But she couldn’t break free from the paralysis that gripped her. And even if she could, nothing she could do would change her fate. Not against pure evil of this magnitude. The man was a snake who had hypnotized its victim, his dead, soulless eyes having completely shattered her psyche, as surely as his bullets had shattered her parents’ bodies.
As the man reached for his underwear to pull them down, one hand still clamped tightly over Anna’s mouth, the door from the pharmacy burst inward and Erin’s father stumbled into the room, making an awkward path toward the intruder and his youngest daughter. His intestines were still fully exposed, and he had lost most of his blood, yet there was a look of superhuman determination in his eyes, and Erin somehow realized that only his love for his daughters could have possibly kept him alive for this long.
The intruder reached for his gun with an untroubled expression, but as he was swinging it around, Ted Palmer stumbled and landed at the man’s feet.
The intruder lowered the gun and shook his head in mild amusement. “Don’t tell me you want to watch too?” he said.
Erin’s father lurched forward and stabbed at the man’s lower leg. He had concealed a small syringe filled with unknown fluid and he drove it deep into the intruder’s flesh, using the very last of his strength. Her father fell away from the man and an instant later allowed death to finally take him.
“Great,” the intruder complained to Erin. “Now I have to find out what he just injected me with.” He paused in thought. “I guess I’ll have to move up my timetable.”
With that he put both hands around Anna’s small head and yanked. Erin heard a horrible crack, like a thick tree branch snapping in two, and Anna’s head went limp and lolled to the side.
The man turned to Erin. “I guess it’s just the two of us now. I’ll find out what was in that syringe, and then you’ll get to experience the fun of anal sex for yourself. You’re in for a real treat.”
The man smiled, took one step, and then fell to the floor, his eyes glazing over. He convulsed a few times and then his heart stopped.
Whatever Ted Palmer had injected had finally taken its full effect.
A small part of Erin Palmer felt a shallow relief, but the intensity of her suffering remained crippling. She was vaguely aware of time passing, but everything was a blur. She continued sobbing softly until she finally fell into a welcome unconsciousness.
The next morning, Emily, her father’s nurse, came in to work to find a scene straight from a charnel house. An hour later, the building swarming with police and two psychologists, Erin still hadn’t moved, now curled up into a fetal position.
It was as though she had died inside, even though her body was still living. Her father had given every last ounce of his strength to save his daughters’ lives. And Erin had done nothing. Now she was totally alone in the world. Alone with her cowardice and shame. And alone after suffering a loss so great it nearly stripped her of her sanity.
A female psychologist cleaned Erin up gently and gathered the young girl in her arms, carrying her away from the grisly surroundings. Feeling a compassionate human touch helped Erin’s psyche reemerge from its hiding place for just a moment.
Why had this happened? a voice inside her head demanded of an uncaring universe. How could that man have taken everything from her? How could God allow such evil to exist?
Erin tilted her head and caught the eye of the counselor. “Why?” she whispered hoarsely, her voice pleading.
This would be the last word Erin Palmer would speak for the next twenty-seven days.
PART ONE
SCIENTISTS DECODE PSYCHOPATHS’ BRAINS
Science Illustrated, May/June 2012
Psychopaths suffer from an antisocial personality disorder, expressed in a marked lack of empathy, conscience, and sympathy … Psychopaths either do not feel fear or simply disregard it … Psychopaths are thought to be predisposed to commit violent crime. It has been estimated that while only 1 percent of the population are psychopaths, they make up 11 to 25 percent of all prison inmates.
… In healthy individuals, viewing morally offensive pictures activated an area in the amygdala, whereas this area was not activated at all in psychopaths. The amygdala is involved in emotional processing.
[Researchers] examined the “connecting roads” in the brains of psychopaths who had been imprisoned for murder, multiple rape convictions, strangulation … The study demonstrated that the white matter connecting the orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the vision-related centers of the brain was markedly weakened in the group of psychopaths as compared to a control group of healthy individuals.
STUDY FINDS PSYCHOPATHS HAVE DISTINCT BRAIN STRUCTURE
Chicago Tribune, May 7, 2012
The study showed that psychopaths, who are characterized by a lack of empathy, had less gray matter in the areas of the brain important for understanding other peoples’ emotions.
Blackwood’s team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of forty four violent adult male offenders in Britain … The crimes they had committed included murder, rape, attempted murder, and grievous bodily harm … The results showed that the psychopaths’ brains had significantly less gray matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles than the brains of the nonpsychopathic offenders and nonoffenders.
These areas of the brain are important for understanding other people’s emotions and intentions, and are activated when people think about moral behavior, the researchers said. Damage to these areas is linked with a lack of empathy, a poor response to fear and distress, and a lack of self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.
