“Who said that?” Andrew demanded, glancing quickly about his computer screen.
“Nobody said that,” I declared, without, I hoped, missing a beat. “It was your conscience, Andrew, telling you that you truly are wasting time.” Cutting off his attempt to protest further, I said quickly, “Now, then—last time we were talking about how much attaching the forensic sciences to law enforcement agencies at the beginning of the twentieth century weakened the ability of early criminal investigators to apply The Theory of Context with real force. Remind us, Andrew, why this was so.”
As the rest of the class tried to suppress smiles of satisfaction, Andrew grimaced uneasily and answered, “Because criminal scientists lost their independence, and began to bend their findings in a strictly prosecutorial direction.”
“Not right away, Andrew,” Linda said. “There was a period of give-and-take.”
“Indeed, Linda,” I judged. “Although that period was not quite as long as most think. The shift to a prosecutorial bent by criminal scientists in fact occurred fairly quickly, forcing Context, in its formal sense, more and more into the hands of relatively few criminal psychologists. In fact, by the early Nineteen-twenties…”
The class proceeded in like manner for the first forty-five minutes, after which we took a five-minute break, one that permitted me to retreat behind the black partition and fix a firm scowl on Lucas, who was already holding up his hands.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he whispered. “I didn’t think they could hear me!”
I tried to maintain my arch attitude; but Lucas now had the flight goggles over his eyes, and was a pretty comical sight. “You somehow figured that this piece of fabric is soundproof?” I whispered back, slapping at the partition. “No more of that, Lucas; we’ll get to you soon enough. Meanwhile, it’s important that you listen to and absorb the discussion in this class. Check?”
“Check, got it,” Lucas murmured. Then, as I began to turn away, he lifted the goggles back onto his forehead, and nudged Mike, who was working feverishly at his computer. “Kind of a hard-ass, ain’t he?” the kid whispered.
Michael busted up, causing me to spin back around and lift a finger to the both of them. “I’m not kidding, you two—knock it off.” But I couldn’t suppress a slight smile of my own, as I grabbed a bottle of water from a nearby case and went back behind the partition.
“Now then,” I said, retaking my seat, opening my water, and suddenly noticing that an additional two faces had appeared on the screens: a tough but handsome and amiable young mestizo man from southern Arizona called Frankie, as well as a classic Californian blonde in her mid-twenties named Vicky, who was in fact one of the smartest students I had. “I see the Southwestern contingent has decided to join us—does that really mean we have to discuss the irrelevance of time zones to attendance once again?”
“No es mi culpa, Doctor,” Frankie said, although his English was fine. “I got profiled on my way home—bastards searched my whole damned car.”
“If true, Frankie,” I said, agreeably enough, “then I apologize for the white race. If untrue, points for inventiveness. Vicky?”
“Can’t beat that,” she replied a bit sheepishly, in a voice roughened by liquor and cigarettes. “Unless you’d like to count being profiled by God for getting drunk last night.”
That brought some soft laughter from the others, and I chuckled, myself. “Afraid not,” I replied. “But we will let this one go as a warning. All right—we had been discussing the erosion of Context due to the attachment of independent criminal science to law enforcement, and the creation thereafter of forensic science. The subsequent dominance of statistical rather than contextual analysis has been covered, as well, a rise that was soon cemented by what evil tool, again?”
“The computer,” said an unusually soft-spoken young woman from Boston, Colleen, who was moving straight from her undergraduate work into graduate studies, after having won an internship with the BPD’s Crime Lab Unit, during which she witnessed several large-scale scandals involving techs tampering with evidence in order to increase conviction rates. She generally hung back in discussions, although I would have preferred her to speak up more; for she had much to tell, as I had learned during one-on-one sessions concerning her papers and grades.
“Thank you, Colleen,” I said. “Anybody else care to add anything to my summary?”
“Well,” Vicky said, still a bit embarrassed, “you may have already gone over it, but there’s the twisting of profiling itself: an emphasis on those behavioral elements that indicated abnormal or criminal activities, and the interpretation of innocent or even exculpatory behavior as fitting a criminal pattern, because the context of the subject’s ordinary behavior was ignored.”
