maggie added a slice of sausage to a forkful of mashed potatoes. “Anyone who knew his history felt sorry for the little guy.”

  They chewed in silence for a while, puzzling this out.

  Then Maggie returned to her first point. “The other kids—Luis is hardly a mystery, he died before our eyes. Rachael was probably an accident—”

  “Probably,” Riley said.

  “What about the hair from the stairwell railing?” Jack asked her.

  “Not hers. A brown hair about the same length as hers, but the pigmentation is different. Also, I asked Trina about the mysterious boyfriend. She has only Rachael’s word for his existence and he sounds like pure Rachael fantasy. Rich and hot.” She gave them what details Trina could supply.

  Riley said, “If she’d had more time she probably would have sketched him in next to the pretty house and the long flowing dress.”

  Maggie continued. “This Tyson apparently OD’d. Not really surprising if most every kid there has substance abuse issues. When they mix with the day students, it would be hard to keep items from being passed back and forth. A baggie of heroin would go through any metal detector.” She suddenly stared at Riley’s chest. “You have blood on your tie.”

  He looked down. “Damn. This is new.”

  The waitress had chosen that moment to stop by and now eyed the striped piece of material nervously. Riley distracted her by asking if she could find any strudel left in the kitchen, then went on: “Still. Four deaths in custody in less than a month? At a juvenile facility?”

  “That’s a lot?” Maggie guessed from his tone. She didn’t have a lot of experience with in-custody deaths, which alone told her that they were not common.

  “That’s a boatload. Now that the press has hold of the story, Palmer’s life is going to become a living hell. ‘Rash of deaths at juvenile facility.’ Cue the ‘we’re too hard on the poor kids’ people versus the ‘zero-tolerance boot-camp’ groups’ letters to the editor. Throw in a couple of conspiracy theories and we’ll make CNN.”

  Maggie continued to play devil’s advocate, though in this instance she didn’t believe her own arguments. “It still could be coincidence. Like most cancer clusters and things like that—sometimes it’s just a run of bad luck. In this line of work it never rains but pours.”

  Jack agreed. “And this isn’t a normal prison. It’s a prison that’s trying not to be a prison, so the inmates—I mean, the kids—have more freedom and contact with the outside world than a secure facility. Not just the day kids, either; there’s family, counselors, lawyers. All of whom treat them like victims instead of criminals.”

  “They are victims,” Maggie said.

  “But they’re also criminals. I asked about your new pal, Trina. Do you know why she’s there? She put arsenic in her mother’s sugar bowl. The woman’s in an irreversible coma. Don’t frown, I’m not trying to be harsh, but a high mortality rate isn’t surprising given that this place isn’t an alternative school or a halfway house for misdemeanor charges. It’s a cesspool of violent impulses, that’s all I’m saying. Oh, and that you shouldn’t eat anything she offers you.”

  The waitress stopped next to his chair, bearing three plates of apple strudel.

  “I didn’t mean you,” Jack assured her, but she gave him a wide berth as she set the plates on the table. He waited until she walked away. “In light of that, four deaths in a month is not such a shock.”

  “It’s not a secure place,” Riley said.

  “Which is DORC’s problem to clean up. They’re not going to listen to a word you say anyway. Bureaucracies aren’t known for welcoming outside opinions.”

  Maggie continued to digest this information about Trina along with her strudel. Poison. Just what they had first suspected about Damon. Why would a little girl do such a thing? Did her mother abuse her horribly or just take away her cell phone? “Rachael suffered things I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Damon spent his life locked away. Sounds like Quentin joined a gang at, like, four.”

  “They had crappy lives,” Jack said. “But a lot of kids have crappy lives, and they all feel that pressure we were talking about. How many end up as killers?”

  “It would help if their parents had a clue. Or were old enough to have a clue.” Riley ate half his strudel in two bites. “We should do it like China.”

  Maggie and Jack exchanged a glance. Perhaps Riley’s blood sugar had dipped too low. “Restrict couples to one child?”