1
ERIN PALMER PARKED her fifteen-year-old Dodge Intrepid, which continued to be more reliable than it had any right to be, especially given the time it spent in the relentless desert sun, and checked herself in the rearview mirror. Her hair was pulled back into an ugly, severe bun so tightly that it looked as if she had an oversized forehead. She removed a pair of glasses from a case—glasses containing large, strangely shaped lenses set in thick, brown plastic that seemed to clash in every way possible with the contours of her face—slipped them on, and checked her makeup, which added fifteen years to her face and left the impression of wrinkles rather than a silky-smooth, flawless complexion.
She exited the car and adjusted her drab but professional outfit, which had virtually no waist and was cut in a way that made it unclear to anyone seeing her from the neck down if she was a man or a woman, covering every inch of her body more surely than a burka.
She left the car and walked past a sign that was surrounded by cacti and sagebrush, a tiny oasis of landscaping in an otherwise barren and uncared-for desert landscape. The sign read, Arizona State Prison Complex—Tucson.
Another day at her home away from home.
As she approached the entrance, the main yard came into view within the fenced-in perimeter, the coils of razor wire on top of the tall fences looking as lethal and intimidating as ever. Inmates exercised or conversed in small clusters throughout the dry, dusty yard, every last one of them wearing orange: some wearing cotton slacks and an orange T-shirt, some having chosen orange sweats in the chilly morning desert air, but all of the clothing stamped with giant black letters, ADC, which stood for Arizona Department of Corrections.
She submitted to scanning and security procedures with a mechanical detachment and finally walked through two heavy metal doors that slid open before her, triggered by a guard manning a control station. The doors were programmed so that the second door wouldn’t release until the first door was closed behind her, so that for just a moment she was trapped between two impenetrable doors, in what she’d learned was called a sally port. As she cleared the second door, which slid shut behind her with a solid thunk, she waved her thanks to the guard behind her.
To Erin’s right a familiar sign read, Welcome to ASPC, Tucson—Medium Security Prison. Medium was a misnomer if ever there was one. No one was getti
ng out of this facility unless they were let out.
“Alejandro,” said Erin cheerfully to her favorite prison guard, who met her just inside the grounds. “Good morning.”
“Good to see you, Erin,” he said, having long since become completely comfortable using her first name, which she had insisted upon, rather than the Miss Palmer he had used in the early days. He began to escort her to the side yard where she would spend the entire day.
“How was your daughter’s birthday party this weekend?” asked Erin.
“She loved it,” he said with a big smile. “The balloon guy was a big hit. And a lot less expensive than a magician,” he added.
Erin nodded. “Good choice. Those magicians can be hit or miss. And you got the added benefit of the kids getting to keep the balloons when your guy was finished.”
They entered a side yard, whose most distinguishing feature was a massive trailer that was parked dead center—a long rectangular container that had been unhitched from the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. Makeshift wooden stairs led up to its entrance.
Inside the trailer there was carpeting, an office, an all-important air-conditioning unit, and a smooth, white, doughnut-shaped MRI apparatus, with a perpendicular platform emerging from the bottom of the doughnut hole. The platform would slide the heads and upper torsos of patients inside the white torus, which generated a potent magnetic field, so they could be bombarded with radio frequency pulses and have their brains mapped. The trailer may have been mobile, but it now seemed as permanent a fixture in the prison as the fences, and it was an office Erin had occupied for three or four days a week for many years.
When they arrived at the trailer, Erin handed Alejandro a printed list of names. “I’ve got a pretty packed schedule today,” she said.
“When don’t you have a packed schedule?” he replied in amusement.
They chatted warmly for another five minutes and then he left, returning a few minutes later with a man named John, dressed in orange, although not restrained in any way.
“Welcome back, Miss Palmer,” said John affably. “How was your weekend?”
“Good,” she said flatly; noncommittally. She made sure she always acted professionally, but was never friendly. But this wasn’t always easy to do. The man in front of her now was even more charming than most of the men she worked with—and that was saying a lot. He was relaxed and confident. He was of average height but managed to look trim and appealing, even in prison orange. He had striking blue eyes that stood out against jet-black hair, a masculine and very symmetrical face, and no tattoos or piercings to mar his classically handsome features.
“Are you ready for today’s session?” asked Erin, keeping her voice monotone.
“Absolutely,” replied John enthusiastically. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Yes, he was the total package. He was handsome and charming and smooth as silk. He had also, three years earlier, beaten a young couple into a bloody paste with a tire iron. They had been out on a date and had paused during a stroll for an extended kiss, leaning against his car as they did so and inadvertently scratching it.
When it was over, John calmly carried the tire iron he had used to kill them to a nearby field, buried it, and returned to his apartment, where he had showered off to remove the significant amount of blood that had splattered on him, ordered a pepperoni pizza—since he had worked up quite an appetite—and settled in to watch a movie on cable.
Since this had happened at night and there were no witnesses, it was more luck than skill that had enabled the police to finally catch him five months later. When asked if he felt remorse for what he had done, a look of disbelief had come over his face and he had said, “Why should I feel remorse? They got what was coming to them. I had just gotten that car repainted the week before. They didn’t care about me. Why should I care about them?”
