“You don’t think so?”
“I wish it was so clear-cut,” she said.
I thought about Alex Delaware’s reply when I asked what was wrong with Triplett.
It would be convenient if everyone fit into a diagnosis. Or if a diagnosis was all you needed.
“You have two kinds of symptoms,” she said. “Positive, like hearing voices or paranoia, and negative, like social withdrawal or diminished affect. Julian has always shown more of the latter. Certainly he’s shy.”
“That’s what comes across on the tapes.”
She nodded. “It could simply be that he’s an extreme case of social anxiety, or that he doesn’t understand social cues the same way most people do. To me it feels more appropriate to put him on the autism spectrum. Even that’s not a perfect fit.”
“He hears voices,” I said.
“Does he, though?”
I looked at her with surprise.
“He never complained about it to me,” she said. “Personally? I witnessed what you’d regard as irrefutable proof. Mumbling to yourself when you’re experiencing stress isn’t quite the same as being plagued by an internal monologue that you can’t turn off. I’m not a psychiatrist, granted. But, again, it feels like we have a hammer and we’re seeing nails everywhere.”
He’s always been like that. Not dangerous. Just... himself.
Kara Drummond had said that.
I said, “His mother described him as afraid of his own shadow.”
“That’s definitely true,” Weatherfeld said. “He was — is — extremely anxious. You could label it paranoia. It’s a fine line. If it were me, I’d probably be paranoid, too, at least by now. Think about what he’s been through.”
Enough to induce a false confession.
Enough to hide and stay hidden.
I said, “Why keep him on antipsychotics, then?”
“Because they make him feel better,” she said. “Risperdal helps with other things, too, like mood. Understanding the mechanism isn’t as important as knowing that it works for him.”
“Does he see a psychiatrist?”
She shook her head. “In the beginning we wanted to keep a low profile. If I’d noticed anything worrying I would have insisted. In fact, later on I tried to refer him for a checkup. Meds aren’t a silver bullet. There are side effects, and it pays to recalibrate every once in a while. But he refused. He has a hard time trusting people. It was hard enough for him to learn to trust me.”
“I can’t blame him for that.”
“Me neither.” She clutched her water. “It was supposed to be temporary.”
“Him being up here.”
“Just till things calmed down. Walter and I never explicitly discussed the terms, or how long it would last. If I had any idea it’d turn into a permanent arrangement, I never would’ve agreed. You have to realize: after Nicholas died, Walter was in a frenzy. He was absolutely convinced the police would come swooping down on him, or Julian, or both of them. Talk about paranoia... He had me convinced, too. All I had to go on was what he told me.”
“Which was what?”
“There was an accident,” she said. “It looked bad for Julian.”
“He didn’t say Julian was involved.”
“No. Walter was adamant about that.”
“Did you and Julian ever discuss him going back?”
“It never came up. In the beginning I was more concerned with short-term goals, managing his stress level. Once he did get settled, a certain amount of inertia set in, I guess.” She paused. “He never raised the subject, either. For the first time, he was living on his own terms.”
Point taken. What did Triplett have to return to in the East Bay?
People did love him, but love didn’t guarantee safety.
I said, “What was the deal with the tapes?”
“Walter’s idea. He wanted to hear Julian’s voice, to know he was okay.”
But she had broken eye contact. I said, “Any other reason?”
She said, “I’m not going to say he had ulterior motives. He really did care about Julian. Immensely.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, sighed. “He wanted to write a book.”
“Walter did?”
“Explain it all. The murder, the trial. Put the record straight. He thought he could fix everything.”
The manuscript.
an alternative explanation presented itself
She faced me. “He meant well.”
I said, “What was it that changed his mind?”
“I’m not sure there was one specific moment,” she said. “He got to know Julian. That’s a process that takes a long time. It requires serious dedication.”
“Let me put it another way,” I said. “Did he learn something from Julian that would have caused him to shift his attention to Nicholas Linstad? Confront him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Again, I doubt it was so cut-and-dried. Few things in life are. And, believe me, Walter could be... fickle. With his affections.”
Everyone disappoints in the end.
She cleared her throat softly, drank water, moved her lips against each other. “As far as the book’s concerned, I think he ran out of steam once I stopped recording. By then I was seeing Julian far less often. He didn’t need me as much. He had a routine. Unconventional, but stable. In my experience, Deputy, much of mental illness is about losing autonomy. When someone starts to regain that, you want to encourage them.”
I nodded.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m letting myself off the hook too easy.”
“Julian and Wayne seem to get along.”
She smiled faintly. “Yes. And thanks for changing the subject.”
She checked the time on her phone. “Should we get going?”
In daylight, the neighborhood looked less menacing — worn out but bright. Crahan sat on his porch steps, smoking, while a pair of dogs chased each other in circles. One brindle, one white with half a black head. Compact tubs of gristle and teeth, well short of purebred, they ceased their game to watch Weatherfeld and me. We waited at the gate for Crahan to stub out his cigarette and amble over.
A third dog, crazily pied, older and larger, trotted out from behind the Camaro and joined the other two.
Mom and puppies.
“Safe,” Crahan announced in a loud voice.
He lifted the squeaky latch.
I tensed.
The dogs stood locked in place, vigilant, calm, nothing like the hellhounds that had produced last night’s earsplitting racket.
Crahan held the gate for us. “He’s up,” he said. “I heard him moving around.”
We walked toward the back of the property. The roofline I’d discerned in the dark belonged to a trailer that had seen better days. Exterior paint crackled, and the whole structure listed toward the ass-end. Orange extension cords originating in the main house snaked through open windows, where gingham curtains hung slack in the frozen, windless morning. The dimensions looked utterly inadequate for a man of Triplett’s size. I pictured him wedged in there like a fetus.
Crahan thumped the door gently. “Yo JT. Company.”
A wooden croak.
The trailer tilted forward.
No matter how often you tell yourself not to make assumptions, you can’t help it. I believed — knew — that Julian Triplett was innocent. Yet as the door opened and his torso filled up the frame, the reality of him startled me nonetheless.
I felt a click in my throat. I’d taken a step back, reflexively.
He was bending over to peer out, clad in a 5XL blue T-shirt and camo mesh basketball shorts. Barefoot, or so I thought initially. Then I saw flip-flops, black plastic straps stretched to their limit and cutting into his insteps, foam soles squashed flat, toes the size of plum tomatoes overhanging in front.
My work has taught me to know at a glance what lies beneath a person’s clothes. Calves say a lot. They describe the burdens a body imposes on itself. Julian Triplett’s were hewn cliffs of muscle, suggesting that the load above was balanced despite its outrageous proportions.