Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [21]
“If memory serves, Romeo dies.”
She snorted in derision.
“About the psychopharmacologist,” Jenkins went on. “One of the things he said about you in his report is that, in his opinion, you’re lacking in affect.”
“I think he’s lacking in affect.”
Jenkins gave her a tight smile. “What his diagnosis means is that, basically, you have difficulty locating your emotions. Sometimes you can’t find them at all. In other words, there are times when you just don’t care about anything … or anyone.”
She looked away again.
“His evaluation will hold a great deal of weight in the course of the investigation. Typically, people who can’t feel—”
“I told you,” she flared. “No fucking drugs!”
“You’re not listening to me,” he continued doggedly. “Your reaction to your boyfriend’s death—or rather your lack of one—was duly noted by everyone at the crime scene, including those sympathetic to you.”
“You can’t possibly understand.”
He spread his hands. “Now is your chance to enlighten me.”
She stared at him, stone-faced.
Jenkins sighed heavily. “In return for you being held in your uncle’s recognizance instead of in a federal holding cell, the judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation.” He took another breath and let it out slowly, as if anticipating the coming storm. “You must comply with the psychopharmacologist’s diagnosis, which, of course, includes your taking whatever psychotropic medications he prescribes.”
Alli leapt up again and retreated behind the chair back, as if he were a lion from which she needed saving. “I can’t! I fucking won’t!”
“I’m sorry.” Jenkins regarded her with what seemed to be genuine pity. “I’m afraid you have no choice.”
* * *
DAYLIGHT SEEPED into the grove of trees with the blue-white flicker of a television screen. Jack, exhausted and frightened for Alli, had been scrutinizing the crime scene for hours. The detectives had made their reluctant exit, but Naomi Wilde and Peter McKinsey remained, along with Fearington’s commander, Brice Fellows, who had had sandwiches and thermoses of strong black coffee brought out from the academy’s commissary. Fellows, to his credit, stood back, sipping coffee, silently observing him as he worked. Jack was unfamiliar with McKinsey, but he had gotten to know Naomi well enough when she was guarding the FLOTUS. Carson had plucked Naomi out of her daily assignments specifically to guard his wife. That was how Edward Carson did things—by instinct. In thinking of Lyn Carson, Jack realized that no one had informed Alli that her mother was dead. On reflection, Jack supposed such news was better left undelivered for the time being.
Jack had spent his time wisely. As soon as there was sufficient natural light he switched off the spots and got to work. He had learned to distrust spotlights, which tended to distort perspective and played havoc with the impressions received by his brain. Circling the body in ever closing circles, his dyslexic brain literally took pictures of the corpse—not only the ashen color and unnatural granular quality of the skin, the grotesque disfigurement of body and face, but aspects other people could not see or perhaps accurately interpret. His brain, however, worked more than three hundred times faster than other people’s, and so it could recognize tiny anomalies and dislocations, and, in the time it took a human being to inhale and exhale, analyze them.
This was how he discovered the fracture below the left eye. It was precise, like a break a surgeon would make in the process of resetting a bone. There was, also, a deliberateness about it that intrigued him. He said nothing of either his find or his musings to the people in the grove with him.
He stood up and said to Fellows, “Commander, do you really believe Alli capable of this crime?”
Fellows’s meaty shoulders lifted and fell. “To be honest, Mr. McClure, I found myself a failure at human psychology the moment my wife of twenty years walked out on me without a word of explanation.”
He turned. “Naomi?”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine it.