"When?"
"Someday," she whispered, leaning so close her lips were against me. I felt the kiss on my face. Right under my cheekbone, next to the bruise. Then I heard her heels tap away until she was standing behind me, waiting for Kite.
When I opened my eyes, they were on Kite's reposed face. He'd slipped back into his chair as quietly as a bird landing on a branch.
"It bothers me too," he said. "The whole hypnosis thing. You know about the so–called 'false memory' controversy?"
"I heard about it," I said, neutral.
"The water is very murky. There is no question but that the recovery of repressed memory is a documented, scientific fact. Repression? Of course it exists."
I listened to him. Wishing some of my memories were repressed. Maybe there wouldn't have been that dead kid in that basement in the Bronx…
"You can't 'remember' pain," Kite went on. "You'd go stark raving mad if you could. Not physical pain, anyway. But some memories certainly can be repressed…and then surface without warning. Take the 'Vietnam Vet' syndrome. I actually provided some help to the defense in one such case—a man who committed a series of rapes while reexperiencing combat in Vietnam. Flashbacks caused him to—"
"That guy was convicted, right?" I said. I remembered the case. One of Wolfe's, before she got fired. The perp said he'd been flashbacking, believed he was back in Vietnam when he committed the rapes. But he'd robbed the women after he was through with them every time—and he came unglued when Wolfe asked him how many gold chains he'd snatched in Vietnam.
"Society is not always alert to scientific advances," Kite replied, undisturbed. His face shifted into harsh lines, and his voice tightened. "But that does not change the truth. We will never succeed as professional debunkers, we will never be able to testify credibly in a court of law, we will never be able to make a real contribution to society…to the world…if we persist in the overheated rhetoric that none of those with recovered memories are telling the truth!"
I heard the tap of Heather's heels behind me, but she wasn't moving, just shifting her weight, caught up in Kite's jury–summation voice.
"I realize I may be dismissed from the movement for this," he said, letting a deeper organ–stop into his voice, as though he realized it was getting shrill. "But I will not be humiliated in court the way I have seen it happen to my colleagues. 'Have all the cases you've investigated turned out to be false allegations, Mr. Kite?' he said in a sarcastic imitation of a high–pitched woman's voice. 'And if you ever found out an allegation was true, you'd go right to the police, wouldn't you, Mr. Kite? I will never go through such an experience. I need one victim, one real victim, one whose memories are just resurfacing. And now, I've found one. At least, I believe I have…"
"A legit—?"
"Trauma is scar tissue over memory," he said, his voice changing to a reasonable tone. "There have been cases of violent bank robberies, for example. A woman teller is terrified, goes into traumatic shock. She can't identify the robbers, not even their age or race or height. She undergoes clinical hypnosis at the hands of an experienced, trained professional. And she recovers her memory to the point where she can describe the robbers perfectly. The defense says that you can't trust memories like that—too many other factors might have interfered with the 'picture' the woman's getting. But the videotape from the bank surveillance camera shows her description of the robbers was dead accurate. So we know it can happen. But…"
"You don't always have videotapes."
"No. And there seems to be no question but that charlatans with agendas of their own can implant memories. Especially when the subject is in a highly confused state. Or drug–impaired. Or suffering from a delusional disorder. With certain disorders, there is an enormous need to confabulate. Do you know what that—?"
"Fill in the blanks," I said. "Some people lose time. They can't account for whole blocks of it, sometimes even weeks. It's scary to them."
"Multiple personalities especially," Kite said, an intensity to his voice. "But they test perfectly. A multiple would survive any conventional psychological screen. The MMPI, for example. That could explain accounts of alien abductions."
"Multiples who need to fill in the missing time?"
"It could be; that's all I can commit to at this time. But it remains a possibility, one that cannot be discounted."
"You think she could be a—?"
"No. She's been tested. And there's other evidence."
"Such as?"
"We took her down the same road."
"Hypnosis?"
"Sodium amytal. She went right back to it. We had her in the room. Brother Jacob's room. When she was a little girl. She even remembered his cologne."
"A twelve–year–old girl knew his—?"
"Not the name," Kite said, anticipating, "the smell. She described it. And the next time, we brought samples, a whole variety. She picked it right out."
"It happened a long time ago," I said. "Can you—?"
"We know we have a statute problem," Kite interrupted, answering the question he thought I was going to ask. "New York has been a strict jurisdiction, very hostile to delayed discovery."
"What's delayed discovery?"
"Ah," he said, changing tone, finally on ground where I didn't know the way. "The analogy is to medical malpractice. An operation is performed and a surgical instrument is left inside the patient. She doesn't discover the error until a long time later. Perhaps when she has other medical problems as a result. The statute of limitations doesn't begin to run until she actually knows malpractice was committed."
"But Jennifer did know…"
"She knew it when it was happening, yes. But the perpetrator's own conduct—the shock of the sudden knowledge that she was a victim—literally drove it out of her mind. She was in a psychiatric coma. She didn't discover it until later. And that's another doctrine we plan to utilize: equitable estoppel. It simply means a wrongdoer cannot profit from his own bad acts. Do you understand?"
"I hit someone in the head with a tire iron. He goes into a coma. Years pass, he's still in a coma. The statute of limitations runs out. He wakes up. Remembers it was me who did it. It was me who took his memory, so I don't get a free pass for doing it."
"Yes! Not the most graceful explanation, but certainly a cogent one."
"But that was physical," I said. "This was…"
"Emotional. Of course. The hardest thing to prove in law is the so–called soft–tissue injury. Any lawyer representing a car accident victim would rather have a broken finger than the worst whiplash. And the human heart is the softest tissue of all," Kite intoned in that jury–summation voice.
"So how are you going to…?"
"Laws change," he said. "Some cases actually make law. I have never heard of a better case to prove the viability of the 'delayed discovery' doctrine than this one. And times are changing. Many states recognize that a child may not have the internal resources to come forward in a case of sexual abuse, especially when the perpetrator is a powerful figure in the child's life. Connecticut has already extended the statute. So has Vermont. And California. I don't fear the odds. In fact, I look forward to the opportunity."
"Okay. You said there was other proof. Could I—?"
"Take this with you," he said, handing me a pile of paper. And a bunch of letters, neatly tied in a black ribbon. I put them into the aluminum case.