Erin forced herself to remember the exact reason John was here every time she met with him. He smiled at her pleasantly. “Let’s do this thing,” he said, straightening his orange shirt.
Erin nodded, keeping her face impassive. Yeah, she thought grimly, this John is a real charmer all right. She took a deep breath, motioned him into the trailer, and then followed.
Alejandro watched them both enter, waited for the door to shut, and then walked purposefully over to his post near the entrance to the trailer.
2
ERIN HAD BEEN in graduate school now for over five years, and her thesis should have been completed already, but it was at least a year or so away. The truth was that she didn’t much care. She had bigger goals than this, and was in no hurry. And even though her thesis advisor, Professor Jason Apgar, mouthed platitudes about her needing to speed it up, she did great work, marred only by a few unfortunate incidents that had been found to be totally unrelated to her work. Graduate students were slave labor, and she required almost no supervision, had a mind as sharp as a razor, and was more dedicated than anyone in the school. She knew Apgar wouldn’t rush her to get her Ph.D.
As John filled out a standard questionnaire, her mind wandered to the first time she had met Jason Apgar. She had been accepted into six graduate programs, and she had set up a meeting with him before committing to a school. Her first visit to the University of Arizona. Her first visit to Arizona, period.
The school was an oasis, about a square mile in area, in the middle of Tucson’s Sonoran Desert, at the foot of a barren mountain range, one of five minor mountain ranges surrounding the city. A significant portion of the main campus had been designated an arboretum, and plants from around the world were labeled along a self-guided walking tour, which naturally included plenty of cacti. While it wasn’t Princeton or the University of Chicago, both of which she had been accepted to, it was highly regarded academically, especially in her field of interest, and it formed a thriving social community of forty thousand students. Yes, it was as hot as the surface of the sun in the summer, but during most of the academic year it was sunny and pleasant, and she had been assured that the school took its air-conditioning very seriously.
After touring the campus and grabbing a quick lunch, she made her way over to Dr. Apagar’s office for her scheduled meeting. He shook her hand and motioned for her to take a chair sitting in front of a desk so cluttered with stacks of scholarly papers and miscellaneous items that he had to rearrange several tall stacks so they could have an unobstructed view of one another.
“Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Apgar. I really appreciate it.”
“Not at all,” he replied. “And please, call me Jason.”
She acknowledged this request and he continued. “I understand we’ve accepted you into the department, but you haven’t committed yet.”
“That’s right. I wanted to meet with you in person before making any decisions.”
“So I take it you have interest in my work, then?”
“Very much so,” replied Erin. “I’ve read all of your papers with great interest. Your work with prison inmates is fascinating. More than that,” she amended. “It’s groundbreaking.”
Apgar couldn’t help but smile. “Thank you,” he said. “I would wholeheartedly agree with you on that, but my modesty prevents me.”
Erin laughed.
Apgar raised his eyebrows. “The school is very keen to get you here, Erin. They sent me your records, and I can see why. Top GRE scores, top grades, a course load that was very broad, lots of neuroscience to go along with psychology, even molecular biology. You took on a course load that would break the backs of most students, and performed extremely well. Very impressive.”
She nodded in acknowledgement.
“So what questions can I answer for you?” he said. “I can tell you about the graduate program’s course requirements, research requirements, teaching requirements—whatever you want. I can talk about the culture here. The climate. Anything I can do to help you make your decision.”
“Thank you, um … Jason,” she said awkwardly. “Bu
t what I’d really like to do is learn more about your research with prison inmates. Your methodology and conclusions were fairly straightforward—and very profound. But I had some questions about the nuts and bolts of what you did.”
“Okay.”
“So I know you conducted MRIs on prisoners. And I know what you found. But how did you do it? In practice? Did you actually go into a prison? Or were the prisoners brought to a medical facility?”
“The entire study was done on prison grounds,” he replied.
She nodded slowly. “Yeah, that makes sense for security reasons. But I never would have guessed they’re set up to do MRIs in a maximum security prison.”
Apgar smiled. “They aren’t. But it turns out there are a number of companies that have mobile MRIs for rent or lease. The rental units are quite nice. It’s like they’ve put a doctor’s office inside the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. You just order one up. A driver brings it to the prison, is screened, drives through the gates, sets up the trailer in the prison yard, and then drives off in the cab. The trailer is parked there for months or years at a time.”
“That has to be pretty expensive.”
“Not as much as you might think,” he said. “And my lab has been awarded a significant amount of grant money—more than enough to cover it.” He paused. “And I did the study in a medium security prison, by the way. Not maximum.”
Erin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t understand. According to your paper, you studied serial rapists, murderers, and torturers. How are these people not in maximum security prisons?”
“How much do you know about psychopathy?” he asked her.
She paused as if searching her mind. She suspected she knew almost as much about the condition as he did. “A little,” she lied.
The Cure Page 2