  “Exactly. Less kids, more resources.”

  Maggie said, “If we did that, you wouldn’t have Hannah.”

  He looked so stricken at the thought of life without his younger child that Maggie gave him the rest of her strudel.

  He didn’t abandon the theory, however. “A guy I know visited China for something or other—I think his son teaches English there. Anyway he said they can have more than one kid, they can have as many as they like, but you start paying the second they’re born. In our country grade school and high school are free and you have to pay for college, so doo-fuses like me have a chance to save up for eighteen years to be able to afford it. There, grade school and high school cost a portion of your paycheck, and college is free.”

  “No one would be able to afford to have a kid until they were older—”

  “And hopefully smarter, finished school, and, oh yeah, employed. It would cut the welfare rolls in half, instantly, let me tell you.”

  “Birth control via taxation,” Maggie said.

  “Harsh but effective.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get pregnant. What if someone did and then couldn’t pay?”

  “Aye,” Riley said. “There’s the rub.”

  “Did you just quote Shakespeare?”

  Riley said he had, and wasn’t that impressive.

  Jack ignored them both.

  Chapter 18

  Tuesday

  The next day Jack let his partner drag him back to the Firebird Center to ask about Derald Tyson and, at the same time, who might have wanted to kill a mute ten-year-old. DORC investigators had cleared the infirmary and turned to raking Officer Coglan and his coworkers over the coals as a biohazard team decontaminated the classroom. “Like these kids have never seen blood before,” Jack said. He had no idea where the fourteen-to fifteen-year-old classes would be held that day but knew the staff would figure something out. The last thing they wanted was a group of teenagers with nothing to do. He wondered how they kept the kids busy over the weekends.

  The receptionist escorted them to one of the small conference rooms tucked into a corner of the second-floor visiting area to meet Dr. Jerome Bellamy. The door was closed, so she asked them to take a seat in a row of cushioned seats, next to a small boy of perhaps six with smooth black skin and toddler-pudgy legs, which swung free over the floor. He glanced up at the men without concern.

  Jack s
at. “What are you in for?” he asked the boy, which probably violated HIPAA somehow but he didn’t plan to worry about it.

  Certainly the boy didn’t mind. “I bit my brother.”

  “Really?” And they incarcerated six-year-olds for that? Jack had no clue how to respond. Well, every kid does that? You shouldn’t hurt your siblings, young man? Next time make sure he’s in no shape to tattle on you?

  The boy didn’t mind talking about it, however. “He deserved it, though. That’s what I keep telling Doctor Bellamy.”

  “Okay. Why did your brother deserve it?”

  “He ate my Lego.”

  Jack tried not to laugh. “Ah. How old is your brother?”

  This represented a tough question and the kid screwed up his face as he worked out the answer. “I think he’s almost one. He can’t walk or nothing. And now he know, don’t eat Legos no more. See?” He turned up a sly but visually adorable face to Jack’s.

  So his justified abuse of an infant had really turned out to be for the infant’s own good. But even a six-year-old ought to understand a baby’s lack of understanding, and Jack realized that this very small boy had already mastered the art of spin.

  He no longer felt like laughing.

  Ms. Cooper from the under-twelve group arrived to escort the boy back just as Dr. Jerome Bellamy opened the door. He did not resemble a therapist the way Melanie Szabo and the hapless young man in the under-twelve area did. Bellamy had perfectly cut blond hair and a suit that made Jack feel dowdy. He shook their hands with manicured fingers and smelled of something expensive. They were lucky to have caught him, he said. He only stopped in at the center twice per week.

  “You’re not on staff here?” Riley asked as they took seats around the tiny round table. Jack knew space and privacy were at a premium in the building but he wished all the spaces didn’t seem so child sized. Claustrophobia set in as soon as Bellamy closed the door. No windows and, it seemed, little air.