“Indeed,” I answered, admiring the young woman’s ability to jump into a discussion midstream and sound like she’d been there all along, which was why I’d forgiven her being late. “Thus we have the twin evils of the failure of criminal science to remain independent—to retain what Conan Doyle rightly saw as the virtues of a consulting position: first, gathering evidence began to be taught and learned as a way to find and emphasize only those physical traces that would serve the cause of establishing a favored or simply an obvious suspect’s guilt—”
“Now, hang on, Doctor,” Andrew said, at which the other students groaned. Andrew was good-natured enough to smile at the others’ objections, yet enough of a pain in the ass to press forward: “Seriously, I think I have a legitimate question—”
“I got one,” Frankie murmured, in his most entertaining cholo accent. “How the fuck did choo ever get into theess class, wedo?” The groans from the rest of the group turned to laughter: a lucky thing, because it covered another round of irrepressible amusement from Lucas and Mike. But Andrew, although he was laughing at being the butt of the joke, was not to be denied:
“Yeah, yeah, thanks, Frankie,” he said. “But I do wanna know: you keep talking about what a perversion it was for criminal science to become part of law enforcement, and to take on a prosecutorial bent, finding only evidence of guilt, but—I mean, what the hell is forensic science supposed to do otherwise?” Yet even as he asked the question, the slow dawn of comprehension crept over his features. “Oh. Yeah, okay, I think I get it.”
“And what is it you think you ‘get’?” I asked. “Just so that we’re all sure.”
“I get it, I get it,” he repeated sheepishly. “They’re not supposed to be looking for guilt. They’re supposed to be looking for the truth.”
“ ‘The truth’?” I echoed. “ ‘What is the truth, said jesting Pilate—’ ”
“ ‘—and would not stay for an answer!’ ” my class called out in a unified drone, having heard me voice this quote of Francis Bacon’s a few too many times. Apparently.
“Indeed,” I replied. “And never forget it. Let us leave troublesome, elusive truth be, Andrew, and ask criminal science only for facts, eh? Now—where in the hell were we?”
“You had just said,” answered Colleen, the scribe of the class, as she checked her notes, “that we’d reached the twin evils caused by criminal science’s attachment to law enforcement: first, um, that ‘gathering evidence began to be taught and learned as a way to find and emphasize only those physical traces that would serve the cause of establishing a favored or simply an obvious suspect’s guilt.’ ”
“Word for word, as always, Colleen, thank you,” I said. “And second, there was the perhaps even more shameful drift of so many criminal psychologists in the same direction, which would eventually give the lie to names like the FBI’s vaunted ‘Behavioral Science Unit.’ ”
“Because they don’t study all behaviors,” said Amy, in her light Tennessean drawl.
“Don’t now, and didn’t ever,” I agreed. “And by focusing their attention so strictly on criminal—and let’s try to lose the word ‘abnormal,’ Vicky, because, horrified as it would make many of your psychology professors to hear, it’s mean
ingless—but by focusing so strictly on criminal behaviors, such labs and their staffs have learned to find precisely what they are trained to find; and, worse yet, to understand what may well be innocent or even exculpatory behaviors only in their possibly incriminating contexts. Everybody up to speed? Good. And so, let’s proceed to specific cases. Who’s got one? We’re talking about early examples, now.”
“How about the Lindbergh kidnapping?” Linda offered.
“Fine,” I said. “A good start. The Lindbergh kidnapping: Baby Lindy, Bruno Hauptmann, the New Jersey State Police, and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover—a nice nexus of the various subjects under discussion. Thank you, Linda…”
For the remaining forty minutes or so, we all discussed half a dozen early examples of the prostitution of criminal science and psychology to law enforcement, district attorneys’ offices, and federal officials. I could only suppose that Mike had somehow managed to duct-tape Lucas’ mouth shut, because there were no more whispers or laughs from beyond the screen. It did not occur to me that the boy might actually be engrossed in what was being said; but in this as in so many things, he was set to surprise me.
