“How much for fizzy water?”
“Don’t ask.” He took a second sip, observing me through pale eyes, blue fading into gray, steady and devoid of anxiety. “What can I do for you, Deputy?”
Blameless. Or a psychopath.
“Let’s start with the night of the conference,” I said. “In your words.”
“I was scheduled to speak for an hour. Midway through, a man slips in at the back. I noticed he looked a bit fidgety, but no cause for alarm. People change their minds all the time, switch seminars. I kept going. He stands there a few minutes, then comes running up the aisle.”
“At you?”
“Scratch that,” Delaware said. “Run’s not the right word. He could hardly stand. He tripped over a chair leg and went down on the carpet.”
The memory seemed to sadden him. “People tried to help him up, but he shook them off and planted himself in front of the lectern. ‘Delaware...’ ” Wagging a finger. “ ‘Delaware, I forgive you.’ That’s when I realized who he was. I’m amazed I did, given how long it’s been.”
“Why would you need his forgiveness?”
“I don’t,” he said. “That’s what I told him. ‘Please, let’s not do this right here. There’s no need.’ In his mind, though? I don’t suppose he had any love lost for me. I heard he ended up losing his job.”
“He did.”
“Terrible situation. For so many people.” He sipped. “Put it in context, Deputy: I testify all the time. I’ve made people angry. It’s an occupational hazard.”
“So why was Rennert focused on you?”
“Was he focused on me?” Delaware asked. “Or just drunk and deteriorated and seizing the opportunity because I happened to be in town?”
That stopped me short. “I don’t know.”
“It was a long trial,” he said. “Lots of moving parts, teams of witnesses on both sides. Including, I presume, other psychologists. Have you talked to them?”
I said I hadn’t.
“A child custody case, fine,” he said. “People resolve not to mess their kids up, but often they do, and it gets ugly. Personal. But with Rennert, nothing I did or said should’ve inspired any special resentment. I’m not one of those guys who gets inventive on the stand. I tell lawyers that at the outset. More often than not, they hire someone else.”
“But not on this one.”
“They wanted a qualified opinion on a single, narrow issue. I gave mine. I doubt I made or broke anything. And it’s not as though Rennert tried to contact me before. So I find it hard to believe he’s had it out for me all these years.”
He smiled. “On the other hand, I could be in denial.”
His take on Rennert’s state of mind made sense to me. The iPhone calendar had Rennert playing tennis the morning of the lecture. I pictured him leaving his club, noticing the hotel marquee. I imagined the mix of delight and dread. A psych conference, going on right now, right in his front yard.
He’d be curious, naturally. Enough to look up who was talking and what about. He had indeed viewed the conference webpage on his phone.
Browsing the speakers’ list.
Seeing Delaware’s name.
Feeling the pinch of a dormant grievance.
Witness for the plaintiff.
Calling the Claremont, getting no answer.
Putting back a few drinks.
Discovering, suddenly, the courage to go on over there and give his old adversary a piece of his mind.
I said, “What was the single narrow issue?”
“I was asked to evaluate the boy who had committed the murder and determine whether he was psychologically stable enough to participate in a study with the potential to induce a high level of stress.”
“And you said he wasn’t.”
“Psychology’s a limited science,” he said. “No one honest can pontificate about the past or the future. I said that, if it were my study, I would have excluded him. That’s all.”
“Even so, that implicates Rennert.”
“If the jury took it that way, that’s up to them. I can’t control how things get spun. Let me be very clear: I never said that a video game could make anyone kill anyone. I never said it, because I don’t believe it. I always thought the whole media-violence link is a bunch of horseshit. For one thing, it’s simplistic. It minimizes the role of personal responsibility. In my experience, it’s the individual that matters most of all. Not to mention that a lot of the studies that claim to prove a connection are poorly designed and haphazardly controlled. Back in the nineties, though, it was a sexy topic. The government liked it, you could get big grant money.”
“You don’t think there’s any way the experiment could have set the kid off.”
“I can’t answer that, Deputy.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Either,” Delaware said. “I don’t know what set him off. People are complicated. A doesn’t necessarily cause B. I tried to clarify that but got cut short by plaintiffs’ attorneys.”
“At that point you were no longer helping their case.”
“Like I said, I’m impartial,” he said. “I thought defense might raise it on cross-examination but they didn’t.”
“Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to,” I said.
Delaware nodded. “They wanted me off the stand as quickly as possible. They still had to present their side, and if a jury hears the words study and murder in the same sentence two hundred times, even if that sentence is ‘The study did not cause the murder,’ they start to associate those ideas, whether they realize it or not.”
He paused. “You see the irony, of course. Here’s Rennert, year after year, paper after paper, doing his damnedest to show a causal relationship between violent media and actual violence. Then one of these kids actually does what he’s predicting, plays a game and goes out and kills someone, and his lawyers have to turn around and argue, no, it doesn’t actually work that way. Everything our client has written, his entire life’s work, all the articles, books, and speeches? Just kidding, guys.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t around to watch him take the stand, but I bet the Zhaos’ lawyers had a field day.”
He swirled the ice in his glass. “Look. I didn’t agree with Rennert’s methodology. I thought it was sloppy, not to mention based on a silly premise. And what happened to that poor girl was horrific. But that doesn’t put the knife in Rennert’s hands.”
“If he believed in his own theories, he had to feel responsible.”
Delaware nodded. “I’m sure he did. From the little I knew him, I thought his intentions were good. When he turned up at the hotel, he looked possessed. He said he forgave me but I got the sense he could’ve been talking to himself. I felt sorry for him. Still do.”
The idea of Rennert needing a sedative no longer seemed quite so far-fetched. Equally conceivable was that he’d hide that need from his daughter. “Did you have a personal relationship, outside of this case?”
“You asked me that over the phone,” he said. “No.”
“What about the boy?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“You evaluated him,” I said. “You spent time with him.”
“Under the terms of the settlement, there’s very little I can tell you. Plus he’s a minor. Or was, at the time.”
“What was wrong with him?”
He smiled faintly. Not going to answer that. “I’ll say this: the longer I practice, the less I know. It would be convenient if everyone fit into a diagnosis. Or if a diagnosis was all you needed.”