  “No, I’m in private practice, serving those whose parents can afford me.” He spoke matter-of-factly, managing not to sound as annoying as he could have. The tight quarters didn’t seem to bother him. “Derald and that short tyrant you may have seen leaving are—were—the only two boys. I’ve got one girl I’m taking over for our resident flower child. It’s too bad about Derald, but—”

  “But?” Jack asked.

  “Not surprising. I’m pretty good at my job but I can only do so much. The younger they are, the easier it is to turn them around, and that’s the whole idea here—they’re not evil, they’re not bad seeds, they’re kids who started down a wrong path and no one stopped them. So they kept going. But convincing them to get off that path gets harder the farther down it they are.”

  “Dr. Palmer says intervention needs to start in the womb.”

  He leaned back in his chair, as relaxed as if it were a bar stool at his favorite pub. “Dr. Palmer’s drunk the self-esteem Kool-Aid. It’s the McGuffin these days, and yes, it’s something to work on when you have a kid whose parents told him he sucked every day since birth. But even with not-great parents, let me tell you something about the self-esteem of the average baby, toddler, schoolkid. It’s pretty darn good. They have the time and freedom to devote themselves entirely to their own causes. Bobby didn’t steal from the corner store because he feels worthless or because he wants attention from Daddy. He stole because he wanted something and didn’t have the money to pay for it. It benefited him. Children do things that benefit them. All we do when we say they need more self-esteem or they need more love or they need more attention is provide excuses to kids who are pretty good at thinking up excuses already.”

  Riley said, “For a child psychologist, that’s pretty, um—”

  “Harsh?” Bellamy shook his head. “It’s not. Because the flip side of this is that children are naturally empathetic. Infants will share their toys with another crying infant. Like any other characteristic it will occur more or less—some people get along well with math and others with art, for example—but it can be taught to those who don’t have a lot of it naturally. This is what I’m doing with the six-year-old. Like any toddler he screamed to get what he wanted, like a toy or ice cream instead of dinner. Most parents would put down a gentle foot but some parents—and teachers too—simply don’t have a clue and give in to get the noise to stop. Well, it takes the average baby about two seconds to figure out that this works and then they’re off and screaming.”

  “The Terrible Twos,” Riley said, but he didn’t seem to be exactly buying it.

  “Yes, normal, kid—testing limits, etcetera. But the kids who don’t get limits—”

  “Keep going down that path.”

  “Exactly. Around three or four they start to enjoy it. Manipulating Mom and Dad is no longer means to an end; it’s an end in itself. Why kids who aren’t bullied at home still sometimes become bullies at school. It’s a technique they stumbled on and it gave them a high. They become addicted to the power.”

  Riley guessed where this led. “And like any other addiction, they need more and more.”

  “Exactly!” Bellamy spoke with enthusiasm. Or perhaps he just enjoyed talking to grown-ups for a change.

  “So how do you ‘turn them around’?”

  “Teach them empathy. Despite how they appear most of them are not actually sociopaths. They’ve just never thought about how their actions affect others. Every toddler lies and steals at some point—‘I didn’t take the cookie, my sister Susie did.’ The worst thing you can do is say, ‘Well, every toddler lies and steals at some point.’ You can punish the kid, no cookies for a week, and that’s good except that he might just decide to get better at stealing. He doesn’t consider it wrong, just inconvenient if caught. Some parents say, ‘Well, maybe I don’t know who took it so no cookies for Junior or Susie for a week’—that’s not so good because even Junior can figure out that’s not fair, and if you’re not fair, why should he be? And Susie might not benefit from such a lesson either.”

  Jack shifted impatiently. As he felt well past the age of starting a family, even if he didn’t have such an unusual life situation, he didn’t find the lecture relevant to him. And they hadn’t even talked about Derald Tyson yet.

  “The best thing to do if your toddler lies, cheats, steals? Burst into tears. Ham it up a little if you can. If just once they see how their actions are affecting you, they may do an instant one-eighty. Next, tell Junior he has to do something nice for Susie since he tried to frame the poor girl. Praise him when he does this nice thing. He gets a high. The goal is to train the kids to get the same high from helping people as they had from hurting them.”