“Okay,” I declared, when the class’ time was almost up. “Since even Andrew has managed to grasp the concepts we’ve gone over today, I think we can count our blessings and end the week on a high note.” A few students chuckled, but more sighed in relief beneath the sound of papers and books shuffling. “Just one more thing,” I said, drawing the laptop that sat on the desk close. “I am transmitting to all of you, and to our absent members, a PDF file containing several more pages of Dr. Kreizler’s final journal—the last few pages, actually—and I hardly need say that the same rules apply as have for the other installments: this document was only recently discovered, and it was found privately, by a colleague of mine. Therefore its use in this class should be considered confidential. Its bearing on what we’ve been discussing should be obvious, but I’ll expect at least one written page from each of you explaining just what that relevance is by Monday afternoon.” I transmitted the file with a few keypad depressions. “It’ll be encrypted in the usual way, and you can use the same password. I’ll see you Monday, then.”
The screens before me began to go blank, and my mind immediately turned to what was going on behind me: to what I would say if Lucas and Mike were just wasting time—
But when I stepped behind the screen, I actually saw Lucas at the desk Mike had assigned him, busily if unfamiliarly scrawling notes onto a legal pad; and I don’t mind saying, I was both gratified and impressed, a feeling that only increased when he looked up at me and declared:
“Hey, Doc, I get it! CSI, Criminal Minds, all those shows, they really are full of it!”
Under ordinary circumstances, I would have quit while I was ahead, as I had done with Andrew. But in Lucas’ case, I felt the need for a little more proof than this one comment, which could have been uttered merely to undo the mischief that he’d caused during the session. “Oh?” I said. “And what exactly makes you say that, Lucas?”
“Well,” he replied quickly, “see, on those shows, they always start by saying what the statistics of a certain kind of crime have to do with whatever suspect they’ve picked out, or picked up, instead of letting whatever evidence they’ve found give them a whole list of possible suspects, or, even better, letting it build a real profile of a suspect—one that’s got to do with the context of the particular crime, not with freaking statistics. That’s practically all they ever talk about, statistics! But every case has to be looked at on its own.”
Such was, indeed, a minor triumph, whether of the boy’s innate talent or my teaching ability or both did not matter. And, as I say, it should have been cause enough to call the evening’s proceedings a complete success. But Lucas’ introduction to our work had only begun; and, as he continued on to learn more, it would simultaneously become time for the flow of information to be reversed, and for him to begin telling us what he knew about the three deaths under consideration. That, he would do—but only after Mike, who had never stopped laboring at his computer despite all distractions, revealed his stunningly unexpected discoveries.
{v.}
“Okay, here’s what I’ve got.” Mike took up a legal pad of his own that was covered in his usual combination of scrawled bullet points and shorthand symbols that only he could read. “The X-ray, as we know, came out as we figured: a hanging, and not in the trailer. But along with that, there were, indeed, traces of a crystalline drug on Shelby’s clothes, which at first I figured were probably just the meth that we’d been told she was using, and a bag of which was found next to her clothing.”
“Wait,” Lucas said, now wandering about the JU-52’s fuselage and taking a deeper interest in the known aspects of each of the three deaths that we’d posted at various points, together with photographs of the victims. The pictures had been supplied to Steve Spinetti by the two schools the victims had attended, and were then sent to us by Pete Steinbrecher. “You’re saying that the cops think Shelby was a meth head?” the kid continued dubiously.
“Not, apparently, while she lived in West Briarwood,” I answered. “But they’re presuming she picked up the habit, as Mike says, during the time she went missing.”
“Context—I call it!” Lucas declared. “If that’s what they think, then they didn’t know much about her. Meth was not Shelby’s deal.”
“Oh?” I replied. “And what was Shelby’s deal, then?”
