Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [100]
And that was it, except for some blue onionskin pages typed with an ancient IBM Model-B using italic type. A psychiatric profile, obviously prepared by Pablo at long distance from the subject. I scanned it once quickly, then settled down to read:
“Goldor from relatively wealthy family, sent to British boarding school from age nine to fifteen, when he returned to the States. Return probably occasioned by death of his father. Managed a variety of his father’s holdings, gradually at first, then took exclusive control just prior to death of his mother when he was about twenty. Obsession with hairlessness probably traceable to preoccupation with bodybuilding (note: body builders routinely shave all body hair so as to better display muscular development and vascularity). No validatable information concerning early development. Runs a variety of sex-oriented businesses concurrently with more legitimate enterprises. Projects image of power and dominance in business relationships.”
Then came these underlined words: “What follows is, at best, an educated guess. This represents theorization absent sufficient data and should be so weighted.” Then a lot of mumbo-jumbo about “homosexual ideation,” “situational impotence,” “unresolved Oedipal conflicts,” “sadistic obsessions which the subject believes he tightly controls,” “suspect enuresis, fire-setting, cruelty to small animals, classic triad,” “possibility of iatrogenic therapy prepuberty,” “grandiosity bordering on belief in omnipotence,” “utterly self-contained,” and “functioning psychopath.”
I was still reading when Flood came back wearing one of her robes, this time a bottle-green job with wide black piping on the sleeves. I handed her the stuff without a word and sat and smoked while she read through it. It didn’t take her long. “You know what this stuff means?” she asked.
“Yes—remember, a lot of it is just guessing.”
“I understand some of it—enuresis is bed-wetting, right? But what’s this classic-triad stuff? And what does iatrogenic mean? And—”
“Hold up a minute, Flood. The classic triad is the kid who wets the bed, sets fires, and tortures small animals, especially his own pets. If all three things are going on with the same kid the odds are in favor of him pulling a homicide or two before he grows up. And iatrogenic means a therapeutic treatment that makes a disease worse, like pouring salt on a wound. The whole thing boils down to Goldor being a confirmed degenerate, someone who can never get better no matter what you do with him—or to him.”
“Is this just words, or does it help us?”
“I don’t know. Most of the time it would mean a lot of nothing, but the people who put this together know what they’re doing.”
“They say he’s a functioning psychopath. I thought all psychos were just looney—you know, off the wall.”
“You know what a psychopath is, Flood?”
“I guess not.”
I got to my feet, walked over a few paces and turned to face her. “Imagine you got thrown into a totally dark room, okay? You can’t see a thing. What’s the first thing you do?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Reach out my hands to see where the walls are.”
I reached out my own hands. “Right, you want to find the limits of your environment. Less fancy—you want to know where you stand, what’s going on. That’s why some kids act so bad when you put them in institutions . . . they don’t know the limits and they don’t know how to ask, so they act up so people will step in and show them. But a psychopath, you throw