Do No Harm

"I think he's striking out against rejection, abandonment. As you said earlier, he perceives he's protecting himself."

"Of course he does," Dash said. "But there's more. Assaulting women gives him a satisfaction he doesn't achieve in any other aspect of his life. It's an accomplishment, David. It allows him to replace chronic feelings of inferiority with feelings of empowerment and pride. He's ugly, stupid, and profoundly asocial. He never knew what having control felt like until he seized that alkali and let fly."

"So maybe if he's given some control in his life… " David said. "If he doesn't feel like he's constantly threatened… "

"And how about when he is?" Dash asked. "I had a teenager call me a nigger at the grocery store for taking the last carton of orange juice. We live in a routinely hostile world."

David eyed Dash's bulging arms. "Brave kid."

They reached the field and Dash threw down his weighty bag and began to stretch out his arms.

"So you believe he has deeply ingrained psychopathology and his prognosis is bad," David said. "Sounds like a candidate for an insanity plea if he's brought to trial."

"There are a lot of people with severe mental and emotional problems who can still distinguish right from wrong."

"Which means?"

"Which means he might be psychologically insane, but in his case, that probably won't translate to legal insanity. The courts present us with two options-drooling psycho or nutcase-and they rarely if ever fit. If a violent person pleads insanity, it reduces them to a status of nonpersonhood, a passive victim of brain disease, whose behavior is senseless and unintelligible. This is facile and despicable, and unfortunately, the better option. But it's probably not open to Clyde. He's insane and criminal. No get-out-of-jail-free card."

"It doesn't matter if he's in legitimate need of psychiatric care? He can't go to a high-security hospital like Patton?"

"There are eight times as many mentally ill people in prisons as there are in state mental hospitals. Does that answer your question?" Dash took note of David's expression. "I'm just being realistic. If he's captured, it becomes a legal game. Has he shown goal-oriented activity? Yes. Has he attempted to avoid detection? Yes. The M'Naghten Rule still holds, and Clyde fits both criteria to be sentenced harshly-he knew the nature and quality of the acts he was committing, and he knew they were wrong. If memory serves, he made both of these facts abundantly clear in your conversation with him in the ER. So yes, he will, in all likelihood, wind up in prison. And you'll be the prosecution's star witness." He regarded David with a tilt of his head. "Unless you decide to take up perjury."

"No, I think I'll pass on that one."

"This case has all the elements for a good scapegoating. Heavy press coverage, benevolent victims, an inarticulate, unattractive assailant. He'll be locked away as soon as they can jam him through the courts."

Dash crouched, removing a discus from his bag. He was still the Nigerian record holder in the discus, though David had never been certain of how noteworthy that distinction was.

Dash entered the discus circle and practiced a few rapid pivots, his feet shushing over the concrete. The sun lent the surrounding grass a metallic sheen. Dash paused, breathing heavily, and faced David again. "And since I'm already on my soapbox, let me whine a bit about our lovely prison system. Rape is an institutionalized practice. Massively underreported."

"I'm aware that prisons aren't a good place to summer, Dash."

"My point is that someone like Clyde is particularly ill equipped to handle it. The acute deprivation, the constant abuse-he'll be ripped apart. Look what happened to Jeffrey Dahmer."

"What did happen to Dahmer?"

"Bludgeoned to death with a metal bar." Dash hurled himself into the spin, his enormous body moving quick and graceful, and unleashed the discus with a grunt. It shot from his grip, arcing across the clear blue sky.

David let out a long, weary sigh. "Well, odds are the cops'll shoot him anyway."

Dash stood, hands on his hips, and watched the discus hit the grass and skid to a halt. When he turned back to David, his eyes were deeply sorrowful. "In some ways," he said, "that might be more humane."

Chapter 43

THE shadows were beginning to lengthen by the time David arrived at Carson's apartment complex, a two-story '70s stucco sprawl. The grounds were a confusion of stairs, patios, and short outdoor halls.