  “I see,” Jack said. “So Derald Tyson—”

  “Of course, it’s necessary that the kid cares how you feel. I try to make this connection to someone they already like. With small children it’s usually a parent. They can feel quite strongly toward Mommy even as they make Mommy’s life hell, or even if it’s because Mommy gives them everything they want. There’s a reason grandparents are often these kids’ favorite people. No one’s more indulgent than Nana.”

  Jack shifted in his chair, but Bellamy didn’t seem to notice. “If they have no one who fits that bill then I try ‘We need to be pals.’ I spend a lot of time in sessions playing games with them—checkers, cards, Legos. They have to enjoy spending time with me. The one thing you can’t fake is time, and it’s what kids want from adults more than anything. A couple weeks of snapping plastic bricks together and Junior cares that I feel bad when he engages in antisocial behavior.”

  “So Derald Tyson—”

  “Was, unfortunately, not a toddler.”

  Riley said, “So, another story?”

  Now Bellamy sighed, crossing one slim ankle over the opposite knee. “You guys want any coffee or anything?”

  “No, thank you,” Riley said, as his partner ground his teeth.

  “Well, I do. Give me just a sec, okay? The kitchen always keeps a pot ready for me.�
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  And he disappeared out the door before they could protest. Only his suit jacket and briefcase, left behind on one chair, kept Jack from going after him. “What the hell? We listen to twenty minutes on the proper way to discipline a toddler and then he bails?”

  “He’s coming back.” Riley nodded at the briefcase. “You don’t think this was some code for ‘I can’t tell you because of doctor-patient confidentiality so I’m going to step out but conveniently forget my case files, wink-wink’?”

  “No, I don’t. He would have made sure to tell us he couldn’t talk to us, and besides confidentiality died with Derald.”

  “Okay,” Riley said. “Then he just wanted a cup of coffee.”

  “Or he just wanted to let us know that he’s got a PhD and a roll of rich clients and we’re lowly public servants.”

  Riley glanced over at his partner. “I’m beginning to think you have a self-esteem problem.”

  Bellamy returned, steaming cup in his hand. Apparently the short walk had sharpened his focus because he started to talk before his bottom even hit the seat cushion. “Okay, Derald Tyson. The perfect example of what happens to a Junior when Mommy and Daddy don’t call me in time. Also the perfect counterargument to the belief that all criminally inclined children were neglected, abused, and unloved.”

  He sipped. They waited.

  “I don’t have his file with me so I’m going from memory, of course, but I can give you the gist: Derald was born to a couple in their thirties, very sweet people, Mom is a corporate travel agent and Dad is an exec at Lubrizol. Middle child. Would routinely hit his sister at the age of two. Big deal—what two-year-old doesn’t hit their sister? Mine still raps my skull every time she sees me just to catch up. By three he’s also beating up the neighbor kids. Now it’s a little bigger deal. Mom and Dad spend a lot of time doting on little Derald to assure him that they don’t love him any less just because he was born in between an older sister and a younger brother. So the beatings continue, and morale doesn’t improve. Mealtimes are epic battles. Forget things like making his bed or combing his hair. A slight hiccup when he has to go to school but Mom and Dad tie the teachers’ hands so tightly that they can only shift him to other classes and send him home, with great regularity. Arrested at the age of eight for public drunkenness—he ran out on a babysitter with a bottle of Dad’s scotch. Parents get rid of alcohol in the house, he steals it from the neighbors and is arrested again at nine. Parents start a flurry of ‘keep busy’ activities, thinking they’ll channel the aggression to more constructive traits. Horseback riding—he kicked the horse so hard that the instructor said not to come back unless he wanted to be tied up with a bridle. Soccer—try as he might, the coach could not convince little Derald the rules specified ‘no hands’ because, of course, rules were made to be broken. Karate—which he used to kick a schoolmate in the face, knocking out two teeth.”