“Sex!” our young expert went on, removing the flight jacket, which was causing him to sweat profusely even as the warm day turned to cooler evening. But the cockpit headgear, which seemed to give him some feeling of authority, remained in place. “That’s what Derek and I meant before, when we said that everybody knew about Shelby.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mike inquired. “Got around with the boys, did she?”
“Some boys, maybe,” Lucas replied, “but that wasn’t the big story about her. See, she used to come to games a lot, at our school—just when West Briarwood’s teams were playing ours, at first, but then she came to almost any of our games. It was kind of weird, I mean, she had a lot of friends at Morgan, but still, you don’t see a lot of girls showing up at other schools’ games, unless they’ve got a boyfriend on one of the teams or something. But she didn’t.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe she just liked athletics.”
“Come on, Doc.” Lucas looked more closely at the sheet of known behaviors we’d posted concerning Shelby, seeming to relish his new role of expert. “You’re really telling me the sheriff’s office doesn’t know about it? Because I don’t see it up here.”
“What the hell are you talking about, junior?” Mike asked.
“And I don’t like ‘junior’ any more than ‘kid,’ Mike,” Lucas shot back. Mike apologized quickly, and the boy went on: “I mean about the scandal. Everybody knew about it—it got our asshole phys-ed teacher, Mr. Holloway, fired. Or forced to quit, whatever. Which made Shelby kind of a hero, to a lot of us.” Considering the matter for an instant, Lucas then decided, “Although the school did try to keep the whole thing pretty hushed up, so maybe it never got to the sheriff. You gotta ask Ambyr, she knows more about the details than I do—”
“Lucas?” I asked, as patiently as possible. “Care to tell us what you know?”
“Right,” he said, his brain in overdrive. “Well, at first it had to do with Mr. Holloway getting the tires on his car slashed. He’s, like, maybe a little younger than you guys, used to be a big deal in college sports—total asshole, though I guess he’s good-looking. Technically. Anyway, everybody thought that it was some kids on a team from a school we beat that did it, since he also coached all the boys’ teams, when he wasn’t making us non-jocks miserable in PE. Then there was a rumor he was having an affair with a girl in our school—one of the cheerleaders—and that she did it. The guy’s married, and the story went that he’d told the girl he was gonna get a divorce, but went back on his promise. But that turned ou
t to be even more bullshit. Then it turned out that his wife got caught for it—there was a real short shot of her on a security camera in the school parking lot, which they missed, at first. Pretty soon after that, Holloway quit, without any reason. Except that there was a reason—turned out he’d been doing Shelby in his office after games. She was fucking fourteen! Which he didn’t know, or so he said—she told him she was seventeen, and the dumb-ass bought it. Not that she didn’t look like she was seventeen, or frickin’ twenty, when she got all made up. Anyway, he said he was going to leave his wife and live with her, since her parents were gone.”
“How…?” I was dumbfounded. “How can you possibly know all of this to be fact?”
“A girl who worked in the school office,” Lucas said simply. “Friend of my sister’s, she saw all the records, which they shredded, afterwards. And, like I say, Shelby had a lot of friends at Morgan. It got around. But her parents were gone, and the people she was staying with didn’t seem to give two shits about it.”
“That much certainly fits,” Mike judged; and indeed, it did not seem that the family members that Shelby had been left with—and who had kept her in an equipment shed—would have wanted to get mixed up in such business. “But what’s all this got to do with whether or not she was a meth user?”
“Because her parents were,” Lucas answered simply. “And she told all her friends at Morgan about how much she hated having to live with them, with all their meth-head friends around all the time. Man, I cannot be-lieve the sheriff didn’t know any of this.”
“What’d I tell you, Mike?” I said, quickly grabbing a notepad and jotting down the particulars of Lucas’ tale. “The kid’s a gold mine…”
Lucas erupted: “How many times I gotta tell you guys—!”
“Okay, look, Lucas,” I said, still scribbling notes. “You have to get over this whole ‘kid’ thing. See, where we come from, it’s not an insult. Hell, Mike and I call each other ‘kid.’ ”